… and to what extent to crit troops become redundant in arrows war?
Crit troops don’t seem to be so regularly used, most legendary troops have no effect on critical chance and there are only a few heroes who can buff critical chance, so what’s the point of arrow attack?
When you have an empty slot an a practically infinte number of arrow attacks. Goblin Event also restricts items available. Might as well.
I’m not sure I follow. Are you talking about the battle item arrow attack or arrow wars?
I’m not sure where you’re going with crit troops. At this point in the game I wouldn’t level one.
About the battle item, somehow I’ve managed to develop/acquire 1987 of them.
Likewise, the furthest I’ve ever personally gone to is to get a Deepwood Elder Ent to level 5.
However, I just looked and was surprised to see that the last ten… battles in my watchtower list were all against teams using at least one crit troop, sometimes with the crit troops on utility heroes like healers, but never with more than two crit troops on the few teams I viewed. Members of my alliance use them on their war defences…
I guess there could be some use for arrows. It still seems odd to me to have an AoE attack that only affects specific targets, but at least there may be occasional targets, even “at this point in the game”.
Are there map and quest… contexts where arrows have significant use?
I use them a lot in Monster Island, vs hordes. Many enemies that can fail their attacks 
Maybe I’ve misunderstood arrows. I thought they just lowered opponent’s chance to crit, but if they also give an increased chance to miss that makes sense.
I use them in titans.
It’s good to make the Titan miss his attack.
Useful for lower level players 
Great low level battle item you can use for titans. Great for challenge events too. No reason to save them up. Fly away.
Rare events, very useful as they’re one of the few items you can use.
Wipe out the hordes quickly
Do crit troops improve accuracy generally so as to make it less likely to miss as well as more likely to crit?
Arrow attack items: it really depends on if you need the item slot for something else, of course, but as others have mentioned, having an essentially-free small blind effect is the main reason. --If you’re not throwing big expensive items (like, say, time stops) at titans, giving a titan a miss chance can extend the lifespan of your titan team, especially against bigger titans.
(Also can be useful to end waves going into a boss wave, i.e. all your heroes are charged up, you’d rather not fire one before the boss wave, one silly little minion enemy in the corner of the screen has 97hp, and you can’t match any tiles of colors you have under it. Arrows, boom, dead, boss wave, fire all heroes. --Also, arrows can be used to help finish off boss waves, to a lesser degree than axes and bombs of course, but damage is damage, especially if you throw a whole stack of items at once.)
But in general, if you don’t need to bring big expensive items, but you want something that can move the battle along a bit, arrow attack items are essentially “free” to use when you have berjillions 
of them sitting around anyway.
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Crit troops: To be fair, one pretty good reason that you might see leveled up crit troops is that it really isn’t universally the case that every player has some kind of mana-boosting troop in all colors. It took me years of F2P play (and grinding HA9 to retrain 4* troops!) to get any kind of mana-boosting troop at all in each color, and at some point folks are going to level the troops they have at least some.
If anything, this factor is returning more with a vengeance as long as we can’t use ETTs to get Magic or Styx type troops.
So reasons to level crit troops:
literally don’t have other 4* troop types, or
planning on eventually trading in a 4* troop to a 5* troop, so level up a crit troop with the aim of trading that one in (because the 4* mana-boosting troops, presumably, one wants to keep), or
for use with heroes who don’t really benefit so significantly from mana boosts (e.g. Styx speed) – admittedly, Ninja troops might be preferable to Crit troops in this case, but, you know, only if you have Ninjas (and even there, there tends to be a tradeoff in offense vs defense boosts)
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Also? Carthago delenda est: #52RareQuestsAYear
And cheap ■■■ veterans. 
They basically prevent 20% damage.
Right, arrows are just accuracy. Does the attack hit or miss? They have nothing to do with Critical chance.
Critical chance has nothing to do with accuracy. It is just a chance to double the damage.
Although we call them Crit troops, I often think of them as defense troops, as their boost to defense is better than most other troops.
I keep some Crit troops at level 1 or two for when I care most about defense stat. Plus I don’t have mana boosting troops in every color, and only 2 or 3 in each color that I do have.
Plus I don’t think everyone is so aware of the big advantage of mana boost troops as are those of us who read the forum. The mana boost advantage becomes clear in the gameplay but is probably not immediately obvious to all players.
For some defense tanks I could see where a Crit troop (I.e. defense troop, really) might make sense. When you care more about the tank’s ability to withstand attacks than about how fast they charge up.
One alliance colleague did some tests and came to the conclusion that Crit troop are better than mana boosting troops for titans. In this case though it really IS for their damage boosting chance.
Plus… while mana boosting is good, it’s also weird.
Increasing attack or defense incrementally is always an incremental improvement.
Increasing mana generation is only an incremental improvement when (together with whatever mana effects) it gets a hero past a number-of-tiles checkpoint (which is more fine grained on defense than on offense).
Yes!
I still refer to this chart surprisingly frequently. Although finally many of the breakpoints I seem to have finally learned.
I would credit the chart’s author if I remembered who it was.
This is what i do, or for challenge events in Rare
Not sure if they’re still playing but it’s by @thing2 from this thread
Yes! Yeah that one. Though on offense, about the mana bonuses I usually try to be most aware about are
VF, +9%, takes a hero from 7 tiles to 6. (Firing in two matches especially critical in Rush.)
Average, +12%, takes a hero from 10 tiles to 9. Under many circumstances, makes Average mostly the same speed as Fast (assuming most matches are actually match-3s).
Getting a Fast from 8 tiles to 7 is nice when it comes up (making a match-4 and a match-3), but just generally doesn’t come up as much.
Defense, on the other hand, since it charges with time and by the half-tile… yeah.
Definitely a handy chart! Also: Old Cynic’s guide to mana (including the crazy mix of other speeds)
I have this chart bookmarked, still. One of my key priorities when developing my roster, was getting as many of my average heroes to lose one tile (charge in 9, instead of 10 tiles). that really makes a huge difference!
