I finished my first Normal CW run about 2 weeks ago, then switched to Hard. Right now my Team Level is 49, and I havent lost a single CW Hard run. In most runs, I don’t even lose any hero; I occasionally lose 1 hero. Here’s how I did it.
Note: I’m a F2P player, haven’t paid a cent in this game. This guide’s purpose is to share my experience to casual players who are having trouble finishing CW. There are other ways to finish CW with just 5 heroes, but F2P like myself will probably have a hard time getting those good 5 heroes to begin with.
Reset CW smartly:
From what I’ve heard, CW difficulty is based on the power of your top 5 heroes. That means:
- Remove your Disk BEFORE resetting CW
- Upgrade your skills or equip new badges AFTER resetting CW
- Upgrade about 10-15 heroes evenly. 10 because you probably will need ~10 heroes to finish CW run. 15 because you need 15 for Coliseum anyway.
Hard mode enemy strength is the same as Normal, the only difference is that you dont regen after each wave. If your healer is good, Hard mode is no different from Normal. And if you find a particular Hard run is too difficult, you can still change it to Normal, although you can’t change it back to Hard for the rest of the run.
Set up your Core team and Situational heroes:
Your strong Core team will carry you on to the final wave. But the first few waves are easy, so your goal during the first few waves is to charge up energy for some situational heroes that you might need later on.
Personally, I rarely need these Situational heroes, just my Core 5 is enough to breeze through most CW, but I don’t want to get into ‘Oh sh*t I should’ve charged those heroes’ situation.
My Core team has 3 elements:
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Nick: every time Nick uses his White skill, its damage increases, up to 5 times; the bonus is kept between waves -> until the end of the watch. You want to Nick in your early fights and stack his White skill up to 5 as quickly as possible.
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Scare effects: fantastic damages always crit against Scared enemies -> Nick’s White skill will always crit. You want to always upgrade these scare skill levels to maximum first, then upgrade Nick’s white skill.
Sulley is available pretty early on from chapter 3 Elite campaign. He also has strong self heal which is super important because Hard CW doesnt let you heal between waves.
Mike (got him from a lucky Diamond crate) because of 2 reason: 1. Upgrading Mike to Purple is easier than upgrading Sully; 2. Mike is on pretty much every team on my server’s top 20 Coliseum.
Jack Skellington is another option. I haven’t upgraded him enough to be ready for CW yet. Will try him out later.
Zurg also works, but you don’t see him anywhere in top Coliseum, so building Zurg may not be a wise spending of resources in the long run. He’s very strong in CW, but personally I havent had any problem without Zurg, so I don’t see the point of building him.
NOTE: There’s an alternative tactic based on Study effect instead of Scare. Normal damage always crit against Studied enemies, so you can put Baymax and Barbossa together with a strong AoE Normal damage dealer like Jack Sparrow. The upside is that Baymax, Barbossa and Jack Sparrow are all very good in PvP (as of March 2019), much more worthy of your money to invest in them. The downside is Baymax and Barbossa are harder to get than Sulley. As a F2P player, I haven’t got the chance to try them out, but I expect this tactic to be just as effective.
- Mickey (at least Purple) and Miguel:
Miguel can passively heal everyone on your team over time. Meaning: if you’re sure that you’re going to finish the wave, you can just stop using white skills and let Miguel heal everyone to 100% by the end of the wave while generating free energy. I once finished a Hard CW run without ever using any heal ability other than Miguel’s passive healing.
Another hero that has passive team-wide healing is Woody, but I haven’t got him yet to test his effectiveness. In any case, Woody doesn’t give free energy to teammates, which is the main goal of the first few waves.
Miguel weakness is that he needs time to set up his notes to start healing. So if you start a fight with 2-3 heroes under 100% HP, Miguel might not have time to set up his healing notes before they get killed. That’s the reason I have…
Mickey, who has:
- Very strong single target heal;
- At Purple, his White skill also give fairly strong team-wide healing and HUGE damage buff. You can stack up this damage buff and Scare effect to wipe out whole enemy team in 2 seconds.
- Easier to upgrade to Purple than Miguel.
Strategy:
In early waves, use Miguel and Nick in every fight. Don’t use white skills of heroes you’re charging up, but use the white skills of Nick, Miguel and Tank freely. Tank because he generates energy quick anyway; Nick because he needs to stack up his Lemming; Miguel because his white skill also gives others energy. In some cases, you may want to kill enemies a bit more slowly so Miguel has time to heal and charge up teammate’s energy.
If 2 heroes end up with less than 90% HP, retry the wave.
Example of good Situational heroes to charge up:
- Gaston or Mr. Incredible: you can use the CC just before an enemy’s energy bar is full, and hopefully kill him before he wakes up and do big damage to your team.
- Yax or Violet: you might need them if the enemy team has strong team-wide damage.
- Vanellope: the burst aoe Fantastic damage is good (remember Scare?). Other strong AoE such as Jack Sparrow or Merida are also good.
- You may also want Dash to snipe out a troublesome enemy. Since Dash targets a random target, you can just retry the wave until he hits your desired target.
A bad hero to build for CW would be Frozone. If I want a team-wide CC, I just use Gaston instead. Here’s why:
- Gaston is very strong hero over all. Highest basic damage in game (Calhoun disk). Has 2 lives. You see Gaston everywhere in Coliseum. Frozone doesnt appear anywhere at the top 50 Coliseum.
- Frozone CC skills cost a lot of gold to upgrade, and upgrading them doesn’t increase his damage at all, only reducing the chance for the freeze to fail. But you will meet higher-level enemies at later waves anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much.
In general, building Frozone is just a huge waste of gold and badges and with minimal benefit. There are better heroes that can do AoE CC.
Ralph is an odd duck. On the one hand, he has very good CC for a tank, you can see Ralph quite often in Coliseum. On the other hand, his HP sucks (Gaston has comparable CC, more damage, and more survival), and costs a HUGE lot of gold to keep his skill level up. For now, I’m using other tanks because Ralph is just too expensive to keep up.
If Miguel isn’t able to keep everyone up anymore (usually from the 3rd district), switch Mickey (at least Purple) in, or use both healers to make sure that your team ends each wave with full or near full HP. The team then should look like this:
Sulley, Mickey, Mike, Nick + Gaston/Miguel/Situational hero.
The perfect white skill combo: Mickey (increase all dmg by 50%) -> Sulley (scare) -> Nick + Mike for huge AoE damage. Most of the time, I don’t even use this combo because it kills enemies too fast, no time to recharge energy before the next fight.
Having 2 healers may drag the fight out longer, but that’s also the beauty of it: Miguel has more time to bring everyone up to full HP full Energy.
I personally really like Gaston. He has high damage, high survival and good CC. When Sulley is taking too much damage to handle, I can just use Gaston’s white skill to jump in and become the new front-line tank while Sulley heals up.
We definitely need more guides