WindStrike

Is it the one where you get the element so fast that the free elements don't even register, such that your second element actually ends up free? I've run into it a few times myself recently.

Greetings and welcome to the first patch primarily developed by the new Lead Developer of the Dota 2 version, GoatAss, assisted by DogBollocks and myself. Here's the changelogo! General Endgame Speed Score Bonus multiplier increased from x1.5 to x1.55 Random formula altered a bit to try and shut out "bad combos" better Fixed some old tooltip errors with Geyser & Quake Towers Water increased from 65 / 455 / 3200 / 32000 to 70 / 490 / 3300 / 33000 Laser AoE detection threshold decreased from 400 to 100. Runic damage increased from 1300 / 6500 / 20000 to 1500 / 7500 / 22500 Obliteration damage increased from 1600 / 8000 / 26000 to 1800 / 9000 / 30000. AoE increased from 150-300 to 200-400 Flamethrower damage increased from 360 / 1800 / 5400 to 400 / 2000 / 6000. Napalm damage decreased from 200 / 1000 / 3000 to 180 / 900 / 2700 Quake now also shaves off a portion of creeps' Current HP on each shockwave. Tier 1: 2% Tier 2: 4% Tier 3: 6% Tier 3 Nova damage increased from 4500 to 6000 Tier 3 Roots damage increased from 1500 to 2500 Slowing Towers rescaled: Tier 1: Increased from 10% to 12% Tier 2: Decreased from 30% to 28% Tier 3: Decreased from 60% to 52% Patch is live!

That last one was... weird. It didn't say it was sandbox, but at the same time, I ran calculations on it, and the absolute highest he should've gotten, given the difficulty, time, and number of frog waves killed, should've been 600k to 700k.

I'd check out how he did it, except custom game replays don't work ever since they overhauled the end-game screen, and I've not run into this myself in testing. Twill attempt to look into it though, thanks for the heads up! EDIT: It's a database error, the game is sandbox, it shouldn't have even passed through. Twill get that fixed on the database side.

Probably twill be Patch 1.15, so after this next one, we'll work on it. I'll tell you this much though, it's..... not going to have this little bug that happened on the frog waves...

It's incomplete. As it is now, it's in its "lazy form". Hopefully within the next month, we can finish it up. It's actually supposed to be even harder. Twill apply a score multiplier with it as well. The idea of the mode isn't scoring off of beating as fast as possible and beating up some frog waves. It's just "can you even beat it?". It's meant for the most elite of players. We're considering making it so that it has its own leaderboard, since its purpose is a different style of challenge.

Oh, hotfix to fix scoreboard and some bug with Flamethrower's Napalm being applied twice.

Annnd over a month later, we're back! Sorry for the delay on new patches folks, we're in a bit of a transition period as we have a new person leading balance/development, most of the staff of the game are too busy to do more than quick updates, etc. The patch actually would've taken longer, buuut a recent Dota 2 patch broke the game and we had to release this earlier than intended. Just a note, Tooltips are not updated yet, we had to rush this out. Anywho, here you go! Bug Fixes Fixed the "towers don't do damage to creeps" bug introduced by the Battlepass Patch. Fixed the lack of particles when selling towers. Scoring Speed is back, baby! Base Time for clearing Classic Mode decreased from 45 Minutes to 40 Minutes. Base Time for clearing Short Mode decreased from 35 Minutes to 30 Minutes. Endspeed Score Multiplier for both Classic & Short Modes increased from 1.25 to 1.5 Balance Tier 3 Slows nerfed from 70% to 60% Life maximum lives reduced from 75 to 70. Likewise on Co-op, it's been reduced from 150 to 140. Disease formula has been altered to... some formula that's rather complex. Nutshell, it's waaaay more exponential than before. If it starts shooting something at 20% health or less, it'll be dead soon. 10% or less, it might as well be an instant kill. Disease damage increased from 100 / 500 / 2500 to 140 / 700 / 3500 Note, this change is not in yet, it'll be in w/ the Tooltips within the next day. Vapor reworked! Old: Hits all creeps in range, then for each creep hit, it set off a secondary shockwave around that creep with lesser AoE. Given that's equated to somewhere over 100 calculations per hit, it was laggy as heck, and also impossible to balance. New: Hits all creeps in range. For each creep within its range, its damage is increased by a flat amount. Ability Damage decreased from 30 / 150 / 750 to 25 / 125 / 625 Flamethrower Napalm now has a duration of 15 Seconds. Additionally, all stacks refresh their duration if hit by another Flamethrower Tower. Flamethrower Napalm damage reduced from 240 / 1200 / 3600 to 200 / 1000 / 3000 That's it for this patch! From here on out, we'll have new patches ideally every 3 weeks, give or take a bit. Next one might be sooner, if nothing else, to finish the remaining shenanigans from this patch and possibly tweak scoring a tick more.

They're designed to be roughly equal to each other. In terms of sheer DPS, Pure Towers are better than everything else, hence why they're limited. I can't say which are considered best; I personally love Pure Dark Towers as finishers, though that's just me. It's a matter of builds and playstyles.

My guess is that ever since replays broke, rankings broke along with it. I'll poke around and see what the issue is. Maybe we can fix it, or maybe we're stuck and have to wait for El Volvo.

First we start getting unexplainable amounts of games dropping for seemingly no reason, and now replays don't work. These aren't the first problems we've had in attempting to work on this game either. As Califax says, we can't do crap about it.

Can't do anything about it, the issue is on valve's end and doesn't apply to just us.

Bosses don't give you gold. Killing bosses gives you elements. If you're referring to the icefrog waves at the end, those intentionally don't give gold as they're meant to test your ultimate defense and how long it holds up.

Odds are, it was luck moreso than perfect choice. As much as random seemingly loves to give out "crappy combos" (at least, from a scoring perspective), every now and then it can give you exactly the elements you want and need. I've had a few games of that myself across the Starcraft 2 & Dota 2 versions. Regarding "lumber to pure essence", that's a feature, instead of getting a new element or upgrading an element, you can get another pure essence choice instead. In random mode, as long as you have at least a Level 3 Element or one of every element, it has the chance to random buying a pure essence as well.

Interest bonus was by far the most broken thing in existence. Even at 0.5% upgrade, you could easily get a bonus 100k networth off of it. It also kept screwing up random a ton, hence why it was removed and probably never coming back. Okay, here's the breakdown of attempting to balancing via 3-3-3-3: Let's say we nerf all the Tier 3 slows & damage amps. 3-3-3-3 becomes balanced... but what about attempting to use 3-3-3-2-1 or 3-3-3-2 + an extra pure? All the combos that involve using that one Tier 3 slow or damage amp becomes useless, because you're not able to get a Level 3 Blacksmith, Well, or Trickery, which at that point is far better than a Tier 3 Slow or Amp. Okay, let's say we try making the 12th element pick cost 2 essences instead of one. Then go with your suggestion of buffing pure towers even more. I suppose... maybe, just maybe this could work, but those pure towers would need to be buffed a lot to be brought up to par, and they're already really powerful. Buffing them more to match 3-3-3-3 would probably, more than anything, invalidate just about all your other non-support towers. Alright, let's try nerfing Level 3 Blacksmith/Well/Trickery Towers. Well, if they're nerfed anymore than they're at, 2-2-2-2-2-1 will come back to dominate the scene. Honestly, under the current balance structure, there is a limit to strategies this game. It's literally all about maximum synergy and supports. I don't think anyone can, for example, beat the game on Insane without using any support towers. For newcomers, that's the primary reason they die, because they don't know what is and isn't a support tower, so they just spam random things and hope it works. Then eventually, they find the power of the support towers, start doing really really good, and then eventually, once you play the game enough, you realize just how important those core supports are, thus invalidating any build that doesn't maximize supports and/or stupid amounts of interest abuse. In a nutshell, as long as we attempt to maintain the current overall balance structure of the game, it has serious limits on what we can add to expand it while still keeping it balanced. I would consider trying to overhaul the balance structure to make it more malleable to additions, except that would take a ton of work (at minimum, months), plus I don't even have a new balance structure on-hand that would be better. I am in the process of designing one to be theoretically used sometime in the future, but... that's a very long ways off. Sorry man.

With the 12th element, many, many more combinations are completely invalid for scoring. 3-3-3-3 was the only way to score high; everything else was thrown out the window. As it is right now, I'm aware a 3-element + 2 pures has taken top spot, I'm not surprised. If anything, Tier 3 slows are probably getting nerfed next patch cause they're quite noticeably too strong. We're aiming to make a balanced game here, not a broken one where customization playstyle is invalidated by clearly superior combos that are impossible to balance.

Yeah, I ran into that bug a few days ago on accident. It worked w/ a Level 3 & a Level 1, buuut as of the recent Patch 1.12, that bug is fixed.

Kay, now that we've had our share of the fun of 3-3-3-3 dominating the leaderboards, it's time to fix that and actually go back to evaluating balance. No new features this patch; however, two serious abuses are fixed along with a nukebat. Aka, game is no longer as abusable. 12th Element Pick Removed The combination of Tier 3 Triple Element Towers + 12th Element Pick is impossible to balance, so between the two, we're keeping Tier 3 Triples as it allows far more viable builds than 12th Element Pick, plus its existence feels a lot more natural. I'm pretty sure everyone that didn't play for leaderboards didn't even know 12th Element Pick existed. Slow Abuse Bug Fixed Previously, if you put a Level 3 Slowing Tower up, and then just a little bit later, had a Level 1 Slowing Tower of the same type, it would bug the creeps into being permanently stuck at 70% Slowed. This has been fixed. In fact, I think slows respond a little better overall now. Trickery Upgrade Abuse Fixed Apparently, if you were fast enough, you could upgrade a tower, use Trickery to clone it while it's upgrading, and then cancel the upgrade, effectively giving you a free clone of the upgraded tower. This is no longer doable, because Trickery can no longer clone a tower while it's upgrading. Minor Fixes Flipped Poison Tiers 2 & 3 Cosmetics. Increased the Attack Point Animation for Incantation from 0 to 0.1, so Tier 3 (Medusa) no longer looks retarded when firing, and in general looks better at all tiers. Patch is live!

If you want to, sure. Won't help performance in all situations on mobile, but it could help for the affected builds.

You know, this might explain the cause of the camera going completely nuts when you get so many towers on screen, the game lags a ton, and then double speed and then attempt to zoom in or out.... maybe the input at x2 isn't able to properly comprehend the intended input, and that's what makes it spaz out. Twill look into it, having the zoom speed NOT do this at x2 would actually be really helpful, now that I think about it. Thanks for reporting it!

Vapor Tower is getting a changebat in the next week or so due to a combination of its performance issues and the inability to even somewhat decently calculate its average or potential DPS, thus making balancing it nearly impossible at the moment. Nutshell, it won't do secondary shockwaves anymore (primary cause of the performance issues), and instead just be a damage increase based on the number of creeps within its range. For clarification on how much a Vapor Tower is capable of lagging, let's assume it hits 15 creeps. Based on its secondary AoE search radius proc, that can trigger up to 15 more explosions, all of which can hit up to 15 creeps, based on how clumped the creeps are. Meaning the number of calculations per attack = as long as it's hitting 10 or more creeps, somewhere over 100.

Nuclear lunch detected! LET THE SKY BE FILLED WITH ENDLESS LIGHTS FROM THE HEAVENS! RAIN DOWN UPON OUR ENEMIES!

Actually, time-wise, that is doable. The leaderboard doesn't record whether or not it's Normal Length or Short Length. Now, that high of a score in that period of time..... pretty sure that part was impossible.

Lots of Cosmetics just got updated, including Tier 3 Triples.

Ah shibby, it does do that, lol. That is... weird. We'll try to have it fixed next patch, thanks for letting us know!