Realm Siege Strategies

Read also General Strategy - e.g., General Strategy: Chapter 3 Resource Management including "fast-tracking" a hero to awaken them faster, vs. purchasing new heroes. This strategy guide assumes basic familiarity with RS - e.g. read basic mechanics in Realm\_Siege. Read also Battle Mechanics for issues such as scalability of abilities.

## General Tips

### ALWAYS do AT LEAST the two free RS runs / day.

People say this game is limited by gems, but really it is limited by TIME - especially as a F2P, but even somewhat if you could do 7 RS runs/day as a P2W player, whereupon it would still take >22 days to get each one of the strong late-game heroes from R2 to R6.

### The difficulty in RS depends mainly on your flexibility.

RS is simultaneously one of the most important aspects of the game - i.e., you will spend MUCH more time in it than you did in campaign, or will in tournaments - and yet also not as important, since failure costs you nothing and you can choose to avoid playing maps entirely. Thus, the difficulty of this game mode depends mainly on how committed you are to working on a specific task, vs. being flexible to choose from among what RS offers you each time.

### The difficulty increases as you progress further.

Thus, there is a real risk that you will get “stuck”, unable to handle +5 difficulty each time. Plan ahead to avoid this, b/c the loss of that +50% to your monthly income beyond that offered by the Daily Trial (but not considering the Wheel) is severe. Though it's worth repeating again: do *not* skip RS under any circumstances: getting your heroes to more powerful states is more important than any other game aspect.

### Almost ALWAYS place towers on blessed spots.

Since their power keeps pace with the ever-increasing difficulty, at the very end of the game (as you approach having literally all the heroes, and awakened to maximum ranks & power) these will be the only things even capable of giving or receiving damage, long after your heroes can no longer help much directly.

### Place towers on the remaining locations for benefits not directly related to damage.

Once blessed spots are full, or even before, this approach can provide substantial benefits.

* example 1: a W1 wizard tower’s primary attack will do very little on a non-blessed spot, but it’s two secondary abilities (teleport and haste) will work exactly the same as they would on a blessed spot
* example 2: a non-blessed barracks in front of a blessed one can soak up some additional damage and special attacks, and delay enemies a bit next to a tower or hero that actually does damage. This works especially great in W4 to get the ninjas to use up their jump-attack, absorb a ranged attack and their corresponding "slow", and to stop enemies with zero offense such as the clouds, which when engaged no longer spawn cloudlets.
* example 3: a W2 axe tower can still boost the speed of all nearby towers, even if its' primary and axe spinning attack are useless when not blessed - and W1 archer towers similarly can boost the range of nearby towers (a questionable benefit), plus apply their "slow" effect
* example 4: a W2 lightning tower can still stun enemies as they pass by, and in W4 an archer or mage tower can similarly slow and stun enemies, although those are likely not worth their enormous costs

### Buy RS keys, or not, to achieve your aims.

Buying keys costs gems (duh), so to save up for a shiny new hero, don't do that. On the other hand, awakening an existing hero takes enormous amounts of time - e.g., getting a hero from R5 to R6 requires 80 Tokens and thus would take 40 days without keys. Buying just 2 keys per day can half that cost to just 20 days, and if you are P2W, buying more keys can reduce it still further (to 11.4-13.3 days). Though be careful, b/c as explained below, if you move too fast you may not be able to afford the 800 gem cost to actually awaken the hero once you get the tokens you need (e.g., R1 to R2 needs only 10 tokens, that you can quickly get in just 2.5 days with 2 keys / day). Hence, use your key purchases to balance your gem income vs. time, and also to balance getting new heroes vs. awakening existing ones. See General Strategy: Chapter 3 Resource Management.

## Early Game

### Focus on your strongest heroes.

Not all heroes are created equal in this regard: some offer better utility for this mode than others, so choose your hero (purchases & tokens) wisely (plan ahead) or risk getting stuck later with a hero whose utility is not tuned well to this style of combat.

### Power up your heroes appropriately.

2 R3 heroes is *nowhere near* the same as 1 R6 hero, and a common adage is that in terms of power, 1 R6 Efrigid is the equivalent of 3 R5 versions of her (literally: at that rank, every ability she uses occurs in triplicate). Though she gains very little from her R5, or her R3, with new talents only coming from R4 and R6 - so perhaps do her R3 & R4 together, and the same with her R5 and R6, treating each pair of awakenings as a single unit rather than separately?

* Example: one of the worst teams a player could have is R2 Fee, R2 Lancelot, and R3 Efrigid. At R3 Fee gains the ability to shoot arrows much faster (VERY useful for flying enemies who can't be halted along their path to the exits), at R3 Lancelot heals fewer total allies and restricts the range of those that get healed, but yet heals a MUCH larger amount to himself and those allies, which greatly improves your defensive capabilities, and at R4 Efrigid reduces the cool-down for *all* of her wonderful AoE abilities. Though the R3 version of her is basically the same as the R2, and the R2 versions of Fee and Lancelot are very similar to their R0, so a better team would be either a R4 Efrigid + R0 Fee + R0 Lancelot, or else a R2 Efrigid + R3 Fee + R3 Lancelot.

### Consider using different heroes for different situations.

Not all heroes function equally - some are better at anti-air (Fee), or ground enemies including bosses (Lancelot), or AoE against large groups of them (Efrigid) - so it is good to have a few to choose from, to pass different types of levels, or at least a varied team that can handle these differing types of situations. Plus, each can work in concert with the others - e.g., Efrigid can slow flying enemies down (in addition to damaging them), while Fee works to kill them in a more focused manner.

### Complement your tower strategies with the heroes that you bring.

e.g., if you have primarily ground-based heroes, focus your tower upgrades on anti-air defense, or vice versa. This mode is *very* different, either from campaign (higher difficulty, faster enemies), or from tournaments (same low # of enemies as campaign, not huge waves of them that come quickly as in tournament). Whereas CC & delay works very well in tournaments, what works best here is to complement towers - e.g. Lance’s shield & heal of barracks units - and killing individual or small groups of enemies quickly - e.g., Raida or Leif's AoE critical attacks or Helios's special.

### Eventually flying enemies get to be your biggest problem.

Since that is the weakest point for heroes’ skills - but fortunately you have towers that work well here, unlike in tournaments. So maybe take in some very good tanks, and then build a good anti-air defense with towers?

## Advanced

### Go slower & use campaign levels to your advantage, not wasting their opportunities.

* most people rush through the campaign, then have no more content to work on while waiting for weeks (months?) to unlock the next world. But what if there was a better way - like doing just one level per day, while working on those awakenings (to unlock worlds with, and to increase your hero power)?
* one odd / controversial thought-experiment: since worlds do not appear in RS until you unlock them, you could use this to your advantage - e.g., pausing at level 40 and before unlocking W3, get a hero to R6 (like Efrigid?), or even R7 (Fee? Lancelot?) without ever having to face more difficult W3 maps. And/or pause at level 80 before unlocking W4 and do the same, while having to face W3 but not W4 situations. This would make the campaign far easier, and also your future RS situations. It would take a lot of time though - 39 days to obtain the 155 tokens to go from R2 to R6 if buying 2 keys/day, and another 25 days to obtain the tokens to reach R7. Still, it's an interesting thought to ponder - e.g., if you get stuck, pause wherever you are at to do this (*at least* a few days to reach ideal ranks, if not weeks for a R6) before continuing? If you plan to compete in tournaments later, you'll need to do it anyway eventually, but this is one way for patience to pay off to get over the hump of increased difficulty in the middle of the game. Or, don't buy keys in RS and save up gems to instead buy better heroes (like Helios) - you need those too, to compete on their blessed weeks in tournaments.

### There are real risks arising from progressing too fast.

* RS can become quite dangerous if you make a wrong move - e.g., if you have a R6 Fee that offers supreme power to your campaign but yet *lack* a hero with abilities that are more scalable to higher difficulty settings, then you may find the +5 difficulty setting far too much to handle. Plan ahead to avoid this fate.
* If you find yourself stuck though there is not much choice except (i) buy a better hero to try to keep up (you may have to make further campaign progress to unlock them though); or (ii) at least get an older but more scalable hero, and then quickly rank them up to where they are good - e.g., Efrigid, who at R2 isn’t that good, but becomes MUCH better at her R4, 18 days later, or just 9 if fast-tracked.
	+ In the meantime, if you dial the difficulty setting down to +0, you can watch ads to avoid the difficulty of playing through the level. You'll miss out on all those extra +50 gems beyond those offered by the Daily Trial, but at least you'll continue to power up your heroes, which is far more important. Or there are other ways to make progress - see the section below on tying together several strategies.

### Some worlds are easier than others in RS => use that to your advantage.

* The various worlds do not scale their difficulty settings all in the same way in RS. W1 and to a lesser degree W2 are FAR easier to handle, even at extremely high difficulty settings (like +300), than W3 or W5 at a comparable setting, though W4 seems to offer the worst situations for most people. Part of the reason is that W1,2,3, & 5 towers are fairly great, especially against fliers, offering immense range to take them down quickly enough, but also offer wonderfully decent AoE towers and also those with high range, so that having a good ground tank can get you a long way towards killing the enemies if you just hold them in place long enough. W4 though has many split levels, where often even fliers cannot go across, and while the range of the mana tower is immense, it is extremely expensive & offers no AoE, and yet at the same time players at that time usually lack a hero with teleportation abilities (Masamune and Narlax, and later Raida, Cyra), and more importantly a good tank that can both receive and deal damage fast enough to kill enemies before getting overwhelmed, especially while frozen (it is especially annoying to see Koi frozen in the act of becoming a dragon, then remain that way for like forever, and then you lose). Surely some great later-world heroes would help out there - Leif, Raida, Azura, etc., but those are completely inaccessible to a new player, and Helios and Narlax are extremely expensive and usually not owned by most players even several months past completing the campaign. At least necro-Connie's bunnies can be placed anywhere on the map, which is a MAJOR help.

* a minor theme playing off of this major one is that typically the first few levels in a world are significantly easier than the last few levels of the previous world - e.g., level 81 is MUCH easier than levels 70-80.
* boss levels are of course are significantly harder than their normal counterparts - although even there it depends on the situation - e.g., Koi can finish level 90 much easier than he can 119, especially if there are no blessed towers on the right path of the latter. He can kill the Yan boss in level 90 in just a few hits (until you power up that level's difficulty), making it much more trivial to pass the first few waves before she appears, whereas in level 119 if he is the only hero on the right path and there are no blessed tower spots to help him, he will struggle much more with the 2-entrance & -exit non-boss level than the single-exit boss one.

* one **very important** strategy to use this feature to your advantage is to focus, whenever possible, on maps that are “easier”, and conversely avoid ones that are “harder” - which primarily focuses the increases of difficulty on the former instead of the latter. It almost sounds too simple to be true but consider this scenario: lets say that you are a newer player and are fast-tracking a particular hero, perhaps your first that will eventually be R6, and after your first two free plays of the day, you bought and used one key, and then on your 4th and last play were presented with a difficult level such as 70 (with the sandstorm blinding & slowing your heroes). Even if we take it as a given that you COULD complete the level, the question is: SHOULD you? Completing it will give you your reward, but will also make it harder later on, to the point where eventually you may not be able to. This applies to many boss levels, and for people lacking teleportation heroes, also to many levels in W4 and perhaps a few in W3 also. Instead, as a favor to your future self, would you be better to skip the level, taking the 3 but skipping the 4th play, thus lengthening your overall time, but making the journey easier? Conversely, will future you be mad at past (now current) you for doggedly playing a level when you didn’t absolutely need to, thinking only of short-term gain at the expense of the long-game? Only YOU know you…:-)\
	+ example: several people avoid playing level 120 - often more than an entire real-world year goes by, only having played it a few times. This preserves it for a time when it may be your first play of the day, and you can't do a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) without getting past it, nor can you complete a campaign level if you have run out of them.
	+ personally, in doing that level somewhat recently, I discovered that I no longer “fear” it like I used to - now that I have most of the heroes, including the meta (Elara, Jett, Cyra, Koi, Raida, Leif, necro-Connie, etc.), and they are all awakened to R6/R7 and have levels close to 35. Avoiding powering up those levels to too-high difficulty settings at first, until you have heroes that can handle them, can make a BIG difference to your enjoyment of this game mode.
* remember: as the difficulty setting increases, the amount of elixir that you earn from completing a level also increases. So powering up W1 levels to +100 difficulty is a very good idea, when you can still handle them and gain even more rewards from them, far easier than a much more difficult level from a later world that offers lesser rewards. Even later when you have all the heroes, this strategy still maximizes your elixir gains.

### Meta-strategy tying everything together: keep a bank of saved keys, and other approaches.

* a follow-up question: what about, if instead of encountering a difficult map on the 4th play of the day (or 2nd if you were not fast-tracking), it was the 1st play that day - would that change anything? This time, if the difficulty were pumped up so high that you could not handle it, you would miss out on the ability to work on your chosen hero that day wouldn’t you? Though there are several work-arounds:
	1. watch an ad instead, and miss out on the extra gem income for that play, but still work on the hero.
	2. work on a different hero for that entire day - a “backup” option that you also want to get to a higher rank, just with lower priority than your first chosen hero.
	3. play a campaign level that you have never played before (if any are available) - this will advance the map in RS to a different level (conversely, re-starting the game’s app on your device will NOT).
	4. go ahead and play it anyway, sparingly - like if you have no other choice that day - but then AVOID playing this level at other times (if you don’t absolutely have to), in order to keep its’ difficulty relatively low, in essence “saving it” for those times when you can’t avoid it.
	5. **store up a bank of keys in RS \*at all times\*, and use those whenever the level is easy, or store more whenever the level is hard** (only applicable beyond the first 2 free runs each day)
	6. instead of mindlessly doing just 2/3/4 runs per day, vary it depending on the situation - take advantage of "easy" maps that RS offers that day, or else use the break to build the bank back up (to a maximum of 10 keys).
		+ when presented with a series of easy levels (say, W1-2 maps), use up more keys, perhaps even using them all up entirely, to take advantage of the situation. But whenever a more difficult (series of) situation(s) occurs, *after the first 2 free plays*, then merely buy your 1-2 additional keys to bring its’ stock back up, to a maximum of 10. Again, “difficult” is a relative term: you might be able to handle it NOW, but the question is really will you still be able to handle it LATER?
		+ this “variable-speed” approach to using keys can either be tuned more towards "fast-tracking" at 2 keys/day, or "mid-tracking" at 1 key/day, or even remain closest to "slow-tracking", depending on how often you use the additional key.
			- e.g., you could mainly slow-track but then use up a key whenever you see a W1-2 map, for an average of something like 2.1 plays per day, which is very close to the 2.0 of slow-tracking, but offers a number of advantages above that (e.g., more elixir).
		+ overall this strategy encourages you to be more bold when the stock is high, and you should trend towards lowering it (at the limit, when you start the day with 10, and so can’t buy any more keys unless you use some up), or more conservative when the stock is low and you want to build it back up (at the limit, when it is zero and you can’t play anymore anyway - although even then you COULD play again with the additional keys bought that day, to extend the run of good fortune even further, until the stock hits zero again).
		+ this “bank” approach lets you focus your efforts primarily on W1-2, or ground-only (lacking flying enemies), or whatever other situations you find yourself most able to handle, and allows you to de-prioritize those that you perhaps COULD handle, but which in the future may quickly get out of control to where you CANNOT, thus jeopardizing your future plays - though as the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and you can avoid them if you use a good strategy ahead of time.
			- you can get bolder over time as you get better heroes, like having Koi makes boss levels EASY (for awhile), and a teleporter helps with split levels, a tower-booster (Leif, Yan, Helios) with all situations in RS but especially W5/W6 levels, etc.

* don't use just a single strategy, but rather use several together. For instance the bank approach doesn't help on the first play of the day, so having a backup hero to work on to avoid difficult levels is still a good idea, even if used sparingly.

## Post-campaign

After completing the campaign, you will have access to all of the heroes, and can choose which ones you want to focus on for various purposes. But not all of them offer the same utility, and especially their utility in this game mode can differ dramatically from others. For instance you may be surprised to learn that...

### Koi isn’t ideal for most RS situations.

* Pros: offers high defense, letting towers do their work, though at low rank can only hold very few enemies; Koi offers the top utility (for a long time) to quickly & easily kill either (a) large enemy waves or (b) especially strong bosses that are otherwise very hard to kill - e.g., levels 70, 80, 90, etc.
* Pro-Tip: if you don’t feel like it is “cheating”, Koi can become a dragon every wave after the first one...though you'll earn the least gold this way, and it's annoying.

* Cons: he cannot remain in dragon form for the entire duration of a wave (even if you prepare him in advance between the waves), so for non-boss waves his power often isn’t enough to work on its’ own - e.g., in a split level where the blessed spots are on the wrong side, and you hoped that he could hold a lane by himself (at first yes, but as the difficulty piles on, no - especially if he is frozen, or even killed).

* Conclusion: think of Koi’s utility in RS as being primarily a “boss-killer”, but otherwise leave him behind (to rest up between tournaments?:-).

### Raida tops the list of most-useful heroes in RS for a LONG time.

* his generic utility is immense, and he can hold a lane by himself better than any other hero, plus can teleport to where he’s needed and help shore up struggling lanes elsewhere, and he'll send his magic Oni blasts everywhere too, quite often.
* A close second is likely **Necro-Connie**, who can similarly stun/disable/slow enemies down, and while she cannot teleport herself, her bunnies can go anywhere, providing IMMENSE help wherever it is needed most.
* **Leif** also deserves special mention here: once he works up the momentum (to his maximum of 6 "stacks") he can usually hold a lane mostly by himself with his powerful AoE crits and lifesteal (though not as well as Raida, and can't do anything directly against flying enemies) - just be mindful of ranged attackers that he cannot heal from unless he is engaging someone else (unlike Koi or Raida who have constant regeneration).
	+ Pro-tip 1: like Koi you can power him up between waves (if you wanted), thus he can already be at maximum power starting from the second wave. Or the second wave usually isn't difficult either and his 4-stack powers are fairly good, so you could also spread out the upgrades a little to make your life a tiny bit easier.
	+ Pro-tip 2: even after he reaches maximum power, it's advisable to wait a little to start the next wave until just after he uses his active. For one thing this increases the attack of all nearby heroes + towers, which is EXTREMELY effective on blessed towers, and yet the next wave refreshes this ability that takes a long time to cool down, thus giving you the option to use it anytime during the next wave that you want. Good uses include refreshing the boost on the towers after its expiration, or since it also increases his speed (movement and attack), just before either moving to a different location or to kill a particularly difficulty enemy or group more quickly.

* Honorable mention: although at this stage, generic utility of late-game heroes can still win out over scalability, the ability of a hero to keep pace with increasing difficulty is still somewhat important.
	+ Heroes who can power up towers on blessed spots are especially to be prized: **Leif > Yan > Helios** > Lance (barracks only) > others (Sethos’s blind also aiding only barracks, etc.).
	+ Heroes who can delay enemies as they pass by towers are also highly prized: heroes with strong tanking utility like Koi, Raida, Leif, Caldera, Azura (charm), and necro-Connie offers both bunny tanks & the ability to stun (direct attack) and slow (especially at R6), Efri’s multiple & powerful abilities to delay/slow, etc.
	+ Enemy speed also increases with difficulty, so use primarily defensively-oriented heroes: especially those that can halt enemies in their tracks entirely, or at least slow them down, to let towers and other sources of damage do their work.

### Bring heroes with abilities that scale well with increasing difficulty.

* An illustration here may help:
	+ Did you know that Fee is perhaps the game's best early-world campaign hero? She is the ONLY one who can outright SOLO all of the levels, including Shattered Realms - e.g., she is perhaps the absolute best "bandit catcher", not needing to walk over to them or know where they are or will be in advance, before she kills them dead. She also kills flying enemies or ground ones with impunity, and has a variety of damage types: physical, magical, and critical “true damage” attacks, as well as quickly-replaced wolves that you can place anywhere on the map to shore up defenses or at least delay enemies a little - in fact this is one of the best ways to slow down a boss, even when Lancelot (or Obsidian or even Sethos) cannot tank it, since each wolf at least slows it down a little. Fee has a little bit of everything, and combines it all together WELL, at least for the campaign. However, as enemies gain various types of armor, and health, and speed, the primarily offensive style that heroes like Fee (and Hogan, etc.) use can no longer keep up in RS.
	+ Did you know that Efrigid can barely deal any damage at all in later worlds, or in RS? On the other hand, her "delay" abilities, that are dealt over a large area, often, and affect ground and flying enemies alike, and also freeze or slow enemies down, help her to keep up with increasing difficulty much better than offensive attacks since her abilities continue to work no matter how powerful enemies become. Though she is forced to use a more defensive style, making her more of a "support" hero than a damage-dealer in her own right, this actually works very well in RS, buying time for towers (or other heroes, like Raida) to do their work.
	+ So to be blunt: Fee is better than Efrigid in many, even most ways (especially at comparable R2/R4) - AT FIRST - but later on, Efrigid holds on to her power, while Fee’s wanes much more quickly; and therefore Fee is a better hero for your early campaign, while conversely Efrigid is a better hero for RS (and tournaments too but what works best in these two game modes does not always coincide together like they do for her).

* Strong heroes are a MUST - lacking them can quickly get you to where you can’t complete RS with +5 difficulty each time. Before you get Raida RS can get to be really hard, especially if you also lack Leif or any other strong tank besides necro-Connie. (Once you get Raida though, he will carry you - especially with help from Connie, Efrigid, and/or other such heroes - for a LOOOOONG time, where you won’t even need towers for most levels! if you follow all of these tips) But before you get him, do your best to make sure that you have enough power that is geared not just towards passing campaign levels most quickly & efficiently, but also to handle RS as well. e.g., it is possible to complete the campaign without having any R6 heroes, but this can leave you severely handicapped in RS unless you prepared ahead VERY well, by making sure that your heroes can handle the increasing difficulty.
	+ Good: heroes like Lancelot at R3, Efri at R4, necro-Connie at R5, Smoulder at R4-5, Mabyn at R2, Helios at R4, etc.
	+ Better: any of the above at R6, plus Yan or Narlax.
	+ Best: Raida, plus maybe Leif, Caldera, Azura, Koi.
	+ Bad: Fee, Bolton, Obsidian, Sethos.
	+ Worst: Hogan, old-Connie. :-P

## Final end-game, and/or new hero events

### Non-scalable solutions may stop working

At some point, with the difficulty setting depending on large part on the situation (e.g., W1 maps much easier than W4 maps, fliers harder to handle than ground enemies, etc.), the **game changes radically and solutions that used to work can no longer keep up**. The set of viable solutions narrows dramatically, and ONLY abilities that offer high scalability to increasing difficulty will work. A real-life example is available at Guide\_FAQ\_for\_Shamiko's\_event (outdated information on heroes, but useful as a reference guide), where the difficulty setting ultimately reached >200 during those few days where RS only offered the same map throughout.

### Use scalable solutions

When generic utility ceases to be as effective, **heroes who offer scalable utility are the ONLY ones that can keep up**. Fee offers tremendous utility to campaign battles, but is one of the worst for late-stage RS - basically the only thing she has to offer is her wolves (which are somewhat helpful actually) - while in contrast your other free hero Lancelot can shield & heal barracks units placed on blessed spots and thus offers MUCH greater scalability for this game mode (though it is not scalable at all for large numbers of enemies in tournaments).

### Direct tanking ceases to work entirely

No matter who it is every hero ultimately gets to where they will die quickly, and eventually, even from a single blow from the weakest enemy types. Barracks, on the other hand, can still be effective: placed on non-blessed spots for a short pausing, but especially on blessed spots where their defense and HP can keep up with the increased attack of the enemies. At the end, barracks offer the ONLY possible tanking solution.

### Direct offense too

**Direct offense takes longer to go away** **but ultimately it too ceases to be very effective**, even for heroes like Koi and Raida that start at such immensely high levels, as the enemies zoom past a hero who can no longer tank them and yet barely has time to react to their presence before they are already gone.

### Tower buffs offers top utility

**Offense & Defense: Leif blesses ALL nearby heroes and units that lie within his rather large range, and so ultimately becomes your MVP in this game mode** (though he should be kept far away from enemy units directly at this point - leaving his other abilities go completely to waste). **Yan** blesses up to 4 “entities”, though this is \*much\* trickier to use than you might expect (read in-depth info at https://www.reddit.com/r/RealmDefenseTD/comments/ez9bd0/yan\_haste\_tower\_bugbad\_design/). **Helios** can also bless one tower at first, and then later as you awaken her further a second one - plus there seems to be a way to move her back and forth to have two towers blessed at once?

### Relative damage

**Special note about Raida’s R5 Baberu-Taimu Shoki Bash** **Plus** that deals 10% damage, EVEN to bosses: this pretty much guarantees that Raida can kill ANY enemy (group) in at most 10 hits - or perhaps less if his stun allows him to remain behind afterwards and get in a R3 or better yet R6 critical attack, before he is forced to turn and run away, no longer being able to tank directly. The down-side is that 10 hits is a lot, and will take quite a bit of time to deliver, so this isn’t nearly as useful in most situations as the “stun” effect that he delivers every time he charges. But...in other words, if used correctly Raida ultimately becomes the new Koi: able to (help) kill bosses when very little else (except towers) will do the trick.

### Indirect tanking

Necro-Connie’s bunnies last a LONG time (even if they are killed in one blow, the time to engage in melee is a very helpful delay), especially the bunny mamma; Azura’s charm also converts an enemy into a short-term ally, no matter how strong they are; and Caldera’s outright physical immunity works no matter how high the enemy's attack may become, as long as there are no magic-users present - basically in W1,2, or 5, but not in W4 or 3(poison).

### Delay tactics

Regardless of how powerful enemies become, they can still be slowed/frozen/stunned/etc., and with towers being the ONLY things capable of doing damage at this stage, delaying enemies as they zoom past towers becomes an increasingly attractive option - whereas before such utility often lost out to the higher (at the time) generic utility of direct damage & tanking. So here again, useful heroes whose abilities scale with increasing difficulty include Efrigid (slow), Necro-Connie (stun & slow), Raida (stun, though no longer for tanking, and only the charge able to deal significant damage), and so on. Bolton, Obsidian, and Masamune also have a stun ability, but don’t deliver it nearly as often or as well or over as many enemies as the former list of heroes.