Barricades should be cheaper with the upgrade. 700 gold for something that gets destroyed in second, doesn't stop some badguys and requires a lot of itself to redirect traffic on most maps is kinda silly. Once I figured out how guardians + tar is super effective, cheap and works on nearly every map the normal difficulty became a bit of a joke.
In fact I don't know if I'll ever finish Nightmare as it is as the name implies. I couldn't even beat the second stage. You get an Armored Orc and a Ogre at the same time I I just don't know what the fuck to do with them.
Put down a single mushroom tile behind your other stuff; make one of the ogres fight the other.
I feel like the only purpose of the Coinforge is to use it for the first couple of rounds to build up some quick cash before you can afford a real trap network. In the long run replacing it with tar to set up trap combos is going to be a lot more useful, plus it doesn't stack with the Weaver cash bonuses anyway.
In fact I don't know if I'll ever finish Nightmare as it is as the name implies. I couldn't even beat the second stage. You get an Armored Orc and a Ogre at the same time I I just don't know what the fuck to do with them. You get no prep time, no wave breaks nothing in Nightmare; you have to do everything on the fly and you seem to have way fewer credits than you do on War Mage.
I'm only like 5 or so stages in, but I've found Nightmare to be really easy so far. Easier than the late-game Warmage stages, I mean. You can take out effectively infinite numbers of orcs with a good singular chokepoint, which all the early stages give you. It's just a matter of tarring it up, setting up something horrible in it, and
keeping a lightning cloud over it, which helps immensely
. I've felt totally free to play for maximum score rather than pure survival (I'm #1 on The Corner and #2 on The Fork, The Baths, and Runner's Alley right now). If you're having a lot of trouble with trolls or gnolls, just bring the ice spell. It lets you take them down no problem: it can lock down more than one at a time, all damage is amplified while they're frozen, and you can just reapply it if they break out.
Barricades should be cheaper with the upgrade. 700 gold for something that gets destroyed in second, doesn't stop some badguys and requires a lot of itself to redirect traffic on most maps is kinda silly. Once I figured out how guardians + tar is super effective, cheap and works on nearly every map the normal difficulty became a bit of a joke.
My understanding of barricades is thus: As long as every Rift has a path open to it, the orcs will ignore your barricades and go the route you set up.
If you block off a rift they will do their damndest to blow through your barricades. So you can still use them to route enemies, without a ton of fear of destruction, as long as you don't fully block off a rift.
I'm not 100% on that however. Also, the suicide guys might ignore that rule too.
Kobold sappers and fire trolls will attack barricades. Maybe other trolls too, actually; I'm not sure. And I think gnoll hunters might be able to jump over them. Everyone else will run up to it then turn around without complaining. On the whole they're quite reliable.
plus it doesn't stack with the Weaver cash bonuses anyway.
I think it does. Regular orcs give $15, the +100% bonus from the knowledge weaver makes $30, and then you'll get $45 when they're on the coinforges. (so it's not N*2*2, it's N+N+N)
Kobold sappers and fire trolls will attack barricades. Maybe other trolls too, actually; I'm not sure. And I think gnoll hunters might be able to jump over them. Everyone else will run up to it then turn around without complaining. On the whole they're quite reliable.
I've had Hunters take extreme measures to get past them: either destroying them outright or using stairs/alleyways to bypass them.
Sometimes barricades are godsent but mostly you're faced with a choice to either spend 2100 to block off a hallway or use 2100 to build traps to kill shit. I'm sorry, but 2100 for a defensive measure that doesn't kill anything, folds against certain enemies and can't be repaired inless it's breaktime is kinda harsh. 2100 gets me a Paladin and 2 Archers. A Paladin and 2 Archers that will generate gold and scale with my weaver talents.
plus it doesn't stack with the Weaver cash bonuses anyway.
I think it does. Regular orcs give $15, the +100% bonus from the knowledge weaver makes $30, and then you'll get $45 when they're on the coinforges. (so it's not N*2*2, it's N+N+N)
What's the problem? You got a nice narrow bridge for the top and a decent sniper ledge for archers. In general: trap one door heavily and manually defend the other.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
Yeah. I heavily Tar the narrow bridge and leave four archers and a paladin. Same setup on at the top of the stairs. Stuff keeps getting through. Should start using Magic more.
I think the gimmick is that it's a first person tower defence.
Indeed, but it's still an awsome game. Just the thing when you want a break from Elder Scrolls:Skyrim, and can't stomach logging into your WoW account.
plus it doesn't stack with the Weaver cash bonuses anyway.
I think it does. Regular orcs give $15, the +100% bonus from the knowledge weaver makes $30, and then you'll get $45 when they're on the coinforges. (so it's not N*2*2, it's N+N+N)
Oh...I guess it does. I tested it right after I got it, but it seems that I accidentally hit reset instead of accept when I picked up the skill (I seem to do that a lot). That makes Coinforges fairly useful for people who like to rely heavily on magic to kill enemies, I suppose. Or you could have one pathway heavily trapped while you handle the other one yourself over a Coinforge, using the skill that gives mana for trap kills to keep you going. Eventually you'd be so rich that you could afford to trap both passageways effectively. I might give that a try next time I do a relevant stage.
It DOES seem to count towards trap combos, and it covers a 3 by 3 area for 3,400 less than tar (or 2,200 if you go 2 by 3 and skip the edges). I just question what you could possibly spend that money on that would give you a deathtrap fast and efficient enough to not let orcs through by the dozens. EDIT: Or...maybe not. I suddenly can't replicate it with other trap combinations.
For Lunch Break I put enhanced spike traps down on the bridge and then archers on the lower ridge area to cover the mess hall. Staying up at the top of the huge stairway allowed me to cover both the bridge and the messhall with no problems.
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
For Lunch Break I put enhanced spike traps down on the bridge and then archers on the lower ridge area to cover the mess hall. Staying up at the top of the huge stairway allowed me to cover both the bridge and the messhall with no problems.
I have to stop running up with the BladeStaff as well. Gets me into too much trouble.
Does anyone have a good strategy for the finale? I tried forcing everyone down the same path with barricades, and that worked well until the wave of bomb guys. I ended up beating it by spamming paladins/archers and dropping a spore trap under the ogres, but it wasn't a clean win. I feel like there must be a way to do it better.
FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
The Spore Trap is a game breaker. Drop it at an Ogre's feet and you have a nearly unkillable Orc blocker.
Aside from that, it helps to guess right on which doors the waves will be entering. Every door has at least one potential Mace Trap position, by the time I was finished I had deployed a Mace in every one.
Does anyone have a good strategy for the finale? I tried forcing everyone down the same path with barricades, and that worked well until the wave of bomb guys. I ended up beating it by spamming paladins/archers and dropping a spore trap under the ogres, but it wasn't a clean win. I feel like there must be a way to do it better.
I went for a chamber of death in the very middle. Spent my advance prep time lining all those balconies overlooking the rift with as many archers as I could (facing inwards toward the rift), and used the balista-thingies on the north and south to kill the ogres as they come in. The rest of the time I'd just run around with my lightning ring and wind belt killing tons and tons of orcs. As money came in, I planted tons more archers (up the the max), put auto-balista traps all around the rift as well (right under the archers, facing inwards towards the rift as well) and circled the rift with tar.
The middle turns into a giant chamber of death, and anything that makes it past you dies pretty fast. You don't have to worry about exploding kobalds or hunters, since they just run towards the middle and die, they'll never go into the rift. And if an ogre makes it into the rift room, just stun it with the crossbow secondary till it dies.
Is there a point to taking Wall Blades instead of the Grinder except for ogres? Is it actually better for ogres?
Is it just me or does the grinding animation not really work very well?
Also on the subject of grinders and grinding: definitely best trap right there.
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FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
I found the Arrow Trap to be superior to both. Also cheaper. The Grinder come so late in the game that you're probably already using upgraded Arrows or Wall Blades, both of which cost significantly less, so I never used Grinders much.
FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
One of the elements I like best about this game is its pacing. A very difficult, demanding map is always followed by an easy one with long, narrow avenues of approach that allow you to build all sorts of neato trap combinations for getting back at the evil creeps who just made your life miserable a few minutes before.
\
I purchased this game exactly a week after buying RAGE, and I gotta say, I'm having A LOT more fun with ORCS MUST DIE. For 1/4 of the price, too.
I found the Arrow Trap to be superior to both. Also cheaper. The Grinder come so late in the game that you're probably already using upgraded Arrows or Wall Blades, both of which cost significantly less, so I never used Grinders much.
Upgraded Grinders can go for a very long time. Yeah, you unlock it late but you have it for replays for skulls and/or Nightmare.
However the Wall Blades are way more useful for Ogres, but Arrows are overall more useful in general.
Only semi-related I decided to watch the Giantbomb quicklook last night when I couldn't sleep despite having already bought/played through the entire game.
It made me think of a tip to give people coming into the game because of a mistake the guy was consistently making.
Don't ever double up arrow traps. What I mean is, if you have an arrow trap on one wall, don't put another one directly across from it on the other wall unless there is a gap in coverage i.e. to cover a very large room, and in that case you typically shouldn't be using traps there anyway as they're far far far less effective than finding(or making) good choke points. Anyway, you don't want to double them up like that because they'll both fire at once, no questions and one single arrow trap is enough to kill anything other than ogres/gnolls (and runners but they're a different beast entirely). Take that extra arrow trap and line them up instead of wasting your money doubling up. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single time in the game that double arrows is useful. If you think it is being useful reconsider the situation and see if wall blades/smashers etc would be more effective use of your money. I'm saying that because the only time ever dual arrows would be useful is for big bads and then there are far far far more useful traps for them that you can usually pair or put near arrows to help you out better.
Also patches of brimstone before/after series of arrows/swinging hammers usually handles any stray runners that get through.
Another tip for arrow walls is that they're almost universally more effective if they're placed so they face the oncoming hordes as opposed to being "horizontal" to the hordes. I.E. if you have the option to put full coverage in a hall (typically with a turn) where the arrows shoot toward the horde as they are incoming you'll get far more mileage out of those traps than those that trigger as the horde passes and shoots across from them. The arrows fly further than the trap trigger range so you'll always get orcs behind the ones that tripped it, and it is a far more effective way of handling runners than horizontal traps, even with slow patches.
And on that not, if for some reason you haven't played many tower defense games or haven't noticed in OMD, slow patches are probably the most useful trap in the game, bar none. If you're running into a situation where it seems like too many things are getting through you're probably not putting down enough slow traps. Poisoned spike traps are also useful but in later stages take too long to reset and are better replaced with brimstone before/after large areas of slow traps.
Anyway, having said all that, there really are very few locations where grinders/wall blades are effective. I can count on one hand how many maps have enough narrow enough halls that they provide sufficient coverage, and even then unless the map has a lot of big bads, arrow traps are generally still a better option.
EDIT: the only map that I can think of that doubling up on arrow traps is useful for is the Arena map, where you can beat the entire stage (and I did) using only Arrow traps. This wouldn't work for Nightmare, granted, as I imagine there are more than the one shot kill enemies, but yeah, you can pretty much get every square foot of that map covered in arrow traps, it's actually pretty funny.
FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
Arrow traps work most efficiently placed perpindicular, rather than parallel, to the Orcs' axis of advance, but there are few maps where you can do that. Most hallways are deliberately designed to not include turns, just for that reason, I suspect.
Yeah, probably, but when you can, you absolutely should because they do work insanely better. And placed in that way you usually don't really need to plaster them with slow traps like you do on horizontal ones, saving your money for other methods of murder.
There's one particular stage where you can put many on the wall across from the doors (there's two levels) and then down the first hall you can line the oncoming walls and then again in the last turn you can put them on those walls. That stage was pretty easy.
EDIT: I never found a single use for barrels. You can pick them up after placed; can you do that and drop them on stairs, or do they just fall down?
Yeah, probably, but when you can, you absolutely should because they do work insanely better. And placed in that way you usually don't really need to plaster them with slow traps like you do on horizontal ones, saving your money for other methods of murder.
There's one particular stage where you can put many on the wall across from the doors (there's two levels) and then down the first hall you can line the oncoming walls and then again in the last turn you can put them on those walls. That stage was pretty easy.
EDIT: I never found a single use for barrels. You can pick them up after placed; can you do that and drop them on stairs, or do they just fall down?
I know that map you are talking about and it's my favorite because it is so trap friendly. Also very easy, the game tries to compensate by throwing a ton of Ogres at you but even they can't stand for long against my multiple walls of death.
I found the Arrow Trap to be superior to both. Also cheaper. The Grinder come so late in the game that you're probably already using upgraded Arrows or Wall Blades, both of which cost significantly less, so I never used Grinders much.
Upgraded Grinders can go for a very long time. Yeah, you unlock it late but you have it for replays for skulls and/or Nightmare.
However the Wall Blades are way more useful for Ogres, but Arrows are overall more useful in general.
I don't really think arrow traps are anything special, at least when they're firing perpendicular to the orcs' approach (obviously they're extremely efficient when they can fire head-on).
I just did a bunch of informal tests in standard three-tile-wide hallways, and it seems like one arrow trap is enough to kill two orcs and injure about two or three more on a 10-second cooldown. One upgraded grinder seems to have enough juice to kill something like 4 orcs from full health before jamming (which takes about 8 seconds to clean, I think). So one grinder plus one pusher will cause about as much carnage in a standard hallway as two arrow traps for only 100 points more.
The real draw to the grinders, though, is that they scale fabulously with larger trap systems. Since they don't kill instantly, it's really easy for some other source of damage to deal the finishing blow, promoting big combos. Meanwhile this takes pressure off the grinders, requiring them to deal less damage per orc and stretching out their time active before jamming by a ton. So if you have a system that combines pushers, grinders, tar, embers, archers, pounders, and a lightning cloud, damn near everyone that steps into that deathtrap, even the ones that are instakilled by the pounders or lightning, will have grinder damage adding to the combo. Damage is distributed widely enough that at least one or two grinders will always be spinning, so they cover for the cooldowns on any other traps you use. If you tried to use arrow traps on the walls, the whole system would tend to blow its load at once and let a a fair number of orcs through unscathed while everything recharges.
The range on grinders is too small to be very useful in normal situations. You can use barricades to force orcs into them but barricades cost way way way way way too fucking much. I seriously hope the devs look at the cost on those and see how insanely prohibitive their cost makes them vs their usefulness.
Arrow traps can do much more damage than that, but used perpendicular is virutally always not the way to go. Of course that's not always an option, but most maps where you need to rely on things other than the swinging hammer, there are corners where you can put enough facing the oncoming horde to just decimate anything small.
If you put in a row of slow traps before your arrow traps start your orcs bunch up more so they get cleaned out easier by your arrow traps, if you must have them facing the opposite direction.
The range on grinders is too small to be very useful in normal situations. You can use barricades to force orcs into them but barricades cost way way way way way too fucking much. I seriously hope the devs look at the cost on those and see how insanely prohibitive their cost makes them vs their usefulness.
Arrow traps can do much more damage than that, but used perpendicular is virutally always not the way to go. Of course that's not always an option, but most maps where you need to rely on things other than the swinging hammer, there are corners where you can put enough facing the oncoming horde to just decimate anything small.
If you put in a row of slow traps before your arrow traps start your orcs bunch up more so they get cleaned out easier by your arrow traps, if you must have them facing the opposite direction.
my experience has been that upgraded grinders absolutely wreck shit, so putting down a barricade or two is completely worth it. One barricade tile can enable several grinders, like putting a barricade in the middle of a 3-wide hallway and putting a grinder on each wall so they split the bandwidth. Then you can put additional grinders on the entry and exit of that chokepoint you just made, so 1 chokepoint, potentially one single barricade, is good for 3-6 grinders depending on whether you're doing both sides of the hallway.
I've never actually tried barricades in that situation. But pushers have a range of two, so that plus the one tile covered by the grinder itself means an entire three-tile corridor is effectively covered as long as a pusher is active. A lone grinder on one side of a hall with no support is pretty worthless, admittedly, but pushers are dirt cheap and recharge quickly, so that never has to be the case.
Hmmm..how would you say grinders compare to a slow trapped swinging hammer? Granted, half the maps don't have hallways that the hammer is viable, but a row of three hammers, followed by a row of brimstone, at least on War Mage, will kill literally everything.
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Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Put down a single mushroom tile behind your other stuff; make one of the ogres fight the other.
I'm only like 5 or so stages in, but I've found Nightmare to be really easy so far. Easier than the late-game Warmage stages, I mean. You can take out effectively infinite numbers of orcs with a good singular chokepoint, which all the early stages give you. It's just a matter of tarring it up, setting up something horrible in it, and
My understanding of barricades is thus: As long as every Rift has a path open to it, the orcs will ignore your barricades and go the route you set up.
If you block off a rift they will do their damndest to blow through your barricades. So you can still use them to route enemies, without a ton of fear of destruction, as long as you don't fully block off a rift.
I'm not 100% on that however. Also, the suicide guys might ignore that rule too.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I think it does. Regular orcs give $15, the +100% bonus from the knowledge weaver makes $30, and then you'll get $45 when they're on the coinforges. (so it's not N*2*2, it's N+N+N)
I've had Hunters take extreme measures to get past them: either destroying them outright or using stairs/alleyways to bypass them.
Sometimes barricades are godsent but mostly you're faced with a choice to either spend 2100 to block off a hallway or use 2100 to build traps to kill shit. I'm sorry, but 2100 for a defensive measure that doesn't kill anything, folds against certain enemies and can't be repaired inless it's breaktime is kinda harsh. 2100 gets me a Paladin and 2 Archers. A Paladin and 2 Archers that will generate gold and scale with my weaver talents.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
I....did not say that. O_o
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Edit: Feel worthless. I'll get it eventually.
What's the problem? You got a nice narrow bridge for the top and a decent sniper ledge for archers. In general: trap one door heavily and manually defend the other.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Also if guardians are standing next to them, or right behind them.
Please shoot me a PM if you add me so I know to add you back.
Indeed, but it's still an awsome game. Just the thing when you want a break from Elder Scrolls:Skyrim, and can't stomach logging into your WoW account.
It DOES seem to count towards trap combos, and it covers a 3 by 3 area for 3,400 less than tar (or 2,200 if you go 2 by 3 and skip the edges). I just question what you could possibly spend that money on that would give you a deathtrap fast and efficient enough to not let orcs through by the dozens. EDIT: Or...maybe not. I suddenly can't replicate it with other trap combinations.
I have to stop running up with the BladeStaff as well. Gets me into too much trouble.
Aside from that, it helps to guess right on which doors the waves will be entering. Every door has at least one potential Mace Trap position, by the time I was finished I had deployed a Mace in every one.
I went for a chamber of death in the very middle. Spent my advance prep time lining all those balconies overlooking the rift with as many archers as I could (facing inwards toward the rift), and used the balista-thingies on the north and south to kill the ogres as they come in. The rest of the time I'd just run around with my lightning ring and wind belt killing tons and tons of orcs. As money came in, I planted tons more archers (up the the max), put auto-balista traps all around the rift as well (right under the archers, facing inwards towards the rift as well) and circled the rift with tar.
The middle turns into a giant chamber of death, and anything that makes it past you dies pretty fast. You don't have to worry about exploding kobalds or hunters, since they just run towards the middle and die, they'll never go into the rift. And if an ogre makes it into the rift room, just stun it with the crossbow secondary till it dies.
Steam 3DS: 1160-9885-2554
Is it just me or does the grinding animation not really work very well?
Also on the subject of grinders and grinding: definitely best trap right there.
\
I purchased this game exactly a week after buying RAGE, and I gotta say, I'm having A LOT more fun with ORCS MUST DIE. For 1/4 of the price, too.
Upgraded Grinders can go for a very long time. Yeah, you unlock it late but you have it for replays for skulls and/or Nightmare.
However the Wall Blades are way more useful for Ogres, but Arrows are overall more useful in general.
Only semi-related I decided to watch the Giantbomb quicklook last night when I couldn't sleep despite having already bought/played through the entire game.
It made me think of a tip to give people coming into the game because of a mistake the guy was consistently making.
Don't ever double up arrow traps. What I mean is, if you have an arrow trap on one wall, don't put another one directly across from it on the other wall unless there is a gap in coverage i.e. to cover a very large room, and in that case you typically shouldn't be using traps there anyway as they're far far far less effective than finding(or making) good choke points. Anyway, you don't want to double them up like that because they'll both fire at once, no questions and one single arrow trap is enough to kill anything other than ogres/gnolls (and runners but they're a different beast entirely). Take that extra arrow trap and line them up instead of wasting your money doubling up. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single time in the game that double arrows is useful. If you think it is being useful reconsider the situation and see if wall blades/smashers etc would be more effective use of your money. I'm saying that because the only time ever dual arrows would be useful is for big bads and then there are far far far more useful traps for them that you can usually pair or put near arrows to help you out better.
Also patches of brimstone before/after series of arrows/swinging hammers usually handles any stray runners that get through.
Another tip for arrow walls is that they're almost universally more effective if they're placed so they face the oncoming hordes as opposed to being "horizontal" to the hordes. I.E. if you have the option to put full coverage in a hall (typically with a turn) where the arrows shoot toward the horde as they are incoming you'll get far more mileage out of those traps than those that trigger as the horde passes and shoots across from them. The arrows fly further than the trap trigger range so you'll always get orcs behind the ones that tripped it, and it is a far more effective way of handling runners than horizontal traps, even with slow patches.
And on that not, if for some reason you haven't played many tower defense games or haven't noticed in OMD, slow patches are probably the most useful trap in the game, bar none. If you're running into a situation where it seems like too many things are getting through you're probably not putting down enough slow traps. Poisoned spike traps are also useful but in later stages take too long to reset and are better replaced with brimstone before/after large areas of slow traps.
Anyway, having said all that, there really are very few locations where grinders/wall blades are effective. I can count on one hand how many maps have enough narrow enough halls that they provide sufficient coverage, and even then unless the map has a lot of big bads, arrow traps are generally still a better option.
EDIT: the only map that I can think of that doubling up on arrow traps is useful for is the Arena map, where you can beat the entire stage (and I did) using only Arrow traps. This wouldn't work for Nightmare, granted, as I imagine there are more than the one shot kill enemies, but yeah, you can pretty much get every square foot of that map covered in arrow traps, it's actually pretty funny.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
There's one particular stage where you can put many on the wall across from the doors (there's two levels) and then down the first hall you can line the oncoming walls and then again in the last turn you can put them on those walls. That stage was pretty easy.
EDIT: I never found a single use for barrels. You can pick them up after placed; can you do that and drop them on stairs, or do they just fall down?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Edit: Hell. Have them roll down if you place them on stairs. Anythings better than me standing at the top and force pushing barrels down at enemies.
I know that map you are talking about and it's my favorite because it is so trap friendly. Also very easy, the game tries to compensate by throwing a ton of Ogres at you but even they can't stand for long against my multiple walls of death.
Has there been any word on one?
I just did a bunch of informal tests in standard three-tile-wide hallways, and it seems like one arrow trap is enough to kill two orcs and injure about two or three more on a 10-second cooldown. One upgraded grinder seems to have enough juice to kill something like 4 orcs from full health before jamming (which takes about 8 seconds to clean, I think). So one grinder plus one pusher will cause about as much carnage in a standard hallway as two arrow traps for only 100 points more.
The real draw to the grinders, though, is that they scale fabulously with larger trap systems. Since they don't kill instantly, it's really easy for some other source of damage to deal the finishing blow, promoting big combos. Meanwhile this takes pressure off the grinders, requiring them to deal less damage per orc and stretching out their time active before jamming by a ton. So if you have a system that combines pushers, grinders, tar, embers, archers, pounders, and a lightning cloud, damn near everyone that steps into that deathtrap, even the ones that are instakilled by the pounders or lightning, will have grinder damage adding to the combo. Damage is distributed widely enough that at least one or two grinders will always be spinning, so they cover for the cooldowns on any other traps you use. If you tried to use arrow traps on the walls, the whole system would tend to blow its load at once and let a a fair number of orcs through unscathed while everything recharges.
Arrow traps can do much more damage than that, but used perpendicular is virutally always not the way to go. Of course that's not always an option, but most maps where you need to rely on things other than the swinging hammer, there are corners where you can put enough facing the oncoming horde to just decimate anything small.
If you put in a row of slow traps before your arrow traps start your orcs bunch up more so they get cleaned out easier by your arrow traps, if you must have them facing the opposite direction.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
my experience has been that upgraded grinders absolutely wreck shit, so putting down a barricade or two is completely worth it. One barricade tile can enable several grinders, like putting a barricade in the middle of a 3-wide hallway and putting a grinder on each wall so they split the bandwidth. Then you can put additional grinders on the entry and exit of that chokepoint you just made, so 1 chokepoint, potentially one single barricade, is good for 3-6 grinders depending on whether you're doing both sides of the hallway.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand