This weeks Splinterlands Battle challenge is Retaliate. This is an ability that I really like the concept of but don't actually use very often. I only have access to the stonesplitter orc who has retaliate at the moment.
I like the stonesplitter orc with the 3 attack and retaliate but his low health makes it hard to use as a tank. One place that I really do like to use the stonesplitter orc is in a super sneak battle. This battle was under those rules and I used the stonesplitter orc as my rear monster. Since the mana was fairly low it was just front and back for my line up. My first position was Rexxie since it has a lot of melee damage and could take a fair amount of damage. Finally, my summoner was Mylor Crowling for the thorns ability. I expected that it would be likely the opponent would also focus on using melee to take advantage of sneak on everything.
Considering the opponents lineup I figured that retaliate would definitely come into play, however every time that the orc got hit the thorns would activate but since retaliate is only a 50% chance it never did.
Once the kobold bruiser fell and other than the one strike from the living lava, the stonesplitter orc never took any strikes to retaliate with. He still was very effective at dealing a lot of damage though.
Here is the link to the battle if you wish to see everything yourself: Replay
I ended up winning the match, but it was definitely the thorns ability that was the mvp. Once I have a monster with more health like a higher level nectar queen I could see using retaliate a lot more as on a tank it could be very useful. At the moment I am mostly only using it with certain types of matches such as super sneak, melee meyham, and up close and personal.
For the lower levels it seems like thorns is much more effective for a similar type of ability. Retaliate, on the other hand, looks like it will be able to scale much more at the higher levels of game play. So for now I will probably use thorns but once I have more choices with retaliate as well as monsters in general dealing higher damage in one hit then I will probably start to use retaliate a lot more than I currently do.
