Orcs Must Die 2 Combo Guide

Orcs Must Die 2 Combo Guide by Rogotin

i. Bio – The Trap Whisperer

Who am I? The community calls me ‘The Trap Whisperer’.  From the darkest depths of OMD2 I helped drag the scores kicking and screaming into the millions with the support and trust from the community of OMD2 and the help of Robot Entertainment. Disecting the game in its entirety and breaking it down into tiny pieces and putting it back together for all to share.

I couldn’t have done any of this without my friends Fryedegg and  Radio Kenny. The community Nananea, Wyatan, Odragon, Juicebags, Cheetah 2000 and many others who are mentioned in the special thanks. With faith in my theories and crazy concepts and zany ideas the combo bible served its purpose and became the single most powerful influence on combos to date prompting Sixokay to give me the title ‘The Trap Whisperer.

Now it’s time for it to be completed with all the information I can muster.

My name is Rogotin, and I am The Trap Whisperer.

ii.  Combo System

Basic Combos
Basic combos can be done with un-upgraded traps, a simple x3 combo looks like this.

Spikes x1 -> Tar x2 -> Arrow Wall x3

For the sake of the guide – I will be explaining all trap sequences in this fashion. This will come into play later, but in this case the Spikes add x1, the Tar adds x1 and the Arrow Wall adds x1 killing the orc for an x3 combo.

iii. Affliction Guide

• Fire
• Chill
• Frozen
• Bleed
• Snare
• Stun

• Fire / Bleeding / Slow / Stunned
• Chilled / Bleeding / Slow / Stunned
• Frozen / Chill /Bleeding / Slow

These are the types you want to use together. HOWEVER with the expansion it seems that fire and chill replace eachother. Also the base trap still applies its combo point. This means if you use chill over a target that is on fire it will become chilled INSTEAD of ignited and get ONE combo point. (not two)
The afflictions can be applied in any order it does not make any difference which hits first or last.

iv.   Rules of Affliction

There are certain rules that need to be followed when applying affliction.

• Fire replaces Chill
• Chill (when target is on fire) is IGNORED (target remains on fire)
• Frozen removes Stun and Fire only

Killing and Orc May Not Apply The Affliction

This ones a little weird too – its noticable in things like ceiling pounders. If the trap that applies the affliction kills the orc outright it will not apply the affliction at all and you will not get the extra combo point. The best example of this is ceiling pounders. They hit hard enough to kill most orcs and if you apply a stun effect to them the initial hit may be too much for them to survive. This means the hit kills them, the combo is calculated and the stun effect and the combo point from stun is ignored (it vanishes). This may be the case with other traps too if you do TOO MUCH damage to an orc then hit them with a trap that will cause affliction the affliction WILL NOT ADD A COMBO POINT if they die by the initial hit of the trap.

v.  High Scoring

vi. Smash Combo Theory

Smash comboing is the introduction of a combo point that is intercepted by geometry. In the case of the swinging mace and in the lantern the geometry acts as a kind of central pivit point. The lantern is much harder to understand so we will go with the swinging mace instead.

Mace swing initiates an x1 combo point. However orc is very close to the wall.
The mace slams the orc into the wall at very close range causing a smash combo point to occur. This means that even though the swinging  mace hit and applied its damage; the combo point is written as wall damage instead of the swinging mace.
The swinging mace then continues upwards picking up the ragdoll orc and adding its own true combo point giving the swinging mace the ability to give an x2 combo instead of an x1.

Now remember the rule that traps that kill orcs can not apply their combo point for affliction.
Smash Comboing breaks this rule and is the exact reason why we can get an x3 combo out of a swinging mace by itself. Because an orc that is smash combo’d bounces off the wall and acquires the stun, this means that it is registering the orc as stunned and smashed for x2 combo before the swinging mace continues on its trajectory giving it the 3rd and final combo point killing it for x3.
Smash combos can be applied in all manour of ways, any physics trap including stage physics traps that force orcs into ragdoll mode can force a smash combo to happen. Smash combos also seem to have the unique ability to never be released from the orc and last until the orc gets up (keep it in rag doll mode). Explaining why mine carts can sometimes hit an orc and give their x1 combo for long periods of time.
The lantern is explainable also however I would prefer to do so on a one to one basis and answer any questions so just message me with questions.

Following is how you can smash combo with the wind belt thanks to Juicebags:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV29JDPAxJ8

Windbelt Smash Combo
The windbelt has the unique ability to grab orcs. However grabbing and throwing orcs does not combo; as we all know. However it is very easy to do a smash combo with the wind belt.

1.     grab orc
2.     use geometry to force the orc to release from your grip (do not let him go with mouse 2)
3.     blow orc into trap sequence

Because your grip was released by geometry you will get a smash combo point from the secondary of the wind belt. Giving you an x2 combo for blowing it into a trap sequence instead of an x1 as demonstrated in the video.

vii. Trap Specifics
(added soon)

viii. The Math

Finding out what a combo is worth:

2^(x-2)*100
x = combo value (ie x7 would be 7)

(for the record the highest completely theoretical combo I have calculated to be (im)possible is x22 which would give a whopping 104,857,600 for the single kill)

You can just keep doubling the score too. It’s essentially the same thing – this formula just does it for you.

Calculations:

I use the endless mode data because its much higher than normal data and shows better variances.
After a certain point you combo less but get more numbers. This will lower your average progressively which means for this to work properly a very high score that lasts a very long time will get much lower average combos than someone with a lower score that ended it much earlier.
Ideally you should only be using this technique on normal maps (ie not endless). If you do the numbers may not be correct. Remember I use ENDLESS on this screenshot just because the numbers are nice. Not because it’ll generally give the right data.
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/939261051767600229/6245803C95918F0DE…

Description                                         Score
-----------                                        -------
Combat Kills                  940                   47,000
Trap/Minion Kills           1,379                  137,900
Combos                 21,277,400               21,277,400
Biggest Combo                  13
Biggest Kill Streak            21
Kill Streaks               16,225
Skull Score               120,000                  120,000
Money Score                 1,075                    1,075
Total                                           21,599,600

Asside from the obvious (add all the scores together and you get the total score) this tells us much more.

Combat Kills:

With 940 combat kills this does not mean that combo’s were missed. Only that something other than the warmages traps got the final blow. This is not necesarrily a bad thing – far from it. But it is not optimal and lowering this number means more kills are being applied by the traps and not the weapon of choice.

Trap Minion Kills:

The other half of the total that will give us the number of minions that passed through your devices is the trap kills. This is funadmentally what you want to be highest; showing the number of orcs and such that died due to trap oriented devices that will hopefully be maximising your combos. A large ratio difference here is ideal such as in this case where this number is far greater than that of the combo kills.

Average Combo:

The ‘average’ combo is the number I use to know exactly what the average combo variance is. While you can get a dozen x14 combos and a huge amount of x0 combos you can score very highly but much lower than say; someone that gets a huge number of x10 combos on everything. Here you want to use this simple formula:

Combo Score / (Combat Kills + Trap Kills)

Example:

21,277,400 / (940+1,379) = 9175.2479517

Now we take our handy dandy combo list

Combo x3 200pts
Combo x4 400pts
Combo x5 800pts
Combo x6 1,600pts
Combo x7 3,200pts
Combo x8 6,400pts
Combo x9 12,800pts
Combo x10 25,600pts
Combo x11 51,200pts
Combo x12 102,400pts
Combo x13 204,800pts
Combo x14 409,600pts

And we notice that 9175 is between Combo x8 6,400pts & Combo x9 12,800pts. What this means is after the orcs that were missed opportunities, and general freak accidents his average total combo score was between x8 and x9 per orc.

The higher this number, the higher the score for the level will be. And to clarify we add the combat kills into the mix because this gives us the total number of deaths on the level and adjusts our variance slightly. It doesn’t add up perfectly to a combo because there are other modifiers like orcs dying without comboing giving combat kill points etc etc. This does however give us some idea of where it is on the scale.

This concept does not work cross level really. You can use it to see if the same setup is functioning better on one level over another easily enough though. Like using the setup on The Edge then using the identical set up somewhere else and seeing what the averages are means it works better on one map than another.

You can also use the formula to see if your average combo’s are rising or dropping with one set up over another. This is extremely useful when attempting to go for very high combo scores and dropping a lot of lower combos and finding that you fall short. You can run the maths and find out that your averages are running short.

You can also use it to find how many combo’s you are dropping. For instance; if you have an ungodly combo score and you do all the maths and you find that it averages at x5 to x6 this means that you’re actually getting a good deal of very high combo’s on a portion of the guys coming through but dropping a great deal of combo’s that are available potential to drastically increase your score. In this case Wyatan is rocking x8 – x9; however to push his score to the next level he really needs to push his score average into the next bracket of x9 – x10 average.
If another person came along and got a higher score than Wyatan but never got anything above x11 you could use this math to find out why. The reason would theoretically be because his general average would be in the range of x10 – x11, despite never reaching above x11. (assuming every single orc hit this high).

Asside from that though we can check for cheaters by simply adding up the score and checking the total.

Combat Kills           47,000
Trap/Minion Kills      137,900
Combos                 21,277,400
Kill Streaks           16,225
Skull Score            120,000
Money Score            1,075
-----------
Total                  21,599,600

With cheaters it won’t add up.