Kingdom Rush Vengeance (Steam) Impossible Hero Challenge - Pond of the Sage Heroic

I'm appreciating that in the bonus campaigns we're finally getting maps with a level of challenge comparable to previous Kingdom Rush games.  I still feel it's rather a waste that the main campaign was so easy, even on Impossible, but I'm glad to be getting back into challenges where I have to think about handing out grades.

This map is challenging for all the same reasons campaign mode was, and I finally feel like we have a heroic mode where the difficulty was dialed up a notch over campaign mode.  This one took me quite a while.  I had to tweak my build plan several times before finding the sweet spot.  In fact, I had already made several recordings when I made a couple of tweaks that improved things and decided to go back and re-record those heroes with the better plan.  That's always a pain to do, but I like to use the same plan with all heroes whenever possible so I feel like I'm comparing apples to apples.

The biggest tip for this map is Soul Impact management.  Having been nerfed to oblivion compared to previous games, it's not often that Soul Impact ends up being the game changer in Vengeance, but it does here.  It's important to have one near-off cooldown when wave 5 starts to deal with the horde of Chasers.  Equally important is using reinforcements to make several Chasers bunch up in one spot before using it - both to maximize it's effectiveness and to get as many kills as possible to reduce the cooldown for wave 6, because it's critical in wave 6 again.  There's simply no way to survive the ludicrous numbers of Crystal Amphipteres there without either Soul Impact or a hero spell (and there aren't many hero spells that can really help).

Impressions

The biggest surprise here was having to assign 'C's to Jigou and Jun'pai.  As physical DPS heroes they just struggle so much to bring down the never-ending waves of Wardens.  You would think that Veruk and Tramin would have the same difficulty, but for some reason there was definitely a marked difference in how they performed.  Quite honestly I could have given Jigou and Jun'pai the very first 'D's of this series, they were that borderline.

Final Grades

• Veruk - B
• Asra - B
• Oloch - B
• Margosa - B
• Mortemis - B
• Tramin - B
• Jigou - C
• Beresad - A
• Doom Tank SG-11 - A
• Jun'pai - C
• Eiskalt - A
• Murglun - A
• Jack O'Lantern - A

Kingdom Rush Vengeance Impossible Hero Challenge - Pond of the Sage Heroic