Nightmare Mode Guide For Heroes vs Hordes

Setting The Nightmare Stage

First off, Nightmare Mode is broken into two parts.

Part One comprises the original 120 chapters. These chapters have no cap on movement speed, and horde have been nerfed a bit.

Part Two is chapters 121+, which have a set movement speed of 9m/s and stronger horde.

That set movement speed is a hint that it will be important for part, but more on that in a bit.

In both settings, horde have a ton of HP, making them very hard to kill, so don't try! Your goal is to simply live through all 3 waves to earn the end-of-chapter rewards.

There are additional modifiers to this game mode that it is important to know about.

Modifiers

There are constant modifiers across all chapters of Nightmare Mode.

The first is an extreme reduction in evasion and health regeneration. That means that you're going to get a hit more often, and you won't be able to heal it back up.

However, horde don't hit quite as hard in Nightmare Mode, so don't be afraid to run through them as needed.

After that, cooldown is capped at 40%, so don't spot any cooldown jewels.

Invulnerability and instant kill have been disabled, so no Blademaster or Pirate Queen cheese to be found here.

They've also removed movement speed tome and regeneration tome, so you can't evolve divine aura to vampire aura, and you're not going to be evolving boomerangs or getting move speed.

As you can guess, all of those abilities would be way too strong in Nightmare Mode. However, that means you need to get creative in finding substitutes.

So if increasing your movement speed is strong, then REDUCING horde movement speed is strong. And if you can't heal, then maybe you can shield.

Kiting

Kiting in video games is a fancy way of saying running around so bad guys can't hit you, but you can hit them.

In Nightmare Mode, you're not even worried about the second part. Your goal is to kite horde around and not let them hit you.

There are three typical ways to kite.

There's circle kiting, snake kiting, and Haxkiting. Early on in Nightmare Mode, you should be moving fast enough that the only kind of kiting you actually need to do is circle kiting mixed with some snake kiting as needed.

If you want to make it really easy, practice your Haxkiting as you go through early Chapters. Haxkiting is when you lift your finger off the screen to do extreme 45 to 70° angle cuts in movement. That controls the flow of horde so that they do not spawn from one side of the map.

You can then safely run in that direction, keeping the horde behind you.

That takes a lot of practice and messing up will cause a whole bunch of horde to run into your face, so keep working on it. That's how you will reliably be able to clear the hardest chapters of Nightmare Mode. it's also one of the few chances for skill expression in the game.

So get good like Hax and practice up.

And as it turns out, that's what makes certain heroes excellent for Nightmare Mode.

There are several classes of heroes that excel in Nightmare Mode:

1. Self-healers and shielders
2. Speedsters
3. Disruptors
4. Mass damage dealers
<.ol>

Starting backward, mass damage dealers are a niche group of two limited to Artificer and Clockwork Mage. Remember how slowing horde is the same as increasing your movement speed? Well, CWM's innate slow allows you to outrun horde all day.

Other disruptors include Necromancer and Dark Paladin. Both have creative ways to keep horde from hitting them, which is the name of the game.

Speedsters are really strong in the early parts of Nightmare and include Crazy Tinkerer and any hero with +armor and +move speed base stats. Think heroes like Void Raven, Shield Warden,Knight, Paladin, and others, making them all good candidates for Nightmare Mode. Post 120, 4* Knight is a standout that can clear most content.

Now, let's prep our roster to step into the Nightmare.

As far as gear tier power levels go, I recommend having at least full legendary gear to start Nightmare Mode. You'll start to need Ascended gear to come online around chapter 60 before needing full ascended for 120+.

Mythic Gear makes it easier but isn't technically required if you're good at this game.

I have three standard sets of gear I run in Nightmare Mode. The first is what I call the Crazy Taxi for Part One. It revolves around maximizing movement speed and using a speedster like the Crazy Tinkerer to outrun horde. That build is:

Ranger helm night chest, Ranger boots, night gloves, knife necklace and knight ring. You want the night force step bonus the additional movement seats and then you run Ranger helm and Ranger boots for additional movement again.

The second build has a higher cap, but requires Ascended Gear to work. I call this the Werewizard Build, as it utilizes the wizard set in order to create a slow zone around the hero. Because, say it with me, slowing horde is like increasing your movement speed. That build is:

Wizard helm with wizard robe, knight boots, knight gloves, wizard amulet, and wizard ring.

You run knight boots for slow immunity and night gloves for additional health and armor.

The Wizard robe and amulet help with starting upgrades, and the helm and ring provide increases to status effect duration.

There are some alternative builds for Warlord and Artificer that let you try to out-damage the horde. That's built around Rogue Gloves and Rogue Amulet with ranger, wizard, or knight gear in other slots. I'm not going to go into detail here because you either need 5* Warlord to make it work, and Artificer fizzles out around chapter 60.

So, instead, let's move on to Jewels.

In what's becoming a theme even I realize might be overdone, your goal with weapons is to survive, not to kill anything.

Therefore, the aim of your build is maximizing your survivability via disruption and effective health. Your top priority is getting to the 90% damage reduction cap, so prioritize armor tome.

Follow that up with an Ice Wand max and Life Tome. If you have 4* arcane staff, that's your next priority and the cornerstone of the Werewizard Build. The slow from Death Ray is how you will clear out Part Two of Nightmare Mode.

Next, I personally really like Boomerang. The 2* forge stun goes off reliably for me, so I like it more than crossbow or bomb. Round out your base weapon build with one of those two or divine aura.

If you have special weapons, anything that has a slow or freeze is worth using. 4* borer is incredibly strong, and getting 1 point in that is big.

Snow Globe can be really strong at higher forge levels. No forge smoke bomb is actually surprisingly weak, but a 5* smoke bomb can carry you. And then a scrap hammer can be a good 1-point fifth weapon.

Your goal with this build and your pet is to hit around Level 21 by the end of Wave 1. That will allow you to max armor, ice wand, arcane staff, and life tome.

Certain chapters only give you Level 11 by the end of wave one. Those are hard chapters like 202. You want to try to max armor and ice wand if you can by the end of Wave 1 in these harder chapters.

And now, the last, most important bit of Nightmare Mode, Kiting.

For jewels in the early chapters, you want to push your movement speed to over 11 in the detail screen. That means running four to six movement speed jewels. After that, 1 weakness jewel is required follow by as much regeneration as you can fit.

Even though regeneration is limited, more is better than less.

Post Chapter 120, remove all those movement jewels and replace them with one projectile M jewel, evasion jewels, and more regeneration.

You want the Projectile M to max the number of potential Ice Wand orbs and Arcane Staff lasers. The other jewels provide more tankiness.

Mix and match depending on the quality of your jewels. You can also opt for high-level health jewels.

Now we just have to set up pets before we load into a run.

Pre 120

Post 120

Pets offer a fun little optimization for Nightmare Mode.

You want your main pet to be your highest DPS pet. For many, that is Hydro Basilisk or Crystalsaurs. Grpyhon or Stormshock are also ok if you don't have the first two.

Crystalsauras is a surprisingly large jump in DPS and should 100% be your priority if you have him. Unlocking him is key to clearing the hardest chapters of Nightmare Mode.

For passive pets, you actually want to run double snails. That means getting two different snail types to 100 for the 15% HP bonus to heroes. That combines for 30% total, which is big.

If you don't have two snails, or believe Haxsennin, you can run a Gryphon as a passive for the knockback and another high DPS passive like Emberpaw or Pyrokraken.

No matter the exact setup, your pet will do the most damage of any weapon in NMM and be key to helping you clear our horde to level up during a run.

So here's your weapon build to compliment your pet.

There are three major rewards from Nightmare Mode:

1. A ton of coins
2. A ton of hero orbs
3. A bunch of runestones

You get a surprising amount of this limited set of resources. In fact, I farm high levels of NMM purely for the Coins at this point. I get something like 4x the number of coins from 1 run of NMM280 that i get from HM140.

As you progress, those coins really add up.

Nightmare Mode is how you level up heroes via both orbs and shards. You get 1000s of hero orbs over time. And the 40+ runestones from each chapter directly convert into Hero Shards.

There's also Hard Mode chances for silver and gold keys. That means a 25% silver key chance and a 5% gold key chance.

So besides being a lot of fun, beating NMM chapters is how you level up your overall roster.

And that's it, everything I've learned about Nightmare mode.

Nightmare Mode is one of the last modes in the game that requires actually playing the game, so it should be the most fun! If you're smarter about what you're building and get set up before you load in, you'll be running away from horde like a pro.

Because at the end of the day, your pet will carry you to all the hero orbs and hero shards you could ever want.

I'm Kolz, a high-level hvH player.

This is my guide, Nightmare Mode. It's actually pretty straightforward. You just have to think differently.

Feel free to ask me questions here, on Discord, or on Reddit. You can find a written version of this guide on my website, HvHLounge.com

And you can get early access to videos and priority answers to questions on my Patreon. You can become an executive producer of videos like Cake Invictus, the executive producer of this video.

And remember, always do your adventures!