Orcs Must Die 2- Nightmare, manaless run. Rules are straight forward: I can't use mana. I am resetting if I lose any rift points, though I am not if I go over on par time. This is much harder than it sounds. No thunder storm to control crowds, no wind belt/void wall action, no guardian revival (This one hurts, it'd be easy to spam guardians and just revive them after every wave otherwise). The only trinket I can use the active skill on is the rift defender trinket, which has been very useful. I'm a little over halfway through. I am using the Warmage, as he is very well suited to this. Oh man is Tar godlike. Anyway. Notable levels:
Big Valleys- Had a couple of resets here. Kobold sappers are extremely dangerous here due to sniping guardians. I end up using a lot of dwarves to handle the earth lords.
Hidden gulch-
Loadout: Crossbow, Spore Mushrooms, Archers, Rift Defender Trinket, Arrow Wall, Guardian Trinket, Tar, Barricades, Healing Trinket, Coin Forge
Waves 2 and 3 are extremely difficult here. Why? Fliers. You have to assign some archers early on to deal with the fliers, which means you have to choose between damage traps and barricades to prevent enemies from escaping. The Armored Ogre in waves 2 and 3 kept kicking my ass. I tried duelling him down- it took forever, and I wasn't good enough with the war hammer to take him down with it. I ended up using a spore mushroom to ID him, then selling it before the next wave. Once I got past wave 3, it was pretty trivial. I just had to rush forward and kill the Gnoll bombers before they sniped my archers.
Precipice- Loadout: Crossbow, Tar, Archers, Barricades, Flame Scorcher, Guardian Trinket, Arrow Wall, Boom Barrels, Healing Trinket, Rift Defender Trinket
This fucking level. >_< Three things are killing me in this challenge: Gnolls, Fliers, and Kobold Sappers. Fliers cannot be reasonably killed with traps and physical attacks. So you have to use Archers. Archers get vaporized by Gnolls, so you have to figure out a way to deal with them. Wave 3 has a lot of Gnolls. But wait! You can't ice or wind them, you can't charm them and you sure as hell can't revive your archers. Argh. I got past the Gnolls with a cute spring/void wall setup, and promptly got slaughtered by the heavies in wave 4. I scrap the void wall setup, and go with what got me through the yeti DLC. Clearing Chilled Caverns required heavy use of boom barrels. Boom Barrels also more or less kill Gnolls in a single attack. Four of them will kill even a Mountain Troll. They replace magic as your crowd control/heavy killer in this run. I take out the fliers in wave 2 without archers on the left side, boom barrel the gnolls in wave 3, and use boom barrels to snipe heavies as need be. The run is pretty easy once you get past the gnoll threat, just getting to that point sucked.
Passages- I had about a dozen resets. It was just a matter of finding the right mix of flame traps/archers/tar/arrows for the first few waves. The insane number of sappers on the level means that barricades are out. I end up going heavier on the flame traps than archers early. Boom barrels kill any gnolls that get to close (And the rift defender trinket can buy me a few seconds if the horde is closing in on my guardians)
I am getting much higher scores than normal, since I am comboing instead of smashing things with magic.
