Shadow T1 strategy for 4player rPvE 7

[Pyneappole]

Of all four factions, I have not been able to devise a shadow T1 strategy that consistently works at destroying spawners without the need of teammate assistance. The best I can do is to use unholy armor skeleton warriors to try to lure the enemies while forsaken attack the spawners, but this doesn't work very well if the spawner happens to be far in the back from the front enemy (and therefore aggression zone) because it forces the forsaken to slowly walk further and through a crowd while they take damage. Attempts to kill most of the enemies before respawning doesn't work so great either in situations where you are mostly facing small units, since both skeleton warriors and forsaken are M counters.

I tried witchclaws, but they tend to be worse. Often times they die before they can explode, and attempting to get the max corpse without triggering aggression and enemy spawns requires a lot of power input, even when considering embalmer's shrine. Plus using witchclaws means I can't use soulsplicer as a fallback due to them stealing corpses that would otherwise be needed for the soul splicer.

And I am not even talking about lost souls.

[SunWu]

When it comes to easier 7s i usually do fine with 3 or 4 skellies and 6-8 forsaken.

When you don't have much time to do damage on the spawnhut (cause the forsaken die quickly) you gotta have high damage, that's why i think motivate and frenzy at the right time is important. 

I usually motivate the forsaken squad wich takes the most damage early or one that gets blocked the most and is dragging behind. Even if 2 or 3 die without doing any damage, the rest should be able to get the spawn down withitin seconds once they reach it (motivated, frenzied forsaken do more than 1500 damage)

If there's a camp with knockback (twilight hags, crystal fiends) try to split up the forsaken bunch a bit, so one opponent doesnt disable half your army.

[This Is Halloween_2]

T1 shadow suffer in rPvE 7-8.

The best to do is 1-2 tank units in front, 8-10 forsaken with motivate and frenzy, and towers for the inevitable counter attack (lifestealer isn’t bad) since you won’t have the possibility to collect corpses before it.

Considering how much shadow start burns forsaken charges, having also nox trooper as a back up isn’t a bad idea.

For the tanking units, I’ve started to prefer dreadcharger to skeleton warrior.

They both die anyway, and I find dreadcharger better at creating space for the forsaken (no S knockback or average moving speed that stop them in their charge and make npc switch focus back to the forsaken).

Anyway, shadow start is by far the weakest of all 4 start for rPvE 7-8 as you’ already guess.

[Eirias]

Depending on your micro, skill there's a few good options. In decreasing complexity:

1. forsaken dps. Usually use motivate + frenzy on 6 forsaken, while a few others focus energy. An important detail here is that enemies attack your units which are attacking them, so you typically want the other backline forsaken to be switching targets a bunch to aggro enemies away from your camp burst. For improved consistency, you can use a soul splicer for healing and/or skeleton warriors in front to soak damage.

2. Witchclaw focus. Again you want to use forsaken to generate corpses and focus enemies away from your witchclaw, while the witchclaw focuses the camp. Make sure you're using blue witchclaw, and lifeweaving can improve consistency too.

3. Lifestealer spam. I usually do 6 towers around the camp I want to attack, and 2-3 towers defending my base from the other lane. I also make 7-8 dreadchargers, and have 3-4 suck up the remaining ones. Use the dreadchargers to focus the camp while the towers attack the enemies. Again for added consistency, I like to use 1 squad of archers to aggro enemies into the tower and away from my dreads. 

#3 is my preferred method, especially because it gives me a reason to run dreadcharger for t4 shenanigans. I think there's a replay of this strategy on one of my recent streams, but I don't remember which one.