| Overall: B+ | Early: B |
| Late: B | NMM: B |
| Adventure: B | Arena: B+ |
| Clash: B | Boss Brawl: B |
Let's give the new Plague Keeper adventure hero in Heroes vs. Hordes a look.
Straight away, he's a very cool-looking hero. I accidentally spoiled him one hour before he came out because I was looking through an APK trying to get some pictures of other heroes.
More importantly, we're gonna go through all of his skills, globals, faction bonuses, and forges to paint a picture of his power level.
I will also put together a recommended build based on his kit and where I would recommend playing him.
Let's start spreading the plague.
Kolz's First TakePlague Keeper seems like he'll be a really good boost for Assassin. His strong 5-star forge combined with average to below average globals makes him something of a standard "Shelf Hero."
You could push his forge if you like his playstyle. However, a lot will ultimately come down to how much damage his level 80 Skill "Poisonous Mixture" can really pump out at max levels.
Note: I will not have Plague Keeper until the end of the Adventure. So these are provisional rankings.
His base stats are:
Okay, armor and move speed that's good for early Nightmare Mode (Pre-120). Any hero that has plus armor plus move speed in early nightmare mode is viable, so that's good.
Nothing amazing here like Clockwork Mage's +Cooldown per star shard piece.
At level 10, Plague Keeper gets a 10% bonus area of effect, which is a nice scaling buff.
Level 20 is a starting upgrade. Starting upgrades are good for beating the early part of a chapter, but they cap your end power. Think of it as moving your power up throughout the course of a chapter to the beginning via levels. But now at the end of the chapter, after your max level, it's not doing any damage like the area of effect is at level 10. So there's an opportunity cost trade-off here.
Level 30 is another 10% area of effect. That's great.
Level 50 global is plus 50 health bonus. Health is not great. It's more valuable early in the game than later in the game, so that's not a great global. It's the same as 5 of the worst basic talents.
Level 60 is plus 60% damage when dealing magical damage. Plus-damage things aren't always great because you have so much damage from other sources, but this is kind of standard. You'd rather see something like AoE, cooldown, or any other effect from higher-tier talents.
Then level 70 is +12.5% damage. That's a kind of recent, standard adventure hero global and is really bad.
Level 90 faction bonus is x1.05 damage to poisoned enemies. That's actually a very strong faction bonus because it mainly amps up Assassin. Anything with a multiple to damage is a great additional bonus to have, particularly in Shadow Syndicate.
Then 120 is x1.025 times damage to poisoned enemies. Again, that's good. That's an average level 120 global, I'd say.
Finally, at 140, his extra special bonus is three starting upgrades, so that's really good for arena or faction wars, where having additional starting upgrades makes clearing the content easier. But like the level 20 starting upgrade, this will not help his end of run cap on max damage.
Plague Keeper is part of the Shadow Syndicate, which is good because it'll help power up Assassin via star levels. You'll always take that.
His particular faction bonus is plus magical damage, which is less helpful than his poison multipliers elsewhere.
I kind of wish they kept that theme here.
Let's give him a try and see if it stands out…
Wow, he's got so many starting upgrades. That's funny, the 140 bonus is strong.
Okay, the first thing to note is that the rebounding injection is going everywhere. That's like having a permanent poison crossbow. That seems strong.
His basic attack is throwing vials that land with a small AoE. That means they scale nicely with projectiles and AoE, along with other bonuses like projectile speed.
His evolved weapon seems strong. It ends up splitting like Bomb and hitting most horde. That's a good sign.
And lastly, his level 80 skill just seems like a miss. No horde are running over these random puddles. You'll have to kite enemies through them to make them do any kind of repeatable damage.
No Disruption
No slows or stuns anywhere in his kit, so not particularly well adapted to something like Arena, except for all of those starting upgrades.
No Healing
He doesn't have any kind of inbuilt healing or shields, so he's not a particularly good Nightmare Mode hero. However, his plus base stats make him fine for early Nightmare Mode.
No Scaling Puddle Damage
Being able to effectively use puddles will be important in the long term. He's not gonna do damage if they're not gonna hit anything.
And there's no interaction like Warlord to reduce the cooldown of his skills to make them stronger later in the game.
You run the HvH standard max damage per second (DPS) gear build.
| Helm: Rogue | Gloves: Rogue |
| Chest: Rogue | Necklace: Rogue |
| Boots: Ranger | Ring: Wizard |
Run the standard weapon build with Plague Keeper.
Tomes to compliment the build are:
Cooldown
Area
Duplicator
Damage
Crticial
You don't evolve Crossbow because the increased number of projectiles apply a ton of vulnerability to targets that increases your overall DPS more than the evolution to Crossbow would. The Crit Tome also plays into the Rogue 4x multiplier gear.
Plague Keeper runs standard jewels for HvH.
Ultimate Charge
Ultimate Duration
Vulnerability
Cooldown til 60%
Projectile (P)
Projectile Speed
Area
Run cooldown jewels until it hits 60% in the detail window. You cap cooldown at 60% because you get 30% from cooldown tome. 90% is the max cooldown cap in Normal, Hard, Arena, Boss, and Guild modes.
Area has a soft cap on Area Of Effect when the inner ring of 4* Fire Orbs hits the side of the screen. But that's not really a worry until you have Heroic gear.
You have some leeway here to use much higher-level jewels instead of lower-level cooldown jewels. For example, I'd consider a level 7 Projectile (P) over a level 1 cooldown. You can always test which does more damage in your game by doing the same run with the same gear and weapons but changing the jewels.
Then let's check out his forge.
His weapon evolves into Chaos Plague from Area Tome. That's very good as area tome works in all events and game types.
1 Star Forge
Area of effect and projectiles. Projectiles are like a flat increase to damage, while area of effect is helpful for normal/hard mode content. I'd run plus projectiles for something like Boss Brawl.
2 Star Forge
Left: 1.1xdamage—that's good for Boss Brawl.
Right: 20% status effect duration—so a lot of his kit seems like it's damage over time, so that'll be a net increase to the damage, assuming things live to take the damage, but they shouldn't really be living all that long.
I'd probably take the damage multiple there.
3 Star Forge
Plus 10% extra poison damage. I don't know if there's a multiple or if it's adding a flat plus. You don't usually see plus 10% extra poison damage, so maybe this is adding 0.1 to the number instead of multiplying it 1×1.1.
I mean, that's fine, not great. You have to do something that does poison in order for that to make a difference, so Assassin benefits again.
4 Star Forge
Chaos Plague - Each vial shatters into smaller toxin ones, spreading poison in all directions. Using this in the try screen felt like a nice damage amp. It's like how Bomb evolves to start spreading more bombs on impact.
5 Star Forge
Left: Increases damage by 20% and increases area by 1.2. So that's a pretty standard five-star bonus good for most modes.
Right: Small vials have a 2% chance to leave behind puddles from level 40 ability that deals 20% damage over a five-second duration. The Level 40 ability is "Rebound Injection," and that's the one that deals a lot of damage. So the five-star looks like it'll be a whole big increase in damage for him.
So that looks good.
Forge Summary
His four- and five-star forges look strong.
His three-star forge is, I'd say, below average because not a lot of heroes have poison, and his one and two-star forges have a nice little combination of either being good for normal mode, hard mode, or Boss Brawl.
Level 40 - Rebounding Injection
From what I can tell, they wrapped up all of Plague Keeper's power in his level 40 skill, Rebounding injection. This skill scales nicely with levels and adds what are essentially poison crossbows to the screen at most times. With no way to reduce the cooldown or amp the damage besides increasing weapon damage, he'll live or die by what this hits in a run.
Level 80 - Poisonous Mixture
His skill at 80 is every 10 seconds, throwing three poisonous potions to deal 20% damage every one second. Enemies that touch the puddle get poisoned for 500% damage for five seconds. Okay, that 500% doesn't scale, and the 20% every second will take five seconds to do damage. That's not great— you want your damage to occur all at once because hordes don't live that long.
Over-time dots aren't great unless you're doing something like nightmare mode, where they'll live long enough to actually experience the damage or Boss Brawl. The scaling part is on 20% damage every one second.
Using this in testing, it feels very, very weak. The puddles aren't big enough to hit anything. In an event like Boss Brawl, you'll have to make a lot of effort to make sure the boss runs over each puddle.
Level 100 Ultimate - Vial Throws
All weapon kills fill a meter. When full, lays down a potion-throwing machine. The machine throws five potions every 10 seconds. Thrown potions apply Poisonous Mixture. Poisonous Mixture is the level 80 over-time bonus.
All weapon kills means it's not main weapon based, making it easier to proc. However, it is kill-based, so you're not going to get to use it in something like Boss Brawl or Nightmare Mode.
And again, it's applying ticking damage, which seems relatively weak. So it's not the best ultimate.Scaling
Let's see how these abilities scale.
He gets standard new adventure hero scaling. So getting the three-star Plague Keeping is the big upgrade. It is six times as strong as level one.
The scaling comes in Rebounding Injection. Unless Poisonous Mixture is better than it reads, his damage will feel kind of lackluster at higher levels.
If Poisonous Mixture actually works, then he'll scale fine as a lot of his later damage revolves around this skill.
On the pet side, you're looking for max DPS pets.
Main Pet. The best main pet for the Plague Keeper is your highest-level pet. Typically, that means the Pyrokraken or Emberpaw. When you get an epic pet, switch to them.
Your highest-level pet should do the most damage.
Passive Pets. I typically run my next two highest-damage pets as my passive pets. That means either Emberpaw or Pyrokraken, plus an elemental striker with a damage bonus.
I have a full pet guide that goes into more detail.
Main Pet. I really like the Hydro Basilisk as a main pet. The ultimate slow is great, the geysers do a ton of AOE damage, and it's ranged. A great combo across the board.
I just now managed to get the Crystalsaurs to the same level, which should start doing more damage.
Generally, your highest-level pet should do the most damage. Stormshell and Storm Gryphon are both also great choices for a main pet.
Passive Pets.Right now, I am running Pyrokraken and Crystalsaurs as my passive pets. I like them for the ranged DPS that isn't limited by the Emberpaw radius. If you have a higher level Strom Gryphon than Basilisk, I would swap in the Basilisk for Pyrokraken.
A lot of this will come down to your own testing, honestly, as there's no 100% ideal setup.
In Nightmare Mode, you might consider running double snails for extra HP instead of extra damage, but some prefer to let pets wail away on the horde.
I personally opt for double snail passives, which each give 15% HP and then use Hydro Basilisk as a main pet.
Plague Keeper seems fine. It doesn't seem like a particularly exciting adventure hero in terms of unlocking any kind of new content for you the way Shield Warden did.
You're not gonna use him in Nightmare Mode. He's not gonna be a beast in Arena. He doesn't have any slows.
So it feels like a very standard Adventure Hero.
On the plus side, he's part of the Shadow Syndicate, and so he'll make a hero like Assassin stronger via Echo and other faction bonuses.
His 120 global looks pretty good, and his faction bonus looks pretty strong. So, there are some pretty solid globals there for making someone like Assassin stronger. But Plague Keeper is going to be a pretty standard shelf hero.
In my opinion, you probably won't use him all that much unless you like his theme. In which case, go nuts, dude, and use him all you want.
