hero comments

[clayffo]

i have played to 108 stars so far and i've seen a few posts about hero ratings, so i wanted to give my opinion on heroes.

It's nice to have a variety and something to look forward to, but more thought has to be put into application of these heroes. most levels come down to 1 of 2 problems, crowd control or dps.

I ended up using alric, cronan, and bonehart to beat pretty much every level. These heroes appear to be the only ones with appropriate enough crowd control and/or DPS to do the job. Bonehart is way OP and made this game much easier than it should have been.

if blackthorn had a little more dps and another crowd control skill, rather than looting, he would be very good too.

the characters i played once or twice and never again included mirage, bruxa, grawl, sha'tra, kutsao, and kahz. They lack any meaningful crowd control and cannot not singlehandedly do enough damage to hold back mobs.

Kahz is especially disappointing because he does not have the offense or defense to survive once his rush stun wears off. I found it tremendously aggrivating that he would chase after a far away mob (and get killed) when he was needed to support the main line of defense (and buff the towers). If he had more DPS and a skill to heal as a percentage of damage done, that would make him much more effective. he should also automatically reset back to his original position once his primary attack is complete.

I wanted to like Nivus, but the only way to effectively play him was to teleport in and out of mobs, using his disintegration skill. however, this was very labor intensive and i could not focus on my towers and keeping him alive. he could really use a big AOE attack that could be launched from behind cover. He also needs a lot more range and damage effect on his missiles.

Dante was good, but he fell apart on later levels that had big mobs. his gun skills need a lot more DPS to take down heavy targets and his holy grenade should be replaced with a more effective skill, like teleporting away from melee combat or a range buff. i found that arrow towers were far more consistent using debuffs, such as weaken and silence.

Dierdra, as a defensive character, required levels that allowed for a single bottleneck to be effective. i found that she was pretty good at AOE heals of larger groups, but was not at all effective at single target healing. 2 of her skills are totally worthless, blessed armor and divine health. If those skills were replaced with more useful skills, such as a projectile shield and HOT, then she would be much improved. also, her consecrate should buff 50% and her wings of light should be replaced with an AOE armor buff to 50 points.

[Osiris]

I think most of the heroes just require you to change your playstyle(yes, sometimes because they are flat out not as good as others when you use an optimal tower configuration, but you can treat this as a difficulty level if you want an extra challenge). Some are more micro-intensive, some make barracks more viable, some allow you to pick things off, some are good to just leave as an extra blocker, etcetera. I find that Dierdre for example allows you to make use of a bunch of barracks, whereas normally if you use a bunch of barracks you will just lose the stage because they are one of the weaker towers.
So I kind of agree with everything you said, but at the same time I think it's nice that some heroes are weaker, as a sort of artificial difficulty level. And it's nice that some allow or even force you to use different towers which are usually bad but still possible to use.

The one hero that I absolutely agree is undebatably broken as a concept is Kahz. He is not tough enough for the abilities he has. Sometimes he will do things like pull a monster with high damage and armour into your barracks/reinforcements and then instantly die, leaving the big monster to kill all your soldiers/reinforcements and allowing the smaller enemies to just run through unobstructed. If he's going to have a hook ability, he needs to at least be able to tank the thing he pulls for SOME time so the towers can get some damage on it before Kahz dies or needs to be moved.

[clayffo]

i suppose you could look at it as using weak heroes as a handicap to increase difficulty. I personally would like to see each hero as a strong and fully developed character. certainly the devs made this game too easy. that should be addressed directly with more challenging runs

[Natu]

Huh, i found Nivus to be the best one, he can dish out damage more than any other hero in the game, Boneheart is on par with him but i found it's buggy when it comes to where you send Boneheart, he has to be in front by a set amount otherwise he won't use his primary fireball thing and it gets annoying, whereas with nivus i just keep him behind soldiers or mercenaries all the time, if a big enemy get through his book attack is charged and will deal with them most times, he's also really fast despite being labeled slow, because of the teleportation.

[Diergato]

Guess everyone has their own preferences, in my case:

Dierdra, with max armor and health shes the tankiest hero in the game only those big lizards with whips can take her down, shes very useful for unit oriented builds thanks to her buffs and teleport.

Mirage, my personal favorite and shes rather tanky with her 60% dodge chance that leaves an ilussion, needs a lot of micro to trigger her backstab and other dps ability but she can dish a lot of damage if used right.

[Kolevska]

I used Saitam in the higher levels and, even though he doesn't do anything spectacular in melee, his ability to make all enemies on the map receive extra damage (65% extra damage when trained to the max) turned out to be very useful.

edit: and oh yes, Kahz has been a letdown, changing positions way too often and totally messing up my strategy at crtitical times, esp. in the heroic and iron challenges

[Todd]

I have to disagree with this. All the Hero's can be used just as effectively. You just have to change your style. For example stick Dante near a necro mancer tower and you have loads of powerful minions that pop up since Dante raises their strength. And some Hero's are better for certain maps than others, so to best take advantage of each one, use different hero's for different maps. But you always have to change your style for each Hero to take best advantage of them. With flying enemies I can use a hero that can shoot in the air and if executed well enough I don't even need a single tower that shoots air enemies. I move blackthorn around so much to where the most destruction is at the moment, and I get tons of gold. And also rain of fire right where I have blackthorn and many enemies and I get rained down with gold. So much so I have far far more towers and upgrades than I'd have otherwise that I can dominate a map. Some hero's are great for crowd control, some are great for taking out single heavy enemies, so on a map with one you'd have the towers take out all the smaller guys first, and allow through the bigger one that your Hero can take out, or vice versa. There is just so much you can do with each hero if done well.