Clicker Heroes Explained with Strategies - NO HACKING

Strategies for making your Clicker Heroes game go smoothly and more quickly, without using any cheats or hacks. Such as, which heroes are worthy of upgrading? Which ones deserve to use the Gild bonuses? And what is the best strategy for upgrading heroes? Works well up to zone 3000, helpful up to 300,000. Written primarily for patch version 1.0e2 up to 1.0e9 but also mostly compatible with version 1.0e11.

Game Version Updates

Please read this section FIRST to avoid any future confusion.

My own personal progress in this game has STOPPED officially at patch version 1.0e11 and right after unlocking the hero named Maw. This is because I feel like I've gotten enough fun (and work) out of this game and so I'm spending my free time on other things now. This guide should still be useful for future patches but beware there may be some changes that I didn't account for because they were made after I wrote this guide.

The developers are pretty good about continuously updating this game. About every six months or so, they make a few changes and release an update patch. That being the case, this guide (as with any guide for this game) might not reflect all of the most recent changes in the updated game versions.

At current time (March 2018), this guide is 100% compatible with the game version 1.0e2 up to 1.0e9. Some big changes were implemented in the 1.0e2 patch that affected the Ancients, the Outsiders, and also added some expensive heroes to use in the higher zones. Then minor changes were made up to 1.0e9, before another set of big changes came with 1.0e10 and also 1.0e11 had some big impacts. Because I have a job and a life outside of this game, I do not always have time to come back here and update this to reflect all the new stuff. Sorry, but such is life. Feel free to leave comments if you think it will be helpful to other users about the new stuff.

As of update 1.0e11 this guide is still useful to help you with the basic strategies to hit zone 3000. The new stuff is almost exclusively tied to the Outsiders, which have been totally redone, or else they have added heroes that you will not be able to afford to hire until sometime after zone 5000 anyway, at which point you should have a really good understanding of how to play by yourself so I don't feel the need to discuss them in this guide. Some small tweaks have been made to the Ancients as well, but really nothing that I feel needs to be reflected in this guide because most of those changes are very minor. One other big change is that it used to be each zone required you to kill 10 monsters to pass, and every 5th level boss gave you 30 seconds to kill it. The new update changed that so now the higher zone you go, the more monsters you have to kill to pass; and boss timers get shorter in higher zones. This makes the Ancients who reduce monsters per zone and who increase boss timers or decrease boss life much more useful than in pre-1.0e10 versions of the game. Other than those few things, as far as I know, this guide can still be used to help you reach zone 3000 at least.

This is NOT the same as the phone version!!

This game is available online at www.clickerheroes.com on your computer or tablet. Save-games from those versions and the Steam version (text files that contain your game data) will transfer between them because essentially they are THE SAME GAME, there are no differences between the web version and the Steam version except that in the Steam version the auto-save feature actually works. Still, it doesn't hurt to do a manual save after every 10 stages or so.

There is a DIFFERENT VERSION of this game available as an app for Smartphones. THIS IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH THAT VERSION. The game-play is essentially the same, but in this Steam/web version it is setup for FREE play while the phone app version is setup more for "pay to win" but it can still be played and enjoyed for free. The phone version has the cost of everything you can buy with rubies in the shop set at about 10 times higher than the web/Steam version. So instead of spending 20 rubies to buy 3 random gild tokens you will have to spend about 200 if I remember right. Also, in this version your mercenaries die about once every ten missions... but in the phone app version they seem to die on EVERY mission at least once AND the revive cost in rubies is 100 times higher!!! So be advised: the phone app version will try to steer you into spending real money on ruby purchases. This Steam version will not try so hard. Otherwise, the gameplay is essentially the same so this guide can be used for either version.

The mobile app version has two additional Ancients (Iris and Khrysos) that are not in the Steam/web version. These will give you start-up GOLD next time you use Ascension, and instantly unlock a higher stage next time you use Ascension (you will still start on stage 1 but you can immediately move up to a higher stage). I wish these were in the Steam version. There is another one, Thusia, who increases treasure chest life but only while golden clicks is active so that you can sort of abuse the golden clicks skill i you are lucky enough to find a treasure chest while using it. That one, I think is a waste of hero souls to upgrade anyway so I'm glad it's not in this version.

Roadmap and Manual Save

Hello and welcome!
This guide will NOT include any hacks or cheats! Just legitimate gameplay tactics.
Since this game really has no plot, there also will not be any spoilers if you have at least beaten stage (or "zone") 10 already, which should take you no more than fifteen minutes your first time. This guide should be useful up to zone 3000 with lessons that might help even beyond that. And it is tested and true for patch versions 1.0e2 thru 1.0e9. Patch 1.0e10 makes some significant changes to the Outsiders and the Ancients which I do not have time to investigate, but the basic strategies still apply.

I give you some fair warning: this game starts out feeling VERY slow. But after playing for almost a week, it will pick up speed. Also, there will be periods where you can really only play for maybe 15 minutes and then you have to wait a few hours to gain enough gold to get to the next hero upgrade or the next stage or whatever... so this is a CASUAL style game, not like a traditional RPG/Strategy video game that you have to be present to play.

This game, to "succeed" you must run through it a few times to build up your power levels. Then you should adjust your strategy in order to go deeper into the game. Your first three runs or so it will seem VERY slow... you will likely play five or ten minutes, then you will hit a wall and have to leave it to run by itself for 3 or 4 hours while your hero team collects enough gold for the next set of upgrades. After about 3 days of this, you will be somewhere around stage 150 and you should have between 8 and 15 "Hero Souls" so you will want to use the Ascension skill to reset your world. (I'll discuss that in detail later.) When you ascend, you acquire the hero souls that are waiting in limbo for you, and you can spend them to hire and upgrade Ancients to boost your power or the amount of gold you collect or do a few other things. Each of these will make your next run a little easier. By your fourth run, you should be getting to stage 250 or so and earning about 25 or 30 hero souls from your next Ascension. From there, the game will start to get significantly easier to get through those early stages.

Here is the game screen, with labels for all the buttons. Should be mostly self-explanatory but each part will be discussed in the following chapters:




And here are instructions for creating a manual save.
First, open the options with the wrench button.



Then, hit the SAVE button and pick a location and filename just like any file download. It has to be a .txt file though.

When you need to load an old savegame, hit the IMPORT button on the Options menu and you should see the following screen. Click in the text box and PASTE the text from your savegame file. That means you will have to open the savegame file in notepad or word, CTRL-A to select all the text, CTRL-C to copy it all, then go back to the import screen and CTRL-V to paste it all.



Loading a manual save will also automatically acquire any gold that you would have received, since there is a timer there that will assume you were running the game in FARM MODE for the entire time since your save was made.

It is a good idea to create a manual save every 20-30 minutes you are actively playing, but the auto-save feature in the Steam version is actually pretty good.

The Right Side: Auto-clickers

As of version 1.0e5, you can use the FINGER icon on the right side of the screen, below the Ascension skill's icon and the farm/progress mode boot icon, to set Auto-Clickers. Auto-Clickers can be purchased in the ruby shop. The first one costs 100 rubies and each additional one costs that plus another 50 rubies, plus there may be new skins available as DLC. Currently as of writing this at Halloween time, there is a zonbie-themed edition available for $10 on the Steam Store.

I built my own auto-clicker, not really to cheat at the game but because I wanted an excuse to teach myself how to use Visual-Basic for programming my own .exe files. Mission accomplished. :) The in-game version has a few extra features though.

Basically what these do is let you click and drag the finger icon to a point on the screen and then it will automatically click 10 times per second until you decide to turn it off by clicking the finger again. If you have more than one auto-clicker purchased, they can stack, too, so if you spend 550 rubies to buy 4 fingers you can put all four of them on the battle screen to do 40 clicks per second. Or you can put two on the battle screen for 20 clicks per second plus one on each of your two favorite heroes (on the left side of the screen) to level them up as soon as you have enough coins because it will click the LEVELUP button 10 times per second.

The main reason to do this is if you have the Ancients known as Juggernaut, Bhaal, and Fragsworth (and also Pluto in version 1.10e or later) at reasonably high levels and you are at the end of your Ascension run where your "idle mode" DPS and gold gains leave you going a bit slow. At that point you would turn on the auto-clickers and utilize the "active clicking" mode to see if you can get a few more HS by gaining another few dozen stages by clicking with Juggernaut's combo building instead of relying on your idle mode damage. A secondary reason to use this is right after you ascend, when you don't have enough gold to hire any good heroes yet, you can set auto-clickers to kill the enemies and levelup your heroes while you go get yourself a chicken-salad sandwich or go to work/school for the day. When you come back, depending how many auto-clicker fingers you have, you should have made enough progress to allow you to turn them off and coast on idle bonuses from Siyalatas and Libertas for a while.

If you are at the point where you are earning over 2e2000 HS per run, it is also worth noting that you can use Auto-Clickers on your skills to keep them active. At this point your Ancients should be leveled high enough that the duration of each skill (except Energize, Reload, and Dark Ritual) is longer than its cooldown timer so if you put an auto-clicker on the icon that skill will never shut off. With the new 1.11e update, when you first activate a skill like this you should hit Energize first to double its effect, then set the auto-click finger on it. Since it never shuts off, it will STAY ENERGIZED forever! Bonus!


The rest of this guide will assume that you do NOT have auto-clickers.

The right side: battle screen and option menus

When you start the game, you will see the screen is divided in half. The right side is your battle arena. The left side is your team management menu.

The Right Side

On the right, you should see a little square at the top that says "1" to indicate you are on stage 1. Below that is a label that describes the stage. (They call it a "zone level" in the game, but since there are MANY kinds of levels I will call this one the "stage" to avoid confusion.) Then below that is a skull with a number. This shows how many monsters you need to kill to advance to the next stage. At first it will say "0/10" which means you still need to kill 10 more to unlock stage 2. After version 1.0e10, higher zones require more monsters to die.

At the bottom right you should see a label and health bar for the monster on the screen. Your job is to get that health bar to zero. That is all. The monsters NEVER FIGHT BACK; they just sit there looking cute until you kill them.

Below the monster label is the "SHOP" button where you can go pay rubies to purchase a number of things, or spend REAL MONEY to buy rubies. I DO NOT RECOMMEND EVER SPENDING REAL MONEY IN THIS GAME since you get so many rubies for free. I will discuss the shop more in another chapter. In the lower right corner are your options to turn on/off the music and sound effects.

On the far right, there are some little circular icons that take you to differetn places. The wrench is for the options menu, I advise you to go in there and set things how you like. I also recommend using SCIENtiFIC NOTATION instead of the stupid "M, B, T, q, Q, s, S, O, N, !" notation because it is easier to understand! Scientific notation numbers look like this: 1.234e56. This means the actual number is 1.234 * 10^56, which is equal to 1234000.... there would be a total of 53 zeroes there. So 4.000e12 is a 4 followed by 12 zeros. 4.001e12 is 4,001,000,000,000. Whatever number is after the e, that is how many total digits are after the first one in the full number. So, 6e11 is exactly 100 times 6e9. Not so hard, right?

The rest of those little icons are for twitter and the forums, which you will probably never use... except the boot icon is for switching between FARM and PROGRESS mode. Farm mode has a red slash over a black boot, and keeps you on the same stage even after you kill all the required monsters. Progress mode is a yellow boot and will automatically move you to the highest unlocked stage after you kill all the required monsters on your current stage.

The Left Side: Hero Menu

The left side of the screen has several menu tabs you can explore. Certain ones are not unlocked until you beat a certain stage level or meet some other prerequisite.

The Hero Tab (crossed swords)

There are dozens of heroes you can hire, each one in succession having more power but costing more gold than the previous one. After you hire them, upgrades beome available as the hero's personal level reaches a certain number (usually 10, 25, 50, and 75 but some go beyond that to 100, 125, or 150). You can buy these upgrades AND hire heroes using the Gold you earn by killing monsters. The upgrades are mostly damage boosters for that hero, or for all of your heroes, but there are about a dozen skills that you unlock by buying them as an upgrade, too. When you unlock a skill, it will appear as a small square icon in a line that runs down the center of the screen. Clicking on a skill will activate it, but each skill has a certain effect duration and a cooldown time that must run down before you can use it again.

Your heroes will face off against a constant stream of monsters, who actually are more like cute little creatures. The monsters NEVER ATTACK YOU; but you kill them all anyway. Your heroes cannot take damage or die. All they do is wear down the HP of the monsters until the monster is dead. After killing enough monsters, you advance to the next stage... which is exactly the same but maybe with a different background and stronger monsters. Besides the constant DPS that your hero team does, you can also CLICK your mouse on the monster screen to attack it yourself and add CLICK damage on top of your team's DPS damage.

There are THREE battle modes in this game, depending on your actions. If you do NOTHING for at least a minute, you start IDLE mode. Certain bonuses (particularly to your hero DPS damage and the amount of gold you collect) only work in IDLE mode. If you CLICK a couple of times then you enter NORMAL mode which cancels idle but not combo mode. Normal mode has no bonuses of its own, it is really just a transition phase between idle mode and combo mode. COMBO mode only becomes available after you hire a certain Ancient (discussed later). COMBO mode makes your click attacks stack into a combo meter that increases your damage. After five minutes of inactivity, your combo counter will quickly decay until it gets back to zero again, but you can stop the decay and continue to add to the counter by clicking the monster battle screen again. Clicking on any of the menus in teh left side of the screen does not start combo mode or cancel idle mode. Same is true for clicking on the orange things that show up sometimes and explode into a gold shower if you click directly on them. However, activating a skill (either by clicking its icon, click-killing one of the tiny bees that flies areound the top of the screen sometimes, or by having a mercenary activate it for you) will cancel idle mode. (As of 1.0e11 skill usage no longer cancels idle mode - except Clickstorm because it adds a temporary auto-clicker to click-attack the enemy.) Only your active clicks and the Clickstorm skill will add counters to combo mode, and only if the click actually hits a monster; if you click after one monster dies but before the next is summoned then it does not count as part of the combo.

At the bottom of the hero menu are two buttons. One will automatically buy all the skills that you can afford (so you don't have to scroll all over the menu list if you think you forgot one). The other takes you to the GILD MANAGEMENT menu. You will eventually earn Gild Tokens which add bonus power to individual heroes; I'll talk about those a little later.

So yeah, the basic goal here is to kill enough monsters and earn enough gold to be able to hire and upgrade all of your heroes. Kill monsters, get gold, hire/upgrade your team, rinse and repeat. Enjoy.

The left side: achievements, stats, and clans

Acheivement Tab (three stars)

The achievement tab (three stars) is wher eyou can see which achievements you have unlocked and which are still waiting for you to get them done. Fairly simple stuff really. When you get an achievement, you usually are awarded with a permanent boost to your DPS damage.

Stats tab (bar graph)

Go to this menu if you want to see how many things you've killed, what is your highest stage ever, how many hero levelups you have, and a bunch of other facts. Feel free to explore this at your leisure.

Clans (three blue people)

WARNING:
If you are in a Clan or have made a nickname already to join a clan, DO NOT share your save-game file because your Clan nickname and stats are also part of that save file!

The clan tab is where you can create or join a clan. This menu should become available after defeating stage 50 (thanks user Nantes for this info which I forgot!). Right now (game version 1.0e2) there is no PVP function but there is a message board feature you can use to send notes within a clan. But a clan can work together to attack IMMORTAL TITANS, which is a never-ending string of monsters, in daily raid battles. You only have your click damage for these battles but not your regular click damage - it is determined by how many HERO SOULS you collected so far. You are rewarded with more hero souls depending how much total damage you and your clan did to the titans and what zone you were at when you killed it.

Each time you kill a titan, the next one will be a level higher and will have more HP. If you fail to kill a titan, you can have several tries (I think up to three per day) but you have to wait an hour - or pay 10 rubies to fight immediately. If you STILL don't kill it, the next day's titan will be a level LOWER. So if you get "stuck" on a high-level titan don't panic just wait a couple of days and then try again. If you can kill a titan QUICKLY on your first attempt, you get an "overkill" and the next titan is summoned immediately and the fight continues until your 30-second timer runs out. The timer will NOT reset to 30 when you get an overkill. The more titans you can kill in a row like this, the bigger your reward will be.

I made a clan named LimitBreakers777 if you are interested. I am no longer with the clan, passed the torch to others, but it was fun while it lasted. My advice: avoid clans until you are up to stage 150 at least because anything less is too weak to contribute to those Titan raid battles. Second, just as a general rule please do not use profanity or rudeness in the clan message board - there may be young kids playing. Please, if you decide to quit the game later, be sure to leave a note on the clan message board and then under the Clan Options tab you can quit the clan to make room for someone new who still plays the game frequently.

The left side: Ancients and Hero Souls

Ancients tab (pyramid with eye)

Please note that patch 1.0e10 makes some changes to some of the Ancients. There are some new ones, and some are removed, and some have had their effects changed. The info below is for 1.0e9 and earlier, but the basic strategies still apply to 1.0e10.

In addition to your team of heroes who fight cute monsters, and your mercenaries who go on scavenger hunt missions for you, you can also hire Ancients when you reach a high enough stage. Ancients are pretty cool, very useful, and very expensive creatures. They boost various aspects of your game, but in return you have to feed them Hero Souls to level them up and hire them. The first 5 or so levels of an Ancient are usually pretty cheap, but then they start going up by a ton of hero souls for each additional level. So, let me start off by describing what hero souls are and where to find them.

Hero Souls are collected by defeating "Primal Bosses" that appear randomly instead of ordinary bosses on every 5th level, but they only show up at stage 100+. Higher stage primal bosses will drop more hero souls. On your first and second runs through the game, you will likely only find about 12 or 15 hero souls before you have to Ascend and essentially restart. When you get hero souls, you cannot use them immediately. They are on hold until you use the Ascension ability to reset your progress. Then you can use them for a couple of things: hiring and updating Ancients, or managing the Gild tokens on your heroes. Besides the Primal Bosses, sometimes your Mercenaries will go on a quest to find hero souls for you. Or you can buy an instant Ascension to get the hero souls without reseting your progress, but that costs 50 rubies and IS NOT WORTH IT.

In any case, once you have some hero souls you can feed them to your Ancients to summon them and then to level them up. You can summon as many Ancients as you want, but each successive summoning will cost more souls. Each time you summon an Ancient, the list of Ancients availble to summon next time will change and it is always random. If you don't like any of those choices, you can choose to REROLL but it costs a lot of hero souls just to do that and then you still have to pay more hero souls to actually hire the one you like if it shows up in the new list. If you find that you have fed your hero souls to the wrong ancients and your game is not going how you expected, use the Respec button at the bottom of the Ancients menu to reset things. You will LOSE all of your Ancients so you will have to find them randomly to hire them again. You will also LOSE 25% of the HS that you spent on your Ancients. This applies to all your Ancients, you cannot pick and choose which ones to keep and which to reset.

The Ancients and Their Powers
Given that there are TWO ways to do damage in this game (actively click the mouse or be lazy and let your heroes do DPS) there are two acceptable strategies to using Ancients. You could focus on the ones that increase click damage, critical click damage, and duration of your clicker skills if you want to play actively. Or you can focus on increasing your DPS when idle, increasing gold drops when idle, etc. if you want to play the lazy way. Basically, for every aspect of the game that could be increased, there is an Ancient to do just that. Here I will list them in order of suggestion as to which ones you should summon first. Bear in mind that the list of available summons will be RANDOM each time, so you don't have to Reroll to stick with this list, just get the best one you see available and hope for another good one on the next round. Ancients that I find to be especially useful have their names in bold print.

Terms you need to know here:
Idle mode expires if you click twice in a minute, and starts if you don't click for at least a minute.
COMBO mode expires after five minutes without actively clicking.

• Dogcog: reduces the cost of hiring and upgrading heroes
  
• Siyalatas: boosts your DPS WHEN IDLE.
  
• Mammon: boosts gold dropped, whether idle or active
  
• Libertas: boosts gold dropped WHEN IDLE
  
• Chronos: adds time to boss fights
  
• Khrysos: gives gold after Ascenscion
  
• Iris: opens a higher stage after Ascenscion
  
• Solomon: increases amount of souls dropped by Primal Bosses -- version 1.0e10 removed Solomon from the game... so sad. :``(
  
• Atman: increases chance of finding a Primal Boss
  
• Dora: increases chances of getting a treasure chest instead of a monster
  
• Mimzee: increases gold from treasure chests
  
• Fortuna: increases chance of getting special platinum coins instead of gold, worth 10x as much
  
• Bhaal: increases damage from critical clicks
  
• Fragsworth: increases CLICK damage by a percentage of your base click damage
  
• Juggernaut: activates COMBO mode, clicks stack to increase your damage.
  
• Revolc: increases chance to get double rubies from clickable objects
  
• Bubos: decreases boss health by a percentage
  
• Kumawakamaru: reduces the number of monsters that appear on each stage
  
• Vaagur: quickens cooldown time for all of your active skills
  
• Argaiv: increases damage boost from each Gild Token
  
• Nogardnit: bonus to gold while idle for each UNUSED auto-clicker that you own
  
• Pluto: (new for version 1.09e I think) get more gold per click from the Golden Clicks skill
  
• Morgullis: ordinarily, if you have a Hero Soul that you do not spend, it will add 10% bonus DPS by just leaving it there... or you could feed it to Morgullis and turn that 10% into 11%. These 11% bonuses STACK on top of each other so you feed him 6 souls to get 66% extra DPS. However, in order for the bonus to be active you will need to have AT LEAST ONE unspent Hero Soul remaining. Spending them all or feeding the last one to Morgullis will TURN OFF the bonus damage until the next time you have an unspent hero soul.

The rest of the Ancients just add time to the duration of your active skills (Clickstorm, Power Surge, etc.) which I only use when I get stuck on a boss fight stage. As I did not find them to be very useful in the lower zones, I am not going to bother listing them, but perhaps you will like them beter than I did so feel free to play with them anyway. They do become quite useful when you start earning a ton of HS per run though - see the "Auto-clicker" chapter for more info on that..

** The mobile app version has two additional Ancients (Iris and Khrysos) that are not in the Steam/web version. These will give you start-up GOLD next time you use Ascension, and instantly unlock a higher stage next time you use Ascension (you will still start on stage 1 but you can immediately move up to a higher stage). I wish these were in the Steam version. **

The left side: Relics and Mercenaries

The Relic Tab (brown chest)

Relics are items you might find that you can EQUIP to gain some combat bonuses. Basically, for every Ancient there is an effect for a Relic that can do the same thing. Usually, relics add the equivalent of 2 or 3 (or partial levels like 2.34) levels to the Ancients' power, but you do not need to have that Ancient hired to get the bonus. You can equip up to four relics, and each one might have only one bonus effect or it might have several. Any unequipped relics go into the junk pile, and any junk relics can be swapped for equipped ones before you hit the SALVAGE button. Salvaging will PERMANENTLY DESTROY any relics in the junk pile, but you will gain some Forge Cores depending on the total power of those junk relics. Then you can use those forge cores to upgrade the relics you want to equip and keep.

To maximize your forge core gains, upgrade junk relics before you salvage them. However, only upgrade them to the point where each additional level will cost roughly 5 forge cores. (The forge core cost goes up after each upgrade.) Some relics can only gain one level at a time, while others might gain two or three levels at a time. Read the description on the upgrade screen to see what your relic will do. If it says "Upgrade this relic 3 levels for 14 forge cores" then you can do that because 14/3 is still less than 5 cores per level. If it says "upgrade 3 levels for 20 cores" then don't do it because that is more than 5 cores per level, so you will actually LOSE cores on the deal because each level gives you 5 more cores when you salvage.

Relics are gained by fighting a Relic Ooze monster that appears on some random stage between 100 and whatever your highest stage ever is. Only one of those guys will appear in each Ascension. You can get more relics by hiring a mercenary to go get some on a quest, or by paying rubies in the shop (NOT WORTH IT).

The "best" relics to equip early on will boost your Treasure Chest Appearance %, or your Chance to Get 10x Gold. But go with whatever relics you have that support your chosen style of play (idle or click/combo). When you start earning more than 4e1000 HS per ascension, the ones that boost duration of skills (particularly Golden Clicks, Metal Detector, and Lucky Strikes) are better. Once you are getting over 1e3000 HS per run, all relics are useless because you can manually levelup your Ancients high enough to do the job on their own.

Mercs Tab (skull with sword)

This is where you manage your mercenaries. These guys, when hired, will go on scavenger missions for you. They can hire more mercs, get rubies, get gold, get relics, or get hero souls. The higher a merc's level, the more they get. Each merc also has a bonus (increased by more rarity) to a certain type of mission rewards: get more rubies, get more gold, get more souls, or faster recruiting missions.

Mercenaries WILL DIE, unlike your heroes. When they do, you have a choice to revive them for a crazy large number of rubies (cost goes up the more the merc levels up), or bury them for a permanent death. Reviving them will let them resume their quest right where they left it. Burying them will free up that merc slot so you can hire a new one; you can only have up to 5 mercs at one time. Mercs seem to die at a random time based on the total hours they spend doing quests. And they level up after a certain number of hours on quest duty. So the higher your merc's level gets, the greater the chance that they will die... but the more rewards they will get if they survive.

Sometimes merc die young, and are pretty cheap to revive. Usually, you don't have to worry about them until they reach the level of "Demigod +2" or higher though. Usually. In this pic, poor young Mark died on his very first mission and I am debating about whether or not to spend the 12 rubies to revive him. There is an achievement where you want to kill and bury a merc named Leroy Jenkins. Leroy is a VERY RARE merc who you will find randomly someday if you are lucky. If you don't know the reference, search youtube for a "Leroy Jenkins WoW" video.

The Left Side: Outsiders

The Outsiders tab (green eye thing)

This is where you can hire and upgrade your Outsider team. These guys work much the same way as the Ancients, but their powers are much more mysterious. Or something. And instead of eating Hero Souls, they eat Ancient Souls.

So, where do you get Ancient Souls? Simple. Get more Hero Souls. The Outsiders tab will tell you how many Ancient Souls you will earn if you use the Transcend function now. Each new Ancient Soul will cost more Hero Souls to obtain. You basically trade in ALL of your Hero Souls from that transcension (even the ones that you already spent on Ancients and Gild Token management) to earn a handful of Ancient Souls to feed your new Outsider friends. Of course, the hero souls do not count until you actually have them in your hand so you should always Ascend before you Transcend. (Once this menu tab is available, it will stay there forever so you don't have to get back to zone 300 to transcend again.)

There are only a few Outsiders, but their upgrades get expensive VERY FAST because Ancient Souls take so long to earn. So plan wisely when you feed these things. You cannot Respec these in the middle of a run like you can with the Ancients. If you want to respec, you keep all of your AS that you spent so far, but you have to transcend and start your entire universe over in order to reallocate your AS points to your Outsiders.

This tab is also where you will find the button that lets you TRANSCEND to a whole new universe instead of just a new world like with the Ascension skill. More on that later. When you do click the Transcend button you have the option of a regular Transcension or transcend and respec your Outsiders. If you respec, you will KEEP the list of available outsiders, but you LOSE any level-ups you gave them so you start from a clean slate. Good news is, unlike the Ancients who have a 25% restocking fee, if you reset your Outsiders you get to keep all the Ancient Souls you fed them up to that point. So there is no penalty for resetting them, except that you have to decide again which ones are getting fed.

Please note: Update 1.0e10 changes the effects given by several of the Outsiders, and it alters the upgrade costs for all of them. I will start by listing Outsiders prior to 1.09e and then I will list the new setup.

Here is a list of the Outsiders and what they can do for you...
version 1.0e9 and earlier

• Xyliqil: increases bonuses from "... while IDLE" effects.
  
• Chor'gorloth: reduces the Hero Soul cost for hiring and upgrading Ancients.
  
• Phandoryss: boosts your TRANSCENDENT POWER
  
• Borb: gives you a higher max Hero Soul reward from Primal Boss monsters due to Transcendent Power
  
• Ponyboy: increases the effect of the Ancient known as Solomon (more Hero Souls from Primal Bosses).

version 1.0e10 or 1.0e11

• Xyliqil: increases bonuses from "... while IDLE" effects.
  
• Chor'gorloth: reduces the Hero Soul cost for hiring and upgrading Ancients.
  
• Phandoryss: boosts your DPS (damage per second)
  
• Ponyboy: gain extra Hero Souls from Primal Boss monsters
  
• Borb: increase power of Ancient Kumawakamaru (fewer monsters per stage)
  
• Rhageist: increase power of Ancient Atman (higher chance of finding Primal Boss monsters)
  
• K'ariqua: increase power of Ancient Bubos (lowers HP of boss monsters)
  
• Orphalas: increase power of Ancient Chronos (increase boss timers)
  
• Sen-Akhan: increase power of Ancient Dora (find more treasure chests instead of monsters)

The Ruby Shop

The ruby shop has a few items for sale. You can click the PLUS sign on top to buy more rubies for REAL MONEY... please don't do that, it's not worth it because you get rubies for free from mercs and by popping oranges.

There is a chest of gold with a refresh timer. This automatically resets the cooldown for all of your skills so you can use them again right away, plus gives you as much gold as you would earn in 8 hours at your current stage and your current DPS. Get to a higher stage, or levelup a hero to do more DPS, and the gold amount increases. NOT WORTH THE RUBIES.

You can also buy a box of 3 relics for 40 rubies. Only one relic out of every fifty or so is actually useful, and you probably find better ones from merc quests or Relic Ooze monsters anyway, so this is NOT WORTH THE RUBIES.

You could buy a bunch of hero souls, and increase your stats "number of ascensions" count by 1, for 50 Rubies. Your merc quests to go find "X% of a quick ascension hero souls" rewards are based on this number. This number rises after every five levels (every boss stage). This number stays the same after Ascension, but using Transcend will reset it to zero. NOT WORTH THE RUBIES.

You can also buy a double-damage bonus that lasts FOREVER, for I think 50 rubies. WORTH IT. Buy this thing first.

The only other thing here is a box of 3 Gild Tokens for your heroes. If you already have the double damage, and you're not worried about saving rubies to revive a merc, go ahead and buy this because gild tokens are pretty sweet. Clicking the "?" will bring you to the Gild Management menu.

I want to thank the developers (if they're reading this) for making this game truly free to play and free to "win" while also providing a method for dedicated gamers to "donate" cash in return for some in-game goodies. Very cool use of premium content.

Non-Monster Battle Items

Platinum Coins

Once in a blue moon you will get platinum coins instead of gold from whatever you just killed. This is a GOOD THING since they are worth 10x as much gold. It is really nice when this happens to a boss monster or a treasure chest! Originally, the chance to find platinum is SUPER LOW so you will almost never get any. You can boost it with Ancients and Relics, but even then the chance is really low. Still, 2% chance is better than 0.2% chance. If you are struggling to get your next hero upgrades, this may be a good Ancient to upgrade.

Treasure Chests

From time to time, wherever you would normally encounter a NON-BOSS monster, you will see a treasure chest instead. These things are a gift from the gods; they contain much more gold than a normal monster. So obviously you want to beat these things up whenever you can. Plus, just like normal monsters, they sometimes explode into a platinum coin bonus instead of gold coin bonus! Extra gold... x10... = even more extra gold! The original chance for a chest to appear is RANDOM and set to a pretty low percentage. You can boost this chance by using Ancients or Relics, but Dora is quite expensive to upgrade. You can also boost the gold contained in a chest with Ancients or Relics. Pretty useful! It seems that the best "chance for treasure chest" you can possibly get is roughly 20%, but that requires a ton of hero souls fed to Dora (up to +750% chest chance). Realistically in the early to middle stages of the game (until you can reach stage 1000+) the best you can hope for even with relics and ancients is about 7 - 10% encounter rate. Better than the original 1 - 2%, and totally worth it.

Orange Fish

Once in a while you will see an orange fish (I'm not sure what it is really supposed to be but you will know it when you see it) on the screen. It can appear anywhere on the game screen and at any time. Sometimes they even show up on the left-side menu screen. It will just stand there looking stupid until you click it. Then it will rain coins on you. They hold about the same amount of gold as a normal monster on your highest stage this ascension, even if you find it when you move backward from stage 90 to stage 5 it will still give gold from stage 90. In addition to a little bit of gold, these sometimes give you a RUBY, too! The chance for a ruby seems to be right around 30% in my experience. There is an Ancient who increases the chance that you might get DOUBLE ruby drops from these, but that only activates if you are already supposed to get a ruby from it; it won't increase your chance of getting a ruby above the pre-set 30%. So if your Ancient says you havea 10% chance for bonus rubies, then you still get NO rubies at all 70% of the time, ONE ruby 27% of the time, and TWO rubies 3% of the time. Because 10% of 30% is just 3% of the total. Anyways... these things are your main source for rubies unless you want to spend REAL MONEY to buy some in the shop, at least until you get to hire mercenaries who go hunting rubies for you. These will stay on screen even after you change to a new stage, so there is no hurry to pop them. You only get 25 rubies per ascension from these things! Don't panic, if you don't get a ruby when you pop one then it does not count towards that 25 maximum limit. In your stats menu, these are listed in the "Ascensions" heading and they are called "Ruby Clickables Clicked This Ascension."

To clarify because some people misunderstood I think, you can only see ONE of these at a time so a second won't appear until you pop the first one, but you are allowed to wait a while if you want it to drop more gold on a higher stage before you pop it. Clicking and killing these will not deactivate idle mode or add to your click combo.

Bumblebees

Occasionally you will see a small flying bug lazily floating across the top of the battle screen. If you leave it alone it will just pass right on by without affecting anything. If you click it a bunch of times it will die, and when it does it will activate one of your skills at random, without resetting your cooldown timers. It is up to you whether or not to use the bees. Clicking the bee will not deactivate idle mode or add to your click combo, but killing the bee to activate the skill WILL deactivate idle mode.

Which Heroes Are Worthy?

This game is entirely based on MATH, so MATH is the only way to optimize your speed of earning gold and beating stages to get hero souls. Luckily for you, I already did the math so you don't have to. In fact, I'm not even going to show you the math. I'll just tell you the result.

Each hero has certain upgrades. Some increase the entire team's DPS. Some increase your click damage or your critical click chances. Some give you more gold. Others boost an individual hero's damage output. Really, you should get ALL heroes to level 150 or 200 in order to unlock EVERY upgrade because they are all useful. However, some heroes are only useful for those upgrades and then they become a waste of gold for further level-up spending.

The main way to determine if a hero is worth going beyond level 150 is to look at the total individual damage boosters they get. Most of them get a total of 20x boosters, but a few only get 8x or something like that. The 20x heroes are the best, obviously, because they do the most damage regardless of their upgrade level. Also, remember that starting at level 200, every 25th level that hero will get another 4x damage boost... and for every 1000 levels he gets a 10x damage boost. So part of the process is also to determine which heroes are likely to be able to reach level 1000 or higher on THIS current run through the game. Earlier heroes reach level 1000 or 2000 faster, but they also hit that 9999 cap faster than later heroes. That means you want basically 2 teams of heroes: one for the early game to get you to where you can afford the later heroes, and then the later heroes for after the early guys hit that level cap.

Be advised though, it takes a LONG time to hit that cap; even at stage 900 my Treebeast is still only around level 3000. Also be advised that update 1.10e removed the level cap! Hooray! But early heroes still get stale once they pass level 4000 or so, compared to the bigger/newer ones you can hire.

So... here is a list of the USELESS heroes who you should stop caring about once they reach 150:

USELESS after level 150
• Cid
  
• Wandering Fisherman
  
• Betty Clicker
  
• Leon
  
• Alexa
  
• Broyle Lindeoven
  
• King Midas (a skill from Wepwawet later makes him a powerhouse though)
  
• Abaddon
  
• Amenhotep
  
• Beastlord
  
• Athena
  
• Aphrodite
  
• Shinatobe
  
• Grant
  
• Frostleaf

It is also worth noting that the heroes that are worth the upgrade cost all follow the general rule that when you are leveling them up past level 400, for the same price you will get roughly the same damage boost no matter which hero it is, assuming they have the same number of Gild Tokens. So, say you want to add 100 levelups to a hero. You can boost Treebeast from 1800 to 1900 or Dread Knight from 500 to 600 for the same price (roughly 5e58 gold... that's a 5 followed by 58 zeroes folks). Whichever one you choose, they will end up doing the same amount of damage after the levelup so it really doesn't matter if you want to focus on the beginning of the list or the end of the list. But then the end of the list feels like more of an accomplishment because you need to do some work to unlock those guys.

GOOD heroes to have upgraded
• Treebeast
  
• Ivan
  
• Brittany
  
• Masked Samurai
  
• Great Forest Seer
  
• Natalia
  
• Mercedes
  
• Bobby
  
• Sir George II
  
• Refri Jerator
  
• Ma Zhu
  
• Dread Knight and beyond

You will notice a big spike in hiring cost between Frostleaf and Dread Knight, then each hero after that has a huge gap, too. This was intentional, so that you have enough little heroes to handle the early game to start earning gold... then you have enough later heroes to replace them once they start hitting that stale phase. These later heroes from Dread Knight up to Astraea are known as the "Ring Rangers" because each has a power ring in their description. As such, they have an extra benefit: from level 525 up to 775, they get a 5x damage increase per 25 levels instead of the usual 4x increase. This makes them slightly more useful (after they hit level 775) than the earlier heroes.

Managing your Gild Tokens

You will earn Gild Tokens every time you beat 10 levels, but only once for those ten levels. You can buy them from the shop for Rubies (WORTH IT), too. After you use Ascension, you keep your gilds just how they were and you do not earn new ones for 10th levels that you previously beat. After transcension you lose all of your gilds but then you will earn NEW 10-level gild tokens. They will also give you back your "purchased" gild tokens that you spent rubies to buy... but only a few at a time until you get them all back - usually before you hit zone 350 you will have all of your initial gilds back after transcending. The hero who gets that gild token is RANDOM each time. Each gild token adds extra damage to that hero's DPS, and the first one also gives them a new outfit and their bar in your hero menu will turn gold to let you know they have a gild token.

EXAMPLE: Let's say you beat zone 500, and you also spent rubies to buy 90 additional gild tokens. You get 10 gilds for every 100 zones (not counting the first 100) so you would have 90 + 40 = 130 gild tokens total. (Yes, I know this number is insane for such a low zone you really would have too few rubies to buy that many, but just go with me here it's just an example.) Then you ascend... you would still have those same 130 gild. Then you transcend. After transcending you would have ZERO gild tokens at first. Those 40 that you earned from zone progression are gone but you will re-earn one every ten levels once you reach level 110 again. Those other 90 that you purchased will be returned probably 2 at a time along with your 10th level gild reward. So at level 110 you will get 1 for the regular zone reward + 2 that you already purchased = 3 gilds. But they will still be distributed to RANDOM heroes, rather than the ones you put them on before you transcended. If you buy another 90 gild tokens before reaching zone 500 again then you will have 40 from zone progression + 90 that you purchased on your previous transcension + 90 new ones that you just purchased = 220 total. I hope that clarifies any questions about how you lose and earn gild when you transcend.

There is an Ancient who will boost the bonus damage from each gild token. I highly recommend hiring and upgrading that one.

When you get into the Gild screen (from the button at the bottom of the hero menu) you can move your gild tokens around a bit. It costs 2 Hero Souls to remove a gild token and put it on another random hero. It also costs 80 Hero Souls to choose a hero to receive a token and pull it off of a random hero. It is cheaper and therefore better to use the 2 HS method instead of the 80HS method, even though sometimes you have to chase that gild token around the list through 10 different heroes before you get it to land on a good one. Well, at least this is true up to the point where you start earning several million hero souls per ascension.

Refer to the previous chapter about which heroes are worthy and look at the list. If a hero is on the lame list, make sure they never get any gild tokens because it would be a waste. If a hero is on the amazing list, he is allowed to have some gild.

Here is a pic of my gild menu, where the golden ones have some gild and the grey ones do not. (At this point in my game I also have Dread Knight and Atlas each with 20-something gild tokens but they are off screen farther down the list.)

Ascend vs. Transcend

Ascend

When you upgrade the hero Amenhotep to level 150, you can unlock his Ascenscion ability. DO NOT USE this ability until you are ready to basically restart the game. Usually, on a first run, this will happen somewhere around stage 140. On your first run, it is ok to Ascend when you have at least 8 hero souls. On runs 2 and 3, you want at least 12. After run 4, things should start getting a little easier so you can come home with more hero souls. Eventually you want to be reaching level 600 and earning 10000 hero souls with each run, or more. Ascending will allow you to spend your hero souls as you earn them to upgrade your Ancients, who in turn make the next run easier by increasing your damage, giving you more gold, etc.

When you Ascend, you will KEEP these:
• summoned and upgraded Ancients
  
• EQUIPPED relics and forge cores
  
• any earned achievements
  
• mercenaries and their missions
  
• the amount of hero souls on the RUBY PURCHASE instant ascend
  
• Gild tokens for your heroes
  
• earned or purchased Rubies
  
• that 2x damage bonus you should have bought with your rubies
  
• hero souls
  
• Ancient Souls (discussed later)
  
• Clan status

When you Ascend, you will LOSE these:
• heroes and all their upgrades
  
• stage progress, back to stage 1
  
• earned Gold

Transcend

Just as the Ancients need Hero Souls to be summoned and upgraded, the Outsiders are also hungry... for Ancient Souls. Basically, when you earn a TON of hero souls you have the option to Transcend. This will convert ALL of your hero souls (even the ones you already spent) into Ancient Souls. Then you can feed these to the Outsiders. The trade-off here is that unlike Ascending, you keep ALMOST NOTHING with this action. All of your hero souls become ancint souls, so they are gone. You lose your ancients, relics and forge cores. You lose your mercenaries. You lose your gild tokens. The shop's instand-ascension resets to zero hero souls. All gone, back to square zero... except now you can hire the Outsiders.

If you paid rubies for gild tokens, DO NOT PANIC, you will get them back... but only a few at a time each time you get a new "highest stage" at every 10th stage. Also, your 2x permanent damage boost is still in effect if you paid rubies for that. And your mercenaries are only temporarily gone; they are restored when you reach a high enough zone to unlock the mercenary menu again. One other bonus to Transcending is Primal Bosses now give extra hero souls depending on your Transcendent Bonus Level; plus you gain increased CLICK damage with each transcension, to make the beginning of the run a little quicker.

There are only a few Outsiders (see my chapter about Outsiders for a list). You don't have to hire them, just feed them to level them up.

Setting up an effective team

Now you know which heroes are worth the effort to upgrade, and which are just "eye candy." You also know the basics about Gild tokens. If you want to setup an effective team to get you beyond zone 300 or so after your 4th ascension though, you will need to know how to upgrade your heroes in an efficient way. So, here is a list of your early batch of heroes (Treebeast to Dread Knight) listed by the cost of their next upgrade level. For instance, if you have just enough money to upgrade Treebeast, then the next one you will be able to afford after that will be Refri Jerator, and so on. After completing the list, you can cycle back to the beginning with Treebeast and start another round of upgrades. I recommend using this with the x100 upgrade rather than doing 1 upgrade level at a time, especially once you get the Ancients Libertas and Siyalatas boosted to help out with idle DPS and gold. Anyway... once you unlock all the heroes you can follow this list so you don't have to keep scrolling up and down asking yourself "Who can I afford now?"

Good Heros Listed by Upgrade Cost
• Treebeast
  
• Refri Jerator
  
• Dread Knight
  
• Masked Samurai
  
• ............
  
• Natalia
  
• Ivan
  
• ............
  
• Sir George II
  
• Brittany
  
• Mercedes
  
• Great Forest Seer
  
• ............
  
• Ma Zhu
  
• Bobby
  
• .............

You'll notice I have it separated into four sections. These groups are heroes who cost almost the same amount to upgrade. (FYI Atlas fits in with Natalia and Ivan.) When you are ready to start focusing your gild tokens on a "commando" team of super-heroes, basically you should pick one from each group and give those four heroes about the same number of gild tokens. Then you ONLY upgrade those four heroes beyond 200, only get the upgrade skills and abilities from the others and then ignore them. This basic strategy will help you get up to zone 2000. At that point, you can afford a few of the stronger (and more expensive) heroes like Atlas, so you can start dumping NEW gild tokens onto them and add them to your team. Eventually, when your original super team gets stale around level 4000, those more expensive heroes will take over for them completely, but you will still want that original team to be gilded and ready for action the next time you Ascend so you can make quick work of stages 1 - 1000 again.

For example, I prefer to use the team of Treebeast, Ivan, Great Forest Seer, and Ma Zhu. But you could use a team like Masked Samurai, Natalia, Mercedes, and Bobby equally well.

Remember, this strategy only starts to be useful AFTER you gain enough gild to put a whole bunch onto each of four heroes, and you should have enough hero souls available to manipulate them to get them onto the right four heroes. So, you might not have a chance to use this info until you are almost ready to Transcend, but once you have the gild and hero souls to make it work, you will notice the benefits. You will want at least 12 gilds on each of your four super-heroes, so you should have a total available 50 gild tokens at least. And you will want to save at least 200 hero souls to spend on moving them around in the gild menu before you start playing with that.

Successful Use of The Dark Ritual

This method will allow you to get DOUBLE the effect from The Dark Ritual skill each time you use it, as well as reduce its cooldown timer by 2 hours - or 4 with the right ancient. You will need The Dark Ritual, Energize, and Reload. Those skills are bought from the Heroes Abaddon, Aphrodite, and Shinatobe. Now follow this process - exactly as written - to make it happen.

1. Use whatever OTHER skills you want first. This step is optional, you don't need any other skills.
2. Energize
3. The Dark Ritual
4. Reload
5. Wait for Energize and Reload to cooldown... DO NOT USE OTHER SKILLS NOW!
6. Energize
7. Reload
8. Use whatever OTHER skills you want, while you wait for The Dark Ritual to finish its cooldown.
9. Repeat starting from step 1.

There is an Ancient (Vaagur) who will reduce the cooldown time of your skills. Leveling him to roughly 25% cooldown reduction will reduce your wait from 8 hours to 6 hours, and then using this technique will reduce it another 2 hours so basically you can use Dark Ritual once every 4 hours. If you have a mountain of hero souls you can boost that ancient even further but it gets very expensive after 25%.

So what is happening here?
Using Energize before The Dark Ritual (or any other skill besides Reload) doubles its effect. In this case, that means you get +10% DPS instead of the original +5%. Then you use Reload to reduce the cooldown of your most recent skill by 1 hour (The Dark Ritual in this case). Then, using Energize before Reload causes it to reduce the cooldown by 1 hour for the previous 2 skills used, instead of reducing the single last skill by 2 hours like you might expect. This allows you to reduce the cooldown of The Dark Ritual by an additional hour (2 hours total speed-up). Because who wants to wait a full charge timer before boosting their DPS?

Combo Clicking vs. Idle Mode

In the hero menu's info bar, it shows your DPS and click damage. It also shows if you have idle or combo mode active currently. The combo counter (i.e. "300x combo") means that you have 300 clicks in your current combo chain, not 300x your damage. Remember each click is only worth a small percentage of your damage, but if you add up a few thousand in that combo then you will notice the difference.

Click/combo mode has the potential to give you more instant damage (damage per click is through the roof) but you have to be actively clicking like a maniac to reap the benefits. Or use a few auto-clickers. All of the skills will be useful in combo mode. There are several ancients that will boost your click damage or your activated skill durations. Use them to make combo mode more effective for you.

Idle mode, on the other hand, does considerable damage over time but the real benefit here is you can earn a TON of gold from these bonuses. But only if you STOP CLICKING and just let your heroes do all the work for you. Go ahead, go get a sandwich and just let the game run. Maybe by the time you get back you'll have enough gold to get more levelups. As of v1.0e11 you can use your Metal Detector, Powersurge, Energize, Reload, and Dark Ritual skills while in idle mode. The main ancients for idle mode are Siyalatas, Libertas, and all the other ancients who increase your gold gain in any way.

There is also a "hybrid" method that a lot of people seem to like that combines elements of idle with combo mode. This is a tough setup though since you have to then buy practically all of the Ancients so it is quite expensive on hero souls and is only possible late in the game.

To help you with the decision process as to which style you want and which Ancients to levelup, please see the chapter here on the Ancients. I have a list of them all and what they do so you can start thinking about which ones you think might be the best for your chosen style of play.

If you really want to get far in the middle part of your experience with this game, where you want to get 100,000 - 200,000 HS per run you will need to build SOME of both styles for your Ancient upgrades. But at that point you probably still cannot afford to max out ALL of both styles, so you'll have to pick one to be your main style and then supplement it with the opposite one a little bit at a time.

GAME BUG: IDLE/COMBO DAMAGE DISPLAY
There is a BUG where if you have both IDLE and COMBO active together on your hero menu's info screen, the damage it displays for you is INCORRECT. What actually happens is, when you stop clicking you keep your combo damage for ONE MINUTE ONLY. At that point, your combo damage bonus quits but you will gain your idle bonus to gold pickups and DPS, assuming you have the correct ancients. Four minutes later, the combo click counter will quickly decay back to zero. So you cannot have idle DPS bonus active while your combo bonus is also active even though the damage displayed looks like that's what is happening. You will actually do less damage than what it displays. It will, however, save your combo click counter for the full five minutes so if you start clicking again it will cancel idle mode and you get that combo bonus back.

Winning Strategies

This section will be divided up into sections based on how many Ascension and Transcending you have done, as well as what is the highest stage you can currently reach. So pay attention to the section headings when you're looking for advice because what works at the "baby's first steps" level is drastically different from the "I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA" level.

Baby's FIrst Steps

My advice: for your first few Ascension runs, let the gild tokens fall wherever they will. Explore the skills list and get used to how they work. Get familiar with how to exploit the Dark Ritual skill by also using Energize and Reload. Try to earn 12 - 20 hero souls beofore you have to Ascend. Play around with the Ancients a bit, don't be too worried about getting them perfectly upgraded because in (much much) later runs you will have more freedom because you will eventually be earning over 100,000 hero souls per run. Get used to the game and how things work, basically. You don't really have to start "trying to win" until your 5th use of Ascension or thereabouts.

You don't have to worry about your Gild Tokens yet because you don't have many HS to deal with them, and their DPS bonus is still small because you Ancient hasn't boosted them yet, and we will move them around a little later anyway. You also don't have enough gild or hero souls yet to try setting up something like my "effective team" strategy, so for now just keep upgrading all of your heroes whenever you can afford it.

If you can unlock the hero Grant and get him up to level 75, you're in about the right place to use the Ascension skill and reset your world in exchange for some Hero Souls. Just make sure you're getting at least 8 of them before you do that for the first time. The top right corner of the hero tab shows you how many you currently have available to use, and under that how many more you will earn for Ascending now.

When upgrading your heroes there are some special keyboard controls that the game DOES NOT tell you about:

SECRET HERO LEVELUP CONTROLS
• Click: upgrade a hero by 1 level (or whatever the currently highlighted value is)
  
• SHIFT-Click: upgrade a hero by 10 levels
  
• Z-click: upgrade a hero by 25 levels
  
• CTRL-click: upgrade a hero by 100 levels
  
• Q-click: spend all of your gold to upgrade that hero as much as you can afford now
  
• T: cycle through the list of upgrade levels to use for ANY AND ALL hero upgrades with just a regular click, this can be canceled by using any of the 10/25/100/max upgrade hotkeys above.

If you use those hotkeys in the battle screen, it will display a silly message about doing zero damage, but it will actually just attack like normal.

As soon as you have enough rubies (50) be sure to buy the Shop upgrade for 2x damage. That lasts FOREVER, even through Transcending, so it's the first thing you want. After that, focus on ONLY spending rubies for buying Gild tokens or else reviving your dead mercs.

Before you Ascend, be sure you read my chapter on that so you know what you're in for.

Your next 2 or 3 runs should be similar to this, but you should earn at least 12 hero souls from the second one, and at least 16 from the third.

Walking Alone Now

By now you've got the basics down. You've Ascended a few times and you've even managed to get Frostleaf up to level 200 or 300... but Dread Knight still eludes your grasp. Now we begin to make some plans for the foreseeable future. Start picking your Ancient upgrades with a little more care because they will progressively become more expensive. Decide whether you want to play a more active (click-battle) role or just run the game in the background and let the idle DPS do the work, and build your Ancient army accordingly.

Also experiment a bit with the Gild management page. Try to get a gild token on every hero (at least temporarily) so you can see their new outfits. Choose a team of five or six heroes from the Awesome Goodness list in the worthy heroes chapter, and start herding your gild tokens onto them and only them. Start setting up for my "effective team" strategy now, though you still might not have enough gild tokens to do it all.

Continue in much the same fashion, using Ascension when you hit that wall where it just takes too long to get another hero levelup. With each ascension after the fourth you should be able to get a bit farther into the game, and earn more hero souls each time. Eventually you will see the Outsiders menu tab become available. Have a look at it when it does, but don't touch the Transcend button until it tells you you will earn at least 8 AS. (AS stands for Ancient Souls, duh.) Before you Transcend, you ought to be able to recruit the hero Atlas... though you probably still can't afford to upgrade him much past level 25.

The Wonder Years

You've got your finger hovering on the Transcend button now, wondering if it will be worth it. What will you really gain, when you have to lose everything to progress further? BE VERY CAREFUL when upgrading your Outsiders. Those first 8 AS are cheap. Soon they will be costing a few million HS for one new AS, and the only way to reset your Outsider upgrade choices is to Transcend again with the "Respec" box checked. I mean, your first few upgrades are not going to break your game, but put a little thought in first, that's all. I recommend starting out by feeding a few AS to Xyliqil, Phandoryss, and Ponyboy since they help a lot in the early game.

Back to square 0... well, 0.5 anyway. Now your Heroes AND your Ancients are gone but you've got the Outsiders backing you and they last forever. For your first few runs, again, you ought to be earning 12 - 20 HS per Ascension, using tactics similar to previous. You'll have to start deciding which Ancients to focus on, again. Remember that the Outsiders will give boosts to the effects of certain Ancients, so you might want to start by getting those Ancients fairly early.

Also be sure to boost your Ancients who give you 10x gold, increase gold drops, chance to find treasure, and gold from treasure. The more gold you earn, the faster you can levelup your hero team to get past those pesky early stages that give you barely any hero souls. You should notice a huge increase in hero souls acquired after stage 600.

Once you can easily reach level 600, your "bread and butter" Ancients who will always be worth feeding will be those who increase your gold drops, 10x gold, treasure chest chance, treasure chest gold, idle gold, golden clicks gold, click damage, critical click damage, idle DPS, hero souls, and primal boss chance. By now you should also have your boss timers +30 seconds or so, boss life -10% or -0.5 monsters, and skill cooldown itme -25%. If you have a few extra HS after ascending, you can either save them to use on Gild tokens, or feed them to Morgullis but remember to always keep at least 1 HS or else lose any benefit from Morgullis.

Once you can start earning over 5000 HS per Ascension and you have at least 70 total gild tokens, it's time to really think about those Gild Tokens. For best effectiveness at the lowest upgrade pricing:

Give ALL your tokens (spread evenly) to Treebeast, Ivan, Brittany, and Great Forest Seer. That is all.

In battle, levelup all heroes to about 200 and unlock all their skills. After that, ONLY EVER GIVE LEVELUPS TO THE GILDED TEAM. Those four heroes will be your core damage for a long time now.

DO NOT Transcend unless you have at least a dozen AS coming to you for your second Transcend! Focus on your gilded team of four, give them more gilds and upgrade your Ancients as needed to make sure you're hauling in more than 100,000 HS per Ascension. Follow this same basic strategy until you are ready for your third Transcension, but for the third it is ok if you only can get 8 AS (though 10 would be better).

Advanced Strategies for after your third Transcend

Get a Haircut, and Get a Real Job

After your third Transcend, AS will be earned much more slowly than before. From now on, you want to Transcend when you can gain aonther 5 or 6 AS, unless you really don't mind waiting forever for that 7th one. At this point, you should also have AT LEAST 30 Ancient Souls (total) collected, so having played with the Outsiders a bit you should be thinking how best to set them up to help you get past that barrier you're probably hitting right around stage 1100. You will probably need to respec your Outsiders on your next transcension. No big deal. At this point I like to run with Xyliqil level 6 or 7, Phandoryss at level 2 to 4, Borb somewhere between 2 and 6, and Ponyboy between 14 and 20 (version 1.0e9). For version 1.10e and later, try feeding the bottom five Outsiders up to level 4 or 5 each, Xyliqil at 5 or 6, Phandoryss at 3 or 4, Ponyboy around 10, and any leftovers go to Chor'Gorloth. Then follow the same basic strategy, possibly tossing a few more upgrades to Chor'gorloth, until you have a total of 55 or more AS. You can check your total AS by hitting the Transcend button and hovering your mouse over the Respec box; it will tell you how many AS you will receive if you respec.

You might want to think about setting up your Ancients for a "hybrid class" run, which means combining elements of Idle boosters plus Click/Combo boosters. That way you have good DPS during skill cooldowns, and then you use your skills for crazy high click damage + building up a click combo.

Remember you can keep your combo going THROUGH the idle phase! Follow these steps for that:

1. Run all of your click-damage skills (especially Clickstorm) with Ancient-boosted durations and cooldowns!!
2. Meanwhile, click your mouse and use auto-clickers until your skill durations all expire and you have to wait for the cooldowns.
3. When cooldown hits, STOP CLICKING.
4. Wait one minute for Idle mode to start.
5. Wait four minutes through idle mode until your combo is in danger of decay.
6. Start clicking and/or using click skills again to keep building on your previous combo.
7. Repeat from step 3.

Each individual click only gives a small fraction of a percentage (at ancient level 1) of your damage, but after a few thousand clicks in a combo chain you'll be a force to be reckoned with. Using this tactic, you can get well past the point of bringing home 200,000 HS per Ascension after about a half dozen Ascension runs.

Probably the most productive way to use this strategy is to run idle with Siyalatas and Libertas most of the time but then use your active clicking with that high Juggernaut combo chain + Bhaal + Fragsworth + the Lucky Strikes skill to muscle your way past that boss monster that's been holding you back until now. Golden Clicks for the win! Once that boss is dead, go through the next four stages on idle mode while clicking just enough to keep your combo intact, collect more gold with your idle bonuses, and then if you get stuck on the next boss go click-happy again.

As you progress furrther, beyond 50 AS or so, you will have to start feeding even more HS to your Ancients to reach higher stages before you transcend again. By utilizing the Ancients in charge of reducing skill cooldown time and boosting skill duration, you can get your skills (particularly Clickstorm, Powersurge, and Lucky Strikes) to become "almost permanent" by getting the duration to be nearly as long or longer than the cooldown time. This will let you continuously have those extra damage perks going, and this is even better once you boost your Ancient for critical click damage.

Some Ancients though, are only good up to a certain point. As you experiment with your Ancients you will see which ones have a limit where the cost outweighs the benefits for getting them to the next level.

Strategies for "Deep Runs" beyond stage 2000

I AM THE ALPHA, AND THE OMEGA... NOW YOU DIE

There are some guides out there that show you the "ideal" way to setup your Outsiders depending how many AS you have. Someone has even posted a spreadsheet that lists the mathematically ideal setup for each AS you might have earned. Remember the Outsiders CHANGED DRASTICALLY with version 1.0e10 so make sure you know what you are reading! The remainder of this guide will focus on how you should level-up your Ancients and how to handle your Gild as you get into the "Deep Running" part of the game.

So you may be asking, "What exactly is a deep run?" A deep run is what people call it when you use a hybrid idle/click strategy to get into the higher stages (actually more like middle stages) of this game, typically beyond 2000 or so. This section will give you a good basic strategy to start your deep run process. First off, you will have to be on your fourth Transcension or higher for these strategies to work effectively, and just to get you started I will recommend an Outsider setup like this for v1.0e9 or earlier: Xyliqil 6 or 7; Chor'Gorloth 0; Phandoryss 3 or 4; Borb 5 or 6; and Ponyboy at least at 20. After that if you still have 1 or 2 AS left to spend, maybe give them to Chor'gorloth just so he/she/it doesn't feel left out. For version 1.10e and up, refer to the previous chapter for a decent Outsider setup to start this. This is the last time I'll give you any advice on those Outsiders. :)

Remember when you first transcend you will lose EVERYTHING including your ancients and gild tokens. So just follow the earlier guide phases for a while until you have rebuilt your army. Once you have unlocked all of your "purchased gild" again (they unlock usually 3 at a time whenever you get a new one for passing every tenth level) you should start working on your Ancients while using the same strategies as before. You want to get your ancients up to levels close to this list. If an Ancient is not on this list, put him at whatever level you want because he is not essential to this strategy. For v1.0e9 or earlier. V 1.0e10-11 will be similar though.

Suggested Ancient Levels for Starting Deep Run Phase
• Argaiv level 2480 (+5000% DPS per Gild)
  
• Atman level 20 (+19.5% chance of Primal boss)
  
• Bhaal level 2350 (+35250% dmg for critical clicks)
  
• Bubos level 12 (-10% life for bosses)
  
• Chronos level 12 (+12 seconds to boss fight time)
  
• Dora level 20 (+450% more treasure chests)
  
• Fortuna level 11 (+5% chance to find 10x gold)
  
• Fragsworth level 3500 (+70000% click dmg)
  
• Juggernaut level 250 (+2.5% DPS per click in your combo meter)
  
• Libertas level 2100 (+225000% gold from monsters while in idle mode)
  
• Mammon level 3000 (+15000% gold dropped)
  
• Mimzee level 615 (+31250% gold from treasure chests)
  
• Siyalatas level 2100 (+225000% DPS while in idle mode)
  
• Solomon level 515 (+15100% Hero Souls earned from Primal bosses)

You should also be able to reach level 1200 without too much effort. After you have accomplished that, you will need to start shifting your gild around. Wait until you have a few million hero souls ready, then use Ascension. Immediately go into the Gild menu. By now you should have a total of 200 gild tokens at least. If not, spend some time sending your mercenaries on ruby missions and then buy a bunch of gild from the shop until you do have 200. Once you get over 200 gild, point your mouse at Great Forest Seer and hold Q then click him. This will give him ALL of your gild tokens at a cost of 80 HS per token that had to be moved from someone else. Trust me, it's worth it now. Then go ahead and spend whatever HS you have left on whatever Ancients you want to boost. You'll probably have about two or three million left, if you did it right.

Starting with this ascension, you're going to levelup your heroes ONLY ENOUGH to unlock all of their skills, then ignore them all after that... except for Great Forest Seer (or Masked Samurai if you like his look better). He's your super-cannon now. Boost his level as high as possible. Just like before, I still recommend boosting him in 100-level increments so you have time between levelups to go do other work, but increments of 25 also works well for this. With this setup, and a little bit of patience letting the game run overnight to collect some gold, you should be able to get Great Forest Seer up to 4200 and zone 1570. When you reach the point where you can't earn money fast enough to raise his level anymore, go on a clicking spree. You will rely on critical click damage to kill your enemies for a while now, instead of DPS. This should get you an extra 100 or 200 levels if your finger doesn't get tired first. (NOTE: if you want to use an auto-clicker program, this is the time to do that!! You dirty cheater.) Then you Ascend again and follow the same process until you can reach level 1600.

Once 1600 is easy to reach, go back to your Gild menu. Make sure you have AT LEAST 50 GILD TOKENS MORE THAN YOU DID WHEN YOU GAVE THEM ALL TO GREAT FOREST SEER. Point at Terra. Hold Q and click to give all of your Gild to Terra. Now point at Great Forest Seer. Hold SHIFT and click to give him a gild token from "a random hero" which means from Terra since nobody else has any gild now. Give Great Forest Seer about 30 or 35 gild tokens. This will let you use GFS as your sledgehammer of doom during the early stages, then switch over to Terra for the later stages since Terra generally does a bit more damage than that other green guy. Now you follow the same strategy as the previous paragraph, except that once Terra reaches level 400 you can stop paying for Great Forest Seer and only give levelups to Terra.

For later runs, you can use a similar strategy where you have Great Forest Seer with 35 gild, Terra with about 50 gild, and put the rest onto Cadmia. For these runs, you can stop paying for Terra when Cadmia reaches level 400. Now there is going to be a slight change in how you handle your Ancients. Now that you have Cadmia involved, you should be going deep enough with each ascension to earn a whole lot of hero souls. (Particularly true if you have transcended two or three more times since starting this section.) You can make the clicking portion of your deep runs go a little smoother by boosting the levels of these Ancients now:

Ancients That Boost Click Skills for Super-Deep Running
• Chawedo (increases Clickstorm skill duration)
  
• Hecatoncheir (increases Super Clicks skill duration)
  
• Sniperino (increases Lucky Strikes skill duration)
  
• Vaagur (skills cooldown faster)
  
• Pluto (increase gold gain from Golden Clicks)

The Ancients that boost the other skills are totally optional and in my opinion not really all that helpful YET. The goal if you are going to use this method, is to combine your Ancients and Relics in a way that will give you nearly-infinite use of Clickstorm, Super Clicks, Golden Clicks, and Lucky Strikes. Maybe also Metal Detector. Lucky Strikes is the most important one though, since your critical click damage is incredible and that is the skill that boosts your chance to score a critical strike each time you click. You accomplish this by boosting the Ancient level and stretching the duration, while simultaneously boosting Vaagur to reduce the cooldown, until the active duration ends just a few seconds before the skill is ready to use again. Be advised: these ancients get expensive VERY EARLY compared to the ones we had setup for idle mode thus far, so you will have to use idle mode for a while first to earn enough HS to spend upgrading your clicker skills.

To go even deeper still, use a similar strategy by expanding this process to include one of the even later heroes so you can ignore Cadmia once your new one reaches level 400.

Mastering the Art of Gild Manipulation

If you have at least 200 gild tokens, and if you are EASILY raking in more than 2 million (2e6) hero souls per ascension, then you can try this method. Before you continue though, you should be VERY familiar with the techniques I've already gone over. In particular, you should know pretty much all there is to know about Ascension, Gild, and Idle vs Combo modes. This strategy will start you out on stage 1 just after an ascension, and take you pretty much as high as you'd like to go on that run. You should first have your Outsiders and Ancients setup as in the previous section at least as good as my suggestion for beginning a "deep run." So, away we go...

You've got your ancients and outsiders rolling pretty well. You've got let's say 240 gild in total, having reached stage 1100 on your previous run. And you're sitting at stage 1 now, staring at a tiny monster for the first time in four days, wondering what to do with all your shiny new hero souls. DON'T spend them on Ancients now!!

Open up your gild menu. Slap ALL of your gild onto Great Forest Seer (Q-click, remember!) This will cost you 80 * gilds in hero souls, 19200 HS in this example with 240 gilds. Then use shift-click to put 30 gild on each of: Ivan, Ma Zhu, and Dread Knight. This will cost you another 80 HS per gild that moves, probably you'll have to move about 110 even though you're only trying for 30+30+30 = 90 here, so that's another 8800 HS, give or take. But hey, now your gilds are set for the start of an ascension run.

You'll want to SAVE ENOUGH HS to move your gild around at least three times more during this run!! And remember, as you clear higher stages you will earn an extra gild for every ten stages beyond your previous highest stage. So leave some extra HS just in case. In fact, leave about half a million (5e5) HS in your inventory for later. Now go levelup your ancients as you see fit. JUST BE SURE TO LEAVE THOSE HALF MILLION HERO SOULS FOR LATER!!! And now you're ready to start your run.

Get up to around zone 1000 as you normally would. It should not be too difficult. Right around this point, Dread Knight should be at level 1500 but more importantly Atlas should be at least 1000. Go to the Gild menu and Q-click to move ALL your gild onto Atlas now. You may ignore Dread Knight and everyone earlier from here on, you will only be using the later heroes (some folks call them the "Ring Rangers"). Since Atlas does a ton of damage once he breakes 1000, as do all of the ring rangers, he should see you through another 1000 levels BY HIMSELF. If you want to save some HS, you can even keep going just with him and skip right over Terra completely.

When the next "ring ranger" you wish to use hits level 1000, go to the gild menu and Q-click to move all your gild to them, proceeding just like you did with Atlas. Then run it on the next one up, and so on. Remember you can skip one or two rangers between gild switches, there is no rule that says you have to use them all. Particularly since all of their skills only boost DPS for themself.

When it just gets to be too much time farming until your next levelup, or if you run of of HS to spend on gild swaps, spend some time in active clicking mode just to see if you can get some extra stages cleared and earn a few more gild tokens. Then go ahead and Ascend and run it again next time... but next time you will likely have some new gilds which means you will need to save more HS for your run. But remember, in order to move gild in the middle of a run you must have AVAILABLE hero souls! SO save some from a previous ascension run or else get in on your clan's raid battle and reap the reward from killing the immortal titan. Titan kills reward a lot of HS when you get to the higher stages of the game. If neither of those is an option, send your mercs on a mission to collect some HS for you!

Super-Advanced Gild Management (easier than before)!
Once you have 350+ gilds and you have the Ancient Argaiv up to level 12000+ you can do this simple trick:
Put 3 gilds on Great Forest Seer, he will get you through the early phase of the run. Also put 3 gilds on Terra, who will get you through the middle section of the run. Put half of your remaining gilds on Orntchaya and the other half on Alabaster, they will finish off the mid-late part of the run for you. This way you can avoid bouncing gild tokens around until you are able to unlock the next group of heroes after the "ring rangers" series.

Lazy-Man's Gild Setup

Now that you understand how gild swapping works, and you've been playing long enough that you have AT LEAST 350 gild tokens to mess with, I am going to present you with an alternative strategy for those who are a bit lazy and don't want to spend time trading gilds between heroes all the time. This won't get you quite as far in a single ascension run as gild-swapping, but there is a little less work involved. For this, you will need a pretty heavy-duty Ancient setup as well as some help from your Outsiders so I will start off by listing which of those you want.

OUTSIDERS
minimum level you want for each... v1.0e9
6, 10, 4, 2, 19
X, C, Ph, B, Po
obviously more levels will give better results.

ANCIENTS
You can totally ignore all the ones that deal with click damage, skill cooldown speed, skill duration, and a few of the others. Here are the ones that are important for this build, and the minimum level you want them at. Like with the Outsiders, more levels will give you better results.
Argaiv 15,000
Atman 25
Bubos 25
Chronos 25
Dogcog 25
Dora 25
Fortuna 25
Libertas 20,000
Mammon 35,000
Mimzee 25,000
Morgulis 11,000,000 (1.1e7)
Nogardnit 7000 (you also will want at least one autoclicker purchased from the shop)
Siyalatas 20,000
Solomon 4000

HERO SOULS
At this point in the game you should already be in the habit of leaving yourself at least 400,000 (4e5) souls to use for gild swapping, but until you need them for that they can just sit there and boost your damage a bit thanks to Morgulis.

HEROES
At the start of your ascension, dump all of your Gild onto Chiron. Remember you should have at least 350 to put on him. Now put just 2 gild on EACH of your "rangers" from Dread Knight up to Astraea. Also put just 2 on either Great Forest Seer, Masked Samurai, or Treebeast whichever you like best.

PROGRESSION
Now you play as you usually would. Look at the Ancient setup though; this mostly relies on IDLE BATTLE MODE to do damage, so you don't want to use your auto-clicker or your skills. The only time you should be using skills is for using or reloading Dark Ritual. And avoid clicking on your enemies, at least until the end of your run. Get each hero up to about level 150 or 200 to unlock all their skills, then ignore them. Focus your levels onto the ones you gilded. When your one early hero hits level 2200, STOP feeding him and then focus only on the rangers from that point on. If you purchased a few auto-clickers, you can place one on each of your gilded heroes' levelup button so you can just walk away and not even worry about leveling them up manually!

As each ranger hits level 2200, STOP feeding them and focus on the newer ones instead. In this way, you should always have 4 heroes being actively leveled, except when you first unlock a new one you will have that one plus four other ones. Go ahead and work your way through your list of rangers until you simply cannot progress any further within a reasonable time frame. This ought to take you to zone 2700 or 2800 if you use the "minimum" setup listed here.

Once you hit that slow-down point, you can try to reach a new "highest zone ever" if you have some points invested into the click-based Ancients. Use that autoclicker that was previously just earning gold by sitting idle. Put Juggernaut to work and build up some click combo damage. You may just get another 40 zones out of your run that way, more if you have additional auto-clickers to send into battle, but you will basically stop earning gold because your IDLE mode will deactivate.

Now when you ascend, you DO NOT have to touch your gild at all; it should already be setup perfectly for another run. The only time you should have to touch your gild is if you earn one from a new highest zone, or if you buy some from the shop, and if you do that then just move any extras onto Chiron.

At some point, you will have enough levels on your Ancients and Outsiders that you will be able to bump this up another step and leave give the bulk of your gild to Moloch or Bomber Max instead of Chiron. But then the basic strategy is the same. Just leave 2 gild on everyone already mentioned plus Chiron, and dump the rest onto Moloch. Adapt the strategy further if you need to go higher still.

More Lazy-Man's Clicker Heroics

How to be lazy when you ascend enough to quickly and easily reach zone 3000 again, when you have already reached zone 4000 last time. REMEMBER: you can move ALL of your gild onto a single hero by holding Q and clicking him in the Gild menu screen. So basically this strategy will get you up to zone 3500 or so with just about a dozen clicks on your mouse spread over six or seven hours of play.

You will need: at least 540 gild tokens, 4 auto-clicker hands, all your Ancients boosted so high that their next levelup will cost 3.5e12 or more, and Outsider levels 4, 10, 7, 2, 20 at least v 1.0e9. NOTE: when I say Ancient levelup I mean like this: for those who boost your skills, give you 10x gold, and such that are usually at a pretty low level because they are expensive, they should be right around level 30 or 40 with the next 10 levelup costing 1.5e12 hero souls. The ones that boost your idle damage, idle gold, and such that are at a much higher level should be at level 1,000,000 = 1.0e6 or higher, with the next 1.0e6 levelup costing 1.5e12 hero souls or so. I hope that makes sense. Then, after leveling up your Ancients, you will need to save at least 1.0e7 hero souls to use for gild switching. You probably will not use it all but it is good to have some spare change just in case.

First setup: click once on the first enemy after you ascend. You should kill it in one hit. Collect his gold and use it to boost whatever heroes you can afford. Just like our previous runs, you want each hero to level 200 or so just to unlock their skills. However, pick ONE hero (I prefer either Masked Samurai or Great Forest Seer) to be your first real fighter. Set your levelup increment to x25, dump all of your gild onto that hero, and then put ONE auto-clicker hand onto his levelup button. Now you will want to put all three of your other auto-clicker hands on the monsters to auto-attack them like crazy. If your click damage and critical click Ancients are strong enough, this setup should get you all the way to zone 1500 or so. Giving you time to walk away and go do real life stuff.

The reason all heroes except the gilded one are only leveled to 200 is because even if you leveled them all up the same as the gilded one, the gilded one would still be doing 99.99999% of your DPS by himself. You have over 500 gilds on him and each one gets boosted by the Ancients so he should be doing +2.5e8% extra damage (roughly). Thus it would take over one million non-gilded heroes to equal the damage of just that one. So boosting them any higher than just enough to buy their skills is sort of a waste of gold.

When your monster-killing starts to slow down a bit, move your level-up auto-clicker hand AND all of your gild onto Orntchya. Mid-way through the "power ranger" heroes is a good place to be right now. (Or if you walked away for long enough you might be able to afford a stronger ranger in which case use them instead of Orntchya.) TURN OFF your battle auto-fingers; at this point you want to take advantage of your Ancients that boost your idle gold collection and DPS.

Put your level-up finger and all of your gild onto Moloch when you can afford him at level 200. Go away and let it run until you can afford to hire Wepwawet.

Then dump all of your gild and your level-up finger onto Wepwawet. When Wepwawet reaches level 1500, buy the new skill that boosts the DPS for Betty Clicker.

Dump all of your gild and your levelup finger onto Betty Clicker. Continue as you were EXCEPT you also want to continue giving some levelups to Wepwawet until Wepwawet reaches level 2000 and you get the next skill that boosts DPS for Midas.

Dump all of your gild and your levelup finger onto Midas. Now all of your gold should be spent on Midas. Continue until your kill rate slows down. At this point you probably still cannot afford Tsuchi yet. So when you slow down and get stuck on a zone boss, turn your battle auto-clicker fingers on again to gain another 100 - 200 zones or so before you Ascend again and give your Ancients a few more levels for next time, until you can afford Tsuchi. (Tsuchi is the shovel guy below Wepwawet.)

And now I'll leave you with one last tip, for unlocking Tsuchi and the later heroes:
Dogcog and Dora for the win.
Yep, Dogcog the often overlooked Ancient, combined with the gold-earning potential of a high-level Dora, will get you there... eventually. Just imagine having a 75% off coupon for your heroes, and having almost every monster show up as a TREASURE CHEST.

Leveling Up Your Outsiders

Please note: this is specifically for version 1.0e9. If you have the latest patch (1.0e10 or later) these specific numbers WILL NOT BE EFFECTIVE. So please skip this section and move on to the next one. Sorry, I have a full time job now PLUS got my new NVidia GeForce 1080 computer working so I do not have time to commit to figuring this out anymore. If you have a better source of info for the latest patch, please post in the comment section. Toodles!

Here is a copy of a chart I found online that outlines a good optimization for leveling up your Outsiders. I like to give credit where credit is due (and someone spent a lot of time and effort to figure this out) which is why I didn't want to post this... but too many people are asking about Outsiders and how to arrange their levels, but they are too lazy to go do their own research online, so here you go.

When you transcend, choose to reset your Outsider levels. Then check to see how many TOTAL Ancient Souls you will have. Remember that number! Now open this chart and look on the bottom. Find the number of Ancient Souls you have and go UP the chart in a straight line from there. When you cross one of the colored lines, that is the recommended number of LEVELS (not Ancient Souls as it says on the chart) to give to the Outsider that has that color line.

For example, if you have 90 AS, then they recommend giving 4 levels to Borb, 6 levels to Xyliqil, 7 levels to Chor'gorloth, 12 levels to Phandoryss, and 23 levels to Ponyboy. Then you play through until you have 8 or 9 Ancient Souls waiting and so you Transcend again and reset your Outsider levels to match 98 or 99 AS total instead of 90.

Reminder: this chart is for version 1.0e2 up to 1.0e9 only, version 1.0e10 introduced SEVERE changes to the Outsider system.



from https://www.reddit.com/r/ClickerHeroes/comments/4rs7hw/outsiders_optimal_build_for_any_amount_of_as/

Bigger and better heroes...

One last set of tips for you. I finally unlocked Tsuchi somewhere near stage 7500-8000. If you have been following my advice so far about moving your gild tokens around, that's great... but Tsuchi is SO MUCH MORE POWERFUL than all of the earlier heroes that it no longer makes practical sense to keep gild on them. So pile all of your gild (you probably have around 800 by now) onto Tsuchi. If you have any auto-clicker fingers, set one to keep leveling up Tsuchi. And forget about all of the earlier heroes. Perhaps some of the later heroes will have skills to make the old ones relevant again, like what Wepwawet did for King Midas, but for now you should be focusing 100% of your efforts on Tsuchi. Also, at this point in the game it is likely that you will get farther faster if you have three additional auto-click fingers to put on Golden Clicks, Metal Detector, and Lucky Strikes; plus two or three more fingers to use for attacking the monsters. So at this point you might want to invest some rubies in the shop. Each additional finger costs 50 rubies more than the previous one you bought. I saved up and bought 10 fingers.

You should also notice that Ancient Dora level 80+ will essentially make every regular monster turn into a treasure chest, which is awesome when paired with Ancient Mimzee level 1.000e15 or higher, and getting Ancient Pluto past level 1.000e15 will greatly assist your progress in combo clicking mode as long as the Golden Clicks skill is active. And your Ancients should all be at levels so high that most of the Relics become useless... so try to collect the ones that boost the power of Ancients Bubos, Energon, Sniperino, Kleptos, Dora, and Fortuna.

As you continue to unlock the bigger, stronger heroes you should essentially treat them just like you did Tsuchi. Each new hero is going to be the solo star of your show, until you unlock the next one. With the exception of Cadu and Ceus, who need to be leveled up together in order to be effective. Then with Maw it's back to the old plan because he/she... it? can do a lot more damaage than even Cadu and Ceus were doing.

Just remember to keep a pretty good balance on your Outsider levels. (Talking about the new version 1.0e11 now.) The bottom five outsiders you will want to keep somewhere between level 65 and 85 each. But don't neglect the ones that boost your idle bonuses, DPS, ancient costs, and HS dropped by primal bosses. Also remember that when your idle mode hits a wall, turn on your clicking skills and auto-clickers to gain some additional progress before you ascend.

If you're past Maw, well congratulations you have surpassed my progress!

Enjoy the game, everyone!

That's all I can say about this game. Hope I helped you out some. :)
And remember, this game is meant for CASUAL play style so it's fine if you only play for 10 minutes at a time and only come back to it once a week to collect the gold that your heroes earned. Or it's fine if you get up to stage 800 and quit because you realize that the whole game is just the same thing over and over. The fastest way to progress is to babysit your heroes and give them levelups as soon as you can afford it, but it is PERFECTLY OK to save your game, quit, and leave it for a month before you come back to it!! Your heroes will still kill things and collect gold while you are gone. You're not going to hurt their feelings, I promise. The main thing is: you should be having FUN. Otherwise, what's the point?

Ok, go kill yourself some cute, defenseless monsters now. Bye-bye!

How Damage is Calculated

For the curious, this is how the game calculates your heroes' DPS...

For these examples I will be using fictional numbers because they make the math easier than the real numbers used in the game, but the calculation methods are the same as in the game. SInce I will use fake numbers, I guess I will also use a fake hero. Let's call him Dave (hey that's MY name, too!).

Each hero has a "base damage" number. This is how much DPS they will do when you hire them at level 1. Each new levelup you buy for them will add that base damage again. So let's say you are currently doing zero DPS because the only hero on your team so far is Cid - and Cid never does DPS he only adds to your clicking damage. Then you hire the (fake) hero Dave and he does 500 DPS at level 1. Now you are doing 500 total DPS because he's the only one on your team that does DPS. Makes sense, right? If you levelup Dave to level 2, you add in that base damage again so 500 + 500 = 1000 DPS now. Get him to level 3 and you do 3 times your base damage, or 3 * 500 = 1500 DPS.

See, you multiply your base DPS by that hero's level. Simple, yes? So at level 150, Dave the hero will be doing 500 * 150 = 75,000 DPS. It's really straighforward like that until you hit level 200.

So what happens at level 200?

At level 200, your heroes will gain an additional booster of 4x for every 25 levels, and 10x at every 1000 levels. (At level 1000 you only get the 10x, not both that and the 4x.) These boosters affect your base (level 1) damage!! So at level 200 Dave's base damage is no longer 500, it is now 500 * 4 = 2000. Then you multiply that new base number by the level to get his actual DPS. 2000 * 200 = 400,000 DPS. At level 220, you still haven't hit the next 4x boost but that first one still applies to the base damage (it is permanent!!!!) so you would have Dave doing 2000 * 220 = 440,000 DPS. At level 300, you now have a total of FIVE 4x bonus boosters active (one each from 200, 225, 250, 275, and 300). So your new base damage is (5*4) * 500 = 10,000 and then your current DPS for Dave is that new base multiplied by the current level again so 10,000 * 300 = 3,000,000 DPS.

When you hit 1000, instead of the 4x booster that is common for every 25th level then you get a 10x booster instead. But the math process is otherwise the same as before. You now have THIRTY-TWO of those 4x boosters plus the one 10x booster for level 1000 so your base damage is (32 * 4 + 1 * 10) * 500 = 138 * 500 = 69,000. That means your current damage is 69,000 * 1000 = 69,000,000.

But how do skills play into this?

And all of this is assuming that Dave has no skill upgrades that affect DPS!! (Like Midas.) But if Dave also has those DPS-booster skills similar to the "awesome hero list" like Great Forest Seer, then he also has three +100% DPS and one +150% DPS skills to buy. Those will all stack, and they also affect your base DPS and are applied permanently. The first skill will DOUBLE your base. The second will DOUBLE the already doubled base. The third will DOUBLE it again. And the fourth will multiply that result by 2.5. So let's say you have Dave at level 100 (remember from the previous example that makes his base DPS equal to 500 and his current DPS = 500 * 100 = 50,000) and you are going to buy all of his skills right now!

The first one will change his base damage to 500 * 2 = 1000. The second will change it to 1000 * 2 = 2000. The third will make it 2000 * 2 = 4000. And the fourth will make it 4000 * 2.5 = 10,000. So as you can see, the total accumulated effect of all those skills is to boost Dave's base damage by a factor of 20x, making his level 100 damage now 10,000 * 100 = 50,000 * 20 = 1,000,000. And just by removing that +150% skill (maybe replacing it with a "more critical click chance" skill or something) the damage booster from skills would be reduced to 8x instead of 20x and his damage would only be 400,000. This is why the "awesome heroes list" only includes those heroes with all four damage booster skills!!!

Those DPS skills modify the BASE DAMAGE of that hero, and their bonuses will stack with those 4x and 10x boosters for getting levelups. So if Dave has all 20x skill boosters, plus he has reached level 1000, then his BASE damage is 69,000 (from the previous example) * 20 (from skills) = 1,380,000. That is a HUGE boost up from the un-skilled 69,000! And now we multiply that base by the level to get the actual DPS: 1,380,000 * 1000 = 1,380,000,000.

And of course, skills applied from other heroes who modify "all hero DPS" get applied in a similar way. So that 20x, combined with all of Betty Clicker's skills (four skills that each add +20% DPS) would then be multipled by 1.2 for EACH of Betty's skills, bringing the total modiier up to 20 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 = 41.472. At level 100 with Dave and Betty then, Dave's DPS alone would be 500 * 41.472 * 100 = 2,073,600. So even though Betty isn't really useful herself, she can effectively double the damage of your ENTIRE team by using those skills. There are a few other heroes with those sorts of skills, they work in the same way and the results are cumulative.

Once each of your heroes' damage has been calculated, your actual DPS is simply the sum of all of them... until you gain some hero souls. The "+10% per HS" extra damage, as well as any bonus from the ancients Morgullis or Siyalatas, is applied to your TEAM TOTAL DPS rather than the base damage as in hero leveling. This is why for example the listed damage for Aphrodite does not change when you go from Idle mode to Active Combo mode, but your total DPS will change. Also this is why the listed damage for Aphrodite (4.576e20 in my game right now) does not necessarily equal the correct percentage (88.77%) of the DPS shown (1.417e21 with Siyalatas for +175% idle DPS).

Click damage is calculated as the sum of Cid's damage, plus 1 for yourself, plus any additions from Fragsworth and the hero skills that add some percent of DPS to your click damage. That percentage of DPS is based on your final total DPS number, not the individual heroes' base damage, so when you hit idle mode with Siyalatas or add HS to Morgullis, your click damage will go up along with your DPS. Then your critical click damage is based on your current click damage. Remember the ancient Bhaal can boost your critical click damage, and certain hero upgrades also affect critical clicks.

EDIT: Damage calculations in 2024

So... I haven't played this game since late 2020 or something like that. Been busy with other projects, and quite honestly I got tired of the math LOL.
A few of my readers have suggested that the updated (June 2024) version of the game may have changed the math behind damage calculations. According to them:
Additional damage multipliers on a hero are no longer ADDITIVE, but MULTIPLICATIVE.
This means that instead of having the +X% act on your hero's BASE damage, it acts on that hero's ENTIRE CURRENT damage. So if you have a hero with multiple damage bonuses it apparently goes like this:

Original base damage - let's call it 100 DPS so the math is easy, and we'll name the "base damage" as "B" to save me some typing...
First damage boost multiplier is +150%. Since your current damage (before adding this bonus) is only B, which was 100 DPS, the final damage is now B*(1+1.50) = 100*2.50 = 250 DPS.
Second damage boost multiplier is another +150%. But now your current damage before applying this bonus has already been boosted by the first DPS bonus. So this multiplier acts on the already-multiplied DPS. 2.5*B * (1+1.50) = 2.5 * B * 2.5 = (2.5)^2 * B = 6.25 * B = 6.25 * 100 = 625 DPS.
Let's say the third damage bonus for this imaginary hero is +200%, just to show how this affects the math. It now acts not on the base damage B, but on the TWICE altered DPS of 6.25*B.
6.25*B * (1+2.0) = 6.25*B * 3.0 = 18.75 * B = 18.75 * 100 = 1875 DPS.

So as you can see, the new game version's math lets the DPS ramp up MUCH faster as your characters levelup. And this only gets even more drastic when you start applying Ancients and Outsiders and active-clicker skills and everything else, because supposedly those bonuses all will ALSO act on the "current" damage rating not just the base damage.


I haven't personally verified this information. I've already uninstalled the game, moving on to other things. But I wanted to make you all aware that what I said previously about the "most efficient" way to hire, levelup, and then replace & ignore your heroes as you advance... well... it might not be the "most efficient" way anymore. Which means it might be more useful to build your team a bit differently. It might be better under this new DPS system to continue boosting levels on your lower-level heroes instead of focusing primarily on the newest ones.
I'll leave it to you all to experiment and see what works best in 2024 and beyond. But remember, the point of any game should be to HAVE FUN. So try not to stress too much about min-maxing.

[[ΩΜΣΓΔ] Drocheslav]

Join the "Nihau" Worker clan

[dubai_555_111]

Hmm, I need to agree with Thurhame.
Just check it, they multiply.

[Mr. Moyer]

As for the Ancients... you're probably right. I haven't played this game in such a LONG time I don't even remember how the math worked on them anymore, and again the developers probably changed the rule set for those. Again, is someone wants to spend some time to do the math and confirm this strategy for the Ancients, I'll update the guide.

[Mr. Moyer]

@Thurhame:
You get NO BONUSES before 200. You get 4x boosts at each of 200, 225, 250, 275, and 300. They each multiply your BASE ORIGINAL DAMAGE only, they do not multiply by each other but rather they ADD to each other. So yes it is actually 20x damage not 1024. Similar for the later levels. Trust me, I did the math.

However, I did my math YEARS ago in a much earlier version of the game. It is possible that they have changed the rule set between then and now. And I'm not about to dive back into this thing just to do more math. I have other things I'm working on and I just don't have that kind of time. If someone else wouldn't mind putting in a bit of work to verify Thurhame's math on the most recent game version I'd appreciate it, will update the info in the guide and credit you both for it. :)

[June]

The total bonus multiplier at hero level 300 isn't 5 * 4 = 20. It's 4 * 4 * 4 * 4 * 4 = 1024 !!!
Similarly the bonus at level 1000 isn't (32 * 4 + 1 * 10) = 1280. It's (4 ^ 32 * 10 ^ 1) = 1.6 e20 !!!
So at level 1000 without skills, Dave has a DPS of 8.0 e22 :)

Non-exponential Ancients effectively become a flat multiplier by level 500 or so at the latest, since your gold or dps without the ancient is insignificant next to the ancient's bonus. This means it's most efficient to level all such Ancients of the same type evenly. For example, if you play active (combo) and have 3.000e20 hero souls to spend on dps, your dps ancients should wind up looking similar to this:
1.000e20 Morgulis
1.000e10 Argaiv
1.000e10 Bhaal
1.000e10 Fragsworth
1.000e8 Juggernaut
In general, if Morgulis is e(X), then Ancients with N scaling should be e(X * 1/2), and Juggernaut / Nogardnit should be e(X * 2/5).

[Mr. Moyer]

it's just math, but with cute monsters LOL. Nice to have running in the background while I work on other things. Haven't played in a couple of years though.

[puffs]

i use an autoclicker for this game for fun but i cant believe someone plays this game seriosly

[Walter White]

Take my steam points

[Mr. Moyer]

@MisterNuFlo Kick it up a notch!

[MisterNuFlo]

Bam!