Everything You Need To Know About Bear Hunt in Whiteout Survival

Bear Hunt is an alliance event that can be repeated every 2 days (47,5 hours to be exact) and lasts for 30 minutes. Players can call or join a rally to attack the Raging Bear and are rewarded based on the total damage dealt.

Although this is an alliance event, the total damage you deal as an alliance is largely inconsequential due to the insignificant amount of alliance rewards compared to the personal ones. What matters is the damage dealt by individual players, so every player should make it their goal to increase their damage output as much as possible, this can be achieved in number of ways but more on that later. Of course one should still take into consideration the alliance as a whole and help weaker players pass higher damage thresholds so more members get better personal rewards.

Bear Hunt Rewards

Rewards you can get comprise of two categories - alliance and personal. You can get alliance rewards even if you have not actively participated in the Bear Hunt, while personal rewards are solely based on your damage dealt to the Bear.

Alliance Damage Rewards

In a new server, alliance rewards will be Sergey shards and several thousand alliance shop tokens.

Around the time when the server enters Fire Crystal age, or generation 2 of heroes, Sergey shards will be replaced with Essence Stone.

Personal Damage Rewards

Personal rewards come in several ranges and increase in quality the higher damage threshold you pass.

Tip: If you know you will not be able to pass the next damage threshold, stop joining rallies (but still start one) and let other alliance members get a chance to get more damage in and possibly pass another threshold to get better rewards. It is a nice thing to do and it will not actually cost you anything. Of course if you need/want to test how much damage you are missing to reach another threshold for yourself, you will want to push as much damage as possible, but you don't need to do that every Bear.

How To Maximize Bear Damage?

There are number of ways that you, as an individual, and as an alliance can increase the damage you inflict upon the Bear and we will discuss them further in this guide in more detail.

The thing you need to understand is that a 'Bear Rally' is really no different from a rally against a facility, Sunfire Castle or a player city. Only difference is, the Bear does not fight back, so all you need to focus on is offense.

Trap Enhancement

The most straightforward way to increase bear damage is to enhance the Bear Trap.

From the event page, or by clicking on the trap, you can select 'Trap Enhancement' option, there you can donate 'Explosive Arrowheads' you get from slaying beasts. When enough Arrowheads are donated, the trap is enhanced to a new level and everyone will have their Troop Attack increased against the Bear.

By donating Arrowheads, you are also rewarded with 200 Alliance Tokens per 1 Arrowhead. This is a very good way to get more Alliance Tokens to buy whatever you desire from the Alliance Shop.

You can donate Arrowheads even if the enhancement is at max level to receive the Alliance Tokens, but any donated Arrowheads at that point will NOT transfer to the next Trap so consider that.

You can also dismantle the Bear Trap at any point without losing any donated Arrowheads, they will carry over to the new trap.

How To Be a Rally Leader?

If you are starting a rally, you are the rally leader. This means different rules apply to you from those who join your rally. This is crucial to understand because if you do not, everyone in your rally, including you, suffers the consequences.

As rally leader, all three of your Heroes use all of their Expedition skills (up to 9 with all mythic heroes). So it is paramount to use your best - combat - heroes who have the best offensive skills and are of the highest star-level so they can also provide the highest possible % bonus (Attack and Lethality) and have the Expedition skills leveled up.

I am using Flint, Molly and Bahiti, so I provide 8 Expeditions skills in total as rally leader.

The worst thing you can do is to use weak (blue, or low-star) heroes, heroes who have zero combat skills (e.g. Gina), or use no heroes at all! If you do this, everyone in your rally will score very low damage!

How Can You Increase Your Bonuses as Rally Leader?

• Strong Heroes - Mythic heroes of the newest generation are obviously the best choice, but it will depend on how developed your heroes are, for a time your heroes from previous generation might be stronger, so it will be different for every player. Simply try to use your best Infantry, Lancer and Marksman heroes at the time.
• Hero Gear - Use high level mythic gear, which you can also Forge to further increase its Lethality stat. If you don't have mythic gear, use what you have, but lower tier gear is vastly inferior. You should look for ways to get a a full mythic set for each hero class, you will benefit greatly from that. Start with Headgear and Boots for each hero since those are the two pieces providing Lethality bonus. Exclusive Hero Gear also plays an important part because through it, the individual heroes can provide large increases of Lethality and some extra bonus skills.
  
  • You can equip Hero Gear at Furnace Level 15.
• Chief Gear - It provides bonus to Troops Attack and Defense, the better gear you have, the higher bonus.
  • You can use Chief Gear at Furnace Level 22.
• Chief Charm - It provides bonus to Troops Lethality and Health, the better charms you have, the higher bonus.
  • You can use Chief Charm at Furnace Level 26.
• Pets - They provide Troops Attack and Defense bonus for leveling up and Lethality and Health bonus for Refining. Leveling and Refining pets is very expensive and unless you are spending money, it will take a long time to max your Pets. Be efficient and focus on the pets which skills you want to increase first.
  • You get access to Pets at Furnace Level 18, if your server is older than 60 days.
• Daybreak Island - The Tree of Life itself provides Troops Attack at level 5 and Troops Lethality at level 10. And then there are several buildings (Decorations and Accessories) which provide Troops Attack and Lethality buffs to all troops or specific troops type.
  • You get access to Daybreak Island at Furnace Level 19.
• Technology - Research stat buffs in your Battle branch tech tree to get better bonuses. Same goes for alliance technology.
• Facilities - You can get extra Troop Attack bonus for your alliance by being in control of several facilities. You can stack the buffs, but only from facilities of different levels. So for example you can get a combined +13% Troops Attack by holding one Level 2 and one Level 4 facility. But if your alliance holds two Level 2 facilities, you will only get bonus from one of them.
• City Bonus Buffs - You can increase your Troops Attack and Lethality with these, but they cost a lot of gems and getting them from events is rare, unless you pay money for packs. So spending them for Bear every 2 days is not advised. But if you turned them on before the Bear for a different reason, know these can increase your damage here too.
• VIP Levels and Jeronimo - If you are a heavy spender and have maxed out Jeronimo, when you are a really leader, you and everyone else in your rally will benefit from his passive skill Natural Leader which increases Troops Lethality and Health by 15% even if you don't actively use him in the rally. But to max Jeronimo, you need to get to VIP level 12 which in itself also provides another Troops Attack and Lethality bonus of 16%.
• VIP Levels and Natalia - In an update during July 2024, Natalia received a buff where she got a new passive skill, similar to Jeronimo, which grants 2%/4%/6%/8%/10% Troop Attack and Defense per star, meaning spending any money in the game will unlock enough Natalia shards to bring her to a 1-Star and give you a 2% Troop Attack bonus.
• Skins - Some skins in the game actually provide combat bonuses and having more skins allows you to stack these bonuses to a meaningful stats increase. Although for the Bear purposes, you are interested only in 'City skins' which provide +2% Troop Attack bonus and 'Teleport skins' which provide +2% Troop Lethality bonus each.

How To Join a Rally?

Joining a rally follows different set of rules compared to starting a rally. This is the 'other side of the coin' you need to understand to be able to score high damage in Bear Hunt.

Players who join a rally can only contribute with the first Expedition skill from the hero in the first position in their march.

Jessie is one of the best heroes to join a Bear Rally with because at level 5, her first Expedition skill provides flat 25% damage increase to all troops.

Meaning you need to sort the heroes in a specific order (at least the 1st hero) and not rely on auto-sort from the game by default. Make use of Formations and save loadouts before the Bear starts!

Click on the red minus sign to remove the hero and place a correct one in its position.

Tip: Did you know you can also simply swap the heroes around by holding your finger on the first hero and moving it over another in line? So getting Jessie in 1st position in the example above takes literally 1-2 seconds with swipe of a finger!

But this goes deeper, only four players from everyone who joins the rally can provide a skill buff for the rally, and it is important to understand how this selection process works to know how to avoid screwing it up.

• First four players joining rally will provide a buff, and priority is given only to the skill level.

Examples of correct and incorrect Expedition skills provided as buffs from heroes of first four players who joined the rallies.

This means that the only way for 5th or later player to be able to replace a previous buff with theirs is if they joined with a hero whose first skill is of a higher level. But if all heroes already have skill level 5, it cannot be replaced. Only way to change the buff is to remove the previous player from the rally.

Example of Rally Bonus From Joining Players

• For the purposes of this example, please ignore that it is from a Berserker Cryptid rally, that is irrelevant, the rules still apply.

As you can see, Ilyaze, Sinti, Malu and GHT8 were the first four players to join the rally, meaning the heroes in the first positions they joined with would provide their first Expedition skill as a bonus buff for the rally.

But when we look at the Rally Bonus detail, we can see that a buff from Malu's Seo-yoon is missing, that is because she only has the first Expedition skill at level 3 thus her buff got replaced by a 5th player joining the rally, A1B2C3, and their Molly's skill which is level 5.

Rally in the example above would get NO bonus to damage or attack towards the Bear.

What Else Can We See On the Picture?

Barbie and Antolozza joined with Jessie (2x +25% damage) and Love with Jasser (+20% damage (LVL4 skill)), which would be the correct heroes to join a Bear Rally with and had they joined first, the rally would get a bonus of +70% damage. But in this case they would be completely wasted, because first heroes of players who joined before them already have their first Expedition skill at level 5, so it cannot be replaced by later joiners. To make use of the proper buffs, rally leader, iov, would have to remove Ilyaze, Sinti and GHT8 from the rally. Then, Barbie, Antolozza and Love would be able to provide the correct buffs.

So What Have We Learned?

If any of the first four players join the rally with wrong heroes and those heroes have their first Expedition skill at level 5, the rally will get useless buffs that have no impact on damage done to the Bear, which means lower damage for entire rally. And only way to replace those wrong buffs is to remove the player from the rally entirely by the rally leader (R5/R4 cannot remove players from Bear Rally).

How Can We Avoid This?

You should only join Bear Rallies with correct heroes in the first position of each of your marches.

If you run out of correct heroes, either send in the first position a hero who has their first Expedition skill of level 4 or lower; or simply do not send any heroes at all, just send troops.

• Sending no heroes will lower the Troops Deployment Capacity (how many troops you can send in a march) which might be a problem for players who do not have more march slots and would then be forced to leave some troops home.
• For those players sending heroes with low level Expedition skill is preferable.
• You should pre-save your troop Formations with correct heroes before the bear starts, there is little time during the chaos to manually adjust it for every march.

Heroes Do No Direct Damage to the Bear

By the way, heroes do no direct damage to the Bear, but they do CONTRIBUTE towards the final damage via their Expedition skills! Meaning they do not use their Exploration skills (left side skills) to deal damage.

This should make complete sense, since that is why the skills are designated for Exploration or Expedition in the first place, and Bear Rally is an Expedition type of deal. But I have had several people in the past fight me to death that they need to join with their strongest heroes (not the ones providing the correct buffs) otherwise they will deal less damage. So this section is for them, and for anyone thinking that heroes actually attack the Bear. No, heroes provide Expedition skills which boost the troops that attack the Bear.

We have tested this in stable conditions with our farms, where we made sure that the only variable was whether I (SintiFARM) added heroes or not. And as you can see from the picture, I did the exact same amount of damage with and without heroes.

I will admit that the phrasing of what is happening, or the representation of it, especially if you look at regular battle reports, can look like heroes do deal damage, because next to their Expedition skills you see a damage number. But again, that is a representation of how much damage troops did through those Expedition skills, not heroes themselves.

Best Heroes to Join Rally With

As we have learned, you want to use heroes who have the first Expedition skill that can provide either damage buff or attack buff to your troops. This can be a direct increase or a chance to increase. Debuffs on the enemy actually work too, for example increasing their damage taken.

Image made with the assistance of Tierkmaker.

S Tier

Heroes that provide substantial and direct Attack or Damage increase. Best heroes to use because their Expedition skill can stack with each other.

• [1] Jessie (Lancer) - Increasing damage dealt by 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% for all troops.
• [1] Jasser (Marksman) - Increasing damage dealt by 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% for all troops.
• [1] Seo-yoon (Marksman) - Increasing Troops Attack by 5%/10%/15%/20%/25%.
• [1] Jeronimo (Infantry) - Increasing damage dealt by 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% for all troops.
• [4] Reina (Lancer) - Increasing normal attack damage by 10%/15%/20%/25%/30% for all troops.
• [5] Gwen (Marksman) - Increasing target's Damage Taken by 5%/10%/15%/20%/25%.
• [7] Bradley (Marksman) - Increasing Attack by 5/10/15/20/25% for all troops.
• [8] Sonya (Lancer) - Increasing damage by 4%/8%/12%/16%/20% for all troops.
• [9] Magnus (Infantry) - Increasing Troops Attack by 5%/10%/15%/20%/25%.

A Tier

Heroes that provide direct Attack or Damage increase, but less than S-tier heroes or have some added conditions/restrictions.

• [2] Philly (Lancer) - Increasing Attack by 3%/6%/9%/12%/15% and Defense by 2%/4%/6%/8%/10% for all troops.
• [5] Norah (Marksman) - Decreasing Damage Taken by 3%/6%/9%/12%/15% and boosting Damage Dealt by 3%/6%/9%/12%/15% for Infantry and Marksman.
• [7] Edith (Infantry) - Reducing damage taken by 4/8/12/16/20% for Marksmen, and suppresses the enemy, increasing damage dealt by 4/8/12/16/20% for Lancers.

B Tier

Heroes that provide a (relatively high) chance to damage increase, but not a guaranteed one. And heroes that provide damage increase during X amount of turns. Problem is, we do not know how many turns there are in a Bear Rally attack since we do not have a Battle Report like for a regular rally attack. So one can argue that some of these heroes actually provide NO benefit at all. Hard to tell without rigorous testing in stable conditions, which is virtually impossible to achieve in an average alliance.

• [3] Mia (Lancer) - Grants all troops' attack a 50% chance of cursing the target, increasing their damage taken by 10%/20%/30%/40%/50%.
• [4] Lynn (Marksman) - Granting a 40% chance of increasing damage dealt by 10%/20%/30%/40%/50% for all troops.
• [6] Renee (Lancer) - The troops she commands can place Dream Marks on their targets every three turns, dealing extra 40%/80%/120%/160%/200% Lancer Damage once next turn. The Dream Marks last for 1 turns.
• [6] Wayne (Marksman) - Allows friendly troops to launch an extra attack every 4 turns, dealing 20%/40%/60%/80%/100% damage.
• [7] Gordon (Lancer) - Every 2 attacks, Lancers deals 20/40/60/80/100% extra damage and apply poison to the target for 1 turn. Poisoned enemies deals 4/8/12/16/20% less damage.

C Tier

Heroes that provide a chance to damage increase, but with a very low chance. Still better than nothing :)

• [2] Flint (Infantry) - Grants all troops' attack a 20% chance of setting the target on fire, dealing 8%/16%/24%/32%/40% damage per turn for 3 turns.
• [3] Logan (Infantry) - Granting all troops' attack a 20% chance of dealing 8%/16%/24%/32%/40% extra damage per turn for 3 turns.
• [3] Greg (Marksman) - Granting a 20% chance of increasing damage dealt by 8%/16%/24%/32%/40% for all troops for 3 turns.

D Tier

Heroes that provide absolutely NO benefit for a Bear Rally attack as a joiner.

• Everyone else.
• Only use these heroes to join with, if their first Expedition skill is level 4 or lower and you don't have any hero from a higher tier to join with and need any hero for the purpose of increasing your Troops Deployment Capacity for the march.

Troop Formations

This is one area which I am not very well experienced in, thus I will not be giving a comprehensive troop ratios for each generation and so on. There are some guide-pictures you can find online, or ask on WOS discord or reddit and people will give you their opinion.

Why am I not experienced in this area? Because after 6 months of playing the game, the troop ratios have so far been largely inconsequential for me. I had no need to do anything but 33/33/33 spread of infantry, lancer and marksman.

To be fair, I did test the damage output of each unit type, and my conclusion is that in a "vacuum" (meaning no bonuses affecting only a specific unit type) - marksman do the most damage, followed by lancers and then infantry. If we take marksman as 100% baseline, then lancers do about 80-90% damage and infantry about 20-30% damage.

Knowing this, using a heavy marksman+lancer ratio would be preferable, so something like 10/30/60 should work very well.

But why did I not need to care about troop ratio so far? Because simply I did not have enough troops at first to even be able to afford to change the ratio of my formation. And when I did get enough troops to do that in most, or all, of my marches, it was not necessary anymore, because I was reaching the damage threshold even without it, and could not reach the next damage threshold even when I was min-maxing the troop ratios. And one more Essence Stone is not worth the hassle to me at this point.

When Fire Crystal Troop skills come into play, they further favor marksman and lancer over infantry, and when late generation heroes arrive who have skills that boost damage of specific unit types, the troop ratios which you would want to be using can change. Generally either leaning more towards majority of lancers or marksman. I don't think any skill can save how little damage output infantry has, but maybe I am wrong saying that.

So this is why I don't go into detail with troop compositions.

Random Tips and Information

March Speed to the Bear

The lowest march speed to the Bear is 12 seconds. You cannot go lower than that even though it can sometimes look like you hit 11 seconds, but that is just game information not updating properly.

If you have a higher marching speed, especially if you are further away from the Bear Trap, increasing March Speed is very useful to get your march to the Bear faster and also to get your troops back home faster, so you can join another rally sooner.

There are few ways how you can increase your Troops Marching Speed - and you need to understand that this is a different 'speed stat' from the 'Solo Hunt Marching Speed' (or sometimes called 'Wilderness March Speed') which plays a role in PVE (hunting beasts, polar terrors, mercenaries and traveling to gathering places).

• Lv. 3 Expedition Facility - 15 % increase in Troops Marching Speed.
• Lv. 5 Rock Outpost (Daybreak Island Decoration) - 5 % increase in Troops Marching Speed (1% per level).
• Snow Leopard's pet skill 'Lightning Raid' - 30 % increase in Troops Marching Speed (15/17/19/21/23/25/27/30%).

Ideally, you want your march speed to the Bear be under 30 seconds if you can help it. This means you can start five 5 minute rallies, which is the maximum amount of rallies any player is able to create in a 30 minutes time-frame period.

I have seen some people suggest, that Gina or Walis can at least increase your marching speed back to your city from the Bear after the attack is done. But I was unable to confirm these suspicions, a rally I joined with Gina had the same marching time to Bear and from Bear for me. It was 27 seconds so if there should have been any cutdown on the marching time, it would have been noticeable.

Starting a Rally With 1 Troop

This can be an effective strategy, if your alliance has a lot of players online for the Bear Hunt.

It allows you to not tie down a portion of your troops in your own rally for 5 minutes, but to have them available to keep hopping in between other rallies. Mind you this will only increase your total damage if you are able to gain more damage from those troops in a 5 min interval than you would get if you used them in your own rally. So this makes more sense to do for weaker players, or if you have a lot of strong players with good bonuses starting rallies comparable to yours.

If you do this, don't forget to still adhere to everything you learned about being a rally leader (use your strongest heroes etc.), because if you expect from others to provide rallies for you to jump into frequently, you should do the same for them.

Swap Your Hero Gear Around If Needed

This is probably going to be mostly related to Gina. I personally have my main mythic gear set for Marksman equipped on Gina most of the time because I use her to hunt beasts and Polar Terrors to make use of her skill which lowers stamina cost; and I also use her in Arena (start of Gen 3 in our state at the time of writing this guide).

But she is NOT a good hero to use during a Bear Rally since she provides no combat skills. So before the Bear Hunt starts, I unequip her hero gear and put it on Bahiti for example. After the Bear is done, I put the gear back on Gina. This might be different for everyone based on which heroes you use for whatever reason, but the main point stays the same - use correct heroes as rally leader, but also equip them with your best gear to further increase the bonus they provide for the rally!

Gear does not matter when you are just joining a rally, so you only need to look out for this as rally leader. It might matter if you are joining a defensive rally protecting garrison, but that is a topic for another time.

Can I Participate in Bear Hunt With My City Shield Up?

Yes. The shield will not be deactivated.

Can I Participate in Bear Hunt After Moving to Another Alliance?

This depends on when did you participate in Bear Hunt last. Because the 2-day cooldown actually works also on personal level for each player individually.

For example, If you did Bear on the same day you swap alliances and the new alliance's Bear Trap cooldown is about to run out later that day, you cannot participate in the 2nd Bear Hunt because your personal cooldown will not allow it.

Conclusion

Being a good rally leader is much easier to achieve because it is a 'solo effort' of every individual, compared to the necessary 'combined effort' of entire alliance to properly joining rallies. It just takes a bit of preparation and some experience. You will get there with time.

Joining rallies is a different matter. A lot of variables go into this, and the short time-frame of the event when triggered and chaos that follows is not helping things. As we have learned, even if just few players mess up, it has consequences for a lot of others. So this part needs an effort from entire alliance and it will take a long time to get it right.

Don't be too hard on those who are messing it up, now you understand why they might be doing so, have patience with them and try and explain the situation. The amount of marches any individual player can launch, and the level of skills of their heroes, is also a big factor. They might be in a position where to use all or most of their troops they have to use the wrong heroes to join. In that case, we don't want to punish them for 'having too many troops' or 'not paying money for extra march queue or VIP level'. But their job is to, with time, make sure they can have enough proper heroes to join with.

Good luck in your Bear Hunt, everyone, and don't forget to feed the Bear :)

And that does it for the Bear Hunt guide guys. I hope you have learned something here today and if you have any tips that you want to share with others, feel free to tell us in the comments below! Thanks!