Cheesing the Beta (and thus coming up with helpful feedback)

[Guest discore]

The last few days I've been looking for a ridiculously easy strategy that plays out as unbalanced.

So far I have tried building nothing but Hydro and nothing but Jinx. All Hydro is pretty funny (especially when you summon new elementals) and I think it has potential to be the type of "strategy" I'm looking for - the cheesiest possible, but I think my placement was off (mostly building around numpad 4/5). And I think I made a mistake, instead of just massing Hydro like there was no tomorrow, I started to build some Well towers and started to upgrade Hydros to Spouts. A mass Hydro plan with good placement could be really cheesy.

All Jinx could probably work with a lot of micro and a little luck. It was definitely interesting but I wasn't doing nearly enough micro to make it effective. Jinx towers just don't perform that well (even though the concept of the tower is cool). The problem I was running into was: 1) right as you start getting your Jinx towers out, everything dies too fast to allow the 3 second wait for the possible teleport and 2) Once everything isn't dying too fast, it's almost entirely luck based, "Will that monster at the front get ported?! OH GOD" and it takes waaay too much micro. I think Jinx towers could be improved by reducing the cooldown on the possible teleport, or maybe saying like "10% chance to teleport back instantly upon hit, 30% chance to teleport back 3 seconds after hit" or something along those lines (although I understand that may be hard to code since you can't easily determine where to port the monster back to instantly - or can you? Never coded a War3 map).

Off the top of my head I think mass Impulse would be interesting. Select them all and just blow up the farthest monster one at a time. Maybe the opposite of that with mass Laser could work as well.

One of my earliest plans was mass Zealot with a couple Well towers. I haven't tried it since becoming more familiar with 4.0 but I could see some potential for cheese with Zealots.

Mass Roast maybe? Never tried it.

What have the pros come up with for the cheesiest possible strats? I usually test my cheesing on Normal but a VH friendly cheesy strat would be awesome. The easiest way to beat VH I've seen has been jolin012's replay using 1 of every element and getting your Cube towers out around level 52 (replay in this thread), but it requires so many different towers that it's not nearly as cheesy as I want it to be.

[Cisz]

Mass hydro doesn't really work.

I tried to stop ronald (only 30 are on the map) with mass hydro, and he just got slower. and that was on very easy.

Many things should work on normal, but on vh the cheese get's hard indeed.

Can you provide a jinx replay? I never tested that tower.

[Guest discore]

Yeh I'll try to whip up a Jinx replay tonight. Another idea I had on changing Jinx: maybe make the teleport part of it work like the Enchantment tower's Faerie Fire? Instead of it being linked to the attack of the tower, it could be an autocast debuff that doesn't require any micro.

[Guest ma23]

this is so weird. last night i was actually trying to do a hydro/jinx strat. needless to say it doesnt work. hydro works better than jinx simply because if the unit dies in the air, the aoe damage is still applied, while in the case of jinx, if the unit dies in 3 seconds, no aoe damage. i was thinking of all flamethrowers just for the added aoe damage on death (the damage is very minimal though).

unsurprisingly, all electricity towers work fairly well. i just try to make nature arrow towers for the earth lvls. but then i leaked roughly 20 on lvl 39 and promptly died. mass mushroom and hail towers work fairly well, except that there is no way to prevent the tower from using its ability (ie. 2 creeps left and i want to save my mana for next round).

i was crunching some numbers to see if a money tower strat would work, but it seems only when it is a lvl2 tower will it be viable.

i also want to try mass quark, mass disease (disease range is more than 300 and seems to hit faster then 1 unit per second), mass polar and a strategically placed mass tidal.

on the less crazy side, there is the roots + corrosion (possibly add in voodoo) strat since its aoe and damage is done for the next 5 seconds, and place towers 5 seconds apart (whatever that means).

Edit: i added a replay i just did. as expected, when using light as primary damage element, i die on lvl 39. too bad i cant get lvl 2 mushroom to support my lvl2 electricity by then.

*added a short mode kindle run to lvl 37. i tried it earlier but i summoned a lvl 3 elemental at lvl 30 and got demolished because of it.

vhard electricity mushroom ---ma23---.w3g

kindle lvl 37 ---ma23---.w3g

[Guest discore]

except that there is no way to prevent the tower from using its ability (ie. 2 creeps left and i want to save my mana for next round)

This is really annoying, especially with Tornadoes and Hail. Not sure if it's been brought up before, but you should be able to control the cast of everything that has a castable ability. I don't want to manually control every cast of every tower, but I do want to be able to prevent it from casting at certain times. I suppose you could probably spam Stop but that's kinda lame and probably impossible with more than a few different towers.

I think this is all of the towers that could benefit from that change:

Magic

Plague

Mushroom

Oblivion (maybe not since you pretty much always want it summoning stuff)

Storm

Hail

[Twilice]

You can do it on magic allready. Just right click it.