Orcs Must Die 2 Gnolls-Kill them Now!
Gnolls appear throughout War Mage and Nightmare story mode in Orcs Must Die 2. They are also a common enemy in every endless mode map. While dealing with one or two gnolls is an accomplishable chore, packs of Hunters can make a player’s life a terror. Take a look at why gnolls present a challenge for players and how to overcome those challenges.
How Gnolls are challenging:
Gnolls pose several significant challenges to the average and professional player. Their overall speed is much higher than your typical orc or troll, ranking just behind Kobold Runners in speed. They also have a high attack damage which is coupled with a poison-slow (hunters). The combination of high movement speed and on-hit slow makes escaping gnolls nearly impossible once engaged. Along with significant speed, high attack damage, and a good slow, gnolls are not influenced by barricades. Barricades provide no barriers to gnolls, as they walk over these waist-high bits of timber as though they were carpet squares. This creates a significant problem for players who focus on rerouting enemies to kill boxes utilizing barricades.
Imagine a trap setup for maximizing combos. You have planned, tested, and organized your weapons, traps, and, trinkets, and selected your map. In the middle of slaying Frost Ogres and Swamp Trolls, you are suddenly surrounded by a haze of green poison and can’t seem to move at all. You turn quickly to discover four Gnoll Hunters dropping your health bar like a toddler does to a house of cards. It doesn’t matter that your barricades were setup correctly. It doesn’t matter that your decoy barricade kept the sappers from frying your maze. Gnolls don’t follow the rules and you end up dying because of it.
Another frustrating aspect of gnolls is their taste for guardians. Archers, Dwarves, and Paladins are all targeted by gnolls. If left unprotected, groups of guardians can fall to a single hungry gnoll, costing you precious gold and the help that would have provided.
How to deal with Gnolls:
Fortunately, gnolls have one characteristic that Orcs Must Die 2 players can utilize to reduce their threat; gnolls hunt down War Mages to the point that they ignore rift portals. That’s right! Gnolls want to kill you so badly that they will not enter a rift portal even if you are running circles around it. While rift portals may not provide physical protection from gnolls, they do heal your character while in close proximity. Using a combination of rift healing and spamming attacks, gnolls, while still difficult, become manageable as long as you can afford to be away from your kill box for an extended period of time.
There are a few other strategies as well. Spore Mushrooms can convert any enemy that steps into its space, including pesky gnolls. With this trap, a problem gnoll becomes an effective ally until it dies or until you sell the trap. Placing Spore Mushrooms at key pinch-points will ensure that any gnoll becomes an ally before it becomes a threat to your health. Another alternative is dispersing Decoys around the map or within kill-boxes to distract the gnolls until they can be handled appropriately.
Gnolls may be the scariest enemies in OMD2, but, by using a few of these tips, they should no longer be a problem and may even become a powerful ally.
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Few options that I suggest:
– Dropping a manabar of primary attack on the lightning ring kills any gnoll. (not the case in endless high waves ofc)
– Charm for the sorceress is a great way to stop any gnoll. Gives you plenty of time to kill it.
– The fully charged attack of the sorceress knocks down gnolls, so they cannot move. This makes it easier to kill them. It sometimes knocks them into lava/acid/abyss as well.
– Ice is an absolutely amazing counter to gnolls. Ice amulet can be your best friend.
– Polymorph ring, great in 2 ways. Not only could you polymorph the gnoll, but the secondary turns you into a ogre, with increased health and damage. You can tank and kill them that way.
– Stand inside your killbox. It’s sometimes that obvious.
– Health potions remove the slow that is on you. ”Run” to a health potion and then you are able to run away safely.
And lastly, fire! Fire Fire Fire.. Brimstones, scorchers.. anything that puts them on fire. When they are burning, they are slowed and cannot attack.
Those are great suggestions. Thanks David! The sorceress seems to be much better equipped to handle Gnolls with the polymorph ring, charm, and charged attack. A very easy way to kill them is to simply push them into lava, acid, or off of a cliff. Using the Wind Belt to this this is particularly easy on some maps and almost too easy. Not only is standing inside the kill box an effective way, but it also looks really cool too! Thanks again for the other recommendations. Good luck hunting
JLes13
Another great way is the Wall of Flames (Secondary from Fire Ring) with Stun, it kills them instantly with no efforts no matther how many there is, easy way to get rid of them.
Shock Zappers are my preferred weapon to dealing with gnolls and kobold sappers. Zappers are high damage stun the enemy and a single fully charged zapper can take out more than one gnoll at least before endless ups there hp too much. Being mountable on walls makes a big difference as to where and how you can place them giving them basically the same flexibility as a wall arrow trap.
tar slows them, the first 2 3 lines of any killzones we make are usually tarred(with the modification slow stays a bit after leaving), or b urning, then something like the pushing walls which send them flying into abyss/lava… its a great way to kill everything thats fast even after wave 40+
Love OMD2, but jeez the GNOLLS are insane in endless mode.
If you kill a knoll manually (as opposed to booting them off cliffs) then they drop coins. To this end I try to group them together, lead them to brimstone then lob a blunderbuss grenade into the group. The initial explosion is enough to knock them off their feet and the brimstone will sap their health the longer they stay on it.
If you’re lucky you’ll get an almost instant kill this way.
If you don’t have brimstone then knock them down with the blunderbuss grenade, wait for them to get up and then knock them back down again. This can be time consuming, but its preferable to having your face bitten off.
Knoll Grenadiers can destroy your barricades so make sure you engage them away from your kill zone or you risk them punching a hole in it.