Loop Hero Loop Boost Guide

Loop Hero is a grindy game. It felt like the start was ridiculously slow.

If you don’t know (say this is your first hour)…. what you want to unlock is Necro, forest and river.
Why? The Necro is very simple to play once you get attack speed. Forests give attack speed and river double that effect. You can also double the doubling if you have river/thicket/river (note thicket gives 2% speed and forest gives 1% speed).

This guide assumes you have these basics unlocked. If you don’t have those… just keep chipping away until you do.

I never bothered playing the rogue by the way until I had rivers unlocked. I focused on getting the crypt because it seems to make for easier runs *for me* even when playing warrior.

I prefer the crypt over the arsenal (but choose the latter if you want to grind with rogue) for both Warrior and Necromancer. For one you get a free rez and it lets you scale health to an insane degree if you fight enemies with a soul. This is not to be confused with “living”; spiders are living but do not have a soul (this was nerfed I believe in the first patch).

Some very basic tips:

Farms give food and you’ll need a whole bunch to get your town maxed out.

Stone Huts give you more storage. Each level of bulding gives you more storage (supply tab)

Level one huts give you supply for +1 food/furniture/total supply slots.
Level two huts give you +2 furniture/ +1 tool/ + 1 food/ +1 total supply
Level 3 huts give you ++2 furniture/ +1 tool/ +2 food/ +1 total supply

Be aware dwellings are more valuable later when you have more supply to use. Early on you’re likely to get random stuff that won’t be very helpful.

After you’ve been playing for about 10-20 hours you might get 5 count chairs and 5 alchemist tables (gives you +1% vampirism if you already have it / +1 potion slot). So obviously they are something to focus on *later*.

As soon as you can make watchtowers. They summon archers to help with everything not the boss around the campfire. They start at range one and become range 2 form tower level 2-3.

Note that tower level 3 gives you +1 tool/ total supply points. By tower level 6 you get an extra +2 tools, +1 more supply slot (2 total), and +1 food slot. But of course you can’t upgrade them quickly because it uses some expensive resources (like 32-44 food for tier 3-4 upgrades). And of course that doesn’t cover the orbs either.

Long story short upgrade what you can when you can – if there’s not something better to get close by. For me my goal was to rush necro/river/forests but you might have something else in mind and that will probably also work if you just keep grinding.

The good news is that you never backslide so that any progress is always in the forward direction.

I’ve finished runs with over 400% attack speed. I can summon skeletons so quickly that this can become dangerous when you fight the “fake” villagers that have thorns. The necro is good against almost every enemy type assuming you’ve got about 5 skeletons.

How do we optimize him? On gear you want to look for these stats:

• Max Skeletons
• Skeleton level
• Skeleton quality

What do they do? Max skeletons gives you more available summons. After you summon 4 melee skeletons you can summon ranged units (who cannot be attacked).

Skeleton level makes your minions tougher to destroy and deal more damage. This only increases their stats every time you increase to a new whole number. In other words 5.99 is the same as 5.1 in terms of skeleton level.

Skeleton quality gives you the chance (0-100) to summon either a tank or rogue pet. The rogue pet has evasion and the tank pet has “first target” which means the enemies will attack him first.

What do you prioritize? This is where you have to use your brain a bit. You might have a necro book with +2.45 skeleton level and +1 skeletons but get a new book that has 4.65 +1.35 skeleton level. You very likely want that stronger book as long as your skeleton count is at least 4 or higher.

I prefer having 4-5 skeletons , a level on par or close to the loop level and then aim for 75% quality. Why? I have discovered that if you have ~250% attack speed or better you about 99% immortal as you can just keep summoning tank skeletons. They get summoned and often die instantly – but you didn’t get hit. Then you summon 2 more skeletons and the tank dies again. This repeats until the enemies are all dead and you rarely ever lose any HP once you get the stats you need.

In the above screenshots you can see some of the gear you should be looking for. That “perfect” ring took many many loops to find (sometimes you can get it twice). Most of the time you will likely settle for +1 skeleton with +skeleton level on your rings for quite some time. There is also only really one good choice for amulets; you usualy have to settle for +skeleton level and skeleton quality. I always focus + skeletons over other stats early on except maybe on my book.

Note that without rivers and lots of + minions the Necro is complete garbage. I had one run where I had only 3 skeletons after 8 loops (and I was fighting almost 4+ enemies on every tile).

Pay attention to how I looped the river around the map to get lots and lots of attack speed! Once you have the bookery unlocked you can use it to cycle out forests and instead place only thickets (I wouldn’t try that on chapter 4 however).

What kind of build should you use?

This is what I started with. Villages+vampires give you lots of really difficult fights that you can often win with zero gear. That helps you get lots of cards early (this is a key point as killing the boss early is usually easier due to the way that difficulty increases usually faster than you do.

You can place a blood grove next to a forest. This prevents monsters nearby from running away. This makes it relatively safe to spam lots of ruins for good loot and experience. Be careful about placing vampires in range of what will spawn from a blood grove (vampire blood golems can be really nasty). But never put a ruin or cemetery “behind” the campfire as they will assist the boss. *You could potentially ignore that if you are 30+ hours into the game with infinite supply or have the *reflect* power unlocked from one of the bosses and have chosen it during level up.

With a little luck you can get your vampires+ villages placed early. About 4 loops later they will no longer spawn enemies. Then it becomes a nice place to put ruins nearby. If possible put a battleground on the village. Every round it will spawn a vampire with a chest; before the village is cleared you can have chest+vampire+4 ghouls for a ton of chances at loot.

Be very careful about vampire goblins. Goblins in general can be really nasty or just block placement. Feel free to use oblivion on them. After chapter 1 never place a village without placing a vampire area first (the bandits that spawn can steal your gear and inventory). Be aware that every 2 villages a bandit camp will spawn. You might need to oblivion that if you get unlucky in the placement. Note that bandits that move into a ransacked village become ghouls.

This is the build I used to beat the game for the first time. Note that I did something really risky and used the Arsenal not the crypt. This changes 27 quality on rings to +17 but allows you to “maybe” get a shield that adds +17 quality +1 skeleton (and if you are beyond lucky + skeleton level too). It will also add some pitiful level of defense that we will completely ignore. I *accidently* forgot to use suburbs but I got insanely lucky and got all the perks I needed.

On that note : The Necromancer relies very heavily on level up perks. Some of the best ones include:

• +1 skeleton
• every time you summon a skeleton you get +magic hp (current not max)
• + skeleton level for every loop (if you don’t get this one by loop 5 you might want to restart)
• damage dealt to the hero is split between his minions (not the ranged units)
• 20% chance to summon +2 skeletons (meaning you might proc 2 mages with 4 max skeletons)
• 20% chance for skeletons to deal 3 attacks for 50% damage each. Note this is a boss unlock – meaning you can’t get it without a bit of luck and having killed the bosses a few times.

There are some other decent options but they are definitely lower tier.
1. skeleton horde: start each loop with 3 powered up skeletons (great early on if you are getting terrible gear rolls). This would be infinitely better if it were a temporary +3 to max skeletons.

2. Counterattack – when you get hit there is a chance your skeletons will attack. This is pretty good considering lots of chances over multiple minions – but it’s just not “top tier”.

3. Summoning a skeleton gives you 3 HP (do not use with swamps). Why is this a lesser perk? Why are you getting hit!

*Warning* be careful of fields as the mobs they spawn get aoe attacks in later chapters. They also do not count as an enemy with a “soul” if that matters for your build.

Necro can use Swamps+Vampire Mansions to create very easy to kill enemies but you have to make sure not use any regeneration or “healing per day” food.

Necro can use Swamps+Vampire Mansions to create very easy to kill enemies but you have to make sure not use any regeneration or “healing per day” food.

I left room for an arsenal in case a ghost dropped one.

You start with the warrior and he does a decent job. If you have unlocked tons and tons of supply you can make him insanely overpowered with +50 vampirism from stacking the count’s chair – but almost nobody has that obviously. So how do you make him work?

I prefer the crypt to the arsenal. Using the arsenal with the nerco reduced gear quality bonuses from .27 to .17 and I find that kind of gross. The crypt gives you a free resurrect so if you mess up you can get right back up and very likely quit safely on the next loop. The crypt also gives you lots and lots of HP if you fight enemies with a soul (not scarecrows, spiders, suits of armor, etc).

You can build for attack speed with rivers+ storm temple+ forests but that’s three cards. I find you can do a lot with just mountains+ suburbs (the latter give a stacking xp boost if you don’t have it yet- in the picture on the right you can see that I have +84 xp per kill).

The screenshot on the right has some of the better warrior level up options. Obviously some are better/worse depending on what you are trying to do (farm/kill boss).

Thanks to a bit of luck this run ended up being a “Tyler Durden : hit me as hard as you can run”. I placed mountains on about 2/3 of the map and that gave me about 4,000 hp at the end. Note that this was a combined effect from the crypt. Once I got strong aftertaste, the perk that gives you + damage for drinking a potion, I tried to take more damage. And then I got bottomless bottle, the perk that gives you a 40% chance to not spend a potion. These two perks together helped scale my damage tremendously.

As you can see I focused on vampirism/counter (with a touch of regen and alternatively attack speed). I find evasion to be lacking because it drains your stamina but if I get some – whatever. Unless a weapon has an insane % of vampirism I go with highest possible damage. Sometimes I make an exception if I am trying to stack counter. Be aware that one of the hero perks can heal you as a multiplier of loops completed every time you counter attack.

After 12 loops I got 8 level ups. The power not shown was the ability to reflect projectiles at enemies 60% of the time. Had I gotten that sooner this run would have been massively easier.

The build strategy here was to have a few counts+vampires and a few groves+blood groves near ruins. Both of these make good synergy with lots of high level fights that give you lots of xp and good chances at high level items.

I do not have exact knowledge of what defense does but I *believe* it helps to mitigate damage. I have noticed that if I ignore it I often get sent home prematurely.

I likely could have kept this run going for 4-5 more loops but I got a little over zealous and made a few vampire golems. If you get a quest from the cleansed vampire town to kill a golem ( which gives it 200% health) you can find yourself losing thousands of health in that fight. Things can get really bad if you have worms standing on the next tile over shooting at you while you kill a golem that has more health than the boss you killed several loops ago.

The rogue has synergy with the outpost. You can use two to help you with the boss fight but sometimes they get targeted instantly and don’t do much. The rogue gets loot at the end of a loop based purely on number of kills. So you should be fighting 4+ enemies as often as possible. I am a big fan of using the watcher tower as that gives you +1 enemy over a very large radius (doesn’t work with vampires – not that you probably want to use vampires with rogue).

Mountains can work on rogue as they give extra enemies. Treasures can do this too and are likely a better bet but long term you would likely use something else. Once you build your mountain you can cycle the rock/mountain tiles to place more important things (using the bookery).

Be careful about using Watchers with the rogue as they lower evasion.

Also be warned that overlapping Battle fields usually cause me a number of problems.

The rest :Coming soon ™

What cards you pick for your deck will have a huge impact on the resources you take home after the mission as well as how difficult the enemies will be. Some of the cards make things quite difficult once they have multiple abilities (never use villages without vampires starting with chapter 2 and beyond). Another example of tile synergy is the combination of swamps+ vampire mansions. Instead of leeching life everything will kill itself by attacking.

Top tier cards

Aresenal/Crypt – Never leave home without one of these (unless you are trying to make the game hard). They are absolutely amazing! Pick whichever fits your tile build best.

Battle field – Spawns a chest every loop. If you can spawn these everywhere (with a little help from the bookery – see below). Note this can spawn mimics but it is still totally worth it. If the battle field is touching a river then it spawns a guaranteed non mimic chest and a siren. Stacking the area effects of battle fields on empty tiles will spawn Blood clots. By themselves these are not dangerous but be careful because if they are present with a siren she gets a huge evade buff. On higher tiers the blood clots will kill themselves.

Furthermore any enemy killed in range of a battle field can spawn a ghost with a 20% chance. That ghost has a 20% chance to spawn the ghost of a ghost. And finally you have a 20% chance to spawn a “prime matter” from the ghost of a ghost. This final enemy can give you 3 random card drops or if you are very lucky one of the “limited” gold cards such as a crypt or arsenal.

Oblivion – You start with this unlocked for a good reason. Bad things happen and you need this to delete them. You can also use these with a mountain to “move it” . This is a really easy way to farm orbs of metamorphosis.

Temporal Beacon – Affects a huge area and speeds up time by 50% which means you heal more often and get to fight enemies more often. If not in the radius of a vampire mansion this also adds the watcher enemy to a fight. When combined with a bookery it makes a watcher mage but both will give you time shards. Often two or three of these will cover 80% of the loop or more. Sometimes your loop is bad and has no room for them on the inside track (might want to restart).

Ruins- Spawns a scorch worm which is a ranged unit that can attack the tile before it. These mobs have the highest chance to drop loot (85%) compared to anything else I’ve seen; I believe the next closest was the golem with 80% chance. Unfortunately worms try to run away after a fight (40% chance). So make sure you place ruins in range of a blood grove – which means they now have a 0% chance to run away.

Blood Grove – These can only be placed next to a forest or a grove. They can spawn blood golems which are very dangerous but drop great loot. Blood Groves have the added effect of not letting Scorch worms run away.

*Not tested* – they may prevent enemies in a battle field from becoming ghosts.

Vampire Mansion- Gives enemies in nearby battles 10% vampirism. This can be really dangerous with spiders/goblins/golems/sirens/etc. Combing with villages gives you a 5 enemy fight as early as the first loop. Large fights usually beget more cards which means you usually end up getting lots of cards faster which means you get more xp/loot faster.

Note: Vampire Mansions only prevent bandit spawns when directly touching a village. Every 2nd village placed spawns a banit camp (so be careful how you place those).

Wheat fields- These are full of easy enemies (unless you are a necro on higher difficulties and they get an AoE attack). They can also scare away (read as remove) one enemy from battle. There is some synergy here with these as you can make goblins vanish from a fight. I am not sure if vanished enemies count as defeated for the purposes of getting loot but they do count for increased chest rewards.

You can “chain” wheat fields and villages to give yourself access to healing without using meadows.

Niche cards

-Bookery : A great option if you want to cycle cards (to replace thickets with forests). When placed on a double or triple corner you can cycle 4 or 6 cards respectively. This means you can get +1 monster as early as 6 loops into the mission and in the meantime get the cards you want more often. This has more value for “long runs” on chapters 3-4 when you know you will farm a while after you kill the boss. The resulting mob can help you get time shards.

-Smith’s forge : Removes useless items and gives you a damage shield; after enough items have been deleted it makes a “living armor”. This creature has “Defender” so it will get killed first. It only has 12 hp but it only takes 1 damage per attack. This can be difficult into any build besides for a necro – where you likely don’t need the damage shield because you have undead minions taking all the hits.

-Outpost : This is basically a “rogue only” card. He takes your loot as warrior and actively attacks the necro. Otherwise it helps you fight on the tile at no cost if you are playing as a rogue.

-Storm temple: Combine with a forest to make burnt forests for +0.5 damage. There is some natural synergy here in that you can use both forests and thickets to add +magic damage (or more optimally you can thickets for double attack speed and forests for magic damage without the need to card cycle).

-Zero milestone : I wouldn’t use this card if you have it unlocked.

-Cemetery : This spawns “easy” enemies but it gives you only knowledge. Lame. They also hit really hard as the loop counter increases.

-Desert : Lower enemy health and your own at the same time. This is generally a bad idea. You can combine it with a river to make an oasis (which lowers your attack speed and the enemy’s attack speed). If you find an amazing use for this let me know.

Late game enemies to avoid

Gargoyles – Gains defender.
Scarecrow- Has 30% chance for AoE attack the battlefield. Has 30% chance to counter attack.
Prime Matter – Has 6th strike will kill the hero.
Goblin leader – The rage gets really nasty if this guy is killed last.
Rat wolf – Can only lose 30% of its health per swing.

Beware there are spoilers ahead. If you have plenty of supply space you might consider using the Old paintings as each one increases your damage to the boss by 4%. Maybe I got lucky or they are common but I very quickly got 5 and I have never taken them off. The extra 20% damage gives me the security to fight the boss even with half health (if I have any kind of resurrect remaining).

Litch

The boss can be tricky because he summons tiles that make him more powerful. Each tile called “litch’s palace” that he places increases his damage tremendously. To counter this boss just overload the tiles around the campfire. On chapter 1 you can make him usually get 0% bonus damage. In chapter 4 you can pretty easily drop him down to 10% if you try hard enough.

Priestess

This boss is super easy if you are playing necromancer or any class with lots of stacked attack speed. The boss repeatedly summons mirrors that deflect your attack onto the mirror. Unlike summong skeletons as a necro the boss seems to be able to summon them very very quickly. Once the mirrors are broken the boss still has a very high evade chance (if I recall while looking in the game files it was 30%).

Hunter

This boss has two hounds to help him in battle who will repeatedly phase in and out. While phased out you can’t hit them. Meanwhile the boss has an ability that forces you to attack a different target. So you can get stuck hitting everything down to low health instead of killing any one target quickly. High damage or attack speed are your friends here but it’s not as critical as the second boss.

Omega

The final boss is likely the most annoying as he can temporarily delete your items and one of your stats. Make sure then to have some useless stats if possible like 5% evasion or 0.6 regeneration so those get targeted instead of +hp, + max skeletons, + attack speed, etc.