Forums → Quests → Clicker Heroes Quests

Thanks, Vinicius! At least there's two of us who can shake our heads at this pretend game.

I find this game incredibly boring

I completely agree with you, I don't know why it's so popular.

3-4 weeks to get to 500 is crazy. Is that because you're a "constant" or "frequent" player? I'm on 87 days, with 10-15 minutes a day

Somebody did it in 3-4 weeks? What?? I'm at 58 days with ~5 hours a day. My highest level is 164. Am I doing something wrong?

My highest level is 164. Am I doing something wrong?"

Probably, yes. Since you guys really seem to need it, here's a step-by-step guide(I will bold sections that matter a lot):

1. Day 1 - Hit level 120-140 or so. Prepare yourself to ascend, and go to sleep.
2. Optimize your HS income by buying levels on all your heroes. Ascend. Start some runs that take ~1 hr, ascending at around the same point. Again, optimize. This will take a sizable amount of time, but much of it will be idle. Buy the following ancients, but do not upgrade: siyalatas, libertas, vaagur, atman(less so), juggernaut(only if you want to be chained to CPU). Do not buy any other ancients. Do not attempt to buy treebeast level 1000, or exceed frostleaf level 100.
3. Repeat day 2's actions for the next few days(maybe as much as a week). Stop when you have acquired at least 100-150 hero souls(including any invested in siya/libert). Upgrade siya/libert if it improves your gold income rate substantially(>20%).
4. Purchase vaagur(reroll as necessary). Do not buy any other ancients.. Max out vaagur(for 45 HS), and begin the grand run. Spam the EDR combo and buy upgrades every 15 minutes. Do not click.
5. Over the course of the next 3-4 days, repeat EDR spam until you hit at least level 200-300. Regilidng the worst gilds(for 2 HS)(betty, midas, 'hotep) may not be a bad choice. Ascend.
6. Invest about 30-60% of the souls. Consider buying: atman, solomon, mammon, dora, mimzee, and dogcog in that order roughly. Invest in the ancients with level cap somewhat more heavily, while keeping the scalable ancients(ie siya, mammon, etc) raised to a sizable degree.
7. At this point, level 140 should be a moderate roadbump, but not hugely difficult. You should be able to push to level 200 every time at least. Ascend once things start slowing down. Keep ascends to under 1.25 hours.. Current time: about 2 weeks.
8. Repeat #7. After 1k+ HS, you should be able to comfortably regild a little more. Purchase kumwakaru, fortuna, argaiv, maybe juggernaut(depends on your style). By now, every ascend should bring your to a higher level. Most of the ancients with level caps should be maxed(of the aforementioned). Current time: 1 week after #7.
9. Really, you shouldn't notice it when you run over L500. Every few runs or so, you should be mowing down a new centurion.

Remark: I hit level 2k in about 6 weeks, as I mentioned earlier. You can probably do some guesswork and figure out how long it took for me to hit L500. Before you ask, I did not use an autoclicker or hack the game or [insert silly thing here].

Now that I've written this, I'm kind of curious to see what you guys are doing differently. I've reset my game(note: a copy exists on notepad still) to see how long it will take.

Oops, some of the bolding didn't work(and I apparently ran out of time to edit), but the important parts:

Do not buy any ancients other than the ones listed above(especially pre-deep run). Ancients go up in cost, and you can't afford to waste HS in the beginning. Of special mention is morgulis - avoid him(it's at best a 1.1 multiplier on HS, but you spend a hefty amount just to buy him, so you'll need to spend 10x (buy cost+raised prices) to break even).

Do not attempt cracking L140(aka treebeast 1k)(until maxed vaagur). You'll fail, and waste hours.

You have to do the EDR combo at some time. The difference is very dramatic.

Thanks for responding!

Day 1 - Hit level 120-140 or so.

Optimize your HS income by buying levels on all your heroes. Ascend. Start some runs that take ~1 hr,

Spam the EDR combo

-----

I see what I've been doing wrong, I've spent very little on ancients, I only have 4 and two are useless (morgulis and siyalatas). The highest level of any of them is 5. Is it worth to sell them and start over (with 75% HS back)?

I haven't bought any more ancients as it will cost me about 50 HS just to buy. It hardly seems worth it.

I'd also like to know your playing style/technique between ascensions. How do you get to high levels so quickly?

Er... apologies about day 1. It's been a while, and it's pretty apparent that it won't go on day 1 from my hard reset. It's going to take some days maybe, but it's a one-time cost.

In terms of banking souls, it will help if you toss some into siya/libertas. I don't recall it being that difficult to pound through the lower levels, but essentially, don't try to push past 140(iirc 10 HS is a decent haul). This part is kind of sucky, but you'll need to do it 10-15 times at most probably.

The EDR combo(or lack thereof) is probably why you're finding it hard. Essentially, once you have Vaagur, you can reduce dark ritual's cooldown(and enhance it) to 30 minutes cycle. That means 1.1x multiplier every 30 mins, which is how you break the L140 barrier. In theory, you can EDR spam with 46 HS, but I'd add a buffer so that life doesn't suck super-hard.

I would use a reset if I was you and you don't own Vaagur; this is why buying frivolous ancients is a poor choice. I don't know how you're getting the ~50 HS number; the prices are 1-2-4-8-16-35-70-125... Again, this is a good illustration of why buying only good ancients is worth it. If you need a list, http://www.reddit.com/r/ClickerHeroes/comments/2goxa8/tier_list_for_ancients_v1/ is the go-to. The majority of my suggestions are based off of that list. Note: Siyalatas is pretty **** good.

Playstyle during fast ascensions: quasi-online(check every 1-2 mins?). Depending on how powerful you are(ie if you insta-gib the first 200 levels vs. 100 levels) you can check up less. During this part, it'll skyrocket, so you kind of need to be online to keep buying upgrades. If you're feeling a bit tired, you can let the runs go on a little longer, but things do slow down at somewhat fixed rate(costs rise by 5, dps rises by 4 every 25 levels).
.

By the way, EDR stands for "Energize, Dark Ritual, Reload." It seems to be a fairly common strategy people are using, but is really only effective if you have Vaagur.

Oh, I forgot about what EDR is:

In terms of powers, you press:

time = 0: (123457) 8-6-9.
(powers in parentheses can be pressed in any order, and don't need to be pressed).
Do not use any powers in between.
time = 15 min: 8-9 (123457).

time = 30 min: repeat.

I just got all the achevements x2

@bakkart and @clancy12 and anyone else who's complaining about the time it takes for the quests:

It took me 12 days(+~3-4 hrs) (I hard reset the game) to go from first click to L 486(essentially 500) using a single Vaagur EDR run. At this point, I feel confident enough to say that the CH quests would be pretty trivial from this point onwards(aka hit L500, ascend, and buy 2 ancients).

The first ascend took 1 day(I was really impatient and ascended at L103). After that, it took another 13 ascends over 7 days to stockpile 55 HS + maxed Vaagur + Siya L4.
Days 1-8 were basically spent mongering hero souls in preparation for the EDR run. After around 30-40 HS, I started investing in Vaagur, while slowly growing my stockpile.
The EDR run itself lasted 5 days. The rate of progression is roughly 10 levels every 1-2 hrs.

I do think that any player should be able to do this quest in a timely manner using this method: Vaagur is guaranteed in first batch of ancients and Siya/Lib have reasonably decent chances(2/26, rolled 4 times means an average of 3 rerolls for 3HS).

For players who want to enjoy this game a little more, ascending at L 300 or so may take a couple days longer, but hitting L 500 will be doable on idle mode.

Thanks for the hints, Randomblah -- that should be a help.

A couple of counterpoints, though --

Your focused 12-day run (at 3-4 hours a day? 3-4 hours total?) still seems like a lot of work. Unless I'm reading it incorrectly it almost seems like you're compressing what a lot of us are doing exactly except you're focusing your time ... i.e., spending more time per day. 12 focused days to complete a quest is still significant.

One reason I think this is a poor strategy game is that it takes an outside source like you to make it "winnable." There's nothing in-game that would suggest Vaagur is important (those other three Ancients sound better than him off the block), or that EDR is a great way to rack up hero souls or to progress. Without that knowledge -- as in just playing the game -- I'm sure it takes most people several weeks or even months to complete.

Finally, for me at least, this is pure agony. If the game play was at all interesting, I could put up with the time investment. But this is my pick for most boring game on Armorgames at the moment. I'm just slogging through for a few minutes a day, hoping eventually to get that last quest and be done with this travesty forever.

Sanity:
It's better if you can devote some time across multiple hours rather than playing blocks in a row. That is, 15 minutes every hour for 4 hours is better than 1 full hour block. In between, you're more or less free to do anything, in part because the way that this is an idle game. Basically, you want to keep a balance between getting burned out(12 hrs of clicking in a day) and neglecting CH(checking only 1-2 times a day). The best solution is finding some computer activity to do(ie another game, school/real life work, etc) while playing CH. This gets especially true for EDR runs: the only goal is to tab over every 15 minutes, press buttons, and leave(time <=1 minute).

Math comments
CH is analogous to compounding interest problem(much like any other idle). If you're constantly online, you get an exponential base of e(2.718...) over that period of time, compared to linear growth(base=1) (not logging in ever). If you, say, logged in every 15 minutes or so, you'd probably get a growth rate of 2.3 or so, which isn't terrible, but not perfect. Power play will get you there faster, but even if your rate is 2, it'll only take you 1.4x as long or so(ln2=0.69).
TLDR: Compression only works so well - playing a third day will get your further than doubling the amount of time played in a day.

Guide Dang it!!!!
Certainly, there's a few things that could be better explained. The first is a relatively sparse tutorial. The second is that you don't know what ancients exist(beyond your first rolls). The third is the way ancients stack - but the only real problem is Morgulis, as everyone else is multiplicative. The fourth is the fact that heroes x4 every 25 levels.
There's some elements of truth to this, but it's not totally a lost cause. For one, the CH comments are filled with people talking and willing to help - at the rate of 4+ comments/minute. For two, you're not totally clueless about what each ancient/HS does - those are explained decently in-game.
Another thing to look at is the comparison between this and other strategy games. Most strat games aren't perfect about their info(even if they're very good) - KR for example never tells you the exact reload time of a tower so that you can find dps, Gemcraft has special enhanced forge mechanics(16 combine, etc). I do think that you're expected(and capable) of using some observations and rough calculations to choose and improve your ancients sans-help. It's not exactly difficult to see that hecatoncheir is probably worth less than Vaagur(60 seconds boost/hr, or powers every 15 minutes hmmm), or that Juggernaut/Siya/Lib are very powerful. Perfect information is certainly preferred, but a lot of good games have gotten away with much less, and I do think it's bad if the game starts spoon-feeding meta tips to you.

Hints for the weary
If you already have a lot of HS, but you're not making more very fast, consider resetting. You'll lose 1/4 of your invested HS, but if you just reroll till you max Vaagur(44 HS cost), have a bank of 30-40 HS(so you can actually start the combo), you should be done in less than a week(my EDR took 4 days).

Thanks again, RB -- you make a good case. I'm never going to like this game, and resent this quest tremendously, but you have some good points (and a heading like "Guide Dang It" was classic ...).

I maintain that the strategy of Clicker Heroes is too external. I can play GemCrafters, and perhaps even beat the game, without having to ask for help, or needing any guidance. Same goes for Kingdom Rush and just about any other game. The in-game notes are not necessarily any clearer than CH's, but they are more integrated, and often more substantive in the first place. So, it's never been a matter of knowing what a particular Ancient does; Kleptos, for example, adding time to Golden Clicks is pretty clear.

What is not clear at all is how vital a particular ancient might be. You have to be very lucky or intuitive to know that Vaagur is absolutely essential. I don't know what Ancients I had in my first round, but I remember thinking the other three all sounded better than an Ancient who had skill cooldown. Again, how could anyone really know this without a ton of experimenting (who has time for that?) or without reading comments of others. With such outside dependency, I again argue that it does not have inherent strategy.

As for the in-game comments -- I have never seen those as helpful. Lots of "trolling" and non-strategy and rudimentary kinds of things.

Again, it comes down to taste. You seem to like CH, and I abhor it, and I doubt we'll change each other's minds.

So I finally realized that you shouldn't ascend just because it starts taking 30s+ just to kill each monster. I kept ascending around level 150 because of that. Instead I just kept doing EDR and in a couple days I am now at level 290!

Can't believe it's finally over. You know that feeling of whacking yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer and then stopping? Or of walking across a football field of hot coals and finally getting to a pool of water? Or of lying down on a bed of nails for days on end and then standing up? Or of ....

I have many more metaphors to describe my experience with this game, but suffice it to say that I got to Level 500 and now am free of this non-game. Party at my house tonight ... come on over!