Walkthrough: Born of Fire TD

Welcome to the Born of Fire TD game guide.

Born of Fire is a rather different kind of tower-defense, bringing in a couple of new game-play elements.

First, there are the role-playing elements: your heroes are not just “upgrading”, but they are gaining experience points, unlocking new skills (over 10 for each class) and improving their stats. Their experience is carried over from one mission to another.

You don’t build anything, all the heroes are available at the mission start.

Unlike the common TD, where you build towers and forget them, in BoFTD you may move some heroes around the map, using some of their skills.

The maps are not just one-screen, but scrollable and sometimes very large. A minimap is also available to help you navigate.

Each character also has hit-points (HP) and mana, just like in the mainstream RPGs. Monsters that reach the exit will damage and ultimately kill the heroes, but there are skills that will help the heroes recover their lost health.

Then, each hero may have up to 2 skills active at any time: you can use 2 attack skills, or just 2 support skills, or any other combination necessary given the incoming monster waves. In the normal campaign, there’s little need to micromanage the skills, but in the hard campaign and “Eternal Damnation” mode, you’ll micro-manage quite often.

The Options

You may reset the game progress in Main Menu – Options – Reset Game Data. Take care that this operation cannot be undone (this is why it’s so well hidden 🙂 ) and will reset the characters to level 1 and mission progress to the initial state.

You may also turn off the game intro, if it’s getting too annoying, in the Main Menu – Options – Intro.

Game Modes

Campaign, Normal: monsters come in a predefined order. Kill them all to win. Monster levels are in the 1-25 range.

Campaign, Hard: same as the Normal, but the monster levels are in the 25-50 range, so it’s recommended that your heroes are at least level 25. Take care that this game mode is really brutal and unforgiving, but I guess you would have expected that after playing the hard mode of Orbital Decay 🙂

Army of Darkness: you get to fight skeletons only. Seems simple enough, until 80 of them crawl the path. And if only one of them reaches the end portal, the game is over.

Eternal Damnation: monsters warp in with increasing levels, from 1 to 50. Kill’em all to win.

Hero Classes

The Demon Incarnate

Click for the stats.

Is an offensive character (dealing physical, fire and magic damage type) and has skills that allow him to focus on one enemy (like “Strike with Hate”, “Rage of the Banished” or “Hail to Fire”) or to control crowds (“Barrage of Blades”, “Faces of Fear” or “Scourge of Malice”). He may also be relocated on the battlefield using the “Nightwings” skill, if your a fan of “juggling” 🙂

You only get one character of this class, Sorgal the GodSlayer.

The King

Click for the stats.

Is a great support character, with skills that will protect the allies from the monster damage (“Heart of Steel”), heal them (“Warriors Prayer”), replenish their mana (“Spiritual Healing”) or boost their physical attacks (“Battle Hymn”). But he’s not shy of dealing damage (“Hand of Doom” – which works best with the Demon Incarnate’s “Tremble”) or controlling crowds of monsters (“Archers Ready!” or “Metal Apocalypse”).

The Kitsune

Click for the stats.

Wielders of fire and cold magic, the kitsunes have a lot of destructive spells to fight the monsters. They are also able to relocate on the battlefield, using the “Gate” spell.

The Shield-maiden

Click for the stats.

Is a great offensive character, dealing physical and electric damage. The bow attacks are very powerful, but their downside is that most are not very precise. At the 20th level, it gets the “Arrow of Time”, an ability that will teleport an enemy back to the beginning of the path. Also has passive skills that will increase the damage and the critical chance.

Gameplay Help

During the game, you may use the following key shortcuts:

• ‘P’ pauses;
• ‘J’ toggles the monster HP bars;
• ‘T’ opens or closes the skill tree; you need to have a hero selected;
• ‘R’ toggles the skill ranges; you need to have a hero selected;
• ALT key + left-click on a skill icon in the skill tree to decrease one level (updated as of v1.0.7);
• ‘Q’ cycles through quality settings (low, medium, high);
• ‘M’ toggles the sounds on/off;
• ‘N’ toggles the music on/off;
• ‘Esc’ to abort placing a hero, to cancel the selection or to abort an interactive skill;
• WASD or arrow keys to scroll the map.

Here’s a video demonstrating the common gameplay elements:

The Rules

There are several damage types (or elements): physical, fire, cold, electric and magic. Your skills may cause critical hits (doubles the physical damage), bleeding (physical, monster loses health over time), burning (fire, monster loses health over time), instant kill, to lower the monster resistances to the damage types, to pierce (for missile spells, causes the missile to continue), to split on impact (for missile spells), to stun or to slow.

But take care that the monsters may also be shielded from your skills, getting resistances or immunities. Click a monster on the map or hover the mouse over a monster icon in the wave bar to find out what you’ll be facing.

Bosses and leaders cannot be instant killed (by skills like “Black Hand of Niphret” or “Rage of the Banished”).

Heroes gain experience by killing monsters. The hero that kills a monster get 50% of the experience, while the rest is split between the heroes that are placed on the map.

Try keeping the difference between heroes levels as small as possible, to stand a chance in later levels. When a new hero is unlocked, level him by playing previous missions.

Heroes are capped at level 50, and so are monsters 🙂

There are 3 types of monsters: soldiers (regular), leaders and heroes. Each type will give you different XP and score. And, of course, leaders and monster heroes are harder to kill and will deal more damage to your characters.

You may invest up to 10 points in a skill. However, you may only invest skill points with the restriction: “Skill Required Level” + Points are less or equal than “Character Level”.

You may reset the allocation of the skill points, by opening the “Skill Tree” and pressing the “reset” button. In certain levels, you may find this tactic mandatory, because there will be lots and easy to kill monsters mixed with bosses.

You will get full experience out of killing a monster if the absolute difference between the hero level and the monster level is lesser or equal than 3 (the infamous CLVL vs MLVL 🙂 ). Outside this range, you get a percent of the experience (33% for over 6 levels difference, 66% for over 3 levels difference). The rules were updated since v1.0.6, responding to the player suggestions over at Kongregate 🙂

Of course, if the monsters overwhelm you, it’s recommended that you level up the heroes a bit more by (re)playing the previous levels.

Don’t forget about the “Gate” or “Nightwings”. In some missions, you’ll even have to chase the monsters around 🙂

Heroes are invincible to damage when they use “Gate” or “Nightwings”. Maybe you’ll find this useful someday.

The score depends on how many heroes you used in the mission and on how many monsters managed to slip through the exit portal. So the highest score will be obtained if you use one hero and let no monster slip.

At the end of a mission, you will also be shown the total score; this is the combined score of all game modes in all missions.

The Strategy

Here are a couple of videos outlining the strategy for the Normal Campaign. Other than that, you have to keep experimenting, because there are more other strategies available.

Have fun playing and please share your thoughts on the game!