Hello my friends and welcome to the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Creatures tier list revisited. About a year ago I did a video where I put every creature from the game into a single tier list as you can see playing out in fast forward here behind me. Now there's a link in the description below if you want to check out that video to get the background on things but if you've already seen that or you don't care and you just want to enjoy the show stick around and we'll get started. And so this is the list as it currently stands. Over the course of the year or so since it's been up on YouTube I've had amazing feedback from the community. Lots and lots of comments and debates raging in the comments section about my choices, some controversial ones that a lot of people really strongly disagree with, some that people generally do agree with as well. And that's been fantastic and that was my mission sort of all along. One thing though that really came up that I'd probably underappreciated is the sheer degree to which horn of the abyss has kind of taken over the interest of most of the community and I'd also underappreciated how fantastic it is as a community mod, the attention to detail, not just to the game and the gameplay itself but to all of the wonderful flavor, graphics, music, almost everything that the developers of Horn of the Abyss have put into that modification. So I thought it would be fun to come back to the list and add in the creatures from the new town types that are added in Horn of the Abyss. That's the Cove and the Factory which just dropped a couple of months ago. Now in addition, Horn of the Abyss also changes the balance of the creatures in the existing game. There are some creatures on this list in particular say the phoenixes, the Magogs that really get a serious edit, shall we say, in the Horn of the Abyss balance changes. So we've got a few movements we need to make on this list as well and that'll sort of be the second phase of the video. And then to round things out, I'd like to address some of the most heated debates in the comments section. There are a few things I think you guys have convinced me of. Perhaps a couple of creatures I was a bit too harsh on. There are some mistakes I just made where in the first video I just forgot the build order of certain things and the cost in particular of a couple of creatures that I want to amend as well at the end. So stick around and we'll get through all of that. But for now, let's get cracking. We've got the Cove and the Factory. I think I'm actually going to start with the Factory creatures. Before we get started, I'd like to just refresh everyone's memory as to how it is I'm ranking the creatures. I like to play the game on the impossible difficulty starting at zero resources and having to work and scrounge my way economically through all of the early and mid game. And as a result, what I'm looking for in a creature is something that is great value, something I'm really eager to build the dwelling and start recruiting quickly and then deploying on the battlefield in favor of doing something else. So whether it's delaying my city hall or whether it's not buying the tier four creature because I'm so so ecstatic about the tier three creature, whatever that might be, there's only so much golden resources in the game to go around in the version I the game I like to play. And so that's how I'm ranking the creatures. It's not about pure, pure raw damage output potential or any of that. To get to the ATA you need to be someone I'm really, really eager to buy and to get the dwelling built quickly at the expense of doing other things across my empire. To get into the STA you need that and in addition, you need some busted broken extra angle where you just have a you know, you deliver an ability for the player to just leverage and exploit essentially the game as a result. So it's quite hard to get into the A. It's very hard to get into the S. A B tier unit is someone that I'm keen to buy happy to put money into and I'll rely on them good solid investment happy to do that. See again solid but I don't care if I don't quite get them as quickly as I possibly can. D is something I'm probably not bothering with a lot of the time but I'll happily use them depending on the situation. And then E is something that I really don't like having to put money into. F is something that is a pet hate and I just can't stand and I will almost never buy. Okay. Alright, so that's the ranking order. So let's get cracking. We've got the halflings up first. Okay, so I'll put each candidate here just next to my camera while we're talking about them. So halflings are a whole new thing in the Horn of the Abyss. We have new artwork from the factory town for the halfling. And we're all going to have to get used to this idea that the halfling isn't what it used to be. What it used to be to me was an incidental neutral creature you could pick up, be quite happy with them roaming around with your army dealing good damage. When they inevitably die, who cares didn't really matter to me that much in the first place. Quite enjoy marching them into the skeleton transformer. Don't mind admitting this kind of thing. Those days are over. These guys are the base unit for the factory. And the immediate and obvious kind of temptation, I think, is to compare them to master gremlins that we can see we scored quite highly up here. A minus for a master gremlin. Being at tier one ranged damage dealer kind of squishy. So a lot of similarities to the master gremlin. Now, in terms of damage output, they deal one to three damage instead of one to two, which is an upgrade. No doubt about it. They also have four attack instead of three attack, which is really great. You also don't need to upgrade the dwelling with masters. You have to pay 1000 gold somewhere in week one to even get them online in the first place. So already we're starting to think, well, gee, these guys should maybe be up in the A plus region. However, the story doesn't quite end there. I have found half things to be quite squishy and difficult to defend and to keep alive. The starters, they have a defensive two instead of a defensive three for the gremlin. And you might say, well, that's no big deal.  And that's that that would be that would be a fair criticism. However, when I look around at the gremlins friends, and when I look at the halflings friends, there's a really big difference. Master gremlins have stone gargoyles, hidden behind the wyverns, as you can see. And in the early part of the game, your stone gargoyles, you don't really mind what happens to them. You're kind of, they're happy to work in defense. You're happy to trade their bodies in combat so that you don't lose master gremlins. They're a versatile unit flying around, taking care of business in the middle of the map and trying and you can very much leverage and use them to keep the masters alive. By comparison, the tier two creature in the factory, the mechanics and engineers will talk about now in a minute, which are both great units, but high damage dealing units that you don't really want to trade their bodies. You don't want to trade their HP to protect halflings. I haven't wanted to anyway. When I've been playing, I've wanted to snowball and stockpile my mechanics into a bigger stack for use later into the mid game. Now, the armadillos and the iron golems are broadly comparable. The armadillos we'll talk about now in a moment are kind of comparable. There's the iron golem there. He needs to be promoted, by the way. That's D plus is too low for him. We'll come to that later. So they're broadly comparable. The armadillo is probably a little bit better, the two hex body to body block the halflings and so on. However, when you look to the heroes as well, we've got artifices and mechanics, artifices and mercenaries, sorry, that are leading these armies. And neither of them are particularly great at keeping the halflings alive, especially the mercenary. The mercenary increases the damage output, but it's the squishiness that's the issue for me. By comparison, alchemists and wizards, they all have spell books. They all have 20 or 30 spell points right on day one, and they can magic arrow, they can slow, they can haste, they can mess around on the battlefield to keep these masters alive. All that means that I have found the halflings quite difficult to keep alive. They're great when you field them and you're up against an enemy stack of zombies or ogres or something like that. Swinging their flinging their slingshots fantastic and they do more damage than the masters, of course. But one lucky morale flash from that stack of griffons that's flown over to the middle of the map and you get a single hit put onto your halfling stack and you're in a very unhappy place. So I think all of that means that I'm still going to buy them. They're still very attractive to me, absolutely cheesing them in the first week or two, but it's likely that you'll struggle to keep the stack alive and they might drop off in the latter part of the early game, middle of the mid game. So I think they're a priority, but they're probably in this B plus region for me. They're not really an A tier unit for those reasons that I've laid out below. So we'll leave them there for a moment while we talk about their upgrade, the halfling grenadier. Okay and here we have the grenadier. Amazing artwork, he's facing the other way and he's got himself a cool top hat. These guys get upgrades to damage. Essentially they are more deadly than a basic halfling. They have 20% reduction to enemy defense similar to the kind of behemoth ability, which is a really nice feature. If you have a good sized stack of these in the late early game, mid game, go for the upgrade, it's good, it's worthwhile. They are however 50% more expensive per model instead of 40 gold per model, which by the way these guys are both the same cost. These guys are 60 gold per model and that will actually bite in and affect your economics, you know in those first few weeks. How much of a massive priority are they? I think they're situational. If you've been really really good, you've got tactics or you've got armadillo defense methodologies, you've got a big stack of guys they're still alive. Sure, high priority upgrade. It won't always be the case though that you're in a position to do the upgrade and for it to be particularly profitable. So I think that the Grenadiers are probably in the reasonable priority of the C category for me. So mechanics and engineers, these are amazing. I mean I absolutely love the flavor. I love the artwork of these girls. Look at this, she's got the flamethrower goggles and then the upgraded engineer version has the welding mask that she fights with as well. Now what do we get for our money? I might start with the engineer to start with. We get damage two to five, we get movement seven, okay, attack seven, defense five, HP 16, solid, solid stats for a tier two upgraded unit. Very very solid, powerful, good unit. In addition to that, fire breathing.  Now that is absolutely amazing. It's so so powerful in the right situation on the battlefield to get amazing leverage out of that fire breathing. It is also possible to accidentally incinerate your own halflings and you can watch me doing that in my recent Ironman run through on the impossible difficulty on Factory which is available now on the channel. However if you avoid making bonehead decisions like that, she's really really powerful. I found myself so far playing the Factory really wanting to get up to the engineer quickly and to keep them alive. I don't want to trade their bodies as I said before. I want to keep them alive for that damage dealing upside. In addition to that, if that wasn't enough, you have the repair functionality. They can repair automatons and dreadnoughts, juggernauts that have been damaged and the repair is awesome. You get tons of HP back relative to the number of engineers. It's something like a ratio of three to two. I think I worked out three engineers can resurrect to automatons which is just awesome. I think these guys are really high priority. A. I think they're an A grade unit, the engineer. I'm minded to put them sort of somewhere in this middle of the A. I don't know if they're quite as exciting and oh I can't wait for this the way I can with some of these other units but it's solid. She's a solid, solid creature. Somewhere up here in this high A, mid A ranking for the engineer. Now the mechanic is basically an engineer that's just a bit worse in almost every way. So damage, movement, attack, HP. But all of her other stats and primary things kind of remain the same. She has the fire breathing aspect and she has not stats I shouldn't have said but she has the fire breathing and she can do repair but her repair is half as effective as the engineer's repair. These were good. These were fine in the games I've played as Factory so far but again I want to keep them alive and get them upgraded. So she's probably in that same conversation as other junior versions of powerful units like a green elf. Yeah, yeah, yeah, green elf's great but I want to upgrade it pretty quickly or him. That's also the case with the mechanic so I think the mechanic's probably in this sort of region here. Okay and so the list is getting starting to fill up as we can see here. We're on to armadillos and bellweather armadillos. So here we have this is the basic version here and the bellweather version to the right. These are solid chonky units that you can get at tier three very cheaply. The dwelling is cheap and easy. You can build it immediately after straight away actually you don't you don't need engineers or mechanics. You don't need that dwelling. You can skip it. In addition they have the pen upgrade which I've since learned the correct terminology is a horde dwelling. So in the first video I kept talking about the accelerator building. What I mean is horde dwellings. Creatures like Cerberus that can get extra cages, griffins have the same thing where you can get extra body count than you would normally get. And that tends to increase the value of creatures on this tier list because of that point about being able to create a large stack of something really powerful in the in the time part of the game at which that creature comes online. Now with that said these guys have a very specific role which is sort of hovering around or revolving around defending the halflings, defending say something like the gunslinger later in the game and that is a fairly niche and specific role. The basic ones have movement four and movement four is so much worse than movement five. So I don't know. I mean they're okay. I mean that in terms of value for money they're good but I didn't find myself desperately wanting to buy every single one of them. I found that it was actually better to just buy some to have in your army depending on the composition and depending on what your tactics are. Now in terms of the bell weather ones you get a massive upgrade of speed from four to six which makes a huge difference. There's a really cool feature I found as well that when you haste an armadillo it changes its movement animation and it rolls up in a ball and rolls across the the terrain which is really really fun. Yeah I think the bell weather one is a bit better. It's a bit more viable as a stack. These guys have massive defense and really bad attack though and so you need if you're going to build a big stack of them and try to make use of them you're going to want a fancy sort of move like frenzy. There is a frenzy hero actually an artificer that specializes in frenzy which would turn the armadillos from very very stonky stodgy defensive creatures into absolute killing machines for the turn that that's switched on. So yeah a lot going on here but in terms of appeal how many of these do I want to get and when? How quickly do I want to get it online moderately? I think the bell weather one is a good solid investment better than average. I think the normal one is just okay-ish probably languishing a little bit down. C-minus not terrible. C is still a good score C is average but um yeah I don't really want to be stuck with these movement four guys for very long. Bell weather ones are solid and I can see myself investing in these more more as I play the game and I get more reps in with the factory going forward. Next on the list is automatons and sentinel automatons and the basic one here is shown on the left the sentinel automaton upgrade on the right. What's going on with these? Well they are lifeless automatons immune to things like morale and that kind of stuff. The basic one has movement eight and a solid reasonable stat line of attack, damage and so on. Now there's a feature with the particularly relevant with the basic one where you can switch on detonation so you can make many stacks of these with the intent of switching on detonation and having the stack die in the company of the enemy and that causes massive damage. I think it's 70 damage per creature that is in base contact with the basic automaton when it dies. I'll be honest so far I haven't been able to leverage the detonation ability I'm sure it is possible to do a completely broken things with it and I'm hoping to experiment with that a little bit more in games that I'm going to play going forward. Now when you upgrade from a basic automaton to a sentinel you get plus one move so you go up to nine movement you do also get an upgrade to damage from seven damage to nine damages quite a healthy damage upgrade. In addition to all that though the sentinel is no enemy retaliation and we talked in the first video about how important that is for my ranking of units. Units that are fast who cannot be retaliated again such as the ones I'm clicking up here on the left tend to find their way very high up the list because of the leverage you can get from that the ability to swoop in wait at the beginning of the turn swoop in at the end of the turn deal damage take no retaliation and then act early in the following turn by either attacking again most often or kiting running away flying off to a different target in the case of say a devil all very good stuff right so the sentinel automaton has this kind of combo thing going on now is he quite as amazing value for money as a harpy would be or a cerberus in terms of priority am I desperate to do this ASAPing as much as these maybe not quite but that's before you also need to factor in which we haven't yet the impact of the repair from the engineers so what I found myself doing with the factory so far with sentinels in particular is using them kind of like a makeshift vampire lord which we have up here you run around the map attacking things with no retaliation if the enemy attacks you and you take damage you can intentionally put these guys out there as the sacrificial lamp take damage and then towards the end of the combat you can tidy things up with a massive repair from your engineers and you've kind of achieved the same thing that the vampire lords would have achieved so I think these guys are really really strong I think they're a high priority I found them to be a high priority you can build automatons without armadillos you don't need an armadillo pen you can go straight to automatons from engineers which is also very very nice so I think these upgraded guys again they do have the detonation ability but I haven't figured out how to leverage that properly because you can't even invoke an enemy into retaliating because of the no retaliation thing so there's a there's a challenge there and getting the best out of that detonation feature I think for the sentinels all told I think these are an A grade unit something I'm really eager to do and together I found these two guys were like strawberries and cream absolutely just go together really really well I love the artwork of the angel so much I don't actually want to mask him so I'll put I like him I like you he kind of feels like he's the representative of the whole group you know being at the head here so I'm going to put the automaton right up here next to the the sentinel right up against the next to the engineer as well as for the basic guy I think he probably does have more utility than I've been able to get from him so far you will find applications I'm sure to leverage the detonation and he can do a good job for you while you're waiting for the money you need to upgrade so go back to your town and get this guy so similar to what we talked about before with the mechanic I think the basic automaton deserves a solid B as well now with the sand worms I think the best comparison I could find for these and the way it felt when I was playing the game is to compare them to a minotaur kind of similar idea you've got a 50 HP body it actually goes up to 60 HP for the upgraded ones these guys have flying and really solid attack defense damage the kind of thing that you're quite happy investing money in and getting them to walk out burrow out it's not flying it's actually burrowing burrowing out to the middle of the the park and getting mixed up in fights and dealing good damage you don't really want to trade their bodies but if you have to you have to that's kind of they're doing a job for you they're flexible useful units for that purpose I did find the upgraded ones to be better value for money I was more excited about getting to them quickly so I think these guys are going to outrank the basic sand worm now in addition the upgraded ones have this corpse devourability which again I'm just learning I don't think I was able to leverage as well as I'm meant to where they can land on a hex and devour a corpse in order to gain additional attacks like a crusader but it's a one-shot effect so after you've devoured the corpse you get one extra attack the next time you attack so there are going to be ways to really really leverage that that I think if I'm completely honest I'm probably still learning overall really really solid unit the other thing I wanted to mention about them as well and I was just thinking there there's another thing you don't have to have the automatons you can skip the automaton dwelling go straight from armadillos into the sandworms and in a way you've kind of got two trees in the factory two different build trees you can either go the biological zoological path armadillos into sandworms or you can go the mechanical route of engineers into automatons now so where are we going to rank these yeah I feel like it's it's there's a lot of analogies to the minotaurs you know the upgraded one really solid good high priority creature I'm going to want to do that I want him up here in this B plus region alongside the kings I think the basic sandworm similarly to a normal minotaurs probably a little bit better with the flying has a little bit more utility than the basic minotaur would have so I think that's where I like the sandworms and I've just made a slight tweak to the sizing of the creatures in the front rank in the foreground here the picture's going to get pretty busy by the time we've added all the cove and all that kind of thing as well so hopefully that's still coming okay for you guys coming through okay for you in terms of the graphic all right now where are we up to we've got to move on to tier six it's time to talk about gunslingers and bounty hunters now my story so far with these units is I've been really excited and pumped to get these guys going and start fighting with them because I love the flavor the idea with these guys is they are very very good at dealing damage from distance like a lot of other units in the game the gimmick is the special angle is that they can't really be shot by enemy archers okay so when they're facing off against an enemy stack of archers they have a preemptive shot the gunslinger will actually fire his weapon first before the enemy let's say it's a lich actually attacks him okay so you're really discouraged from shooting these guys with your own archer units the bounty hunter then is able to preemptively shoot any number of different archers that might be shooting him okay now what what what what is the con to that like what's the what's my sacrifice here well unfortunately the sacrifice is pretty big they're a tier six unit with 45 hp now for a tier six unit that's really really bad they're extremely squishy and I found that they're just not really a tenable unit in the way that they actually slot into your army you cannot attack an enemy castle an enemy town while packing these guys they will be murdered by the arrow towers because they can't preemptively shoot the arrow towers in addition to that okay I can't shoot them but I can still melee them I can just fly over with some good quality melee unit a happy haggle well actually happy haggs aren't as good but you know what I mean like any melee unit really heck even in a firefight with grand elves I could walk over with my grand elves and melee you instead of shooting you I mean I don't know if that's a thing or not probably you would expect these guys to win in that in that type of engagement I guess but yeah I just unfortunately not found them to be practical the bounty hunter's upgrade he gets okay an upgrade to whatever damage and stuff and then being able to do it to any number of enemy archers that's just going to be such a corner case it's going to come up so rarely that I really don't think he adds much more at all to the power level of the exit of the starting point which is is quite is quite poor I think so gunslingers I actually have found so far to be something I don't want to invest in and I don't want to buy and so that means they're not even actually qualified to be a D I think the gunslinger is an E I might say he's an okay E he's a bit better than I was quite mean to ghost dragons here actually wasn't I I think he's somewhere in this neighborhood he's worse than an imp I'll buy imps and use them for longer more often or a bone dragon more often than I will a gunslinger I think that's true I think that's the case that I think that's how I feel about them the upside isn't enough if it would be different if they had two shots something like the marksman or they did like unfair levels of damage when they when they just shot someone with their amazing looking rifles but the damage just is okay for the gold that you spent it's not a broken amount of damage that they do when they when they shoot the bounty hunter okay I've got to pay to upgrade the dwelling and pay to upgrade the guys and the extra point the gold coins per model what do I get for my money an extra preemptive shot like an infinite number of preemptive shots against enemy archers doesn't do anything to address the shortcomings of the HP these guys are an absolute glass cannon I think and just a very low priority for me I don't think I can put them there because my camera is going to be in the way I think he's I think he's an he's a bad E the bounty hunter we have the Kotl I'm going to pronounce that the word Kotl the basic one here on the left and the upgraded Crimson coattle coattle Kotl oh I'm going to get in trouble for this I'm going to say coattle coattle for both the Crimson coattle now what do we get for our money here first things first the basic one to get the dwelling you can skip past gunslingers and the watchtower you can go straight from sandworms up to these TS7 units coattails and that's quite good the dwelling is not very expensive what do you get for your money in terms of buying the unit I like to think of these almost perfectly exactly as a flying hydra they have almost the same stats as a basic hydra which the basic ones are down here in E plus however what are the cons and pros and cons and minuses and pluses compared to the hydra well instead of having no enemy retaliation and attacking all the hexes around it what the coattle can do is fly and have movement 11 and movement is absolutely king in this game in addition to that you have this thing where you can switch on once per combat an invulnerability rule but if you do that with the coattle you can't attack so all he can do is sit where he is and be invulnerable yeah overall I think that he's way more flexible and powerful than a hydra but the damage the damage output per gold coin spent is okay you do feel him you do feel that it's a basic TS7 unit it doesn't feel he doesn't deal insane damage the way that an angel does for a basic TS7 unit sheer damage output of something like the angel just isn't quite there with the coattle so he's not an absolute no-brainer have to get him ASAP but he's a good solid investment I think you can you can be happy investing in these and getting some good payoff from them so we'll move him into the B tier I think it is getting a bit busy up there but we'll find a home for him up there at some stage in a moment I'll fix the formatting in terms of the crimson coattle well you get a nice upgrade to most of the things that matter you only get as far as 200 HP though and we've got other TS7s here that are 300 or at least 250 so that's quite a low HP point to be upgrading to only 200 for the crimson one the invulnerability clause changes though you can now attack fly over with your high speed attack and then turn your invulnerability on all at the same time and that has a lot more utility it's a lot more useful the cost of the dwelling to upgrade though is quite pricey we're talking 15k and 20 crystal to make that upgrade is it really worth it? I think it kind of is but I think maybe the basic ones are going to have a little bit more utility in terms of value for money for longer than the upgrade is the upgrade's fine you can be happy doing that but I think these guys are a little bit ahead the basic ones are a little bit ahead for me in terms of attractiveness okay so we found a home for them up here in the B rankings solid but okay I mean a solid good choice and just a tiny bit more formatting there to hopefully improve the visual experience now we aren't done with the factory though there is another tier 7 dwelling and separate upgradeable tier 7 creature the dreadnought and the juggernaut okay so what do we do here with these guys well firstly how do we get how did we get here in order to build the gantry where you can recruit dreadnoughts and juggernauts you need the watchtower first you need to go through gunslingers and not bounty hunters but you do need to get the watchtower before you can actually build the gantry in addition the gantry wants lots of crystal the same way that the serpentarium does for the codles it's going to be difficult for you in most games certainly resource constrained games the version I like to play of the game to do both things certainly on time anyway now in terms of how these units play I haven't had a lot of experience with them yet but my perception of them is very much kind of a walking dragon picture a dragon that can't fly but instead can walk is an automatic automaton so with no morale is repairable by the engineer which is a key key benefit and instead of fire breathing swap the fire breathing over imagine you could just instead of doing fire breathing do one massive ridiculous fire breathing every combat and I think it's called the heat stroke ability where you can sweep your fire breath across multiple three hexes and cook hopefully cook anyway a basket of perhaps two or even three enemies at the same time depending on how well you are able to set things up in the combat the biggest problem though that's all sounding okay okay that's all sounding cool the biggest problem really is for me the movement the basic one is movement six the upgraded one is movement seven and I said before in the first video we're taught like chaos hydras have this problem for me is like movement is king movement is absolutely the king key statistic for virtue for me otherwise it means okay you're powerful but I have to massage I have to haste you I have to teleport you I have to slow your enemies or figure out a way by which I'm going to leverage your abilities in a siege I have to somehow get you past go get you over the walls I have to babysit you somehow in order to get the best out of you so these guys for me are not in the same conversation as dragons despite them having a kind of a similar virtue two dragons in a lot of ways huge beefy HP big damage fire breathing I'd probably actually prefer heatstroke to fire breathing I think it's probably more powerful to be able to do that one devastating shot instead of being fire breathing every turn but I'm just not going to be as excited to get these guys as quickly especially given I've got to go through gunsling is to get there often I'll find myself I think going for coattles instead so where am I with these guys I feel like it's a lingering sort of C I don't think you could say that they're D you know because you will get value from them in the late game if you've got that money if you've got that crystal to invest they'll pay you back and you'll have a good return from them now in terms of which one I like better the investment that you've got to make in crystal and money is more or less the same you pay it once then you pay it a second time to get up to juggernaut but the basic one already has movement six and heatstroke you do get a buff to attack and defense and HP pump as well though for the upgrade I think overall basic one probably does give you a better yield per gold coin spent than the upgraded one that doesn't mean you're never doing the upgrade you're going to be pointing the game where the money and the crystal crystal is not a problem I've got like 80 crystals like it's not a problem okay fine in the round though over the course of many many fights and many many campaigns maybe the basic one gives a that just that little bit more utility okay and we are done with the factory and we're ready to move on to the Cove now the Cove town updates the factory by some years and I have a bit more experience playing with these creatures but with that said I still don't have anywhere near as much experience as I have with the creatures from the vanilla game so similar to what we were doing there with the factory creatures I'm going to be drawing comparisons and analogies to other creatures that I am more familiar with in order to help guide the ratings and rankings so the first creature off the rank is the nymph and oceanid and you can see them respectively left and right here at the bottom and the way I like to think of the nymph is essentially the same as a pixie it's very much based on the same idea as a pixie the pixies are in here behind here behind the pit Lord pit fiends as you can see now in making the comparison well what are the comparisons for starters you can't accelerate the nymphs the way you can with pixies with the garden of life or whatever it is you're stuck on 16 per week you can't stockpile huge amounts of them quickly in addition to that they are one hex slower than a pixie okay so not like already feeling not really as good as a pixie and a pixie isn't even that good um what do you get well you get plus three attack instead of having two attack they have five attack and that actually makes a really big difference when they hit it's a noticeable punch in the face and that's true across a lot of these creatures in the cove we're going to be talking about high damage output capabilities the name of the game when it comes to cove I just adjusted the lighting there hopefully wasn't too glaring for you guys um that's great and all but high damage is nice and they're annoying to fight against they're actually quite scary in the early game sometimes in big in in in large numbers if you aren't able to quickly kill them but they're so squishy I mean they're as squishy as a pixie one hex slower I just don't find myself getting really excited about getting tons of them early in the game you'll have the dwelling so the dwelling is there at the beginning of the game how eager am I to buy them every single turn um every single week all the way through the early game not that excited and in contrast to the pixie when you upgrade the pixie you go to the sprite which in the vanilla game is insane the sprite will be moving later though because of the balance changes where it will come to uh due to hornet the abyss um so getting to pixies and stockpiling them early buying tons of them yeah yeah yeah that's a big priority because I want to get to these as quickly as possible that's not really true with the ocean it yeah the ocean it moves faster it does more damage than a sprite will deal um but again it doesn't have that no retaliation feature movement eight I think for the ocean it it's just okay they're gonna die in droves as soon as the opponent kind of turns their gaze toward them so I just don't actually think these are a high priority you can spend your money on them they're not very expensive but you're not expecting the world from them so I think it's a D plus okay so I found a spot for the two girls there I think the basic one's better value for money than investing in the upgrade and getting the ocean it so that's how I feel about that I have to be a little bit harsh otherwise everyone's just gonna end up in the B all the time which is no good these guys aren't a big priority for me okay who's next okay the next is level two creature in the cove which is the crewmate and the upgraded crewmate as I'll as I'll call this fellow here in the stripes I actually struggled a little bit to find a good comparator for the crewmate in the rest of the game they've kind of got a bit of everything going on they're a little bit like a gargoyle a little bit like a harpy in the way that they fight the in terms of the movements that you get out of them I find that um they're actually a really high priority for me when I play the cove however because their baseline stats are just really sort of solid across the board almost everywhere except for defense in the case of the basic crewmate in addition to that you get the pub which is the hoard building that allows you to get large numbers of crewmates quite early on in the game and they're really stodgy solid guys you can just count on them to walk up fight kind of like what I was saying before about gargoyles if some of them die in response well that's okay that's kind of your job um I found actually when I was playing in the campaign of the cove as well that they kind of serve this role they get in the way of things in particular get in the way of pirates sea dogs and that kind of thing we'll talk about in a moment and sort of exchange blows but they deal good solid damage in response as well when you upgrade them you get an upgrade to just about everything attack, defense, damage or the rest of it speed as well but the defense upgrade is plus two they go up all the way to six defense from four which really improved their survivability big solid stats on these guys for an upgraded tier two unit I think because the nymphs aren't very good and this is what happens with zombies by the way and the whole thing about whites being so terrible and when the creatures in the town nearby you aren't that great your rating will naturally go up because my priority for forgetting you online will be that much higher I think the upgraded crewmate is very very solid and highly desirable kind of in this B plus region the basic guy I think you can get away with using it instead for a while but I do want to get that upgrade pretty pretty urgently I think maybe the basic one is in the same conversation as in a very tail end of the B for him and my but it's getting busy in this in this B tier as we can see here but yeah no good creature the crewmate solid solid and the horde dwelling really really helps okay on to pirates now with the pirate you've got this really unique thing going on where you can start with the frigate to get the basic pirate you can upgrade the pirates into corsairs and then uniquely you can upgrade the corsairs into an additional level of upgrade to sea dogs and these guys are kind of like a level three and a half unit if you like in terms of ranking them I found it a little bit difficult to find good comparators when I first started playing as the Cove I really was working on the assumption that pirates are the main meme of the town it's a pirate town I thought the pirates themselves are going to feel like grand elves when you're playing the game you want to buy as many as possible and they're a massive massive priority and you're going to upgrade them to and sea dogs are going to be right up here in the S tier along with the best archers in the game in terms of value for money that's not quite right I actually think the pirate the basic pirate one of his best comparators is the evil eye or beholder which is actually here the basic beholder now when you compare these two guys the pirate and the beholder both have this thing where they have nomally penalty in horn of the abyss that's really important because the player has the discretion to hold down the control key or hit the little sword icon and instead of shooting when you have the discretion to shoot you are able to walk around and use your nomally penalty instead which is a really really nice feature that the developers have added to horn of the abyss now a pirate by comparison to beholder has 15 HP instead of 22 HP he's much easier to kill he dies more easily however he deals more damage three to seven damage for an average of five instead of three to five damage for the beholder which is an average of four by comparison in terms of dwellings you get the pillar of eyes you can get that straight after the troglodytes you don't need the harpies you can go straight there the pirates do require the shack in as a comparison in addition to that the pirates have four shots per combat beholders have 12 that's a problem four shots is going to bite it's going to hurt and you're going to have it's going to cause a headache for you more often than only having 12 shots which will almost always completely be enough for any engagement so yeah they're not grand elves they're more like for me a beholder how important is it to get pirates going quickly in the cove well I've actually found that you don't always have to do this you can go from shack straight to storm birds and storm birds are really really solid creatures as well I feel like though you do want to get the frigate and you do want to start collecting these guys and letting them build up even if you aren't buying them as a really high priority I think the pirates are solid creature particularly given the upside of being able to get to these higher tiers at your own discretion they have a lot of option value that isn't there with certain other creatures so how much of a priority is this yeah it's better than C but they're not A grade units that I absolutely have to get ASAP every time I play the cove I do want to build the dwelling pretty urgently so where should they land I'm reticent to say I think we're heading for the B plus again for a basic pirate so let's put in there for now and yeah we'll tidy up formatting we'll have to think about how we're going to represent this now in a moment now for the first level of upgrade the Corsair nice upgrade good upgrade to all of the key things that really matter particularly both attack and defense both get a plus two buff they get plus one speed which is solid still stuck at 15 HP and still stuck at four shots per combat so yeah good but oh man there's it's comes with a little asterisk right the cost of the upgrade isn't insane and as long as you have a reasonable stack of pirates that you've either been saving up or you're circling back to the town this will be an upgrade that you'll do with a pretty high degree of probability I think especially in a resource constrained game where it won't be possible necessarily to go straight from pirates to seadogs for reasons we'll talk about now in a second when we talk about the cost of seadogs so I think Corsairs are okay but probably not as high up in terms of frequency of purchase priority compared to other units that maybe the original one is somewhere in this kind of meandering solid B minus E sort of range for a Corsair okay so we'll leave him there just while we're trying to figure out what we do now the seadog is a really difficult one to rate I went through so many different iterations in my mind thinking about how I was going to rank these guys what the seadog does first and foremost is upgrades itself from the Corsair into something that deals more damage with its higher attack skill more speed great and it inherits this cool accurate shot ability which is very analogous to the mighty Gorgons that we have here in B minus where if you have a large enough stack of seadogs after they've shot something they'll then murder an additional whole unit of that stack so when you're shooting something that's tier 7 like a I don't know an archdevil or a green dragon you get a whole extra kill from that effect which is extremely powerful and scary to go up against so you attempt it at first blush to say well aren't these guys similar to a mighty gorgon because in addition to that stuff I just said the cost of getting them is quite high in terms of dwelling you've got to invest in what's called the gunpowder warehouse which requires five of every resource like three grand it's quite an expensive dwelling to get online reminds me a lot with mighty gorgons you've got to build the resource silo first which costs five grand before you can and that's why these guys are in B minus by the way because with value for money and priority that's a really big consideration in addition while the mighty gorgons have death stare and can do the same thing to an enemy tier 7 unit that accurate shot can the mighty gorgons are able to take care of themselves and if they find themselves in melee one-on-one with a unit of devils between death stare and their sheer chunky 70 hp they're going to trade so well you don't really have to babysit them with the sea dogs that's not really the case right if these devils get next to them it's all over there's no shooting let alone survivability with 15 hp you don't even get any more hp that's the other thing when you upgrade them so in a way these guys wear down to looking a little bit like the old mage and arch mage from the tower where you've got to find five of every resource to get these creatures online and then they sit there with a moderately I mean these guys have 25 hp so they're 30 hp I think for this one so they can fight with normally penalty decent hp but you've got to find all these resources to get them online and I don't like that right in the case of mages and arch mages that's why they found themselves in D minus because like I want to do something else instead they're great they're great on the field of battle but too expensive and difficult for me to to unlock so now you're wearing back and saying okay what are these guys now are they D minus I think what it all comes down to is that ultimately you have the discretion you can play with pirates or corsairs well into week three week four as long as you want okay or you can build the frigate and just leave it sitting there with these guys accumulating when you're ready you can get sea dogs okay unlike the mages you can't even get a basic mage started you can't start saving them until you build the mage tower and find the five of every resource which is just a headache that's not a problem with these guys okay whenever you've got the resources together and you want to make the investment you can go ahead and do it I do still feel like with 15 hp these guys are getting lightning bolted so often they're getting absolutely prioritized by the enemy so it's like a halfling how much utility will you really get for your investment from a sea dog I don't actually think it'll turn out to be that much very often I haven't found it to be that much when I've played the Cove over the last couple of years that said you know I love you know it's there's nothing more satisfying than getting an accurate shot off and killing an extra hydra or something that's that's that's brilliant so there'll probably be some controversy around this because a lot of you guys out there will really love this unit but I think they probably have less value for money and applicability and desirability in the round than the other two guys do I don't have the heart to give them a C but again I'll end up just a little bit behind I think the core says in terms of value for money and desirability okay some more visual tweaks there I'm getting concerned that you can barely tell what some of the guys in the back row even are these are hellhounds and this is a lizard man that's a basic knoll centaur captain there halberdier with the original graphics from the first game in the background there so I might do a rethink on the graphics just before we finalize the video but hopefully you guys can still see whatever everything's happening there interested to see what you guys make of this with the three-way kind of upgradeable thing and yeah I think you I do get fairly reasonable feedback on my point about the majors and arch majors and their value for money difficulty in unlocking I don't think the same thing applies with the sea dogs though for those reasons I mentioned earlier okay let's keep moving we're on to tier four and the stormbirds and acids okay and here they are I often get these mixed up when I'm looking at the graphics in the game as to what I'm up against whether it's the basic one or the upgraded one basic stormbird is here on the left and you've got here a really interesting creature I think the most reasonable analogy would be to compare the to a pegasus tier four flying creature now how much better if at all is a stormbird than a basic pegasus a lot better in my opinion right the stormbird is better than a pegasus in almost every respect just about every single stat from attack defense speed almost everything it's got at least plus one better than a pegasus and the upgrade to the acid the acid that we'll talk about in a second is really strong whereas the silver pegasus is not a very high priority for me when I'm playing as rampart so I'm quite eager to get this dwelling up and running in addition you can get there straight from the shack as I mentioned earlier and on top of all of that there is the horde dwelling the roost as it's called as you can probably tell I had to just go and look up what the heck it was actually called means you can get seven creatures per week instead of five pegasus per week start getting that stockpile working very very good unit highly desirable if I'm stuck using them for a while I'll be happy that again means we're in the B tier which is another quick tweak there as I realized the sand worms had been hidden there yeah that's a good solid creature the stormbird probably I want to up in this conversation with basic vampires let's move some things around here so I'm experimenting with a third layer of foreground here hopefully just for the B plus range stormbirds here in their own little border in front of the behemoths and the ephreat sultans I think that's better than trying to cram everything in on that second tier but we'll see how that looks at the end we might have to do a tweak now in terms of the acids the acids are great they go right up to movement 11 and they gain this ferocious ability where if they kill something on their first attack when they first attack it and they then take a retaliation let's say they then also get to attack a second time the same way that a crusader would so it's kind of like having the crusader ability but with a slight claws a slight kind of slight caveat on it they're very very good at punching down if you're attacking tier three tier two stacks that kind of thing they're almost certainly going to trigger that ferocious attack because of the effect of the roost and all of that other stuff the fact that their little brothers are already quite strong as well I think the acid is a great value investment and a really high priority part of the reason why I find my money going in towards getting these but that's part of the reason why the pirates just aren't quite at that a tier of priority for me instead so I think the acid belongs up in this sort of a minus category good solid unit yeah kind of same conversation as a rock you know in the terms of the functionality of what it does a thunderbird really really strong solid unit as well has nowhere near the hp obviously as a as a thunderbird but the two attacks thing high damage high output creature that you can be quite happy investing in okay solid a minus for the acid and we're on to tier five to talk about sea witches and sorceresses and so the best analogy for these that I can think of is the lich and power lich in the necropolis here we can see the power liches here the basic lich is here tier five powerful ranged attacker what are the key differences in similarities well the comparisons actually really really close with the sea witch having poorer defense than a lich but higher hp but there's not really very much in it in terms of the sheer amount of damage they deal when they attack comparable the lich has this aoe effect of the death cloud now which we'll be talking about by the way in a moment in relation to the changes to the way that the game works in hd mode or in horn of the abyss mode compared to vanilla mode instead of the aoe attack what the sea witch will do is cast weakness on whoever she just shot I have found that to be really good really really useful and then if she's hitting them in subsequent rounds she'll do disrupting ray instead of weakness and that's that's really really nice so you have the sort of upside option with these girls of playing them in small stacks instead of massive stacks in order to get those weakness triggers off early which is a is a nice sort of tactical option that you have as the player so we're in the same conversation as the lich I think for for sea witches sorceresses are worth the upgrade again similar cost profile in terms of dwellings and cost per model to the upgraded power lich I think these are a really good high priority in addition you can go straight from the shack to the dwelling to the sea witch and sorceress dwelling which is very very good that means they're extremely accessible even maybe more so than the mausoleum I can't remember now if you need the vampire dwelling to the mausoleum so yeah like high priority I think these are an A grade unit they gel nicely with the crewmates that will be happily used to body block and defend them they pair pretty well with the acids although not as well as you know something like a black knight pairs with a lich but that's it from a different tier anyway all in all told I think these are A grade units both of them the basic one and the upgraded one we will also be moving the power lich up to the A rank for reasons we'll explain later as well as for which one's better I think the upgraded one is better because it's practically it's almost the exact same cost per model it's a very small like less than 10 percent upgrade to the cost per model and the cost of the dwelling isn't much and you do get a nice uplift to damage range and plus one movement as well so still constantly making formatting tweaks as I go here yeah and as I say the the liches do need a a revisit as well for reasons we'll talk about in a moment right we're getting there we've got two tiers left in the cove we've got the nicks and nicks warriors next so these guys are absolutely fascinating and interesting to rate and rank as opposed to the other creatures in the cove these guys are exceptionally defensive minded and I'm almost tempted to compare them actually to a unicorn they have a similar stat line in terms of damage output HP that kind of thing however if I start with the next warrior here the upgraded one they have this unique ability which is that incoming attacks are nerfed by 60 so whether it's being shot by an enemy archer whether it's being attacked by an enemy melee unit the incoming attack strength is deleted by 60% it's not deleted by 15 or by minus 10 it's a percentage haircut now in the late game that can have massive consequences when both heroes of on the fight are adding 15 or 20 attack to all of the units you can end up with this bizarre scenario where this guy might have you know I don't know 35 defense and the attack that's coming in from a chunky good unit is reduced to like five or something insanely reduced and that makes them really really powerful they can punch well above their weight they can fight against tier seven units all day long melee one-on-one not a problem in the same way it's same breath as mighty gorgons and that kind of thing okay which is really really good so great value for money standing in front of sorceresses even splitting them into stacks of two using them for that sort of functionality very very handy good solid unit you might teleport them you might haste them if the enemy doesn't have any way to deal with them they can almost feel like the same thing that happens with magic elementals where it's like oh I don't have a way to deal with this unit what am I going to do I have to fight it fairly it's just going to print so much value in a fair fight but that's where the asterisk comes in right for these guys they can be blinded and they can be imploded right they have no resistance to magic that you know they don't give any of the incoming magic damage haircut there is however interference is kind of a theme in the cove and if you pair these guys with interference to stop the damage of incoming damage spells you've got a really nice combo on your hands so I think the next warrior is great very very good unit I have to kind of almost choose between like my priorities am I desperately trying to get to these guys are they an A grade unit yeah I think they are I think they're up in this conversation like a naga queen how happy are you to get a naga queen stack going you're willing right you're going to go to nagers you're going to skip them go go through the upgrade and just buy the queens because of just how good they are there's so much utility in them and it feels the same with the next warrior it's like yeah yeah yeah get these guys get them deployed early A minus for a next a next warrior very very good return on investment as for the basic guys here at the bottom still waiting for a rating the haircut they give to incoming attacks is 30% and that's a noticeable difference they are still a nuisance to deal with but I don't know if I really want to be fighting with them for very long I want to upgrade them pretty urgently so I think I'll probably put them somewhere in the C plus region I'm not going to give them that B minus status of being a little brother of someone great which I sort of have been doing to this point I think these guys just fall off a little bit more we're probably down in this region here so we're on an absolute flyer here we're nearly done we've got one tier 7 and its upgrade left the sea serpent and the haspid the closest creature I could find to really compare the sea serpent to was the ancient behemoth but it's not sorry the normal behemoth but it's not a great comparison so they're a lot more expensive per model than a basic behemoth they have plus three movement and more attack but the behemoth has that 40% damage reduction feature which means the amount of damage they're dealing will often probably be comparable so they're more expensive but more mobile and flexible in addition to that they have this poisoning thing going on which the wyvern monarchs have I didn't talk much about the poisoning when I talked about wyvern monarchs in the first video I don't really feel like poison is an amazing ability on creatures that want to move swiftly over and murder stuff in a single swipe wyvern monarchs I don't want a big protracted three turn melee encounter against an enemy stack with my wyvern monarchs no thank you and that's where poison really shines right what I want to do is fly over murder the stack and then fly off and do something else now okay the fact I'm also poisoning the residual creature that is still alive after I've attacked that's useful it's upside but it's not massively great whereas if basilisks had the poison attack now you're talking because that's a creature that wants to walk out get involved in a protracted contest and you know poison would really have a bigger upside there I think for something like a basilisk yeah so poison doesn't venomous or whatever that ability doesn't really massively excite me I do feel though that this creature has enough going for it in terms of flexibility and power level again though it's a high damage unit you want to be pairing it with your acids to really get over their use tactics get over and get that damage dealt quickly because if it's a long protracted fight you know it's not going to be as fun a time for you although ironically poison does work better as time goes on as the fight goes long so it's a B for the serpent and I'm saying because I just don't really have room for them I'm going to figure out a way to do that now in a second a good solid B for the sea serpent high priority but if I don't get there immediately it's not the end of the world and yeah we're not quite in this in this kind of eight a rank category I don't think for the sea serpent as for the has bit upgrade you get additional movement to speed 12 and a huge buff to HP all the way up to 300 HP and the damage output remains kind of the same so it's a bit like what happens between angels and archangels where the amount of damage that the basic one deals when it's left alone to do that damage is always on most of the damage it's quite a lot of the damage that you will be getting out of the haspid in addition to that the cost of upgrading the dwelling is is not the cheapest in the world that additional three moves though movement 9 and movement 12 really will make a big difference I think you will get good utility out of upgrading them to haspids it's not a massive priority for me though towards the late game it'll often be the case that it's him like with the ancient behemoth we talked about in the first video I will be returning to the him him now in a moment by the way the ancient behemoth but it's like well I could upgrade this creature or I could go over to one of these boutique upgrades where I've got other towns that I've conquered and make these guys instead you know oops hang on just move the black dragon sacrilegious so yeah I think the haspid upgrade is a fine upgrade I would not object at all to you making that a priority and it's something I would do towards the late game depending on how Covey my final composition is assuming I've started the game as the Cove most often so I think it's probably a solid C for the haspid and I just made a couple of tweaks to that B rank have introduced a few more creatures into that foreground third level I don't know graphically how this will turn out on YouTube and if you're on a tiny mobile device my apologies but there are so many creatures I just really wanted to give a B and so that's kind of how that panned out so now we have all of the creatures to date as things stand at version 1.7 of Horn of the Abyss on the tier list we aren't done though right because second phase of the video now which is in the Horn of the Abyss the developers have made some downright changes to the cost of some of the creatures but critically also to the build path of how easy it is to unlock the creatures and get them going as well as introduce these functional elements to combat which also affect the uh desirability and usefulness of the creatures so the first town to get a makeover in the balances or the Horn of the Abyss is the tower now the list is pretty long of things they've changed the first and most important one I think is that the mage tower dwelling it's still difficult to build it's a little bit cheaper it's actually down to only two grand instead of two and a half grand but you still need five of every resource but a key thing now is that you no longer need to build it before getting the genies altar of wishes or the pavilion for the nagers you can actually skip these guys and go to tier five six and seven without building them at all that's a really really big change gives a lot more flexibility okay now the upgraded altar to get the master genies now requires the mage guild and the basic altar to have been been built but that's fine that's a very acceptable swap for not having to worry about the mage tower in the first place the altar itself is now two and a half grand down from three grand as well as the other resources that you have to find and the upgraded cloud temple to get to titans is five grand cheaper down to 20 grand from 25 grand and quite importantly as well the golem factory is down to 1500 gold from 2000 gold as well as the resources that would normally require so there's quite a bit going on there in general things are cheaper things are easier things are more flexible so all of the creatures that are kind of hostage to the mage tower require a review I think one other key thing that we'll come back to now when we talk about giants in a moment is that there's a new adventure map item called the golem factory and when you go to the golem factory you have to fight steel golems and if you beat them the prize is giants so now we have a situation where like angels like wyverns you can go out into the adventure map and start collecting these creatures before you get the cloud temple which is quite powerful so what's the net effect of everything well what needs to move I think from the point of view of well let's actually start with genies and the altar of wishes how easy it is now to get those genies going I think massively buffs their desirability and their their usefulness yeah I think the basic genie can easily go to a solid C if not C plus-ish in terms of its desirability I still don't think they're particularly amazing on the field of battle but for the money and hassle of getting them online you don't need the prerequisites now you don't you don't need those former tier dwellings in order to get them started so they're a lot more viable okay I'll fix up his formatting now in a moment as for the master genie well they are now really really fun and useful they also something I didn't dwell on very much in the first video was the fact that you can get a lot of utility from master genies without buying all of them if you just have five or six you can spread them around into single stacks and get the spell casting benefit right out of the gate so that's really really powerful I think the master genie probably belongs more in the A minus EB plusy category now as a result of those changes so yeah I think I'm still a bit too proud and stubborn to give him a full A E minus sort of ranking maybe the more I play Horn of the Abyss in this mode in tower mode the more I'll increasingly come to like him but I do think because of that fact that you don't have to buy all of them means that yeah are they going to be a massively high priority oh they're going to be a pretty big priority but I think I'm happy enough with with B plus for now the changes that have been made to the accessibility of the cloud temple are immense and coupled with the introduction of the Gollum factory I think giants are far more of a priority now for the tower player for me as a tower player than they were before more than a naga queen? yes actually I think these guys are really really good and a very very high priority great value for money they absolutely wreck on the field they deal so much damage for a basic tier seven similar to the angel in terms of the amount of carnage they'll cause okay movement seven you know they don't necessarily have all the virtues in the world but they're a really really good thing to pour your money into I think as the tower player the titans I think inherit some of the stardom that you get like you're that much closer to getting the upgraded cloud temple you're going to be that much more invested in wanting to do so so I actually think that the titans also deserve a small promotion to just acknowledge that point so I've moved titans up there as I said liches will be getting moved now in a second as well now before we finish up with the tower I need to return to iron gollums these were a mistake in the first video I think I use on iron gollums all the time like they're a really important unit I prioritize getting them unlocked quite quickly primarily because of the fact that I'm stuck here with this problem I mean I mean I made a massive fuss about the archmages and mages and it's a couple of people pointed out it's like well yeah but man doesn't that then mean that iron gollums are a really big priority and great value for money so these guys didn't deserve a d-plus in the first video on top of that they're now even easier to get the dwelling is cheaper to build than it was before because of the way the changes have worked with genies being more accessible now we can get there quickly get up into nagers more quickly I don't want to teleport them up to A or anything but I really feel like the iron gollum deserves acknowledgement as a really solid B tier unit and one that probably should have been in the B tier right from the beginning I think it's a high B it's a high priority they you know I'll buy almost all of them a lot of the time all the way through that mid game will I stop buying them towards the end of the game the late game yeah probably but they're going to tend to still be alive well into the late game and still useful so often as well so I found a home for him up here in slightly B minus but hopefully that's that's not too far away from where he really does deserve to be and I think that's it for the changes to the tower now the next town on the list that received a major injection of assistance was the inferno and even though the guys didn't buff all the creatures or make them all immune to fire magic or or or anything like that one critical thing they did was introduce the ability for the player to select a hex on the ground to target with liches and with magogs so you no longer have to pick an enemy creature and allow the magogs fireball to incinerate whatever creatures are engaged with that enemy and sort of suck that up you can target a hex on the ground next door to the target that you want to kill and that massively changes the viability of magogs by the way in addition I think with release 1.7 and I don't know if this is true of previous versions of point of the abyss I have observed the AI using this ability which is magnificent that the guys have taken their time to actually teach the AI to level up and use that new functionality they haven't just given the player the ability to do it the AI will do it as well how important how much of a priority is it to get to magogs and start using them early in the game in the campaign as inferno well imps and familiars kind of stink demons are just okay serbras are really really strong these guys are going to be massive now you can get away with gogs that will still be true for a long time all the way through the early game and into the beginning of the mid game if you have to but this will be a massive priority now these guys deal great damage and you have the aoe upside of being able to hit more than one unit at a time and you never have to incinerate your own troops anymore so I'll confess I haven't actually played as the inferno in this format yet with magogs switched on but I am brimming with like glee at the excitement at the possibility of at the prospect of doing so I expect magogs to be right up there as a very very high priority purchase do I think they're going to be more exciting and relevant well into the long game you know as these other two units from the inferno probably not um I think the excitement and priority factor will be somewhere down in this region here but these will be an a grade unit in my opinion so new home for the magogs here up in the a tier which is amazing and by the way what an amazing addition to the game to unlock that ability for us to choose which hex these aoe arches are able to target really really good sensible thing for the guys to have prioritized I think okay so that's inferno now before we move on from inferno I do just want to give a nod to pit lords I that they have actually changed the build order so you no longer need a level two mage guild you can just get away with a level one mage to get these guys started and you can begin your demon farming strategy if you have an opportunity to do that with the creature stacks that are nearby um raising demons taking them back converting them to horn demons using your pit lords I didn't really acknowledge that strategy enough in the first video either and so I think the pit lord actually does deserve promotion how often will I prioritize it probably not as much as I should and as much as maybe some of you might do um but I am going to have to acknowledge these guys as being better than just a plain c I think I'm going to make room for them here in the b category and so the next key change we want to talk about is to the necropolis and we're really zooming in here on the impact that the change that I just talked about with magogs has had on liches not only can the liches target anywhere on the ground so the ai or the opponent cannot sort of stagger their units in a way to avoid the death cloud it's very very difficult to avoid giving your opponent a death cloud opportunity now but in addition the mausoleum itself is even cheaper to build I actually don't know why I think why why they chose to make this cheaper but the cost is down from 10 stone and sulfur down to five stone and four sulfur so it's it's it's even easier to get the mausoleum going in the first place in addition to all of that I had actually neglected in the first video I'd sort of said at the time oh you can upgrade them to power liches but it's not really worth it you get a little bit more speed you also get what I didn't say you also get 40 HP instead of 30 it's a huge increase from 30 HP to 40 HP for the power lich and in my last run through as a necropolis you know I think I realized that I don't know if I called it out in the video as such but the power lich is a worthy upgrade and it should probably be above the basic lich the cost of upgrading the mausoleum is not much and especially getting to the getting the dwelling up in the horn of the abyss mode is also another animal so these guys are moving and there's a question of where they're moving to the new functionality alone means that the lich I think is more up in this category here he is a plus okay vampire lords are still the boutique unit that I cannot wait to get going on when I'm playing as the necropolis but basic lich is awesome now such a high priority cheap easy mausoleum and let me get that aoe attack online as quickly as I can the power lich as I said belongs above him it's so worth it to upgrade viability now in the mid game high priority in the late game amazing insane attack solid beefy body with HP 40 I think we might be creeping into the special region the power lich is a really special unit now I don't know if it's really special as in special special special it doesn't totally break them open the game and destroy it the way that you can do in the vanilla game with some of these five units we're talking about here but great great unit incredible better than a wyvern I think wyverns really if they're special because of the reasons I explained in the first video they're probably the worst of the specials due to that accessibility point the ability to get these things working quickly and get start collecting them is the reason that they're in the special category the value for money that you get they're better than a wyvern right these guys in terms of how how eager I am to make this unit and start using it um yeah and the basic guys similar like really really high up a plus fantastic unit now the lich and the power lich okay moving on to the dungeon actually there's a couple of things I just want to acknowledge here because we now have the option to when we have an archer unit that has the opportunity to shoot that's not engaged melee in the vanilla game you have to shoot in the hold of the abyss you can push a melee button and walk up to something and melee it instead now normally with something like a marksman or a grand elf you're never going to want to do that but with something like a beholder uh you might because it has no melee penalty and you might want to reposition the beholder while attacking interestingly as well with the medusas and the medusa queens you have the upside potential of petrifying the target after you've attacked it and if you're in a desperate enough situation and your medusa stack is small enough you might decide actually that rather than shoot my arrows with these three medusas I'm going to walk up and attempt to petrify that nasty stack of whatever devils or something and that's a nice upside in utility for the medusas I don't think it's enough to massively move the needle and make me want to promote them to see or anything I don't think I really want to move them out of the region that they're in but I just did want to acknowledge uh those effects on those two creatures um there's one other impact I want to the delta or change the guys have made to to dima as a hero they've taken away his scouting or made it a basic instead of advanced scouting that won't affect um you know the attractiveness of the town very much but certainly rebalances things for uh pvp and and that kind of thing I might also just mention as well that harpy hags now have the ability harpy's and harpy hags instead of striking and returning here's the basic one um instead of striking and returning you have the choice you can strike and remain which is quite nice if you are wanting to get next to a archer and block it from uh attacking that was never an option before and now it is which just makes the harpy hag even better than it already is again though I don't think it moves the needle on me wanting to promote it into a triple plus or or the st here but a really nice upside for the harpy hag as well the next tell I want to talk about is the stronghold where they have changed the cost of the cyclops cave it used to be that you had to pay 20 uh crystal to even get the cave up and running in the first place um now you don't pay any crystal to get the basic cave but you do pay 10 crystal in order to upgrade it so it's a lot more accessible and sort of easy to get moving uh on your cyclops cave now in addition to that something I do want to call out similar to with what happened with the giants we now have the wolf raider picket as an adventure map uh location where you can go and beat the wolf raiders and your prize is cyclops and that's really nice that really helps buff their viability and desirability in terms of building the dwelling and buying the guys at the time that they become available because the 10 crystal isn't the end of the world I think the main cyclops king gets promoted to be up in the same region as where his the little brother version is um and I think they're both moving to somewhere like a minus for the basic cyclops something I'm keen to do get that cave and start saving them and do the wolf raider picket and start collecting them and using them solid solid creature for the money that you spend a minus a minus now for a cyclops I think maybe the king it's probably just a little bit under but not far under uh let's find a space for him in b plus even though that's already a very very busy uh very busy part of the world okay so again even though the power level of those units hasn't been buffed the accessibility has and that really uh improves the gold coins well the the power per gold coin spent or per um opportunity foregone for for these units that are affected by these changes right what's next okay and now we come to the conflicts which of all the towns has had the biggest changes of all where do we begin well sprites are let's start from tier one it used to be that you could go straight from pixies to upgrade them straight to sprites and then start flying around on day two or down as soon as possible with sprites you could get the garden of life to get 30 sprites per week um in the by the time you have the castle upgrade and that's just amazing you know and you can get so much done with these first striking no retaliation high movement flying girls yes as soon as they meet with a magic arrow they're in big trouble but the amount of unfair things you can get done before that happens in the vanilla game was just unfair completely ridiculous now what the guys have done is they've changed the build order so that you can't you can't go straight from pixies to sprites the same way you used to you have to build a mage guild first okay and at first glance you might say well that's not too bad i was going to do that anyway but the key reason why sprites are special in the vanilla game is that you don't need anything you just go for it and in week one they just tear up the countryside they're insanely good in that vanilla game in week one right it's week one is really really where i want that value to be to be leveraged because i expect them to die by the mid game i expect them all to be dead by week four or five now having to build the mage guild first well by the time i do that in a resource constrained start where i start on zero yeah i am going to get the mage guild on my way to city hall but it might not be until week two week three that i finally get the mage guild up once i've got it up sure i'll do this upgrade but how excited am i to get back and get the pixies upgraded probably not very i think probably i'll let the pixies build up sit there building up and when i can eventually get back i'll buy them all as a single upgrade the kind of thing we talked about doing with the sea dogs that's the kind of thing i'll do with these these girls now these sprites but i might not be fighting with them until week three maybe late week two so that means their desirability and priority goes down i don't know where because as i haven't played complex in this new format but i feel like i feel like it's probably not better than a minus it's probably b plus i'm going to say b plus for a sprite now that even might still be too generous because the real juice the real x factor of those girls is week one day one even so i found a new home for them here in in the decent b range i do think it is something i'll be doing as a fairly high priority but there might be plenty of game case scenarios where i'm running around i haven't quite got around to mage guild yet and by the time i do they're just okay something that i'll do but won't be particularly happy or sad about doing value for money is still ridiculous with these girls like the amount of gold coins you spend per power level is still fantastic i mean really really good um so yeah i can't see them being worse than a b plus now the next major change that's been made to the conflux is with regard to the elementals psychic elementals and magic elementals um these have been nerfed basically in a way whereby their stats and stuff they fight the same way but they're way more expensive they're 50 percent more expensive so per model they're really expensive and they're going to put a serious dent in your finances this is one of the problems the complex though in general i don't like about the other four elementals is the value for money like you can see the earth elemental i just like what is going on at tier five but generally speaking the elementals i haven't given them a very high score just because i don't find them to be amazing value for money they're decent on the field of combat sure but the amount of money and effort i've got to put in to get the thing is just okay you know and not to be confused with the summon elementals which are just pure upside um now with these guys i love magic elementals i said a plus right because immune to every spell in the game is a busted ability ridiculous attack every hex around me and no retaliation well like they should probably be special like they probably should have been at est here the first time i'm not putting them in s now because they're quite expensive they're 50 percent more expensive than they used to be so i think that's what i want to do i want to promote them to s to correct maybe a slight undervaluation last time but then demote them back down again to where they are based on the fact that they are going to put a dent in your pocket uh with i think it's like 1200 per per model now at yeah 1200 per per model i think the thought elemental psychic elemental down here at b minus that's probably a bit generous now um on the other hand i might be stuck with them for a while until i can afford to the upgrade and to upgrade all the the psychics that i've bought i think he's probably okay to leave where he is relative to i mean the fact that we are nerfing the sprites we're also about to nerf benix's as we'll see now in a second so these guys probably are about the same level of priority that they were before okay but just want to acknowledge that cost increase for those guys now major change is also made to phoenix's in the vanilla game you can get the pire an upgraded pire very cheaply you can start buying phoenix's you get four per week by default and they're two grand per bird and that is just busted they're so so good per pound per gold coin spent amazing their combat statistics are great fastest units in the game they're going to hand you the first turn a lot of the time and value for money is just absolutely out of blows it out of the water you're going to be skipping past tier five you're not going to bother buying the earth elementals you save all that money spend it on phoenix's as i explained in the first video now what have the guys done well the first thing that's happened is that you can't just get four per week for free anymore it's been nerfed down to three per week but you can build a new building called the vault of ashes for 5000 gold which will up that to an additional plus one phoenix per week so you can get back up to four per week but you've got to pay for it in addition each bird is 50 percent more expensive so same as the magic elementals that's now 3000 gold per bird instead of 2000 and that is a major major haircut to their cost effectiveness and cost efficiency i actually think that uh i've had some limited exposure playing with the top end of conflux in one of the abyss just recently and i found out the case that i wasn't it wasn't a huge priority be lining my way to phoenix is the way i normally would and i was actually playing around with fire birds for longer than i otherwise normally would have now countering all of this there's another new feature in horn of the abyss where you have this red elemental tower adventure map location where when you defeat the fire elementals your prize is fire birds so there's this weird thing going on actually where i feel like fire birds ironically even though they're more expensive they have a 50 increase to their cost weirdly get a buff i actually think a fire bird is now something that i'm more keen to build the pyre and start saving and buying than i was before but the phoenix is not the phoenix is an okay good solid thing you'll find yourself doing um but it'll be competing for your money with other things you could be doing in the empire in a way that it didn't have to before okay so i think fire bird actually gets a promotion you can start saving these and be pretty happy with them and you'll be fighting with them in the late game as well now in a way that you didn't used to i think it's at least a minus but maybe you could even challenge for something a bit further up for the fire bird the phoenix it's still an upgrade i want to do you know but it is just isn't the massive priority that it used to be um is b plus two harsh i think actually the phoenix can um go to the same location okay and slight nod to the fire bird now for maybe being actually a little bit better in terms of value for money and excitement factor though that red elemental tower really does help prop things up in the same way that it has for the cyclops and stuff as well um so still a high priority unit still in credit i mean the fastest unit in the game all good things and high priority um so i think a minus is still absolutely fine for the phoenix bit of a shame that we lose one of our specials because it almost looks a little bit like the specialty is a little bit thin now um but let's see how we go let's keep going um through the rest of the tweaks that we want to make as well before before we finish off one other key unit in the conflicts that i really want to zoom in on now and acknowledge before we move into the general sort of irata and other tidying up that needs to be done is the storm elemental and a lot of pushback from you guys on my ranking of these they're actually buried here as you can see behind the basilisk sort of meandering around in the c category and my rationale for that in the first video was that look i've got to build the mage guild to get them and i'd rather just pour all my money into the sprites and uh you know i'll get them i'll use them but i'm not super excited about it they're not a massive priority for me um i feel like you've persuaded me that actually that's an under rating in addition to that now i can't even get the sprites without doing the mage guild anyway as well and uh storm elementals will be kind of a linchpin now for the conflicts when i play it a lot more than it maybe it used to be i still don't find them insane value for money for the gold you spend in the hassle you go to to build them uh they're still just okay for me i don't love them as much as you guys all do but i think i'm willing to admit them to i was going to say a minus but do i really believe that i know you guys are here going paul you're an idiot they're s like so like you guys love this unit ah for me they're just okay like they are better than what i gave them here even in the fidelity mode probably and i think acknowledging the nerf to the other creatures that have happened in the conflux there's a natural buff that they should enjoy as a result um b plus so there they are there was a slot actually in the back row for them so um so so that's them moved i think that's okay that's about as far as i'm willing to go with them though guys i appreciate that you uh you might not agree now i think that is actually the end of all of the changes i wanted to make to the list based on the balance effects of uh horn of the abyss okay so magog's obviously teleporting up to really really solid status um giants and all the rest of the stuff that we talked about there so to finish things off i want to just address a couple of mistakes i made in the first video and talk about a couple of the creatures where we've had some really lively debates and might make a couple of changes uh in that regard as well um for the creatures that sort of stirred up the most controversy um in the castle i had forgotten when i started hit the record button i had this whole thing where you know your star struck in front of the camera i had forgotten the build order of um griffons and swords uh swordsmen uniquely in the castle you can't get griffons until you've built the um barracks for the swordsmen first which is a real back to front way uh that isn't replicated anywhere else in the game as far as i know okay i made a big fuss about griffons the fact that you can have the horde dwelling to get lots of them i love the infinite retaliations the hp the stodgy solid nuisance stack that they can be flying over walls using them in the even the late game to um to sack towns and so on that is all still pretty much true but what isn't true is the ease with which you can get it started and get it rolling okay so i need to make an adjustment i need these two units to come down the list in terms of value for money still powerful but less uh but more expensive than i remember more difficult than i remember and the opposite is true with swordsmen okay so i think where what i want is for the griffon to find its way to be minus the royal to find its way to probably a minus okay so that's the birdies moved uh to i think a more appropriate position i still really love royal griffons but yeah i had misremembered the build order and the fact that that's that's a problem you've got to get the barracks going first it's a whole extra two grand that you've got to find before you can begin stockpiling using these these creatures um now with the swordsmen uh yeah it's basically a tier three unit but with a tier four body quite useful and something that um i probably do use more than d minus uh i don't use monks and zealots they are staying there uh that that's right i don't i just don't use i skip past i build the dwelling so i can get on to the next thing that's not true with swordsmen i'll use these in the early game and i obviously want their bodies to stay alive so that i can make them into crusaders who i'll talk about in a second um i think these are a really solid unit by comparison to what i ranked them in the first video so hands up on that one uh just have to figure out where i'm going to put them i tell you what crusaders are moving so just put them there some of you will enjoy seeing them up there i'm sure some of you feel they should be there so i'll leave them there for a second um and i'll give swordsmen the old slot from the crusaders they're going to inherit that that that space okay now as for the crusader i had it in my head that the crusader uh cost 10 crystal and uh some gems or whatever to upgrade the dwelling i had it in my head that the dwelling upgrade was really expensive i think i was confusing it a little bit with ogre mages and vampire lords that tier four thing where you go from a basic tier four to an insane tier four um the cost of that upgrade is not that bad it's only five uh crystal and crusaders if that stack of swordsmen is still alive into the mid game is going to be a very high priority their damage output man per man per pound with the two attacks is better than all of the other high damage uh multiple attack dudes so so he's more powerful than an acid um you know or or what have you when he's dealing those two attacks um so yeah i think he's actually a heck of a lot better than c plus and um again given that you don't need griffons you can just get swordsmen get crusaders and do stuff with that and skip griffons if you want to means that there are much more powerful and viable alternative to the griffons than i had i had remembered i think these guys deserve an a minus so there he is he slots in alongside the royals in a minus really really solid investment the crusader and uh it was a mistake to put in so low i think in the first video so hopefully a few of you guys will be happy that i've made that change for those guys so that's griffons uh and crusaders swordsmen another mistake i made is in the video i talked about lizard men and lizard warriors and in my memory i had it that the lizard man dealt two to five damage along with the lizard warrior and i had it in my head that it's not a big priority to upgrade them because you get that damage anyway and what's the point you just get a bit more speed that's actually not true the lizard man has four moves and deals two to three damage he's currently here the lizard warrior is the one you want you want to upgrade that thing get these guys they're not going to you know they're hard to kill that's one really good thing about them get them upgraded though plus one movement is really really nice actually helps in the turn order a lot but they go from two to three damage all day to two to five damage and they love being blessed these are the guys that i think of fondly when i think about lizard men uh not and i got like essentially got it the wrong way around so i've said there that i want to swap these two over lizard men something i'm going to want to do early and use them in that first week or two but then i want to get the upgrade and it's a pretty high priority actually um i can go from these guys my they're competing against serpent flies which are great i love serpent flies they're here somewhere um you know and wyverns the potential of getting your wyvern nest up online early so i think that's probably why they didn't make it up to the very high b plus um but yeah solid solid unit the lizard warrior uh lizard man belongs more in the in the c plus category there's two creatures left that i want to talk about and the first of those is the ancient behemoth um i said in the first video that i like the first behemoth the basic behemoth because he's fairly cheap and he's a great fighter and useful you can get him in the midgame get him quite quickly and get him moving and i sort of said that by the time i can afford to upgrade the cave or the uh whatever it's the behemoth crag ah there's other cool upgraded tier eight level tier seven what i used to what i was going tier eight level creatures that i could be doing in my other towns instead and i often ancient behemoths just end up not being a huge priority for me but i think in fairness you guys have pointed out that pound for pound gold coin for gold coin the ancient behemoth hits like an absolute truck he actually for each dollar spent on an ancient behemoth that stack will beat any other unit in the game just about any other unit in the game i think certainly any other tier seven unit which i had underrated and i hadn't really um given enough credence i think in the first video with that said the 80 percent damage reduction is lovely and everything but i still feel like it has a little bit of a hydro disease i've i need to help it out it can't get through the walls itself it has to be teleported over or you've got to have ballistics or some of the way of leveraging it in a siege um it doesn't always get its way right it can be blinded it can be messed with some of these other top top units it doesn't have first strike or no retaliation the way this thing does it doesn't have insane range to attack the way this thing does it's so yeah it's good it's good it's better than a d plus fair enough i hear you for me though i still don't love it as much as the community at large loves it so i'm willing to acknowledge it's got a lot more utility than i said in the first video where do i want to put it now that cyclops is so high up i think i'm just going to restrict it to b plus but solid nod and a solid acknowledgement to all of you guys out there who thought that they were quite hard done by the first video okay so new home for them they are squeezed into the b plus hope that hope that's satisfactory to people um i realized actually before now that we've done the ancient behemoth i there was a creature on the list i wanted to get to before i close off i've got two creatures left i want to talk about which is the champion and the archangel all right now the champion i gave him a d um i didn't have that much pushback i had a couple of people saying what no then what are you talking about they're worse than a dwarf i had a couple of people pointing that out but it actually has weighed on my mind more than it should i think this is an under rating the basic cavalier i'll stand by what i said which is that like ah for what you get for your money it's just just all right it's not a like big priority but i'll build the training grounds and allow these guys to stockpile and then i'll buy the champions i will they are competing with angels though and angels are expensive and difficult to get online that's the main rationale for why i gave them a low score it's just because they're competing with these amazing this amazing tier seven unit and i just find i don't always buy them as quickly as i'm physically able to i think d is wrong and um they should probably be more up in that same conversation as the the swordsmen were earlier so i'm gonna put them there okay so i'm happy with that move maybe you can argue ah come on surely they're bees that they surely are more high priority but for me i just find what i play castle out that much of a priority even though they are powerful i'll acknowledge that and probably more powerful than i than i would have said in the first video okay my voice is given out there's one last creature i do want to talk about which is the archangel now probably the most controversial rating of everything i've put on here now you guys love the archangel um s plus plus plus for a lot of you guys that are watching in a in a resource constrained environment for me i've really thought about this right if you're playing a fast game pvp where you both start with 100 grand and it's a three week game you're getting to archangels go yes get the portal of glory upgraded get the archangels sure i mean amazing unit no one's absolutely arguing the sheer power level the fact that they can do resurrection second fast unit fastest unit in the game the the virtue on the field of battle is unquestionable they are great sure agreed however to get the first portal of glory i've got to find 20 grand and 10 of every resource if i'm playing in a resource constrained start here okay now for a basic tier 7 unit i want that coming on in the middle of the mid game okay that's hard to achieve but worth it for this fellow here who gives me you know 50 damage 9 flying movement 200 hp i mean that sound of the singing sword as it whistles through the air i can go to griffin conservatories to top up my stack what a huge amazing priority a grade unit yes okay however to get the archangel i've got to do that all over again i've got to find another 10 of everything and another 20 grand and i've got to find two grand per guy to upgrade my existing dudes to the archangel so if you can find the money to do that you've more or less in my experience you've more or less got enough money to win the game one way or the other anyway and you might find you better off spending that money is somewhere else in one of your other towns that maybe needs to be propped up maybe it's time to go mighty gorgon somewhere elsewhere in your empire maybe it's time to get those black dragons up elsewhere in your empire build a castle in the towns that are more vulnerable to protect them against enemy incursions and just keep using your your normal existing angels so how excited am i and how much of a priority is it for me to spend my precious resources on getting to archangels at the time i'm able to my answer is moderately so i didn't give them a d right i didn't say that they're useless units e because they're such terrible value for money that's not how i feel they're good value for money because they're so powerful they're ridiculously powerful on the battlefield but you've got to pay some serious serious to nero to get there so as unpopular as this is going to be to round out the video i'm not moving them i'm keeping them there in the solid b section i hope you guys can forgive me for that uh but i hope i've explained as well my rationale for why that is so i started moving things around just to make it look better not to actually change the ratings and i realized there's a couple of other tweaks i want to make here the naga's are um better now right with all the changes made to the tower it's a massively buffed town tier five six and seven all get stronger i didn't really talk too much about the naga's i think i'm happy with the queens where they are but the basic one has a lot more viability and early game appeal than it used to so i'm gonna give that a promotion i'm also looking here at dragonflies against vampire lords and wondering if they're the right way around i really like both um they're both very special to me vampire lords are special to everybody out there in the community no one's arguing with me about these being special probably some people would prefer that they were up here for me the resources the gems and crystal to get the guys working in the first place they're more of a tier four and a half and for that i get they're ridiculously busted the things you can do with them provided you can keep that critical mass going so there's a little slight caveat on their awesomeness um based on cost which is why they're down at the bottom end of that special with the dragonflies so much upside i love doing it it's cheap and easy to get them the huge movement you've got the first turn all the time when you're using them all through the mid game until the really big stuff comes online but i do think maybe we could swap these over i think there's a good case for that um vampire lords probably a bit further up that special ranking that i had said the first time i don't think dwarfs are that stone golems and dwarfs probably should be further down i think maybe we could say arch mages become more optional cheaper dwelling we talked about the medusas having the option to walk around and use their petrification instead chaos hydras probably are more exciting to get to than a dwarf probably as well since this uh since the first video got recorded i got kind of trounced by chaos hydras in a fight against an enemy a witch who teleported them into the center of my what i had created a ring of uh high level powerful reaches uh and she teleported the chaos hydra right into the middle of them and i probably wasn't um that that wasn't at the forefront of my mind when i made the first video let's just say i'm thinking that i want to just rejig this a little bit down the bottom here okay so i think i like this better um yeah silver pegasus is about as exciting for the for me is this this is about right for me i still don't think medusa is a very good value for money um and these guys are still a problem uh the resource is required to get them online in the first place so that's fine but i a basic dwarf i'm just getting the dwarf dwelling up and then i'm gonna get to battle dwarfs as quickly as possible and then the battle dwarf himself is actually a pretty solid uh solid old gentleman so that's it that's the final picture as things stand here in uh march of 2024 in my opinion in horn of the abyss this is the tier list for each creature that you can purchase in the game uh i might return to it one day when we have more if we ever have more factions or more balance change that kind of thing but in the meantime if you are still with me and if you've watched through the entire thing as i know some of you do thank you so much i really appreciate your company on the journey and i hope it's been a chill sort of session much like the first video uh was i certainly enjoyed doing it it's taken a heck of a lot longer to produce uh and get to uh the end point here than i anticipated but it was totally worth it i had an absolute blast doing it do check out the channel for your all of your heroes of might and magic 3 needs in particular my series of iron man impossible difficulty level runs uh a new one on there for the factory actually just went up in the last week or so so do check that out in the meantime i'd love to hear from you guys as always if you've got any strong opinions positive or negative you know let me know what you think of these rankings in the comments where you disagree with me i'd love to hear from you as always so again thanks for watching and i'll see you next time bye for now