Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
7/4/2013 11:11:10 AM
Subject:
RE: My warmage progress
I have been putting off Stairs of Doom because this map is clearly intended for co-op. Two spawn points, two rifts. In between the two stairs is a gulf of acid, so getting back and forth between one choke point and another is risky. In single-play, your conventional killboxes won't work, partly because of the gulf logistics and partly because you get a lot of heavies early, about wave 10. You also have those filthy little goblin healers.
So an unorthodox strategy is called for here. I decided to go beyond unorthodox and strove for silliness.
My loadout:
Weapons:
crossbow with mana regen on headshots
lightning ring with prolonged storm cloud (ice amulet won't really work here because you need a lot of early AOE damage you can cast and forget -- grinders will only get you so far, and I was not able to bring zappers -- the crossbow stun sufficed for my purposes)
Traps:
tar
scorchers with burn longer (probably should have used wider area)
spike walls with stun
archers with fire arrows
spores with faster regen
Trinkets:
mana rage
scavenger trinket (mo' money)
guardian revival trinket
Each middle stair landing had, from back to front, this configuration:
scorcher row
tar row
scorcher row
spore row
I was able to get one scorcher on each landing facing sideways-inward toward the tar row.
At the foot of each stair, I used one row of scorchers, then laid as many rows of spores as I could afford. I wanted lots of in-fighting before the orcs started up the stairs.
At the top of the stair, before monsters turned the corner to the rift, I set out about six archers. I also put about three archers on each side of the big bridge thing that spans the stairs.
The archers were standing on rows of spores.
Along the entire surface of each stair wall, I put spike walls. I also put them down in front with the spore garden.
I was surprised by how well all of this worked. Naturally, the little guys and earth lords wasted the spores, but the archers were able to inflict an amazing amount of damage while the other orcs were busy beating up on the little guys.
Of course, the heavies were free to charge up the stairs and kill my archers, but they had to get past the spike walls first, which was very hard for them to do. As they got tossed down the stairs, some of them landed on the bottom rows of recharged spores and went to work for me. Meanwhile the archers continued raining down death on unturned orcs.
As you would expect, the later waves became rather chaotic because all the orcs were gaining strength. The earth lords and some other enemies were able to get at my archers. They beat them to a pulp and started making their way toward the rift, but they stepped on the spores where the archers had been. Doh. Meanwhile the lower spores were refreshing and I was adding more to the garden. I usually was able to sell and replace at least one of the very top rows of spores. This became necessary as little earthlings ruined them.
At the beginning of each wave, I would use the guardian revival trinket, and my army of archers were back in action.
Very few enemies got past all this, so I easily arrived at my 40-wave goal. Unhappily, I forgot the gnoll invasion that occurs in wave 43. Here I decided to end things and threw myelf into the acid a few times, but then I stopped when I saw that the gnolls were dying or turning.
I decided to see how far this would play out. I got through wave 49 and would certainly have passed 50 if I hadn't done all the suiciding.
So the lesson here is: be unconventional every once in a while and watch what happens.
