Orcs Must Die! Unchained – FAQ/Walkthrough

Heroes

Cygnus

Overview

My Personal Rating: 7/10

• This is entirely based on usage in Survival. In Endless, Cygnus is actually probably one of the best Heroes to use.

Cygnus is a ranged Hero that uses Lightning magic damage. He has a slow-firing (but hard hitting) Primary, a Secondary that chains to multiple targets, and can summon a mini-Rift to help keep himself topped off with HP and Mana. His primary feature is his Rift Lord Passive, which increases his damage whenever he's nearby a Rift (which includes the mini-Rift he can summon).

Abilities:

Cygnus's Primary attack is unique, as it costs 6 Mana to use.

Chain Lightning (L2) - Cygnus zaps a minion, and the damage will chain to nearby minions (I believe it hits 3 total targets).

• Mana cost: 25
• Cooldown: 3 seconds

Phylactery Pylon (Triangle) - Cygnus summons a pylon that will increase the damage of traps nearby by 15%. The Pylon lasts about 15 seconds before it disappears. It can also be removed early by pressing Circle (while you are aiming at it).

• Mana cost: 50
• Cooldown: 9 seconds

Rift Shard (Square, Hold) - Cygnus summons a small Rift, which grants everything that a regular Rift grants; if you stand nearby, it will activate Cygnus's Rift Lord Passive, and will constantly restore HP and Mana.

• Mana cost: 0
• Cooldown: 30 seconds
• Cast time: 4 seconds
• Duration: 15 seconds

Passive: Rift Lord - Cygnus's damage is increased if he is ever standing near a Rift or his own Rift Shard.

Pros

Cygnus is incredibly one-dimensional in what he does well: He can do a serious amount of damage.

I would argue that he just might have the best balanced damaged in the game. It's powerful, but each individual hit is not as hard as Bionka's or Midnight's. Rather, you can almost think of him as a more simplistic version of Yi-Lin; once all his abilities are combined with each other, Cygnus becomes a Hero that can dish out high damage to multiple targets.

Chain Lightning is easily his best damage ability, and not only is the group damage automatic (as in, you don't have to worry about aiming it), Cygnus's level 10 upgrades make it downright phenomenal.

Rift Shard allows a portable buff-station, which is good for both co-op and solo purposes. As long as you're nearby your Rift Shard, or the map's Rift itself, not only do you get the damage increase from Cygnus's Passive, but since you're gaining constant HP/Mana restoration, you pretty much never have to worry about keeping yourself alive or running out of Mana.

He's pretty simple to understand what he's good at, but his performance is extremely dependent on his Rift Lord Passive, which is a problem. Please read the next section as to why this is.

Cons

Although Cygnus can perform extremely well, it doesn't always work out that way in practice.

The main issue is the maintenance of his Passive, as ideally, you want this up as much as possible. Cygnus's damage output is only mediocre at best without his Passive, but the design intentionally forces you to always be around Rifts regardless. So in other words, you can't just simply deal with the lower damage, and not being around a Rift, because if you do, Cygnus will turn into one of the worst Heroes in the game.

The design forces you to be around Rifts due to his Primary attack, which consumes a significant amount of Mana. This is unique to Cygnus, as no other Hero in the game consumes their respective resource to use their Primary.

This means that unlike every other Hero in the game, Cygnus can't simply sit back and use his Primary if he runs into Mana problems; he constantly needs a Mana source in order to perform. This is where Rift Shard comes in, and due to the nature of Survival (and constantly moving around maps), this means you will be extremely dependent on always having it around.

There are a few problems with Rift Shard as is, but this is mostly to keep it balanced:

• It takes a long time to summon (about 4 seconds, but can be reduced via upgrades).
• It doesn't last that long (about 15 seconds, but can be increased via upgrades).
• It has a long cooldown (about 300 seconds).

This means that by design, you're forced to at least have a 10 second window (although upgrades can improve this) of not having it around.

Phylactery Pylon, I would argue, is mostly useless. Its "aura" that it has to increase trap damage isn't actually very large, so it's only ideally utilized in small corridors. This is unfortunate, but not a huge issue. The bigger issue is that it only lasts about 10 seconds, but the shorter cooldown does ensure that you can continually replace it (in fact, you can have multiples up). However, I find it to be a huge hassle to continually put one down, and do realize that taking the time to put one down is taking you away from dealing damage.

Cygnus also suffers from one of the lower movement speeds in the game. In terms of rank, if Bionka is the slowest, I think Cygnus is either the third or fourth slowest. This is a bit problematic for Survival, particularly when you consider that he needs a slight amount of time to set things up before he starts to deal damage.

Upgrades

Upgrades I use:

• Experienced or Silver Streak (Level 2)
• Paternal Instinct or Mana Miser (Level 4)
• Ornery Oldtimer (Level 7)
• Get Off His Lawn or Maniacal Master (Level 10)

Upgrades Analysis:

• Level 2:
  • Experienced: This should be the upgrade you almost always want to get during Survival maps, although it depends on how well you can camp at the Rift. Since most of the time in Survival, you're reliant on Rift Shard, the initial casting time of it is pretty terrible (mostly because if you get attacked, it interrupts). Taking this upgrade almost makes the cast instantaneous, which makes it significantly better.
  • Buff, Old Man: I don't normally use the Pylon that much in comparison to Rift Shard or Chain Lightning, so it's very difficult to justify this upgrade over the other two.
  • Silver Streak: You should certainly take this upgrade instead if you plan on staying near the Rift for the majority of the match. Since the Rift can grant the exact same things as a Rift Shard, if you stick by the Rift, there is absolutely no reason to use the Rift Shard. Thus, there's no point in taking Experienced. Having the Chain Lightning cooldown is much more attractive, particularly when used in combination with his upgrades at level 10.
• Level 4:
  • Paternal Instinct: Another almost required upgrade if you're constantly using Rift Shard. Although an extra 20% isn't much (it's only a few seconds), it is actually beneficial in two different ways. It not only means that you get to keep the Passive buff longer, but it also reduces the time you have to wait between each active Rift Shard.
  • Mana Miser: You do need to get some experience with Cygnus to see how this is a useful upgrade. Generally speaking, you'll probably think "well this sucks, I keep plenty of Mana when Rift Lord is active anyway", and you'd be right. When you play as Cygnus, you'll notice that the activation range for his Passive is quite large; you don't need to stand right next to either the Rift Shard or the Rift to get the Passive damage buff. However, this is not the case in order to be granted the HP/Mana restoration, as you have to be relatively close to it, fairly close to melee range, in order to start the restoration. What you'll also find is that on some maps, particularly if you're camping the Rift, it's optimal to try to get the maximum possible distance from the Rift (while still keeping the Passive buff). The issue is that by doing so, you won't get any Mana restored, hence, your Primary is going to drain your Mana incredibly fast. This is what the upgrade is for; by taking this, this means you can be at maximum possible distance from either your Rift Shard or Rift, and not worry about your Mana. This takes some knowledge of the map to understand where it's potentially utilized.
  • Mini-Master: I would certainly never pick this over Paternal Instinct, but if you're camping the Rift, I suppose it is a viable option. Extra damage that you don't necessarily have to think about isn't exactly a poor idea, and at the very least, it gets you to actually use the Rift Shard; if you're just sitting at the Rift, obviously there's no need to summon the Rift Shard otherwise. Personally I never use it though, as I never feel I need the extra damage. If I'm camping the Rift, I'd prefer to have a little more flexibility in my range and take Mana Miser.
• Level 7:
  • Pylon Patriarch: Once more, because I don't really prefer to use the Pylon, I never really take this upgrade. From what I read of the description, I assume the Pylon will activate the traps once, upon its summon. This is potentially useless, because it's possible that they're already activated, or you place down the Pylon first (before minions get to it) so you don't have to worry about placing it mid-combat (which is what this upgrade is encouraging you to do).
  • Tough Old Geezer: You can almost look at this as the HP equivalent to "Mana Miser" at level 4. By taking this upgrade, you almost guarantee you'll be invincible if you're getting the HP restoration from the Rift/Rift Shard. However, it seems like it is a bit unnecessary, as I find the regular HP restoration from the Rift/Rift Shard is more than enough.
  • Ornery Oldtimer: This is one of the most attractive upgrades Cygnus has, because a 15% damage increase to the minions with the largest HP pools is fantastic. Normal minions will generally die within 1-3 uses of your Primary or Chain Lightning, but not necessarily large minions, bosses, or Mercenaries. 15% more damage to Trolls? Yes please.
• Level 10:
  • Enlightening Education: Okay, this takes a bit of thought (and math) to understand. I could be wrong, as I am no Math major, but let's say you're hitting for 100 per Chain Lightning hit. With this upgrade, that means the second will take 110, and the third should take 121 (add 10% of 110). So you have a total of 331 damage. Keep this in mind, and read my notes about "Get Off My Lawn".
  • Get Off My Lawn: Okay, here's some more math. Let's use the same numbers as Enlightening Education; your Chain Lightning is hitting for 100. This means, assuming Chain Lightning hits 3 total targets (without this upgrade), you're doing 300 damage total. If you add 3 more targets, all for 100 damage a piece, that means you're dealing 600 damage total. So unless I'm not understanding it fully (or I'm missing something about it), Get Off My Lawn will always outperform Enlightening Education. I suppose the only true exception is if there are only 3 targets total (as in, there are no more targets in range for Chain Lightning to go to); if that is the case, then this upgrade is wasted. However, you'll see when you take this upgrade, that the "extension" effect is actually gigantic, and it seems longer than the initial chaining of the ability. This upgrade makes Chain Lightning one of the most amazing abilities in the game.
    • One thing to note is that Get Off My Lawn is only active while you have Cygnus's Passive active. So in a way, Enlightening Education is much more consistent (as it's always active). Still though, I think Get Off My Lawn outperforms Enlightening Education regardless.
  • Manaical Master: Initially I never really chose this upgrade (and I still normally don't choose it over Get Off My Lawn) but it is in fact extremely good crowd control, particularly if you decided to take "Silver Streak" at level 2, because Chain Lightning will be roughly a 2 second cooldown, and hey look, a 2 second stun. Now this doesn't mean you can have infinite crowd control, because inevitably a new minion will walk in front of the stunned ones, and they'll just alternate getting stunned as they progress. However, I do think it's a very amusing upgrade to take, and if you feel fairly confident in your damage output, you may want to take this instead. I personally prefer Get Off My Lawn simply because of it's incredible damage increase.

Synopsis

Cygnus has the potential to be one of the best damage dealers in the game, but unfortunately it is almost entirely dependent on whether he's near a Rift or one of his Rift Shards.

In Endless, you really see Cygnus shine the most, because you can happily set up all your traps and Barricades near the Rift, and just sit there zapping minions as they move through all your traps. However, this isn't possible to do on some Endless maps (Crogon Keep and Frostbite for example) so you do have to be somewhat knowledgable about how to set things up in order to excel with Cygnus.

In Survival, he's not quite as good, but it's really how you feel about having to constantly put down your Rift Shards in order to properly deal damage. If you don't really mind doing that, I feel confident in saying that you'll enjoy playing as Cygnus. His slower movement speed does affect things on occasion, most notably on the larger maps, but it's not quite as bad as other Heroes, so it's not too problematic for him.

He's really quite simple to understand; put Rift Shard down (and the Pylon if you want to), constantly zap with Primary, and use Chain Lightning every times it's up. That's pretty much all there is to Cygnus.