Talk:Wood Elf/@comment-686000-20150331000148

The wood elf subrace is predisposed towards producing powerful ranged attackers. Many of their upgrades focus on improving the capabilities of their core ranged units (sight range, attack speed, arrow range and damage).

Wood elves have two major weakness: an economy that places emphasis on all four basic resources, and a weak  (or best case scenario, relatively passive) early game. This in mind, when choosing a wood elf hero consider picking a class that does well in both combat and non combat situations (eg. Druid, Archmage, Runemaster). The hero must be especially adept at countering early game rushes. To improve resource production, consider bringing along as many ancient wisps in your retinue as possible. Note that the design of the wood elves gives them a distinct disadvantage in no-building maps, effectively stripping them of two (Forest Rune and Sky Rune) out of the five basic skills that all hero races start with/can learn. The very bonuses that wood elf heroes get are unique in that, among all the races in WB3, all of them are designed towards enhancing the synergy between the wood elf hero and the wood elf race.

For the most part wood elves require gold and crystal for their strongest upgrades. Stone is required for tier upgrades and core units like treants, and metal is required for the production of core units like gladewardens. There are basically two ways to create a late game wood elf army - one is by juggling resources/researches/unit upgrades and (in the case of low resources maps) hoping for the best, and the other is by rushing level 4 Haven to open up the Magic Well/White Tree buildings and gaining access to druids, before working on mass producing core troops like gladewardens.

The latter is of note because it is similar to the Fey strategy that involves mass producing leprechauns and garrisoning them in towers to provide gold/crystal for Orb of Wonders research, except in this case pixies replace leprechauns, Ancient Wisps replace crystal gain from Fey towers and Magic Wells replace the gold gain from leprechauns. While wood elves employ this strategy in a rather inelegant way, their method has its own quirks, pros and cons. One distinct pro is that the White Tree allows wood elves to mass produce pixies, which can then be used to garrison wood elf towers (increased damage, range, towers do cold damage).

The gist of the strategy is simple - it significantly simplifies wood elf economy by bringing down the number of resources one actually has to worry about to just two - stone and crystal. This is where classes like Archmage (with Transmute, and Create Item for stone/cyrstal production items) and Runemaster (with Quarrying, a good nukes and extra support for towers) come in. With the right hero, and by pooling extra resources to create a stable defensive line against rushes, once enough Magic Wells are built the player can then shift his focus into the creating a powerful offensive army.