Best Pet Setups In Heroes vs. Hordes

Pet Basics

You first unlock pets at level 100, and at the beginning of the game, they are incredibly strong.

You want to get to chapter 100 as quickly as you can, because they'll give you a big power boost. Back in my day, we didn't have pets, and so you just had to figure out how to grind through those next 100 chapters all by yourself.

Early Game Pet Setups

The general rule of thumb I give for pets is to use the highest rarity pet that you have. Now, that works in most situations, particularly when you first get pets, but after that, there are some better setups. So I'll start out at the very beginning and work from there.

The first one that I would go with is a snail. Snails aren't particularly strong, but they will be valuable later in the game, so any leveling you do to a snail is actually worth it and will stick around for a while. So, if your very first pet is one of these regular common guys, go with a snail and work on getting him up to level 100.

But then, you'll start to get great pets, at which point you want to start leveling up either a Flame Striker or an Earth Striker. The reason for that is that the Flame Striker passive at level 100 adds burning to the main pet attack, which will be useful later in the game. The same thing with Earth Strikers, they add slow to the basic attack. So, those would be somewhat valuable, and any levels you put into them won't be wasted. Early in the game, your setup might be something like this, with a Flame Striker as your main pet and your snail leveled up as your passive pet.

You unlock passives at level 100 for the pet, and they buff up the main pet. The one exception is snails, which I'll talk about later. But for now, you should have an elemental and you should have a snail. Open enough eggs, and you'll eventually get your first rare pet, either an Emberpaw or a Pyrokraken. Now, I have a personal preference for Pyrokraken because he's a ranged pet and Emberpaw is a melee pet. That means that Pyrokraken should be able to hit more horde more easily than Emberpaw, because Emberpaw has to run in and Pyrokraken can just stay back. So, if you get both of them, I would favor leveling Pyrokraken before Emberpaw.

That would then make your early game setup look something like this, with Pyrokraken as your main pet, and then a Flame Striker and a snail as your passives because you were leveling those up as you were grinding out more pets. Now, your big goal here is to get Pyrokraken to level 200. At level 200, he gets his active effects, which throws more bombs and hits more horde, basically amping his damage pretty substantially.

Your goal, then, is just to unlock more rare pets and add them as your passive. So, a very common setup might be something like Pyrokraken as your main pet with your Flame Striker as your passive, and Emberpaw as your other passive. And then, depending on the play style and which pet you like better, you could make Emberpaw your main and Pyrokraken your passive. I used this particular setup for a long time.

Mid Game and Standard Pet Builds

It took me something like 200 normal days to finally hit Hydrobasilisk, which is my first epic pet. Once you hit Hydrobasilisk, you're actually set for most of the game. Many endgame players actually prefer Hydrobasilisk over a lot of the other pets, and he's super strong in certain game modes. So, getting to your first epic, if it's Hydrobasilisk, is really good.

The other epic pet you might hit is Storm Griffin. He's not as good as Hydrobasilisk, but he's perfectly fine to use. And as you hit these epic pets, you basically take your rare pets and you move them over to the passives. So, then the standard setup becomes Hydrobasilisk with Pyrokraken and Emberpaw. This would give you the most damage for basically any game mode you want, including normal mode, hard mode, Arena, Boss, all the good ones.

Literally, any part of the game up until nightmare mode, you can use this setup.

Now, the one thing to note is, I don't recommend using Hydrobasilisk or Storm Griffin as passives. They're just not very strong relative to these other two. And that's because of how pet damage is calculated.

You can think of pets as another weapon, and they scale off of both your weapon power and their power score. So, the higher level you get them, the more damage they do, and the higher your damage, the more damage they do.

That's why you also choose these particular pets as passives. Looking at their passive abilities will tell you what percent of damage they do when their abilities attack. The higher that percentage, the more damage they'll do overall. The percentages are what matter. And because Hydrobasilisk and Storm Griffin don't have percentages built into their attacks, they're not as valuable as these other two rare pets in terms of passive.

Legendary Pet Builds

This will be your standard build for a lot of the game. Hydrobasilisk with these two passives is quite strong. Over time, you can open enchanted eggs. These were once available in events, but they've become much less common recently. So, you might have to spend gems in order to get them. But it takes about 84 of them on average to unlock Crystalsaurs.

Crystalsaurs, while very strong, only upgrades over Hydrobasilisk when you can level it up past level 400. So while he's got a higher cap, Hydrobasilisk is actually pretty good.

That said, as you open enchanted eggs, you also get access to Cycowl. Owl's passive is one of the best in the game because it has a 50% damage multiple. That's one of the highest multiples available outside of other extremely rare epic and legendary pets.

So, opening enchanted eggs has two benefits: you get access to Crystalsaurs and to Owl, which becomes your late-game Max DPS pet combo. For reference, my Max DPS late-game build includes Crystalsaurs as my main pet with Hydrobasilisk and Owl as my passives. This is my Max DPS setup, achievable with just enchanted eggs and normal eggs.

Specialized Pet Builds

But you don't always need Max DPS, and in certain game modes, you actually switch up your builds accordingly. The first is Nightmare Mode.

Nighmare Mode

Remember how I said that leveling up a snail won't go to waste? Well, snails become incredibly valuable in Nightmare Mode. If you read a snail's passive, it increases the hero's health by 15%. Using two snails together multiplies their effect. So it's 15 plus 15, and it's 30%. 30% more HP is incredibly valuable in the late game modes, like hard mode Arena, and particularly in Nightmare Mode.

The goal of Nightmare Mode is to survive, and 30% extra health will help you survive much easier. So, that's why I recommended leveling up a snail as your first pet, because you can combine them with Crystalsaurs or with Hydrobasilisk to run in Nightmare Mode.

You'll also see that pets are extremely OP in Nightmare Mode. While you're too busy running around trying not to let horde hit you, your pets just constantly DPS, and it is not uncommon for Crystalsaurs or Hydrobasilisk to be your highest DPS source by a wide margin.

You can then also go for a hybrid approach, which is one passive snail and one passive damage pet. In a game mode like Dragon's Tower or Hero Clash, it might make sense to do a hybrid approach, where you take a passive pet for damage and then another passive pet, like a snai,l for more HP. That'll give you some more survivability because you will get hit by horde, but it also gives you the damage boost of having a strong pet like Owl, or maybe something like Pyrokraken. And these are the very typical endgame pet builds.

Boss Brawl

Now, there is a special case for Boss Brawl. Crystalsaurs is a really strong pet for doing massive AOE damage, but in Boss Brawl, there's only one boss. And in that case, Hydrobasilisk actually does more targeted DPS.

So for that reason, I run Hydrobasilisk as my main pet; that'll give you the most single-target DPS. I'm also reaching the point in the game where I need to apply so many statuses to the boss that I can't do it via weapon. In which case, you can do this unique build.

Because of the way that elemental striker's passive works, it only impacts the pet's main attack. But again, in Boss Brawl, you're only hitting one target. So in that case, you can switch out your secondary pet for a Flame Striker. Flame Strikers give each pet's attack the ability to apply burning on the boss. If your hero doesn't have burning in their kit, Flame Striker will apply it to the boss, and so you can get other weapons that will apply more statuses or do more damage.

And again, that's why we decided to level up a Flame Striker earlier in the game. So, there was no wasted progress when you leveled up your snail and Flame Striker, as they also become valuable in the endgame.

I also use Hydrobasilisk as my main pet in Dragon's Tower. Hydrobasilisk's active effect provides geysers that heal you. And because there's no healing in Dragon's Tower, you can actually heal back your hero some using these geysers over the course of many floors, making Hydrobasilisk a really good pet in Dragon's Tower.

Rare Pets

If you get lucky or you have the ability to spend, you can get access to some even better pets in special events. The first is Blazetail. Blazetail is the single best pet in the game. It does the most damage of any pet by a pretty significant margin. Level this guy up to level 500, and he can clear out most of the game just by himself. If you ever have the opportunity and means to grab Blazetail, he's definitely worth it.

The other big one to know about is Shell Shock. Shell Shock has the best passive in the game, and that's, again, because of the multiple on the damage to his shells. The issue is, these shells are really small, so the AOE area is not very big, but you compare it with something like Crystalsaurs that stands in the middle of horde in nightmare mode or a hard mode arena, and it'll do a substantial amount of damage.

Again, you're looking for multiples here on the passives. Now, the one catch for all pet setups is that you can only equip one of each type of pet once. So you can't have Hydrobasilisk as your main with two Pyrokrakens as your passive. So you're going to have to mix and match as you go. One more important thing to know is that Cloudhoof's passive actually does damage, and it's supposed to be very strong, and that would make your optimal pet setup, assuming you have access to all the pets, something like Blazetail as your main pet, with Crystalsaurs and Cloud Hoof as your passives.

And that's my guide to pet setups. Typically, you use your highest rarity pet as your main, followed by your next two highest rarities as passive pets. But I gave you the special occasions where you can swap out those guys for niche situations. Just remember, pets are your strongest weapon, so use them accordingly.

Very few people in the game are going to have access to all those legendary pets, but if you do, congratulations. They're quite, quite strong. But for all of us regular free-to-play players, know that getting Crystalsaurs or even Hydrobasilisk is perfectly fine for clearing out every game mode in the game.