What the Bear Trap event is
Bear Trap (also called Bear Hunt) is an alliance event. Your alliance places a trap, a Raging Bear spawns, and for 30 minutes everyone rallies it for damage. Rewards scale with your personal damage total, topping out around the 1.2B tier, and the alliance earns rewards collectively. Since the March 2026 update, alliances can schedule traps automatically, and since July 2026 auto-register fires the moment the trap cooldown ends. What's left for you to control is how you build your rallies.
How rally damage works
The most misunderstood part of Bear Trap is whose skills count. The rules change completely depending on whether you start the rally or join it.
If you start the rally (captain)
- Your hero's base stats boost the troops of their class.
- All expedition skills of your deployed heroes apply.
- Exclusive gear (widget) skills apply once the widget reaches level 2. Rally-type gear skills (Rally Attack, Rally Lethality) are the ones that matter here; defender-type gear skills do nothing on offense.
If you join the rally
- Only the first expedition skill of your first hero counts. Your hero's stats, other skills, and gear contribute nothing to the rally.
- The rally has four joiner skill slots. The first four joiners seat their skills in join order; from the fifth joiner onward, the game re-sorts and a higher-level copy of a skill replaces a lower-level one already seated.
The practical consequence: a joiner with a maxed damage skill in slot one contributes more than a whale joining with the wrong hero first. Check your march order before the event starts.
The best joiner heroes
Joiner skills fall into two families that stack differently:
| Family | Heroes (first skill) | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Additive lethality | Chenko, Amadeus, Yeonwoo, Wee & Woo (Gen 7) | Flat % lethality added to the whole rally; stacks additively |
| Multiplicative damage | Amane, Margot | All-squad attack % that multiplies with the lethality family |
The strongest rallies mix the two families rather than stacking four copies of the same one. Wee & Woo (Generation 7, and the current Hero Roulette pick) slots into the lethality family with an attack-and-lethality first skill, which makes them the best free-to-play joiner in the game right now. If you don't own any of these heroes at a useful skill level, joining with no hero sometimes beats seating a defensive skill. Our optimizer will tell you when that's true for your roster.
Picking a rally captain
Captains want maximum personal damage output: high-investment heroes whose expedition kits multiply the rally's attack and lethality, plus rally-type gear skills. Ava (Gen 7) is the current premier damage captain. Her kit stacks an enemy-defense shred, a periodic damage amplification, and squad lethality, with Rally Lethality on her gear. Earlier-generation standouts with rally gear skills include Marlin, Helga, Thrud, Rosa, and Yang. Whoever you pick, remember the widget needs level 2 or higher before its skill exists at all.
Troops and formations
You'll see formations like "1/10/89" repeated across guide sites as if one split fits everyone. Against the bear, what drives damage is simpler.
- Send your highest-tier troops first. Damage scales with troop attack, and higher tiers are strictly better per march slot in a PvE rally.
- Type ratios matter far less than in PvP. We tested counter-bonus models against real rally logs and none beat a no-counter model, so chasing an exact infantry/cavalry/archer split is mostly superstition. Fill the march with your strongest troops and let hero skills do the multiplying.
- Pitfall levels add up to +25% attack for the whole alliance, so make sure someone keeps upgrading the trap.
The Bear Trap Optimizer does this arithmetic for your actual roster: it knows every hero's skills through Generation 7, applies the captain and joiner rules above, and ranks your best hero combinations and troop fills for both roles.
FAQ
Does my hero's gear help when I join a rally?
No. Joiners contribute exactly one thing: the first expedition skill of the first hero. Gear, stats, and remaining skills apply only when you're the captain.
Which hero should be in slot 1 when I join?
Your highest-level copy of Chenko, Amadeus, Yeonwoo, Wee & Woo, Amane, or Margot's first skill. If you own none of them, open the optimizer in joiner mode and it'll rank what you do have.
Is there a damage cap?
Personal reward tiers top out around 1.2B damage. Damage beyond that still helps alliance totals.
How do I hit higher damage numbers overall?
In rough order of impact: seat the right joiner skills (all four slots, mixed families), level those first skills, upgrade your captain's widget past level 2, push troop tier, and max Pitfall.