Mini guide for easy Hero mode in Elona Shooter

Mini guide for easy Hero mode in Elona Shooter:


PC Class.


Start as a Rogue.

Rogue makes enormous amount of money, especially later on. Use money to upgrade Villa when you need more damage, rest of the money will go to upgrading bowgun, Trainer and Wall. Later most of income is spent on Trainer - you get levelups more often, thus get more money from kills to level up trainer more often. Vicious cycle.


Skills:


Power Shot is great, max it first, Killer>Sense>>Luck>Threat.
 Aimed Shot may be useful when you get lv100 bowgun or higher when fire rate is capped (i dont know exact fire rate cap, but its probably 1 bolt per frame)
Accuracy is harmful for bowgun.
Reload is useless.


Weapon:


You can get Hunter's bowgun(lv1 rifle requirement instead of lv3 for Bowgun) at start by hiring hunter and taking his weapon.

Get a 4-6 sloted Bowgun ASAP with mods: leech, autofire, fire rate, fire rate, autofire, fire rate. Order is important, however you can put Leech after autofire.

Reforging weapon removes last mod so make sure to not remove first 3, they are the key to win the game. Keep a stock of 3-4 useless mods that can be inserted in bowgun (no reload/ammo/autoreload) to insert before reforging.

When equipped with first 3 mods you can just hold the mouse button and spray bolts. When  fire rate is sufficient, you can just aim very close to your character to spray bolts all over the screen.
When you hit fire rate cap, start upgrading Aimed Shot (slows rate of fire by 70% at lv10), then swapping Fire Rate mods with Damage mods.

Never add lv3 mods after lower level ones, remove those first with several reforges.

If you can find second 6-slotted Bowgun, KEEP IT. Upgrade it whenever you have free AP/gold and slowly prepare a set of mods. Its much easier to upgrade unmodded weapon. You can swap weapons every 20-40 "Mk." levels, depending on how fast you can find full mod replacement. IF you lack damage, simply upgrade villa a bit.

Reforge randomizes resulting weapon's value. Cancel reforge if it increases value too much.
Engineer skill level is only applied to newly inserted mods. However, when you reforge weapon, ALL mods bonuses are recalculated using current engineer bonus. Sometimes its useful to upgrade guns just for this.


Allies:


Absolutely necessary party skills: Engineer(huge bonus to mods efficiency), Leadership (~Halves ally's aim delay), Active (AP is used everywhere)
Good to have party skills:: Defender, Quick Eyed, Cook, Threat

Get ally with Engineer first, if you can.

Allies are needed for quick support/crowd control vs mobs that passed between your bolts, so they need instant-damage guns, and preferrably shouldnt kill enemies after you level required party skills. After leveling party skills focus on reload skill.
My preference is 2 sheriffs(dr holiday, cripple shot. leadership) and 1 Hunter(engineer, rest doesnt matter). Avoid leveling accuracy to keep splash wide enough. Weapon is auto shotgun. Mods are double reload + double ammo, 1-2 fire rates on sheriff, 1-2 impact on hunter. Leech is unnecessary.
Set allies to "attack air mobs", "do not shoot boss", "defend"

Preferred use of low-level guns. Your kills should go to Rogue PC.
To level allies, get normal Shotgun with damage/anti-armor mods (lv2s are fine too) and make them kill bosses. Getting 3x 5-6 slotted  autoshotguns will take a while either way.

Take a note that AI will try to reload between waves if it got no targets to shoot, so more ammo mods play a key role for sustained fire. Low accuracy is important to keep splash area big, however allies will miss the target too often, thats why you need Fire Rate mods. Impact is necessary to prevent enemies from attacking walls, however Sheriff has 'builtin' Impact mod.

Dont be hesitant to dismiss ally in favor of new recruit with skills you need. One time i've had Hunter that never got Engineer for 100 days.
Do not focus-train(click on skill) any skills when ally didnt learn required skills yet.

AP spending:

Always party if you lack damage. However if you can safely kill enemies, better use AP elsewhere.
Dinner with maxed out party skill 'Cook' is very good option until you get very high trainer levels.
Whenever you have money and free AP, upgrade Bowgun. If you have spare Bowgun, upgrade it even above your skill level.
Avoid using special trainer until you get all necessary skills. It can train useless stuff. Overall pretty bad choice.
Rob/Eggs are nice very early, but is a waste of AP later on, since Rogue generates too much money in comparison.
Until you get a good 4+ slotted bowgun, spend AP to refresh the shop.
Later on, its preferred to spend leftover AP on 'Go Searching'. It gives a little bit of everything you need.
Get quick-eyed party skill before using Go Searching, if possible.

When desperate for bowgun mods, use "Recycle Gun" on expensive (3-5k+ value) weapons, preferrably from boss waves.
Searching the town with Quick Eyed may give more mods than refreshing shop stock. You get random bonuses in the meanwhile as well.

Medals:

Important:
Random extra AP (boomer and the like)
Gun Mania
Hard Badge

Good to have:
Impossible Badge  (more money when rob museum early)
Starting money medals.
Starting skill ones (not necessary, you can learn all of those normally as a Rogue)

You can get most medals with casual mode/laptop difficulty and other easy-mode options. Noble or Duelist are good medal earners.

Upgrades:
Villa when needed, always priority if you need more damage.
Repairman to lv2-3 to make it easier to get perfect games early. After you get leech mod, useless.
House to max out party. Getting allies early is important.
Smith. Upgrading smith re-rolls the shop inventory for free, so do this when you have some extra cash to buy nice stuff.
Walls when you have free cash. More important early, later "Go searching" will become main source of wall upgrades.
Sandbags, however dont spend more money than on upgrade walls - you need something like 100k gold to max it out, too expensive early.
Storage to be able to get all weapons from boss day.
Trainer. Exp is the key.
Looter is supposed to boost weapon levels from Boss day and stuff. Dunno if it actually works, but i still level it with leftover cash.

Unnecessary upgrades:
Sp. Trainer - too much AP, better explore the town with quick-eyed bonus.
Museum - too slow to pay back even with all medals. Better invest in PC.
Sisters - kills with sisters dont crit. No crits = no mooney. Also triggered by bowgun all at once. Useless. Payback with Love party skill is very slow as well.
Chicken - slow to pay back, and you need to spend AP to make use of it.



If you dont want to use bowgun rogue for whatever reason, make sure your allies can actually kill targets in 1-2 shots.

Duelist is much stronger than Hunter and both got Engineer. Revolver is the best weapon.
Sheriff is a good armored target killer with basic shotgun(autoreload lv3 and anti-armor mods)
Noble/Ranger with gravity gun are very powerful, high reloading skill levels make them deadly, especially as PC.
Chaingun is pretty good and fun weapon for PC.
Grenade launcher is vastly superior to slow as hell(very slow animation) rocket launcher. Grenades are very nice to get rid of dragonflies, you can use it as backup weapon for thoose.
Shotguns are the most powerful weapons overall for longer games. Best possible damage-per-shot scaling and decent rate of fire.
Noble with autoshotgun is the most powerful one-hit kill class later, not much weaker than Sniper but with much faster rate of fire.

Keep in mind that all weapons have preferred range (long/medium/short) and normally allies will chose target within preffered range with "Attack mobs in weapon range" option. Long range weapons usually give birth to highest kill count among the team. You can use normal shotgun(short range) instead of autoshotgun(medium range) to focus sheriffs on defense, to avoid taking kills from your long-range rogue.
For the same reason, Rogue better have long range weapon: Bowgun, Machinegun, Hunter's rifle, Sniper revolver, Sniper rifle.
Duelist/Noble that have naturally high damage are good at clearing enemies in midrange - you dont need to invest much in their weapons for them to be effective.