YMMV / Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes

• Cheese Strategy: Ludmilla is normally That One Boss, as described below, but there's a way to cheese her fight. The Wraith unit available to Fiona can kill anything in one hit, including bosses, but its strength is normally too low to pierce through the Bone Dragon shielding Ludmilla before she moves. However, equipping Fiona with the Spider's Cloak, which doubles the power of her units in exchange for lowering her HP to 10%, can let a Wraith take out both the Bone Dragon and Ludmilla herself with a single attack.
• Complete Monster: Markal appears. See Heroes of Might and Magic for more details.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Necropolis faction is rife with these, as usual.
    • Ghosts are immune to pretty much everything while charging, making it easier to kill the enemy and block off enemy Elite and Champion units.
    • Vampires aren't too bad normally, but some artifacts make them extremely powerful, and their HP drain, if it reaches the enemy, is about as good as it gets.
    • Wraiths instantly kill the enemy hero if their attack goes through (works on bosses, unlike many other unique unit abilities). Wraiths will also kill another player in multiplayer if its attack reaches their HP bar. Combine this with Markal's magic spell, which instantly charges any elite or champion units on the field, and you have a serious game breaker.
    • Necropolis has some quite insane artifacts, but special mention goes to the Spider's Cloak, which turns Fiona into a Glass Cannon by doubling her units' attack at the cost of reducing her HP to 10%. If the player can strategically place their stacks, they can bulldoze through most enemies, including elite units, and tank most enemy attacks, ensuring that she doesn't get hit at all. Furthermore, the vampire unit can heal her beyond the 10% HP handicap. The Updated Re-release changed the attack bonus and HP decrease to 75% and removed the vampire's overhead, but it is still a force to be reckoned with and can blitz through the campaign.
    • Fallen units leave behind bones, which move forward on the player's turn to form/reinforce walls. Even in double-death, your units prove useful.
  • Outside of the Necropolis, Elven Unicorns create a very powerful barrier while charging, reducing each incoming attack by up to fifteen. Only Champion attacks have any real chance of getting through.
  • The Inferno faction can set up an onslaught of attacks that is very hard to counter against by picking only the Nightmare as their elite unit. Since they're only two spaces, more can be received, and all active Nightmares attack regardless of time left when one's countdown finishes. Picking only hellhounds, the fastest unit, as your normal unit and the artifact that gives an extra moves per turn can quickly turn this into a rapid beatdown. The Succubus can also cut a wide path through an enemy field with power to spare.
  • Most of these only apply to the DS version of the game: in the Updated Re-release, a lot of the above stuff has been either made far less effective or not useful at all anymore: the attack boost artifact for Necropolis only increases it by 75% and it affects your max HP so boosted Vampires can't heal it back anymore, Unicorns' barrier only protects whatever is right next to them and it isn't automatically placed in the front row anymore, Phoenix lost its AoE effect from its attack and gained a different secondary ability and so forth. However, there's still some additions that greatly increase the effectiveness of some factions and units: Inferno's extra turn ring gives +1 extra move on every turn instead of 5 on their first one, Academy gets an artifact that allows Mages of any color to be fused together and Necropolis' previously near-useless Death Knights with no special ability now gain a massively powerful one that absorbs extra PWR from the opponent's units for every turn they're charging, both making them that much stronger while also disallowing the enemy from forming any weak formations while the Death Knight is charging.
  • In a more general sense, Artifacts are likely to be game breakers in some form or another — especially when combined with a faction's specific abilities. Some give you an extra move each turn (which is just a ridiculous advantage, really), others bring you back to life if you're defeated, and so on. The King's Crown and Dwarven Hammer are particularly broken — the former eliminates the action cost for reinforcements, and the latter removes the action cost for deleting walls. Both allow the player to manipulate formations and charge units without wasting turns. The Dwarven Hammer was removed from the Updated Re-release, however.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Zombies poison your attack formations. Including ghosts.
  • Gremlins have immense attack power for core units, but they're short-ranged, with the damage from their guns falling off sharply for far-away targets. They're unlikely to actually damage you all that much, but they can certainly blast through your walls and deliver a surprising punch to charging Elite or Champion units.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Count Carlyle isn't really hard to beat; his attacks don't do enough damage to reliably pierce Godric's strong defences, and any hits he does land can be healed off by Priests. However, his strongest attack will transform all killed units into food which he'll then eat, healing him significantly and dragging out the fight much longer than necessary.
  • Lord Bloodcrown is an incredibly long and dull battle of attrition, as there's only one really valid method of beating him, and it takes a while. If you're curious, Nadia has to focus solely and totally on building as many walls as possible, moving them around bit by bit using the artifact that allows you to move a square of wall, and withstand Lord Bloodcrown's attacks until her Lightning Strikes spell activates — then hope more than one of the totally random bolts hits the boss. This technically makes him a Luck-Based Mission, with luck determining just how long it takes to beat him. Alternatively, equip the shield that lets you tank hits with your mana gauge and, while still building a ton of walls, get in a lot of quick 10-damage hits from fully leveled Gremlins, then build walls in the spaces they vacate when they fire.
• Nausea Fuel: The battle with Carlyle. His One-Winged Angel form has him like some kind of Jabba The Hut blob... thing, with a giant mouth at the stomach, which vomits up green blobs, and if your troops happen to be in the center of his wand attack, they all get turned into food that he eats up, conveniently healing him.
• That One Boss: Ludmilla is the hardest boss, despite only appearing about halfway through the game. She'll start the fight by summoning one or two Bone Dragons in front of her or to her sides; while this leaves her open to attack, the Bone Dragons will deal devastating damage and can easily kill you if given a chance, if not taken care of quickly. Once they die or attack, she'll then move around erratically, either firing a quick-charging, 2-column-wide laser that hits for 80 damage, summoning more Bone Dragons, or sending a swarm of bats to barrage every lane for heavy total damage. All of her attacks also heal her by the amount of damage they deal, making it hard to inflict any lasting damage to her 150 HP and dragging the fight longer than necessary. And, like most bosses, she has a tendency to move around just as your attacks would've hit her, on top of everything else. Fortunately, she's not immune to the Wraith's One-Hit Kill power, but good luck getting one to land a hit.
• That One Level:
  • Sheogh is an odd case, as it begins with some frustratingly unconventional and overleveled battles (such as one in which you not only have to hit three cannons, but have to march your units across moving platforms over lava to do it), but everything from the halfway point onward is very straightforward and enemies tend to be evenly matched or a level below your hero.
  • Silver Cities begins with three extremely dangerous and puzzling fights, with no chance to save between them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Nadia's chapter is set in the Silver Cities, the game's "Arabian Nights" Days setting. However, she cannot engage in any sidequests or explore the setting like the other four chapters, as she is railroaded into The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, already at a high exp level with several units already recruited. Any sort of introductory quest exploring the towns would have fleshed out the story and served as tutorials for the Academy faction's units.
• The Woobie: Poor Fiona. She's the most gentle and soft-spoken of the main cast, and arguably suffers the most out of all of them. Notably, she's the only one who dies and comes back as a ghost, looking down in horror at her own corpse....