Difficult Stages - Stage 100

Clear Stage 100 by May 30, 2014 and you will receive Sorcerer Cony for free in your mailbox on June 5!

This post is just for Stage 100 as it has come to the forefront of players' attention during the Rangers Event Sorcerer Cony giveaway. I've collected all the stuff about this stage and put it all here for reference.

Stage 100 was really difficult and since a couple weeks ago it was tuned down in difficulty, but still pretty challenging for some. Since there has been some back and forth about it with several of my readers, I'm putting all the links I think are useful for people to take into consideration. And these are food for thought only, not an exact guide. Keep in mind, all my videos have the 45% attack bonus from treasures, and I would imagine that the other Youtube video makers do as well. 

Stage 100 is tough on the front line while also delivering tons of very annoying splash damage on your team. It's important to take into consideration the DPS, speed, and cooldown of your available rangers when seeing if they will rise to the challenge of this stage. 

At the start of the stage, as long as you stay on the left half of the pathway and don't cross the midpoint, you will only have to fight a steady release of Tyler (airplane enemy). It's plenty to deal with on its own because when a lot of them stack up, your health rangers will melt in seconds. If you're using any health rangers, make sure that they can be sent out quickly and if they can't (like Styne), you will need a faster ranger to back him up (like Moon). Both direct damage and splash damage rangers are useful in this part of the stage so long as you have someone safely in the back doing it. 

Once you finish off the airplanes and cross the midpoint, you'll start to get Mabebe (chicken enemy) and a lot more ice cream enemies. The thing that's going to determine whether you win this latter part of the stage is the size of your army when you cross the midpoint. If Stage 97, 98 and 99 have taught you anything, it's that you don't cross the midpoint with a skinny army. You need a rather large "ball of death" as you walk across the middle. 

That ice cream is gonna die in about 2 seconds!

The ball of death is when you have a healthy clump of rangers and your entire team approaches the enemy front in tight formation. No super speed rangers are dashing ahead of the group. Your fastest and slowest rangers as well as your melee and long-ranged rangers are standing together pretty closely, all meeting with the enemy together, thus able to start firing on the enemy all at once. Said another way, it's when you build up to critical mass to quickly get rid of the next big enemy in front of you without losing any rangers. Your team will only continue to grow past this point. This is the kind of team formation you need in order for the ice cream enemies to die as soon as they get into damage range. For example, if Xan and Jessica are running ahead halfway across the path to meet a Mabebe and an ice cream alone, they're as good as dead because Ellin/Sol/Alice/Sindy/Clara are way in the back, not even in firing range yet. And by the time they get there, the big meaty health rangers are all about to die, then your long-range team will die too.

Side note: Even the video that uses 2 lowbies has a ball of death. It's the group of Sindys and Claras in the back. 

The entire group moving closely, killing each of the 2nd wave of enemies off one by one and inching forward

This takes a considerable amount of planning when you are fighting Tyler to control how quickly you kill him so that you buy yourself enough time to build your team up while making its way toward the middle. This may mean holding back on Friend, Thomas, Missile and other Items. If you don't have enough total DPS to kill the ice cream as soon as they pop out, you can say goodbye to your army in the second half. I would even go so far as to say, if you are barely making it through the Tyler half of the stage, re-think your team as the second half will surely kill you, and if not, then Hurry Up will. I highly recommend keeping Ice Shot as long as possible so that you can use it to freeze the enemies at the foot of the enemy tower towards the end (or right as Hurry Up begins). 

Hurry up? Who cares, you have the ball of death. Everything melts as it meets with your team. 

The things to pay special attention to whenever you're watching a video of someone's gameplay are:

• When they upgrade minerals and when they stop
• When they use Ice Shot and Meteor, and where
• When do they deploy Friends, if any
• Which ranger in their team is top priority for deployment, which ranger(s) are deployed only when everything else is on cooldown and you have mineral to spend which will not get in the way of you deploying your top priority ranger when it is ready to deploy again. RTS players will know this phenomenon as not being "supply blocked", thus always able to get what you need most deployed ASAP. 

It's a tough one but by no means impossible. It takes planning, good timing and lots of practice. Hope all these are helpful! Good luck!

Link	Type of Review	Rangers Used
Line Rangers Stage 100 - General Brown	Just Video	Sol (70), Clara (60), Warrior Jessica (60), Fighter Moon (60), General Brown (60)
Line Rangers Stage 100 - Xan	Just Video	Xan (70), Sol (70), Alice (70), Warrior Jessica (60), Ellin (60)
Line Rangers Stage 100 No Health Rangers	Annotations	Sol (70), Ellin (60), Warrior Jessica (60), Alice (70), Fighter Moon (60)
Line Rangers Stage 100 - Xan, Honey	Just Video	Xan (70), Honey (58), Alice (62), Warrior Jessica (60), Sol (67)
Line Rangers 100 - 2 lowbies	Chinese annotation (Not my video)	Sindy (52), Warrior Jessica (40), Clara (60), Rei, Scott
Line Rangers Stage 100 free rangers	Not my video	Sindy, Ellin, Clara, Styne, Fighter Moon

Videos for other stages in the Castle in the Sky are here.