Heroes vs. Hordes Pet Guide

Chris "Kolz" Kolmar 3/2/2025

I've been using pets since they were in beta.

And man did I think they sucked when I first used them.

But boy was I wrong.

After several months of grinding, like everything else in Heroes vs Hordes, these little guys evolve from cuddly companions to battlefield beasts.

In this guide, I'll show you how to turn your snails into nails, or at least the mechanics of how pets work.

There are four main topics to cover:

How pet expeditions work
How to level up pets
How to choose which pets to level
How to maximize your pets' damage on the battlefield

Your goal through all of this is to create the strongest set of pets to help you on the battlefield and rake in expedition rewards.

So get ready to deploy your pets to maximum efficiency.

tldr; Most Important Rules of Thumb

1. For leveling pets, choose your highest rarity and get them to 2-star, then get two other pets to passive status. In the early game, Pyrokraken main with an emberpaw and a striker passive. When you get an epic pet, make that main with Pyro and Emberpaw passives.

2. For choosing expeditions, the priority is: Gold Border > Silver Keys > Shorter > Longer > Orbs | Coins > Dust.

3. Buy the expedition starter pack for $4.99 if you can afford it.

Update Log

3/2/2025: Added tl;dr and clarification on why shorter expeditions are better than longer.

How To Get Your First Pets

Real quick, what came first, the pet or the egg?

In this case, it's an egg to start out. You'll find it on the eggs tab of the Pets section at the bottom of the screen.

Open it up, and you'll start your eggcellent journey through the pet mechanic in Heroes vs Hordes.

What Do Pets Do?

Heroes can take one active pet into battle, each with a unique ability that assists in combat.

Additionally, heroes can assign two passive pets to provide support bonuses to their active pet.

Pets can also be sent on expeditions, which yield essential resources based on the pet's power level and expedition type.

Put simply, pets come with you on the battlefield to deal damage, and you make them stronger through expeditions.

So let's start our explainer on the expedition side.

How to Maximize Expeditions

Expeditions are a key source of pet-related resources. You send pets on expeditions to receive rewards to help increase the power of your pets, along with typical hero-based rewards like dust and gold.

However, the pet resources are the more important part of the expedition, so it's important to understand what the most valuable resources are and how to get them.

Pet Expedition Mechanics

Here's a rundown on how expeditions work, followed by how to choose the highest priority runs:

Expedition Areas. Heroes can select to run expeditions in any of the 5 areas.
- Each area provides unique elemental resources
- All areas have the same relative importance
- Expeditions can vary in length, lasting 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours
- Some special expeditions will have a gold border indicating the resources rewarded are rare and valuable.
- You get more resources in return for longer runs, but it's generally better to run more expeditions. I'll explain more as we go, but know for now that it's better to run two 1-hr expeditions than one 2-hour expedition.
You run expeditions mainly to get pet-specific resources. There are six types of pet-specific resources:
1. Standard Eggs. These will hatch into certain types of pets. You can only get standard eggs from expeditions. Enchanted eggs can be obtained via event rewards or gems but will not be a reward from an expedition.
2. Pet Orbs. A pain to grind early, they become completely forgettable after a month, but they are required to level pets
3. Neutral Stones. Required to promote all pets. These have been the most valuable in my experience as they continue to be the limiting factor for me across all resources in leveling up pets.
4. Elemental Stones. A specific type of stone that's required to promote pets of the same type
5. Neutral Prisms. Required to evolve all pets
6. Elemental Prisms. A specific type of prism that's required to evolve pets of the same type
You get these resources upon completing an expedition. The Expedition Rewards always follow this general pattern:
- Slot 1: Always grants pet orbs.
- Slot 2: Guarantees the resource displayed on the expedition header.
- Slot 3: Provides a random resource from the pool of pet expedition rewards, both pet and hero-based. Areas do not influence this third slot. These are random across all areas.
- This is why running two 1-hr expeditions is better than one 2-hour expedition. You get additional spins on that third slot. The additional spins of that slot offer more chances at the highest-value pet rewards: stones and prisms.
You can run up to three expeditions at once. You get them from the following sources:
1. Free for all players.
2. Available to VIP 5+ players. So that's a ~$75 dollar value.
3. Unlockable via the Expedition Starters Pack (a permanent perk) and one I highly recommend getting for $4.99.

How to Prioritize Expedition Runs

Now, that was a lot of information to take in, so let me distil it down to a rule of thumb for choosing expeditions. Follow this rough priority to maximize your rewards:

First prioritize gold border runs
Then prioritize silver key runs
Then shorter runs over longer runs
And then gold > orbs > dust.

You prioritize shorter runs for three reasons:

You only get 5x the rewards for an 8-hour run compared to a 1-hour run, so you net out to more resources if you can consistently do shorter runs.
More runs give you more chances to spawn Gold Border expeditions.
More runs give you more spins on the 3rd slot, which is where you earn the most stones and prisms, the highest-value resources.

You should do more short expeditions when you actively play and try to save longer ones when you go offline or sleep.

If you need a particular elemental stone or prism, you can favor expeditions in that area. For example, if you're short on Fire stones, prioritize Fire expeditions.

What Is An Expedition Power Score

Now, I skipped over one very obvious mechanic: power score. The power score at the top of the expedition roughly correlates to the size of the reward at the end. A higher score means more resources.

The power score reflects the average power of your 12 strongest pets. If you have fewer than 12, then it uses the average score of all your pets. Increase the levels of your 12 strongest pets to increase your expedition rewards.

So that begs the question, how do you increase your pet levels?

How to Level Up Pets

Your goal with leveling is to create the strongest set of pets to bring onto the battlefield with you.

You level up pets by spending the pet resources you gain through expeditions.

And gold, a lot of gold.

Pets have three parts to their leveling system:

Basic levels which require gold and pet orbs to increase.
Promotions, which complete one arm to a star, that always require neutral stones and then typically an elemental stones.
And evolutions, which complete the star and give access to pet skills. Evolutions require neutral prisms, elemental prisms, and sacrificing one or more lower level pets to the Devs.

Which Pet Resources Are The Most Valuable?

Very early in your get grind, pet orbs will be at a premium. However, they quickly become forgettable, so don't pay for pet orbs.

After the early part of your grind, elemental stones may become the bottleneck to promotions for a bit.

But, in the long run, neutral stones will become the limiting factor in your pet grind. So you want to focus on getting neutral stones from as many expeditions and events as possible.

How Does Sacrficing Pets Work?

You may have also noticed that evolving a pet requires sacrificing lower-level pets. That means you have to level up pets only to put them on an alter to the devs. Sacrificing level 0 pets to reach star level 1 isn't a big deal, but sacriaficng a level 1 pet to reach star level 2 is a whole bunch of resources.

A level 1 pet costs nine elemental stones and seven neutral stones, so it's a really big investment. And it only gets worse as hitting level 3 requires sacrificing two level 2 pets, which is the equivalent of 52 elemental stones and 34 neutral stones.

And that crazy increase in resource requirements is why I think the pet starter expedition pack for $4.99 is totally worth it.

It's also why I like to get Star Buscuits from events. They cound as a 1 star pet, or the equivalent of seven neutral stones and nine elemental stones, which is typically a decent deal from the event stores.

But because it's so expensive to move up star levels, it's important to understand which pets to put resources into.

How Do You Increase Pet Expedition Scores?

You want to balance leveling up 12 strong pets to optimize your expedition returns but also focus on three pets to bring with you onto the battlefield. Just to repeat for emphasis because it's the only time I'm going to mention it: your pet expedition rewards increase based on the power level of your 12 strongest pets. So you want to manage the tradeoff between having 12 strong pets and sacrificing them to level up your main pet.

How To Choose Which Pets To Level?

You have to prioritize a certain set of pets to level. In my experience, you should try to focus on three pets early in the grind:

A main pet
Two passive pets

Your main pet is the pet that comes with you on the battlefield. They follow you around, do damage, and offer fancier ultimates at higher star levels. Your main pet gets its power augmented by the two passive pets you choose.

Your main pet, for the most part of the game, will be the highest rarity pet you hatch from eggs. For me, it was Pyrokraken for a long time until I finally hatched a Hydrobasalisk after about 300 eggs.

I always prefer ranged damage over melee and Pyrokraken fits that bill between the two base set rare pets.

Your passive pets will typically be your next two strongest, or highest rarity pets. Early in the grind, your passive pets will typically be an Emberpaw and an Elemental Striker.

To become eligible for passive status, pets must reach 1 star via leveling. I personally tried to get Pyrokraken to be eligible for star level 2 evolution before leveling the passive pets to 1 star.

Then, I leveled two more pets to sacrifice them to evolve the Pyrokraken. For these sacrificial pets, I choose Green elementals because unless you get a Dino, those elemental tokens will not go toward any epic-level pets.

Note, there are no special bonuses for sacrificing specific pets. And you cannot sacrifice a pet that is currently deployed or on an expedition.

My thinking with this build path was that it would max your damage early and then let you augment it with passive pets without costs going crazy.

Because, at the end of the day, you want to maximize your pets damage on the battlefield.

How to Maximize Pet Damage

As pets level up, their stats improve, making them more effective on the battlefield. The power score at the top of the pet portrait gives you a sense of the damage they'll do.

So your goal is to get one super strong pet and support it with two strong passive pets. Because rare pets have higher max levels, they will eventually become your main pet, while lower rarity become passives.

Pets start doing additional damage once a run begins from two, and only two, sources right now:

Damage Tome will increase pet damage.
Pets gain one level for every five hero levels.

Typically, ranged pets can maintain more constant DPS than melee pets.

But you can't always have them stand still. For example, Emberpaw's passive creates a fire-orb type circle around your pet. To max damage with that, you need to make sure your active pet is standing in a big bunch of horde.

And that's basically how pets work. There are a few odds and ends to mention real quick.

Other Tips and Tricks

How Do You Obtain More Eggs?

There are several ways to obtain more eggs:

They are available via monthly subscriptions from the Pet Store.
You can find them in expeditions as second-slot or third-slot rewards.
They appear as rewards in events and token shops, although I wouldn't spend event tokens on basic eggs.

Are Enchanted Eggs Worth It?

Enchanted Eggs are not available from expeditions, but you can get them from events or pay gems for them.

I think of enchanted eggs as a long-term investment across many events as a way to guarantee epic pets. I would throw any kind of excess event tokens at enchanted eggs until you get an epic from them.

If you're really dedicated, you could push for Dino, which has an expected value of getting pulled in the first ~88 enchanted eggs according to MarioVX.

Expedition Power Ups

There are two types of mini power-ups for expeditions: re-rolls and time skips. You get one of each every 12 hrs from the shop.

Re-rolls will shuffle all the expeditions with new resources and lengths. Use it if you don't get any of the higher-priority expeditions.

Time skips let you shorten the length of an expedition. You can apply multiple to one expedition to rush through it.

I, personally, would not recommend spending money or gems on either of the power-ups. Pet leveling is too much of a grind to ever have one run make a difference.