Cursor the Wizard guide

A rambling guide for Cursor the Wizard in Clicker Heroes 2.

Introduction

In this guide I’ll try to explain the different parts of Cursor the Wizard.
I’ll mostly try to explain the different parts, and not focus on a specific build. Although I’ll try to give some examples of how to build at the end.

Overview of the tabs

You’ll not start with all the tabs unlocked, but you’ll see them when they start to become important.
From left to right:

- Items:

Here you can see the items that you buy and can buy. The most optimal way to play would be to buy and upgrade these manually, but ain’t nobody got time for that. So you will automate this with Exchange (more about that later). But if you want the best clear times, you could choose to do this manually. It can take out a minute on a world clear.

- Level Graph:

This is where you see your skill tree and later on the tree planner. The skill tree might look overwhelming at first, but is quite easy when you look closer at it. It only has a few choices along the way, but a lot of it is a straight path. We’ll get deeper into that later, to discuss what node is useful (spoiler, most of them are useful), and which one you would want to avoid.
You buy the nodes with skill points, which you get from leveling up.
After the first transcendence you will also see a tree planner here, with the tree planner you can let the game automatically buy your nodes.

- Spells:

This is the list of spells you get, which you unlock with the nodes on the skill tree. Together with the incantation to cast them. More on that later.

- Runecorder:

The runecorder is the tool you use to automate your Cursor. I’ll go more in depth on it later, but in short, with the runecorder you can record your actions. So you have full control over what gets recorded, and how fast. You can have an unlimited (or at least, I have not reached a limit yet) of recordings, but only 3 sets of recordings. Of these 3 sets you can have 1 active for Cursor to execute.

- Ethereal Items:

Every time you clear a world, you get an ethereal item. It will always give a percentage bonus to a stat (chosen from the same stats that the items can get). These will be removed with the next patch for Cid, and I assume also for Cursor. I’ll update the section when the update goes live. Later on we’ll discuss what stats could be good for Cursor.

- Worlds:

An overview of your star systems and worlds cleared, together with your best clear time for a world. After world 3 (so starting with world 4) you can choose an automation option for what to do when you clear a world. If you have no unlocked the tree planner yet, the most efficient would probably be “Do Nothing” when the world ends. So that you can assign your skill points after each world. But this would take a fair amount of time. Offline calculation gets paused after a world with this option. So you can assign skill points, start the next world, offline calc will do its thing, and if you clear another world in that offline time, you can again assign skill points, etc. When you have unlocked the tree planner, you can switch it to “Ascend On Plan Completed”.

- Transcendence:

Here you can see an overview of your current transcension. It is also where you spend your hard earned hero souls after transcending. Empyrean Motes are multiplied with your pending hero souls to calculate how much hero souls you get upon transcending, the total of which you can see after “Hero Souls next Transcension:”. If you hover over the TRANSCEND button you can see this calculation.
You get the motes over time, the further in your transcension, the faster you gain these. Seeing as Cursor progresses a lot slower than Cid, I would recommend always waiting for max motes. But you can also decide that for yourself. We’ll talk more about transcendence later on, also to see how you could spend your hero souls. And we’ll off course take a look at the special perks you can purchase.
- Miscellaneous:
An overview of your stats, some graphs, achievements, and the none existent skins for Cursor.

Items

Most of the time you will let Exchange handle the buying and upgrading of your items. Exchange will try to do 4 things in order. First it will try to buy a random catalog item (one of the 4 items you can see at the bottom). If you don’t have the gold for this, it will try to upgrade the newest item to the next 10th level. So if your boots where the last item to be bought, and it is now lvl 20, Exchange will try to lvl it to lvl 30. If you don’t have the gold for this, it will try to upgrade the 2th newest item to the next 10th level, so in this example that would be the gloves. The last thing Exchange will try, if you don’t have the gold for any of the first 3 options, is to upgrade the 3th newest item to the next 10th level. Which would be the pants in this example.

The downside of Exchange is mostly noticeable at the start of a game or the start of a transcendence. Seeing as at that point, upgrading the first few items with a few levels can speed up Cursor. Later on the challenge is seeing how often you need to cast Exchange. If you go through the mobs very quickly, you need to cast Exchange a lot. If you go through them slower, you get less gold, and so have to cast it less. This is something you have to experiment with yourself, as this highly depends on your personal Cursor.

When I’m in my trivial part of my transcension, I cast Exchange after every time I do damage. As at that point every time I do damage (with a spell, or with a zap powered click) I clear a zone. Which is often enough to buy a new item. Later on I cast Exchange only after casting a few fire 1 spells, and even then I still cast it to often most of the time.

If you want to go for the quickest clear time of a world, you would forgo Exchange altogether and upgrade and buy items yourself. This saves up the time that it normally costs to cast Exchange. But it does mean having to babysit the game.

If you want to make it as optimal as possible, I suggest to go for “Click damage”, ”Gold received”, “Critical Damage”, and “Monster Gold”. As these all boost your damage for your spells, yes even click damage increases the base damage of a spell. “Gold received” and “Monster Gold” boosts your damage indirectly by making it so you can buy more items and upgrade them more.

Casting spells

Before going over the skill tree, I’ll talk about casting spells. When you level for the first time, you are forced to choose “Ice: Magic Rank 1”, which unlocks your first spell.

When you then check the spells tab, you will see the “Ice: Magic Rank 1” spell, with an incantation below it, the damage it will do and the energy cost. If you hover over it, you will also see the cast time.

The incantation will tell you that you need the “Frigo” and “Exe” runes. The frigo rune is the ice rune, every ice spell starts with it. The exe rune is the Activation rune, and is always the last rune in an incantation.

Default, your number keys will be keybinded to these runes. I suggest going into your keybinding options and switching this to your numpad keys, but try it out for yourself to see what works best.
To cast the spell, you need to press these runes in this order.
So if you stay on the default, this would be 2-8, if you change it to numpad, it still stays at 2-8, but then on your numpad 😉

When you only click 2, you will see a cursor in front of Cursor, as he is typing out the spell. Together with the cursor you will see a balk filling up. This balk indicates how much time you have to finish the cast, which increases with every rune you type, till you type an exe rune. It will then try to cast the combination you typed. If it is a legal incantation, it will use the cast time to finish it. If it is not a legal incantation, because you might have made a typing error, or trying to cast something you have not unlocked yet, a bit red cross will go through your symbols and Cursor will wait for new input.

Incantations start out simple, rank 1 spells only have 2 runes, but will increase in difficulty the stronger the spell. It will become impossible to consistently and correctly cast the spells in sequence, but that is where the runecorder will come into play. Which we will discuss after the skill tree.

Every elemental spell that you cast will generate a fatigue stack (higher rank spells will generate more stacks at once). Fatigue stacks will increase the energy cost for that elemental, and each elemental has its own fatigue stacks.

If we take ice again as an example, ice rank 1 will generate 1 stack of Hypothermia, which will increase the cost of ice spells by 4% each.
This will quickly make your spells to expensive to cast. There are 2 ways to combat this. At the start, this will be with the spell Energon. Energon will give you energy with every tick, and reduce your fatigue stacks. To be precise, it will regen 2% energy every 3 seconds. And has a 20% chance to reduce all fatigue by 1 every 3 seconds.
Energon can stack, and you want to stack it. The problem is that you can’t keep stacking it indefinitely, seeing as you don’t regen enough mana for that.
But more on that in the runecorder section.

This skill tree! I can’t even!

Like I said in the tab overview, the skill tree can look intimidating, but I like it a lot more than the skill tree of Cid for the simple reason that it is more structural (imho off course).

You always start at the “Ice: Magic Rank 1” node, and at that point you can go 2 ways. You can either start by buffing your ice magic a bit first, or you can go for energon next. At the start I would suggest just going for the basic spells first, so take energon with your second level, then “Lightning: Magic Rank 1”, then “Runecorder”, “Neutral: Cut and Paste”, “Fire: Magic Rank 1”.
From there you could also take “Neutral: Dark Ritual”, but you might not need Dark ritual yet, and after ascending, you get this node for free.
When you have these basic nodes, you have to make a choice. My suggestion is to focus mostly on 1 element. At the start of the game, Lightning is probably your best bet. But lets discuss the difference between them a bit.

Ice

Ice focusses mostly on being efficient and critical hits.
It gets the Chain ability from Lightning, and the Corrosion ability from Fire.

The damage nodes for Ice are:

- Ice: Damage
- Ice: Crit Damage
- Ice: Crit Chance
- Ice and Lightning: Crit Chance
- Ice and Lightning: Chain
- Ice and Lightning: Damage
- Ice and Fire: Corrosion
- Ice and Fire: Crit Damage
- Ice and Fire: Damage

The 3 different damage nodes are all the same damage type, as are the 2 crit chance and crit damage nodes. So you have 5 different types of damage on the Ice nodes.

Lightning

Lightning focusses mostly on the ability to chain, although compared to the other 2 elements, it suffers a penalty on its base damage for it. In regards to energy cost, it is between the 2 other elements. It also has zap, which boosts the next 2 clicks you do after casting a lightning spell and makes those clicks cost no energy. The zap clicks also benefit from Chain.
Lightning also gets Crit Chance from Ice and Burn from Fire.

The damage nodes for Lightning are:

- Lightning: Damage
- Lightning: Chain
- Lightning: Zap
- Ice and Lightning: Crit Chance
- Ice and Lightning: Chain
- Ice and Lightning: Damage
- Lightning and Fire: Zap
- Lightning and Fire: Burn
- Lightning and Fire: Damage

Just as with Ice, the damage nodes are all the same damage type, as are the 2 Chain and Zap nodes. So you again have 5 different types of damage.

Fire

Fire focusses on burn and corrosion. It has the same base damage as Ice (so slightly higher than Lightning), but has a slightly faster cast time than Ice (Lightning being the fastest to cast) and twice the energy cost compared to Ice.
Fire gets zap from lightning, and crit damage from Ice. Burn gets applied last, so also benefits from the damage boost from zap (this also applies to lightning, which gets burn from Fire). Making burn the highest damage for both Fire and Lightning, as it benefits from all the other damage sources.

The damage nodes for fire are:

- Fire: Damage
- Fire: Burn
- Fire: Corrosion
- Ice and Fire: Corrosion
- Ice and Fire: Crit Damage
- Ice and Fire: Damage
- Lightning and Fire: Zap
- Lightning and Fire: Burn
- Lightning and Fire: Damage

As with the other 2 elements, this comes down to 5 different damage types.

Buffs

So far all elements look about the same, but this changes when we look at the buffs they can apply.
When you look at the skill tree, you can see that it is in a bit of a zig-zag structure. Starting on the 4th line, in the middle of an elemental part, buff nodes start to appear.

For Ice this is “Ice Trait: Cool Criticals”, which boosts the critical hit chance for all spells, for a certain period. The time period starts with 10 seconds, but every time you take this node (it appears 3 times in the tree) the time increases with 10 seconds. As does the crit chance off course.
Seeing as Ice already gets a fair amount of crit chance from its normal nodes, this buff is less useful for the Ice elemental. Lightning also gets a small amount of crit chance through the dual nodes, but not as much, so still benefits greatly from this buff. But Fire doesn’t get crit chance any other way, and so benefits most from this buff.

For Lightning the node that gives the buff is “Lightning Trait: Flash”. This gives the next few spells a chance to be cast again. Basically you can see this as a damage multiplier, just like any other damage node. This buff is unique, none of the elements get this through any of their normal nodes. And so this buff is equally useful for all 3.

For Fire the node that gives the buff is “Fire Trait: Combustion”. This gives a chance for any burn damage to be applied another time for a certain time period. Just as with flash, this is an unique buff. But unlike flash, this is dependent on having a burn effect. Ice does not get a burn effect, and so gains zero benefit from this buff.

The verdict

As you might have noticed, because of the buffs, Ice lacks behind the other 2 elements in pure damage numbers. Going by pure damage, Fire wins. Because it gets both crit chance and damage, it has 1 damage type over Lightning. The downside of Fire is that it doesn’t get chain, which can really hurt it at the start. So because of chain, Lightning is still a viable option.

To push as far as you can, Fire would be my suggestion. If you want to go quicker through the first couple of worlds/systems, Lightning might be more your cup of tea.
I would not suggest Ice at any point.

I made a choice, now what?

Now its time to plan out your tree. Focus mostly on your main element, but branch out in the other 2 to get the buffs.
To plan your tree, I suggest using this site: https://ch2.erosson.org/#/g/0.15.0-r531/wizard .
You can choose the nodes you want, and in which order. Later when you have unlocked the tree planner, you can copy past the string into the game. The site will also tell you how many nodes you have chosen and how big of a buff it would be.

As an example, this is the plan I use at the moment: 2&9&10&11&25&3&4&1&5&6&17&16&15&31&18&19&37&36&35&34&62&61&59&58&57&90&91&92&93&95&96&137&89&88&86&85&84&123&138&139&141&142&143&144&145&104&106&107&108&109&198&197&196&195&193&191&190&189&248&199&146&148&149&151&152&153&208&247&246&245&243&242&240&239&238&237&236&235&233&232&230&229&228&301&302&303&304&305&307&308&310&311&312&388&300&299&298&296&295&294&292&291&290&362&389&390&392&393&395&396&398&399&400&401&402&403&326&328&329&331&332&333&335&336&485&484&483&482&481&479&477&476&474&473&472&471&565&486&487&404&406&407&408&410&411&413&414&415&501&564&563&561&559&558&556&555&554&552&551&550&549&548&547&546&544&543&542&540&538&537&535&534&533&651&652&654&655&656&657&659&661&662&664&665&666&668&669&782&650&649&647&646&644&643&641&640&639&637&635&634&633&744&783&784&785&787&788&790&791&793&794&796&797&799&800&801&802&803&805&692&694&695&696&698&699&701&702&704&705&706&72&73&74&76&77&78&927&928&929&931&926&925&923&63&64&66&67&102&103&101&60&94&26&27&781&780&778&777&775&774&773&771&770&768&767&765&764

This is after I already unlocked synergy in the transcendence perks, so it might not suit your needs. I will also not imply that this is the most optimal way, but it works for me.

What nodes to avoid

I would avoid the nodes that purely increases the time for the various buffs, like “Ice Trait: Cold Cool Criticals”. Seeing as you will get enough uptime with just picking the main 3 big buff nodes every ascendence (we have not talking about ascendence yet, more on this later).
You also have to watch out with the various cost reduction nodes. The cost reduction is useful, but proper energon, mana and energy management might be enough to keep you going. It’s up to you to figure out the correct balance between choosing the cost reduction nodes or the damage nodes.

Maths

This part is only for people wanting to know why I say Ice is worst and Fire is best damage. If you trust me in that, and don’t care for maths, you can just skip this.

I have talked about damage types, the reason for this is the difference between additive and multiplicative. Same damage types from different sources are added up together (additive), while different damage types are multiplied (multiplicative).

Now lets assume that every node gives a 5 damage increase, just to make it easier to calculate, and we set the base damage to 1.
Now lets first do a calculation before the buffs. And lets look at Ice first again, which would look like this:

(Base damage)*(Ice:Damage + Ice and Lightning: Damage + Ice and Fire: Damage)*(Ice: Crit Damage + Ice and Fire: Crit Damage)*(Ice: Crit Chance + Ice and Lightning: Crit Chance)*(Ice and Lightning: Chain)*(Ice and Fire: Corrosion)

1*(5+5+5)*(5+5)*(5+5)*5*5=37,500

Now for Fire, this would exactly the same. Because as we’ve seen in the nodes breakdown, all 3 elements have the same amount of damage nodes and types. But for Lightning the base damage is lower, namely 0.8, so:

0.8*(5+5+5)*(5+5)*(5+5)*5*5=30,000

We will now add the buffs to that. For Ice this would look like this:

(Base damage)*(Ice:Damage + Ice and Lightning: Damage + Ice and Fire: Damage)*(Ice: Crit Damage + Ice and Fire: Crit Damage)*(Ice: Crit Chance + Ice and Lightning: Crit Chance + Ice Trait: Cool Criticals)*(Ice and Lightning: Chain)*(Ice and Fire: Corrosion)*(Lightning Trait: Flash)

1*(5+5+5)*(5+5)*(5+5+5)*5*5*5=281250

As you see, we have added cool criticals in the crit chance section, because these are the same damage types. We added flash at the end, seeing as this is a unique damage type. Combustion is not included, seeing as Ice doesn’t burn.

Lightning:

(Base damage)*(Lightning: Damage + Ice and Lightning: Damage + Lightning and Fire: Damage)*( Lightning: Chain + Ice and Lightning: Chain)*(Lightning: Zap + Lightning and Fire: Zap)*(Ice and Lightning: Crit Chance + Ice Trait: Cool Criticals)*(Lightning and Fire: Burn)*(Lightning Trait: Flash)*(Fire Trait: Combustion)

0.8*(5+5+5)*(5+5)*(5+5)*(5+5)*5*5*5=1,500,000

We added the 3 buffs, flash and combustion as different damage types and cool criticals together with the dual crit chance nodes. The difference is pretty big, just a bit more than a factor of 5.

Fire:

(Base damage)*(Fire: Damage + Ice and Fire: Damage + Lightning and Fire: Damage)*(Fire: Burn + Lightning and Fire: Burn)*(Fire: Corrosion + Ice and Fire: Corrosion)*(Ice and Fire: Crit Damage)*( Lightning and Fire: Zap)*(Ice Trait: Cool Criticals)*(Lightning Trait: Flash)*(Fire Trait: Combustion)

1*(5+5+5)*(5+5)*(5+5)*5*5*5*5*5=4,687,500

And again we see a pretty big difference compared to lightning. Not a factor 5 this time, but just a bit higher than 3.
Even though this is not exactly comparable to the actual game, because we used a made up number for all the nodes, and in reality they are not all the same damage number. But the bigger the numbers become, the bigger this problem becomes. The difference is caused mostly by the buffs, which are the same numbers for every element.

Runecorder

Now we get to the automating part of Cursor. It both gives more freedom and less than Cid’s automator. The more freedom comes in that you can actually record your own actions, so you have full control over what Cursor does when the runecorder is active. The less freedom is that the runecorder has no logic.

Having no logic build into it, means it is very difficult making something that works with different spell ranks, or any other active node you get in the tree. But let me try to explain the runecorder, and then it might become clear why I only use the rank 1 of the elemental spells.

The runecorder basically consists of 3 parts. At the bottom you can make new records, delete them and start your recording. At the left you see your current records. At the right you see the sets of records of which you can have 1 set active.

When you active a set, Cursor will do exactly what you recorded in your records, in the order that you set them there.

So how do you make such a recording?

First you make a new recording, by pressing the +. You will then see an Unnamed record at the left, click it. Now at the bottom you see that the Unnamed is ready for recording. You can rename the recording by clicking the name at the bottom. Lets name it Energon, and we will start by making a recording for Energon.

To start recording, you press the big red button. The runecorder won’t actually start recording till you do something, so you can press the red button and then calm yourself a bit before recording.
The incantation for Energon is Helio(7), Ohm(5), Frigo(2), Exe(8). This time we start with 1 of the neutral runes, but we again end with the Exe rune. Now a 4 rune combination is still pretty decent to remember, but if you don’t want to rely on your memory for whatever reason, make sure you make a note somewhere that you can see while having the runecorder tab selected. I like to just make a screenshot of it on the spells tab with the “Snip & Sketch” tool (included in Windows 10 by default), and keep that next to CH2. With 4 runes it might not be needed yet, but when you get to synergy, which is 8 runes, it might get a bit much to memorize the runes. And imho a waste of your time 😉

Now that we have the incantation, we can start recording. Press the button, and then press the incantation. Wait till the cast is finished, and then press the red button again. You want to stop the recording as soon as the cast is done, but definitely not before. If you stop the recording to soon you will mess up your sets when you put recordings below each other, seeing as you’ll then get an overlap with the next spell.

Now that you know how to make a recording, you should start by making a recording of all rank 1 spells of the 3 elements, and the Exchange spell.

For Lightning and Fire you also have to remember you get the Zap buff after casting one. Zap increases the effectiveness of the next 2 clicks, so make sure you also include 2 clicks in your recording. With the default keybindings, you can use W to do a click. This way you can keep your mouse on the red button, quickly press W twice when the spell is cast and then quickly stop the recording.

With these 5 recordings, you can make a basic rotation that will get you through the first part of the game. The challenge in making a rotation is your mana and energy management, which you will do with Energon.

You regen 1 mana per second, Energon costs 25 mana to cast and lasts for 18 seconds. So it is very clear that you can’t keep up Energon indefinitely. I like to keep my rotations to 5 minutes, this is because later on you get synergy through transcendence perks, which has a 5 minute cooldown.
In 5 minutes, you have 300 mana to spend (300 seconds in 5 minutes, 1 mana per second). This means that you can cast 12 Energons in 5 minutes.

So we know how long Energon lasts, and how many we can cast. To make it easier to make a 5 min rotation with this knowledge, lets cut it down to 2 mini rotations. You will make 1 rotation with Energon, and 1 without. You want the rotation for Energon to be less than 18 seconds, so that you can stack up Energon. Try to aim for 17 seconds. At the start you probably want all 3 elements in your mini rotation, so that you can easily keep your buffs up, and not increase your fatigue for 1 element to much. You also need to include Exchange so that items get bought and upgraded. How many of these you need depends on your game, like I already explained in the Items section.

An Energon rotation could look something like this:
Ice 1 – Fire 1 – Lightning 1 – Exchange – Lightning 1 – Lightning 1 – Lightning 1 – Exchange – Energon

This is assuming you take lightning as your main element, you can switch the 3 lightning with fire if you go for fire. For my recordings, this comes to 17 seconds, but that will also depend on your recordings. You might be able to sneak in another Exchange, or you might have to drop a lightning 1. Just make sure it is shorter than 18 seconds.

The rotation without Energon can be the exact same, but removing Energon. You could also exchange Energon for 2 more lightning 1 spells, to make it close to the same 17 seconds. Or you could just make a rotation of 30 seconds, whatever floats your boat.

Now that we have a rough idea how our mini rotations look like, it is handy to make a recording of that. To easily do this, you can drag your recordings in a set in the correct order for your mini rotation. Then make a new rotation, name it, start recording, and then activate your set that you just put together.

The runecorder will then record itself. A tip for this is that you can turn off the runecorder while you are still recording, so that you don’t get the first spell in your recording again. You can also put an empty recording at the end. You make an empty recording by just starting and stopping a recording for a record. Then repeat that a few times so you have time to stop the recording when your rotation is done.

Use this to make your 2 rotations. You can then make a set of 5 minutes with these 2 recordings, making sure you use the Energon rotation no more than 12 times.

The idea behind this is that you build up and spend energy, then clear that with the energon rotation. The important thing to check, is that all your fatigue stacks are clear after your done with your energon rotations. It matters less if you run out of energy during your burst rotation (the one without energon), you can try fixing this by getting some cost reduction nodes in the skill tree.
This set-up will carry you at the first few ascensions, probably your whole first transcendence. You could get a bit further by also including dark ritual. Dark ritual costs 10 mana and lasts for a minute. This also stacks, and you want to keep its uptime to a 100% when you use it. This does make it so that you can cast less Energons.

Later on you will also get synergy, which also costs mana, but with the basic information here, it should be doably to make yourself a rotation that includes this.