Black Tide Event Guide For Heroes vs Hordes

How The Campaign Works

This is the standard quarterly event setup, so if you played the Mine Event or either crossover, you already know the shape of it.

You start as the captain with none of your account's power. No globals, no weapons, no skills. As you beat each level you gain access to more skills, and it is tuned so that the skills you have roughly match the level you are on.

Do not spend gems to buy skills early. You do not need them.

There are 20 levels, three open per day, so about seven days to clear the first run. Beating all 20 opens hard mode, which is the same 20 levels tuned harder. Worth knowing that in the last couple of events hard mode has actually played easier than normal mode.

Attempts are unlimited. There are no tickets, so dying costs you nothing but time, and you have 35 days. Do not spend gems on revives or shuffles.

Each block is four regular levels and then a boss. The bosses are the best part of the event and they will punish you for not paying attention. As for weapons, I have a feeling Lantern is your best early pick, but honestly nothing hits very hard in here. You are mostly running in circles and not getting touched.

The Wheel And Your Free Spins

Everything in this event routes through the wheel.

There is a long chain of quests, and most of them have hidden quests stacked behind them. Spend 250 gems, claim it, and a 500 gem quest appears, then a 1,000 gem quest behind that. There are somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 of them, plus spins for beating bosses.

Add it up and a free-to-play player gets roughly 50 to 60 spins.

The odds are not kind. Marina Tideborn is 0.3% per spin. Powder Kegs is 0.3%. You have a 2% shot at 1,000 coins. Even at 150 spins you are only looking at something like a 75% chance of landing her.

Inkbeard is not on the wheel at all. He is a Skull Coin purchase only, so there is no lucky pull that saves you the grind.

What you actually accumulate is Skull Coins, averaging about 75 a spin. Over 100 spins that is 7,500, plus the 6,000 sitting in the quest chain, so call it 13,000 total.

What Things Cost

• Marina Tideborn, 15,000 Skull Coins or a 0.3% wheel pull
• Inkbeard, around 12,500 Skull Coins and no wheel option
• Powder Kegs, around 10,000 Skull Coins or a 0.3% wheel pull

Which tells you the real story. With 13,000 coins you can afford Inkbeard or the weapon, not both, and Marina Tideborn is out of reach unless you spend or get lucky. Wanting all three puts you at 40,000 coins and something like 600 spins, which is real money. I ran this math for the Avatar event and it came out between 500 and a couple of thousand dollars to max everything in one go.

Spending Priority

In order: heroes, then the weapon, then hero shards, then weapon tokens, then hero orbs.

Whether shards or tokens come first depends on which hero you land. Sometimes you want three stars for the global, sometimes two stars and the forge.

Never eggs. I will come back to that.

The most common free-to-play outcome is that you burn all your spins, hit nothing, and pour everything into hero orbs and skill book cores with the leftovers going to eggs for fun. That is what happened to me in both Avatar and Ghostbusters, and there is nothing wrong with it.

The Pass And The Swabbie Math

The pass has 15 levels of rewards you earn for free by beating campaign levels. The paid side costs 20 dollars and comes with Swabbie.

Here is the part people miss. After pass level 15, every campaign level you beat gives you two more Swabbie shards. Clear all 40 and that is 25 extra levels, so 50 bonus tokens.

And you get all of it retroactively. Buy the pass on the second-to-last day and you still collect all 15 reward tiers plus every bonus shard you earned. So there is no reason to buy early. Play the event out, see what the wheel gives you, and if you came up empty, then buy the pass and dump your Skull Coins into Swabbie.

HaxSennin has a good extension of this. Buy the daily gem pass, then put the 200 daily gems toward pushing additional pass levels. Roughly 3,000 gems gets you into the bonus tier and another 30 or so Swabbie tokens on top. Daily gems are already the most efficient gems-per-dollar buy in the game, and making any purchase gives you a couple of extra spins, so you reach 100 spins faster too.

Should You Buy Powder Kegs With Gems?

If you net 64 free spins, getting to 100 costs 36 more at 200 gems each, so 7,200 gems.

That is expensive for a weapon. I would normally want to pay 3,000 or 4,000, which is about what the Mine Event charges, and Powder Kegs will land there eventually. If you can wait, wait.

If you are early in the game, do not wait. You pick up a real pile of gems just clearing the normal and hard mode chapters in this event, and Powder Kegs will carry you for a long time.

Stay Away From The Ocean Eggs

Pets in this game are incredibly strong. They open up at level 100 and they function as a sixth weapon in your build, because a pet's damage is a function of the pet's own damage and yours.

The eggs are still a trap.

You have a 1% chance at a legendary, and then a 3% split between the options once you hit it. Blaze Tale and Fire Horse are both fantastic, so landing one puts you in a good spot. But at 500 Skull Coins an egg and roughly 70 eggs needed on average, you are looking at 30,000 to 40,000 coins to guarantee a pet.

No pet is worth that. Collect enchanted eggs over time and go get Dino instead.

What I Would Actually Do

Plow through the campaign as it opens. Do every quest. Take every free spin.

Then wait until you have cleared all 40 levels and exhausted the quest chain, and only then decide where the Skull Coins go.

Having reviewed all three heroes and the weapon, Marina Tideborn is the best thing in this event. Her 120 global is All Heroes, x1.1 damage to bleeding enemies, and both Swabbie and Inkbeard only give x1.05 at that tier. She is worth double, and that global makes your entire roster stronger whether or not you ever play her.

Worth knowing that all three of them have a faction-shared global at 90 rather than a roster-wide one, so do not overvalue that line on any of them.

Powder Kegs is the pick if you are newer. Swabbie is fine for 20 dollars without being exciting. Inkbeard I would not chase at all.

You are not going to main any of these heroes long term. Their kits are pretty standard. You are here for the globals.

One last thing: go read HaxSennin's guide in Discord. It has been refined over half a dozen of these events and it goes deeper on the quest specifics than I have here.

I'm Kolz, a high-level HVH player. Ask questions here, on Reddit, or on Discord.

And remember: Always do your adventures!