GAWWD! How do I deal with mass skeletons?!

[Yapper]

I keep getting torn apart by the Undead army in 1v1, no matter what race I am. Lately I've been the humans, they seem to fare best though not good at all, and I'll tell you what happens. Statistically, I own my opponent; my score is higher in every area, I have 3x gold (useful for coming back again and again to no avail), our armies are evenly matched, or in some cases I outnumber him. I think I have a decently balanced army, knights, rifemen, mortar, priests, two high level heroes.

I get beaten by his army of six or so necromancers, a tower (set to mana!), a handful of crypt fiends, and those damned corpse generating meat wagons. It's truly a massacre, the moment I set foot on the battlefield I'm surrounded by a comp lagging sea of skeleton warriors and mages and my army melts away like a warm sunday. The worst thing is no matter how many of those damned skeletons I kill they're back within seconds. I've tried aiming for the necromancers/wagons that he keeps tucked away in the back, but it only means quicker death, I can't get through the endless mass. The game is feeling very unbalanced right now. I can own this opponent when he is any other race, but the undead summoned army is beyond me. How can I deal with this??

 

[Dream_Walker]

1. play warden on NE, get fok.
2. use your priests dispel...
3. run until their duration runs out, if this is not possible, fight at your base behind something (i.e. a farm)

 

[Emperor Pan I]

drop the rifles when u get kngihts. Get lots of priests and morters. lots of priests.

dispel skellys. Morters focus on nercos.

 

[ChrisH36]

1. play warden on NE, get fok.
2. use your priests dispel...
3. run until their duration runs out, if this is not possible, fight at your base behind something (i.e. a farm)

Those work, except maybe running.

Human - Priests to dispel, morts to fire upon the necros, and maybe use Breakers to Control Magic some skeletons to fight for you.

Orc - Spirit Walker's Disenchant. This is better because if your teammate has necs, you won't kill his skeletons (250 dmg to hostile summons)

UD - Destroyers should use Devour Magic to eat the buffs then use Orb against the necros. If you want, possess some unsummoned units with banshees and turn the units against them.

NE - You could use Dryad's Abolish to get rid of some of them, or why not use Mana Flare and kill the source of the skeletons.

In any situation, have units to take skeleton blows. And make sure these units don't die so easily to necs. After reading your posts, I am wondering why in hell would you sacrifice all your men to kill off necs when they come back from the men YOU used to own?

Hero wise. Use AoE heroes (Pit lord, Archmage, Blood Mage) to attack groups and use ones like TC, Warden, or Dreadlord to spread damage across more than one. Get siege to bomb them from a distance as well, necs dont like siege damage.

 

[Emperor Pan I]

Undead should always use destroyrs, especialy against this strat. Undead is essencialy the only race that can take on skellys with absolutely no trouble. Destroyers uck in genreal, but skellys give them a nice big beefy amount of mana.

 

[ChrisH36]

Plus, you can possess some of thier units and turn thier former comrades against them. I like Destroyers for thier constitution along with thier spells. 900 life and 11 armor at lvl 3 is quite a lot. If you tri hero with undead, a dark ranger can be of great assistance if you silence. At level 3, necros are useless for about 30 seconds, enough time to get them before the silence wears off. However, experienced players will eat the silence and use orb against you.

 

[Emperor Pan I]

Banshees are shit against necros. Possess is terrible when they rendered it useless several patches ago. Only good thing it has now is curse.

 

[ChrisH36]

Curse isn't that great. However, AMS has some uses. I used it once on a pit lord of mine and fought casters. With his high hit points and 400 immunity to magic. He slaughtered a vast number of units before his shield ran out.

 

[Emperor Pan I]

i dont see the point of the shield. Casters don't do shit damage anyway, so with or without the shield a pitlord can still take out any number of casters.

The only thing the shield should be good against is the heavy air which do magic damage, but omg 4 chims and within like 2 attacks a shield is gone, and the unit dies. Plus it isn't evne worth wasting time casting with banshee mana. Face it they raped AMS and Possess then think the ybalance it out by making banshee build slightly faster.

 

[ChrisH36]

Actually that 400 life can help out. Since you are kinda adding 400 life to magic damage. Still, Tier3 air can decimate it easily.

 

[Emperor Pan I]

there is no inbetween daamge. Casters is useless cuse they really do no damage anyways, and tier 3 does incredible damage making the magic worthless. that is why AMS sucks.

 

[Revelade]

Actually, it's more like 300 bonus magic health and it's useful in several occasions. What I mean here is that when you are facing enemies that use massive AoE spells like Blizzard or Flamestrike, it really helps out. If the game goes on for a long time and the enemy has tier 3 air which are either: Frost Wyrms, Chimaeras or Gryphon Riders, it helps to use AMS on your heroes or other vital targets. Finally, AMS helps against those hero killer spells like Holy Light, Storm Bolt, Shadow Strike, and Frost Nova. It costs a cheap 75 mana, so it's easily usable on even the lowest units like the ghoul. 300 health can be a great boost to units, in addition to the 33% gain with curse.

Normally, the chimaera needs 3 shots to kill a ghoul. However, with AMS, it would need 7 shots, which effectively doubles the hp of the ghoul. However, once you add in curse here, the chimaera would need about 10 shots just to kill one ghoul. If that's not amazing, then prove me wrong.

As for curse, I think this is the most underated spell ever. Not only is it a cheap 40 mana to cast, but it's effects are incredible. 33% of any enemy attack is missed, which, if cast entirely on the enemy, can increase the life of your army by a third! This is even better than level 3 evasion, and that's a hero spell! This also lasts 120 seconds, tied with fairie fire for the longest duration spell. Since many Undead units are fragile to damage, I think it helps a great deal, by reducing the pain your army takes.

In conclusion, vs. tier 3 melee, use curse and possess them. When facing tier 3 air however, use curse and AMS to reduce the damage you take.

Now, for the topic on skeletons... Well, I suggest you use the Pitlord for many reasons. First of all, the enemy is most likely to use a DK which can nuke heroes, but not the PL. Next, Howl is a spell that effects a large radius of units. If you somehow got your PL close enough, but not enough to be surround, you could get possible 15 or so skeletons with it, which is a great deal for 75 mana. Next, his passive makes him do splash damage, which is PERFECT when facing masses of skeletons.

Another option as Hellwolf has said, is using the Dark Ranger. Like the PL, it gains immunity to coil, but the real treat is in the spell silence. 30 seconds will last quite a while for a battle, and you have effectively nerfed half the army, if he uses 6 necros. As for using life drain or black arrow... It's preference really. If you can get meat with either knights, breakers or footies, I'd say drain, but if you are mostly ranged, I'd get arrow.

Next, you will want priests more than anything. So drop 2 arcanes and train those priests right away. I'd say get your priest count to match his necro count. The great thing is, if his skeletons are dead, necros are pretty much useless. You could also get several breakers vs his DK and necros, and to counter cripple, should he use it.

Another odd strategy would involve using breakers, and mass AOE, in addition to priests for dispell. Since skeletons tend to swarm, you could probably do large chunks of damage and that could give lots of exp to your heroes...

And finally, you may also want to use the Paladin with Light and Shield and run into the back and start smacking the necros while Lighting them up.

Another thing is, you could try to hit at tier 2, with footies, priests and sorcs, since the undead player has to tech a while to not only get 6 necros, but the skeleton upgrades, and wagons with the corpse upgrade. Defend should help vs fiends, priests are there to keep them alive longer, while sorcs make fiends very slow.

 

[Yapper]

Thanks guys, some solid advice here. I like the idea of using lots of mortar team to fire on the necromancers, beats sending the knights in. I'll have to start using my spellcasters more effectively. The priest's dispell is a manual spell so that will be tricky. I'll see how it goes.

 

[Emperor Pan I]

if you learn to use hotkeys quicker, dispel goes from being 15 seconds to cast to 2 seconds to cast it. Basicly, hotkeys will speed things up, and keep your mind ready for your next offensive. If you slow down to click on the spell every time, your going to be to slow and overwhelemed.

 

[LuNa[eP]]

NE - faerie dragons / Warden
UD - Destroyers / lich / DL / CL
ORC - Spritwalkers / TC / FS
HU - priests, spellbreakers / AM / BM / MK

 

[ChrisH36]

You can still send knights. They have 11 armor and barely take damage from skeletons. However, they succumb to fiends and necs .

 

[Revelade]

It shouldn't be too hard to counter skeletons. You just have to make sure you have priests with dispell. I wouldn't use breakers as their normal armor is weak to skeletons attacks, and that the Undead usually don't have any buffs you can steal. The great thing about human heroes is that all have an AoE spell, except the paladin of course. The AM has Blizzard, MK has thunder clap, and the Blood Mage has flamestrike. Try to use Area of Effect spells because fiends tend to be large and skeletons are very vulnerable to it.

Use:
- Priests
- Archmage with at least 1 level in blizzard
- another AoE hero
- Mortars
- Knights

 

[TheoStormhawk]

I keep getting torn apart by the Undead army in 1v1, no matter what race I am. Lately I've been the humans, they seem to fare best though not good at all, and I'll tell you what happens. Statistically, I own my opponent; my score is higher in every area, I have 3x gold (useful for coming back again and again to no avail), our armies are evenly matched, or in some cases I outnumber him. I think I have a decently balanced army, knights, rifemen, mortar, priests, two high level heroes.

I get beaten by his army of six or so necromancers, a tower (set to mana!), a handful of crypt fiends, and those damned corpse generating meat wagons. It's truly a massacre, the moment I set foot on the battlefield I'm surrounded by a comp lagging sea of skeleton warriors and mages and my army melts away like a warm sunday. The worst thing is no matter how many of those damned skeletons I kill they're back within seconds. I've tried aiming for the necromancers/wagons that he keeps tucked away in the back, but it only means quicker death, I can't get through the endless mass. The game is feeling very unbalanced right now. I can own this opponent when he is any other race, but the undead summoned army is beyond me. How can I deal with this??

If u cannot defeat them with priests( dispeling is at hand because u have brilliance) it means that u have another problem, no offense but u need to practice more your micro, no real UD goes mass skellies, if u don't believe me the net is full of pro replays, watch a few and u will see that the mass skellies strategy isn't an option not even against orc who needs more tech to get dischenant.

 

[Ntrik_]

If you have problem defeating skellies with priests' dispel..

Just remember this

put your mouse cursor in the middle of crowds of skellies

Press D + left click

repeat the step above

 

[ChrisH36]

Its not difficult mastering the keys. That is how true micro occurs. You can have easy times if you remember hotkeys and saving time on casting the spells you want to cast on the opponents.

No, Human and Orc tech exactly the same to get dispel. Just Spirit Walkers cost more than priests.