A Beginner's Guide To Heroes vs Hordes By Kolz

How To Use Resources Early In The Game

After completing a Chapter, that's what "levels" are called in Heroes vs Hordes, you get access to seven different resources:

1. Coins
2. Hero Orbs
3. Dust
4. Scrolls
5. Keys
6. Runestones
7. And Gems

Each resource has a purpose in making your hero stronger.

• Coins are used across all points in the game to help with leveling, but are particularly helpful for talents early in the game. Talents make ALL of your heroes stronger, and I'll talk about them more in a bit.
• Hero Orbs are used to level up one hero at a time. As heroes hit higher levels, they get access to powerful skills, ultimates, and upgrades.
• Dust can be transformed into Jewels. Jewels are the least important early in the game, so I won't go into a lot of detail here, but I have a whole guide dedicated to them. The big thing to know is not to merge jewels until you read my guide 🙂
• Scrolls are used to upgrade the SLOT for gear. So, for example, you can use scrolls to upgrade the Knight helm. That will upgrade every HELM, not just the knight set. Always use scrolls when you can! There is no downside.
• Keys are exchanged in the shop to get more pieces of gear. You combine gear to level it up. Unlike jewels, you should always merge gear in the blacksmith! There's no downside to using them. But NEVER exchange it!
• Runestones can be spent in the portal to gain star shards for heroes. These are used to "star up" a hero and give them access to stronger abilities.
• Lastly, the rarest resource in the game is Gems. These are used for special purposes throughout the game. I will go into great detail in a bit, but know that you should do everything possible to save them.

We established that Knight is going to be your main hero for now, so spend resources you get early in the game trying to level him up with hero orbs and coins!

Now, to start ramping up your damage, turn in the keys you collect from beating chapters to the shop to get new gear. You can merge three pieces of the same type and rarity to get to the next level. For example, 3 Common Knight Helms turn into a Great Knight Helm.

Once you get that new Great Helm, use scrolls to level it up and make it stronger.

After that, use any dust you collect to turn them into Jewels in the shop. They eventually go into your gear and make you stronger, but it can take a while to get there. I have a full guide to jewels in the description.

You'll unlock hero star levels by turning in Runestones to the portal. Higher star levels mean stronger heroes with new skills, but hero shards are a long grind. You can take solace in the fact that you're saving up for something good, even if it comes in a month or two.

And lastly, you've been using Coins along the way to help with gear leveling and hero leveling. Well, the most important early use of Coins is in Talents. The talent system is a permanent boost to all of your heroes' power. Each time you buy a talent, a slot machine spins with three options to choose from. Here's how you pick the best talent from the results:

1. Pick the highest rarity talent
2. Then, if all common, pick damage until ~30 points in it
3. Then, if all common, pick anything BUT damage or health. So armor, movement speed, etc
4. Then, pick damage
5. Then health

It's harder to get higher rarity talents, so always pick them. While you want some damage early in the game, it doesn't scale well. So that's why you stop around 30 to grab the other common talents. Health is the least valuable because you should not be getting hit by horde.

I have a full guide to talents in the description.

After leveling up some talents, you'll have one other important use for coins: pets.

Farming Primer

Farming is vitally important in Heroes vs Hordes.

There is going to come a time when you don't do enough damage to clear a chapter. At which point, you have to go back to an earlier chapter that you already cleared and keep beating it over and over again.

That's called farming.

Farming will let you collect more keys, hero orbs, dust, and coins to level up your heroes, pets, and gear.

As you hit certain break points, for example, a new tier in your damage gear or a higher talent level, then you can go back to progression, which is beating new content.

Like every other section, I have a full guide to farming in the description, but the key takeaway is that farming Hard Mode is better than Normal Mode because of the key chance. That small but very important key chance will let you improve your gear much faster.

You make farming even more efficient by using Noble Gear. Noble Gear sacrifices damage for improved resources at the end of the run. So, an example farming run would be to wear Noble gear in every slot and go back and beat Hard Mode Chapter 1 to collect keys and resources.

You take the same weapons you would during a normal run, so it's a good time to practice strategies for getting them.

After you hit those damage increase breakpoints from farming, you can go back to beating chapters, which will get easier with optimal weapons.

But you don't want to progress too far into Normal and Hard Mode early because it will impact the difficulty of Adventure. You can make sure you haven't gone "too far" by actually wearing your farm gear to progress through new chapters.

Let me say that again for emphasis: you can get to a point where you are beating new chapters in weaker Noble farming gear.

If you beat Normal and Hard Mode chapters in all Noble Gear, then Adventure mode should be easy mode with full Damage Gear.

But wait, what the heck is Adventure Mode?

Unlocking New Game Modes

As you continue to progress in Normal Mode, you will unlock about ten different game modes. You look at my guides for all of them to help out.

Try to complete as much of Arena, Dungeon, and Boss Brawl as you go. Those are targeted more at later-stage players, but there's no harm in trying them out.

However, I want to cover three important modes for early game players here.

I already mentioned the importance of Hard Mode. Use that for farming after you've progressed some.

The other two are Adventure Mode and Guild Mission.

I'll tackle Guild Missions first.

The Guild Mission is a six-out-of-seven-day weekly event that requires you to use a ticket each day in order to fight the horde. You work together as a guild to get as many points as you can.

The more points your guild gets, the more guild tokens you receive at the end of the week. You use those tokens in the Guild Exchange for a very solid set of rewards. I'll leave the details to that guide, but know the most important part of this Guild Mission is JOINING AN ACTIVE GUILD.

Finding a guild where everyone does the event and chats makes the game 10x more fun. Don't be afraid to leave a dead guild each week in search of a live one. And in the same vein, hop on Discord or Reddit and join the community!

Next up, Adventure Mode.

Adventure Mode tasks you with saving a hero who has been imprisoned 40 stages away. It's your goal to rescue that hero within a 30-day time period, free them from their prison, and add them to your ranks of heroes.

Each stage in the game mode is a five-minute test of survival that offers rewards. There are no waves; it's just a five-minute countdown.

Clear 40 stages within 30 days, and you get the ultimate reward: a new hero.

This is important, as it only costs 1,300 gems to reach the hero if you run the whole adventure efficiently from day 1. Joining mid-month will make it harder on your first adventure, but if you can reach the hero for under 3000 gems, it's still totally worth it.

I have a guide on how to save the hero efficiently, but this is the first time I've talked about gems since I promised earlier.

Questions around gems were the second most common in the forum, so let's go over how to best use them.

How To Use Gems

Gems are the single most versatile currency in the game. You can use them to do literally anything, but there are smarter and more efficient ways to spend them.

You will be collecting gems from a variety of sources. You get them for beating chapters the first time, from logging in each day, and from completing daily quests.

In total, you should expect to get between 3,000 and 4,000 gems over a month.

As a rule of thumb, try to only spend gems to collect heroes or weapons. That makes the key to gems' understanding where NOT to spend them.

Do NOT use them on:

1. Keys
2. Jewels
3. Reshuffles
4. Revives
5. Hero Resets
6. Talent Spins
7. Guild Tickets
8. Eggs
9. Pet Resources

When in doubt, don't use them! I know that's kinda crappy to hear, but the best use of gems when you begin playing is to save em!

Early in the game, just stockpile as much as you can for use later when you actually understand the value of different items.

The one early game exception is Adventure Mode. You do want to buy the tickets necessary to reach the hero if you can do so for under about 3000 gems.

You start with three free tickets, get another new ticket each day, and get one more free ticket along the way. That means over 30 days, you get 33 free tickets.

You can buy two discounted tickets for 150 gems each, that's 300 gems. The remaining five are at the full price of 200 gems. That's 1300 gems in total if you never fail a stage.

3,000 gems is a good price for a hero, so if you come into the adventure about 8 to 9 days late, invest in those remaining 8-9 tickets to grab the hero.

The other place you will eventually use gems the most efficiently is in Special Events. They are too nuanced to go over now, but I have a guide for most of them.

If you made it this far, you're sufficiently well-versed in the early game, but now it's time to take the real money leap and make Heroes vs Hordes 100x better.

The Only Real Money Purchase You Need

There is one purchase I recommend to all players who have been playing for at least a week and really like the game:

Buy the No Ads pack.

Up until this point, you've been playing a free trial. For $20, you're buying the game.

HvH becomes 100 times more fun when you don't have to put your phone down for a minute because stupid ads constantly spam your screen.

The no ads pack unlocks everything you previously had to watch an ad for, including daily gems and quests.

If you've been playing for over a week and you're really enjoying yourself, I highly recommend buying that.

After that, you don't really have to spend any more money. Enjoy the game and the grind.

That said, if you want to go a bit deeper, I recommend buying permanent additions. The five-dollar pet expedition pack is immensely valuable. As are the Faction War passes for either the Warriors Guild or the Mechanist League.

If you're running out of energy and want to play more, a hero pass is a very cost-efficient buy for the first couple of months.

But after that, I would chill out and not spend money.

Stay under $50 for the first few months and make sure you're in it to win it.

At that point, you can check out my real money guide if you think you want to step up your spending seriously.

But, I'm telling you, all you need is the no-ad pack to really enjoy Heroes vs Hordes.

What's The Best Hero Early In The Game

The number one most common question across every forum was, "What hero should I use early in the game?"

And while the tutorial starts you off with Arcane Mage, it gives you the choice between her and Knight.

The clear choice throughout the early game, and in fact, most of the game, is Knight.

Knight is one of the stronger heroes in the game, but he just so happens to be a starter hero, which is great.

His big advantage over Arcane Mage is that his weapon can hit multiple horde with each swing, while she can only hit one at a time with her orbs.

You'll encounter other free-to-play heroes early, but Knight is easily the best, so do not feel rushed to get the other heroes!

Pirate Queen is acquired by logging into the game on 30 different days. Fire Wizard, you get for logging in 7 days in a row. And Blademaster is earned by completing the Hero Prologue.

You can use gems to acquire Dark Ranger, Spirit Shaman, and Frost Wizard, but they will not help you early. They are good to add to your roster, which is the name for your complete hero pool, eventually, but don't worry about it right away.

I'll explain later, but save your gems for now.

None of these heroes is better than Knight.

With that in mind, you're going to want to start leveling up your Knight. But how do you do that?

Well, for every chapter you beat, you get resources. You use those resources to make your heroes stronger. So let's go through how to use each resource early in the game.

You will start to earn gear by exchanging silver and gold keys in the shop. You equip this gear to make your hero stronger. While higher-tier gear is typically better, it's important to look at the different gear sets.

Early in the game, there are three gear builds to be aware of:

1. Max Damage Gear
2. Max Defense Gear
3. Farming Gear

I'll go over farming in detail in a bit, so let's start off with the most common gear build - max damage gear. This build consists of:

The biggest increase to your damage comes from the Cooldown stat. This stat allows your hero to attack with their weapon more frequently, up to a cap of 90%. It scales somewhat exponentially, so any increase is a nice spike in your damage.

That means any gear that has Cooldown is a win, but the Rogue set also adds critical strike chance and 4x critical strike. Critical Strikes do 2x damage, but with a random chance. Increasing your critical strike chance, therefore, increases your damage potential.

While this is a max damage build, early in the game, you should typically still run your highest-tier gear, even if it doesn't fit in the build! So, go with a rare Wizard Helm over a Great Rogue helm, even if you lose the set bonus.

Another viable option is a fully defensive build around knight gear. I'm talking:

These all add defensive abilities like Armor and Healing. For most of Heroes vs Hordes, it's a risky strategy to let horde hit you. Ideally, you want to clear them before they get close, but early in the game, this can work because they don't hit too hard yet.

You can combine this defensive build with its namesake, Knight, and a particular set of weapons to beat the early chapters.

As you progress through a run, you collect experience orbs to level up. When you level up, you're greeted with a weapon shop. The weapon shop offers two distinct types of items. Weapons and Tomes. Weapons do damage, while tomes amplify weapon damage.

There's even a special interaction between the two called "Weapon Evolution," in which a Tome allows you to evolve a weapon into a stronger version. Evolved weapons do a tremendous amount more damage than their base versions.

You can pause a run to look in the evolutions tab to understand how they interact. You will memorize this over time, and there are icons on the tomes that match the weapon they evolve, but that screen is always there to help.

In order to evolve a weapon, you need to level that weapon up to five in the middle of a run, get the tome, and then evolve the weapon. Like most everything else, I have a guide in the description on how to get optimal weapons during a run.

The weapon builds I'm going to share with you now create optimal synergies between your gear, weapons, and tomes to give you the best chance at beating the chapter.

There will be two primary weapon builds you run early in the game.

The first weapon set is max damage, which you run in combo with your max damage gear.

The weapon priority here is your hero weapon, followed by Dragon's Breath, Bomb, Fire Orbs, and Chain Lightning. You then get cooldown tome, area tome, duplicator tome, damage tome, and critical tome.

Those tomes will allow you to evolve every weapon in your build into the stronger variant. Furthermore, they each amplify the damage of every other weapon in the build.

Hence, the max damage build.

Dragon's Breath will be your main source of damage for a long time, early in the game. The key is to literally spin your hero in circles so that the flames hit every horde. It's a little silly, but very effective.

The second weapon set is defensive, which you run with your defensive gear, I mentioned earlier.

I call this a Flag Pole build because the idea is you get so tanky you can stand still like a Flag Pole and let the horde bash their heads into you. Note, this only works with Knight early in the game.

The weapon priority of this build is your hero weapon, followed by Dragon's Breath, Divine Aura, Bomb, and Fire Orbs. You then get armor tome, health regeneration tome, area tome, duplicator tome, and damage tome.

Armor will reduce horde damage, and evolving divine aura into vampire aura will heal you. That combo allows Knight to stand still and absorb anything the horde throws at him.

This strategy can be a bit risky since horde hit you, so play with it as you go.

Now that you know which weapons you want, you can practice optimally getting your weapons during a farming run. Farming is the key to getting stronger early in the game.

Pets are one of the best investments you can make. One active pet comes with you on the battlefield to do damage and fight horde. Early in the game, pets are essentially your strongest weapon.

You gain access to pets from the Pets tab. Hatched from eggs, they have their own currencies for leveling up. I have a whole guide on pets I linked to in the description, so I'll just cover the core concepts now.

You want to work on getting one main, active pet leveled up. That will typically be your highest rarity pet. Early in the game, a common-tier Snail pet or a great-tier Earthstriker are very good choices because they will continue to be useful into the late game.

If you get lucky and get a rare pet like a Pyrokraken or Emberpaw, those should be your main pet.

Run as many expeditions as you can each day to collect resources to power up your main pet. Resources will snowball as you start collecting them.

After your main pet reaches level 100 or 200, you can go back and level up two other pets to level 100 to act as passives.

The big tradeoff early in the game is just deciding how to split your coins between pets and talents. While I would say try to do both in parallel, I would prioritize talents as best you can and then put any extra coins you have into pets.

Pets may have a more immediate effect, but talents make a stronger long-term impact on your heroes.

Honestly, there's no perfect way to balance this, so just do whatever feels good. Both are going to be a grind, but every grind counts!

Ok, now that we have the basic resource concepts in place, let's get them by playing the game and beating Chapters!

Well, dudes, we made it to the end of my beginner's guide for Heroes vs Hordes. I covered A LOT of topics and said "read more in the description" at least 5 times.

At this point, you should understand how to play the first 50 to 100 chapters of Heroes vs Hordes as efficiently as possible.

You know to take Knight, invest your resources into him, and start to level up your gear.

You know what weapons to build in the middle of the run, and how beating chapters helps you progress.

So join a guild, get active on Discord, and save your gems!