Get ready for He is Coming
In this Big Friendly Guide, we'll walk you through what exactly He Is Coming is, and how you can maximize your potential each run.
He Is Coming is a pixelated auto-battler with a PvE focus (although it does have a PvP mode). It's currently in early access on Steam and it's pretty brutal after your first run.
In this Big Friendly Guide, we'll walk you through what exactly He Is Coming is, and how you can maximize your potential each run.
Gear up, try not to die, repeat
He is Coming has a really succinct gameplay loop: find gear, keep swapping out and leveling up that gear for a few day-night cycles, and then fight a boss.
When you start any new run, your priority is chests — when you move over a chest, you can choose one of the three items inside (or none — more on this later). At the beginning, you only have four equipment slots (more on this later, too) and you can only remove equipment by replacing it with something else — and you can only replace things once all four slots are filled.
You can also find merchants (their icon looks like a farmer?) who will sell you new gear for the gold you collect by defeating mobs.
Levelling up gear is a little more complicated (and rarer). You can add oils to increase your attack, armor, or speed. You can visit blacksmiths to add a modifier to your attacks, or you can hit a golem who will combine two identical items into one higher-level item.
Mobs don’t move during the day
Bosses spawn after three day-night cycles in He is Coming. And that means you only have so long (three days) to get geared up. Time only advances when you’re moving. Moving from day to night, your range of vision decreases a bit and you can’t identify what distant points of interest are. Graveyards only open at night.
The more useful effect of the day-night cycle, though, is that mobs don’t move during the day. Use this to your advantage while looking for chests and upgrades. You can avoid the random mobs or, if it’s getting close to dawn, outrun them if you don’t want a fight.
The RNG is the real enemy
The main purpose of the random, not-boss mobs is to earn gold. If you get a get enough build locked in, you can heal during easier fights. But those mobs aren’t the real enemy. The bosses aren’t even the real enemy.
The randomness of your loot draws is the real enemy. If you can’t find a weapon better than your starting stick before you run into your first low-level mob, you’ll die. If you can’t get some decent armor before your first boss fight, you’ll die. If you can’t pick up an item that heals you before your first boss, you’ll (probably) die.
The RNG is a bastard in He is Coming. The good news here is that, like many of these auto-battlers, experiencing the game will help you learn how to mitigate that RNG. Hitting up merchants, trying to clear out as many chests as possible, etc. As you improve, the RNG will become less punishing, but you do need to accept that sometimes you're just going to be dealt a bad hand. GG go next.
Fights are settled before starting
Since He is Coming is an autobattler, it’s not overly concerned about your skill. It’s a (literal) numbers game. You’re just trying to get the best numbers on your side that you can.
There’s no randomness in any fight. Who goes first is determined by your speed stat (ties seem to go to the player). Everyone always deals the same amount of damage. Everything plays out according to rules.
The trick is the modifiers you get to add with your gear. All of those calculations between hits will make or break your run.
Learn when to leave loot alone
Picking out gear in He is Coming is a delicate dance. You need those better numbers, but you also need to build out the best modifiers you can. And, sometimes, you won’t find anything better in a chest because, as we mentioned, the RNG is a bastard.
Once you’ve filled up your equipment slots and dialed in a decent build, it’s perfectly fine to not take anything from a chest you open. Just move on.
You can fight the boss at any time
Speaking of, if you lock in a great build that you’re happy with and you’re positive you won’t improve, you can fight the boss early. This will save you a lot of wandering, mob encounters, and frustration with lackluster chests. But it will limit your gold income, so you should consider the capabilities of your build to fight random monsters before skipping (more on that below).
Scout ahead
You can see the boss in the upper right corner of the map at all times. That means the second you load in, you can check out what a boss does so that you can better put a build together to deal with it. If the boss has really high damage, maybe you want to boost your armor as much as possible, or build toward Freeze to cut that damage in half. If they're fast, having high Thorns can end a fight quickly.
With the RNG being what it is (bastard), you'll absolutely get screwed if you try to fully build in one direction or another — after all, prepping too hard for one boss could screw you once you get to the second boss. But if you can build toward strong ideas — this is a Freeze build or an Armor build, etc. — you can (hopefully) overcome a wide range of challenges.
Become self-sustaining is the key to success
Your ultimate goal in He Is Coming is to defeat the boss that comes at the end of the three day cycle. Then your new goal becomes to do it again. You need to be building toward those goals, like we've mentioned above, but you also have to worry about all of the enemies roaming around the world. If they're constantly taking your health down, forcing you to heal at the campfire, you're going to be wasting time and gold opportunities. But if you can get a build together that always evens out — something with high armor or a build that heals on hits — fights become extremely beneficial. As you build, consider how easy it'll be to loop your effects each fight. Just know that many of these loops don't work nearly as well against the cycle's final boss, so don't lose sight of the ultimate goal.
This post originally appeared on BigFriendly.Guide
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