Orcs Must Die! Unchained – FAQ/Walkthrough

Heroes

Midnight

Overview

My Personal Rating: 9/10 (only with the Enjoys Pain Trait)

• Without the Trait, she is about a 7/10

Midnight is a melee character that deals physical damage. She boasts the fastest movement speed in the game (she can be as fast as a Kobold), and she has some of the highest damage output in the game.

Abilities:

Vital Strike (L2) - Midnight hits an enemy for increased damage (I believe it is either 4x or 5x her Primary damage), and also places a damage-over-time effect on the target.

• Mana cost: 0
• Cooldown: 4 seconds

Dash And Slash (Triangle) - Midnight dashes in a straight line in front of her, damaging all minions that are in the way.

• Mana cost: 0
• Cooldown: 10 seconds

Prowl (Square) - Once activated, Midnight becomes invisible, completely dropping all threat on any minion (which means minions will stop attacking her). Prowl continually drains Mana, and Midnight will break Prowl if she runs out of Mana; gets attacked; hits a minion; or if Prowl is used again.

• Mana cost: 15 (when activated); drains about 5 Mana per second while Prowl is in use (difficult to tell with natural Mana regeneration).
• Cooldown: Once deactivated, 2 seconds

Passive: Sucker Punch - Midnight deals 50% more damage to stunned targets. Increased damage is always nice, but what you'll find is that the condition of the minion being stunned forces this to occur only sparingly. This Passive is meant to coincide with Prowl; when Midnight attacks a minion while Prowl is active, it will stun the minion for roughly 1 second or so. This allows you to create your own stuns to get the increased damage.

Pros

Midnight is great in terms of simplicity; she is extremely fast, and she does a great deal of damage. Due to this, a description of what she does well is incredibly easy to understand, and so this section won't be all that detailed. How she is played on the other hand, requires more explanation, so check the Synopsis at the end if you want more information on that.

Her Primary's attack speed is decently fast (I think it's 1 attack per second), so in combination with her fairly high damage, she can clear out minions incredibly quickly.

Vital Strike hits like a truck, and it even places a damage-over-time if the minion manages to survive it. This means that the ability is suited perfectly for anything with higher HP; large minions will mostly outright die from it (and if not, the damage-over-time will most likely kill it), and for boss minions/Mercenaries, you'll see that at minimum, it'll probably take around 50% of their HP in a single use. Combined with its lower cooldown, it is extremely easy to quickly take care of boss minions and Mercenaries within a couple of uses.

Prowl has a few different functions:

• First, I believe it actually gives a slight movement speed increase. This makes it incredibly useful to traverse larger maps, such as Crogon Keep and Shark Island.
• Prowl drops all threat, which is very useful when Midnight is taking a lot of damage. This becomes a little less useful once you use the Enjoys Pain Trait. If you don't have it yet, this becomes more of a defensive ability, as it becomes a very necessary tool for Midnight's survival.
• When you have the Enjoys Pain Trait, then Prowl becomes an offensive ability; since any attack used in Prowl will stun, this means Midnight gets a damage bonus as a result of her Passive.

Unlike a lot of Heroes, Midnight has fairly easy to understand upgrades, as most are direct benefits that don't really require much experimentation to see how useful they are. Not only that, but she's one of the only Heroes that has a selection of upgrades that compensate her one weakness, which is her survivability.

Cons

The first glaring problem, and the entire reason why Enjoys Pain is so necessary: She has the lowest amount of HP in the game.

Her low HP effectively makes her a "glass cannon", as she can deal an extreme amount of damage, but she cannot take a lot of damage. If you do not use her with Enjoys Pain, you will find that she will need to constantly back away from combat in order to get her HP back up (via whatever means you have).

Vital Strikes has an extremely short range (I believe it is actually shorter than her Primary range), which means it takes practice to be good with it. Due to how awkward it can be to use it at first, it can potentially leave you a little frazzled if you are relying on it in high-pressure situations (such as trying to kill the Orfum beating on your Barricade).

Prowl, as a defensive tool, is far from perfect. In fact, it's very easily broken by any ranged minion (particularly Archers) because if you use Prowl while you're being shot at, chances are you will be hit by the arrow regardless, which will force you to immediately break Prowl.

She also does not earn Combo points very well, although I'm not sure why. The only thing I can think of is that she deals so much damage, and her abilities aren't really supportive of Combos - Dash And Slash propels her too far away from her first target; Prowl does not add any Combo points (the stun effect when you break Prowl should though); and Vital Strike hits so hard that it will most likely just outright kill the minion, meaning no opportunity for more damage sources.

This ultimately just means that you will see her gaining Unchained at a lower rate in comparison to other Heroes. Truthfully though, this is a bit of a moot point, because her damage output is so high, going Unchained just turns into overkill damage.

Believe it or not, those are the only problems I see with her. One could argue that her simplicity is a downside, because some may feel her boring to play as a result. Personally though, I feel that she because does so much damage, I don't even care how basic she is to play overall.

Upgrades

Upgrades I use:

• Hardened Killer (Level 2)
• Sa-Meow-Rai Armor or Catpurse (Level 4)
• Poison Paw or Slash-N-Dash (Level 7)
• Thrill Of The Kill (Level 10)

Upgrades Analysis:

• Level 2:
  • Prolonged Prowl: I never found removing the activation Mana cost of Prowl to be helpful. It can be potentially useful if you're using Prowl a lot (offensively) in combat, but personally I found using it sparingly within your offense works just fine.
  • Hardened Killer: In my opinion, no contest at this level, this should be the upgrade you choose. Even with Enjoys Pain, you'll still see that Midnight needs some help with her survivability. If you take this upgrade with Enjoys Pain, you'll notice you almost completely negate melee damage from normal minions. If you don't have Enjoys Pain, this becomes almost a necessity in order to give Midnight any survivability; without it, it's going to be even more difficult to survive until level 10 (when Thrill of the Kill becomes available). Do realize that the HP regeneration is not much, given Midnight's low HP, so do NOT make the assumption that this is going to make-or-break your survival without Enjoys Pain; in fact, it does very little on its own, but without Enjoys Pain, I'll take whatever I can get.
  • Feeling Frisky: I can see the use of a 1.5 second respawn time (which effectively almost makes it instant if you die), but the reality is, you don't want to die, period. It would be more attractive if the minion's did not get their movement speed buff when you die, but the fact that they get that buff really reinforces the idea of staying alive. Thus, if you're successful in that, this upgrade is useless.
• Level 4:
  • Nimble As The Night: 66% more movement speed during Prowl is a LOT of extra movement speed. Problem is, it's totally overkill, as Midnight should never need this much speed, given how fast she is in the first place.
  • Sa-Meow-Rai Armor: It's difficult to determine how much damage mitigation 25 Armor actually is, but since it does help reduce how much damage is taking, it's still incredibly attractive. Do keep in mind, that I believe it only reduces physical damage, not magical due to how there is "magical armor" (which can be seen on some Trait descriptions). Still, the most prevalent damage is in fact physical, so this is nonetheless helpful.
  • Catpurse: If you feel that your survivability is just fine, you may want to take this upgrade instead, as it helps with Midnight's coin generation. It's slightly difficult to understand based off its description, but what it means is that if you're actively attacking a minion (if you're dealing damage), you'll be gaining 4 coin per second. However, since Midnight's damage output is so high, this is a fairly balanced upgrade, and not as imbalanced as it first sounds; if you are killing things fast enough (and if minions are spread out enough), you're barely going to see any extra coin generation. Still though, extra coin is in fact extra coin.
• Level 7:
  • Poison Paw: This is kind of an interesting upgrade, and it does give a bit more versatility with Prowl. The damage-over-time is not significant at all (it's not horrible, but it's not great), but the slow is potentially nice. The issue is entirely with the fact that it only works while you have Prowl activated; this means that you have to stay in Prowl, and basically walk through the minions to get it to work. Since the slow and the damage-over-time does not last very long (a few seconds), you may be tempted to just weave through minions while in Prowl, which is NOT an effective way to use Midnight. However, it is still kind of interesting to use, and if you want Midnight's Out of Sight trophy, this at least gives you some motivation to use Prowl more (even though it's not necessary, and you'll still earn it if you're regularly using Prowl to traverse maps).
  • Slash-N-Dash: A 50% damage increase to Dash and Slash is fairly attractive, even though Dash and Slash is Midnight's weakest ability (unless you manage to line up a lot of minions). The issue is Dash and Slash is probably the least utilized because of Midnight's high damage; there are not a lot of reasons to use it because you should be killing things so fast. I still take this upgrade most often though, as the damage increase is not conditional upon anything.
  • Feline Fugitive: Kind of interesting upgrade, but it's mostly pretty situational. It's particularly useful on maps that feature Frost minions (Frostbite, etc.) as it will reduce the duration of Freeze. This is particularly helpful for Midnight, because even though Freeze doesn't last that long, it can still be detrimental due to her low HP. The "increases Midnight's control effects by 25%" I believe specifically points to her stun granted by Prowl; the issue with this is that the stun is so short as is, a 25% increase to it is virtually nothing.
• Level 10:
  • Thrill Of The Kill: Personally, I think is the best upgrade for this level. Although you may feel that with Enjoys Pain, Hardened Killer, and even Sa-Meow-Rai Armor, gives Midnight plenty of survivability, it does not account for a few specific minions, which are minions that explode. What you'll notice is that Kamikaze Kobolds, Gnome Destroyers, and Firelings (and to some degree, Orc TNT Archers) are devastating to Midnight; since she is killing things so fast, it's very easy to have her attack clip one of these, and thus they explode, taking a huge chunk of her HP away. With Thrill of The Kill, this allows her to help maintain her HP, as at the very least, she'll regain a slight amount of it back when the minion is killed (and ideally, she'll be able to quickly regain her loss by killing other nearby minions).
  • Sharing The Shadow: This upgrade is obviously meant more for co-op, and thus, I've never actually used it. I can't see the practical use for it, other then potentially using it as a safety net for your allies that are in danger. I have read on the forums that it does in fact affect ally NPCs as well, which includes Summoner Traps and Blackpaw's summoned Gnolls. Again though, I'm not entirely sure how beneficial that is.
  • Kitty Overkill: All this does is give a knockback to Vital Strike, which gives it a slight amount of crowd control. However, I don't think this is really all that helpful, because again, Midnight's damage is so high, there's no real reason to crowd control enemies any more than the stun she's already granted via Prowl.

Synopsis

In my opinion, Midnight is the best Hero in the game, but this is entirely contingent upon using the Enjoys Pain Trait. Due to her extremely high Primary damage-per-second, the Enjoys Pain Trait compliments her low HP almost perfectly. You should be doing enough damage to recover any HP loss while clearing minions.

Midnight is far from invincible though, and you do have to be careful about any minions that deal a lot of burst damage. Minions that are particularly dangerous are:

• Fire Fiend Warlocks/Order Mages/Cyclops Mages - Functionally the Warlocks and Order Mages are the same, as their Fireballs perform identical to each other. Their Fireballs are incredibly devastating to Midnight, and there's a good chance that they will instantly kill you if you get hit by one. Even at a higher Account Level (Hero HP increases per Account Level), even if you manage to survive the initial hit, there's still a good chance that the damage-over-time effect that the Fireballs inflict will kill you a few seconds later. Cyclops Mages don't hit quite as hard, nor do they have the fire damage effect, but they still have a chance to instantly kill you, or deal enough damage so you get killed by a minion in melee range instead.
  
  • To deal with these, you have to either make clever use of line-of-sight (moving behind a pillar or something), or be very attentive and use Prowl as you see them. Once in Prowl, you have to try to single them out amongst the crowd in an attempt to kill them, or simply back out to find a safe spot.
• Kamikaze Kobolds/Gnome Destroyers/Firelings - In comparison to the "mage" minions, these are much more frequently seen, thus are probably the biggest threat to Midnight. Due to Midnight's low HP, making an attempt to kill any of these Barricade-destroying minions is extremely dangerous, because of how much damage they deal when they die. This turns out to be quite the problem, as obviously you generally want to kill these minions as they appear (unless you plan for them with decoy Barricades, or Decoy Traps). Some maps even throw multiples of you in quick succession, which increases the likelihood that Midnight will get killed if she proceeds to kill them.
  
  • This is why the Thrill Of The Kill upgrade at level 10 is so attractive. With it, it's much easier to survive these minions exploding. If you're not level 10 yet, you just need to be very careful and not kill these minions in extremely quick succession; whenever you see one, you have to be mindful and warn yourself "okay, after I kill this one I need to back out for a second and possibly heal". With Enjoys Pain, try to refocus your attention, if only for a few hits, to other minions so you can leech some HP back, and then proceed to kill the next.

One thing you can try to do to increase Midnight's survivability further, is try to get a feel for each minion's melee speed, as well as its range. It is possible to almost "weave" back-and-forth while moving, carefully approaching the minion (as it is not hitting you), then quickly backing back outside of its range right as it begins to swing. This is obviously easier to see with the larger minions, but even with normal sized minions, I find it effective to be constantly sweeping back and forth as I attack minions with Midnight.

• By keeping yourself at maximum melee range (the furthest point away from the minion, where your melee still connects), and constantly sweeping-back-and-forth (this increases the likelihood that minions will need to readjust), you can help reduce some damage.

One thing that you may notice, is that you get random damage increases on minions on occasion. What is actually happening, is that every minion has a certain HP threshold, at which point they will become stunned; the stun is shown by a "dizzy" animation, but unlike a normal stun, there is no "bubble" graphic above their heads. This specific "damage stun" can only happen once per minion, and lasts less than a second. If Midnight attacks the minion while this happens, she does get the extra damage from her Passive.

Ability Analysis:

Midnight does need a little bit of explanation in how her abilities function, as they are not initially obvious.

• Vital Strikes - Due to the extremely small range that this ability has, I would recommend trying to get extremely close to any minion you're trying to kill with it. Not only that, but the cross-hairs on the screen may also come into play; I do think it is required for the target to be exactly in the middle of these cross-hairs. If they are even the slightest bit off, the attack will miss. This should further reinforce the idea that this ability is to be used against larger targets with more HP.
• Prowl - Offensively, it's optimal to use Prowl in combination with Vital Strikes and Dash and Slash. With Vital Strikes, if it's used within Prowl, the damage increase (from the stun) happens immediately, and thus, you get a 50% damage boost on top of Vital Strikes already ridiculous damage. With Dash and Slash, utilizing Prowl beforehand allows you to potentially stun a long line of minions, making decent crowd control.
  • Defensively, since ranged attacks are an issue, consider simply running away a decent distance before using Prowl if you're in danger. This can help increase some distance between any ranged attacks, while potentially throwing off their targeting.

For me, Midnight carried me through a lot of the tougher 5 Star maps on Rift Lord and Master on my first account. The reason why she performs so well is because of the Par Times; since she deals so much damage, she can clearly minions quickly. This allows her to then utilize her fantastic speed; she cover sections of the map quicker, which means you can get to another area to trap it faster, or get to another gate to clear minions faster.