Orcs Must Die! Unchained – FAQ/Walkthrough

Heroes

Smolder

Overview

My Personal Rating: 5/10

Smolder is currently the only Fire-based Hero in the game. Every one of her abilities deals Fire-elemental damage, but not all of them apply the Fire damage-over-time effect. She is one of the fastest Heroes in the game (possibly faster than Midnight in some cases), and she's the only Hero in the game that can revive herself if she dies.

Abilities:

Dragon's Breath (L2) - Smolder deals constant Fire damage to enemies in front of her, and this ability is channeled by holding the ability button down. The area affected is directly in front of Smolder, in a "cone" shape (think of a tornado spiraling outward). This ability will add a burning effect to enemies.

• Mana cost (while active): ~10 per second
• Cooldown: None

Heart of Flame (Triangle) - Smolder places a ring of fire around her in a radius. This ability is in continual effect, and will last until the ability is canceled or Smolder runs out of Mana. If enemies are caught in the ring, a burning effect is placed on them. Smolder's movement speed is also increased by 15% while this ability is active.

• Mana cost (while active): ~5 per second
• Cooldown (after deactivation): 2 seconds

Incinerate (Square) - Smolder creates an explosion around her (about the same radius as Heart of Flame), which damages enemies. The damage of this ability is increased more than usual when Smolder levels up.

• Special note about this ability: The description of this ability might throw you off a bit; it will ONLY deal damage to enemies to burning enemies. That means if nothing is on fire, it will do absolutely nothing. This is particularly strange if you go in with Smolder without reading this. Ultimately though, I would recommend using this ability in conjunction with Heart of Flame. Since their radius is basically the same, and Heart of Flame always catches things on fire, it basically guarantees Incinerate will work if you only use it while Heart of Flame is active. Since the range of Incinerate coincides very closely with the range of Heart of Flame, it's best to think of it as "If they're in my Heart of Flame, I can use this ability".
• Mana cost: 30
• Cooldown: 9 seconds

Passive: From the Ashes - If Smolder dies, she will revive herself, and deal Fire damage to all enemies around her. Smolder revives with 40% HP and 50% Mana.

• Cooldown: It's difficult to tell the cooldown of the Passive, as the only indicator you get is the icon above your HP bar, which appears after you use it. It's a debuff, which prevents you from activating the Passive again while it's up. From what I saw, it seemed to decrease 1/4 for every 30 seconds, so it's possible that this means it has a 2 minute cooldown between activations.

Pros

Smolder is arguably the best Hero for Runners in the game, and it is because of one ability: Heart of Flame.

I would further argue that Heart of Flame itself is one of the best abilities in the game, in terms of simplicity of use. All you have to do is activate it, and the damage is automatic. That's it, and that's why it does so well against Runners; since they'll be running right past you, they'll inevitably get caught in the ring, get caught on fire, and die shortly afterwards.

Incinerate is also a very good ability, although it is balanced because of the "burning" condition. If you decide to specialize into Heart of Flame, and take the Incinerate cooldown reduction, Smolder can be a huge powerhouse during Unchained; Incinerate will have no cooldown (during Unchained), which means you can consistently use it over and over. If you jump into the middle of a huge group of enemies, you'll probably see them all get destroyed within a few uses.

Smolder is also arguably the best Hero to use against Frost minions. Since all of her damage is Fire based, she gets an extra 50% damage on all Frost minions. This is particularly good against Frost Order minions (the Northmun), because the burning effect easily bypasses their "steady" buff.

Cons

Unfortunately Smolder has a lot of issues. It's almost if she's the worst "glass cannon" imaginable; she can't really take a hit, but she's not really that great at dealing damage either.

Despite the fact that she looks like a ranged Hero on the surface, as it turns out, she really isn't. With the exception of her Primary, all of her attacks force her into some strange range just outside of melee range. For reference, if you are relatively in "mid-range" with Max or Gabriella, Smolder generally has to be closer than those two to efficiently deal damage.

This forces her to take more damage as well, given that closer distance. Unfortunately, Smolder is still built like a ranged Hero; she has lower HP, she doesn't really get any crowd control, and she doesn't get anything to help her survivability.

Dragon's Breath, although seems like a far-reaching attack, actually isn't. Although the animation extends out fairly far in front of you, the actual hit-zone of it is almost in the middle of it (so cut the animation in half, and that's relatively its range).

Heart of Flame's and Incinerate's range seems a little more obvious (since they radiate out from Smoder). Her Primary, is also a little deceiving in her range; although obviously it travels a long distance, and her cross-hairs don't really move much, it is the fact that the projectile speed, and her attack speed, that forces her closer to minions. The projectile speed is slow enough that it's really easy to be inaccurate over long distances; the minion may simply move somewhere else by the time the projectile reaches the area. Combine this with her slower attack speed, this means you have to make every shot count, thus, you'll be motivated to move closer to ensure her Primary is connecting.

The biggest issue, in my opinion, is her Mana usage. She truly burns through it quicker than any other Hero, and that is because of all of her channeled abilities. You may be inclined to use Heart of Flame as much as possible (due to how nice it is), but if you do, you'll have to be constantly turning it on and off (until level 10, since an upgrade removes the cost).

Since she has issues managing her Mana, this obviously affects her damage output. Given lower damage output, and not much in survivability, this turns Smolder into a Hero that...just isn't very good overall.

You may wonder - well, Bionka has Mana issues too, so how about Smolder's Primary to rely on? Again, unfortunately, Smolder also has questionably the worst Primary in the game; the attack speed is only slightly faster than Cygnus's (in other words, how many she can fire in a given timeframe); the projectile speed is about the same as Cygnus's (how fast the projectile moves to its target); but unfortunately, her Primary hits no where near as hard as Cygnus's, so its overall performance is below average.

Upgrades

Upgrades I use:

• Flame Thrower (Level 2)
• Endothermia (Level 4)
• Belligerent or Passionate (Level 7)
• Spontaneous Combustion (Level 10)

Upgrades Analysis:

• Level 2:
  • Hot Foot: Heart of Flame already grants a good movement speed increase, and Smolder is already naturally kind of fast. Having even more movement speed, in my opinion, is completely unnecessary.
  • Flame Thrower: This is the upgrade I always take, because I feel you really need to be reliant on her Primary until you can remove the Mana cost of Heart of Flame. It does grant two separate benefits as well, damage and projectile speed, which makes it even further attractive.
  • Fuel Reserves: I've only chosen this upgrade once or twice, and I don't like it because it's just a simple increase to her Mana total. It doesn't change the fact that Smolder is continually guzzling Mana, all it does is give you a slight extended duration of her channeled abilities, which doesn't equate to much in my opinion. If this was something such as...Mana regeneration of some sort, this would be much more attractive to me.
• Level 4:
  • Phoenix Heart: It's really not the fact that her Passive isn't good; you really can't develop the "oh you shouldn't be dying anyway" argument with Smolder's Passive, because it is irrelevant due to how it functions. If you die, you stay in place, explode, and revive. So to a degree, there is some incentive to activate the Passive. However, her Passive is more of a simple added bonus more than anything else, because you do have to remember that for every second you're not actively attacking, you're hurting your damage output. Hence, there's not much reason to specialize into it.
  • Endothermia: Smolder's main issue is Mana consumption, and this upgrade certainly helps with that. The only thing I'll say about it is you kind of have to "pick a playstyle" with her upgrades; if you never use Dragon's Breath, obviously you may want to pick Red-Headed instead.
  • Red-Headed: It's not a bad choice if you don't like (or never use) Dragon's Breath. Unfortunately a 12% increase to her HP isn't actually much; for reference, at Account Level 100, Smolder has 690 HP. So increasing it by 12% is going to amount to around 775 HP or so.
• Level 7:
  • Resilient: Similar to Phoenix Heart, there's just not much reason to specialize further into Smolder's Passive. Do pay attention to the wording of this upgrade as well, as it indicates that the upgrade increases the HP/Mana returned by 100%, not to 100%. This means you'll come back with 100% Mana, but not 100% HP (it'll be 80% HP).
  • Belligerent: Here you have to decide how you want to play as Smolder; you can either rely on Dragon's Breath, or rely more on Incinerate. This upgrade does directly increase the damage of Dragon's Breath, which is always great, but it really depends on how much you like to use Dragon's Breath.
  • Passionate: I generally choose this upgrade because I like to use Incinerate more. If you like to use Incinerate, this still turns into a damage-per-second increase, because you're able to use Incinerate more often. Without the upgrade, it takes 90 seconds to use Incinerate 10 times, whereas with the upgrade, you can get 10 Incinerate uses in 60 seconds, which isn't bad. This particularly useful when going Unchained, because you won't even notice the cooldown anymore (due to Unchained's natural cooldown reduction), and thus you'll be able to constantly use it (assuming you have Heart of Flame active).
• Level 10:
  • Spontaneous Combustion: Personally I think there is no contest here, this is Smolder's best upgrade. The entire issue with Heart of Flame is its constant Mana drain, and this completely removes it. This means you can constantly have that damage shield up, while always moving at that increased movement speed. This also means you don't have to juggle using Incinerate anymore, as Heart of Flame should always be active (there's no reason to turn it off with the upgrade). The removal of the Mana cost also means indirectly that it increases your damage output, because now you'll have more Mana reserves to deal damage.
  • Wildfire: I think this upgrade is completely useless in comparison to Spontaneous Combustion. Crowd control effects (for the player) mostly consist of Freeze and the occasional movement Slow. Also consider, if you don't take Spontaneous Combustion, this means that Heart of Flame will be turned off on occasion. If you get hit with a crowd control while it's off? Well, then the upgrade sees no use.
  • Smoldering: It's not too terrible of an upgrade, but I still think Spontaneous Combustion outclasses it. Having Incinerate slow things down (especially if you took the lower cooldown upgrade of "Passionate") can be extremely helpful. The issue though is you're still seeing that constant Mana drain of Heart of Flame, which means that you can use Incinerate more if you take Spontaneous Combustion, which means an increase in damage. If you're killing things fast enough, there's no real point in slowing them down. Although, if your Mana management is decent (if you have Mana regeneration via enough means, such as Traits and Parts), you may want to consider this upgrade.

Synopsis

From what I understand of it (and have read on the official forums), people like to play Smolder. I can understand this from a certain angle, because she is kind of fun in her own way - With Heart of Flame she's super fast and zips around the map; she can light a ton of things on fire at the same time; her Dragon's Breath is like a flamethrower of sorts; Fire damage is fairly useful in some contexts; and, lack of clothing aside, she seems much more interesting in terms of animation (her hair, how her gloves on fire, and how she sways her hips, for example).

In terms of functionality though, Smolder doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I think the issue is that they didn't really know how to balance Smolder (much like Bionka). It was almost as if they said "well, we gave her a self-revive, so it's okay if we give her low HP"....yeah no, it's not. Then, they may have said "well, we're giving her an ability that kind of works like a flamethrower...so let's work around that", and so they give her the rest of her abilities that force her more into melee range. The combination of these two aspects is really where Smolder starts to see problems.

It always seems, when I play Smolder, she takes significantly more damage than the average Hero. In fact, I would say that she's nearly as fragile as Midnight, but unfortunately Smolder sees almost zero use from the Practices Witchcraft Trait (since her Primary sucks). Coupled with her lack of overall survivability (only 1 upgrade that kind of does something), this leaves her very vulnerable considering you're going to be relatively close to melee range the majority of the time you play as her.

I also think they struggled to balance her damage. Fire damage is basically the only damage-over-time effect in the game (there are poisons and bleeds, but only a few things can do those), which makes it really nice to be able to have a consistent amount of damage without ever having to think about it. For this reason, it feels like they hit Smolder with restrictions in two ways: The fact that each ability doesn't do that much damage (Incinerate is the best in terms of damage though), but also having her abilities have a high Mana cost to them. Again, similar to the issue with her HP, it's the synergy of these two restrictions that make me think Smolder is doing subpar damage in comparison to other Heroes.

The damage-over-time effect is also something to consider more in-depth, because it really doesn't make any sense at all when you're playing as Smolder. Do recall that damage-over-time effects do not stack from the same source, which includes Heroes. This obviously includes Smolder, because everything but Incinerate places the burn effect on the target. In all practicality, you mostly just need to ignore this fact, and play the way you want to regardless (because it would be extremely difficult to micro-manage your burn effects). However, it does seem very strange that they would design Smolder like this, given that restriction.

The reason why I give her a 5/10 is because of this design that doesn't really coincide very well; Smolder's a little mixed up in terms of performance, and they didn't really do a very good job (in my opinion) of balancing her. I wouldn't push her into the "awful" category because she can still do well in certain scenarios, such as dealing with Frost minions, or dealing with maps with a lot of Runners. If you can get comfortable with how she plays, she does perform fairly close to the rest of the Heroes. The issue is that she can't do it nearly as consistently, and that's why I give her a lower rating than most others.