Kingdom Rush Origins (Steam) Impossible Hero Challenge - Duredhel Outskirts Campaign

This map is a lot of fun, mostly because it feels like the perfect level of challenge.  It is very intense and requires careful planning and good play, but never feels frustrating because it doesn't feel like the difficulty comes from being outright unfair (I'm looking at you, Beheader's Seat iron).  It's a great map to close out this challenge series on.  Still, I'm not going to lie - I'm glad to have recorded my last campaign mode.  They pretty consistently take about 15 minutes to complete, and with 16 heroes that's four hours of recording time - and that's not counting time lost due to restarts because a mob slipped through, I got interrupted, etc.

I was worried about the boss going into this map because I remembered what a pain he is from my impossible mode walkthrough.  His massive (and frequent) AoE attack can wipe out your blockers in a heartbeat, preventing the stall you need to burn him down (to say nothing of the three self-heals he gets).  It was fine there because I used the flying hero exploit, where as long as your flying hero stays off the path he'll keep trying to use his AoE on them even though he can't hit them.  Obviously that tactic wasn't going to cut it for all heroes, but ultimately I got down the strategy of stalling him with my go-to two Bladesingers plus Forest Keepers, then kiting my hero around in open areas to make him waste his AoE.  I appreciate maps like this that play to good micro, which normally isn't too big of a deal in the Kingdom Rush series.

Impressions

This is a very "standard hard" kind of map, so there are no surprises in the grades.  Prince Denas, Catha, Razz and Rags, and Eridan make up the 'C' team on this map, and as usual lack of DPS is the culprit.  This is what I like to call a 'timer' map - they send a large threat like a Twilight Golem at you and you have to burn it down before the next wave arrives.  If you don't, the reinforcements blow through your chokepoint and everything falls apart.  There are several instances in this map - not just the multiple Twilight Golems, but also things like the Twilight Heretics in waves 12 and 13.  It's what gives this map a lot of the intensity I talked about above.

Final Grades

• Eridan - C
• Arivan - B
• Catha - C
• Reg'son - A
• Prince Denas - C
• Razz and Rags - C
• Bravebark - B
• Vez'nan - A
• Xin - A
• Phoenix - A
• Durax - A
• Lynn - A
• Bruce - B
• Lilith - A
• Wilbur - A
• Faustus - A

Best Choice

Wilbur, Phoenix, and Vez'nan again tie for top spot here, for reasons that need no explanation for longtime readers.  Phoenix was especially fun to use against the boss because I was able to position her where she would in fact get hit by the boss' AoE without any other units getting hit.  So the boss kept killing her over and over, but all this did was just trigger Immolate constantly, greatly increasing her DPS against the boss.

Kingdom Rush Origins Impossible Hero Challenge - Duredhel Outskirts Campaign