Wood Elf Units

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Wood Elf Units

Racial Tag
The Wood Elves always have a trick up their sleeve and their "Wood Elf" classification is a prime example of this - offering hidden traits to their units that wouldn't normally be known:
 * Resistant to Fear. (+25%)
 * Resistant to Terror. (+25%)
 * Vulnerable to Poison. (-25%)
 * Vulnerable to Disease. (-25%)
 * +2 combat during fine weather.

Wisp - Elven Builder
Wisps are very weak builders that are used for the Elven races. Four Wisps can merge together and form an Ancient Wisp at cost of 100 crystal, but only after researching the skill with the same name at tier 2. Unlike other builder units, Wisps cannot be put into mines.

Forestguard - Basic Wood Elf Infantry
Forestguards are weak Wood Elf tier 1 infantry. They have no particularly outstanding traits other than their ok combat, resistance to slashing damage and high viewing distance.

Gladewarden - Basic Wood Elf Missile Unit
Gladewardens are very dangerous archer units for the Wood Elves. They have a decent amount of damage for an archer unit and can be upgraded with the Bowyer, Fletcher and can be upgraded with fire arrows. Their hits are extremely low though, so cannot survive in any dangerous position. Once upgraded with Bowmaster and Flaming Arrows, they can out range and do decent damage to most towers.

Ancient Wisp - Advanced Elven Builder / Missile Unit
Made by combining 4 baby wisps and spending 100 crystals (takes a grand total of 200 crystals). It generates crystal at a rate of a level 1 mine and can be a lifesaver for the crystal hungry elves. They can construct buildings and are a decent missile unit with long range electrical attacks. They have more hit points than most of your units, but are vulnerable to physical attacks, so you'll either want to keep them protected behind a melee wall or accompany them with so many other ranged units that nothing will survive long enough to do much damage to any particular wisp. They can also be recruited for your Hero's retinue, allowing you to bring them over to other crystal hungry races, such as Daemons and Plaguelords.

Ancient wisps are significantly more powerful the stronger your hero's merchant skill (from Charisma, or from the merchant class), because decrease in cost of purchases is equivalent to an increase in the rate at which wisps produce crystal. Without any mercantile upgrades, wisps have a geometric growth rate of doubling your number of wisps every 7 minutes (not counting the costs of the buildings used to produce the 4 baby wisps and to increase your supply cap). With mercantile upgrades, you can instead reach a geometric growth rate of quadrupling your number of wisps over the same time period. If your income is quadrupling every 7 minutes, while the other player's isn't, then time will definitely be on your side. In addition to the geometric growth from wisps, wood elves also have available a synergetic geometric growth of gold-producing and supply-cap-increasing magic wells.

Woodrider - Basic Wood Elf Cavalry
Woodriders are weak cavalry units which are very fragile when pitted against ranged units. In melee, they are somewhat more proficient due to a high combat score.

Elven Hunter - Advanced Wood Elf Cavalry / Missile unit
The Elven Hunter only receives certain bonuses from arrow based upgrades. They prevail with hit and run tactics due to their high speed, but cannot survive in more vicious combat situations.

Phoenix - Basic Flier
The Phoenix serves a very important role for the Wood Elves by converting mines. Typically, the Wood Elves suffer from an utterly terrible economy that's made worse by not having access to any mine filling units. As such, they need to rely on the raw income of the mines themselves - forcing them to claim as many as they can. Being able to convert buildings is one useful trait, but being able to fly makes it that much more useful. By being a flier, the Phoenix can ignore terrain and reach those un-guarded mines much quicker than a land based converter would, giving the Wood Elves a bit more much-needed time to get themselves together.

Combat wise, the Phoenix is down right terrible. Even a full flock of them wont achieve much and will struggle to take down a mine-defending tower in the middle of the map. Therefore it's pointless to build more than a few at once. Late game you can pair them with Griffons or / and Sprites to clear the area around a mine, allowing the Phoenix to safely capture the building without the threat of a random enemy tower forcing them to turn back.

Druid - Wood Elf Spellcaster
Druids are weak, like most other Wood Elves. They are best used for their Call Lightning spell, able to destroy many weak units simultaneously.

Treant - Advanced Wood Elf Infantry
Treants are the bulk of the Wood Elf army, providing invaluable bait for other units such as Gladewardens. These work greatly to the advantage of the Wood Elves due to their ability to slow down enemies within range of the Treant's spell. They can be upgraded to improve their lackluster damage (considering their low speed). They can also build structures and in fact,they have the best building skills in the game making them a worthy retinue unit and frontline builder.

Sprite - Fey Flying Missile Unit
Sprites were once amazing prior to 1.03, where they could take advantage of the Wood Elven archery upgrades. Although they would remain fragile, those archer upgrades with their ability to fly is what made them questionably unbalanced. Since the 1.03.1 patch, they lost ALL  archery upgrades, which has left them being an under-powered tier 4 unit that doesn't deserve the crystal cost for its production.

Pixie - Fey Fast Missile Unit
Pixies are fast, weak missile units. The cold damage type is a very useful tool when creating a horde of these, because just one critical hit will mean the enemy is now frozen. Depending upon the size of the horde, they can very effectively freeze dangerous enemies, allowing the rest of the Wood Elven army (usually Gladewardens) to proceed to slay the hindered enemy.

Note: In version 1.23.24, Pixies were removed from the Wood Elven army.

Ancient Treant - Elite Wood Elf Infantry
Ancient Treants are accessible later, providing increased power and toughness over the normal Treant. As a downside, it cannot construct buildings anymore. Its ability to split into two Treants when killed far outweighs this issue however. One must note that the Ancient Treant's production time is immense, so there won't be too many of these seen on the battlefield.

Griffon - Advanced Flier
The Wood Elves lack tough units, besides the Treants, but even though Griffons aren't all that tough, they are certainly more durable than the typically Wood Elven units. Griffons can be used to aid your Phoenixes when out looking for mines to convert, or be used as a second line of defense (first would be the Treants) to thwart an enemies attempt to trample your Gladewardens. Their stone cost is somewhat high and conflicts with Treants, which tend to be more useful. As such, if you're low on stone and have to make a choice between the two - then Treants would take priority, unless your enemy will be dishing out a lot of fire typed attacks or you need support for your Phoenixes.

Dryad - Wood Elf General
Dryads are quick units that can convert buildings faster than other generals. They are quite fragile for a general, and its cost is more unmanageable than it might seem, but its build time is low (for a general).

Storm Dragon - Elite Flier
Storm Dragons are more useful to the Wood Elves than other races, due to the omni-presences of low hit point units in their army. This would normally mean that spellcasters with any offensive spells would easily slaughter waves of Wood Elves with minimal effort. Not only can the Storm Dragon throw a spanner into the works as it would normally do, but as Wood Elves have access to the Healing researches, the Storm Dragon can quickly recover from any attack it may have suffered in the attempt to ward off enemy spellcasters. This also makes the Storm Dragon more effective with the Wood Elves, too. But of course, by being a Dragon, it is naturally a powerful creature - allowing it to still be a menace to the enemy even when its main role is no longer needed.

Celestial Dragon - Elite Flier
Although the Wood Elves essentially have access to free crystal via Ancient Wisps, the Celestial Dragon's ability to gain a large sum of crystal immediately upon killing a foe makes it far more valuable. With this ability, plus its magic attack that also does double damage to evil units, it's no wonder the Celestial Dragon is one of the best Dragons in the game, and one that the Wood Elves desperately needed. Celestial Dragons should be used to harvest crystal to fuel Ancient Wisp productions and, when combined with Magic Wells, can even be used to fuel the production of further Dragons. It may be a costly unit to obtain, but the Celestial Dragon's game changing power and traits simply make it a unit that you should aim to get.

Ironbark - Wood Elf Titan
Ironbark would be contender for one of the toughest Titans around, possessing the highest base armor of all Titans along with a special resistance to all physical damage. However, it's his 800 HP, which isn't the best that has been seen on a Titan, and a vulnerability to fire, that can be exploited by his enemies, are all what hold him back from being a true bulky terror. What makes matters worse is that a lot of the units in the Wood Elf army also possess a weakness to fire, which would have already encouraged their enemy to mass fire dealing units before Ironbark even enters the fray. With the poor Wood Elf economy, it is also pretty difficult to actually start the production for Ironbark in the first place - not to mention that in doing so you loose the production capabilities of one of your Tree of Lives for ten minutes, that could potentially force you to build yet another one of those very large buildings.

Regardless, with Ironbark nigh invulnerable on the physical side and exploding in to Rings of Fire upon death, makes him ideal to spearhead into the average enemy base - shrugging off typical tower arrow attacks and common infantry, as well causing utter destruction to the base if the enemy do eventually fell him there.