Hero Hunter vs Hot Candle vs Cake-a-pult Ranked

> Quick answer: The Hero Hunter is the best of the three new crafted defenses and it isn't a close call. It reaches past your attacker's troops to hit heroes directly and poisons them, which is far harder to play around than raw damage. The Hot Candle takes second because it's brutal on a single target but bleeds capacity as the attack runs long. The Cake-a-pult lands third, not because it's weak, but because whether it does anything at all depends entirely on how your attacker's army happens to bunch up.

All three hit ground and air, which is new, and all three sit on the crafting station. If you want to see how people are actually placing them, the base library is filling up with layouts built around the new station.

Every crafted defense in this batch attacks both ground and air. That sounds like a footnote. It isn't.

In earlier crafting phases the standout option only handled one of the two. When the best defense on offer couldn't touch air, the entire meta quietly tilted toward air attacks, because you were choosing between a defense that shredded ground armies and a defense that did nothing to the armies people actually brought. That distortion is gone this time.

The practical result is that you can rank these on merit instead of on which half of the game they cover. Whichever one you build, it will participate in every defence. That's why I'm comfortable saying one of them is simply better rather than hedging with the usual it depends.

It also means Supercell doesn't have to keep rebalancing them. These rotate out when the phase ends, so what you see now is roughly what you're getting for the whole season.

Worth setting expectations before the ranking. None of these three is a Scattershot. A crafted defense is a bonus building bolted onto a base that already has to work without it, and the gap between the best and worst pick here is smaller than the gap between a good layout and a bad one. I'm ranking them because you only get so many builders, not because picking third place loses you wars.

The Cake-a-pult behaves like a mortar with a much nastier payload. It lobs an explosive that doesn't detonate on impact. It lands, sits for a beat, and then goes off, damaging everything nearby.

When it works, it's genuinely excellent. Ground troops stalled on a wall with nowhere to go are the perfect target, and because it hits air too, a clumped dragon stack over a wall section eats the same punishment. I've watched it strip a bunched group down in a couple of volleys.

The problem is that it needs your attacker to cooperate. Troops that are spread out, or moving quickly, or already through the wall, take very little from it. The delayed detonation that makes it devastating against stalled units is exactly what makes it miss against units in motion.

It also has a dead zone close in. Get right up against it and it can't hit you at all, which means a hero that walks directly to it is safe while it fires uselessly over their head. Any attacker who learns that one detail neutralises it for free.

Third place isn't an insult here. It's a coin flip, and I'd rather build something that doesn't need luck.

If you do build it, put it behind walls rather than out in the open. The further an attacker has to be to hit it, the more likely they're standing in exactly the stalled clump it wants.

The Hot Candle is the most technically interesting of the three, and the one most people are going to misread.

It's a multi target flame with a wide reach, and it fires fast. Against a single unit it dumps its full output into that one target, which is ferocious. Against a crowd it splits the damage across everything in range, which is often worse for you than hitting one thing hard.

Then there's the decay. The candle burns down over the course of the attack and its targeting capacity drops in stages, from six targets to four and finally to three, before it runs out and stops entirely. It's an ammo timer, the same idea as an inferno running dry, except the degradation happens in visible steps. You can literally see which stage it's in from the model, so an attentive attacker knows exactly how much fight it has left.

There's a quirk worth knowing right now: the timer currently begins when the first building falls rather than when the attack starts. That's acknowledged as a bug and it's going to be corrected, so don't build a long term plan around the extra grace period.

Second place, and a comfortable one. If your war opponents run heavy air, the Hot Candle is a perfectly defensible pick over my number one.

The Hero Hunter wins because it attacks the thing that decides modern attacks.

It ignores your attacker's troops and looks for heroes. It'll fire past an entire army to reach one. And every hit applies a poison that slows the hero down while steadily draining them. That combination is the whole argument: slowing a hero wastes ability windows, and draining one forces an early ability just to survive.

Here's what makes it genuinely awkward to counter. The usual answer to a dangerous defense is to distract it. Drop something tanky nearby and let it chew on that while your real army works. That does nothing here, because it isn't interested in your distraction. It's waiting for a hero. So you're down to freezing it or turning your heroes invisible, and both of those cost spell slots your attacker would much rather spend elsewhere.

Queen charges have become the standard opening for a huge number of players, and this defense is pointed directly at that habit. Air attacks don't escape it either. A warden or a prince flying merged into a dragon stack is a hero in range, and it will pick them out.

Defensive buildings that make an attacker trip up are worth more than buildings that simply deal damage, and a poisoned hero at the wrong moment ends attacks that a bigger number never would.

The first crafted defense season taught this lesson already. The hook tower looked easy to counter on paper, and it still farmed value for weeks, purely because players hadn't adjusted their armies to it yet. Temporary defenses get most of their mileage from unfamiliarity, so the one that punishes an ingrained habit is worth more than the one that does slightly better damage.

There's a placement consequence too. Because it needs heroes to come to it, burying the Hero Hunter dead centre wastes it. It wants to sit where a queen walk or a hero entry naturally passes, which is usually one compartment in from the edge on the side your base gets attacked from most. Put it somewhere heroes never go and you've built a very expensive decoration.

This order assumes you can actually upgrade the thing. Plenty of players can't.

The crafting station opens at TH11 this season as a Clashiversary test, but your module cap is tied to your Town Hall and it rises one level at a time as you climb. At the very bottom the cap is low enough that you're stuck at the base level with nothing to upgrade at all.

At that point the ranking is close to meaningless, because an unupgradeable Hero Hunter has hitpoints soft enough that a decent queen removes it in passing. If you're down there, treat whichever you place as a free extra building and don't overthink it.

From the middle Town Halls up the ranking holds, and by the top it matters a lot, since that's where a full build costs real builder months. I've written the full ordering in the crafted defense upgrade priority guide, but the short version is hitpoints on all three first, then everything into the Hero Hunter.

Since you'll be attacking into these as often as you defend with them, here's the flip side.

Beating the Hero Hunter: don't walk heroes into it blind. Freeze it before your queen enters its range, or go invisible through it. Warden charges get a little more breathing room thanks to the extra reach, but monolith arrow queen charges walk straight into trouble. If you can route your hero path so it clears the surrounding compartment before the hunter acquires them, do that instead of spending a spell.

Stalling is the whole answer for the Hot Candle. Its output degrades and eventually runs dry, so anything that soaks its attention early is buying your real army a much softer building later. Feeding it a crowd is also fine, counterintuitively, because splitting its damage across several targets is gentler than letting it focus one.

With the Cake-a-pult, keep moving and don't clump. Its damage is delayed, so troops that have already left the impact point take nothing. If a hero is nearby, walk them right up against it and stand in the dead zone.

Supercell's Let's Get Crafty release notes cover how the module system works underneath all three. If you get 3 starred by something you can't identify, drop the replay screenshot into Find My Base and pull the exact layout up to study it properly.