A taste of the grind

As you progress into Day 2k, your heroes are gonna become more important, and Eleanor will lose her spot as top dps vs better options like 10\* Cain, 10\* Saul and 10\* Nero. Once your Eleanor herself is 10\*, you can stop opening tickets altogether and save all for a good rate up. As you progress, check where in the hero rate up40 order you are:

1. Dash
2. Dark Merlin
3. Cain
4. Elden
5. King Arthur
6. Luna
7. Mikhail
8. Lilibeth
9. Clarissa
10. Roland
11. Nero
12. Merlin
13. Lilith
14. Dewitt

and see when the next important rate up is and prepare for it with some saved up tickets. You need 2050 tickets on average to 0-10\* a legendary hero on rate up, and that can be challenging before 2k but very reasonable afterwards.

Ones to look out for are Mikhail, Dewitt, DM, Cain, Luna and Clarissa, stopping at 10\*, and Nero, Lilith, and KA to use as much as you can afford, assuming you can reach their next star. There is a Hero Ticket calculator you can use to plan in the Discord server.

If you don't manage to find a better carry, Eleanor is still very strong until around Day 4k, and as a last resort you can invest some of your catalysts into 10\* Greg, which will be a small boost on your pushing power over Eleanor.

### Main DPS Heroes

       While playing the game, the hero you’ll probably invest more tickets into is your Main DPS. This spot is for heroes that can deal a high amount of Critical Damage, with a big Ascension multiplier and a decent Attack Speed.

       When the Guide was first written, the meta for DPS heroes was to only use Cain or Nero, with Nero being much, much superior than Cain.

       Since then, King Arthur and Lilith received several buffs, with Cain being heavily overshadowed, and as such I wouldn’t recommend upgrading him past 10\* anymore, as once you reach Day 5k or so, you’ll want to be using a 10\* or higher DPS out of the new Big Three.

       Each of these work quite differently, with all of them having particular requirements to be used to their full potential, but are very close in power level, with Nero having a slight edge with his %max hp damage.

       To understand which you would use is quite complicated and much is left to personal taste, so either choose at random, or whatever rate up is more convenient, or upgrade all three to 10\* so you can test before heavily investing.

       Lilith and KA, however, are much more functional after you unlock the Day 5k mechanic, so keep that in mind.

### Catalysts and Dungeon

Talking about Catalysts, we have the Dungeon issue. Dungeon is a mode that drops keys which you use to buy Catalysts41 (you should pretty much never spend keys in gold, and never more than 5000 keys in crates or tickets, keys are more valuable than that). Each catalyst costs 10000 keys, and so they are very expensive and time consuming to farm early, especially because Dungeon drop rates scale linearly. At Day 2k you'll make half of what you would make at Day 4k, and four times less than at 8k, for instance. Does this mean you should never be farm keys? No, you'll need catalysts to ascend your main heroes, and even though you'll get some from the daily log-ins, it takes a while and it's not a huge amount. So, what to do?

* If you don't have the AFK Assist Pack, always do Dungeon overnight.
* Even if you do have the pack, you can stop doing Hell Expedition for a couple days and do Dungeon if you're ready to ascend an important hero to 4, 7 or 10\*. These numbers specifically because that's when you get the big nodes on a heroes skill tree.
* To farm, unequip all heroes except Eleanor (and Greg if you have him high enough) and choose a floor that's low enough so they can one shot every mob. This is very important, if they don't one shot the mobs can end up overwhelming you, or the game can start to lag and even crash in some situations. Being 100 or even 500 days below your max floor is completely normal and won't affect your drops that much.
* Make sure you double your gains42 BEFORE you join Dungeon by watching an ad, or just clicking on the button if you have the Ad Pack (Premium Supporter). If you wait to do it after you're ready to end your run, it might happen that you won't find an ad, and you'll lose either the possibility to double your gains or even your entire run.

Focus on using your catalysts on:

* Eleanor, her path is bottom, top, mid
* Max, his path is bottom, mid, top
* Esther, any path
* Elaine, middle first, then any
* Cain, going for Crit Damage first, then all the small nodes
* Nero, going top and mid, in whatever order, getting the last node on the top at 10\*
* Lilith, going bot and mid, in whatever order, getting the last node on the bot at 10\*
* King Arthur, same path as Lilith, bot + mid
* Dewitt, bot + mid
* Luna, same path as Nero, top + mid
* Mik, same path but going top first at 4\*
* Saul, top + mid
* Clarissa, top + mid
* Cherry Blossom, getting either end node at 10\*
* DM, mid, top, bottom
* Garp, going middle last
* Greg, top, bottom, mid

These are sort of in order of importance, with the legendaries being more important assuming you have enough copies for 4, 7 or 10\*. Getting all of these to 10\* will take a LONG time, so spend your catalysts carefully, as you'll probably not be done with all before Day 6k, especially the legendaries.

### Heroes and Teams

With these heroes recommended, you can start to think of how to build your pushing team:

* You want one DPS hero, such as Eleanor, Greg, Cain, Saul, Lilith, KA and Nero. Use whichever one you have more stars on. There’s not much point in using more than one DPS hero.
* One slow hero, with Mikhail being pretty much the best option always, even at lvl 1 0\*. If you don’t have him, you can use 10\* Tristan or Clarissa, Tristan being pretty pointless, just get a Mik with a few tickets, and Clarissa being good, but not really a full replacement.
* One or two freeze heroes, usually just 10\* Max and any level Dewitt. 10\* Gwen also works but isn’t comparable to the top 2. Luna with her top path is better than Dewitt, but has to be played alone. Don’t use before 10\*.
* Extra CC, in Garp and Elaine specifically. Elaine pretty much only helps against Warmongers, the green guys that jump on your wall, and Garp only helps against Siege Mobs.
* Heroes that deal % of enemy hp, mostly DM, Esther, and also Saul. These are particularly good versus bosses, but they can’t carry your team alone.

Use the pieces as you see fit, try them out, just make sure to have at least one DPS hero, that’s the only requirement.

For now, this same team can be applied to doing Hell Expedition and NM: One DPS hero, some CC, some %hp. For Rewinding, make sure to always equip Eleanor (in addition to other heroes of course), even if you have a better dps hero. She attacks VERY fast and that speeds up your Rewinds dramatically. Cherry Blossom (not to be confused with regular Cherry) should also be used for Rewinding.

### Bazooka Meta

Now at this range of days is when your stacking of crates will pay off, assuming you have Ad Pack or have doubled every crate you got from boss so far, you could have around 600 crates saved up. At Day 2-2.5k you can open many crates, and if you're at 2.5k as many as you need to try and get a bazooka. This weapon is VERY strong at this stage of the game because of its additive crit damage stat (+cdmg), especially compared to the ES skill and the crit damage stat you buy from gold. The bazooka alone can give you over 200 days of damage compared to an old weapon you might have right now. If you run yourself to 0 crates it's fine, as long as you find one. If you still have crates left, you can get a new one later, at 2.7k or 2.9k, and make your push to 3k much easier. There's absolutely no problem in getting to Day 3k without a single crate left.

### Rewind Spots

Once you can progress to Day 2574, stop there. This is the main Rewind spot in this area of the game. From this day you can Rewind faster than on nearby days, due to several factors such as boss and mob types you fight. This is where you're gonna have your main preparation to get to Day 3k.

Every day that ends in xx00, xx07, xx14, xx20, and so on (27, 34…) is considered a Rewind spot for Awakened TJ. This is because Rewinding once from such a day will always land you in a boss day, which is immediately faster than not doing so. Beyond that, the playerbase over time collected the data for what mobs and bosses you fight on each day, and has given them a score.

Some mobs, like Frosks (the blue dinos) walk really fast, and so getting them during a Rewind is good. Caps (the mushrooms) are very slow, and therefore bad. In the case of bosses, the Witch needs to walk all the way to the middle of the screen and then summon her Reaper in order for you to be able to damage them, this makes fighting her incredibly slow. Most other bosses can be killed as soon as they appear, but some are much tankier and if you don’t have the damage to 1-shot them, this costs time in your Rewinds.

With all this in mind, all Rewind spots are given a score, and for most actual timings were collected. Before day 2574 however, most of the data wasn’t collected yet, so this is why I would consider that day the first good Rewind spot.

### The 10 Million Skills Grind

This preparation is composed of Rewinding to get 10 million level (10M) awakened skills. The reason for this is that uncapped awakened skills have a bonus called Milestones. When you awaken a skill, it gains a x2 multiplier to its value, but then another x2 multiplier every time you hit a level that’s a power of 10, starting at level 10k. So, at level 9999, the skill has a x2 multiplier, a x4 once you hit 10k, a x8 once you hit 100k, and so on. Side note: EM doesn’t have milestones, and MS/BS have x3 milestone multipliers.

You want to start with EM, and then do your Awakened skills, in the following order: BD > UP > HL > Inspire > MS > BS. If you do get a bazooka during this, you won't need to get all of these to 10M, especially if any of them aren't awakened. After you get a few of them, you can also move to 2774, as that's also a very good spot and will give you more elixir. If you don't get a bazooka at any point, also get ES to level 10M, the highest it should ever go, and you probably WILL need all the awakened skills at 10M to reach Day 3k.

### Awakenings

During all of this progressing you will have awakened up to 7 skills, and you'll be running out of good options. However, at Day 3k you'll unlock the gold stat, which will be explained later, but to prepare for it you want to make SURE you awaken HL by year 7, and as a last resort, at year 8, just before reaching Day 3000. If you have it awakened before year 7, you can also pick both Deja Vu (DJV) and Bargaining Chip (BC) as good awakens from now on. They won't give you any damage until 3k, but will be very strong then.

### The Final Push to 3k

All of this preparation will be quite hard, you'll have to do a lot of Rewinding, and this will be a bit of a test to see if this game really is for you, as it's just a taste of how grindy the game can become. If you're reading this, you're probably invested enough into the game, so I just hope you enjoyed your way until now.

Once you have everything prepared, you can push to Day 3000, getting one more awaken at 2.9k. The final bosses at 2970, 2985 and 2995 can be quite tough, so try using spells to help you overcome them, specifically Ice Shard, the tier 1 freeze spell, and all three lightning (also known as purple) spells. These deal a percentage of the enemies' current hp, same as Esther does, and are especially good against bosses, since they have quite a lot of HP.

You can see what type of damage a hero dealt based on the bars on the side of the damage breakdown: Red stands for %max hp, and it’s usually fire or darkness damage; Purple stands for %current hp, lightning damage; Blue is good old crit damage.

Once you're done, congratulations! You just beat the tutorial of the game, and the first part of my guide! Things will change just a bit now, and you'll soon get into a very smooth grind, that'll last at least until Day 10000.