Kingdom Rush Origins (Steam) Impossible Hero Challenge - Mid-term Report Card 2

Having finished the faery forest it's time once again for a report card.  Let's look at the tallies and see how things have shuffled around:

• Wilbur - 4.00
• Faustus - 4.00
• Phoenix - 4.00
• Vez'nan - 3.91
• Bravebark - 3.82
• Durax - 3.76
• Reg'son - 3.55
• Lynn - 3.55
• Prince Denas - 3.52
• Lilith - 3.52
• Xin - 3.48
• Bruce - 3.42
• Eridan - 3.39
• Arivan - 3.39
• Catha - 3.30
• Razz and Rags - 3.12

Our three true damage dealers retain their straight-A streak, but Vez'nan's streak of perfection came to an end on the Neverwonder map, where the heavy doses of magic-resistant enemies proved too much for him.  Bravebark and Durax swap the 5 and 6 positions with each other, but remain within 0.06 of each other, as in the last report card.

While Reg'son's GPA only improved by 0.16, he nevertheless leaps way up in the rankings, going from third to last to being in the top 50%.  This isn't surprising, as mushrooms and Bandersnatches are particular specialties of his, and he grabbed no less than three Best Choice awards in this section.  Lynn joins him in jumping up from 13th to 8th.  As the enemies get bigger her strengths come more into play.

Prince Denas, Lilith, and Xin maintain their middle-of-the-pack rankings, but Arivan plunged from 9th to 14th.  There were a lot of maps he really struggled with on this go-round, generally due to his low DPS despite being a true damage dealer.  I have a bad feeling it bodes poorly for him in the second half of this series.

Bruce sadly maintains his spot in the 12th position.  I'm really hoping in the next section - with its heavy emphasis on large enemies like Razorboars and Twilight Golems - that we'll see him shine and move up the rankings.

The usual suspects round out the bottom of the rankings, but whereas Catha and Razz and Rags tied for last place on the last report card, Razz's GPA really plummeted and he unquestionably takes the distinction of worst hero here.  Catha struggles with very low DPS, but her Hero Spell is quite good and has a short cooldown.  Razz, however, has even worse DPS (the lowest of any hero), poor survivability, and Changeling is a very hard Hero Spell to find good use for.  While the idea of turning two large packs of enemies against each other and having them destroy one another sounds fun, the reality is that those kinds of scenarios are few and far between.  Usually the best use you can make for Changeling is just stalling a pack of enemies for a few seconds, which pales compared to all the other Hero Spells.

In terms of the maps themselves, we only had four trivial 'A' maps in this section, which was a nice change of pace from the first round of maps.  The hardest map turned out to be The Unseelie Court heroic, with an average score of 2.88 - almost rivaling Royal Gardens iron in terms of difficulty.

The next section of the game is only four maps long, but they're hard ones and have a different dynamic from a lot of the maps we've done so far, so I'm interested to see if or how the rankings shake up.  With eleven maps behind us and only four maps before us that's not a lot of chances to significantly change a hero's average GPA, but considering we're still only talking about 0.88 between the top and bottom, it doesn't necessarily take a lot to change the rankings - especially in the middle of the pack where the separation is very small..