Whats up with Taros tier two?

Not going to talk about witches or fire demons here, which have clear roles and very common to be seen in pvp. I referring to those other guys... You know, the ones in the abyss that never see the light of day in 90 percent of games. How do they work? Lets all find out!

Dark Hand: Badass looking bloke. It's more expensive than a cabal, but fortunately you don't really need more than one or two per game. This unit seems to have no discernible role besides making Liches; nice to have around when a Zhon player leaves behind a trail of dead swamps beast after a drop.  As far as combat goes, however, it's just very uninteresting. It's almost like a buffed executioner that walks slightly faster but still dies to a monarchs wave... This unit just feels like it's missing something.

The Dark Hand is also immune to freezing and stone. Was it Cavedogs intention to make this unit as way to counter Creon?  

cantbefrozen = 1;
cantbestoned = 1;

Would have been nice if there was such a thing as "cantbeconverted = 1" Then it could be considered an anti zhon unit as well. It would actually serve a dedicated purpose other than creating liches every now and then...

Rictus: One of the best for AA Firepower in the game, in my opinion. These guys absolutely melt through tightly packed groups of flyers. So what's the problem? They cost close to 3000 mana a piece... What the heck Cavedog?

Iron Beak: Very weak in terms of hit points. Better suited at destroying structures rather than units. Slower than a sky knight in a straight flight, but very maneuverable comparatively speaking making it more reliable than SK in some ways. Unfortunately, the build time is just ridiculously slow.

Build Time for Iron beak: 303
Build Time for Sky knight: 331

sigh

wheres the skeleton archer love? and the black knight is obviously the best AA unit =D

abbyss its like special forces tier

only firedemons are somewhat "typicall" unit

same with zhon tier2
basilisk (defense unit, or ultra drop)
harpy (fragile, but can change a lot, some people make a lot of them)
gryphon (drakes usually better)
kraken (swamp better)

Wqaopl wrote:

wheres the skeleton archer love? and the black knight is obviously the best AA unit =D

I forgot about the skeleton archer; they're okay I guess. As for the black knight, its good because it has a near perfect aim. The rictus however is almost just as accurate and does AOE damage (like firedemon, but this one has a bugged aim). This allows it to several targets with just one shot, multiplying it's overall damage output considerably.

Anyway it's all about unit composition. Rictus/Black knights together is much better than either one by itself.

$ MalinOMW wrote:

abbyss its like special forces tier

only firedemons are somewhat "typicall" unit

same with zhon tier2
basilisk (defense unit, or ultra drop)
harpy (fragile, but can change a lot, some people make a lot of them)
gryphon (drakes usually better)
kraken (swamp better)

With the exception of the Kraken, I think Zhon tier two > Taros tier two.

Taros tier 2 (again excluding witches and firedemons) is like specialist force, like you said, except they fail at being special.

Yeah but I think skeleton archer are useful and generally better than other races archers
They dont count as "tier 1" when receiving damage (undead instead) and their attack don't have crippling multipliers like other races "archers" do

Spoiler:

/\ Left: Skeleton archer, Right: aramon t1 archer (x0.25 x0.25 x0.25 x0.25)
They take exactly the same time to build but skeleton archer costs 2x more, which still isn't that much expensive

As for rictus yeah, such a potential unit, good DPS, can float on water, etc, too bad its super expensive for no reason and pretty frail on health, but sometimes it's useful to use them, just very niche situations... same as dark hand

Ill test rictus against AA since Im bored and see if it's better AA than taros other options

Eh.. I did some experiments but didnt turn out very way I think
Basically I compared 20 black knight vs 10 rictus vs 20 spiders vs 10 fire demons, all against 5 rocs
The veredict: spiders > rictus > black knight

Fire demon depends a lot on luck since sometimes they take a lot to attack for some reason and you need to manually control them to attack, also they are most effective when there is good sight
Black knight is good against birds but against rocs they seem to do very poorly
Rictus is good but depends a lot I guess
Spiders seems to be a good choice overall
And if curious, here's the comparision recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLydeS1ldWk&feature=youtu.be but take with a grain of salt

$_Spagg wrote:

Eh.. I did some experiments but didnt turn out very way I think
Basically I compared 20 black knight vs 10 rictus vs 20 spiders vs 10 fire demons, all against 5 rocs
The veredict: spiders > rictus > black knight

Fire demon depends a lot on luck since sometimes they take a lot to attack for some reason and you need to manually control them to attack, also they are most effective when there is good sight
Black knight is good against birds but against rocs they seem to do very poorly
Rictus is good but depends a lot I guess
Spiders seems to be a good choice overall
And if curious, here's the comparision recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLydeS1ldWk&feature=youtu.be but take with a grain of salt

Interesting. The thing is though is that Rocs are large flying damage sponges and don't stack very well, basically nullifying the AOE of rictus.
Try a dense pack of drakes/grpyhons instead and I can assure you that the results will be completely different.

Yeah, i compared only with rocs because Id consider them the main "air threat" that could be in the game
For the typical small birds black knights would be better since they dont miss and birds die in one hit
For very grouped air units then rictus would definitely shine more like you said