An Archdemon Highscore

Castle Crisis is on, and as usual the iOS server did the first three subgames on the third day (and not long into it, either).  Fortunately for me, I am usually up at midnight when the tries-per-day is reset for Castle Crisis.  So I always do well on the lucky imp, and I can always get the full set of crest rewards from the Avaricifer.

Now it's archdemon time.  I used to get great scores against the one that could be beaten with a custom Atlanticore and Death Knight.  Then they stopped sending any archdemon except the latest one.  (I spend a lot of shards getting that DK's skill to level 9!)

The current archdemon is very hard to deal with, since it is immune to stunning, scatter, and silence.  It is not immune to slowing, but slowing it doesn't help much since it will switch targets from time to time (not sure how this works).  This will mean that it will target your PD, who is always close, and then, unless you can tank the damage, you lose.

If you can tank the damage with PD anyway, you might as well forget about slow locking and tank the damage.

The only way I am aware of to deal with it is a combination of massive hitpoints, lots of healing, and protection for your heroes.  Unfortunately for me, I have no Ghoulem.  So I am lacking both the massive healing and the group protection that he supplies.   I can get in the 10 million range just by brute force: lots of revive crests, Tre, and luck.  That's about a much as I thought I will ever get unless they change the archdemon, or I roll Ghoulem.

Today another thread about the archdemon came up on reddit, and after reading shlam16's comments I decided to have another shot at it.  One interesting thing I learned is that this archdemon has a high crit rate, which accounts for a lot of his instakills.  Makes sense.  Valentina can protect somewhat against crits; otherwise it's a vulnerability that you cannot fully address.  You mitigate it by having revive crests or talent on every hero, and Treantar to revive them a third time.

I don't have Ghoulem or Valentina, so I used the core team suggested by shlam, but putting in Medusa and Cupid.  Medusa is great for getting rid of the eye-catchers, which is another thing Ghoulem does if you have him.  Cupid amps damage and adds energy, like Valentina.

For those curious, my lineup is: PD/DD/Druid/Cupid/Medusa/Tre.  The first four are double evoed; Medusa and Tre are single evo.  I crested them all with Revive of various levels (4/4/4/3/1), except Tre who has Revive 5 for his talent.  PD has Berserk 8 and the Blitz Scroll 5, so he amps up fast.

My first run didn't work very well.  I didn't exceed the 17.3 million I got yesterday.  I was close, though -- 17.1m -- so I felt positive about the second run.  Obviously there is a lot of luck involved with the archdemon; you have to try a strategy a few times to have a decent sample of what it's capable of.  (Indeed part of what is hard about archdemon is that you only get two tries per day, so it's hard to experiment.)

The second run, things just went much better.  Here it is after two minutes...

Beating on the archdemon.

You can see PD, Druid, and Cupid have all been revived by Tre.  This means they are on their final life.  No permadeaths yet though.  Eventually, though, the archdemon killed PD one more time:

PD down for the last time.

And after that it goes downhill rapidly.  With PD gone, his stacks unwind over 8 seconds and then the eyecatchers can't be killed fast by Medusa, and they amp up the demon.  Meanwhile, Druid stops his heals every 1.4 seconds, and Tre's shield is no longer providing nearly fulltime coverage.

The end is nigh.

Then a rapid end, with about 26 seconds left.

183m is currently good enough for 382nd place, which would give 1200 fame if archdemon ended today.  My old highscore, 17m, was around 4100th place with a reward of 700 fame.  500 fame is worth working for!

To improve my reward, I would need to place above 200th, which currently requires at least 326m damage.  That seems quite unlikely.  Even if I can get luckier and go the full 3 minutes, it would only increase my score by around 30%, to around 237m.

One easy thing I could do to improve my score is beef up my Druid's skill, currently at level 7.  This won't get more than about 5-10% though.  Not enough to matter, rewardwise.

Other than that, I can't think of any cheap way to get more.