Dungeon Defenders Farming NM HC Endless Spires Naked Guide

Dungeon Defenders Farming NM HC Endless Spires Naked Guide by Rorschach

Edit: After writing this guide I wanted to make a proof of concept. Since i’m atm too lazy to rewrite the whole goddamn thing (and it still contains useful information for ppl wanting to get into NM) i’ll just edit its title and write this nice red edit at the beginning

I did wave 1 naked with a Squire with 120 tower dmg & health, 50 hero movespeed and the rest in hero castspeed. If you use a Countess it might even be easier to her moving faster. The layout however did not change and the instructions are still the same so just disregard the parts about needed gear.

Hi there, I wanted to share my build for farming entry level myths on Endless Spires NM HC.
Im new to the forums so in case anyone else has done something similar already this isnt meant to be a ripoff or anything.

You need:
Squire/Countess level 74 with tower spec (120 towerhealth /120 towerattack), some halfway decent godlys (preferably a matching armor set)
Opptional: Apprentice Guardian / Huntress Guardian, DPS Hero

And thats it

Warning: Walls of Text incoming, this can be skipped though. If you want to jump in head first just scroll down to the build (at your own risk ofc )

Definitions & Explanations:

Farming: Dont be misstaken, farming NM is diffrent from farming insane. Without mythical level gear you will not be able to complete most NM maps no matter how good your build is. Expect to run the first 2 waves several times until you can beat the ogre on wave 3, depending on your gear you might even have to do several runs until you first reach wave 3. If your failing its not you its the difficulty That being said the goal of farming this map is the chests and only the chests. The drops on the first 2 waves are rubbish but each wave gives you 4 chests to loot which can contain some quite decent mythical stuff

Why Endless Spires: Contrary to what logic might lead you to believe Deeper Well is NOT the place to start in NM. The chestdrops are ****, it has ogres from wave one onwards and you wont be able to dps them with godly weapons due to the NM damage reduction ( I dont have accurate numbers but a wave 1 DW NM HC ogres hps (730kish) would rougly translate to 7 million hp in insane due to the dmg reduction alone; nevermind that you got reduced resistances and ogre fireballs oneshot you ).
Thats why we start on Endless Spires. No ogres till the 3rd wave and the chestdrops are muuuuuuuuuch better.

Why HC: Lets face it, if your gear is anything similar to mine (Insane Alchlab Survival wave 15-17 godly stuff) if anything as much as looks into your direction on NM your toast anyways. So if you got to dodge everything to survive you might as well do HC and get better loot.

Why Squire/Countess: One word: Bouncers. Imho currently (7.16c) THE best solo anti-spider weapon there is. Spiders can attack from everywhere but so can the bouncer. The cheapest self contained spider defense an apprentice can build is 2 Magic-Missile towers facing each other / covering a lane while being placed to cover each other but that costs 6 DU. And with godly gear MM just plain suck at fighting spiders, they will have to shoot like 15 times to kill one which gives the spider enough time to web one and further slow down the killing speed and subsequently destroy the tower due to the bad hp scaling apprentice turrets have. Bouncers on the other hand have decent hp and should be able to 2-shot spiders with around 200 tower attack. If they get webed they recover rather well too.

Why Guardians / What Guardians: Well why is easy, they boost your towers stupid What guardian on the other hand is a diffrent question. Apprentice guards generally seems to work best, making sure that your bouncers can one-shot almost everything from the beginning. Huntress guards work fine too, although they carry the risk that a spider will get a web off between attacks (if pushed out of range for instance). Monk Guardians…. ohh poor Monk Guardians…. does anyone actually use these at all ? Just dont, range buff is useless on squire towers (except for harpoons ofc). Squire guards…. hm well at least not for solo play. Their place is multiplayer survival where they can buff blockades hitpoints so they can actually tank the 2 dozen ogres beating on them. On solo its generaly favorable to buff dmg/attackspeed over hitpoints.

Why level 74: Well i havent tried it but theoretically this can be done with heros from level 60 onwards (from there you can carry godly items, these are needed though). But since youre reading this i assume you want to start farming mythicals to get better equipment than the godlys you have and to be able to wear myths you need to be 74.

Which class: the squire is very very slow so you might find it easier to start doing this with a countess. Except for walkspeed and skills (irrelevant to us, we are builders, not dps) they are both the same. If you only got a squire and dont want to level a countess investing some points into walkspeed might help if you dont get enough from your equipment. You only need to max tower health & dmg on your hero the rest is at your disposal, tower speed of course helps killing things quicker but shouldnt realy be necessary so feel free to invest in walkspeed or even hero casting rate to help building faster.

Allright thats all i can think of that you might be interested in so lets get this started.

First wave build: http://html5.cubicleninja.com/cubicl…m?layout=19294

Start by collecting the chests in the following order : next to your spawn, north, bridge to the left, jump UPON the railing, position yourself at the back of it, then move forward a bit and jump from the ledge down (you might want to practice that without a timer on easy-hard mode; if you cant get it to work [afaik squire only, the movespeed factors into this, if you dont get enough momentum from running on the rail you might not make the jump] you can skip the cheast on the left bridge, its not realy needed for the first wave build [but loot it later, strangly it CAN drop weapons and armor once the first wave is over thus giving you and additional chest to loot]), south and then east. Now start building the bouncers on the east stairs, then west stairs, then north, then the internal ones. Your now ready to get your *** handed to yourself

Second wave build: http://html5.cubicleninja.com/cubicl…m?layout=19278

YAAY you made it, good luck on the looting hopefully you got your first myth(s). Use the mana to build the other internal bouncers and upgrade the perimeter ones. The internal bouncers are all placed directly beneath spider spawns so they directly get damaged and have something to attack. If the west and east stairs are holding you might want to start building harpoons facing north to have a chance vs. the ogre coming from there in 3rd wave.

Note: the drops from the mobs are usualy not worth looking at but especialy wyverns sometimes do drop myths so check at the bottom of the towers with the antiair bouncers after this round.

Third wave build: http://html5.cubicleninja.com/cubicl…m?layout=19280

Once again start by looting chests and then build harpoons till theres no more DU. This layout focuses solely on finishing the 3rd wave ogre and is not viable for continuation after that. Also note the changed bouncers in the north: i changed them so the ogre doesnt smack them both at once but one after each other so your harpoons have more time to finish him off. (if you got a Monk you might want to throw in a slow aura north with this setup)

Fourth wave build: http://html5.cubicleninja.com/cubicl…m?layout=19283

Alright this is where builds start to get diffrent. Don’t expect to do this unless you havent got at least a 100 upgrade weapon and a matching set of mythical armor with decent stats in both tower health and dmg and some upgrades invested (i think i had ~450 tower health & dmg + apprentice guard when i first finished this wave). In order to deal with ogres (one from top, one from south east) you need to split dmg up so if you havent got wave 3 on farm status dont even try. There is now no more bouncers west and east but walls the reaons being they simply have better hps and dont die as fast vs ogres. If your heading for this setup right from the beginning place the 2 bowlers plus internal bouncers and the upper bouncer top before first wave, then proceed to this build. Its IMPORTANT that you place the west bowler not in the middle but to the left, the reason behind this is as follows: zippys will walk around the corner and stand left lighting their fuses and then run into your barricades. If you place the bowler mid it wont be able to hit those (due to the bouncing path of the balls, they somehow seem to get “straigthened” out if the bounce on the stairs) resulting in dmg to your blocks. No, dont dare to ask… it took my 20 ****ing runs to figure out the solution to this problem was moving the bloody bowler 2 metres to the left^^ … so much for human intelligence

Fifth wave: same build as wave 4

Only this time 2 ogres from top but dont worry one spawns early, the other late, but you will have to repair/upgrade the bouncers between them, id suggest 3chevrons at the start of the wave for the top one and 2 for the bottom one, then upgrade the top one to one star after the first ogre. If your having troubles keeping the bouncers up try replacing them with barricades after the harpoons facing north are up (preferably before wave 3 starts). If you need to repair during combat, especialy with ogre(s) at the blocks walk to the left of the stairs and repair from there, you shouldnt be hit by slpash dmg that way.

Congratulations, you’ve just finished your first NM HC campaign map

A word of warning towards survival though: dont start it immediatly after finishing once, it has some pretty ridiculous fake difficulty in that they simply multiply ogre count by 4 on waves 3+4 and by 5 on wave 5. Oh yeah did i mention they ALL SPAWN AT THE SAME BLOODY TIME ? This setup still works surprisingly well though for the top choke point: due to most of the dmg coming from harpoons (which pierce targets) they actually all get hit at the same time. The problem is the east choke where the harpoons are shooting in from the side only hiting one or 2 ogres at the same time, moving them to the sides of the bowler doesnt work either. If you place the bowler in the middle you cant place the harps beside it but need to place them on the railings of the stairs leading up to the crystals. But then they shoot an X only hitting one or two ogres again. You still might want to give it a try though if you got a 40 boost app guardian, with that your bowler should hit for 70k / ball dealing with the ogres himself.

Ok wow this took some time, i hope you appreciate the effort and it helps you getting into nightmare. English isnt my native language so pls excuse all spelling & grammar mistakes, also feel free to give feedback

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3 Responses

  1. Anonymous says:

    really good guide i came to wave 3 whit my lvl 72 squire;D

  2. Anonymous says:

    Really awesome guide mate, going to try this exact thing when I buy the DLC! Been looking for a proper squire tactic to play NM. thanks alot!

  3. Anonymous says:

    good guide :)

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