A few months ago I remember reading somewhere in the forum that there was discussion about if the first quest in Champion of the Arena - winning 4 arena fights without joining any guild - was actually possible playing at no loss on impossible. At the time I just completed CotA and DotC impossible-no loss without bothering to try this first quest, after which I started an OotM campaign to check out the novelties, which took me more than two months (work, alas). Having finished the OotM campaign this morning, I decided to take a look at the old school of gloom quest.
I apologize if, as I suspect, many people have already done this before me, but I found that far from being impossible this quest is almost easy. The key, as usual, is the way overpowered plant strategy with Hagrid. I went mage impossible, hired Hagrid right away, made a single stack army of thorn hunters (Lew was selling a horde), and just using Fire Arrow, Mana Spring, the occasional Calm Rage and a few well timed Stone Skins was enough to win the four Arena fights. Turtle, Spider and Toad were very easy, while as the fourth fight I picked the Kraken. A long boring fight that ended somewhere around round 250, but a sure win if you place your TH in a spot attackable from only 3 sides, manage to have two of those occupied by non-threatening (low numbers) stacks, NEVER attack but only defend, chip away steadily at the octopus with FA and place a SS every time, in the final 60-70 turns, a stack of 800+ Devilfish is close to attacking you. I had 585 TH in this fight, they went down to about half a few times, but they build up again while their counterattack diminishes the threat of the main attacking stack (this, BTW, makes the TH stack even more efficient than trolls).
So I suppose this is old news, but anyway I wanted to let it be known once again that in CotA Hagrid definitely rules
12-23-2010, 07:39 PM
CotA School of Gloom quest Imp No Loss
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