Now that Warlord is in the current special event, a lot of people are asking about him, pulling him, and wondering how to build for him.
So today, I'm going to go through the Warlord.
The Warlord is THE best late-game hero. But why?
It has to do with the synergies between his skills, forge, and star levels. Implied in that is a ton of resources in the form of hero shards and weapon tokens. You will also need general global buffs from other heroes and weapons that make later-game heroes strong.
To help you build this beautifully ugly Hulkman, I'll walk you through all the weapons, gear, jewels, pets, skills, and forge in order to make Warlord into the true Goliath of the battlefield that he should be.
Get ready to grind this ugly orge into the Warlord over the long haul.
Pulling him in the special event is just the beginning of your adventure.
After you pull him, that's when the real work begins. You have to make him your main hero and start investing in the big green guy. By that I mean:
So he's truly a carry—one that you want to optimize and make your main—but it's going to be a grind, just like everything else in Heroes vs Hordes.
The Warlord's biggest downside? He's just a big, fat, ugly troll swinging an axe.
Heroic Image Credit: @Orchardist - a true hero.
The key to Warlord's late-game strength comes down to a couple of important factors.
One, he's in the Warriors faction, which is a very strong faction that offers a bunch of survivability and defensive abilities for Nightmare mode. That's where everyone talks about Warlord as being the best because he's the easiest, best champion for clearing Nightmare mode, which is late-late game.
Two, his 2-star weapon forge, "Lifestealer," lets him heal for 5% of his health with his skill, "Wide Swing." That's one of the only abilities in the game to heal. And pushing his weapon to 5* dramatically increases his overall DPS.
And three, 3-star Warlord gets exponentially more damage than 2-star Warlord. Those 375 shards make his Wide Swing an Infinite Swing and Fatal Wounds into the Executor. Add in the additional health scaling from levels, and he enters full angry orge mode.
I'll go into more detail in the forge and skills section, but that's the gist.
The best gear for Warlord through normal and hard mode is your standard DPS build. You don't really want to play him early game as his base stats aren't great. However, he can handle enough business in later games. So, you're going to be looking at building:
| Helm: Rogue | Gloves: Rogue |
| Chest: Rogue | Necklace: Rogue |
| Boots: Ranger | Ring: Wizard/Rogue |
Early in the game, you want to equip your highest-tier gear, even if it doesn't fall into one of those categories.
As you advance into Nightmare mode, your gear changes to be more defensive while still maintaining a certain level of offense. For example, you can keep the rogue gloves and the rogue necklace for the increased crit multiplier while stacking the knight and wizard in the other spots. It's a much more aggressive build, but it works for the Warlord.
A typical Early Nightmare Build might look like this:
| Helm: Knight/Wizard | Gloves: Rogue |
| Chest: Knight | Necklace: Rogue |
| Boots: Knight | Ring: Wizard/Knight |
As the only hero able to consistently clear NMM202, he has another adaptation for that chapter. You build this around needing to hit ice wand evo, armor, and main weapon levels before Wave 2. So you build:
| Helm: Wizard | Gloves:Wizard/Rogue |
| Chest: Ranger | Necklace: Wizard/Rogue |
| Boots: Knight | Ring: Wizard/Knight |
The Ranger Reshuffles reduce the randomness of weapons in wave 1 to make sure you hit what you need.
For other levels in Nightmare Mode, you can also consider the Werewizard Build:
| Helm: Wizard | Gloves: Knight |
| Chest: Wizard | Necklace: Wizard |
| Boots: Knight | Ring: Wizard/ |
Onto the optimal weapons and tomes for the Warlord.
Because you don't play him much in the early game, I'm going to stick to the two basic setups:
Max DPS Gear is just about killing mobs before they kill you. The Warlord's max DPS is the standard late-game DPS weapon build:
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.
Warlord is THE Nightmare Mode hero.
Nightmare mode significantly increases the health of the hordes and reduces your evasion and regen. For that reason, the goal of the weapon build is to survive via armor and disruption, not to kill hordes.
That puts a massive emphasis on Armor Tome and Ice Wand. I call this the "Snowman Build for Nightmare Mode:"
Armor Tome
Life Tome
War Axe
Arcane Staff
Duration Tome
Damage Tome
Duplicator Tome
Bombs
Crossbow
Boomerang
Boomerang
You need Arcane Staff at 4* forge to prioritize it otherwise, remove it from the build entirely.
Special weapons like 4* forger Borer are great. As are 5* Lantern, Smoke Bomb, and Slingshot. But most people don't own these.
You only want Divine Aura at 2* and Boomerang at 3* for the cooldown reduction.
If you're doing nightmare content, you probably have done enough Arenas to upgrade bombs or crossbow to 2*. They both get disruption chance at that point in the form of freezes or stuns. You should use whichever is at 2*.
More details on that build here.
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
Now, I'm going to jump into the Warlord's forge because that's the most important part of the hero.
You need to understand how his forge impacts his kit to get why he's so strong, especially in Nightmare mode.
Go Left for Bleed Punisher at level 1.
While both options in the first level of his forge are strong, the big improvement comes at the second level. You go Left here to get access to Lifestealer. It allows Wideswing to start healing you for 5% of your maximum health.
That right there is one of only two true healing abilities in the game. It lets you sustain through Nightmare Mode's most challenging content.
At the five-star level, most people suggest going Right for Bloodbath to max damage, particularly in Nightmare Mode.
Additionally, because he's a newer hero, his skills grow exponentially with star level, which I'll get into next.
The synergies between Warlord's 2* Forge and his skills bring him to God tier status.
As a newer hero, his power grows exponentially with Star Level. You can see in his skill descriptions the giant boost:
These doublings to 7x increases in damage don't compare to older heroes like Barbarian.
So getting Warlord to 3-star is a giant boost to your damage output and survivability in nightmare mode.
But the real reason his kit is so strong in Nightmare mode is buried in the description of Wide Swing.
The Wide Swing description states, "getting hit reduces the cooldown of Wide Swing by half." Combine that with:
Means those turtles are healing him more than hurting him in NMM202.
That combination of healing and, what is essentially, skill cooldown reduction makes him the king Orge of Nightmare Mode, Hero Clash, Boss Brawl, and basically every other part of the game.
Main Pet. The best main pet for the Warlord 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, as we talked about - Warlord's Wide Swing heals his Max HP.
You don't need the extra damage from pets. You just need to survive.
