Boss Brawl Guide For Heroes vs Hordes: How To Reach League 8

In Boss Brawl, you have three minutes to run around and hit one of 4 bosses for as much damage as you can. The person who does the most damage to the boss across all their runs wins.

The boss will chase you around the battlefield. Your job is to dodge obstacles like spikes and spinning wheels of doom while continuing to damage the boss as best you can.

There are four different bosses in Boss Brawl. Each boss has a unique set of abilities that will either stop you from doing damage for a set period, try to murder you, or just make life generally annoying. Your goal is to thread through those damage points and attack the boss with all you have.

As long as you manage to avoid the death traps, you'll earn:

1. Basic participation rewards
2. The chance to win exchange tokens for how well you do

The more damage, the better the rewards, and the higher league you will move into.

Maximizing Your Damage

The most interesting part of Boss Brawl is the weapon build. While most weapon builds focus on AOE damage to hit horde from every direction, Boss Brawl is a single target.

So your goal is to maximize as much single-target damage as you can.

First, you want to maximize the number of status-based damage multipliers.

Remember all those green talents you're kind of ho-hum about? Well, now they matter a lot here.

Each one of those offers you multiplicative damage based on certain debuffs such as burning, slow, poison, stun, and freeze.

Outside of revive rage, bosses typically can't be stunned or frozen, so you're looking to apply the other statuses as efficiently as you can.

On the topic of talents, there's another damage multiplier hidden in the Epic Talents. You can optimize your damage to the Boss by maintaining a low percentage of health. The lower the percent health you have, the more damage you do via the epic talent.

Particuarly for early vulnerability phases, or when generally kiting the boss, try to stay close to half health if you can to max DPS. However, you can't do any DPS if you're dead, so it's better to stay safe if you're not sure.

Timing Your Revives

Bosses go through a rotation of invulnerability when you cannot hurt them and then vulnerability, where you can do extra damage.

You want to time your one free death during a run with the vulnerability phase. That means that you will actively have to make sure you die right before it. After you die, you come back with revive rage. That does two things:

1. Freezes the boss, getting the extra status multiplier.
2. Rage level damage.

Try to save the revive rate for as late in the run as possible. At that point, you will have more levels in your build - both weapons and tomes - and will be able to push as much damage as possible.

A well-timed death can literally double the amount of damage you do over the course of the run.

Featured Factions & Heroes

Every Boss Brawl session features a faction and select hero. The heroes in that faction will do extra damage, and the featured hero will also deal additional damage. Those effects can stack, so if the featured hero is in the featured faction, they will do 2.5x as much damage.

Unfortunately, the featured heroes will be random and not chosen from your pool of Heroes. So there will be weeks when you do not have one or both heroes, like me, every week…

Faction Camps

Remember to update your Faction Camp to focus on damage multipliers and offense. There's a big difference between the Warrior's Guild all focused on defense versus offense.

The best heroes for Boss Brawl are the ones that bring their own status effect multipliers or single target damage. Heroes like Assassin and Warlord have bleeds built into their kits, which can offer status multipliers from global forges and hero levels.

Additionally, auto-aimers (those heroes like Werebeast that automatically point themselves at the boss, are slightly easier to play. With manual aimers, you need to orb walk in order to optimize damage.

Orb walking just means moving after an attack animation before turning around to attack before the next attack animation.

With that in mind, some of the best heroes for Boss Brawl include:

1. Artificer
2. Oracle
3. Warlord
4. Assassin
5. Druid
6. Clockwork Mage
7. Big Game Hunter
8. Monk

Sleeper heroes at the moment include:

1. Bunni
2. Crazy Tinkerer
3. Sentry Specialist with 2* forge +
4. Pumpkin Shade
5. Crystalmancer

But any hero for which you meet these criteria will be strong for boss:

1. Are newer heroes who get massive damage spikes to skills at higher star levels
2. Have them at Star level 3 with upgraded skills
3. And/Or 4* or 5* forge

As an example, Crystalmancer meets criteria number #1 and #2, while also being an auto-aimer.

These heroes will typically be one of your best to use for maximizing damage, regardless of Faction bonuses.

I will keep this list updated as we discover new heroes that do well in the event.

For gear, you're looking at all Rogue Helm, Chest, Gloves, and Necklace with the Wizard Ring and Wizard Boots. You run Ascended Wizard boots for the ability to attract all the experience orbs. That way, you don't have to lose DPS running around to collect them.

You run ascended+ Wizard Ring for two reasons:

1. The damage to frozen will give you more damage to the boss during you revive rage
2. The increase in status effect duration will make the boss freeze longer during revive rage

Thanks to @CakeWave for confirming.

If you don't have ascended Wizard Boots, you can just run Ranger Boots for additional cooldown:

If you're early in the game, you can use your highest-tier gear that does the most single-target damage.

There are two weapon builds for Boss Brawl that focus on getting as many damage multipliers as possible.

Kolz' Boss Brawl Base Build

I named this one after me since I'm the first to write it down.

This assumes you only have the base weapons but have 4* Arcane Staff and 2* every other base weapon. The weapon priority is:

• One point in poison darts against non-monkey bosses. This will apply the poison debuff, but the monkey is immune.
• One point in Arcane Staff if 2* or higher, else chain lightning if 2*, else crossbow if 2*, else dragon's breath if 2*. The goal here is burning.
• Cooldown Tome
• Main weapon
• Arcane Staff, particularly if 4*. 4* will apply the slow debuff, but again, I think the Monkey is immune.
• Damage Tome
• Chain Lightning
• Crit Tome
• Duplicator Tome
• One point in Duration Tome
• Bomb|Crossbow

Start using my build, and you'll immediately see improvements. And don't take my word for it; here's literally test subject #1 from Discord @DM95:

Thanks, was able to double/triple damage.

You will only get to evolve three weapons, so go for the main weapon + arcane staff + chain lightning while maxing out the tomes besides duration. Duration Tome only needs 1 point.

This build gets you poison, slow, and burning statuses that will multiply your damage via talents.

But, remember, only use this build if you're limited to base weapons. The way you challenge the whales or become one is through special weapons.

Wave's Wonderful All Weapon Build

Before I jump into his build, I will say that you should 100% replace the last weapon in the previous build with Mighty Borer if you have it and make it the second weapon you max.

All the projectiles from Borer target the boss, doing a ton of damage.

Ok, back to Wave's Wonderful All Weapon Build. This build assumes you have access to most special weapons and have them all at 4* forge minimum. Here's the build:

Mandatory. Focus on maxing these. Choose borer and 1 of the other 2:

1. Borer → Forge: Left Right Left
2. If main weapon can't apply bleed, Lotus Pike -> Forge: Right Right Right
3. Or If main weapon has bleed, Pitchfork -> Forge: Right Right Right

Optional to get statuses

• Burn - Dgger of Dawn > Arcane Staff
• Poison - Poison Darts
• Expose - Slingshot

Level up priority:

1. CD tome
2. Main weapon
3. Borer/lotus/pitchfork
4. Damage
5. Duplicator

Dagger of Dawn / Arcane Staff is mainly to apply burn, so I leave it at level 1. Skip it if you have a hero weapon that applies burn, e.g. Tinkerer

Avoid Slingshot when facing storm elemental. He's stationary, so it bounces off him.

Never bother maxing Arcane Staff, Dagger of Dusk, or Slingshot. The other ones always deal the most damage. Only Arcane Staff could deal more damage for you depending on the forge levels you have.

On the Jewel side, there are a few things to consider.

The first is that since there is only one target, it is hard for most heroes to cast their ultimate. Unless it's Clockwork Mage or Tinkerer, you don't need the ultimate jewels.

Next, you're going for the typical 90% cool down max after tome. So, you're looking to hit cooldown to 60%. But since you run Wizard Boots, you'll probably have to dedicate more slots to cooldown.

And lastly, you need to kite the boss, so a movement speed jewel or two can increase your damage uptime for non-auto aiming heroes.

With that in mind, the priority jewel build is:

1. Vulnerability
2. Ultimate jewels only if not based on kills
3. Cooldown to 60%
4. Movement speed
5. Projectile P
6. Projectile M
7. Critical Strike

You favor critical strike over AoE in Boss Brawl because you're only hitting one enemy the entire time. Make sure that you won't go over 100% critical strike after maxing the 15% tome. That can be a problem for a late-game Warlord, for example.

I use movement speed for heroes like Monk and Bunny so I can turn to hit the boss more often or deal with obstacles while kiting.

Pets are surprisingly weak in Boss Brawl. You're looking to get as much single-target damage as possible, but pets do better with AoE. With that in mind, you'll still want to run your highest-damage pets.

Main Pet. Consider something like Crystalaurs, Hydro Basilisk, or the newly buffed Strom Gryphon. Ranged pets may have more DPS uptime against the Boss than melee which need to follow it around.

Passive Pets. Your next highest rarity pets make good passive pets, so early things like Pyrokraken and Emberpaw. Eventually, Hydro Basilisk.

I love the new reward system they created with the update to Boss Brawl.

It starts with two basics:

1. Participation rewards for every two attempts
2. Exchange tokens for finishing high up in your league

The participation rewards are nothing to sneeze at. Over the course of 5 days, you get 1,000 hero orbs and 50 runestones if you do all 10 runs. Those 50 runestones give you two portals. The portals are worth something like five hero shards and another 80 hero orbs but with chances for skill books and bigger shard rewards.

This brings me to the exchange token rewards. While the Big Game Hunter is the obvious long-term grind reward, the ability to select specific hero shards is huge. Fairly priced at 4800 tokens for 20 shards, these will let you get your chosen heroes to 3* much faster.

The exchange makes Boss Brawl one of the best ways to get hard-to-get hero shards over time.

There you have it, my Kolz's Guide To Boss Brawl.

Load up on damage multipliers, kite the boss, and max your damage.

The best part about Heroes vs Hordes is strategically loading in with a plan. Execute this strategy in Boss Brawl, and you'll move up in leagues in no time. That will grant you quicker access to the Big Game Hunter and those sweet, sweet hero shards.

I'm Kolz, a high-level HvH player. Let me know if you have any questions, and remember… always do your adventures!