Hey everyone, Kolz here. Today, I will walk you through The Snowman build for the Shield Warden in Heroes vs. Hordes.
You will learn to wield freezes, stuns, and shields with the precision of a master.
To ascend to the legend of The Snowman—the coldest nightmare Hell has ever known.
You survive nightmare mode by keeping the hordes frozen and yourself alive. In keeping with his creed that the best offense is an unbreakable defense, The Snowman prioritizes freezing his enemies before they can even touch him. Your weapons, gear, and jewels prioritize disruptions like freezes, stuns, and slows.
If enemies do manage to penetrate your frozen fortress, you stack health and armor.
Health and armor scale multiplicatively together. The more health you have, the more efficient your armor is. The more armor you have, the more efficient your health is. And so our goal is to create the most amount of effective health.
And now, here's how you take what you learned to become The Snowman.
Your goal during a wave of Nightmare mode is to simply not die. And the Snowman excels at not dying.
You accomplish not dying by kiting the hordes in a circular pattern.
You want to have them follow you in the direction of your choosing, typically in a clockwise or counterclockwise circle. Your Frostbolts and Stuns will stop them from ever actually getting to you. While you complement those with slows from your pets.
Killing hordes is a bonus. It's not your goal. In fact, you want to maximize the number of hordes on the screen. The screen can only hold so many hordes at once. Once you've hit the maximum number of hordes on the screen, no new hordes can spawn. This makes kiting them easier because they will no longer spawn off the side of the map.
Once you get the hang of it, it's like a running back in a football game. You're going to have to find the holes between the hordes and not let them hit you.
And not letting hordes hit you is key.
The Snowman's advantage in Nightmare Mode is that he heals via his shield. If you don't take damage from any source for three seconds, his shield starts to regenerate.
If you lose your shield, his kit has so much disruption in both his regular stun and his ultimate stun, it provides you with time for the shield to regenerate.
Repeat this pattern until the 200 levels of the nightmarish hell bow to your skill.
Now take what you've learned young snowball, and roll with it. You, too, can become the snow of legend, The Snowman.
Here's how you gear the Snowman up for nightmare mode.
| Helm: Wizard | Gloves: Knight |
| Chest: Knight | Necklace: Rogue |
| Boots: Knight | Ring: Knight |
To maximize the freeze duration of your enemies, you focus on gear with status effect duration. That means The Snowman takes the Wizard Helm and the Wizard Ring. The Wizard helm increases status effect duration by 25%, and the Wizard ring increases it by 50%. The 75% increase will keep the hordes frozen for days..
You follow that up with the rest of the Knight build. The Knight Chest, Boots, Gloves, and Necklace. The percent increases in health from the Gloves and the Necklace synergize well with the massive amount of armor The Snowman has and his percentage health-based shield.
You take the Knight Boots for the mitigation to slow. As you progress through Nightmare Mode, more and more hordes will apply a slow to you, and these boots effectively let you ignore it..
If you find yourself having trouble clearing a level of nightmare mode, you can switch out the Knight Necklace for the Wizard Necklace for the two additional starting upgrades. This change can make dealing with the beginning part of a wave easier.
Now, on to weapons. In keeping with the theme that defense is better than offense.
Armor Tome
Ice Wand
Life Tome
Divine Aura 2*
Boomerang 3*
Evasion Tome
Area Tome
Duplicator Tome
Bombs
Crossbow
You max Armor Tome first. For me, it only requires 2 points because I have 70% base armor, and the cap is 90%.
After that, it's Ice Wand. You want to both max this out and get Life Tome to evolve it, as Life Tome offers you more health, which both scales on your shields and off the armor you've already acquired.
After that, I try and put 2 points into Divine Aura. At 2 points, you get an additional Cooldown and Area of Effect for more pushback.
At this point, you're looking for any weapon that has freeze or stun duration via forge upgrades. Boomerang, bombs, and crossbow all gain disruption at 2-star forge.
My personal preference puts the next priority on Boomerang to 3 stars. You stop at 3 again for the Cooldown improvement.
Evasion Tome is your next bet. Even though Evasion is reduced in Nightmare Mode, some Evasion is better than no Evasion.
Next is the Duplicator Tome or Area Tome. I have no preference as both improve your disruption on the margins.
And the final weapon I would use is either Bombs or Crossbow, depending on which you get and have upgraded.
For Jewels, the priority is weakness, regeneration, and health. Because the Shield Warden has no Ultimate, you don't need to run Ultimate Jewels.
Weakness
Regeneration
Health
Cooldown til 40%
Evasion
With extra jewel slots, I greed for Nightmare Mode's 40% cooldown cap to let out more disruption. I also have two high-level evasion jewels that I run.
Pre-level 120 in Nightmare mode, movement speed is the most important jewel. You want to push that to over 10m/s in the details screen. Post level 120, you are given a set movement speed of 9 m/s, making it useless elsewhere in the build.
Movement
Weakness
Regeneration
Health/span>
Cooldown til 40%
And let's not forget about your pets. In Nightmare Mode, your pet does the majority of the damage as you finish off most of the hordes after the wave is over.
The Earthstriker passive is S+ tier in Nightmare mode for the slow. You combine that with the Emberclaw passive to make the area around your pet a slow zone. Your active pet should be your strongest ranged pet. I use Hydro Basalik because his active abilities create slow zones that heal you.
