Firstly, lets start off with an understanding – even with all the best heroes at the maximum talent level, you are still going to lose some defense raids. Having a well set up team helps you to maintain a higher trophy average and helps your alliance win in alliance war.
There are hundreds of viable heroes in empires and puzzles, and from there a thousand strategies to counter whatever defense strategies you have set up. But whether your opponent is able to counter your strategy with their strategy, it all depends on the “board”. If they open with a “good board”, all your fancy heroes and strategy is for naught.
So what you really want to do is to punish your opponents when they get an “average board”
What is a good defense team?
Let us put ourselves in the shoes of an attacker and lets assume that we will always have the perfect attack team to any defense team (in terms of hero choices).
But all attack strategies requires the right tiles and the right places to execute, and as an attacker, you know that you don’t start with perfect boards all the time.
With a bad board, you require a few moves before you are able to fire off your special skills and start taking the enemy out.
So as a defense team, this is the window that we are looking at – the first few initial moves that an opponent makes charges up your heroes special so that you can fire your special skills before they do.
The best defense teams ensure that their heroes will be able to fire off their specials before they die, killing the opponents heroes first. The few ways to do so are
- Having “fast” heroes that requires less tiles to hit them to charge up
- Having heroes that have high defensive stats.
- Having heroes that delay/nullify/reduce the opponents attacks
- Having a balance between offensive and defensive heroes.
The above explains why the common tanks that you see are Guinevere, Aegir, Kunchen etc.
*Click here to see the current positioning meta
You can see that these heroes all have high defensive stats, along with abilities that make your heroes harder to kill, or delay your opponent’s special skills from firing.
The Reason for this is that the hero in the Tank position takes blocks the tiles from your flanks and would charge up their specials faster.
Block these tiles would also give your flanks and wings time to charge up their specials.
Current Raid Defense Meta
AI always fires off your special skills from left to right. Most people put Alberich & Mother North in the left wing to allow them to cast their special skills first. If they revive any hero with full mana, that hero will also fire his/her special skill in the same turn.
The next thing you will notice is that there are buffers/debuffers in the left wing to allow them to have maximum effect in the turn.
In the left and right flank, you will see heroes that specialized in damage. Gravemaker, Drake Fong etc.
And for tanks you will see that these heroes fulfil the above criteria of having strong defensive stats and impactful hero specials. (As mentioned above)
Picking your heroes:
Now we simply don’t have the best heroes available all the time, so what I have provided here is a framework/strategy to think about how to set up the defensive teams in all the different situations that you require in the game, in Tournaments, in Alliance Wars or helping your allies and friends with their defensive teams.
Congratulations on reading all the way to the end, and thank you and good luck! 🙂
I have a question about Misandra. She is on the list for left flank but not right flank. When I play her on offense I use her special last in case her +mana gives another hero the ability to strike this turn and this way the extra mana doesn’t go to waste. So I have been putting her on the right for defense for those reasons.
Does it work the same way on defense? Will her ability allow someone else to fire this turn or has the AI passed up those positions and doesn’t notice they can go?