Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - Mid-Term Report Card

As I mentioned in my update post a while back, I really should have done a report card after completing the main campaign.  My S.O.P. for these challenges has generally been to do a report card at that point, and then again after each bonus campaign.  And while I have the data to go back and present the grades as they were at the end of the campaign, at this point I think it's just better to give all the grades through the end of the first bonus campaign, Undying Fury.  A single three-map campaign generally doesn't shake things up too much anyway.

As a reminder, we use a scale of 'A' = 4, 'B' = 3, etc.  Of course new to this challenge is that I started adding pluses and minuses to the grades.  I decided that pluses and minuses would be worth 0.25 in terms of adjusting the base grade.  This allows them to have a measurable impact on the grade, while still maintaining a solid separation between the grade tiers (e.g., there's still a difference of 0.5 between an 'A-' at 3.75 and a 'B+' at 3.25).

Without further ado then, here are the GPAs in descending order:

• Bonehart - 4.21
• Broden - 4.20
• Kosmyr - 4.04
• Lumenir - 3.85
• Therien - 3.44
• Warhead - 3.41
• Anya - 3.23
• Nyru - 3.21
• Onagro - 3.21
• Stregi - 3.20
• Vesper - 3.02
• Torres - 2.88
• Grimson - 2.88
• Raelyn - 2.42

Surprising no one, Bonehart and Broden stand head and shoulders above the competition, with Bonehart edging Broden out by a mere 0.01 and Kosmyr as the only other hero to finish in 'A' territory.  I like how these grades delineate the heroes into three distinct tiers.  You have the top performers in Bonehart through Lumenir, then a distinct drop before getting to a well-defined middle tier in Therien through Stregi, and finally a bottom tier from Vesper on down.

It also shouldn't be a surprise that Raelyn takes the bottom spot by a wide margin.  She is the epitome of a one-trick pony, and as the trick is just tanking, it's not a very good trick.  There's just not a lot you can do with a hero with horrible DPS and no other tools.

Originally when I started this series I though that Torres would be the bottom hero - or at least compete with Raelyn for that dubious distinction.  However, he got a pretty decent buff in an update fairly early in the series.  While his grades in videos prior to the buff technically could have been a little higher with his improved kit, I lack the motivation to go back and do them over again.  After all, it only affected maps in the first half of the series which are pretty easy to begin with.  He might tack on a few hundredths of a point to his GPA, but I highly doubt it would be anywhere near enough to leapfrog Vesper above him.

As for our new heroes, they ended up pretty much where I though they would when I started using them.  Bonehart rocketed to the top with his insane AoE DPS, and Stregi is clinging to the bottom of the mid tier.

Now that we're into the bonus campaigns and the difficulty has gone up, GPAs really have nowhere to go but down.  The story will be all about who runs into a rough patch and plummets faster than everyone else.  If I had to make a guess as to the hero most likely to do so, my money would be on Warhead.  I can just see him really struggling more as the difficulty ratchets up, and while he has a decent lead on Anya at the moment, it's not out of the question that he could drop below her if he starts racking up 'C's with regularity.  But that's why we do these challenges, so I hope you'll stay with me for the rest of Alliance.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - Update

So if you've been following my channel you know that after completing the Undying Fury elite campaign I've gone back and started working on getting Stregi and Bonehart caught up in the series.  I've decided this is how I'm going to handle bonus content going forward - after completing a bonus campaign that introduces one or more new heroes, I'm going to go back and do all the previous levels with them so that they're up to speed going into the next bonus campaign.

I originally did this just because I felt like I needed a break after finishing the Undying Fury bonus campaign.  Life has been exceptionally busy lately - as you've no doubt noticed by my haphazard upload schedule - and I just wanted some easy, mindless content to do before diving into the next bonus campaign.  And nothing says easy and mindless like replaying the first half of the main campaign - especially with new heroes who are at least mid-tier or better.

I really like Stregi and Bonehart.  So far both of them are coming out about where I initially predicted them to grade-wise - Stregi is a pretty middle-of-the-road hero, while Bonehart is the Dark Army answer to Broden - an AoE powerhouse who trivializes maps (sorry Kosmyr, you're awesome, but you just can't quite hang with Broden).

Something I've been neglecting so far in this challenge is report cards.  I really should have done one after finishing the main campaign, but life was just a little crazy around that time and I just didn't get to it.  However, I promise that once I get Bonehart and Stregi caught up through the Undying Fury campaign I'll do a mid-term report card so we can see where everyone stands.

As for the rest of the channel content, I promise I will get back to my Skyrim series soon.  I've just been devoting the remainder of my time recently to some works in progress that I needed to do just for a change of pace.

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 19. Temple of the Fallen Iron

To finish up this elite campaign we bounce back yet again from a pretty easy heroic mode to a decently challenging iron mode.  This is one of those maps where I have a sneaking suspicion that there is an easier way to do it that I'm not quite seeing, but I did try several different possibilities and didn't find anything that worked more reliably than what I show in the videos.  The main challenge of course is that the two towers you're given don't have any blocking ability.  The Twilight Longbows do, of course, but as I said, I tried using them in various ways and didn't feel like they gave a better solution.

I do really like the Twilight Longbows as a new tower, and I feel I'll be using them going forward since they are free on mobile, but they're just not the right choice here.  They just can't get enough work done against the high armor Animated Armors and Deathwoods, and Thrill of the Hunt just can't scale them up quick enough to make up for it.  So while the Harassers are good blockers, having to fully upgrade the towers to get them feels like a waste.  Thus we go for dual Tricannons supported by an Arborean Emissary to do all the work here.

Impressions

This was one of those maps where the grades don't adequately reflect the difficulty.  Therien stands out here as the lone 'C' - a rarity for her - while everyone else does pretty well.  However, what you don't really see is how much practice was required to hone the micro for this map.

Therien scores so low because when teaming her up with Nyru there is zero blocking ability, which is really needed to some extent from heroes here.  She would have done a lot better using Vesper as the free Linerean hero, but Nyru is the better choice all around for Dark Army heroes due to her magic damage, and I always like comparing apples to apples as much as possible when doing these videos.

As usual Onagro suffers from the same difficulty, but his long range ability to attack multiple lanes coupled with a solid AoE hero spell helps move him up to a 'B-', the next lowest grade.  And of course all the flying heroes are more than powerful enough to make up for their lack of blocking.  Once again Lumenir edges out Kosmyr for a better grade, which is a pretty rare occurrence, but her hero spell is rather ideal for Animated Armors and Deathwoods, stunning and doing a great deal of damage to them.

Final Grades

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

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 19. Temple of the Fallen Iron

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 19. Temple of the Fallen Heroic

After a dreadful and difficult campaign mode we come back to a rather straightforward heroic mode, continuing the trend of the difficulty of this elite campaign bouncing around all over the place.

The Cryptid presence here is minimal and manageable without having to contort our build to accommodate it.  We go with the centralized strategy from campaign mode again, where our DPS towers do double duty on choke points on either side of them.  Other than that there's nothing particularly remarkable here.

Impressions

Grades are all around good, with Raelyn and Grimson filling out the bottom tier with 'B-'s.  Other than that nothing is surprising other than Lumenir leapfrogging Kosmyr to take an 'A+' to his 'A'.  Lumenir rarely scores better than her dragon compatriot, but this is one of those maps where it really felt like she tore it up.

Final Grades

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

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 19. Temple of the Fallen Heroic

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 19. Temple of the Fallen Campaign

Get a drink, grab a snack, and take a deep breath, because we've got a lot to talk about.

The Kingdom Rush series is now five games long (not counting Legends, anyway).  I have played every level in every single one of them (aside from the levels I haven't yet completed in Alliance).  There have been many levels I have not cared for, for various reasons - because they were too easy, too tedious, I didn't care for the mob designs or wave compositions, etc.  Of course sometimes it is because of the difficulty, but usually this is because - for me, at least - the difficulty landed on the frustrating end of the "fun challenge vs frustrating challenge" scale.  But despite the fact there are many levels I do not particularly like, there has never been a level I hated.

Until now.

I hate this level.  It's one of the worst designed levels in the entire franchise, and it has finally cemented my opinion on an issue I've been wavering on ever since starting Alliance.  Why do I hate it?  Because your entire build plan has to be completely centered on dealing with wave 8, which is the wave with the large number of Dust Cryptids.

Now I will say that I think Dust Cryptids are well designed as an enemy.  In fact I think pretty much all the flying enemies in Alliance are well designed.  In previous games most flying enemies are low HP mobs who are just there to keep you honest from doing an all-artillery build - as long as you build a few ranged or magic towers they are not a problem.  The flying enemies in Alliance though are cut from a different cloth.  For one, they tend to have significantly more HP than in previous games.  Most flying enemies in previous games have 100 HP or less on the hardest difficulty, while Corrupted Stalkers have 200, and other mobs just go up from there.

But flying enemies in Alliance also come with gimmicks.  Corrupted Stalkers teleport forward the first time you hit them, so you need multiple towers staggered along the path to make sure they get finished off.  Tamed Stalkers introduced the concept of a flying tank to the franchise - a behemoth that requires significant planning to DPS down.  Finally Void Blinkers try to stun your blockers at just the right time so other mobs can slip through.

And of course the aforementioned Dust Cryptids leave behind a temporary area when they are killed that prevents other mobs from taking damage.  This is clever because it forces you to spread your anti-aircraft towers throughout the map to gradually take them down, as opposed to grouping them all near your choke points like normal - if two Cryptids are approaching an exit at the same time, killing the first will just leave a dust cloud that will cover the second, allowing it to escape.

And that brings us back to this map.  Wave 8 consists of 2 groups of 10 Dust Cryptids coming out of two different entrances - the top right and the bottom center.  This is already challenging, as there are few build points along the bottom of the map between the bottom center entrance and the lower left exit they head for.  But at the same time multiple Specters come out of the mausoleum in the center, distracting a large number of nearby towers away from the Cryptids.

The result is that I had to literally design my entire build plan around dealing with this wave, which meant that after getting a bare minimum Eldritch Channeler up and running to try to deal with everything else beforehand, I then had to spam Royal Archers over the entire map to attempt to create a defense that could take all the Cryptids down.  Even then it is very hard, and heroes who do not have a ranged attack or a hero spell that can damage flying enemies to help out (*cough*Raelyn*cough*) really struggle here.

This gets me back to the opinion I mentioned earlier that I've been wavering on since Alliance came out.  A significant portion of the player base has complained about the flying enemies in the game.  As for myself, I've been torn since the beginning as to whether I liked or disliked them, unable to make up my mind.  After playing this level though I realize why I've been wavering.  On the one hand I really like the design of the flying enemies as discussed above.  On the other hand I've also felt they are overused in the game.  Well this level takes "overused" and cranks it up to 11.

But it also made me realize that I do not like the flying enemies because they force me to rely on Royal Archers so much.  Archers are just neither powerful nor interesting as a tower.  Yes, Armor Piercer is a fairly powerful ability, but ultimately I just resent ever having to use this tower.  But that's the problem - there just isn't a good free-on-mobile alternative to it. Ballista Outposts are the other free ranged tower, but they are worse in every way.  Their unique firing pattern is prone to overkill and just plain letting flying mobs slip through in between bursts.  There aren't any magic towers that can do a better job either.  Like Ballistas, Arcane Wizards waste too much DPS on overkill with their slow firing pattern.  Arborean Emissaries have the kind of fast attack needed for flying enemies, but they are a support tower and can't get the job done by themselves.  And finally Eldritch Channelers are awesome and can usually deal with flying waves (at least with Power Overflow), but they're so expensive to get going they're usually dedicated to your choke point and will be occupied with other mobs there when flying enemies come through.

This is another difference from previous games - in previous games flying enemies tended to appear in waves by themselves.  They were the aforementioned "build check" to make sure you weren't just building choke points with nothing but barracks and artillery.  But in Alliance flying enemies are much more commonly mixed in with other non-flying enemies, such that your choke point towers will usually be occupied with the non-flying enemies and you must build auxiliary towers elsewhere specifically to deal with the flying enemies.

Now again, I think this is clever design from an abstract standpoint, but when it comes to Alliance, I've settled on my opinion regarding flying enemies - I don't like how they are used in the game.  They are 1) overused, and 2) force me to use a tower I would otherwise never build because it's boring and underpowered.  Just as a note, I did try this level with the new Twilight Longbows, and while I was able to win with them as well I didn't feel like the performance was any better or more reliable than the Archers.

This map would only be moderately challenging if not for wave 8.  As it is, wave 8 turns the entire map into an unenjoyable chore that I thoroughly detest.  Not even a boss fight with a returning Arivan (rather challenging all on its own) can redeem this thing.  Let's just get on with the heroes and get this over with.

Impressions

None of the grades are surprising at all, except perhaps Nyru.  For some reason even with her pretty decent ranged attack I found it difficult to take down all the Cryptids.  Raelyn gets the sole 'D' here because she cannot help with the Cryptids in any form or fashion.  Her performance was not so awful that I truly felt like I was relying on RNG to get me through, as is our normal definition of 'D', but I docked her down from a 'C' for having to rely on Vesper to carry her.

I will also say that this is one rare map where Dark Army heroes have an edge over Linerean heroes due to Ominous Curse, and that's reflected in the grades below.  The slowing ability on the Curse is a real boon in surviving wave 8, giving towers time to get all the Cryptids down.  While I didn't do it with every hero, the best strategy for the map is to time your hero spell so that you can get back-to-back spells off in this wave.

Final Grades

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

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 19. Temple of the Fallen Campaign

Legends of Kingdom Rush No Combat Damage Challenge

So it's definitely been a hot minute since I've put out any Legends of Kingdom Rush content.  I remember I was trying to get my hero challenge rushed out the door before Alliance dropped last July.  I managed to do that, and I managed to get the first two videos in this challenge done, but then I got caught up in Alliance and the new DLC that dropped for Vengeance and this got shelved.  Well, the other day I happened to think about it and was inspired to go back and get it finished.  Thus I give you my no combat damage challenge.

The point of this challenge is to do all four adventures without taking any health damage in combat.  I explain this in the video descriptions, but I'll repeat the rules here:

• Armor damage is allowed, just not health damage (although I don't remember how often this point really comes up in any of the videos),
• Health damage outside of combat - i.e., from dice encounters and the like - doesn't count.  Avoiding that kind of damage is an exercise in pure RNG, not skill
• Damage to summoned and allied units doesn't count, since their whole point is to take damage for you.

For all four adventures I've assembled a team of the most elite heroes in the game - Oloch, the Zapper, and the Ranger.  As I've explained in previous LoKR posts this game is all about the ranged damage, and these guys are the kings of it, as well as coming with kits full of summons and stuns for utility.

For the first two adventures I had to make due with the Knight of all characters as my fourth hero, but I just consider that to make my achievement in those adventures all the more impressive.  For Extradimensional Menace I managed to nab the Bombardier, who is the ideal fourth for that adventure and it's final boss, and in The Wild Moon I was fortunate to get the Arcane Wizard, who is the best fourth hero in all other situations.

It was a lot of fun to pick up this game again after many months' hiatus.  But on the other hand it also made me sad, as this is a really fun game and I hate that it didn't get more love from Ironhide.  I'm assuming it just didn't perform well enough sales-wise, but I will forever remain an advocate for it.  In any case, I hope you enjoy:

Legends of Kingdom Rush No Combat Damage Challenge

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 18. Deepleaf Outpost Iron

This campaign is bouncing all over the place in terms of difficulty.  We went from a fairly straightforward campaign mode for this map to a significantly difficult heroic mode that required two heroes, and now we're back to a single hero for a modest iron mode.  It's a pretty straightforward affair.  When you're given Eldritch Channelers for single target DPS, Flamethrowers for AoE, and Elven Mercenaries for blocking you get the tower defense version of a simple tank and spank fight.  Things only really get dicey at the very end, where you need to ensure all three choke points are holding up adequately.

There's really nothing more to say about the map, but I will say I am appreciating the opportunity to branch out in terms of strategy.  If you've kept up with this Impossible Hero Challenge you know that I've previously eschewed Dwarven Flamethrowers in favor of Tricannons, but in this campaign Flamethrowers have been the way to go.  Dealing true damage and now with the ability to hit flying enemies, they are the perfect fit for the mob composition this campaign throws at you.  I've also begun appreciating the Linerean reinforcements as an alternative to the Shadow Archers.  Though I dabbled with the Linereans towards the end of the main campaign, Shadow Archers were my go-to throughout the vast majority of it as a way to help deal with the somewhat ludicrous amount of flying enemies in the game.  But here I've enjoyed experimenting with alternate builds that put the Linereans' impressive blocking ability to use while relying on towers to deal with flying menaces.

Impressions

There's not much to comment on when no one is below 'B' tier.  A few lower-tier heroes happen to do better than average here and get the chance to bump up their GPA a little, like Grimson and Onagro scoring pretty rare 'A-'s.  On the other hand, Lumenir continues to struggle with particular maps that really take advantage of her weaknesses, and this is one of them.  Of supreme importance at the end (well, through the whole thing, really) is making sure the Soulcallers are blocked at all times so they can't spawn Specters.  If they do it's easy to get overwhelmed extremely quickly, and even Flamethrowers can't keep the situation under control.  To that end reinforcements have to be committed completely to the right entrance, which can leave the other two choke points vulnerable.  Lumenir just lacks the tools to handle the situation in an 'A' tier fashion.  Our other two flying heroes have the tools in spades, though, and they earn the coveted 'A+'.  And even though Onago is in the same boat as a non-blocking hero, somehow he manages to get the job done well regardless.

Final Grades

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

Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - 18. Deepleaf Outpost Iron