The Ultimate Lordrush Bear Hunt Guide

In the world of Lordrush, few events are as critical to your long-term account progression as the Bear Hunt (often referred to by veteran players as the Bear Trap). This recurring alliance event is the primary engine for acquiring Forgehammers, a rare resource required to unlock the true potential of your Mythic hero gear through Mastery Forging.

For a newbie, the event can seem like a chaotic frenzy of rallies and numbers. However, Bear Hunt damage is not random; it is a predictable and optimizable system. Success in this event is less about the individual strength of your account and more about Alliance Coordination. If you understand the "Rally Science" behind the Bear, you can punch far above your weight class and secure the top-tier rewards needed to accelerate your growth.

1. Event Fundamentals: How Bear Hunt Works

The Bear Hunt is a 30-minute window where alliance members launch rallies against a massive bear located at the Alliance Pitfall.

The Nature of the Bear

The most important rule of Bear Hunt is that the Bear deals zero damage to your troops. Because you are not receiving damage, traditional defensive stats like Health and Defense, as well as defensive hero abilities, are completely useless in this mode. Your sole objective is to deal the maximum amount of damage possible within a 10-turn expedition combat simulation.

Bear Hunt Rallies do not require any stamina to launch, but you can only launch one rally of your own at a time.

Rally Roles: Leaders vs. Joiners

To maximize damage, you must understand that a rally is composed of two distinct roles, each contributing different things to the battle:

• The Rally Leader (Captain): The person who initiates the rally. This player is the most important factor in the rally’s success because all of the Leader’s stats and bonuses apply to the entire rally. This includes their combat research, governor gear, charms, pet bonuses, and skins. The Leader also provides the Rally Capacity, which determines how many troops the alliance can fit into that march.

• The Rally Joiner: Players who send their troops to fill the Leader's rally. As a Joiner, your own gear, research, and individual hero stats do not count. Instead, your troops inherit the stats of the Rally Leader. The troops that you send influence your own personal Bear Hunt damage, but not other players. However, Rally Joiners do contribute one critical thing: Hero Abilities, and these absolutely impact other player’s damage outcomes. We will get more into that shortly.

You can run the Bear Hunt with your alliance and receive new rewards for it every 2 days. This means investment in Bear Hunt roughly translate into a massive boost in weekly Lordrush income for your account. As you improve your damage each time, you increase the total amount of important rewards you get like Forgehammers, Hero Gear XP, Basic Resources, and Alliance Tokens. Strong Performance in Bear Hunt considerably accelerates your early game and continues to be extremely helpful even as you get later into the game. Therefore learning how to excel at Bear Hunt is one of the best investments you can make in improving your gameplay.

2. Rally Science: Considerations for optimizing the Bear Hunt rally

This is where most new alliances fail. While a rally can have dozens of participants, the game logic only allows four hero abilities from the Joiners to be active at once. This means sending the wrong hero can completely mess up your Bear Hunt rallies’ chances of causing damage.

Priority Expedition Skills

When you join a rally, you can send up to three heroes. However, only the hero in the first position (marked with a green flag) contributes their skill to the rally. Then within that hero, only the first expedition skill they have listed (in the top right of their character window) is contributed to the rally as a potential joiner ability. For simplicity, we call this the Priority Expedition Skill. The skills of your second and third heroes are completely ignored.

Skill Selection Logic

The game uses a specific hierarchy to choose which four Joiner skills to activate for the rally from all potential joiner skills contributed:

• Skill Level First: The game picks the four eligible abilities with the highest skill level (e.g., Level 5 skills will always bump out Level 4 skills), regardless of what the skill actually does.

• Join Order Second: If there are more than four Level 5 skills provided (or more than four skills tied at the highest level), the game selects the four heroes who joined the rally first.

This is a common point of confusion for players. Many new players assume that its only the first 4 joiner heroes; however, this is only the tiebreaking logic for equivalently-levels joiner hero skills.

The Takeaway for Newbies: If you do not have a top-tier damage-boosting hero at a high skill level, it is often better to send no heroes at all. This ensures you don't accidentally "bump out" a potential 25% Lethality buff from a teammate with a useless Level 5 gathering or defensive skill.

So this begs the question: which heroes should you actually send? Read on below to find out.

3. The Hero Meta: Who to Send

Because the Bear Hunt rewards offensive damage, certain stats are vastly more valuable than others. Lethality and Attack are the kings of Bear Hunt stats, especially lethality and attack on archer troops. (See the formation section below to see why.)

The selection logic is a little bit different for your formation that is leading your own Bear Hunt Rally than the ones that are joining other players’ Bear hunt. Accordingly, there are different heroes that excel in both roles, which we outline in our Hero Tier List module. As more heroes are released into the game, we will continue to keep our Bear Hunt Tier Lists updated.

Bear Hunt Rally Leaders

For leading your own Bear Hunt Rally, you generally want the heroes that have the most offensive abilities and the highest stats that your troops can inherit. This generally means prioritizing mythic heroes, but there are some exceptions.

Because you are going to have the majority of your bear hunt formations (both for leading and joining) be composed of archer troops, the stats of the archer troop matter a lot as well as the abilities. Likewise for infantry heroes, the stats do not matter as much because you use so few infantry troops. Lancer is somewhere in the middle where skills matter more than stats, but the stats still matter.

This means when you are starting out with the initial first generation of heroes, your best heroes will be as follows:

• Infantry: The top choice is Sebastian by virtue of his 3 offensive abilities. He is followed by Valky, who has 2 offensive abilities that she brings. For free-to-play players who are not purchasing either of these heroes, your next best choice will be Bane. Despite having no offensive abilities, there are no other initial Generation 1 heroes who do. You will look to replace him when the next hero generation gets released a few weeks into your game.

• Lancer: Isabelle is the best hero choice for both free-to-play and spender players due to her 2 offensive skills and best possible stats for all first generation Lancer heroes. She is also extremely free-to-play accessible, so you should not bother using a purple Lancer Hero.

• Archer: Porter will be your best choice initially. Despite only having one offensive ability. This is primarily due to his high archer base stats, which your archer troops need in order to maximize their damage dealt to the Bear. He is technically accessible for free-to-play players, although much tougher to get if you are resource constrained. Therefore, the next best option that free-to-play Lordrush players should use is Cyprus. Like Hyeri and Miko, he has one offensive ability and is tied with them for archer base stats. However, you will likely be using Hyeri and Miko for your Bear Rally joiner formations whereas Cyrpus will not be used for that. So best to use Cyprus here.

An additional consideration is the exclusive ability of each hero, which is an extra unique ability that only Mythic (Orange) heroes have. Some heroes work on offensive rallies only and some work on defensive rallies only. Given that the only heroes with offensive widget abilities in the first generation of heroes are Sebastian and Valky, this doesn’t change the tier list much initially. However it does mean that certain later generation heroes will be more or less well suited for Bear Hunt rally leading depending on this exclusive ability. We track all of this in our Hero Tier List module

Bear Hunt Rally Joiners

The selection of which heroes you send to join other players’ Bear Hunt rallies is solely based on their priority expedition skill, and nothing else. At the start of the game, there are very few heroes with an offensive ability in their joiner ability slot for you to choose from. They are:

• Rita, who provides a 25% lethality bonus to the rally

• Hyeri, who provides a 25% lethality bonus to the rally

• Miko, who provides a 25% attack bonus to the rally

• And Sebastian, who provides a 25% lethality bonus to the rally. Please note that if you have Sebastian sufficiently built, you should prioritize sending him in your own Bear Hunt rally leading formation since he is far more valuable there than he is as a joiner.

(A “Priority Expedition Skill” or “Joiner Ability”)

There are no other viable Bear Hunt Rally Joiners in the initial generation of heroes at the start of the game. Future heroes will eventually add in more complex abilities which come with some pros and cons of using them versus other “safer” heroes. As they are released, we will incorporate them into our Hero Tier Lists.

4. The Perfect Bear Hunt Formation

The Bear Hunt is an event in which you will want to avoid the default even split between infantry, lancers, and archers. Even the traditional 50/20/30 PvP formation will not be helpful here. For the Bear, you need an asymmetrical "Glass Cannon" setup for your troop formation.

In order to get the perfect Bear Hunt formation, you would need to run a bunch of complex math involving every stat in your account, optimizing between different fractions of troops, square root formulas, and hidden stats of troops. Fortunately, you can be a reasonable amount off from the mathematical ideal and still get 90-95%+ of the damage with a general purpose “good enough” formation.

The 10/10/80 Formation

The standard recommended formation for Bear Hunt is 10% Infantry, 10% Lancers, and 80% Archers.

Why so many Archers? Archers have the highest base attack stat in the game and their usual drawback is that they are very weak when receiving damage. However, in the Bear Hunt game mode where you do not receive any damage, this is not a problem.

Why the 10%? Research into the game’s combat mechanics under the hood reveals that the troop factor of damage follows a square root scaling based on the number of troops sent. That means if you double the number of archers, you only increase damage output from archers by about 40%. Therefore, there are diminishing returns the more of a single troop type that you send to the Bear Hunt (or any formation for that matter.) And this means eventually sending 1 additional Lancer, or even 1 additional Infantry will eventually provide more damage than one additional Archer. It just so happens that the intersection point for most players is somewhere around a 10/10/80 split of Infantry, Lancers, and Archers.

As a side note, this also suggests that early game increases to your march size and rally size will have a significantly bigger impact on your Bear Hunt score than increases later in the game. This is again due to that square root scaling rule where marginal increases in troop numbers have diminishing returns. This consideration becomes important when selecting e.g., which research project to do next in your Academy.

5. Advanced Alliance Strategies

Once your alliance Masters the basics and advanced beyond the early game, you can consider transitioning to more equitable and/or high-yielding strategies.

Joiner Troop Caps

Because of the diminishing returns on troop numbers mentioned above, top alliances often set a Joiner Cap (e.g., 50,000 troops per joiner). This allows 14+ members to fit into a single high-stat "Whale Rally” rather than having the first few people fill it with 100,000+ troops each. This not only spreads the Forgehammer rewards across the entire alliance, but it raises the total alliance damage dealt to the Bear in aggregate.

Staggered Rallies

In a traditional Bear Hunt, everyone launches rallies at once as soon as they are able. In a Staggered Bear Hunt, the alliance coordinates launch times in waves (e.g., Wave 1 at 0s, Wave 2 at 60s, Wave 3 at…) that suits that reflects the number of players expected at a particular Bear Hunt.

The Benefit: This allows players to use the same "Joiner Heroes" (like Chenko or Yeonwoo) in multiple rallies because their troops return from Wave 1 in time to join Wave 2 or 3. This is increase in joiner hero cycle time improves the overall Bear Hunt scores for everyone.

There are different ways this can be performed, but frequently the strongest players position near the “inner ring” around the Bear Hunt Pitfall and launch their rallies first. Everyone must join the rally at the top of the list, not just the strongest one, to ensure all rallies are filled and damage is maximized. If players “skip rallies”, then their troops and heroes are tied up longer than necessary which hurts their score. It will also frustrate players who are following the rules and feel like they are missing out on the whale rallies because others didn’t. So it is essential to make sure the rules are followed and why it is recommended only as an advanced strategy after players have learned the basics.

6. Pro Tips for New Players

• Formation Presets: Create a specific Bear Hunt preset in your Governor Profile by selecting “Squad” at the bottom of the screen. This should have your best Joiner hero (e.g. Rita, Hyeri, or Miko) in the first slot and an 80/10/10 troop ratio (or some variation thereof). This allows you to join rallies instantly before they fill up.

• Trap Enhancement: Ensure your alliance leadership uses Hunting Arrows to maximize the Trap Enhancement level before the event begins. These are provided to all players for clearing Beasts in expedition mode. It is not necessary for you to use your own Hunting Arrows to receive the benefit of the bonus damage, so feel free to save them for the next Bear if the max bonus is already provided.

(Gaining Hunting Arrows for Bear)

• Placement Matters: Move your town as close to the pitfall as possible, while following any rules set forth by your alliance. Shorter travel time means your troops return home faster, allowing you to launch (and join) more Bear Hunt rallies within the 30-minute limit. Alliance leadership may prefer that the strongest Bear Rally Leaders get the closest position for everyone’s benefit.

Conclusion: Running Your Own Race

Bear Hunt is the best way to earn "free" strength for your account from the abundance of hero gear materials and resources you receive. By focusing on Hero selection, the 80/10/10 troop ratio, and Alliance coordination, you will maximize your Forgehammer income. Don't get discouraged if you aren't the top damage dealer, since there is no reward for ranking on the top of the damage leaderboard beyond the rewards bracket you are in. By being a "Smart Joiner" who sends the right skills, you make the entire alliance stronger, and the entire Alliance’s damage as well as your own.

Happy hunting!