War Defense: Requesting Advice

Here’s my old war defense for Field Aid:


Here’s what I’m thinking of switching it to:

And here are my most powerful heroes:


Anyone got advice for me on this?

The problem I see with your: Graz-JF-Tel-Kiril-Hansel

-is that the enemy by stacking red gets an extra bonus of having an easy kill on Hansel.
-Jf as flank on a team with no aoe dmg or heavy hitters, makes him using an early game dot a lot less dangerous.
-I can see the idea of having Grazul on the corner on field aids. I dont know how strong your wars enemy are, after you cross a certain ranking corner beefy healers are just free points. But on low and even mid level wars it can still steal some extra flags from E/F low level enemies. I personally not a fun, but there is value in her being there.

With what you have on field aids I’d try:

JF-Tel-Grazul-Hansel-Gretel

The whole idea is to force blue stacks to kill Grazul and have a much more devious “extra bonus” on JF. But the thing is having JF in a corner will make him less vulnerable to blue tiles and also, his ult will be a pain in the ■■■ even with favorable blue stack, unless they burn dispels heroes. But then again with Hansel, Gretel and Tel you much rather burn cleaners. Bringing a dispeller and a cleaner every fight is costly.

Another option I see if your alliance uses Green tanks:

JF-Proteus*-Tel-Grazul-Gretel

My personal playstile during Field aid is to not have any pure healers. And stack an extra annoyance instead. In this defense variation you replace Hansel for Gretel (while she is much less emblemed) she doesnt share the color weakness with your tank. Which is more than enough to forgo 11 emblems.

  • Proteus can very well be C.Tiburtus (I’d advice to max his costume stats if nothing interesting is up, it doesnt take that long).
1 Like

Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve changed your thread title from advisement to advice. Was a little confused if you had an advertisement? GL

Thanks for the help! Your explained reasoning has helped quite a bit. Here’s another defense team for your feedback:
This was inspired by the second squad you proposed (JF-Tel-Grazul-Hansel-Gretel).


I swapped Grazul for JF on the wing because as you pointed out, lone healers aren’t threatening anymore for high level players. It’s common for me to have Hansel & maybe the other wing left after an attack, so maybe Hansel’s good for finishing a fight. Trying to draw out the last moments, though, may not be very profitable.

I think Telluria & Neith get along quite well together. Telly’s mana slow makes Neith’s cut hurt more, and an accuracy reduction extends the enemy’s pain in the effort to stop Telly from cranking out more minions & healing. Rough complementing lockdown. I also like Proteus, but he’s a bit more fragile and more weak against cleansers.

One reason I like Telly-Kiril-Hansel: “Oh, you’re stacking on red? Have fun with Kiril” :stuck_out_tongue:
That guy’s a brick. He is my absolute brick. Is it worth missing out on Grazul’s status block, though? There’s a question. I’d want to beat Telluria by mana blocking her or using Defense Down. That’s harder to do with Grazul right there.

I don’t have much confidence in Gretel for defense. Even if her skill was fast with the same effect, Hansel’s better. I also feel like I’m laying a little trap with the green-blue-green setup.

I don’t know why I didn’t seriously consider putting Grazul as tank. She’d do that very well, and give Telluria good time to get started.

If I were to plan an attack for JF-Telly-Grazul-Hansel-Gretel, I’d stack reds. Grazul’s not strong or weak against it, but there are no blues in that squad and I’d be loving life when I hit the flanks. I would then take out the right side and leave Telluria alone as much as possible. Then I’ve got half a board for gathering mana, & then I’d rain fire appropriately.

But that being said, I haven’t fought many Grazuls and I’ve never seen a Telluria right behind her. Think the fight would get more complicated than that?
Your logic has helped me out a good bit, thank you! Got any more for me?

(Additional note: Unfortunately I don’t know of a way to watch recordings of my defense team in action, so I don’t know how many players think like I do on stacking and how many would stack blues vs. a red tank with green flanks. I think it would be a good idea to watch people raid online so I can see the patterns…)

1 Like

I’m very impress with your self analysis, you made a lot of good points.

You are correct on prefering Hansel over Gretel, in the sense that you have the experience to back up Hansel’s performance. Because, unfortunatly like you pointed:

There is no way to know what team attacked you, what tile combination did they have while doing so. Which enemy heroes your team attacked, how effective was the blinds, mana blocks and so on.
We are best to make assumptions on what is best for defense by combining rational thinking with experience. That’s why I belive you do the right choice by sticking with Hansel.

Indeed, so would I. When I see a passive Tank I know for a fact that I will be able to charge my tiles with very little punishment. So even if Grazul does 4 ults before I charge 2 of my heroes to 1K.O one of yours, I dont care. I’ll wait, so I rather bring 3 reds which will make it a lot easier to kill your Tell and your Hansel. Which are the onces that can snowball me easier. And that’s why JF is there on a corner, on Field Aids wars he will have the chance to carry you vs blue stacks. So now your team has an extra winning condition even if your 2 green carriers die.

I personally dont like Kiril that much on this context (the guy is an overall rock star for a 4*). The reason being that Telluria already heals (with dot and minions) and you also have Field Aids: it comes at turn 6 most of the time (unless somebody of your teams dies really fast), while Kiril’s ult if attacker focused properly (your Tell-Kiril is the “safest” place for charging mana with the least amount of dmg comming back to the attacker) will end up using his ult on turn 4/5 (2 turns early than an average Field Aids).
Was that healing ult helpful?, a game changer? hard to tell. A good attacker wont depend on tile dmg to kill your first hero (he/she will set the possibility for it to happend but not make a game plan for it), a good attacker will find a attack combination that can withstand your heroes auto-attacks and debuffs while charging a dispeller or a 2 ults for a combo K.O and go from there.

Last thing I would like to point out is that Neith has “hidden text” on her ult. Her blind effect can be read as:

All enemies get -35% accuracy for 4 turns and a 35% of getting double mana off of their tiles. Chance to miss also applies to offensive Special Skills

When a tile is ghosted (they don’t hit anything) they will give you double mana. So Neith shoots herself on the foot with this, because the mana drain now is countered by the opponent getting double mana 1/3 of the time. That is a VERY dangerous ability you are letting your opponent have. Hence, while I’m not a fan of Neith on defense where you can’t control the impact of her ult.

Edit: I forgot a couple of other pointers:

While I said I dont like Kiril in that particular context. A thing to not understimate is that if you have a pure healer, it means that low level teams will rarely sneak a win off of your team. They can have insane good tiles all they want, but unless they brings stacks to counter the pure healer alone, their chances of getting a lucky win are very very low. This possibility gets shut down on Field Aids week, but not with the other War gimmicks. I personally want to have 1 healer on every non Field Aids war, but the moment this healer is dead the chances of getting my left over team killed by a weak team are much higher (you can compensate this weakness by putting the healer on a corner, so it cant get tile bombed). But the fact that is a weakness that allows low level teams to punish you remains.

Last thing to consider is the color Ratio of the heroes your Alliance uses on defense. Dont just tunnel vision on the tank color. It may very well be that a lot of ppl are using Yellow heroes as key team elements. So then your Neith may get extra value on the fact that most of the dark heroes will be used on other teams.

Edit2: And I promise to be done, you are not wrong in wanting to use a blue hero on your defense. It just that Kiril, imho, doesnt get to shine and give his best on this context. Unfortunatly Grimm is to squishy with emblems figures w/o them. And you dont have others heroes, maybe a Sonya in the future could give you an extra option.

1 Like

I’m back again! Here’s my current defense squad:


And here are my options:

What do y’all think would be the best way to go now? I think after I broke 4,000 power, people stopped underestimating me. Now they usually take me down with 1 or 2 war points instead of 8. :confused: