TLDR;
Hello, heroes. I'm Kolz, and today I'm going to be walking you through Nightmare Mode, Chapter One.
I love Nightmare Mode.
It is nothing like what you've done before in Heroes vs. Hordes.
The rest of the game is all about clearing the horde before they clear you. And in Nightmare Mode, it's all about beating the chapter. That's all that matters. You're just going to run around like an idiot and not die. But if you do that, you get a ton of rewards.
People don't realize this is how you level up your heroes, not through grinding in Hard Mode. It's by beating Nightmare levels. That's how you'll get all of the hero orbs you need. It's also how you're going to get all of your hero shards. And that's why Nightmare Mode is so important.
But what happens is people load into the game and they crash into a wave of horde and they never load it back up. But that shouldn't be the case. You should be progressing through this at the same time as you're progressing through Normal Mode and Hard Mode. And I'm going to show you how to do it.
For Nightmare Mode, I created the Crazy Taxi build. The Crazy Tinkerer is one of the worst heroes in the game. If I can beat Nightmare Mode with him, you can beat Nightmare Mode with him.
The key to Nightmare Mode is not dying. Your goal is not to kill anything here. You just don't want them to kill you. And the way you do that is you don't let them hit you.
That's what the Crazy Tinkerer build is all about. It's about upping your movement speed, even at a low level, so that the horde can't touch you in the first place. There is no cap here. So the higher and more movement speed you get, the easier this is going to be.
His build is Ranger Boots for movement speed, Ranger Helm for movement speed, Four Knight for defense.
Knight Gear, when you hit below 40% health, gives you more movement speed. See the theme?
I like to use three movement speed jewels. After that you're looking for weakness, regeneration, and evasion jewels.
So your weapon priority in Nightmare Mode is way different than in Regular and Hard Mode. Your goal here is to do what? Survive. So the most important thing you can build is armor. Armor increases your effective health for each point of HP that you have. So increasing your armor will give you the most effective health as quickly as possible.
At that point, you're looking to evolve Ice Wand. So you prioritize armor and then Ice Wand and then Lifetome in order to evolve Ice Wand. And then you're looking at Divine Aura, and you only want to put two points in Divine Aura. You do that because at level two, Divine Aura gets additional cooldown and additional radius, and that'll be enough to kind of push back any horde that gets close to you.
After that, you're looking at Evasion Tome as a priority, followed by anything that has a stun or a slow. And you get those additional stuns and slows typically through the forge. You can look to something like level two Boomerang. That will have a stun in it. Or level-two Bombs. That gives Bombs a stun. Level two Crossbows have a freeze.
And so you can fill out the end of your build with one of those weapons that you typically think of for damage. But you use them in Nightmare Mode for what's called disruption. A slow or a stun.
Oh, Pets.
Pets rock in Nightmare Mode.
You're running double snail passives. The snail pet passive adds 15% to your health. And that'll be the first time I bet that you've ever actually read the text on the basic snail pets, because I didn't even know about that until someone told me in Discord. Who the heck cares about those normal pets?
This is how you clear Nightmare Mode One without any revives. Crazy Tinkerer has a skill that every 15 seconds, he gets five seconds of, you guessed it, more movement speed. He's reliably the fastest guy in this game. And you will use that to your advantage to just bob and weave, bob and weave, bob and weave.
The goal with this is not to get hit by horde. And so what you have to do is essentially find the holes between them running around in a circle. As you go up in the circle, they kind of follow you along. You're fast enough to outrun them at this point here before they can get to you. And then again, they're after you, and you can hear them, but they can't get to you, and you can get back up. So, a circle is the most efficient way to kite the horde.
After you run around in circles, a maximum number of horde can appear on the screen. When you hit that max number, no more can spawn. And so you end up just constantly running around in circles with no additional horde coming from the outside, and you survive.
And there will be times when you're at like a sliver of health. You're not dead until you're dead. So if you have a little bit of health, keep bobbing and weaving, because I've survived many a level with like zero HP. But that's the whole goal—just to survive.
You're going to get nervous. You're going to be like, "Oh, God, I'm going to get hit." That's fine. Just take it and figure out where's the next hole. And if you move fast enough, they just won't get to you.
And that's how you beat Nightmare Mode. And I'm telling you, the rewards are so worth it. This is how you get all of your heroes up to two stars and get everything up to level 100 for the bonuses. They just throw orbs and shards at you. But you have to put aside everything you know about HVH and get ready for Nightmare.
