Kingdom Rush Alliance Impossible Hero Challenge - Kratoa

Well at long last I've finally wrapped up adding Kratoa to the challenge.  So what do I think of him as a hero?  He's honestly pretty good.  How good?  Well, let's take a look at the latest GPA averages and see:

• Bonehart - 4.21
• Sylvara - 4.21
• Broden - 4.20
• Kosmyr - 4.10
• Lumenir - 3.94
• Kratoa - 3.63
• Therien - 3.36
• Warhead - 3.24
• Onagro - 3.13
• Anya - 3.09
• Nyru - 3.08
• Stregi - 2.93
• Grimson - 2.85
• Vesper - 2.77
• Torres - 2.74
• Raelyn - 2.34

As you can see, he manages to fit right in the middle of what had been a pretty big void in between the top tier and the middle tier, which honestly sounds about right.  He feels like a powerful hero, but not quite top tier.

Most of his skills are solid, if not particularly remarkable.  He has a nice single target attack + stun, an AoE, and can summon an additional blocker - basically he covers all the bases.  The numbers on these skills are good if not great.  Really it's his hero spell that does the heavy lifting for him, which is not surprising - he basically gives you Rain of Fire from the first two games.  Ironhide has tried to get creative with hero spells over the years, but honestly it's always going to be hard to beat a straightforward nuke spell.  Because blocking is so important in this game (and this series), it's easy to group up a large number of mobs into a small area, then burn them all down with a nuke like Kratoa's Rage Outburst or Torres' Wrecking Ball.

But what I love about him is how his remaining skill and passive synergize with his hero spell.  The hero spell automatically kills him if he gets hit by it, but then his passive allows him to do AoE damage while dead, then his remaining skill buffs towers when he revives.  It's a great combo, and it's very reminiscent of Phoenix from Origins.  If Rage Outburst doesn't finish off everything in the mob cluster, the AoE damage he does while dead generally will.  And if there's a large enemy that's still standing after that, he then buffs all nearby DPS towers on revive, which certainly will finish the job.  In past blog posts I've talked about how Ironhide has struggled to make proper "on hero death" abilities, but this one makes it feel like they've learned the lesson.

So now we get to move on to new maps.  Up next is the Arachnophobia campaign, and I'm very intrigued by the hero it introduces.  It's only three maps, so it won't be long before we'll be doing an entry for Spydyr just like this.