🐻 Bear Trap / Bear Hunt
Kingshot Bear Trap guide
The alliance rally event that showers Forgehammers. Here's how it works, the one rule that decides your whole damage, and how to coordinate the 30-minute window so nobody wastes a rally.
Bear Trap in one breath: your alliance rallies a bear at the Pitfall building for 30 minutes. The bear never fights back — your troops can't die — so this is pure damage optimization, and the payout (Forgehammers for hero gear) is one of the best in the game. Win it by stacking your rallies behind your strongest leaders, not by everyone leading their own.
How the event works
- The bear appears at the Pitfall. Alliance members hit it with rallies for a fixed 30-minute window.
- The bear does not attack back and your troops cannot be injured or killed. That single fact changes everything about how you build for it (below).
- Your reward tier is driven by total damage — both your personal contribution and your alliance's combined total — so it's a team effort and a personal one at the same time.
Because nothing dies, defense is worthless here. Every point of defensive stat, every "tanky" hero, every survivability buff does literally nothing against the bear. Only Attack and Lethality convert into damage — and Lethality is the one to prioritise.
The one rule that decides your damage: leaders vs joiners
This is the part most players get wrong, and it's the difference between a good bear score and a wasted one:
- The rally leader carries the whole rally. A rally's power comes almost entirely from the leader's account — their combat research, Governor Gear, hero equipment, pet bonuses and active buffs all apply to everyone's troops in that rally.
- Joiners contribute far less than they think. When you join someone else's rally, only your first hero's first skill is contributed — none of your gear, research or other stats come along.
So the winning strategy is stacking: your few most-invested accounts lead the rallies, and everyone else joins them to fill the march to max size. Ten people each leading a weak rally scores badly; ten people filling two monster rallies led by your whales scores enormously. Agree who leads before the window opens.
Running more than one bear Player-reported
Almost every guide describes one bear. Organized groups don't play it that way. An alliance gets its own trap, and two is the number most players will ever see — but groups that have arranged themselves into sister alliances with adjacent hives (hive meaning the cluster where members' cities are packed together) coordinate their separate traps into a single evening, and as many as four can be run across the group.
Why that is worth the organizing: rewards scale with damage, and a player who contributes to more than one trap collects more than once. For the group it turns one roster into several full reward cycles in a night.
Staggering is the entire tactic. The window is 30 minutes. Two traps that overlap force every member to pick one; two traps set well apart let the same member hit both. The schedule is the strategy — agree the times across the sister alliances before the day, not during it.
The checklist for whoever is running it
- Name every trap. "Main hive", "sister alliance [TAG]", "north hive". A ping that just says "bear!" is useless when there are four of them.
- Publish the running order with start times in one agreed timezone, pinned where everyone can find it. Members plan their evening around it.
- Assign rally leaders per trap. The leader-and-joiner rule above applies to each trap separately — every trap needs its own strong leaders, so spreading your biggest accounts one per trap generally beats stacking them all on the first one.
- Track who is going where. The classic failure is everyone piling into trap one while the last trap launches with half-empty rallies.
- Arrows are per alliance. The donation multiplier lifts that alliance's damage, so every participating alliance needs its own arrows donated before its own trap — one alliance's prep does not carry the others.
⚠️ This is community practice reported by players who run it, not a documented game feature, and what a group can actually field varies with how many allied alliances and adjacent hives it has. Treat the coordination advice as sound and the exact number as "as many as your group can stagger".
Troops & stats Community consensus
Since only offense matters, you want the highest-damage composition your account can field. Community consensus for developed (roughly Gen 4+) accounts leans heavily on Archers, with a small cavalry share and a minimum block of infantry to hold march structure — commonly cited as a large archer majority, around a tenth cavalry, and a few thousand infantry. The exact split shifts with your generation and hero setup.
Stat priority is simple: Lethality first, then Attack. Ignore defense and health entirely for this event.
⚠️ Verify the exact ratio for your server: optimal troop splits move with server generation, troop tiers and game updates. Use the numbers above as a starting point and test your own damage — don't treat any single community ratio as gospel.
Heroes — pick for the role, not just the tier Community consensus
Because leaders and joiners contribute so differently, hero choice depends on your role:
- If you lead: use your strongest attack / lethality rally hero — the one your whole account is built around. This is where your investment pays off.
- If you join: remember only your first hero's first skill counts, so lead with a hero whose first skill is a damage or rally buff — the wrong hero here quietly lowers the rally's total.
Community guides converge on a handful of attack-oriented heroes for bear leads and a specific short-list of joiner leads. Rather than hard-code a list that shifts every patch, check the current picks against our own ranked data:
➡️ See the hero tier list (rally & damage) · Browse the hero database
Prep before the window: arrows & the attack multiplier
The bear fight starts before the bear appears. In the run-up, members complete intel missions to gather arrows, then donate those arrows to the bear trap. Those donations raise your whole alliance's attack multiplier against the bear — free damage for everyone, paid for by everyone chipping in beforehand. Make arrow donation a pinned reminder in the days before the event.
Rewards — why everyone shows up
The headline reward is Forgehammers, the material for upgrading hero gear — which is exactly why bear is one of the events players never skip. The reward mix shifts as your kingdom ages: newer servers see more early-progression rewards, while older servers get richer Forgehammer and hero-gear payouts. Whatever your server age, higher total damage = better tier = more hammers, which loops straight back into leading stronger rallies next time.
⚠️ Exact reward tables and damage caps vary by server generation and update — confirm the current tiers in your in-game event screen.
Bear Trap FAQ — the questions every alliance chat asks
Do my heroes matter when I join someone else's rally?
Only your first hero's first skill is contributed — none of your gear, research or other heroes come along. Your first slot matters a lot (put a damage or rally-buff skill there); the rest of your lineup doesn't affect the rally at all.
Can my troops die?
No — the bear never fights back, so there are no injuries and no losses. That's also why defensive stats are worthless here.
Should I lead or join?
Lead only if you're one of the alliance's strongest accounts; otherwise join and fill. The leader's whole account powers the rally — joiners mostly bring troops.
What do I spend Forgehammers on?
Hero gear upgrades — that's the whole loop: bear damage → hammers → stronger gear → more bear damage. Aim them at the right hero with the tier list.
How many bear traps can you run?
Two is what most alliances see. Groups organised into sister alliances with adjacent hives coordinate their separate traps into one night and run as many as four — the limit in practice is how many you can stagger, since overlapping traps make members choose instead of doubling up. See the multi-trap section above.
Why bother donating arrows?
Arrow donations raise the entire alliance's attack multiplier for the event — free damage for all 30 marches before the first rally launches.