I usually keep my starting tank until I can recruit level 4 stuff. I only upgrade units that I’m still going to use end game, which there are a few. Keeping things you are not going to shoot for in a final build at level 1 works pretty well. You’ll generally lose games early on to people that were gungho to kit out tier one heroes, but once you get to level 20 or so, and can start getting level 3-4 picks and develop them, it’s all over. At that point, it doesn’t even really matter if you have many synergies if you’re only vs tier one heroes that have been 2 or 3 starred.
My best strat in general, is to not spend any money I won’t get back, until I hit 60 gold, and then really dive in to upgrades on better heroes. I won a couple games last night, where I was down to 47 health or so around round 20, and then never lost another game.
There are a handful of units that are ok to develop early, as they stay pretty strong endgame. Tusk for the knockup, Treant and healer druids, because of the 1 star level bump they get if there are 2 of them, which is incredibly powerful the entire game. That being said, once I stopped worrying about losing early rounds, I started doing much better in the long run. Mid game is really where it’s at.
There’s still a lot of RNG to this game, but in general, how you manage your money turns out to be the biggest factor. Sinking money into early size and hero advances is a good way to burn out late game due to lack of money, at least it’s proved that way to me!
Replacing heroes as you go through the rounds is great, because you don’t lose any money unless you upgrade a unit, or pay for rerolls in the store. Early store rerolls trying to star up tier one heroes is almost a guarantee you’re going to get rolled late game.
Fishman tank (best value),2 druids, all 4 trolls, Drow, Minerva, and Pirate ship boy. This is sort of my go to build at this point, pretty easy to assemble and very consistent. Love this game, so many ways to build teams. One of the things I love about this group, is that it builds along with the game. It’s a nice arc of when heroes show up and become available, you’re never without at least a decent team. I finished this game with pretty high health.
This fishtank ™, has an AOE armor debuff that’s huge and lasts a long time, he also does the most damage at star level 2 of any tank except the tier 4 stuff, and it’s still pretty close, great tank.
P.S. Troll warlord is a beast, I won 3 games where he was the last man standing against multiple enemies. Trolls in general, that 30% attack bonus to your entire team, is the best, such a huge DPS increase.
A cost 4 unit is gonna be better than your tier 2 cost 2 unit in many cases.
Lategame AOE and crown control are super effective
Early game figure out if you’re gonna blow money on leveling up to extend a lead, or just go with it and take the losses.
I just won a game where I was in last place most of the game. 6 other players entered late game broke so they had no chance.
Losing early game doesn’t hurt… late game losses are 10-20 points of dmg.
There is a lose-on-purpose strategy, “empty fort”. you place the minimum available so you don’t lose so many HPs and try to get 10, 20, 30 etc gold. Then around turn 13-17 you turn around, level up, do your rolls, etc, and hope you can turn it around.
Another nice run while at lunch on the phone against the challenging ai. Managed to have to end the game with 100 health. For some reason it can’t track rounds won through suspending a game and resuming it (actually looks like it doesn’t track any stats):
Another comp of warriors, trolls, druids, with tide hunter and shadow fiend. Looking at it now I should have traded out juggernaut for a lvl 2 slardar I had on the bench.
Sitting at Upstart 4 right now in mp. Will see if I can make it to grifter tonight.
Yah, I care not in the least if I lose all the rounds up to 15 or so. The build I’m running now, often stays on top though, it’s got a great arc to it, as there are several early game units that are in the final build, those are the only ones I develop.
Just finished fun, close mp game. Ended up hanging on and winning with 6 (5 lvl 2 + lvl 3 slardar) warriors, 2 lvl 2 druids, a lvl 2 gyrocopter, and a lvl 2 tide hunter. For the first time I had to actually really care about placement as the last person I was fighting with was killing the gyrocopter before it could pop. So it ended up in the corner surrounded by everyone else and the last round we nailed him for 22 points.
Just trying this out. Played 3 matches… so far all 3 (including one by me) were won by people playing 2+ Kunkas. I’m thinking the balance might need some time in oven.
Maybe it’s just a super low level thing and it’s an easily counterable strategy, but his ult stuns and damages the entire enemy team for what feels like infinity, and the cooldown is so short you can often see it used twice per fight if you have a survivability item on him. Nothing is jumping out to me as a hard counter other than maybe a 6 person Human team for the insane amount of silences, but you’d still play at least 1 Kunka in that comp because he’s a human.
I know they rushed this thing out the door to beat some competitors to market, so I’m sure it’ll get better as time goes on. I’ll keep my eye on it.
Do you mean a 2+ star kunkka? If not, you must have played a crazy 3 game sample. On a conceptual level I can’t see how having 2 or more would be good, nor have I seen people win with that yet.
If you are able to get a 2* kunk you play it, but playing a 1 star in the late game is a bad move (a good opponent will be able to kill him before he gets the boat off). So unless you happen to have 2 2* kunks I doubt playing 2 or more could be competitive.
On the larger point about balance, I agree it will improve over time. I think overall the balance is pretty good, and not notably worse than the original mod (if anything it’s better). You might need to keep at it to see that.
PS - there are two hard counters to the boat: kill the kunka quickly, or better yet space out your teams position in the late game so that the boat is very limited in how many guys it can knock down.
I like the game, but I think I won’t have the time to get decent at it.
It’s like a deck builder game, but every card is complicated and comparisons are hard, so you better do your homework.
There are numerous AOE stun/disable/damage heroes, and they are all really powerful late game, especially with the item that instantly refreshes your cooldown once per match. My current team has the boat AOE, the chicken, the 9 bounce stun, and the medusa stone/freeze. There are also various items that can put on heroes that give them a chance to stun, a hammer with a 25% chance for instance. If you put that on a fast attacking hero it’s also pretty devastating.
DPS happens so fast in this game, especially in later rounds, that any kind of disable becomes very powerful.
If you want to see something really funny, put a 2 star or higher medusa out front by herself, with the rest of the team behind, with the retaliation item. She chunks the entire team, and then freezes them in place before she dies. By doing this, you allow the rest of your CC to get rolling as well. I finished a lot of end game fights last night will all of my heroes alive.
They’ve already adjusted down the length of stun the ship does, I’m sure all of the disables will get toned down. Hell, the chicken debuff is…8 seconds at 3 star? You can kill an entire team in 8 seconds.
It might have been only two of the three games that had players with 2 separate 2 star Kunkas, and one game with only a single one. But I can guarantee you that the winner of all 3 matches had a Kunka in their team, every time.
If you can wrangle a 2 star version of Kunka, Tidehunter and Keeper of Light, the rest of your team composition seems almost totally irrelevant as long as it includes 2 warlocks to keep them alive long enough to cast their ults.
I’ve seen some good 6 mage strats and 6 human strats (which can also be a 6 mage strat), but both of those compositions would benefit more from a Kunka and a Tidewalker than any other heroes in the game. Medusa is probably in the group too, because Scaled is so powerful in the endgame, and you are gonna build towards Tidehunter.
Anyways, I think the AoE stuns need some tuning down. The single target ones like Shadow Shaman seem fine to me.
I think they probably will be. The other way to approach it would be to make defense a little more important. At this point in the game, you can pretty much brute force your way through anything with enough DPS, hence why the 4 troll comp is so good, it’s just ridiculous giving your entire team attack speed. They could add a modifier to tankier classes…that you took less damage when stunned maybe, wouldn’t even have to be much, 10%, 20%, 30% depending on how many in group?
The one problem with toning down stuns, is that it makes DPS even more in the drivers seat. Defensive classes give up a lot of DPS, for defense that doesn’t generally balance that out. When you tone down stuns, you’re also toning down stuns on those WTFBBQ dps classes. When I go 4 troll and heavy DPS, if the other side doesn’t have stuns, I can wipe a team in under 10 seconds.
It will be interesting to see what changes they make, as I’m sure they are able to track win rates of various comps and heroes etc, fun stuff.
I made it to Boss II ranking yesterday, before falling down to Boss I after some experiments. (Presumably my MMR is now lower than that, but the displayed rating never drops below the lowest level of the highest title you’ve achieved.)
Specifically, I tried to make Strange Bedfellows work since I was getting it so often as a first pick. Three separate times I even got (and picked it) twice in the first three rounds. This is the item that gives Demon Hunters +30% pure damage for each type of Demon you have. So the basic composition is the two Demon Hunters and, the four other Demons, which should theoretically have given Anti Mage +300% damage, Terror Blade +350%, and all the other Demons +50%. Often this’ll mean running two copies of a two-star AM or TB, since given those bonuses they should still be better than whatever filler you put in the lineup (Kunkka/Tide for the utility, a good Warlock for the synergy with SF; preferably Enigma).
And it never worked, even when I got all the important units at 2/3 stars and two copies of Strange Bedfellows. Some top 3 finishes, but no wins.
The one thing I didn’t try was running a Crystal Maiden in there, just to pop the TB’s off earlier. It seems like a bit of a waste since it gives no synergies, but on the other hand Crystal Maiden is the best unit in the game so maybe it should work here too.
