Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 17. Misty Ruins Heroic

This is the kind of heroic mode that the main campaign is sorely lacking - not just a redux of campaign mode and with a significant difficulty bump.  Now to be fair the difficulty spike doesn't occur until wave 5.  Before that the only real risk is getting bad RNG with the Dust Cryptids and one leaking through.  Waves 5 and 6 though definitely make their mark with the Deathwoods.  There's largely no way to have finished taking down wave 5's Deathwood before the next two arrive in wave 6, so it's all about your heroes being able to hold down the fort at the end, giving your towers enough time to finish everything off.

Impressions

Grades are pretty standard and unsurprising here, which is understandable given that the hard part at the end is a very general test of hero ability.  You have two or three major enemies with several smaller mobs trying to push through, so it doesn't play to any one strength of heroes.  Either they help DPS everything down efficiently, help stall the horde long enough for towers to do the work, or else tank the Deathwoods.  This is probably about as normal as grades get for Alliance.

Final Grades

• Vesper - B
• Raelyn - C+
• Nyru - B+
• Torres - B-
• Anya - B
• Grimson - C+
• Broden - A+
• Therien - A-
• Onagro - B
• Warhead - B+
• Lumenir - A+
• Kosmyr - A

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 17. Misty Ruins Heroic

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 16. Hunger's Peak

At long, long last we finish the main campaign - and it only took 8 or 9 months!  I won't lie that I had been dreading doing this map.  While I found the fight interesting the first time around when I did it as part of my Veteran walkthrough, ever since I've realized I don't really care for the level at all, and it's definitely my least favorite final boss fight in the franchise.

Mostly this is just because the level is a giant RNG-fest.  Now some of the tower swaps the Overseer does seem to be consistent from attempt to attempt, but others are definitely random.  Thus the difficulty depends a lot on if the Eldritch Channelers and Paladins get swapped out to poor locations - like getting both of either kind sent to one side of the map, leaving the other side flapping in the wind.

Still, the strategy in the videos does seem to work pretty consistently.  Usually if I had to restart it wasn't due to bad tower swaps, but instead to leaking Glarelings - most notably the first time the Glare on the bottom left activates while several Mindless Husks are approaching from the left.  If the Glarelings make it to the Glare, not only do they start moving at Road Runner speed, but the healing makes it nearly impossible to kill them.

You may be wondering why I start the Eldritch Channelers in positions where they can't hit the boss.  My best explanation is this classic video.  In all seriousness though, if you start them where they can hit the boss they'll end up triggering his phase transitions too early, and you risk being overwhelmed by the mobs that come with the transitions since your defense isn't very developed yet.  It's much better to start out very slowly and gradually build up the towers that can target the boss once you've earned plenty of gold.  Even doing this there's very little risk of running out of time and having him destroy all your towers - in most cases I got the win before he had destroyed more than two or three towers.

Impressions

Say it with me class - because of the RNG this is a very hard map to grade.  Still, you can tell a lot about a hero by how quickly they can finish off the current wave and get to the next one before it becomes a problem, or how well they can hold the line when you get a really crappy tower swap.

As usual I went with Raelyn and Nyru for the second heroes here.  No chance of soloing this one - at least not for the bottom-tier heroes.  Raelyn's tanking ability and Nyru's speed and DPS make them perfect companions for the main hero.  While I did have to fully utilize them and their hero spells, I managed to get down their micro to a pretty predictable pattern each time, making me feel better that I'm doing an apples-to-apples comparison.

The grades turned out to be much better than I had anticipated.  As I said, I was dreading this map going into it, and I honestly expected a lot of 'C's and maybe even some 'D's, but only Onagro dips below a 'B' here with a 'C+'.  His inability to block coupled with middle of the road DPS and a terrible move speed make him ill-suited to this challenge.  As for the others, shockingly only Vesper and Grimson land in the 'B' tier, and it's 'A's of various sorts for everyone else.

Having finished the main campaign it's time to get into the bonus campaigns.  But first we'll need to do a post calculating GPAs up to this point and seeing how our heroes rank, so we can see who needs to redeem themselves going into elite content.  I'll try to get that out in a few days.

Final Grades

• Vesper - B
• Raelyn - A-
• Nyru - A-
• Torres - A-
• Anya - A-
• Grimson - B+
• Broden - A+
• Therien - A
• Onagro - C+
• Warhead - A
• Lumenir - A
• Kosmyr - A+

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 16. Hunger's Peak

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 17. Misty Ruins Campaign

For a while I didn't think I'd ever make it into the mini-campaigns, but here we are at last.  This comes with the "hard difficulty" notice, but I can't say I really feel it in this first campaign mode.  While there are some tricks here - the Dust Cryptid's immunity gimmick, keeping Specters from infecting the Weirdwoods, and being careful where you kill the Rangers so that the Specters they spawn can't get into them either - largely this is just a horde map, and horde maps generally have straightforward AoE solutions.

I was happy to finally be able to employ the Dwarven Flamespitter for this level.  I hadn't really tried it out since they changed it to be able to target flying units, but that makes it the perfect choice for a map like this.  Don't get me wrong, I still like the Tricannon better, but I feel the Flamespitter has a valid use case now.

The strategy is pretty straightforward here.  It's all about choosing appropriate choke points to maximize the AoE of the Flamespitters and Weirdwoods, as well as making sure you're not killing Rangers too early where their Specters risk infecting a Weirdwood.

I will say I really like the risk/reward factor of the Specter/Weirdwood interaction.  On the one hand the Weirdwoods provide decent AoE and the Deathwoods are quite hard to kill, incentivizing you to prevent the Specters from infecting them.  On the other hand the Deathwoods give an amazing 200 gold bounty, and letting them spawn creates a new build point where you can build whatever you want, so if you think you can handle them it can be worthwhile to intentionally let them spawn.  However, for these videos I decided to go the route of trying to keep the Weirdwoods as much as possible.

As a final note, we're back to just using one hero - for this map at least.  We'll see how far that might last.

Impressions

Yeah that's not a typo - I really did give Lumenir a 'C'.  Her performance on this map is absolutely atrocious.  All the elements of the map combine to highlight her weaknesses perfectly.  I had to do this map an embarrassing number of times before I got a no lives lost win with her - she just kept leaking mobs over and over again.  Granted she can't block, which is a big part of the problem, but neither can Kosmyr, Broden, or Onagro.  Kosmyr and Broden are of course masters of AoE damage though, which is why they both still landed in the 'A' tier.  As for Onagro, I'm not sure why I didn't have as many problems with him other than his hero spell does do pretty good AoE damage.  Lumenir's hero spell, on the other hand, is geared towards dealing with large mobs, leaving her lacking in the AoE department overall.

Therien is the only other hero besides Broden and Kosmyr to land in 'A' tier.  Just as Lumenir's abilities are mismatched for this kind of mob composition, hers handle it very nicely.  While normally I'm not a fan of her hero spell, this is a rare map where I feel it works very well.  And needless to say her teleporting ability is priceless on a mobility-heavy map like this.

Everyone else shakes out in the usual way.  Raelyn's performance was actually not that bad and would normally rate a 'B-' or even a 'B', but I docked her a bit because she could not early-call some waves like the other heroes.

Final Grades

• Vesper - B
• Raelyn - C+
• Nyru - B
• Torres - B+
• Anya - B+
• Grimson - B
• Broden - A+
• Therien - A-
• Onagro - B+
• Warhead - B
• Lumenir - C
• Kosmyr - A

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 17. Misty Ruins Campaign

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 15. The Eyesore Tower Iron

This was one of those maps that was difficult to figure out initially, but once the plan was perfected it was all downhill from there, with no hero taking less than a 'B-' for the last iron challenge of the main campaign.

With Eldritch Channelers, Rocket Gunners, and two pre-placed Necromancer towers it was one of those where you're not sure the proportions between the tower types.  And as always there's the question on this map of whether to build a forward choke point on the lower right path or not.  Unfortunately the answers ended up being the boring, straightforward ones we've already discovered - yes, always go with the forward choke point, and the Eldritch Channelers are the key tower as always, with the Necromancers and Rocket Gunners playing only a minor part.

Impressions

There isn't much to say about the grades this time.  The dragons and Broden land in the 'A' tier while everyone else earns some sort of 'B', and the performances were fairly reliable and unremarkable.  It's honestly a little bit of a letdown after the challenge that was Corruption Valley Iron, and it's sad that the last iron mode of the main campaign was not more remarkable.

Final Grades

• Vesper - B
• Raelyn - B+
• Nyru - B+
• Torres - B
• Anya - B
• Grimson - B-
• Broden - A+
• Therien - B-
• Onagro - B
• Warhead - B+
• Lumenir - A
• Kosmyr - A+

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 15. The Eyesore Tower Iron

I did a bad thing...

So many of you may have been wondering where I've been the last few months, with no posts either on this blog or my YouTube channel.  Now I did share on my channel that we recently adopted our son, and if you've ever had a newborn you know they're rather all-consuming during that stage.  So yes, part of the answer is I just haven't had nearly as much time for videos as usual.  But there's something far more nefarious going on as well, that I felt the need to confess here on my blog.  After swearing I would never do it, I've gotten into playing World of Warcraft Classic.

Now I never played original Vanilla back in the day.  When MMOs first started coming out the idea was anathema to me.  I was (and still largely am) all about the single player experience, and to me an "MMORPG" was almost a contradiction in terms.  In my view an RPG is about assuming the role of the hero of the story whose actions drive the plot to its completion.  Thus RPGs like the Ultima series to the original Baldur's Gate to Skyrim have been my bread and butter in gaming for decades now.  I also had a healthy skepticism of how the social aspect of these newfangled MMOs was going to play out, as the internet was no less toxic back then than it is today.  I didn't have any friends who played, so there was no one to help tempt me into it and provide a safe, non-toxic bubble I could partake of it with.

So for many years I avoided World of Warcraft altogether.  While I had played Warcraft 1 & 2, I never played the legendary 3, so I didn't have the strong tie to the franchise and its story to lure me in either.  It wasn't until some time in 2009 during the Wrath of the Lich King era that my best friend finally encouraged me to try it, and much to my surprise I was immediately hooked.  I continued playing for the next few years through the end of WotLK and into the first part of Cataclysm, at which point I put down the game for good.

While I never got to experience true Vanilla, the old world Azeroth leveling experience from 1-60 was still there during WotLK, and I have a lot of fond memories from that time.  When the Classic version of the game was first announced I will admit I had a wistful desire to join in, but for the longest time I just considered it not practical.  My life just does not afford me the luxury of setting aside four hours every Tuesday night for "raid night", and what's the point if you can't partake in the endgame experience?

Nevertheless, in the last few months I've been listening to a Warcraft-focused YouTube channel that the YouTube algorithm started pushing on me.  It has a lot of interesting information about the history of WoW and its evolution, and gradually it's been stoking the nostalgia fire inside me, reminding me of my glory days soloing dungeons with my hunter and owning the level 60 Alterac Valley bracket in PvP.  Finally I broke down and realized, why not?  So what if I can't raid?  Most of my best memories are from solo play anyway, so I can at least enjoy the leveling experience if nothing else.

So yes, I officially have Warcraft Fever, and it has been dominating my gaming time for the last couple of months, sadly to the neglect of this blog and my YouTube channel.  I'm going to try to fix that and get back into at least some of a routine of posting again.  Now I have no intention of making WoW videos for my channel, but I think I will write up a few more blog posts on it, going over my memories from back in the day as well as my experience now with Classic.  In the meantime please forgive my absence and pray that something comes along to snap me out of this obsession - like the Fangs of Asterkarn DLC for Grim Dawn getting a release date in the near future.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 15. The Eyesore Tower Heroic

This was a frustrating one.  My hope was to be able to do it with just the one hero like campaign mode, but it's just ever so slightly out of reach.  Now the more powerful heroes can do it - although sometimes things can get out of hand - but the bottom tier heroes just lack the power.  I debated letting the heroes that could do the map solo and then using the second hero for all other and just docking their grades significantly, but ultimately I decided against it.  I prefer to keep things the same across all heroes when possible, as I feel it keeps the grades the most meaningful.  So ultimately I used both Raelyn and Vesper as the second hero guarding the choke point on the bottom right.  I did manage to complete all heroes without using the other hero's hero spell at least.  If you do use the hero spell (especially Raelyn's Dark Knight), the map becomes very easy at that point.

As for strategy, it's pretty much just a rehash of the build we used for campaign mode.  We build a couple of Archers on the back half to deal with Void Blinkers and leaks, but the optimal strategy is to go all-in in fortifying the forward choke points and trying to keep anything from getting past them.  This often breaks down on wave 6 with two Flesh Behemoths trying to break through, but it's easy enough to deal with by selling other towers and building an Eldritch Channeler in the back half to take care of any leaks.

Impressions

Grades aren't terribly surprising here, with a couple of exceptions.  Anya joins the 'A' team for once, earning an 'A-'.  Her ability to tank even Flesh Behemoths indefinitely is the perfect ability for this map, which is primarily about trying to maintain the integrity of your choke points while the Tricannons DPS everything down.

Shockingly, Lumenir earns an 'A+' along with Broden while Kosmyr only earns an 'A'.  I guess it's not so shocking, really, as her abilities are ideal for what this map dishes out.  Her hero spell is excellent for stunning and erasing a decent chunk of large enemies' (like Behemoths) health bar, and her Celestial Judgement ability is really just a single target version of the same.  Then her Blessing of Retribution ability is perfect for buffing defenders, keeping them going longer while also dealing serious retribution damage.

The biggest surprise for me though is how badly Onagro performed.  Since this map is so similar to campaign mode I expected him to perform well again, but instead he ties for last place.  For some reason this map highlights his weaknesses (like the inability to block) especially hard, and I'm honestly at a loss to explain the difference here from campaign mode.  Onagro is the hero that definitely has the least predictable performance from map to map.

Final Grades

• Vesper - B
• Raelyn - B-
• Nyru - B+
• Torres - B
• Anya - A-
• Grimson - C+
• Broden - A+
• Therien - B
• Onagro - C+
• Warhead - B
• Lumenir - A+
• Kosmyr - A

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 15. The Eyesore Tower Heroic

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 15. The Eyesore Tower Campaign

I managed to return to one hero only for this map, which I'm rather proud of.  I'll always try to do a map with a single hero first until I determine that it's just not possible to do so.  The strategy here is the same I used in my walkthrough video, where we use forward choke points to try to jam up the enemies as soon as possible, preventing them from reaching the Glare and preventing enemies like Vile Spawners and Noxious Spitters from getting out of control.  That lets us set up the back half of the map to catch leaks as well as prepare for the boss fight.

There's not much subtlety to the micro here, besides obvious tactics like using reinforcements to stall Void Blinkers next to Archers to take them down.  It's largely just a matter of fighting hard to keep the choke points intact as much as possible, so it's a good map to judge heroes on their fundamentals.

Impressions

This is one of those maps where a hero either needs to bring strong tanking ability to keep the Bladeclaw Horrors and Flesh Behemoths contained, or else strong DPS to burn down mobs as fast as possible.  As such, Raelyn takes a very rare but well earned 'A-' for once.  Her strong tanking, along with her ability to bring a second tank nearly as good as her, really helps her hold the choke points, allowing the Tricannons to do their job efficiently.  This is an important part of Tricannon strategy - while it's nice they can target three different spots, it's always optimal to have all three shots going to nearly the same point, allowing mobs to be hit by all three.

On the other end of the spectrum, Therien really struggled here, earning a rare 'C'.  As I mentioned a while back, Mindless Husks really counter her hard, constantly throwing Glarelings into the back where she stands and wasting her time by tying her up in meleeing them.  Which is odd because while Nyru has the same problem, she did really well on this map.  The only explanation I can offer is that Therien's hero spell is pretty bottom tier - the damage it does is decent, but it generally is counterproductive, as the damage is generally less than the damage enemies would take from towers during the duration.  It's shades of Razz n' Rags from Origins all over again.

Speaking of surprises, Onagro snags an 'A' here despite my expectations.  On the last map the lack of blocking was a severe detriment, and I expected that issue to only be worse here.  However, he simply tore it up.  Granted, this map is near-ideal for his hero spell, so that definitely helps, but this guy is simply a rollercoaster in terms of performance.  On some maps his inability to block is a huge drawback and his DPS just seems too low to make up for it, but then on other maps it feels like he's no-scoping mobs left and right.  I've never done standard deviation calculations on heroes' grades before, but I have little doubt his would be one of the highest if not the highest of any hero in the series.

I was originally going to give Kosmyr an 'A+' for this map, but I went back and knocked him down to an 'A' after playing with Broden.  What Broden does to this map is simply a war crime.  He simply destroys everything in his way, and he deserves to stand alone on top grade-wise for it.

Final Grades

• Vesper - B-
• Raelyn - A-
• Nyru - B+
• Torres - B+
• Anya - A
• Grimson - B-
• Broden - A+
• Therien - C
• Onagro - A
• Warhead - C+
• Lumenir - A
• Kosmyr - A

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - The Eyesore Tower Campaign