Guild Wars 2 - Wintersday - Toypocalypse (Solo)
Raw footage of me completing a Toypocalypse solo run during the 2017 Wintersday event.
The strategy is fairly simple. I started South-West since it seems to have the most buildings/trees (to be broken and turned into catapults and snowmen). I start by building a solid defense that can't be broken by a direct attack from the small mobs.
I then continue to work my way around to better cover the dolyaks. Though, only one dolyak needs to be alive. In this case, Belle turned out to be the survivor in which the catapults are able to completely cover it from small attackers.
The only weapon I use is the candy smasher since I need to constantly keep building defenses, and it's great for breakbar damage on the bosses. Though for attacking the boss, I think the rifle might've actually been the better choice.
I only build catapults and snowmen because catapults offer much-needed long range and AOE, and snowmen offer slowing. I'll favour catapults since you don't really need that many snowmen. With so many catapults, the resulting rain of projectiles more than suffices to take down small mobs. But since there is often a lot of snow dropped and building defenses is fast if you don't move around too much, they become very useful for tanking and buffering the catapults. There's really very little reason not to spam snowmen like this (apart from the population limit - you may notice random disappearances due to this [TODO: find a timestamp]).
If it were only small mobs, I could've probably just stuck to filling only the southern half with catapults/snowmen before picking up a rifle and picking off stragglers. However, the boss tends to break defenses very quickly, especially with its AOE attacks. Furthermore, if the boss reaches the dolyak, it can sometimes be very difficult to take aggro off the dolyak, often leading to the dolyak's death and losing the game. It's for that reason that I constantly build while spacing catapults/snowmen out to reduce the effects of AOE.
Date: 16/12/2017