My scumbag AR defense map setup is now ready! It's been a work in progress in my head for some time and I wanted to write about it.
Before I dig more into specifics, I'll go over some general analysis of how AR Defense works. Your goal is to:
1a. Annihilate the enemy team completely
OR
1b. Stall out the enemy team to a loss
2. If you can't, inflict as many casualties as possible
1a is obviously the hardest goal to accomplish. Players on offense don't have the limitation of having AI control their units, and on top of that AR offense allows you to field from up to 5 pre-made squads in advance, with the advantage of being able to preview the enemy defense map and unit setup to fully capitalize on that. There are some handicaps of course - the map itself is still presumably going to cater to the enemy defense's setup, and offense teams have the burden of needing to run a bonus hero for maximum point gain - but minor overall; you generally assume offense will still win in a vacuum if the players on both sides are equally skilled. Wipes happen generally due to an egregious mistake on the attacking player's part.
1b throws an interesting wrench in due to AR's 7 turn limit to victory, and works in tandem with
2. These goals are not mutually exclusive as attacking players seek both to minimize their losses (to gain maximum) Lift while still going for a win. In the playtesting of my defense, I found that it was fairly viable to win if you were immediately willing to take a unit loss to the initial bait or attack, but I am hedging that people will play more greedily than that and aim to exploit it. The aether buildings serve as an incentive to this strategy as well, as people want to destroy them before combat ends and that adds an additional complication that sometimes can result in non-optimal play in the name of greed.
I concluded I was going to aim for stall. My heavily invested units are both horse emblem specific and extremely common in the meta; they obviously are going to be expected by anyone worth their salt. I wasn't quite ready to spin up a whole new defense team from cloth, though, so I figured I'd stick to it and work in whatever solutions I could to counter the most obvious meta answers.
The main units (B.Lyn/Rein/dancer) are lifted straight from my arena defense, where things work a little differently (typically scoring any kill there will net you a successful defense). However they still generally serve well since scoring a kill on the enmy team often snowballs and immediately mitigates Lift loss. Without the need to save a slot for a bonus hero I threw in Veronica (again another very common meta pick, for good reason) as well (more on that in the unit specific analysis).
My last unit, a new addition in unlocking the 5th slot for defense, was initially an awkward decision point. 4 units is a very ideal defense formation that you can preposition together and set up specific threat zones (in AR defense your team does not moved until provoked). Adding a 5th (and eventually 6th!) unit, I feel, can actually make formations less threatening if it results in an easier, less risky bait/initiate for the attacking player. I then realized that stall was probably a viable strategy, though, after watching one player on a replay completely stomp over my team and then subsequently fail to win because they got too greedy chasing the aether buildings and couldn't kill my last (harmless) dancer with their remaining units in 1 turn. So I set out the goal of finding a unit that would be an absolute bitch to kill by the most common units in the meta (as it turns out, all of those defense meta units are also great on offense, so: anti-Rein/Lyn!) and also could not be easily baited out to disrupt the rest of my team's formation. This thought sprung up after fighting an enemy team that literally had housed in an L!Tiki in a corner with buildings in an obvious bid to try to make landing the final blow as painful as possible. It didn't work because Reinhardt still handily one-rounds her, but the idea was good.
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So here's the map:
Spring Breeze was my pick; there are better maps if you're looking to be anti-cavalry specifically (trenches and forests), but this is a solid one because walls block all unit types. From anecdotal experience cavalry and infantry does look to be the most common (I haven't seen a single dedicated flier team, just one-ofs like Aversa and flying dancers).
So we'll talk first about buildings. Buildings do do stuff (Catapult, Tactics, and Panic are my choices for most useful on defense, in that order), but that is, I believe, honestly their secondary function in the grand scheme of things. Their MAIN function is simply to take up space, delay the enemy team into wasting time/being possibly confused about positioning and corral your formation into doing what you want it to do in the ands of the AI. When they introduced the quest to add optional ornamental buildings I was honestly thrilled because I think those are frankly almost as good as the actual buildings, without costing aether stones to build.
Of note here is the Fortress, which is indestructible. This serves basically as a wall tile and is -the- most important building to consider placement. You can see here that I use it to house Surtr in, effectively making it take considerable effort to actually get through and attack him. This ties into the overall plan to stall the enemy team out and also avoids the rest of the team from taking off into unfavorable attacking AI mode just because someone poked him in the other corner.
A ton of buildings are dedicated to the left side to emphasize this. To actually successfully reach Surtr, you have to - at minimum - destroy the Healing Tower (which is a stand-in for whatever the bonus building is for the week, if it isn't already represented), almost certainly deal with the Heavy Trap, and then blow up both the Tactics Room and the Panic Manor. All of these tiles are in the threat range of the rest of the team. It's more or less impossible to provoke Surtr without triggering the rest of the team (and to win, you still DO need to at minimum clear the path to him, since he'll happily sit in that corner no problem if you don't break him out.)
The right side of the map, on the other hand, is scant! This is because the right side is complete bait. A team could split push, sending most of their team to the right and one person to wittle away at the buildings and traps on the left, but it's a tricky endeavor; you really want at least two people to test those traps, and against ranged horse threat range you actually tend to need three (Repoing/Dancing). To push down the right successfully you pretty much have to be ready to clear the entire squad there in 3 turns tops, which I frankly just don't think most teams will be able to accomplish without eating a unit loss at minimum, which makes the likelihood of killing Surtr on time that much lower.
The two frontline units are Veronica and Azura. The Catapult protects Veronica and Reinhardt from being hit by an enemy team's Tactics Room, which would otherwise cripple their threat range (Veronica specifically is of crucial import here; Reinhardt isn't terribly bothered). Ideally I would protect Lyn and Veronica, but to make their threat ranges identical (which is absolutely essential) I can only cover one. The Catapult is also strategically positioned two tiles south of Veronica instead of just one to force a player into destroying it if they want to snipe her; were it just one tile south of her, a player could ignore the building and also choke off Reinhardt's threat range by leaving it up. Creating an open battlefield for more threat range and also forcing the player to waste an action blowing up the building is win-win all around.
Azura doesn't care about being hit by gravity due to being a dancer, and is covered by the Bolt Trap. Were someone to test the Bolt Trap, Lyn and Veronica threaten two tiles away from it, so a single Reposition actually doesn't bring anyone out of attack range at all. You need multiple Repos/Dances, and the terrain makes that tricky even then, such that I don't think it's actually practical to avoid being attacked. The most ideal situation for an attacker is if Lyn is gravity ployed by a Tactics Room and they expose someone who can tank Veronica after the movement shuffle; but even then, Veronica is best suited to punish an enemy team that's clumped up, as they unavoidably will be, and will also be in position to get danced.
Of note - a common meta setup is to have a melee cavalry with a Firesweep weapon and Lunge instead in Azura's position, essentially creating a triple-unit threat zone (2 ranged units adjacent), and replacing Reinhardt with the dancer spot there instead. I thought about this, but because I didn't have any candidates I'd be happy with in that role I stuck to what I'm using, although it's certainly a good formation and I could revisit it in the future if it doesn't feel like Reinhardt pulls his weight.
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Veronica and Lyn are obviously the units I want the enemy team to be scared of. My Lyn runs Firesweep, so if they opt to bait there's no counter-kill happening under any circumstances. Since they're both colorless, they're very vulnerable to Raventome (and the most common Raventome unit is Cecilia, who also hard counters Reinhardt) so I built them specifically to be able to handle that situation. Lyn runs Cancel Affinity, and Veronica forgoes her Prf for a Pain+ instead. This ensures that pretty much any Cecilia build WILL die if they both hit her, as Veronica will do 10 minimum no matter what and Lyn can kill from there in a single hit, so even Bowbreaker won't be enough. Cecilia would otherwise easily run over 3/4 of them without much issue and is an extremely common pick on AR teams, so preparing against her is very important.
Veronica's splash damage means any clumping will be severely punished, and frankly she can just flat out kill people of mediocre Res stats by doubling even with a 10 Mt weapon, which at effectively 45 Spd (39 base + 6 from Atk/Spd Solo 3) happens frequently enough. And if they live, they're eating 24 at the end of combat regardless. The threat of a Lyn and/or dance followup makes this prospect extremely dangerous to bait without a unit loss. She is the artillery of the team, which is why she gets the Catapult-protected column to make sure she always has the threat range.
Notably, she has no heal assist set, and this is deliberate. I originally ran Restore+ to cleanse off Panic as a way to charge up Miracle and counter Aversa, but the AI simply prioritizes healing too much even after offense AI has been triggered, and it is far more important for her to attack. Plus no one on this team aside from Surtr is tanking shit anyway.
Her Prf is still very good - I thought about whether discarding it was really the correct choice - but the stat swing still gets spoiled a bit by Aversa/Tactics Room and, ultimately, 4 Mt is not that huge a loss over the tremendous potential of damage that the artillery build gets. And a lot of my early kills in my previous defenses involved people just getting stomped on by her splash so I was sold on keeping it in the end. There's some argument that Maribelle could be better (trades 3 Spd for a lot more Res), but doubling's very important so I think she still shines even without her Prf.
Lyn, aside from running CA to spoil Raventome, is there to clean up whatever Veronica splashes on. Anyone unfortunate enough to get doubled by her and isn't packing serious Def is of course also at risk of simply dying; she runs QP+Moonbow to emphasize this threat as hard as possible. She's sort of whatever after her first attack and isn't expected to live past that, but it's a guaranteed attack that cannot be countered. People do also occasionally fail to kill her in one hit, which is of course terrible since it's very unlikely she'll be doubled. I waffled a lot on the C slot, since Goad rarely kicks in with the AI's control, and experimented with Atk/Spd Smoke for a bit but decided that this team was too heavy on offense to really take advantage of either. So the rare occasion where Goad makes a difference is probably more relevant, although I'm still unsure on this.
Rally Attack may stick out as unusual, but it actually serves a specific purpose: should Lyn be hit by Tactics Room, she will spend her first action using it (usually on Reinhardt) and Azura will prioritize dancing her immediately. Her second action is NOT subject to the gravity ploy, which means she is free to murder the Cecilia that just baited Veronica. This is a specific scenario I tested thoroughly to make sure my team doesn't bite it to Gronnraven, and it consistently works.
The ornamental building left of Lyn deserves an honorable mention - during playtesting I found out that Azura would retreat back to that tile if it was unoccupied to dance Lyn after a Rally Attack, which of course pulled her out of position and was undesirable. I had the Healing Tower there originally, but that meant an enemy Catapult could blow it up and cause that scenario to happen. Ornamental buildings, meanwhile, are immune to Catapult!
Azura sits squarely in her spot with double Drive Attack which will conveniently cover all of the zones that Lyn and Veronica will attack from if baited. Wings of Mercy is a common B slot option for dancers, but given the ball lightning nature of this team I opted for Chill Speed instead to increase the likelihood of doubles. Aside from that she is mostly replaceable by any dancer but I already invested/merged in her, and hey she has a good Res stat with Distant Counter so she can make enemy Reinhardts' lives miserable and shrug off other offensive-mediocre units (like enemy mage dancers or dragons that don't auto-double). There are certainly endgame scenarios where an attacking team is limited to these units, which cements the stall win. Dies to archers of course, but they're actually not terribly popular right now anyway (Lyn is not common on offense).
Reinhardt is the most questionable unit here, and I mainly have him because he's already built. Under the assumption that an enemy Cecilia won't live the initial bait, he is of course still a threat as always to any unit not built specifically to counter him. In a chaotic situation where the enemy team didn't predict exactly what would happen on a bait he can easily run amok unchecked, so of course he's still good for that. Standard setup, not much else to say; Heavy Blade is strictly better than Quickened Pulse as long as he has more Atk, and he has 56 on initiate (with most damage dealers getting at least 6 Atk from their player phase A skill, this is generally enough). Even good Res greens, if they don't run TA, can still be caught by surprise and sniped by the Moonbow proc. That said, everyone and their mother runs at least one counter to him, ubiquitous as he is.
His main support utility is Chill Res, which is great of course for both him and Veronica, and I'd sorely miss it if I replaced him as I don't have anyone else or more fodder for it. But he's certainly the one that could most easily be replaced; there's an argument to plug Aversa into that slot for instance, or another dancer, if Reinhardt's role as a backup threat is overkill or if people just too easily slot multiple counters for him. In particular, if I ever get around to upgrading the Bolt Trap to L2, triggering it will knock Lyn and Veronica below half HP, so a WoM dancer in the back could be pretty brutal.
Harsh Command is a niche pick; I tried Rally on him but it didn't work out well with the AI, and the movement assists are generally not great, so I decided that if some enemy team really wanted to run Chills/Ploys and he wasn't in attack range he could mitigate it some. I was concerned he would move out of position to use it while idle if Azura got hit by a debuff, but turns out the AI doesn't bother so it ended up being fine.
Of note is that he doesn't run Hone Cavalry, specifically to not get spoiled by Aversa; I thought about this some and decided ultimately that she was still prevalent enough that I didn't want to risk just being blown out by her. Goad again is a very meh pick, but like Lyn the pickings are slim to begin with.
Surtr is my newest project, and is built to be a wall. I threw away his Prf without hesitation; if he's going to get barricaded in a corner, the most obvious solution is to beat him down with ranged attacks and keep him stuck, so his absolute top priority is to make that as unviable a strategy as possible. He already has Def through the roof and Steady Stance 4, so that means he needs Res. I was fortunate enough to grab a +Res IV (helps that his banner was very easy to snipe, being both green and a two-hero focus), and a weapon with a +Res refine was non-negotiable; it was just a question of which.
Distant Counter is tempting to discourage attacking him, but ultimately it didn't make the cut. The main issue isn't that DC is bad - it's very good - but that giving up Steady Stance 4 is simply too high a cost. That's 8 Def and an in-built Guard effect that doesn't take the B slot, the latter being the crucial thing here. Surtr NEEDS Wary Fighter to avoid getting doubled, but without Guard that makes him very susceptile to Def/Res-ignoring specials. Guard in A slot is basically a great argument on its own to make killing him as hard as possible, and so Steady Stance 4 stays. The Def is icing, just essentially making him laugh at any and all archers, especially deprived of their special procs.
Surtr's Menace likewise is a solid C slot unique to him, which serves mainly to force people to waste turns Repoing units away after attacking. Leaving someone in Surtr's threat range is an dicey proposition even without his Prf, because being subject to a net 8 stat swing is pretty brutal. Plus, there's really nothing better to put in that slot for the purposes of stalling.
This leaves mages. Red mages, of course, will be able to handle him even despite all of the measures being taken here, but they're also quite rare aside from Aversa. Reinhardt cries; WTD against 47 Res and no special procs basically just laughs him off. Other mages being deprived of being able to double makes cutting through Wary Fighter in one swing a difficult endeavor. I was aiming for three attacks of substance minimum to be able to kill him, which I think he manages quite nicely. Even red melee will be hard pressed (49 Def if they initiate, can't double.)
The weapon choice boiled down what helps me stall. A Res refine had to be avilable. The list was Sack o' Gifts/Handbell, Hack o' Axe, and Slaying Axe. The first was the weapon I considered initially, +2 to all stats when initiated on, another edge to tank attacks (and one indiscriminate to range to boot). Hack o' Axe was interesting; it gives the Guard effect as well, which means I could theoretically replace Steady Stance 4 with Distant Counter or Fortress Def/Res 3. The latter is actually very good and what I would have gone with if I had a Klive to spare! I didn't, though, and I wasn't sold on DC due to the -8 Def loss either (and being somewhat reluctant to blow DC fodder on an AR defense-only stall unit). Slaying Axe, the choice I went with in the end, doesn't get the slight stat edge that Sack o' Gifts does, but on the other hand makes Surtr threaten to kill even red melee, as a Bonfire from him IS assuredly lethal. This means that even red melee would be forced to be Repo/Dance'd out rather than try to bait into kill if it gets charged, and if Surtr gets softened up at ALL it will be charged.
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If anyone has any thoughts on this - possible improvements (like if anyone has better ideas for C slots I'd love to hear it) - how they'd try to tackle it, etc. it'd be much appreciated! I absolutely had a blast thinking all of this out and designing the defense setup (and AR in general has rekindled my interest heavily), enough to motivate me to word vomit all of this up.
