
So if I need to reduce the fliers early I use arrow walls. You can however stack a bunch of weaker traps to get combos from the fliers, if you have the coin to spare. Most other traps don't 1-shot, except a couple that either lack range, or have elemental effects that some fliers will resist. When you stack enough lasers they tend to work, but that's a late round solution, depending on the map. Lasers are nice, but the fliers have a way of sneaking between them sometimes, and a single laser doesn't 1-shot them.

Grinders are pretty good, but only when they can reach. They tend to 1-shot fliers, and can kill 2-3 if they are aligned with each other. Surprisingly Arrow Walls with penetrating arrows are quite good cost/kills. Instead opting to set up two chokes for the orcs involving big screens of lasers and dealing with the bats, especially shockbats, by myself for most of each wave before picking off the few straggler orcs that survived the chokes.

Slag Field is another beast, just the way it's laid out, I gave up on a solution that makes the bats a non-issue. It's particularly nasty on Order Enclave since the bats fly low enough right to an area that's already a major choke point that you can be stoning all the flyers and non-flyers at once.
#Orcs must die 3 drastic steps upgrade#
Stone Staff secondary will kill them instantly and with the unique upgrade has a huge range so it's good on every level but Slag Field, where half of them fly too high.

They are nearly foolproof and work on every kind of flyer, but being so pricey means you might have to sell them between waves, which is annoying especially on rift lord. In my experience, in solo, 4 grinders on a given path of flyers will be sufficient in war mage and six on rift lord. Grinders can deal with them on the others, although it is a huge investment and this can be a problem, particularly on Slag Field with two separate paths of orcs to deal with as well.
