Hello, please help!
Tharin is scares my army, and attack my base. I can’t defend, because don’t have time to defeat opponents…
Help! What I should do?
(I’m play Ogre-Mage, in dungeon mode)
I’ve seen this strategy, is quite effective.
I didn’t try this out yet, but one of the plans I had in mind is to use Yorgarien, the wizard Ogre. Build Yorgarien and throwers, and use Yorgarien only to shrink the enemy, starting with Tharin. Make a poison cloud as soon as 3-4 units gets together.
I think it might work!
This strategy, as implemented by the top players, is almost impossible to counter. Maybe someone will figure out a good way to do it, but so far it seems that Tharin is overpowered compared to the ogre heroes. I’m considering increasing the base health to make rushes less effective, but it’s not very nice to completely upset the game balance, so I’ve been holding off so far.
I think I tried all possible strategies to defeat Tharin (I am top 50 still), but nothing really can help from this scared spell. And it is also hide from Tharin, because the radius of the spell is enemourous. So yea, it should be a problem with balance. No other hero has such ultra spell.
I’ve been trying really hard to beat him as well. I am playing Yugargen, and despite getting top 100 after playing for basically only a day, I couldn’t beat the base rush. Some things that I noticed:
- Terrify has an insanely big range.
- If I try to move my hero into the top right or bottom right corner, I still get hit by it, when he casts on the clump of units in front of my base.
- The only counterplay to Terrify is to spread out your units to minimize the impact. The range makes this unfeasible, and in the interest of a base race, forcing enemy units to scatter is going to be good.
- A good Tharin should recognize you are moving toward their base and Terrify you when you are in range. Many I have seen are capable of casting it early if you attempt to base race.
- You cannot move in a way that you are guaranteed to avoid Terrify, even if all he does is try to base race. Since the radius is 30m, he can hit everything at his given x, and as I mentioned earlier, he will also hit you if you hide somewhere at your base.
- Not only the skill range is big but the range on your units’ displacement is huge too. I’ve moved over half the map towards an enemy base in some situations. Since the game generates a random seed for displacement, it made testing against a specific opponents’ base race really difficult.
- The range on Terrify is 20m greater than Warcry. For Yugargen, the range on her spells are all a constant amount.
- The range on Warcry is 5m greater than Tharin’s attack range, and Terrify’s range is 25m greater than Tharin’s attack range. Assuming we applied similar values to Yugargen, she should have a longer skill range.
When Tharin tries to base race you, you have exactly two options: race him back or try to defend the base race.
If you race him back, you’re going to lose to Terrify most likely. The range is simply absurd so you’re not going to dodge. The 5s of Terrify + recovering from Terrify puts you too far behind in the race. If you’re lucky your units moved towards their base, but he should start hitting your base before you start his. Additionally, his Warcry is going to trump you buffing your own units.
If you try to defend it, you have a hard time killing things fast enough. You can try to kill Tharin first, but his units might overwhelm you. He might also choose to defend at some point, which mitigates all your damage. If you instead try to kill his units first, Tharin still does a lot of damage on his own, and if those units are mostly soldiers you may not kill them off fast enough.
I don’t have exact stats on how well this strategy is doing, but it seems like it’s a little too powerful based on nick’s response. If that’s the case, the game suddenly turns into Tharin base race and anything that can beat it. If nothing beats it, the game evolves into exactly Tharin rush.
I don’t think buffing the hp on anything is the way to go, but definitely something has to give. Perhaps a Terrify nerf could work out well. If the range was lower and you could dodge it, that would work out well. Also if it didn’t completely immobilize for half the race, that’d be great too.
Just to provide some empirical evidence on the subject:
My friend and I both started recently. My friend picked Librarian and got himself to around 200. I picked Shaman and got myself to 65. We both spent a significant amount of time writing the code and logic.
I wrote Tharin this morning in about 15 minutes to base race. All he does is wait for a couple of units, and then attack your base, casting Terrify on the way and Warcry when available. My Tharin ELO is 500 points higher.
There is little to no incentive for me to even play the map. I am not rewarded for devising an actual strategy over a few hours. I got better results with Tharin in literally a fraction of the time.
Just wanted to give more details on this now that I’ve spent a while working with this.
I spent some time yesterday actually developing a real base race strategy. My first attempt just base raced immediately, but sometimes that’s less effective. I didn’t utilize Warcry or Terrify to maximum potential either. After I wrote some solid logic for base racing, I got up to rank 4, just under 6000k elo; before my score stabilized, I was up to 6400k elo at 1st. I also almost never lose (since the simulations bug and detect the really close games as a tie).
I definitely feel like this strategy needs to be nerfed. I would be quite happy seeing this nerfed, despite spending time to write the strategy/code, simply on the grounds that the level and game will be more balanced and more fun, since there’s more depth. It’s fairly consistently the best strategy. I have not tried to actually beat it yet (at least not with Ironjaw, which is the only one you win with against this strategy), but I haven’t particularly lost much to the counter. The biggest reason why it needs to be nerfed is that it makes Shaman and Librarian under powered. In my simulations, I don’t see either enemy hero. Ultimately the goal should be making everything playable. Again, it’s just as important that this strategy and counters (defending as Ironjaw or racing as Ironjaw) are the only viable strategies.
What I think is the biggest issue with Tharin is the range on Terrify, like I said before. What happens is that you decide to base race and early on Terrify. For 5 seconds, a large portion of the enemy units can’t attack, and get moved in a random position. The opponent effectively cannot race me anymore, and most of the time the defense is too slow. In the Ironjaw match, it was rather significant that the range on Terrify was bigger than the their abilities, so he couldn’t knock up my unit before I Terrified.
My first suggestion for balancing would be reducing the range on Terrify. It would be much closer if people could try to dodge the Terrify. More specifically, if Stomp range was even with Terrify, the Ironjaw would get better results, since he could potentially Stomp before the Terrify. As it stands now, it’s pretty easy to Terrify before the Stomp, since I have a lot of distance between where I can Terrify their hero and they can’t Stomp me. It could also be balanced further if you extended the range of Warcry.
PS. To be on topic with the original question asked, I don’t think it’s possible to beat Tharin as Yugargen. I might try at some point, since I have a decent Yugargen (top 60).