THIS Is How You CLEAR Hard Mode Arena In HVH

Ok, before you even think about trying Hard Mode Arena, know that, at its core, it's a stat check. I'm assuming you have full mythic gear from now on.

If you have full heroic gear, put on noble gear and farm. If you're ascended, go farm.

Skilled players can only do so much - if you don't have the right heroes and enough base damage, you're not clearing it.

That said, you can find small optimizations scattered throughout to try and take advantage of. Here are the three most important.

The first is the max level weapon shop. Because each weapon gets pushed to 5 and tomes to 3, starting upgrades are important. The first several weeks, I went full glass canon and ignored this, but that was a mistake. The early power is important.

Wizard Amulet is S+ tier. Wizard Robe is A tier.

To complete the foreshadowing from earlier, the second is LEAN INTO blessings and AWAY from curses. I typically ignore them in Adventure and Arena at my stage of the game, but they matter a lot in Hard Mode Arena. If the blessing is + magical projectiles, run Clockwork Mage with magical weapons like Arcane Staff and Ice Wand. If the curse has x.75 AoE, then run more crit jewels instead of AoE with weapons that don't rely on AoE.

Some of the curses will be back-breaking. .5x damage, no crit, and .75x damage are incredibly difficult to deal with. So SKIP them! You get three skips through stage 15 like in Normal Arena, assuming you've cleared it.

Look ahead at curses. It's better to skip a chapter 10 awful curse than a chapter 12 easy curse.

I'll count that as tip 2.5 and go with this as the third optimization - try to stay at half HP. Clearing horde at the beginning of the stage is easier than clearing them late, so purposefully take some damage. You'll get the damage amp from talents, which WILL help. I have lost several times to the 3-minute timer, so clear them when they're weak.

The horde hit like NMM horde, so you can let them take A swipe at you for the extra DPS. But after that, get ready to pump DPS or you're going to hit the timer.

Additional Tips

There are a couple of other small tips to consider mid-run.

First is kiting. The pattern here is similar to Normal Arena. Kite from corner to corner using freeze timings around Ice Wand as best you can.

However, you don't want to leave your wingman, your pet! Crystalsuars is going to be your 2nd or 3rd strongest weapon, so do your best to maximize its damage uptime. Try to keep Horde as close to it and you as you can. It has a tendency to get stuck next to an entrance, so either reset it by moving across the map or get close to it.

Keep in mind the curses! This is the third time I'm saying it, but adjust your weapons to match the curses. More physical weapons for physical projectiles and more magic for magic.

So, make sure to pick the right hero.

The Best Heroes for Hard Mode Arena are the mass damage dealers from Nightmare Mode, not the self-healers. At its core, HMA is a damage stat check.

That makes Warlord the lord of the Arena, but only when you get him forged and leveled up.

I know from personal experience that you will cap out around stage 11 with a 4* Warlord with four points in Wide Swing and only a 2* Forge. But when you get to 3* forge, then you can clear it by the skin of your teeth.

Moving up to 4* forge makes it "easy" in the sense that you now have the damage, so it's just a matter of executing. I imagine 5* forge turns it into a Dog Josh run where you can just stand still.

These little damage breakpoints matter a lot.

Before my warlord got forged up, a 3* Clockwork Mage with a 4* forge got me through Chapter 14. She became super curse and blessing dependent at that stage. It's also unfortunate that her weapon evolves from CD Tome, which is totally wasted in this mode. A little thing that matters.

With CWM, I could make the 3-minute timer with her slows, but I wouldn't have enough damage going into a .75x damage or worse curse.

But I squeaked out an additional stage at that point with a full damage forgeless 3* Artificer. That signals to me that a fully decked out 5* forge Artificer can make a very solid run into the later stages.

However, with only 5824% damage in the stats screen, I couldn't go further without Warlord. I tried a 4-star Barbarian. I tried a 5* forge Knight, but they just didn't have the damage.

Without personally performing tests, I'd wager a 5* Forge Dark Paladin and a 5* Forge Necromancer could push significantly stages at my level. There was a post in Discord that a 5* Forge Warlock cleared all 20.

If you have one magic weapon and one physical weapon hero for each blessing/curse, that will also help to push further.

So choose from your roster heroes that can ideally pump damage with some kind of slows, stuns, and freezes. Then set them up with this gear.

Gear prioritizes starting upgrades with as much damage as you can get away with. That means you want to run something like:

Rogue Gloves and Wizard Amulet are the cornerstone for me. You need the crit multiplier from the gloves and the two starting upgrades from the Amulet.

For someone like Clockwork Mage, you can go Rogue Helm, Chest, and, believe it or not, boots. That will get you the rogue set bonus to cap out as much DPS as you can. Although I personally prefer the default build, I just mentioned for the additional starting upgrade.

With Warlord, you can potentially run more defensively, but you need the Wizard set slow in my experience. Or you can guarantee your weapons by going Ranger Chest with Wizard Helm.

If you don't need the slow, then substitute Wizard boots for Ranger boots and the additional physical projectile.

In my experience, dealing with regular horde has been the bigger issue than elites, so rogue chest is not mandatory. Unfortunately, the cooldown there is generally wasted as you hit the 40% cap without jewels in the late game.

You have two options with weapons: Werewizard and Glass Cannon.

Werewizard is my nightmare mode build that focuses on defense and status effect multipliers. This has a lower total damage cap, but higher single-target damage with defense. This build is my go-to with Warlord:

Armor Tome > Life Tome > Ice Wand > Damage Tome > 5* Borer > Arcane Staff > Duration Tome > Duplicator Tome > Poison Darts.

Only the Warlord's weapon and Borer will be doing any kind of significant damage. Everything else is an amp to those two: frozen, slow, poison, and burning.

You're going as tanky as you can get, ideally hitting 90% armor after the tome, while relying on staying around 50% HP for more damage.

I also like duration tome to take advantage of dragon, freeze, and rage power-ups. The extra time with those can make a difference in clearing a run.

On the flip side, you can go full glass cannon with Clockwork Mage. I still grab Ice Wand, but priority looks more like:

Ice Wand > CD Tome > Borer > Bomb > Area Tome > Damage Tome > Fire Orbs > Duplicator Tome > Life Tome

This setup looks way better with a 5* forge Artificer and Projectile Speed tome substitute in for the wasted CD Tome. 4* Borer and Wizard gear will get you a slow status effect here, which would most likely be required.

Unfortunately, I don't have the ideal special weapon collection. You should be using things like Cow Whistle, Dagger of Dawn, Lotus Pike, Scrap Hammer, and Dynamite Slingshot if you have them. Again, looking for disruption and status effects or high-level forges like Smoke Bomb and Snow Globe.

Anything to help you do more damage and kite a bit longer, which brings me to…

Jewels are going to be somewhat blessing and curse depending. Remember, you need to do enough damage, so I typically go for:

Ultimate Charge

|

Ultimate Duration

→

Vulnerability

→

Projectile (P)

→

Area

|

Crtiical

If you are not at 40% CD, then run the necessary CD jewels to hit it with the Hero.

Again, LEAN INTO THE CURSES AND BLESSINGS. Stack more AoE when it's amped and more crit when it's cursed.

I like weakness because you're going to be getting hit no matter what, and this jewel lets you take more.

If you have enough damage, then you could consider more HP Regen jewels like in NMM.

And just like in Nightmare Mode, you have a little flexibility with pets.

Like everything else with our setup, you're looking for some combination of defense and damage with pets.

I always say run your highest rarity main pet, but here you really need Crystalsuars or Blazetail. Then, for passives, you have two options in my head.

For damage, you go owl + pyrokraken. It's too hard to control exactly where your pet stands to take full advantage of Emberpaw, I've tried. Crystalsuars has a tendency to pick an entrance and not move. The passive aura would be wasted.

The other option is to run as many snails as you can get away with. If you have enough damage, then double snails. I've been doing owl + snail for Warlord, which has been a solid balance.

Like pets, you'll need to find a balance between offense and defense with weapons.

At the end of the day, you're really only running Hard Mode Arena for pride points. I honestly haven't felt as satisfied playing HvH as when I finally cleared HMA 20 for the first time.

This mode felt like a real challenge that combined all the little aspects of the game to clear at my current level. If you're running all heroic gear, you missed out on the strategy and thinking required to push small advantages.

However, you did have access to 10% more tokens across all stages and the ability to choose one of three weapons to get tokens for.

Don't go spending gems for the additional 10% tokens IMO, unless clearing one bad curse stage opens up access to the next Super Token clear. Even then, you're looking at 5000 additional super tokens over a year, or ~⅔ of a weapon forge. Everything in HvH is a grind, but every grind counts!

I will say, it is nice to pick a weapon each week. That choice ideally gives you some value in not totally wasting the tokens, even if they are mostly for basic weapons or older heroes.

And that's my guide to Hard Mode Arena. This guide was 5 weeks in the making as I slowly began to develop a strategy, combined with enough damage to actually clear the content.

For reference, once you push into the 6500% + damage range, Hard Mode Arena is more like regular Arena. It's for those of us still grinding for heroic gear, or with relatively limited hero pools, that this guide should help out.

Guys like Hax and Wave have this thing on farm and just show off at this point.