There's no cheat code for Heroes vs Hordes.
It rewards effort, but it's a grind, and every grind counts.
What separates the top 0.1% from everyone else isn't luck—it's the optimizations they make along the way.
These 14 advanced tips come from years of high-level play and will help you level up faster, farm smarter, and save weeks of time.
By the way, I'm Kolz, a high-level HvH player and part of a top ten guild. Some of the best players in the game, including HaxSennin, Squirrel, Spiderpig, and Wave, taught me these, so even I'm always learning.
Since most of your time in HvH is spent farming, that's exactly where we'll start out with first set of tips.
Advanced Tips and Tricks Video Guide
Advanced Tips and Tricks Strategy
1. Don't evolve weapons if you don't need to during farming
If you are setting up a farming run, pick tomes that won't evolve your weapons. Assuming you can clear the content.
Depending on the Hero, not evolving your weapons saves 4 or 5 levels of experience for coins instead of evolutions. I currently get 130,000 coins per level, with Santa x 4 x 2 at the end of the run, is 1 million extra coins. Over a day of farming, that's one extra run in value.
A common build for me is Bomb, Fire Orbs, Chain Lightning, Borer with Coin, Exp, Crit, Cooldown, and Duration. And you choose duration because…
2. Add duration tome during farming to max coin power-ups
A modifier on a modifier, I had been using Crossbow and Ice Wand with duplicator tome, but this makes the build even better.
If you're bored enough to watch, your hero will randomly run into a coin tome in what seems like every other run during auto-farming. Adding 50% to the coin power-up duration is basically worth another level of experience. That's like 250,000 coins.
But if I'm going to setup a run, I prefer to go for more resources over more coins at the moment, so I run this instead.
3. Sub out Noble Gloves and Necklace for Rogue Gear
Before I can explain why I do this, you need to understand the resource breakpoints in chapters. Every ~40 chapters or so, you get more dust, hero orbs, and scrolls from completing a run. With the post 3.4.0 change, hero orbs jumped in value, so farming higher breakpoints is more efficient.
Unfortunately, it's a discrete jump. Chapters 170 through 210 give you 80 / 40 / 45. Chapter 211 gives you 85 / 45 / 50.
While I can Auto Farm 140HM with Santa, he doesn't have the damage in full noble gear to clear 230HM for the next step up in resources. However, if I switch out Noble Gloves and Neck for Rogue, he can 10/10 clear it on Auto with a setup.
Those two noble pieces effectively only provide coin boosts, while those two pieces of rogue gear seriously up your damage with the 4x crit multiplier. The result is that my per-run coin total goes from ~23mil to ~19mil, but I get 26 more hero orbs and 30 more dust per run. A trade-off I'm willing to make at this point because I'm only spinning for health talents.
I got one more advanced farming tip because post mythic gear, you're whole life outside of Boss Brawl is spent in a Santa costume farming.
4. Wear high-value farm gear in non-farm runs if you can
Running Adventure, run all noble gear.
Running Faction Wars or Dungeon, run Noble Chest and Boots, the two highest key chance noble pieces (and ring if you can swing it).
Guild event, as much noble gear as you can without getting thrown out of your guild.
I prioritize Chest > Boots > Ring for the key chance because you can never get enough. And that's why…
5. Rush Santa Forge
Santa is the biggest long-term time save in the game. His 11 percentage point overall plus to gold key chance is an absurd 73% increase in end game gold key chance (15 to 26).
Think of Santa as a Noble Chest, greed him everywhere you can. Dungeon, Guild Event, Adventure, heck even NMM.
The Forge is a global 5 percentage point increase at 3*, so get that and stop. Because…
6. Forge tokens are the most valuable resource in the game
My HvH life has been cut up into distinct chunks the past 3 months:
- 6 weeks for Mighty Borer Forge
- 6 weeks for Warlord Forge
With the changes to hero shards, Forge tokens will likely be your limiting factor late game. I really just wanted to get this point across: Don't use super tokens on base weapons!
Based on the 2024 guide, I put 6000 tokens into Fire Orbs and Bomb, which was easily 4000 too many. You WILL get base weapons from Arena, SAVE SUPER TOKENS! You don't know how exactly you will use them, but don't spend them.
Just like gems.
7. Practice the hardest part of HvH, self-control, and save gems
Try not to spend gems, ever. Well, not ever, but not a lot.
Don't use them in Lucky Draw past one spin.
Don't revive, don't reshuffle, don't reset, don't do anything with a RE in it.
Maintain self-control… Then spend lavishly on events. Like the one right now. 8800 gems guarantees Dark Paladin or Assassin, way better than the 17700 gems from Lucky Draw, or the 24,000 gems if you listen to the Pre Spiderpig advice and spin 3 times on Lucky Draw.
This is the first of three forms of skill expression in Heroes vs Hordes - don't spend gems today that are better spent tomorrow.
But there is one reshuffle you should use, the Mega Reshuffle.
8. Mega Reshuffle Your Reshuffle
Learned this one 5 minutes from OWL, even though Wave swears he told me about it (I found no exact proof!).
You can guarantee the weapons you need at the beginning of an important run like Arena by using the Mega Reshuffle Your Reshuffle.
If you leave during the first 10 seconds, then go to your collection to change the weapon set, and then return to the run, you'll get completely different shop offers.
This strategy gives you an almost unlimited opportunity to get exactly what is needed, even with two starting upgrades.
Make it even more effective by changing something offered in the first pick.
And if you're doing Boss Brawl, check this other stuff while you're in the collection tab.
9. Double-check the little things before important events
Before you load into Boss Brawl or any high-value run, confirm that all the little things are right.
Forge path set up? Faction camp bonus properly adjusted? Double snails riding the bench? Did you skill up the hero you're using?
I've lost farming runs in Nightmare Mode because I forgot Snails.
At the highest level, these things matter, like this tip for maxing damage.
10. Stay at ½ HP or lower as long as you can in Boss Brawl
This is particularly important during vulnerable phases. This tip also represents the one time I actually helped Wave in this game.
You have an Epic talent that increases your damage based on missing HP. Purposefully running into a fan or over a spike to take damage during vulnerability phases increases your damage. Even better, stand under the boss to reflect damage back onto it, I'm 90% sure evasions count for damage reflection.
The second form of skill expression in the game is juggling health in Boss Brawl, this next tip is for juggling horde.
11. Get Good At Haxkiting
The last of the three true expressions of skill, Haxkiting is the hardest. You can control the flow of horde in Nightmare Mode by making discrete, sharp V like movements to the east or west of the screen. These movements cause the majority of horde to spawn from the North and South, leaving you with a direction to kite towards.
The hardest chapters of Nightmare Mode require you to do this consistently in order to clear them reliably.
And while Haxkiting will save you energy, these last tips will save you frustration.
12. You can't sacrifice a pet that is deployed or on an expedition
I know I have a pet to sacrifice, but the game won't let me. Everyone runs into this problem once, shrugs it off, and sacrifices a pet later.
If you get real frustrated, you ask on Discord. And it turns out the reason almost every time is the pet is on an expedition. That's why it works the second time you try.
So make sure your pets are free to step onto dev altar and you're not making this other mistake.
13. Your forge selections are tied to load outs
I learned this one on Discord when I constantly knew I saved a forge option, but had it change the next day. Turns out, I had different options saved for my Farming loadout and my damage load out.
You need to make your selection, then go to loadout and overwrite to get it to stick, otherwise you'll be perpetually switching. Oh, if you're new, you can freely switch between forge options at the same level, so you should be changing them for different builds.
Which leaves me without one little tidbit of wisdom
14. Make sure to get coins in Coin Rush before exiting
I'm gonna waste 10 energy now and show you what happens. Know this is hurting my soul.
It doesn't count as completing the run until you get 1 coin from coin rush. You can't double rewards, and you don't get keys.
It's a mistake you make once and never again, until you bite the bullet for a YouTube video.
Hopefully, this helps you to stay patient with that post-wave trigger finger.
Bonus Real Money Tip 15: Stockpile runestones, then buy a legendary pass
If you save runestones after a long run of clearing Nightmare chapters, you can buy a Legendary Pass for a month to Wishlist all your heroes. Wave did it with 26,,000 runestones, but I think the math works starting in the mid-several thousands.
Squirrel also recommended this trick.
Bonus Real Money Tip 16: Take advantage of foreign currencies
HvH is an international game, so you might be able to get a better deal in a different currency. It requires a bunch of math, but it might be worth setting up a VPN in another country to grab some resources at a lower price.
Bonus Real Money Tip 17: Buy Pumpkin When You Can
This one comes from @Squirrel. Pumpkin Shade's level 90 Faction Global, which increases hero orbs by 50%, makes him the single most important late-game farmer by a wide, wide margin. That makes getting him and getting him to 2* a top priority for everyone, post heroic gear.
Advanced Tips and Tricks Summary
And those are 14 advanced tips and three bonus tips to go with 23 other tips and tricks. Hopefully, they help some later game players with optimizations they weren't aware of yet!
