Orcs Must Die! Unchained – FAQ/Walkthrough

Heroes

Bionka

Overview

My Personal Rating: 3/10

Bionka is a melee Hero that deals very high damage with her Primary attack. She does have a couple of abilities with a slight amount of crowd-control; one ability does a knockback, and the other lifts minions into the air briefly.

Abilities:

Slam It Down (L2) - Bionka slams her mace down in front of her. The damage from this ability is a bit higher than her Primary, but the area-of-effect is fairly small.

• Mana cost: 35
• Cooldown: 10 seconds.

Bionka Bounce (Triangle) - Bionka will jump up into the air, and when she lands, minions around her will be knocked up.

• Mana cost: 30
• Cooldown: 11 seconds.

Beat Dem Back (Square) - Bionka throws her mace in a straight line in front of her, which will deal damage to any minion that it hits, and knock them back.

• Mana cost: 50
• Cooldown: 40 seconds.

Passive: Queen Of The Unchained - Bionka gains Unchained energy from killing large minions. This can be helpful, but it kind of depends on what map you're playing on. As you can imagine, the energy gained is not very significant, but can add up over time.

Pros

Her damage output from her Primary attack I believe is the highest in the game, but you also have to consider her attack speed. It is slightly slower than other Heroes, which needs to be factored in to understand her overall damage-per-second. For comparison, I believe Midnight does attack slightly faster than Bionka, but Midnight also does less damage.

If Bionka is used with the Enjoys Pain Trait, she does become extremely resilient, due to how the life steal from Enjoys pain works only with Primary attacks. She does have a fairly large HP pool (it should be around twice as much as Blackpaw), so combining this with the life steal allows her to stay alive decently well.

Cons

I give her a 3/10 almost entirely due to her movement speed. Bionka is a character that I saw perform fairly averagely in lower difficulty levels, such as Apprentice, but her usefulness seemed to drop severely upon hitting Rift Lord.

The primary problem with her low speed is the fact that Rift Lord maps are generally the largest in the game. In addition, the amount of Unstable Rifts that spawn can cause a gigantic problem for Bionka; if the Unstable Rift happens to appear across the map, you will not only have to leave immediately to destroy it (which leaves the currently opened gate a potential problem), but even then, if the Unstable Rift is far enough away, she may not be able to destroy it by the time she gets to it.

Another glaring issue is her Mana pool. She only gets 130 Mana in total, but unfortunately, every one of her abilities costs a large amount (30 Mana is the lowest ability cost). This means that you can only use about 4 or 5 abilities before she completely runs out of Mana.

Upgrades

Upgrades I use:

• Love My Mace or Love Da Unchained (Level 2)
• Unchained Momma (Level 4)
• Make Dem Stop (Level 7)
• Queen of Hurt (Level 10)

Upgrades Analysis:

• Level 2:
  • Love My Armor: Although 50% damage reduction is quite nice, the entire problem with it is that it is specific to damage from Orcs only. Once you become familiar with the game, you'll realize that Orcs are probably not the biggest threat; Trolls, Ogres, Cyclops Mages, Order Mages, Fire Fiend Warlocks, are all much more threatening in terms of damage. I will admit that it is rather nice to get the damage reduction for Orc TNT Archers, but other than that, it's kind of a useless upgrade. It is especially useless if you go in with the Enjoys Pain Trait, as that should account for a significant amount of healing due to how much damage Bionka's Primary does.
  • Love My Mace: Beat Dem Back has a decently long cooldown (it's 40 seconds), so having your Secondary ability reduce its cooldown can be helpful. However, there is a gigantic downside to this; you may find yourself having Mana issues if you fully utilize this upgrade (in other words, if you constantly use Beat Dem Back and Slam it Down).
  • Love Da Unchained: If you don't find Love My Mace too attractive, this is an alternative, but once more, there's a downside to it. First, it's obviously dependent on Unchained drops, which can be a problem. If no Unchained drops occur, obviously this upgrade goes to waste. Second, the Unchained Energy from the Unchained drops still suffer from diminishing returns (which means each time you use Unchained, the energy from these drops will give you less and less). Although this upgrade lessens that, it's still not significant enough to be all that useful once you've use Unchained 3 or 4 times.
• Level 4:
  • Unchained Momma: Having a longer Unchained duration is always useful, and thus I think this is one of Bionka's better upgrades. Unchained lasts a little over 15 seconds normally, so taking this upgrade will push it to about 20 seconds or so. Of course, if you normally don't use Unchained, this may be less useful for you.
  • Bouncy Momma: I will admit, I don't fully understand this upgrade. The best I can figure, is that it gives Bionka Bounce slightly more crowd control, due to the longer time in the air. It is rather amusing to see how far minions get launched into the air with this upgrade, but truthfully, I think it's immensely useless.
  • Mean Momma: It can be a decent upgrade if you use Beat Dem Back a lot (I personally don't), but 35% Mana reduction for it...still doesn't help much with her low Mana pool. Beat Dem Back's base Mana cost is 50, so a 35% reduction takes it down to about 32, so ultimately you may end up being able to use only 1 or 2 more abilities in the long run.
• Level 7:
  • Make Dem Work: If the upgrade was "100% chance to trigger traps in the area" I would find this much more attractive. I'm not really a fan of upgrades that give a "chance" to work, because it's completely random; I can't rely it on to work when I want it to.
  • Make Dem Stop: Personally I think this is one of the better upgrades, because Bionka really needs things slowed down due to her slow movement speed. By slowing minions down, you keep them nearby to get a better window to hit them with Bionka's powerful Primary.
  • Make Dem Dead: Although I am always a fan of adding damage to abilities that normally don't have it, this one is not as good as some other Heroes. If I remember correctly, the damage component is only a fraction of Bionka's Primary damage (I think it might be 1/3, or something around there). Initially, I thought this wasn't a big deal, but then I started to realize the animation tied with Bionka Bounce; since you cannot attack and use Bionka Bounce at the same time, it basically means you're trading her really high damage of her Primary for significantly less damage, with a little bit of crowd control. Personally, I think dealing the higher damage is better, because if the minion is dead, there's no reason for crowd control.
• Level 10:
  • Queen of Speed: So here we have Bionka's only upgrade that helps her movement speed...and it sucks. Although having a movement speed increase whatsoever can be a godsend, having it tied to Unchained only, is absolutely useless. The only possible scenario I see this being useful for is for those individuals (which includes me on occasion) that do not normally use Unchained during the match. If you don't use Unchained to clear minions, having this upgrade can be extremely useful, because you can save Unchained for those moments that you need the extra speed. Otherwise, it makes zero sense. When anyone uses Unchained, it is to clear larger groups of difficult enemies, which are generally standing right next to you (since Bionka is melee). In turn, you'll rarely find yourself needing to move very far, which makes the extra movement speed absolutely useless.
  • Queen of Hurt: This is the level 10 upgrade I usually use, because again, I'll take any upgrade with Bionka that slows things down. Unfortunately, this upgrade is still pretty pathetic, because you'll notice fairly quickly that the crater left by Slam It Down is extremely small (it's about the size of a regular minion), which means that it's not going to catch many minions to slow them down.
  • Queen of Heals: One of the single most bizarre (and worthless) upgrades she has, because it's conditional, and has a cooldown. It activates below 10% HP, which is actually an extremely low threshold. Since it only lasts 5 seconds, if you are taking that much damage to be brought down to 10%, that means chances are you're going to need to escape very quickly (which, remember, you're Bionka) in order to not die before it drops the shield. Despite what the upgrade's name is, it does not heal you which means you'll revert back to your extremely low HP after the shield fades. Combine that with the fact that it's a 3 minute cooldown, there is something else to consider - If this was an upgrade at level 2, that would be one thing, but this is a level 10 upgrade. That means that even with the longest Survival maps (which take 20 minutes) you have to consider that you'll be spending about half of the map getting the experience to get to level 10 in the first place. So that means, in reality, you'll only have this upgrade for maybe 10-15 minutes, which means that at maximum, you'll see it activate 5 times in a Survival match.

Synopsis

I am convinced that Bionka is currently the worst Hero in the game. Although she probably has the best Primary attack damage, it's as if the developers thought this was the only thing in the game that matters. Considering her attack speed is not the fastest, chances are you'll notice within the first large group of Kobolds you encounter, some of them will inevitably get by you. Once they do, you better have some traps laid down before your Rift, because otherwise, there is absolutely no catching up to them with Bionka, unless you run with Consumables (and even then, you need to chase them down immediately).

In Survival, as I stated above, you'll probably won't notice any of her glaring problems on the Apprentice and War Mage difficulty. However, once you hit Master, and Unstable Rifts start spawning, you'll start to realize how much I hate playing as Bionka. Having to completely drop what you're doing to ensure that you make it to the Unstable Rift is incredibly irritating. Not only that, but when you do destroy it, you then have to trek back to the minions that are currently up. Time is of the essence for a good portion of the Master and Rift Lord maps, and 1 second you're not dealing damage to minions that are up, is 1 second that could cost you your Par Time.

In Endless, Bionka at least gets slightly more use. Since her Passive gives her Unchained with each large minion kill, this is much more useful in Endless (where there are a ton of large minions) than it is on Survival. Since there are no Par Times in Endless, this is obviously much more beneficial for Bionka, since you don't have to worry about moving to various gates to quickly clear minions.

Her upgrades also make little sense, and I would argue are some of the worst in the game as well. I think the developers struggled to balance her correctly; they wanted a Hero with an extremely high Primary, but I think they began to realize that players just spamming her Primary the entire time would make her feel extremely uninteresting, particularly in comparison to the other Heroes. In turn, they give her a very odd array of abilities...

Slam It Down is probably her most useful ability, as it does actually hit harder than her Primary. Of course, just like all of her other abilities, it has one glaring problem - its range. The range is so small one can tell it's meant to be used against single targets (although it can hit multiples). Yet another problem is its high Mana cost - it's about 35. Although this isn't as bad as Beat Dem Back, it also has a shorter cooldown (about 10 seconds) which means if you're only using Slam it Down, you're going to be out of Mana in 4 uses.

Beat Dem Back grants a decent knockback, but unfortunately its damage is lower than Bionka's Primary. Although the knockback does affect large minions, normal minions might be killed by the damage outright, which makes it kind of a strange design choice. In addition, it's given a Mana cost that consumes over 1/3 of her total Mana and then also given a 40 second cooldown. Since the damage isn't as high as her Primary...why not just use her Primary? In the end, Beat Dem Back basically turns into an extremely Mana-heavy knockback, with a long cooldown.

Bionka Bounce is Bionka's crowd-control ability, which can be upgraded to do various things. Although it's the best in terms of Mana efficiency (30 Mana, 11 second cooldown), it doesn't really do anything at all (without upgrades) besides knock minions up a moderate amount. I originally thought "Oh okay, maybe I'm supposed to knock them up and get the 'in-air' damage bonus, because Bionka's Primary hits for a ton", but as it turns out, it doesn't work. Bionka's Primary is so slow (in conjunction with the animation of Bionka Bounce), it's not possible to manage this without the "Bouncy Momma" upgrade. Even with that upgrade, you still have to time it very well to get the "in-air" damage bonus.

In the end, Bionka turns out to be a gigantic mess that doesn't make much sense. I can tell that they wanted to give her more than just a really powerful Primary, but they began to realize that by giving her abilities that are useful might make her too unbalanced. The reason why other Heroes have useful abilities is because they don't really deal that much damage; their abilities give them the extra edge when their Primary attacks are lacking. Since Bionka doesn't have this problem with her Primary, her abilities become almost totally useless, and are only meant to be peppered in so the player doesn't go completely brain-dead while spamming her Primary attack.

It's unfortunate that Bionka has a trophy associated with her. For those that do not care about trophies, I would avoid buying Bionka at all costs, unless she's the last Hero you need to buy.