Zero 2 Hero – Step 1: The Big Cleanse

Continuing on from Neva’s fantastic opening article of the Zero 2 Hero series! yours truly, the person Hell Hades, himself, has called “the Gear Cleanse specialist of the Takeover team” Elvo! I am here with you all, for this step in the Zero2Hero series.

Before we build our teams for the various areas of the game, we need to make some room in our inventory so we can strip the gear off all the champions along with just getting rid of the gear that will not benefit our journey on Zero 2 Hero.

In this guide, I will explain the reasoning behind my decisions and the tools I use to make the tough choices. Bar in mind this cleanse is specific to this account and the level of account it is. But hopefully, any level of player will pick up some tips and tricks to progress your account even further!

Getting started:

The benefits for me is having two screens, on one screen I have the HH Raid Optimizer open in the artifact tab, the artifact tab becomes a must-have when you are a premium member as you will get the potential rating of every item in your inventory, which I rely on when I have to make the tough choices. The other screen obviously has raid running. I understand that the majority of you will only have one screen or will be on your Mobile phones. The two screens are not a must. It just makes it faster for me.

The first thing I do is assess the progression of the account since we know all about this account and where it should be when we are finished. I know it will be a late-game if not a very end-game account. So, I go into the account settings on the optimizer and conservatively I will choose late game and only look keep artifacts that have a potential rating of very strong and above

Without prior knowledge of an account, I check the Great Hall, Dungeon progression (speed runs) Doom Tower progression, (the easiest way to check this is to see if the Doom Tower avatars are available in the profile tab) And what level of Clan Boss they are hitting. I will also check a few builds to see what kind of stats they are getting.

After I do this, I like to look at the overall rating of the gear on the account. The best way to do this is to choose these filters on the artifact tab in the optimiser.

This gives me a rough idea of where the gear is at and how many items the optimiser things are to be sold.

The Starting Artifacts and Accessory numbers:

Artifacts – 1300/1300

Accessories – 996/1300

And here is a breakdown of each item.

The Cleanse

Now we know what we are working with, we can start to clear out all the instant sell items from the account.

First up and it’s an obvious one! Flat stat frank would be upset with it. But all flat stat HP, Attack and Defence Gloves, Chest and boots are sold!! With the small caveat of speed sets with speed sub rolls, although on this account we already know it has good speed gear, so, they are gone as well. Although, funnily enough on this account, one of the fastest artifacts is a flat stat glove.

For a late-to-end game account, like this account is, I will auto sell all 5-star rare artifacts and all 5-star epic and below accessories, as at this stage, we don’t need these anymore.

Next, I select the top row of Weapons, Helmets and Sheilds, go down to the rarity and rank filter and select Rare. Next, I open the substats tab and start by selecting flat HP and selling all that come up and I continue to with flat Attack and then Defence. Again, the only ones I will keep if not already rolled are speed sets with a speed substats in general.

Then I will switch to all epic gear and start selecting two flat stats in combination with each other HP&ATT, ATT&DEF, HP&DEF and sell everything that comes up

if you haven’t realised by now flat stats are BAD in all shapes and sizes! Well except for ones that have speed obviously

After I do the general instant sell steps. I move on to individual artifacts starting with the gloves.

Gloves

HP and Defence gloves are used on support champions that you want to keep alive, and you will need speed and sustain stats like HP, Defence and accuracy and/or resistance. When you are sorting through these gloves also try to avoid keeping items with attack percent or flat attack on them as they are a useless stat for these champions

Attack gloves are only needed for bomb champions as you don’t need crit rate for the bombs to work and crit damage doesn’t affect the damage they do. So, all you are looking for is speed, accuracy and attack. I would advise on only keeping a few of these.

Crit rate gloves are for your lower-tier damage dealers e.g., faction war champions and Doom Tower secret rooms. So we are only keeping ones that have attack, speed, crit damage and some sustain

Crit Damage gloves are for your Nukers and these without a shadow of a doubt need crit rate on them. When going through your Crit damage gloves try to keep away from resistance stat as it’s the least desirable stat for your nukers

Clearing out gloves took us from 139 total, to 53!

Here are a few examples of the gloves with the preferred stats, these are all from the account.

Chests:

Chest artifacts are very much in the same boat as gloves regarding substats.

HP/Def you want accuracy, speed with sustain stats.

attack percent chests you want crit rate and speed.

Resistance Chests you want sustain substats as you will most likely use these on champions that you don’t want to die or get debuffed for example Duchess or siphi

Accuracy chests are a one for all kind of chest, you can use an accuracy chest on a support champion you want more accuracy on like Madame Serris or on a Hurndig if you want him to land his debuffs as well as hit hard.

In general, for Chest artifacts all you are looking for is no flat stats or at least not many!

After going through the chests, we were left with 91 out of 156, which will always be the highest number due to the high amount of options for primary stats.

Boots:

Boots are simple and there is only one rule for any kind of boot, that isn’t a speed main stat boot, and that is if speed is not a substats on it, then it is sold and the pure reason for this is eventually you want to replace those speed boots with the preferred stat for your champion, so you need to make up the speed some how and having a speed substats helps you with this.

Top Row Artifacts:

I am going to treat the Weapon, Helmet and Shield artifacts all the same as, the main stat doesn’t change so we only need to focus on the substats. So, in this section of the guide, I am going to talk about particular sets and what stats to keep and what to sell.

First off all, we need to talk about starting substats

Starting Sub-Stats

this looks great with the substats speed, HP, crit rate and attack. But it has too many 4’s

below is a table of the min and max substats starting roll for 5 star and 6-star gear.

here we have two 6-star rare speed set helmets with speed and resistance substats. To clear some space, I had to choose between these too and for me its an easy choice speed set = speed so, even though the resistance is lower on the item with 12 speed. the bigger speed number wins.

Cruel & Immortal Sets

You acquire cruel and immortal gear from the Clan Boss and if you are hitting the demon lord every day you will eventually end up with a lot of gear. So, you can be extremely brutal with these sets, and I will always sell every 5 star and 6-star rare artifacts that I receive. Then with the remaining gear if it has one flat stat, I will sell it.

The only exception to the rules is Flat HP on an immortal item as flat HP can be useful to boost your HP stat.

Here are two examples of artifacts that were sold.

Accuracy and Resistance substats problem:

As we know accuracy and resistance are opposites and don’t work well together for most cases, however, in niche situations you may want as much accuracy and resistance on your champion, normally that will be on a support champion like Lydia. So, accuracy and resistance on a damage set is not wanted or needed!

Other niche sets:

Sheild set – this set is great for the scarab king in Doom Tower and when you want to build a champion with it. You are trying to keep them alive and give the biggest shield to your allies so, Attack substats is not wanted at all on this set.

Toxic set – this set is used to great affect against the demon lord to help get more posions on him and increase your overall damage, this is where you put your Clan Boss hat on and think what you need for Clan Boss, well, in most cases its speed accuracy, Crit Rate etc…

Stalwart set – another Clan Boss set, this set helps you take less damage against the Clan Boss’ AOE hits. And is popular when building a non-unkillable and for a non-unkillable Clan Boss comp is all about staying alive. So crit rate, accuracy, Sustain stats and speed

Forge Sets

The forge is a great place for artifacts and before long you will have the same situation as you have with cruel gear and its no different on this account. All 5 star and 6-star rare gear was sold and then the optimizer came into play in helping me choose what to sell. I had to do this as when you are forging gear you generally only keep the really great items.

This was sold purely because of the flat stat HP as the account as much better options available and in plenty. Eventually, you can even apply the same rule that I have from cruel and immortal, since we will have a lot of it and only keep 6-star epic and above

Final Top Row Artifact Numbers

Weapons – 164
Helmets – 137
Shields – 160

This is all we have left from 1300/1300 and 300+ items in the inbox, taking us down to a total of 683.

Accessories:

I am not going to go into much detail with accessories as I did with the artifacts mainly due to the fact, we are only looking for particular substats for each of them and its that simple. I do tend to leave at least one for each stat on the accessories even if they are really bad.

Rings: Rings like the top row of the artifacts are similar there are only three options attack, HP and Defence and you don’t want Attack on your HP and Defence rings and you want Attack on your attack rings.

But the ultimate rule for rings is percent stats, percent stats and more percent stats. FLAT STATS ARE BAD on rings.

So, I employed the same filters I did for the top row, starting with the rare items selecting one flat stat and on to epic with two flat stats. There are no point doing it for legendary items as it is impossible to not have a flat stat on them

Then I select HP rings and sell all of them that have at least Attack percent and attack flat stat. I do the same for Defence rings. And for Attack rings I sell any of them that don’t have an Attack percent stat.

Amulets: amulets are the easy enough. And familiar rules will apply here too. For rare and epic HP and Defence amulets you sell any that have attack on them. I personally sell all but a few Attack amulets leaving ones for the bomb champion factions, just in case. And for the Ogryn tribe as with Maneaters multipliers on his skills he benefits from an attack amulet with multiple rolls into crit damage over a crit damage amulet.

For Crit damage amulets I simply scroll down the screen and sell all the lowest rank ones for each faction making sure I leave at least one for each faction.

Banners: Banners are the toughest ones there are…. only joking. Banners need speed that’s it. If it doesn’t have speed its sold, however, I still employ the same keep at least one of each for each faction rule

In Total we have 463/996 Accessories left on the account and a total of 144,706K Silver!

Final Notes

This cleanse was conducted as part of the series to make the account as end game as we can get it. The way I have done it is for this level of account only. If your account is not at this level yet. You can still follow the rules and advice here, however, follow it loosely and eventually you will get to this level of gear.

Going forward for this account we are only interested in keeping 6-star epic and above on all items, everything else will be auto-sold using the Optimizers rating system.

If, you have any reservations about the optimisers rating system rest assured I have probably done hundreds of cleanses and I have trailed a cleanse side by side with the rating and filters and I have to say, I agree with the ratings 99% of the time. But, always use your own brain if you think it’s not worth selling don’t.