I made it to stage 153 so far without hero mode (16 deaths) still just starting swordsman with armor on attack. Been using enchant attack and killing with poison/bleed/burn + armor damage. I also get defense skills like % physical reduction and damage resist and I usually get some extra max hp + hp on hit as well. ofc start with some points in skill cost reduction and star gain bonus. Pretty much every death comes from spider's lucky crit/flurry/multicast killing me in first 2 seconds of a round. :P
The easiest way I've found to get started is to pick swordsman and go for the armor-on-attack and/or hp gain on-hit tomes. If you can only get the hp one you may need to upgrade max hp a bit. Otherwise you just spam most of your points into armor-on-attack and attack speed and maybe a few into attack damage. Almost all the % based skills are pretty much useless until you get some decent starting power making a lot of other builds hard to pull off at the beginning.
hold your cursor above the red mark at about the height of your character and hold down the mouse button and just let go as soon as stuff comes in range and then press it down again. As long as it doesn't come too fast and you can 1 hit them you should be able to beat them all.
from what I can tell the combo doesn't seem to make much, if any difference for your score, but i've only been able to get triple A on that lvl myself so i'm not sure :(
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