Clicker Heroes: Reload

Clicker Heroes has 9 abilities you can learn as the game progresses. Each ability does something and then goes on cooldown for a set length of time before you can use it again. One of those abilities, reload, has an hour long cooldown and reduces the cooldown of your previously used ability by an hour. We were chatting about the game the other day on Skype and were trying to find ways to make good use of this ability.

First of all, 6 of the other abilities all last 30 seconds, have durations ranging from 10 minutes to an hour, and give you a combat relevant buff. It clicks for you, or your clicks are more powerful, or you make more gold when you click... They're all multipliers that stack with each other and the best way to use them is to pop them all for the same 30 second stretch of time. Initially it seemed like the thing to do would be to figure out which ability of those 6 was the best one, reset it, and pop it again in the same window. Unfortunately it turns out that doesn't actually give you a second application of whatever ability you reset. It probably refreshes the duration but it doesn't give you any extra power. And since 2 of these abilities are on an hour long cooldown there's no way to use reload to sync them all up for a different 30 second window.

The next ability is energize which has an hour long cooldown and doubles the power of the next ability you use. It interacts with reload in odd ways. For one, you can never actually reset the cooldown of energize. Reload skips energize and resets the cooldown of the ability used before the energize. Reload can be energized and if you do so it knocks an hour off the cooldown of your previous two abilities used, skipping the energize itself. In an interesting turn of events if reload itself was one of those two abilities it will consume the buff but it won't actually reset the cooldown of reload. This means if we could find two things worth refreshing we could do them both at the same time. I guess you could actually use this to reset the cooldown of both hour long buffs from the previous paragraph to allow you to pop your combo 2 times every hour and a half instead of once an hour. I'm pretty sure just using the energize on the combo itself would be a better thing to do, though.

The last ability is the one that really screams for a reload. Dark ritual has an 8 hour long cooldown and gives you a permanent 5% damage boost. Extra damage is good! If you could target your reload on an ability of your choice things would be easy and you'd just use it on dark ritual. Unfortunately only having it impact your most recently used ability means you need to be careful about your clicking order and it means you can't just spam the reload on dark ritual. If you time things careful you can pull off two reloads per dark ritual, though. Use dark ritual, use reload, and then do nothing else. In an hour come back, use energize, and use reload. This will reload your two most recently used non-energize abilities which happen to be reload and dark ritual. This only works once (try it again and you're reload two reloads) but it does work. Getting to use dark ritual every 6 hours instead of every 8 hours is totally worth it. I don't think there's another relevant use for reload, but this one use is pretty good.

It gets even better once you unlock some ancients! One of the ancients permanently reduces the cooldowns of all your abilities. At max rank (where I have him) he takes a full 75% off of the cooldown for every ability. This means my dark ritual only has a 2 hour cooldown and my reload only has a 15 minute cooldown. I can use an energized dark ritual every 30 minutes! (Energize, dark ritual, reload... energize, reload... Repeat.) I can even use my other abilities as bookends right before the first energize and right after the second reload. It's pretty sweet. I was trying to figure out a way to do better than that, but the problem really is that you need to use the second energize on reload or there's no way to get the dark ritual cooldown under an hour. So you can do one 10% buff each hour while using your full combo 3 times in the hour or you can do two 10% buffs each hour and never do your full combo. If you really need to use your full combo on a boss you could leave dark ritual unused for an extra 15 minutes and do one 10% buff and one full combo every 45 minutes as a compromise between the two. Or you could just not buff one of the dark rituals I guess... Do a 10% and a 5% each hour. That's better than the last option. So, yeah... Always reload the dark ritual, always energize the second reload, and maybe energize the dark ritual or your combo depending on your current boss killing needs.