Hades: Heart-Seeking Bow Builds [All Aspects]
Four powerful builds to cut through Hades like a hot knife through butter. One build for each aspect of The Heart-Seeking Bow.
Gamer Bebop: Video Game Strategies, Character Builds & All That Jazz
Four powerful builds to cut through Hades like a hot knife through butter. One build for each aspect of The Heart-Seeking Bow.
Supergiant Games’ smash hit Hades is popular for a reason. It’s a hell of a lot of fun (pun intended). One of it’s biggest drawcards is the sheer volume of buil variations that you can try out by combining different weapon aspects, trinkets and boons. When you’re just starting out or have recently unlocked a new weapon aspect, those myriad choices can be overwhelming. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a little guidance. That’s where this article steps in, with some example builds to try out with each of the four Heart-Seeking Bow aspects. Each of the builds below also includes a short video showing Hades being defeated with the build in question, so you can see how it performs at the end of the run.
It’s all well and good to have a boon selection list for a powerful build, but what about actually getting those boons, how do you manage to put it all together. While there’s definitely a component of luck involved, there are also a number of things that you can do help shape the boon selection process as you play.
This is a fun build, and if you get lucky with the Daedalus Hammer like I did in the run below, you’ll end up with unstoppable power. The crux of this build is boosting your crits. This works with the the bonus ability of the Zagrues Aspect, which at full upgrade gives you +15% chance to crit. Of course the primary god when you’re looking to boost crits is Artemis. So we want to get the highest rarity version of her ‘Deadly Strike’ boon which increases your attack power and adds more chance of a crit. If you happen to get any of her boons that increase the power of crits or do any other crit related boosting then all the better. But the main thing is to have your attack crit chance boosted.
The next key to the build is Aphrodite, as we want to trigger her duo boon with Artemis, called ‘Heart Rend’ which deals 150% bonus damage to weak effected foes. You can trigger this in a number of ways but I would recommend either getting Aphrodites dash or special for the easiest application of Weak before shooting them with your Artemis enhanced attack for big crits.
The first few times I tried this build it didn’t really end up doing as much damage as I was hoping, which I think could be partly down to my skill as a player. To really get the most out of it you would want to be delivering perfect shots every time to get the full boosted damage. But when I ended up at Hades I would often miss some of those perfect shots, hence delivering much lower damage.
What really helped in the run below was to get two Daedalus Hammer upgrades: Flurry Shot which cancels the power shot but means you no longer have to worry about perfect timing. And Twin Shot which fires two shots at once, with a shorter range. The loss of range doesn’t matter because I mostly found myself shooting things up close and personal anyway, and the lack of power shots was more than compensated for by the consitsency and speed of high crit chance arrows with 150% extra crit damage against Weak inflicted foes. See for yourself how easily it cuts through hades in the video below.
These are the key boons/upgrades in this build:
This build uses the Heart-Seeking Bow’s Chiron Aspect, which makes all the bow’s Special arrows seek out and hit the last enemy you struck with your Attack. So the playstyle is to hit an enemy with Attack and then hit it twice with Special (the seeking behaviour resets after two special attacks).
You can use Daedalus Hammer upgrades to increase the number of Special arrows and the damage they deal. You can then make use of boons that increase damage or add elemental damage or other status effects to the Special, and these will be applied for every arrow in your Special.
In this build we’re using boons from Ares, the God of War, which add Doom damage to the Special and then increase the impact of this added damage.
These are the key boons in the build:
That last boon is especially powerful for the Chiron Bow’s Special as each Special attack includes multiple applications of the doom effect.
While this build benefits from both Dionysus‘ and Zeus‘ boons, it’s really the god of wine’s Festive Fog related cast boons that do the heavy lifting. The damage generated by lightning strikes in the fog, thanks to the Scintillating Feast duo boon is boosted by Dionysus’ legendary Black Out boon, which gives all damage a 60% buff to hungover foes in the fog.
These are the key Boons in the build:
Weirdly, I’ve found the most useful way to play this build is to completely ignore it’s main feature power – namely the ‘Celestial Sharanga’ which can spread damage over a number of foes in certain circumstances. While I’m sure there are some great builds out there that make use of it. I personally found it difficult to get working well for me. That could be because I haven’t upgraded the Aspect of Rama yet, or maybe it comes down to the wrong tactics or a lack of skill. Either way, I found a much easier alternative in the form of the Aspects overpowered special shot.
The special for Aspect of Rama is insane and in my opinion, easily it’s biggest strength. It’s kind of like the normal special, in that it shoots a number of arrows at the same time. But instead of shooting them in a spraying arc, it shoots them one after the other in a straight line, all hitting the same target that you’re pointing at. Not only that but it’s very easy to use as you can just hold your finger on the special button and the flurry of shots will continue to auto fire.
There are a number of viable builds based around this special, but my special so far is the power of Zeus and his lightning bolt special booster ‘Thunder Flourish’. It causes each of your arrows to trigger a lightning bolt on the thing you’re shooting at or something nearby. When you then add to this a number of other lightning buffing boons like ‘High Voltage’ to make your lightning bolts hit a large area and ‘Double Strike’ to give them a chance to hit twice, you’ll quickly see the damage start to stack up.
The secondary god in this build is Poseidon, with the goal being to trigger the Duo Boon ‘Sea Storm’, hopefull after getting ‘Tidal Dash’. If you do this you’ll not only be hitting enemies with multiple lighting bolt arrows that have enhanced powers but as you dash around and knock into them you’ll trigger more enhanced lightning strikes thanks to Sea Storm. The run in the video below is actually pretty weak. It took me a while to take down Hades and I didnt have any pacts of punishment in place. But I also didn’t manage to get the Sea Storm Duo Boon, and also missed out on a lot of other useful lightning enhancing boons that I would have liked. I’ve included Sea Storm in the list of boons below anyway, as regardless of it not being in the video, it’s really a good boon to aim for. What this shows is that even with just relying on the lightning special and not much else, you can make a viable build with the Rama bow.
If you haven’t yet unlocked the Aspect of Rama, follow the following instructions from the Hades Wiki on how to reveal the hidden aspect:
Reveal the Aspect of Rama by meeting the following requirements:
These are the key Boons in the build:
If you’ve found any of my guides helpful and you want to shout me a coffee to help power future work, feel free to do so through Ko-Fi below 🙂
2 Comments »