TLDR;
Hello heroes, Kolz here!
There's finally new content in Heroes vs. Hordes. New Hard Mode, new Normal Mode, new Nightmare Mode. I zoomed through Normal and Hard first, and it was pure AFK farming.
Nightmare Mode was the same right up until I hit 343.
343 and 349 are the two Nightmare Mode chapters that give you real trouble. Everything else you can sit back and farm. These two you have to actually play.
I hadn't broken out my Werewizard build in a long time, so I had to dust off all the pieces. There hasn't been a reason to cover a build in almost a year. With the new Guild War coming, that might change.
The gear split is the foundation. You want two Rogue pieces, your helm and gloves, and four Wizard pieces in your robe, boots, ring, and necklace.
Everything else runs off Ice Wand and Death Ray. The part people miss is the order: you want to max Death Ray first. Upgrading Arcane Wand into Death Ray adds a 90% slow, which is basically a second stun on top of your Ice Wand freeze.
Stack the Ice Wand freeze on top of that slow and the whole map crawls for you. That combo is what buys you the time to survive.
Rush Arcane Wand into Death Ray as fast as you can, then max Ice Wand. After that, grab any disruption you can find: Scrap Hammer, Borer, a 2-star Boomerang, Crossbow. Anything with a stun or a slow is gold.
The real skill here is haxkiting. If you've read my kiting guide you know the drill, but this is where it matters most.
Haxkiting is when you move up and down and lift your finger off the screen to trigger the move. Watch the joystick on the bottom left and you'll see my finger come off it between moves. That's what lets you make clean 45-degree moves in any direction.
Done right, almost nothing spawns from the left side of the screen. If stuff is filling in behind you, you're not killing enough horde on the right. Kill enough over there and they won't overtake you, which gives you room to heal.
Do it wrong and the screen fills in and you can't outrun it.
Two things to keep in your back pocket. Instead of short up-and-down moves, you can go long up or long down to get ahead of the next wave.
On wave 3, the one rule is don't get hit by the butterflies. If you have to eat damage, take it from the mobs frozen around you, not from a wave to the face.
I ran Werebeast at 1.7x speed until I couldn't, then swapped heroes to show you don't need a maxed account for this. I even mixed mythic and legendary gear to see if it held up, and it held up fine.
The best heroes for these two, in order, are Shield Warden, Werebeast, and World Lord. You can get away with plenty more than that:
The thread running through that list is simple: you want a hero with a slow or a stun in their kit. That extra bit of crowd control is what turns a loss into a clear.
The old top players like Wisdom and Wave used to run Smoke Bomb, sit in it, and regen shields the whole time, because they had the health and damage to pull it off. Most of us don't, so we haxkite instead.
For jewels, stack as much Regeneration as you can. After that comes Vulnerability, Weakness, Projectile P, and Projectile M. Fill the rest with Ultimate Charge, Evasion, or a damage jewel like Critical Strike or Area Effect.
That's the whole thing. Max Death Ray, then Ice Wand, grab any stun or slow you can, and haxkite your way through. Once the combo is online, the rest is concentration.
Want a walkthrough of the rest of Nightmare Mode? Check out my Nightmare Mode guide. With the new Guild War on the way, I'll be putting out more content again.
Thanks to everyone who's supported me over the last year and a half.
Always do your adventures!
Death Ray's 90% slow plus Ice Wand freeze lets you shred the whole line.
Watch the joystick, bottom left. Lift your finger between moves to haxkite.
Wave 3 on 349. Take mob damage if you must, but never eat a wave to the face.
