Hey Heroes. Kolz here!
You have to put hundreds of hours into Heroes Vs. Hordes to truly understand the mechanics. Smart decisions can save you gems or change the outcome of a run. But what if you could get insider knowledge without doing 1000s of runs?
Luckily for you, I put in the 5,500+ runs to save you the grind.
These 23 tips will help you optimize energy, rack up gems, and avoid costly mistakes.
Whether it's resetting runs for free, fine-tuning weapon choices, or managing gems efficiently, small adjustments can save hours of your life.
These tips will help you maximize your time playing the game. So, let's load in and make every run count!
#1 Resource Return
Restarting a run within 10 seconds refunds your energy—except in Hero Clash. As long as you quit the stage within the first 10s of the timer, you get the resources back.
You can use that in combination with this next trick to optimize your weapons.
#2 Reshuffle Your Reshuffle
If you reshuffle during the weapon select at the beginning of a run, it changes the subsequent weapons in the shop. That means you can leave the stage, come back in, and try to get better weapons.
While these first two tips help clear content, the next tips are all about increasing your access to gems.
#3 Hidden Weekly Gems
Once a week you can go to store.heroesvshordes.com, scroll down to the way bottom, and "buy" the weekly free gift. While the gift gives you a silver key and gems, it also counts as a "purchase" for completing the weekly quest.
No money down, ez pz.
#4 Connect Your Accounts
You can get free gems for connecting your Facebook, Google, and Cloud accounts. I'm sure they'll sell all your Facebook data, but you're not using that platform anyway.
#5 Arena Skips Save Energy
Using three Skips can save you energy in the Arena each week.
You get one skip on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for any previously completed Stage up to and including 15. So try to get to stage 12 on Friday, then skip 13. Skip 14 on Saturday. Then skip 15 on Sunday before finishing the final five stages.
Or be like me and get impatient on Saturday and just clear ‘em all out.
#6 Always ask guild mates for help!
I know it sounds weird, but that button is meant to be clicked. I thought they would think I'm a noob for clicking it and begging, but the person on the other end gets gold for clicking it. So, always ask for help!
People in my top 10 guild race each other to be the ones to offer help!
And now that you have some resources, here are some tips on how to manage your gear:
#7 Use Your Scrolls
Always use scrolls as soon as you can to upgrade gear. The upgrades are NOT SET SPECIFIC. They are SLOT specific. So, if you upgrade the Noble Helm, it upgrades the Helm for every other set. So always use scrolls to upgrade gear as soon as you can.
But while you should upgrade gear in real-time, not so for jewels.
#8 Merge Jewels Wisely
Merging jewels upgrade them by less than the sum of the two individual jewels. For example, a level 3 cooldown jewel is 1%. A level 4 cooldown jewel is 1.3%. If you have two slots available, 1 + 1 > 1.3.
And with that in mind…
#9 Invest In Jewels
It's best to keep jewels unmerged to save for future slots. When you upgrade from epic to legendary, it opens up a jewel slot for every piece of gear. That means you need to have six jewels ready to fill them. As you get close to those upgrades, make sure to be smart about how you merge jewels.
But, to make things complicated, that's only for common jewels…
#10 Merge Unique Jewels
You can only equip one of them, so go for the highest level you can get. Think jewels like vulnerability, weakness, and the ultimate jewels from the guild shop.
Which reminds me…
#11 Grab ultimate jewels from the guild shop
Feel free to buy any level of ultimate jewel from the guild shop. Because each level of the ultimate jewel is double the cost of the previous, and you have to combine two jewels to level them up, there's no currency lost in having two of them. So don't worry about misclicking.
But if you don't want to click at all, here are some tips to navigate faster around the game.
#12 Long press level up.
You can click and hold on the level-up button for heroes and pets instead of mashing it over and over again. Just make sure you really want to put all the resources into them because it gets speedy in jiffy.
Wheeee…
#13 beastery navigation.
In the beastery, you can double click the tab button at the bottom to jump down to the new bounty you've earned. No need to endlessly scroll through monsters you won't bother ever to learn the names of and miss the little red exclamation point.
And now some tips to navigate mid run:
#14 Evolve weapon shop mechanic
When you can evolve a weapon, it will always appear at the top of your next shop. You can use that to your advantage by…
#15 Get guaranteed helpful shops
If you haven't completed your build, if you have the option to evolve your weapon or choose another weapon or tome you already have, choose the weapon or tome. It's a shop refresh that's guaranteed to have one item you need, the weapon evolution, and will give you another shot at getting the missing item from your build.
Or you can…
#16 Guarantee Evolutions with Chests.
Pick up a chest when you can evolve a weapon and the evolution will be in the chest 100% guaranteed. But fun to note, if you're at weapon level 4, and its the only weapon item you have left, a 2+ item chest will not evolve it. It will give you weapon level 5 + gold for the other item slots.
Must have been a fun corner case for the game designer to think about.
#17 Finish out weapons or tomes.
When you complete a row of items, either weapons or tomes, no other weapons outside of that set will be offered to you anymore, making it easier to complete your build.
Once you've locked in your weapons and tomes, it's time to focus on something just as crucial—seeing what's happening on the battlefield.
#18 Turn up visibility.
If you can't see anything among all the weapon projectiles and horde, switch up to visibility mode.
Accessed via the settings menu in the Pause screen, visibility will dramatically reduce the visual noise from your weapons. While I prefer to have full visibility on, later in the game, your brain will explode if you have the full visuals going.
#19 And turn down damage numbers for clarity.
By the same token, you can toggle off damage numbers in the advanced tab of the settings. This will, believe it or not, stop the damage numbers from showing.
Again, I love those numbers - it's like visual ASMR to watch them tick up, but it can make it hard to see.
#20 Auto Mode Settings
And while you're in the settings tab, check out how you have Auto Mode setup. For higher VIP players, you can have AUTO mode and use the same status as the previous run or default to off.
If you're running back to back to back to back farm runs, it might be worth setting it to mimic the last setting to save you some brain power.
Now for stuff to never do.
#21 Never Do A Gear Exchange
Found as the other tab in the blacksmith, that's a total own goal. You never want to destroy the gear you've collected as you never know which one will upgrade first and give you an edge.
Besides, the goal is to get those powder blue heroics in a couple of years and this will only delay you.
#22 Never Use Gems to Shuffle Mid-run
I mean, I guess you can, but a shuffle will rarely win you the chapter. For 40 gems more, you can refresh all your energy after the run.
And…
#23 Remember to always do your Adventures!
For the low cost of only 1300 gems, you can get the adventure hero if you successfully use all the tickets. Remember to go ham on Day 1 of Adventure so that you can get the midnight ticket refill.
It also means you have to buy the discounted 150 gem tickets from vendors along the way.
It's the single cheapest, most reliable way to get new heroes in the game, and that's why I always say:
ALWAYS DO YOUR ADVENTURES!
Kolz
