Loop Hero – Maximizing Attack Speed With Thickets

Trying to figure out how to get the most out of your rivers and thickets but don’t want to do the math?

Basics

Note: Credit goes to Le Fantabulouso

Area

So, let’s say you just started a new expedition and your map looks something like this. The important thing to note is the fact that you have 5 tiles of horizontal space on each side of the loop. This is critical if you want to get the most value out of your landscape tiles. While most of the time you’ll likely have only 4 tiles of space on each side, here I’m focusing on optimizing for a 5-tile map.

Cards

Thicket

Each thicket provides 2% attack speed base. We’ll be boosting that up to much higher numbers, by combo’ing them with rivers.

River

Each river doubles the effects of every landscape tile adjacent to it. This effect is multiplicative, which means generally you want to surround landscape tiles with as many rivers as possible.

Forest

Unless you’re trying to spawn the boss as quickly as possible, don’t place forests. They simply don’t give enough attack speed to be worth taking up a tile that could be a thicket.

Interactions

Thickets are doubled once for every river tile adjacent to them, up to a maximum of 4 times. This means we can get one thicket to be equal to 8 thickets, while only using 5 tiles of space. Naturally, any optimal setup would make use of this as much as possible, in a 5×12 space.

Optimal Layout

Info

This layout, in total, gives an extra 234% attack speed, using only 22 thickets and 38 rivers. Since rivers can only start on the outermost tiles of the map, you’ll need to place the first river tile at the 5th row of the 1st column. This does only cover one 5×12 side of the map, and could be mirrored if you continued the river. You could also swap out the thickets for suburbs or meadows or something, I suppose. For the sake of keeping things concise though, I’ll leave it at that.