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+
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