Early game Part-2

After Rewind farming you should have enough damage to reach at least Day 900 in a single push, but you could go up to Day 1k or 1.1k depending on how much you leveled your damage skills. While pushing, you'll get your second and maybe third awaken, and the priority will remain the same as before, while changing the list to TJ > EM > RA > BD > UP > HL30 > Inspire > BS > MS31.

### Expedition and Nightmare

While doing your Rewind farming hopefully you experimented with some Expedition, and you might’ve unlocked Hell by beating 4 minutes on Hard, and you might even have unlocked Nightmare (NM)32, by beating 4 minutes on Hell. If you haven’t yet, this is around the time you should do it. Try using heroes with more CC, like Max (if 4\*), Elaine, Garp, Dewitt, Gwen, and Eleanor to do the killing. If you have to, use spells and even try reviving just so you can pass 4 minutes.

Nightmare works a little differently than the rest of Expedition, where you get 3 runs to do every RL day (resets at 12 pm GMT), and you want to squeeze them dry of as many bones as you can, as NM takes you to a certain point in Hell, with the timer starting further and further based on your max day, but you get a LOT more bones in a NM run compared to a Hell run. Your best team for NM for now will be Eleanor and DM, with as much CC as you can spare, and maybe Esther. This same team should be used for your Hell runs (which you should still do overnight if you have the AFK pack).

Because the run starts further the more you push, make sure to always do your NM runs for the day before pushing, but with as much damage as you can. Side note: Once I mention you should start opening crates, watch out for a Galatine33. If you find one, keep it until you find another. It’s a surprise tool that will help us later.

You may also have noticed the option to buy Quickstart for your Expedition runs. Ignore this for now, as its bonus will come into play much later and you have other priorities for your rubies.

### Devastation - Defender and Crit Heroes

At Day 1k you'll unlock your next stat, called devastation (dev)34. Until it's maxed, you should spend all your gold into this stat, as it makes your crits crit again, adding a big multiplier to your damage.

Everything that crits can dev, including your defender, your heroes, and spells that have crit on them. At first only your Defender will be able to dev often, as they attack really fast with 100% crit chance, which makes up for your low devastation chance. Eventually, as you get stars on your Eleanor, and get your stat and crit chance rune up, she'll start doing most of the dev damage.

I've mentioned Dash before, and if by chance you have a copy of him, you can try this strat and see if it works for you. Dash attacks very fast and can crit (therefore can dev) but he only crits Siege Mobs35, the big scary guys, so you'll need Eleanor to clear regular mobs while Dash clears the back row, which Eleanor can have some trouble with depending on her Ascensions. This has personally worked well for me, but isn't widely agreed upon, so try it out for yourself and see if you like it.

### Ascensions

Ascensions, what are they? Ascensions or Stars, symbolized by \* (1\*, 4\*, 10\*) are upgrades that are available for spells, gears, and more importantly heroes. Once you get enough copies of a hero (5 for a legendary, 10 for an epic, 25 for a rare and 50 for a common) you can ascend them36, adding a star to them and unlocking one passive point to spend on their tree37. This ascension will give them a big boost of damage and lower their cooldown a bit, however you need to spend a currency called Catalyst, which will be explained later.

### Runes

This is a good point to talk more about runes: once you unlock Hell and Nightmare you'll be able to get bones with some level of efficiency, allowing you to buy more Greater Runes and upgrade them. You'll want to use a crit damage rune (red), a damage rune (purple), a hero damage rune (yellow), a crit chance rune (orange), and a health rune (green)38.

You can ignore the hp rune for the most part, but will want to level the others equally, focusing on crit damage and crit chance the most, at least until your crit chance is T6 (VI) - T8 (VIII). To level runes efficiently you buy a bunch of them, sell all but two types, which you'll fuse until those types go up a tier, once that happens, you switch to the next two types. Once your crit chance is leveled enough, you can always keep leveling your crit damage rune, while alternating between your hero damage and damage rune so that these last two stay at the same tier, and your crit damage is a tier higher at all times. Always sell mana, spell damage, and blank runes. Blank runes can be used as a rune of any color, as in, you can fuse a T3 blank with a T3 crit damage to get a T4 crit damage, and the same for any other type. This however is not dust efficient, and for the most part shouldn’t be done.

### The Grind Cycle

Around this time you'll start to get into the flow of the game: Rewind, upgrade skills, spend gold (in dev until it's maxed, in damage/crit damage stats afterwards), and push more when you have the damage to do it. This is gonna be pretty much the same for the whole game, with more and more Rewinds being necessary as you get further.

Since the Guide was first released the Mob Data and Rewind Times for lower days have been collected, which means Rewind Spots are a thing below Day 2574. If you want to start interacting with these resources already, jump to Rewind Spots, then to Rewind Sheets, and come back here later.

### Hunt

At Day 1k you also unlock a new gamemode, Hunt. Hunt allows you to kill bosses for gear pieces to equip on your defender, with random base types, main stats and substats, and each boss dropping a different type of item. There are only a couple things actually worth farming here at Day 1k, and the rest is basically a waste of time.

T1 and T2 Asmodeus can drop helmets with the +X% Critical Damage (+cdmg%) main stat, which can be stronger than your other sources of this stat. You can farm for a Rare or higher helmet with this stat and just max it to 10\*, with all substats being too weak to bother. Keep in mind a Legendary version is only twice as much +cdmg%, and takes a lot longer to farm for, as well as farm for the dust used to upgrade it. I’ll link a couple examples here.39

T1 and T2 Leviathan can drop armor with the +X% Critical Chance (cc%) main stat, as well as substats which help greatly while leveling Devastation. Again, any Rare or higher maxed to 10\*. One cc% substat is the same as the difference between Legendary and Rare.

Until Day 4k however, the values on all other items will be too low to bother with your time, so don't spend more than 30 minutes trying to farm something good, just get whatever rare (blue) gear you think looks pretty and move on.

Auto-discard is also a mechanic that was recently added for AFK pack users. This will discard any specific rarity of gear while farming, so your inventory won’t fill with junk. You do this by pausing the game during Hunt and checking the Discard boxes. Always keep commons discarded, but don’t discard rares if you don’t have a good rare of that tier saved up.

### Weapon Crates and Golden Spin

After Day 1500, you can stop buying Caladbolg, as it stops scaling well enough, and can open a Golden Spin. Whichever weapon you get, keep it and use it, and wait at least another ~300 or so days to get a new one. If by chance you hit a Bazooka or a Galatine, these are stronger than other types for now and can be used for 800 and 500 days at least, respectively. You should pretty much only use the Golden Spin, since it has a very similar value to just opening crates, but with much less RNG (Randomness, chance) and it’s also a lot faster.

### Hero Evolutions

Hero Evolutions are a relatively new mechanic in the game which changes weaker heroes into stronger versions of themselves. So far, only two are available:

* Cherry’s Evolution, Cherry Blossom, which grants extra gold while she’s in your party, very useful for Rewinds (more so after Day 3000);
* Paul’s Evolution, Saul, which makes Paul’s original single target potential much higher, with a damage that competes with Eleanor at 10\*, as well as more AoE in the form of extra projectiles and a very strong 2% max hp damage per projectile, which can shred bosses.

       Buy these as soon as you can afford them (each costing 300 hearts and requiring the hero to be at least 5\*), with Saul taking priority as he can be a substitute/helper to Eleanor.

       After you buy the Evolution, you have to complete a quest, which in Paul’s case is for him to shoot 30k projectiles in campaign, and in Cherry’s case is for her to go into Frenzy a certain number of times. You can’t buy another Evolution before the previous one’s quest is finished.