WindStrike

Below is a set of overall comments on the various modes. It includes my personal opinions, what the general response is, and ways it could potentially improve. 1. Overall · Element TD can get away with dropping all of its various modes from the initial menu (the second menu stays as is) and simply providing more options in multiplayer. Why? § Most players only pick the standard mode anyways. § Most players that play multiplayer would probably appreciate more multiplayer options in the base game. · As it currently is, multiplayer interactivity is very limited. § This would attract more players, especially those of the competitive nature, into the game. § This would not affect the single-player game. · Another issue is the platform. In SC2, while there’s various settings players can pick, in terms of the top games, most players are going to ignore everything except the standard mode. I blame the “meta”, but that’s how it is. · If Element TD was a stand-alone game, it could have as many modes as it wants, and people would play all of them. While the standard mode would be the most popular, all the other modes wouldn’t literally get ignored. · But, that asides, I’m going to drop my general comments and opinions for all the modes anyways… 2. Race Mode · While this a mode on the second menu, I feel the need to point something out… · There is no point in this mode existing. With absolutely no multiplayer interaction, all of the players are going to be separate anyways… it would make more sense to just upload replays for the fastest time. 3. Mazing Mode · The game is not designed for Mazing. Or rather, the towers aren’t. Every tower in the game would be need to be rebalanced for Mazing. Otherwise, countermeasures like regeneration HP and speed increases have to be made to counteract the OP nature of splash damage for this mode, not to mention extremely long mazes. · The mode is still fun, but in order for it to be better, it really needs to be completely rebalanced from the ground up. · A lot of what makes Element TD special is that tower placement actually matters, and to such a degree that it’s equally a defining factor of the game alongside its element system. If I were to rebalance the game for Mazing, I’d make sure that key placement is still an equally important factor. · Currently, it is not. It’s still got some impact – place splash towers at the rebound points, make sure mildew and ice are shooting at straight lines, but… overall, you can generally place your towers anywhere in your maze. 4. Hero Mode · This really needs to be a lot more in depth. Elements you choose should have an actual impact on your hero. Right now, every player has an identical hero that they can upgrade down any path, and that hero can synergize with pretty well with builds, but overall, heroes are too generic. · The damage, speed, and mana upgrades should be kept. All of the abilities, however, should be redone entirely, and what you can get should be directly linked to your elements. · You should be able to change the element of your attack at will to any element you have. 5. Team Mode · This mode rules. More people should play it. In fact, I think with more multiplayer options in the base game, it could happen. 6. Wars Mode · It’s fun… to an extent. It’s not really that competitive, options for attack and defense are limited, it’s got flaws all over the place… · To be honest, this mode should just be dropped, and instead, concentrate some of the intended ideas with this mode into the standard game. It can be fast-paced certainly, but when your elements are based on a timer, the opportunity of “when” to attack or counterattack is completely gone, and for any type of wars mode, that opportunity MUST exist, or else there is too much predictability. · A wars mode could be possible, but… again, like Mazing except on a larger scale, it would need to be designed from the ground up.

Incoming list of game-changing/improving suggestions! This first post contains a bunch of changes I’d personally like to see in SC2’s EleTD, and it does include balance changes. I know the game has kind of fallen out, but I really think it can be fixed and improved, along with expanded options for multiplayer. The second post comments on the various modes, and the third post contains a dramatic but primarily positive change to the game. 1. Players choose creep waves · This suggestion is intended as a standard feature, not a mode. Each wave, players get to pick the next wave, starting on Wave 10 (this would choose for Wave 11). Every creep combination is available from the start (element type and creep ability). · There would not be a cooldown on it, so you could theoretically pick the same wave type the entire game. · The picks are done in rotation, so Player 1 starts, then Player 2, then Player 3, then Player 4, and so on until it loops back around to Player 1. · Players have until the start of the wave timer to choose a wave. If the player does not choose a wave in time, the next wave defaults to the standard wave. · This is disabled for 1 to 3 players. · This would expand the multiplayer aspect of the normal game. Quite frankly, if anyone doesn’t like how multiplayer has actual interactivity, they can just play single player. Besides, the “standard” game mode is called Competitive. 2. Global Creep Buffs · Like the above suggestion, this is intended as a standard feature. It is disabled for single player for obvious reasons. · A set of buffs that you can apply at any time, increasing the strength of all creeps for everyone temporarily for the next 30 seconds. The available buffs are: · 15% Current/Max HP Increase · 15% Speed Increase · Creeps regenerate 1% HP per second. · Creeps gain 15% resistance to debuffs. This also lowers the durations of the debuffs by 15%. · You can only apply one Creep Buff at a time. The cost of each buff will scale with every wave, but when the duration ends, you’ll get 75% of the cost back. · When you are applying a Creep Buff, you get no interest. · During the fruit wave, the cost will continue to scale as the fruit scale. Additionally, you don’t get any of the cost back. · This is something else that could increase multiplayer options and strategies. The global buffs may need to scale a little bit depending on the number of players (probably down to 10% at 8 players), but I think it would really provide more interactivity and fun for multiplayer games. 3. Starting Gold · During the game start, it’s rather silly that, in order to get the most out of your interest, you need to wait until right when the first wave starts to build your towers. This suggestion increases starting gold at the higher difficulties while fixing that issue. · Before the first wave starts, interest should be disabled. § Very Easy – 70 gold § Easy – 70 gold § Normal – 70 gold § Hard – 70 gold · Extreme – 75 gold § Very Hard – 75 gold · Extreme – 80 gold § Insane – 90 gold · Extreme – 100 gold 4. Wave timers · The intention here is to give longer wave timers on higher difficulties, but also drop scaling timers. It should also reduce the viability of front-entrance camping. · Very Easy – 10 seconds · Easy – 8 seconds · Normal – 6 seconds · Hard – 5 seconds · Very Hard – 5 seconds · Insane – 5 seconds 5. Ability scaling · This would scale how powerful creep abilities are. Higher difficulties will increase the power of abilities. · Very Easy – Abilities decreased by 20% · Easy – Abilities decreased by 10% · Normal – Default · Hard – Abilities increased by 7.5% · Very Hard – Abilities increased by 15% · Insane – Abilities increased by 20% 6. Speed creeps · Speed creeps are often the most difficult creeps by a long-shot in the early game, but in the late game, due to slowing, they might as well be standard creeps. This change nerfs them early but buffs them against slowing builds later. · When the speed buff activates, the speed increase is dropped from +200% to +100%. · Additionally, the creep becomes immune to all forms of slowing for this period of time. 7. Fruit Wave · While it should stay in waves, it really needs to have randomized creep abilities scattered across the fruits. I’m not saying each wave is a different ability, but each fruit individually has a different ability. · This would really fix how, in the end-game, splash wins by default. Healing creeps and mechanical creeps would really screw up all-splash defenses. 8. Attack Ground · Please make it so when you select a group of towers and have them attack ground on a single spot, they all do it and not just the primary target. 9. 6-element Block · Having all 6 elements can be good. However, in random mode, it can also be rather destructive, not to mention a little boring and quite annoying when you play random mode but get it every single time. · If you’re in random mode, you have a question mark in the top-left corner of your area. This suggestion makes it so the question mark has the following option: · When you acquire a fifth element, it disables the sixth element, preventing you from getting it. · This must be chosen prior to the first element pick (aka, before the end of Wave 5). 10. Speed Mode · Suggested here by TheKingsWolf - https://forums.eletd.com/index.php?/topic/94997-1x-2x-5x-speed-mode/ · Base speed would be x1, the other speeds would be x1.25, x1.5, x1.75 and x2, and regarding how it’s picked, it would act how people picking difficulties work, ala the average. · Not really necessary, but it’d be a nice feature, especially if you’re doing long-pass defenses in single-player and want the game to be sped up. 11. Towers · Annnd here’s all the balance suggestions I’ve got for towers. FYI, some of these are large changes. · Earth Tower · DPS – 16, down from 18 · It feels completely superior to Fire and Water, so a damage decrease should fix it. · Poison Tower – Tower Update · Range – 12, down from 16 · Instead of resetting its splash every time it changes targets, it resets after it hasn’t attacked for 2 seconds. The rate its splash increases would need to drop. · This tower is literally useless in the early game. It cannot do anything without severe slowing and speed bonuses to its attacks, and, in fact, limiting viable builds with this tower to Dark 3, Water 3, Nature 3, Earth 2. This would improve its use in the early game and give it more viability with other builds, as well as maintaining its usefulness with the above mentioned build. · Quark Tower – Tower Rewrite · DPS – 10 · Range – 8 · AoE – Everything within its range · Quark Tower starts out with low damage. However, the longer it deals damage, the more damage it does to everything around it. Additionally, its range can be changed, up to 10, 12 and 16; however, the rate that it grows is lessened, and changing its range resets its damage down to base value. · This change would fix Quark Tower in the early game in that it’s straight up overpowered beyond belief. Its low DPS would weaken the wave and probably only destroy part of it, but in the late game, slowing would help it substantially, so it’d be far more useful then. · Additionally, in terms of what it hits, given the way the orbs are, can be rather impractical, especially at the 16 range. This would fix its issues at the upper range and give it more spots it can be placed. · Mildew Tower – Tower Update · DPS – 15 · The higher the HP is, the more damage this will do. Additional damage dealt is equal to (Current HP/Maximum HP) * 15. · This would make it weaker in the early game, which it needs, because it’s way too easy to camp the front door with this by itself. In the late-game, it was pretty useless, so this would increase its effectiveness. · Vapor Tower · DPS – 8, down from 10 · Decreases the base DPS, lowering its early game power, which is also very strong. · Ice Tower · DPS – 40, down from 50 · Range – 10, down from 12 · This tower is WAY too strong early game. This also makes it so that the explosion can hit a lot better. · Flamethrower Tower · DPS – 150, down from 227 · Napalm’s damage is increased to 100. · Currently, Napalm’s effects aren’t very well felt. This shifts the overall DPS of Flamethrower around so that half of it is in the initial attack and the other half of it is in the Napalm. While its DPS is nerfed slightly, because Napalm’s AoE is a flat 6, this would be an overall buff, and the tower would gain a lot more synergy and thus usefulness in the late-game. · Laser Tower · DPS – 1400, up from 1100 · Laser Tower is just a pretty weak tower overall. This should help it out. · Runic Tower · Ability’s AoE dropped down to 2.25. · This tower is stupidly strong in all stages of the game and stupidly OP with slowing. This is a flat nerf to fix it. · Obliteration Tower · DPS – 500 · This is simply a text change and not an actual damage change. · Hail Tower – Tower Update · DPS – 900 · The tower is always firing 3 shots at a time. · For 3 seconds, the tower can direct its fire at a single target. Defaulted to off for auto-cast. · I honestly found it odd that it’s firing at its best for 6 seconds and then virtually useless for the next 3 seconds, so it might as well be firing optimally at all times. This update gives it an overall damage buff as well as giving it a partial defense against single-targets. This is especially more useful for double-pass and triple-pass positions, as it’s able to make more use of it for picking off single targets. · Flooding Tower · DPS – 1000, up from 967 · Range – 12, up from 10 · It’s a useful tower, but it could be a little bit stronger overall. · Haste Tower · DPS – 340-2004 · Large damage buff. This tower, like Laser, also really needs it. · Ephemeral Tower · Damage – 600, up from 500 · DPS – 1935-388 · Text change for DPS to change it from maximum to minimum. · Similar buff to Haste and Laser, though not as much. · Celerity Tower · DPS – 375-1125, up from 300-900 · Another single-target tower buff. · Torrent Tower · First two charge levels dropped (80 and 175). · Caps at 80 attacks, down from 100. · The first two levels were very useless anyways. This gives the lower levels more usefulness while quickening the pace to max level, giving it an overall buff at all stages of the game. Hooray for really long lists! But really, I do think many of these if not all of them are necessary. I know you (Karawasa) are aiming to shift the game over to another platform, where it’ll exist as a standalone game, but… there is a lot of merit in continuing development for the current version game. It just needs a bit of a different direction, and it’ll probably gain in popularity, and it could even re-acquire a competitive player base. All of this could work towards the next iteration of the game, as you’d have a lot more support from the get-go.

And that's actually the reason that fruit score replays (if you're going for highest fruit points) need to be Normal difficulty or higher, because it's possible to go infinite on an easier difficulty. It used to be Very Hard only, but with the addition of Insane and that you get higher fruit points on higher difficulties, it's now Normal or higher.

Alright, regarding insane difficulty, starting minerals need to be buffed to at least 90, maybe 100, 70 is just too low to stay alive. For extreme mode, the amount of minerals you get per wave should go up by a difficulty level, due to the disparity in interest. Additionally, there needs to be extra time for every 5 waves. Insane + Extreme is currently impossible.

Whelp, incoming small list, cause that's all I got, lol. Runic's base damage is fine now, but its effect damage needs to drop to 33%, it's still pretty busted. And if there's a way, for Mazing mode, revert Vapor back to how it was. It's fine in non-mazing mode, but mazing... I don't have to even comment on it now, lol.

Here's a bug for rematch... Know how you can only increase your difficulty three times? Apparently, that carries over... did a game on hard, hit -harder twice, on rematch, I could only hit -harder once.

Kay, gave Insane + Extreme a shot... it's impossible... by a long shot. Primary reason? You literally don't have the money to build the towers. Haven't tried Extreme + Very Hard yet, but I'm just gonna say this now - buff the income by 20-25%, including the starting gold. It's that bad. And increase the amount of time between waves per 5 waves by 15 seconds. I got to the 30s and then just disintegrated, literally nothing I could do. EDIT: Alright, got a build that worked pretty well for Very Hard, trying it for Extreme now.

Some new costs for the vespene gas: 50 minerals 100 minerals 175 minerals 300 minerals 500 minerals 800 minerals 1,300 minerals 2,175 minerals 3,500 minerals 5,600 minerals 9,000 minerals Total Cost - 23,500 minerals

This is just like any other high score fruit challenge, but in maze. Due to just the way maze mode is, what's called "excessive interest abuse" can't be "leaking a wave repeatedly" because it's possible to make a maze where it takes creeps 3 minutes just to get through it. Very Hard and Insane difficulties allowed only. Use of the vapor tower is banned (currently extremely overpowered in mazing). Wave 60 must be cleared by the time that 70 minutes have passed. Any longer than this will be considered excessive interest abuse. This is a reasonable time, as in non-mazing, this is approximately the longest amount of time one can take to clear Wave 60 without excessive interest abuse. Heroes and team disallowed. However it is you do it, post your replay of it here. Happy fruit hunts!

Regarding the Quark Tower, as it hits everything with orbs that only span a portion of the area hit, would you be able to modify the selection radius for it such that it instead only shows the area hit? And then some sort of option to option to show its increased range. Really great tool; while I don't completely agree with the tower placement score (certain towers may work better in different locations based on particular builds), it is overall a great learning tool that a lot of new players could definitely use.

Hope your elbow heals soon man! Looking forward to the next version.

Currently, AoE defenses are completely dominating the fruit wave. It made me think - how come single-target defenses suck on the fruit round but are pretty much a necessity during the waves? Elemental bosses Healing/Mechanical creeps Essentially, if the game were plain and had no creep abilities, AoE defenses would completely dominate, and single-target would lose by a longshot, currently like how it is in the fruit setup. I suggest having the fruit alternate creep abilities, not randomly, but in a set order of undead, mechanical, image, healing, fast (actually, order doesn't really matter). Essentially, it would repeat this set of 5 fruits, so 6 of each creep every wave total. It's still waves of 30 fruit, and they still scale, but by bringing the abilities back in an even setup, single-target towers would become a lot more useful during the fruit wave. Whether pure AoE, pure single-target, or a balanced mix of both would win, I don't know, but I do know this - Element Tower Defense is balanced around those creep abilities being present, and currently, any build banking on single-target is losing to the AoE builds by a longshot. Alternatively, a slight edit to the set of fruits repeated would be a normal fruit in there without abilities, so it's a set of 6 fruits being repeated 5 times per wave.

This is just an update on all the tower suggestions. Quark Tower: As suggested above. Vapor Tower: I just ran a test with vapor to see if this tower is any good, and the answer is that it's crap. Complete and utter crap. Even with double slowing and full buffs, bloody drowning towers are outdoing it. Quark is one thing where it's absurdly good early and still good throughout the whole game except for fruit. Vapor... is alright in the early game and crap the rest of the way. I'm not kidding when I say this. Double the aftershock damage from 5 to 10. It genuinely needs it. The tower is that bad. Even then, it might be low. The reason I'm not suggesting buffing its base damage is that it may make it too strong early, whereas jumping its aftershock damage would help it at all stages of the game and really help it out endgame. ... except in mazing, but it might as well be banned in mazing anyways. Runic Tower: Revamping damage amounts: Buff its base damage by 50% (from 120/600 to 180/900). When it activates its ability, each ADDITIONAL shot does 33% (40/200). The base shot does not lose anything. Hail Tower: Make its ability permanent. There's no reason for it to just have a cooldown of 3 seconds. And then drop its damage to 100/500 from 120/600. Ice Tower: 10% damage buff on both the line drive and the explosion. Electricity Tower: As suggested above, reversing its effect, same DPS. Flood Tower: Increasing its damage from 300/1500 to 320/1600. Torrent Tower: Increasing its standard attack damage from 100/500 to 125/625. The Site: DPS numbers are cool. It should also list damage per shot and fire rate. Condensing it ingame is fine, but the site really should list all of it (especially since the upcoming UI changes will probably allow you to see all of the numbers ingame)/ The following are some various changes for various towers (site): Due to the Electricity change, it'd be 60-177 Ephemeral should instead list its max DPS down to its lowest DPS. 1613-323 / 8065-1613 Obliteration should just read 500 Ephemeral and Obliteration numbers essentially won't include the downtime anymore. Runic should read 181-Infinite / 905-Infinite Technically, Runic and Vapor have caps. However, due to there being a realistic maximum number of targets alongside that it takes slowing in order to reach those benchmarks, they should stay listed as Infinite.

There's multiple reasons why every challenge on the site asks for a replay as opposed to screenshots: With that screenshot, we see how many fruit points you've gotten. However, what we don't have are the circumstances, most namely - was there intentional interest abuse involved? Additionally, it's also for anti-photoshop. I'm not accusing you of any of these, but in general, I'm skeptical to believe you managed to get 3726 fruit points on very hard (easily the highest fruit score I've seen on non-mazing). I've messed around with that same element build and have never passed 2k fruit points. I could easily be missing something of course, so if you could get a replay of that up, that'd be cool. Question, is random allowed? I had a match earlier on Insane + random and it pretty much gave me my best build, allowing me to score 3000 points. I'll post the replay up, though I don't know if random is included in this leaderboard or not.

In Wars mode, if you get a pure element, it doesn't give minerals like it says in the tooltip. I know it was debated whether pure essence should give minerals in wars mode or not, however if that change was made, the tooltip needs to be updated, or it's just a bug. By the way, I noticed that corpses no longer prevent building on top of them in maze mode, was that the result of a SC2 patch or an EleTD patch? Regarding the Runic suggestion made in the various tower balance suggestions thread, 50% damage buff is fine, but when its ability activates, the damage needs to be more than halved, probably dropped to 40%. Hail Tower feels a little weak and could use a 10% damage buff. Also, EleTD has been hovering between 8th and 10th place on EU servers, go EleTD!

After some further thought (and trying to see how these changes would look in-game), the chatbox in the bottom-left would just take up space. There's no real need for it, plus everyone is already used to the chat messages appearing in the middle for everyone. Might as well scoot the mini-map back down to where it was. As for the elements bar that's shown on the right side of the map, it's not going to fit very well. Instead, it should be placed in the top-center, between the resource info and the scoreboard (horizontally across, of course). A scoreboard just for fruit points doesn't need to exist. Another column can simply be added to the scoreboard. Something I don't really understand that's there is the "Out" on there, displaying the number of creeps alive in the area. Honestly, you can probably see this just fine through the mini-map. It's extraneous and unnecessary, so that can just be tossed. Regarding the double/triple queries, now that some room has been cleared up can actually go where the elements bar was, that is, on the right-side of the screen. Change builder model should probably be here as well. And instead of these being horizontal boxes, they should be vertical and stem down from the bottom of the scoreboard. If those end up crowding things too much, there's still some free space on the build menu, which I'm sure can be expanded a little bit.

Compilation of things for the next patch. From what I've gathered, this is mostly bug fixes and tower updates. Top of the list, this NEEDS to be fixed - https://forums.eletd.com/index.php?/topic/3407-game-breaking-bug-player-leaves-in-team/ To fix the current wars mode still, support towers need to send creeps. Stale, composite creeps for these should be fine. That said, towers need to say what type of creep they send. For Race, could you make it so that All Random, Same Random, and -random actually work for it? It'd be cool if you could up your own difficulty for it too. Extreme Mode Since Insane difficulty has taken the wave timers away, it's time for Extreme Mode to be absolutely absurd and potentially impossible on Insane difficulty (don't know if it is or not, guess we'll see). Back to 50 lives. Wave timers are in accordance to your difficulty. When a wave finishes spawning creeps, the countdown timer for the next wave starts. This becomes an endless stream of creeps. Every 5 waves, when you get an element the break time is increased by 15 seconds from what it is now. Due to bugginess that is rematch when attempting to switch between modes, the settings should end up being exactly the same as previously and should thus skip the voting screens. Some tower balance suggestions - https://forums.eletd.com/index.php?/topic/3410-various-tower-suggestions/ Celerity should reeeaaally auto-target farthest creep. Might need to potentially drop its DPS by no more than 10%, but as of now, without manually targeting (24-7 clickfest), its DPS is getting halved if not more. I don't know how the UI overhaul update is going, but I imagine that'll be a later patch. A new Wars mode is still in the theory-crafting stage that's at least months down the road.

More Quark Tower How much damage does a Quark Tower do in total? I decided to see how many times the orbs hit the creeps given optimal positioning (center of the top-left peninsula, 10 range), and the creeps are hit by a total of 10 times. Each orb does 30 damage, so that makes a total of 300 damage to the creeps. Now, if you look at the creeps, it takes till wave 21 for it to survive that (162 * 2 = 324). The only reason it doesn't solo that far is due to the wave line-up and creep abilities that happen to prevent it from doing so. Now why are Atom Towers mediocre in the late-game, especially against fruits? Well, 300 * 25 is 7,500. With an optimal build of having it Foundry buffed and with a Supernova and Invocation, that would be 7,500 * 1.9 * 1.3 / 0.7 = 26464 damage. That's in the most optimal position. Wave 1 Fruits have (127,048 * 2 = 254,096) hp. One tower knocking out a tenth of the wave's hp, that doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, keep in mind that total damage amount is over a period of time. Most other Level 3 dual-element towers can do the same if not far better in half the time. It is to a smaller amount of creeps, but you're usually able to cluster them enough through slowing that it ends up outdoing Atom by a longshot. Also, that's only wave 1 of the fruits. Not to mention the limited optimal positioning with the Atom tower, dropping its total damage output by a bit depending on its location. I decided to an Excel sheet comparing the damage output of the current Quark Tower and the suggested idea listed above (the stacking debuff). Attached is the file, and it contains two pages - the first one is without slowing (can hit a maximum of 10 times). This is (in a nutshell) what it shows. At one cuil Quark Tower, the old one does a maximum of 300 damage, whereas the new one does a maximum of 195 damage, effectively only 66% of the strength. At four Quark Towers, the new one passes up the old tower. In reality, it's probably equal. The damages on both are skewed due to lack of optimal positioning. The more towers added, it's probably skewed about 20-25% higher on the old tower and 25-30% on the new version. At ten Quark Towers, the new one is double the strength of the old tower. Again, skewing, but it'd still be roughly 80% stronger. To get ten Quark Towers, of course, it'd take a considerable amount of money and investment, something only reasonably possible really in the late-game (at this point, referring to Atom towers). The second page in the Excel sheet is with a supernova tower helping slow everything, allowing for a maximum of hitting the target 14 times. At one Quark Tower, the old one does a maximum of the 420 damage, while the new one does a maximum of 301 damage. So it starts at 70% of the strength, which is fine, because even in the mid-game, the tower still felt too strong. At three Quark Towers, the new one passes up the old tower. Due to damage skewing, it's probably equal. At seven Quark Towers, the new one is twice the strength of the old tower. Damage skewing would make it probably 80% stronger. At ten Quark Towers, the new one is (with damage skewing) no more than triple the strength of the old tower. In theory, this should fix the Quark Tower considerably, making it not so busted and interest abusable in the early game, not as overpowered in the mid-game, and genuinely viable in the late-game. Ice Tower Just did a damage check, it's completely inferior to Mildew tower, buff its damage please, and so the explosion can actually hit something, drop its range to 10. Yes, it's 44 DPS in a line. Mildew says 27 DPS, but if it fires in a line just like Ice Tower, that amount is doubled to 52 DPS. Mildew Tower To make Mildew more original, what it could do is as it passes through each target, it successively does more damage (that way, slowing genuinely helps it). This is currently what Electricity has, but the suggested change to Electricity reverses it, so applying what Electricity currently has to Mildew would be pretty awesome. Its base damage would need to be lowered some. Quark Tower.xlsx

Quark Tower: Currently, the quark tower has the issue that it's stupidly strong early (to the point where its damage literally needs to be halved), but in the lategame, it's very meh, and if its damage was halved, it'd suck. There's triple-element damage towers that do this, but it takes 1500 minerals to build them. Quark is currently an early game tower with nearly the power of a triple-element tower at only the cost of 500 minerals. It is straight up stupidly powerful, and you get stupid amounts of interest gain. Now Quark has the same problem as Electricity tower - they both scale great with the dual support towers, but the triple support towers don't do nearly as much for them, namely the slowing towers. So if we were to give Quark a new ability (still AoE area damage tower, be it the orbs or the old version), it'd be something that might get some decent scaling from slowing towers. Here's my suggestion: First, halve its damage. It genuinely needs to be halved in order for it to not be broken in the early game. Quark Tower now causes an infinitely stacking debuff on creeps. When an orb hits a creep, the next Quark Tower orb to hit that creep will do 1 extra damage, then 2 extra damage, and so on and so forth. If a creep hasn't been hit by a Quark Tower in 3 seconds, this wears off. This has to be flat damage rather than percentage damage, or else Quark Towers will affect Electron and Atom Towers at the same level of scaling. As you can tell, the more Quark Towers you have, the more this stacks and the faster this stacks. Quite frankly, this isn't any worse than Infrared tower, which also infinitely stacks and exponentially scales with itself. The previous weaknesses of the tower stay - mechanical and undead. It does make it a bit better against healing. It does have a new weakness however - it hits creeps on the back end a lot better than the front end. This is a new idea in general for towers; no other tower hits like this. Originally, I was going to suggest that Quark Towers just have an infinitely scaling damage buff on themselves (borrowing from WC3 version) so long as they keep firing, but that would make them busted on Wars mode, even if that damage buff had a cap (in which case, it might as well just have a flat damage). I think the debuff suggestion would be better anyways. For Electron, the flat damage is 5, 10, 15 etc. and for Atom, it's 25, 50, 75, etc. EDIT: Thought about it again, it hits creeps evenly, ignore that strike through part. Electricity Tower: Just reverse how it works. It starts at the high damage point and then drops 20% on each bounce. So the new numbers would be: Starting Damage (100%) - 60 First Bounce (80%) - 48 Second Bounce (60%) - 38 Third Bounce (40%) - 31 Total DPS hitting maximum number of targets - 177 This should help the tower out considerably. If it still feels weak, then there's the crazy suggestion that it drops by a percentage based on the distance between creeps. Dunno how I feel about that. Runic Tower: Know how Vapor's base damage is higher than the aftershock damage? Same thing should be applied here. Runic has the issue that early-game, it's not all that viable (especially by itself), because its standard attack is pretty crappy, and it's only good when activates its ability (for 3 seconds). Once you get slowing towers (namely two level 2 slowing towers), the exponential damage scaling from its ability is stupidly high. Increase its base damage by 50%. Gives the tower some purpose outside of its ability. When it activates its ability, its damage is halved (75% of what it is now). Makes its ability not scale anywhere nearly as bad. Something else that's been bugging me is the overlap between Mildew and Ice Tower. Since Ice Tower is a more original idea, I vote that Mildew Tower gets a rework of some sort. Not sure what exactly, though it should fulfill a similar purpose to what it currently does (line-drive damage that's good at weakening).

I'm really liking this mockup. That said, here's some suggestions that should help optimize the EleTD experience, in coordination with that mockup. Interest: Since interest can't be upgraded and is a flat 2%, instead of showing your interest rate, this should show how many minerals you'll get on your next interest. If you hover your mouse over this though, a help box will appear saying that you get a 2% interest rate. Listed to the right side of it is the timer. Or rather, it could say "## minerals in ## seconds", the first two ## being how much you'll get, the second ## being the countdown timer. Listed below this will show you how many minerals you've gotten total from interest. This should help players A LOT. Elements: Similar to League or Dota, when you get a new element, the icon for both the amount of upgrade points you have and the elements you already have should flash. People are attracted to flashy and shiny things. Build Menu: On your builder, you always have to select 'Build' in order to reach the menu of base towers you can build. This should instead always be visible. Likewise, if you're selecting a tower, it'll show all available upgrades here, along with the sell button. For change builder model, this will be on the selection info for the builder itself. Help Menus: All of the help menus that were on the builder would instead be buttons. On the mockup there, between where the build menu is and the elements, all of the help menus would be right there. Element Query - Doesn't need to exist anymore due to your elements being shown on the screen anyways. Dual Element Towers - By clicking on the dual towers, it expands into a horizontal box, with an icon for every dual tower. The ones you don't have will be grayed out. When you hover over one, it'll show you the cost and info of it, just like normal when you're figuring out what to upgrade to normally. If you click it, this allows you to straight up build that tower without having to upgrade all the way to it. Naturally, the build time will be equal to what it takes to upgrade all the way to there. Triple Element Towers - Same thing A note on both of these build menus - the horizontal length of each should not extend past the build menu. It should stay contained just above the bottom-right side of the screen still. Selection Info: When you select a tower, since every tower model is the same, the unit icon (you know, the green/yellow/red depending on its health) might as well not exist, unless each tower is getting custom icons. In this case, it should be situated on the left side of the info box, just how it is currently. Regarding the icon, a suggestion to show the damage type would be to color the icon in accordance to the damage type. Hovering over THIS would show what it's good against and bad against. All damage info would be visible without having to hover over it. Total DPS, attack damage, attack speed, range, and AoE. This is in the middle. On the right side would be the tower's effect, shown without having to hover over it. It would list the name of the effect, icon, and a QUICK description. Below it, if there's any icons, (ex, flood tower, change AoE/attack speed), that's where it'd be. Alternatively, it could be as it is now, description is done by hovering over the icon. If there's cluttering issues in the UI, especially given all the damage info, then yes, I'd say just keep it as is it now, except now in the bottom-right of the selection info. Hero Mode: When selecting the hero, all upgrades are shown in the bottom right (where the build/upgrade menu is) without having to click into a menu. Selection info will show (in the middle) all damage info, just like a tower. On the right side of the hero will be a list of icons, showing its upgrades and abilities. Hovering over each icon would, of course, detail its description. Current Round and Next Round: This should show both element type and special ability, both as icons. Same for next round. The timer before the next wave starts should be somewhere in here. Control groups would still be listed exactly where they are currently, above the selection info. Hotkeys need to be maintained on the build menu and the selection info. Regarding the current Wars mode, only two edits I'd make would be removing that current/next round on the side, and in the selection info, not only should it list the cooldown, it should list the type of creep it's spawning at everyone else. Regarding a future wars mode, there may need to be a different interface for it - not the bottom and right sides of the screen, but the left and top sides might need reworking.

Great changes to Wars, feels MUCH better now. However, support towers need to send creeps now. Imagine this situation - 1v1, sending creeps to each other... one person has mostly support towers and is banking on only a handful of damage towers. He's only sending a few creeps to the opponent, meaning his opponent doesn't get much gold. I suppose that means he's banking on interest, but I doubt it'll be able to keep up with the difference in creeps sent.

8-player game w/ teams on, one of the players leaves. The creeps don't spawn for the remaining player for the rest of the game. Twill get a replay up when the match is done. EDIT: Replay is up. Team mode, game break.SC2Replay

Regarding upgrades - the reason I'd use terrazine for upgrades as opposed to minerals is because... if it's minerals, those upgrades will be really hard to get early game, but super easy late game. Terrazine would make it easier to balance that out. But, I have a new suggestion, one that uhh... upgrade center won't be necessary. There'll probably be enough death without it as is. It's a combination of several ideas. Creeps come in waves. Prior to the start of a creep wave, you can design the creeps you want to send (that is, Element + Type). These creeps will hit everyone except yourself. You then select how many you want to send. As each wave progresses, the cost to send a creep increases. The value of each creep will be higher than the cost to send it - that way, the game forcibly progresses in both strength over time and minerals over time. The maximum number of creeps you can send per wave is based on the number of players. Okay, so you're probably thinking "Well, all I have to do is not send creeps, and my enemies don't get any money because of that." Here's the catch - the player that sends the least number of creeps each wave loses lives equal to the number of players. Eight player game, someone doesn't send any creeps initially, they lose 8 lives. Two player game, whoever is sending less creeps will lose 2 lives every time. If there's a tie, say for example in an eight-player game, if two people only send 1 creep and the rest send more, then both of those people loses 8 lives each. Anyone sending that maximum creep cap would be safe. Not sure how I feel on that idea, but uhh... there it is. Someone pillage it and see if it's decent. If not, got one more idea in the back.

I'm currently using Brave, personally fond of the dark theme. However, with both Brave and Deviant, the color of "Development Leader" is clashing with the background badly and is both unreadable and painful to look at.

Looked at it briefly earlier on my laptop, I like the dark theme. Feels a lot more modern, and the new logo at the top is really nice. On my phone now, and the phone version seems much better than before. Can actually click on the buttons rather than old microscopic view. Though I can't seem to view the shoutbox from my phone. twill check it out more after class. EDIT: Okay, I stand corrected, where's the shoutbox in general? Is it completely gone?