This week battle challenge is quite interesting as it pick an ability rather than a specific cards. It looks like the perfect opportunity to start a series of article about card’s abilities. I think it will be a good complement to my series about battle setting type

How to use the opportunist

Opportunist is targeting the first enemy with the lowest health. This allow you to disturb your enemy’s line by taking down the enemy support units, like tank healer.

Ironically most of the monsters with the opportunist ability also have a low HP count; making them potential target for opportunists. The only exception to my knowledge is the cave slug which comes with a decent 4 HP.

One of my favourite splinter to deploy opportunists, is the water splinter. This splinter provide 2 monsters with the opportunist ability :

• Feasting seaweed
• Parasitic growth (from neutral monster)

As those 2 monsters have the same HP count, you can use one to protect the other. Place first the Parasitic Growth to die from a first opportunist attack and keep the 2 melee attack power of the Feasting seaweed in reserve.

How to protect yourself from opportunist

When designing your battle line you need to always account for potential enemy’s opportunist. The main way to protect form opportunist is to place some low HP expendable units before you main units. The Furious Chicken is perfect to do so.

I always pay attention to this point when using a tank healer. For example when I play the earth splinter I usually place the Furious Chicken and the Khmer Princess before my precious Wood Nymph. That is greatly improving the durability of my tank healer.

The second way to protect yourself from opportunist is to use a monster with the taut ability. However this ability is quite rare.

Best setup for opportunist

Opportunist ability will excel in “Up closed” and “fog of war” setting. Indeed in those settings opportunist monsters are one of the only option to have active monsters after the 3rd line.

In equaliser setting the opportunists are still nice to have as they will attack the enemy tank, but they lose their ability to disturb the enemy line.

Opportunist is useless in “super sneaky” setup. Indeed your opportunist will also get the sneak ability, which take the priority over their opportunist nature. In a “super sneaky” setup it is better to invest your mana in other melee monsters with better HP/mana ratio.

Also I usually avoid opportunist in game with hight mana cap as they are usually cheap units.

Battle example

Let’s this battle as example.

setting

Mana cap: 40
True Aim
Reverse speed

My line-up

This is perfect setup for me to pick up the water splinter as it has many monster with 1 of initiative (to take advantage of the reverse speed).

Torhilo the frozen
Sea Monster
Parasitic Growth
Feasting seaweed This is my favourite opportunist combo, which is made even stronger by the reserve speed setup.
halfing alchemist This unit is rely strong in reverse speed setup
Cornealus

My opponent line-up

Obviously I did not plan for the Kraken which has the taunt ability and will therefore spoil my opportunist monsters

So I did lose beside the valiant last stand of the cornealus, I lost… Whatever this was a good example of how the taunt ability can ruins you opportunist monsters.

Leave me a comment if you like me to review some specific monster ability.