Warcraft 3 Hard. Night Elf 3: The Awakening of Stormrage

My tips for beating this chapter on hard mode:
1) Focus on the economy. Get an immediate expansion and build numerous lumber wisps.
2) Wait south of the fountain. Fighting further north could aggrro the base garrison.
3) Build 3 Ancients of War so that you can mass produce troops once you have saved up enough resources.
4) Stay in No Upkeep until you've saved up ~1000 gold and have a good lumber income.
5) Build 4-5 Ancient Protectors near the fountain. Before you big assault, lure the enemy garrison out to fight near those towers.
6) Get a balanced army. 6-8 Huntresses, 4-8 Glaive Throwers, as many Archers as that lets you afford. Don't focus on Dryads.
7) 100 Trees remaining is approximately 20 minutes to work with.
8) Protect your Glaive Throwers during the big assault, you want at least 4 of them surviving to tear through the enemy buildings.
SECRET: Clear the trees southwest of your base to get a Scroll of Resurrection!

[@spectre9065]

Priestess has always been a hero relegated to team games or FFA. She's the slowest hero at creeping and all she has for abilities is enhancing auto-attacks. It doesn't help that the Reign of Chaos POTM attacks as slowly as an Alchemist. Scout sounds nice in multiplayer, but the fact that your opponents know you are scouting them removes any possibility of a surprise tactic. However, Keeper of the Grove was an underrated hero. Even before the revolutionary 1.29 patch, Entangling Roots gives you a decisive advantage if used right. I would skill Treants at level 1 for creeping, then level 2 Entangle at level 3 and start 1-shotting enemy grunts/fiends/rifles.

[@Melth]

Is she the slowest *night elf* hero for creeping or the slowest overall? I would assume someone like Paladin could be worse for creeping since at least PotM can give your archers/huntresses a damage boost

[@spectre9065]

@@Melth Slowest Night elf hero. Early game is the most important, and level 1 Searing or Trueshot Aura does not make up for her slow attack speed.

[@poilboiler]

Amazing how he doesn't wake up on his own as the forest is being loudly cut down around him.

[@Melth]

Not to mention he apparently doesn't wake up in time to save himself even with the undead kicking in his door. All he has to do is cast a single spell apparently to demolish their entire base!

[@Mihail4444]

Immensely helpful! Ty! I did it :) Btw it is better to keep the ballistas behind protectors when you drag enemy forces near the fountain the first time around. Just use 1 ballista to drag their attention - this won't clog the units when the fight near the fountain starts. Also, moon wells that are built in front of protectors - are great strategy! Good luck!

[@Melth]

Those are good ideas!

[@TYR1139]

The Frozen Throne has some interesting missions that I always had trouble with for whatever reason. Gates of the Abyss in hard, found it hard to begin with, and to mke it worse I tried cleaning the map, not impossible but destroying the base with dragons is a nightmare and King Arthas, while not hard in theory it is sill tricky.

[@Melth]

One thing I discovered: in the reforged version, the orc base has burrows rather than pig farms (which they'd had in the original). This makes things a tiny bit harder but it shouldn't really matter.

[@asmodeus1234]

Are they statistically different? I've never played W3 personally. Also it's good to see you focusing on games that you enjoy, rather than just playing the latest release, good stuff bra

[@TYR1139]

@@asmodeus1234 Completely different, Burrows can attack if the have peons inside, have more HP (like 100 more I think) and benefit from the reinforced defenses upgrade

[@Melth]

Yep, David is right about that. Also, pig farms have fortified type armor, which makes them super vulnerable to siege weapons. So I would have torn through them in about 1/2 the time in the original release, plus I wouldn't have had to worry about them shooting at me!

[@decem_sagittae]

Haha I knew about that secret at 2:00. I know all the secrets. I beat wc3 dozens of times.

[@mmoff3]

Can you do Symphony of Frost and Flame? That's the only mission I struggle on, and I'm curious to see how you'd handle it

[@Melth]

An interesting mission! I do have a strategy for it which works very well most of the time but once in a while I have a hard time too.

[@frogwhisperer4268]

I just beat that mission after failing and giving up on my first try 10 years ago. You really need solid fundamentals and execution IMO but here are two tricks: 1) Illidan seems to be less aggressive if you don't control any obelisks, particularly early game; 2) dispel is insanely valuable (I used staff of negation but destroyers are another option). My army composition was primarily mass crypt fiends + 2~6 aboms. I added a handful of necros and wagons too (6+3), quite helpful to destroy kael and vashj bases but necrowagon ended up being too much micro to be useful against illidan especially since I felt I needed to split my forces in order to end the game. Maybe I stalled too long and the attack waves become more frequent after 1h lol.

[@nituldeshptha99]

Personally I think your point about the upkeep on this mission might be a bit too much? As much as I enjoy turtling up and booming my eco, there's a time limit which, as you said, is about 20 mins. Plus, there's an expansion nearby which you can get quite easily. By the end of the mission, I think you had 1k extra gold and 700 extra lumber so its not like your eco is going to suffer if you go over the minimum upkeep limit. (Although that might have something to do with you being a very experienced player) When I first tried this mission, I realised that there's not really many attackers coming to strike at your base that can't be dealt with by your initial troops so you can easily build up all your forces, without worrying about eco and just strike at around the 10 minute mark. Also, for the protectors, I think they reuse the attacks of the Dreadlord (Fire/sleep), Lich (frost/frost armour), and orc warlock (lightning/the lightning debuff spell). Or maybe the designers just added random spells to make it more of a boss battle since I think one of them cast the human mage's protection spell. For the elements, I think orcs don't say water because Dranei doesn't really have that any water bodies, so they just mention storm, earth, and fire. I think, the main elements in Warcraft are fire, water/frost, wind/storm, earth, along with others like fel, decay/darkness, spirit/light. But this seems to have changed in WoW to a whole list of different elements.

[@Melth]

It's true that for a skillful player, it's possible to break through earlier if you just build up troops earlier and attack instead of waiting to have an ultra-strong army like I did. But this video is meant to be a guide of sorts. For a less advanced player, having a really big and strong army will make a world of difference. And the most efficient way to get a really big army is definitely to start with a big economy, stockpile gold and lumber and moonwells and ancients of war, and then build a massive force up all at once.

[@zonetropper]

The reason for the change of the Glave Thrower and Demolisher was because of some lawsuit (or potential lawsuit) from warhammer dudes (or d&d dudes) trademarking the names of the units or terms.

[@Melth]

How could anyone possibly try to trademark the terms 'catapult' and 'ballista'? I can understand them suing over the 'steam tank', but I'm pretty sure that catapults have been in the public domain for several thousand years.