This is the ultimate normal mode guide. Follow this guide, and you'll be able to carry normal mode even at extremely low levels. This goes through the entire process of clearing normal mode from start to finish. From the opening waves, how to play the mid-game, and how to scale your damage to the very end. It doesn't matter who your partner is. If you follow this guide, you'll be able to carry the team through.

To do this you're going to need these 3 artifacts at level 1 or higher

You need to start the match by stacking luck stones and coins from missions. You’ll want to have the artifact item “luck stone” to do this because every mission you complete after you get it will give you a luck stone on top of the normal reward for completing that mission. Your goal is to do Epic Roulette Summon to get one or two epics units on the board so you can easily kill the hunts before wave 10.

The most reliable way to get luck stones fast is to complete these missions:

If you have the Luck Stone artifact you’ll have gained +400 coins and +4 luck stones from those missions. If you merged commons and sold blues, thats an extra +1 or +2 luck stones on top of that. It’s highly recommended to not merge your bandits because they help generate coins, but if you haven't gotten bandits to level 6 yet, they generate 5x less coins and you could probably get away with merging and selling them to do another Epic Roulette Summon.

Once you get an epic, it’ll easily kill your hunts and bosses. 2 killed hunts gives you +4 more luck stones, and killing your hunt before wave 10 gives you +100 coins and another luck stone because of another mission. You’re going to need to save coins for the next part of the strategy anyways, so after completing all those missions you should try to save 1000 coins. This completes another mission, giving you another +50 coins, and another luck stone.

Total Mission Luck Stones/Gold not including bosses and sold rares:
+550 coins
+6 luck stones

Bosses and Hunts give +8 more.

If you spend all 14 luck stones on Epic Roulette Summon, you’ll average 3 to 4 epics after. With 2 upgrades to epic damage, they will carry you long enough to easily do the next parts to win normal mode without having to spend a single coin on summoning.

The next step in securing a win is rushing to get a strong DPS mythic. There’s a trick to this that allows you to get the odds of success really high – you need to summon a legendary guardian as fast as possible. There’s a really good reason for this. Legendary units themselves aren’t that strong. However, there are only 4 legendary units in the game, and every single one of them turns into a unit that can either solo, or almost solo normal mode, even if you only have safebox and moneygun 1. If it can’t solo it, you just need to spawn one more legendary unit and get a second mythic guardian.

Once you get a legendary, convert it like this:

• War Machine - Use it to summon Rocket Chu
• Storm Elemental - Lazy Taoist
• Sheriff - Verdee
• Tiger - Batman or Master Kun

There is a catch to some of these units though:

Rocket Chu has an ult that lets you transform him into a way stronger version. But there’s a chance he’ll fail and explode when you try to transform him. His success chance is 35% at level 1, and gets as high as 50% at level 6, so it’s extremely worth the upgrade.

Verdee is pretty strong, but her main attack (other than her ult) takes 10 seconds before it explodes, so you need to have plenty of stun for her to work. You should always have stun anyway though, so this isn’t such a big deal.

Batman is really strong, but his ability that makes him strong requires you to spend coins to upgrade him. This is very worth it, and +10 is a safe level to get him to. But coins are your main source of damage buff, so this is a big loss of damage. For this reason, it’s worth considering getting Master Kun instead. Master

Kun has a similar ability. Instead of upgrading +1 at a time in exchange for coins, he only upgrades when his ult is charged. When you use his ult, it gives him a random upgrade. If you get a weak upgrade, you’re going to have to wait for his ult to recharge. But since you can hold onto more coins, this is an upgrade in damage that’s worth it long term.

The biggest catch is Lazy Taoist. Lazy Taoist is an iconic guardian because he’s very strong. He’s arguably the strongest unit in the game. Similar to Verdee, his attacks are very slow and rely on you having a lot of stun. But his truly unique trait is that he’s extremely weak until he’s level 12, where he’s much stronger, and attacks twice as fast. Before level 12 you’re going to have lackluster results with him, but there’s unfortunately not a better option if you do get storm elemental, so he’s still worth a summon.

For the best results, you’ll want Rocket Chu, Verdee, Master Kun, and Lazy Taoist to all be level 6. Past that, check out the separate guide on mythic unlock/upgrade order.

Lastly, you will get more legendaries doing epic gamble than you will doing legendary gamble. The conversion from luck stone to legendary is actually cheaper doing epic gamble than it is legendary gamble. So not only will epics keep you alive until you get one, but you’ll get legendaries more frequently this way as well.

After merging those legendaries, you now have a mythic dps. Hopefully it wasn’t Taoist, and you’re in the clear. (this is why Tao 12 so good, other than the fact he's probably the strongest character in the game at level 12+) Even if it Tao, you need to shift your focus to setting up stuns. This section will be short. The jist of it is, if you stun all the enemies so they’re locked into one place, every attack you perform will hit every single enemy at one time. If you do this, you only need one or two dps mythics to clear normal. If you don’t have enough stun, and they’re just walking in a single file line, you’re only going to be able to hit some of them as they walk past, and you’re just not going to kill them. You could have 5 dps mythics, and you’ll probably still lose. 1 dps with enough stun to lock enemies in place will outdamage 5 dps mythics every time.

All you need to get results like that is 1 stack of purple stun robots and 2 stacks of blue stun robots, and you're set.

Just copy what's happening in the picture above and your runs will instantly become way easier. Unfortunately, this does assume your partner is doing a good amount of stun too. If they aren't, you can try to make up for it by doing this next setup.

(Ignore the part where it says to summon at 95 mobs, that's only for Hell Mode)

If you’re using physical damage units, they need defense reduction. Out of the guardians I listed earlier, the physical damage ones are

• Batman
• Rocket Chu
• Verdee

As you get to the higher waves, enemies start to have more defense. Magic damage isn’t affected by this, but physical damage is partially blocked by defense.

If you have high defense reduction, physical damage actually gets a buff of up to +90% damage, roughly 2x the damage. Here's an example of a 50% damage buff.

At worst, it will reduce your damage to -80% damage, ⅕ of the normal damage.

This means that if you have enough defense reduction you’ll do 10x the damage you’d do without it. Example math: 10 - 80% is 2, 10 + 90% is 19. 19 is just 1 digit shy of 10x more damage.

It tops out around 200 defense reduce, where you don’t gain much past that. This picture will show you how to check how much damage you’re gaining or losing from defense reduction.

You can get more defense reduction mainly by summoning Monopoly Men and Hunters.

Hands down the biggest damage buff you’ll ever get in the game is through stacking coins with Safe Box, and using those saved coins to boost your damage with Money Gun. Nothing even comes close to this.

We don't have the specific formula on how much damage Money Gun adds to damage yet. However, it becomes very clear once you start getting 100k+ gold, that it increases damage by a massive amount. If we assume the damage is a specifically "0.91% x each gold coins held" It would translate like this -

100k gold x .91% = 910% damage

How can you get 100k gold? Even with safebox 1 you can get a lot of gold. I got 80k on the last game I played on an alt account with Safe Box 1. The idea is - do the missions at the start of the game, get your epics, and then do everything in your power to summon as little as possible for the rest of the game. Need stuns? Do Rare Roulette Summon until you get blue stun robots. Need epics or legendaries? Do Epic Roulette Summon. If you need a common to summon a DPS Mythic, it can be worth summoning to get it, but if it’s early and you can survive off just your epics, wait a little bit so that your coins have time to build more interest. If you don't NEED to spend gold to summon somehting, and you'll stay alive, you shouldn't be spending gold. By the later waves, you should be able to be making 1000-5000 coins per wave just from safebox alone, not including the rest of the coins from killing monsters.

The last thing you need to buff your damage is also the simplest thing - mythic damage upgrade.

Many mechanics are very difficult to actually measure. Luckily, this upgrade is the easiest to understand upgrade in the game. The mythic damage upgrade costs 2 luck stones at the start. Every time you do it the cost goes up by one luck stone and you get an extra +50% damage.

The way this is calculated is:

(all your other damage buffs/debuffs) * (1 + .5 * Upgrades)

I'll translate this into easier to read percent bonuses:

• 2 upgrades = +100%
• 4 = +200%
• 8 = +400%
• 16 = +800%
• 31 (max) = +1550%

Or you can read them in the terms of "how much does each upgrade multiply my damage" as well:

• 2 upgrades = 2x damage
• 4 = 3x damage
• 8 = 5x damage
• 16 = 9x damage
• 31 (max) = (almost) 17x damage

Keep this upgrade in mind. Early on, do your epic gambles and get some dps. You don't need these damage bonuses early on. Upgrade mythic damage throughout the game. If at some point you really want to upgrade mythic damage heavily, towards the end when you’re making a ton of money from safe box you can max out your summon chance, spam summon, and sell a bunch of guardians and you can use the luck stones from that to upgrade even further.

If you use these things, you can carry normal mode even at low levels. The only issue is sometimes it can be difficult to get safe box or money gun. Some players are unlucky with keys at the start. To help with this, I recommend you join the discord. There’s a channel called “first-clear-help” that has players willing to help you through hard mode, and sometimes hell mode, to get your first clear rewards. This will help you not only get more keys to try and get safe box and money gun, but it will also get you mythic stones, helping you level your mythics.