Hey everyone, Kolz here. Today, I will walk you through The Snowman build for the Shield Warden in Heroes vs. Hordes.
You will learn to wield freezes, stuns, and shields with the precision of a master.
To ascend to the legend of The Snowman—the coldest nightmare Hell has ever known.
You survive nightmare mode by keeping the hordes frozen and yourself alive. In keeping with his creed that the best offense is an unbreakable defense, The Snowman prioritizes freezing his enemies before they can even touch him. Your weapons, gear, and jewels prioritize disruptions like freezes, stuns, and slows.
If enemies do manage to penetrate your frozen fortress, you stack health and armor.
Health and armor scale multiplicatively together. The more health you have, the more efficient your armor is. The more armor you have, the more efficient your health is. And so our goal is to create the most amount of effective health.
Here's how you gear the Snowman up for nightmare mode.
| Helm: Wizard | Gloves: Knight |
| Chest: Knight | Necklace: Rogue |
| Boots: Knight | Ring: Knight |
To maximize the freeze duration of your enemies, you focus on gear with status effect duration. That means The Snowman takes the Wizard Helm and the Wizard Ring. The Wizard helm increases status effect duration by 25%, and the Wizard ring increases it by 50%. The 75% increase will keep the hordes frozen for days..
You follow that up with the rest of the Knight build. The Knight Chest, Boots, Gloves, and Necklace. The percent increases in health from the Gloves and the Necklace synergize well with the massive amount of armor The Snowman has and his percentage health-based shield.
You take the Knight Boots for the mitigation to slow. As you progress through Nightmare Mode, more and more hordes will apply a slow to you, and these boots effectively let you ignore it..
If you find yourself having trouble clearing a level of nightmare mode, you can switch out the Knight Necklace for the Wizard Necklace for the two additional starting upgrades. This change can make dealing with the beginning part of a wave easier.
Now, on to weapons. In keeping with the theme that defense is better than offense.
Armor Tome
Ice Wand
Life Tome
Divine Aura 2*
Boomerang 3*
Evasion Tome
Area Tome
Duplicator Tome
Bombs
Crossbow
You max Armor Tome first. For me, it only requires 2 points because I have 70% base armor, and the cap is 90%.
After that, it's Ice Wand. You want to both max this out and get Life Tome to evolve it, as Life Tome offers you more health, which both scales on your shields and off the armor you've already acquired.
After that, I try and put 2 points into Divine Aura. At 2 points, you get an additional Cooldown and Area of Effect for more pushback.
At this point, you're looking for any weapon that has freeze or stun duration via forge upgrades. Boomerang, bombs, and crossbow all gain disruption at 2-star forge.
My personal preference puts the next priority on Boomerang to 3 stars. You stop at 3 again for the Cooldown improvement.
Evasion Tome is your next bet. Even though Evasion is reduced in Nightmare Mode, some Evasion is better than no Evasion.
Next is the Duplicator Tome or Area Tome. I have no preference as both improve your disruption on the margins.
And the final weapon I would use is either Bombs or Crossbow, depending on which you get and have upgraded.
On the jewel front, use standard max DPS jewels through most of the game. That makes the priority getting to 60% cooldown in the detail screen with this general jewel priority:
Ultimate Charge
Vulnerability
Cooldown til 60%
Projectile (P)
Area
Explosion
Unlike other heroes, you don't run Ultimate Duration for the Warlord. His ultimate happens instantly, so there's nothing to extend.
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.
In nightmare mode, you're looking to change it up for survivability, so things like:
Weakness
Vulnerability
Health Regen
Area of Effect
Evasion
You can actually go for more area of effect (AoE) over evasion because getting hit reduces Wide Swing's cooldown. That will net increase your healing
Main Pet. The best main pet for the Shield Warden 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.
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.
Main Pet. I go with Hydro Basilisk as a main pet for the slow. I will test Crystalsaurs when I get it leveled.
Interestingly, it's passive pets that are a bit OP in NMM.
Passive Pets. You run double basic Snails for passive pets in NMM. Each gives 15% multiplicative HP of your base HP for 30% total. It's hugely important in Nightmare mode. Shields Warden's shield scales off of his Max HP.
You don't need the extra damage from pets. You just need to survive.
