Area of Effect
If your team decides to go aoe you will want to cover a number of roles. These roles consist of “Mass Healer”, “Single Healer”, “Damage”, “Armor”, and “Froster” (aka clumping the units). More than 1 person can have the same job and the same job can be split up between players. As long as the roles are coordinated, you should be fine.
Building Together
Just like in the single target guide. Generally the team that builds together, beats the team that doesn’t. This is because sharing auras saves your team a lot of gold. The team that doesn’t build together has to spend extra gold on more auras that have already been built by someone else. If they had just built together, they would have both benefited from the aura that was built.
Mass Healer
There is more than 1 way to do this. You can use either a Rule Breaker or a Witch Doctor. On each side of the map, there is a “U” shaped area. Generally, this is a safe spot to build your Rule Breaker or your Witch Doctor, however, most people build a Witch Doctor where everyone else is building their damage and armor. If you build a Rule Breaker in the “U” shaped area, note that you will want a Fast Rule Breaker and you will want a frost wizard to clump the units together. A slow Rule Breaker just won’t cut it if you’re going AOE. If you plan on having 10 evolutions, you really need to hit all 10 units with the Rule Breaker. Another strategy is to build a Rule Breaker in the “U” shaped area as well as a Witch Doctor in the back area with everyone else. This does require having two frost wizards though, one in each area.
Single Healer
AOE just doesn’t have enough hit points. Witch Doctor just doesn’t put out enough hit points. You are going to want to make sure someone builds a priest so that priest can load up hit points on your most important evolutions. Placement of said priest is extremely important. Priests don’t have amazing range so you will want to build as close to center as possible so it can hit every side. If you don’t have this tower, your tanky units will not have enough hit points to survive. This single target tower is almost mandatory in AOE builds.
Evolutions
You are going to want to upgrade your footmen into better units. When going AOE, it’s extremely easy to get 10 evolutions. Just make sure you have a unit to tank and a Raider to increase the attack speed of all of your units. A good strategy is to make 8 ranged units that will have low hit points and really high attack while you have the other two to serve as your tanks. You will need to ensure your two front line units have a lot of hit points.
Buffing Towers
Trainer towers will want to be built in the back section. The range and speed on the trainer towers make the area good for clumped up units. A rank 2 frost wizard can hit the entire back area ensuring everything is both clumped and slowed through the entire area and Long Slow Aura covers the entire area if built in the right spot.
Pros and Casuals
AOE is fun and generally works very well vs casuals when done right. It is outright overpowered vs those who don’t know how to counter it. That being said, vs pros you will almost always lose if you go AOE. It is very easy for pros to counter and if you don’t win quick enough, you will be facing a team that has 3+ evos with 5k+ hit points. Your evos aren’t likely to have even 1k hit points and you’re only likely to have 1 or 2 evos with more than 1k. If you realize you are up against AOE, you need evo quickly. A captain with high block and hit points and a mage with high damage will make short work of most AOE armies. Other methods of countering AOE just comes with practice. For example, learning to drop a ton of rank 1 weaponsmiths just to get a really quick damage boost on say your mage and captain.