WindStrike

This is a relatively quick patch fix to help cover last week's big balance patch. I don't know for sure if the nerf on the endspeed score bonus is enough for Classic, I'm just taking a step, not a leap. Anyhow, here's the notes below! General Starting gold on Short Mode increased from 1600 to 1750 Elemental Boss Base HP increased from 500 / 2500 / 12500 to 600 / 3000 / 15000 Classic Endspeed Formula: Old: ([(45 Minutes / Your Time) - 1] * 1.5) + 1 New: (45 Minutes / Your Time) Express score per creep changed from (Wave + 5) to (Wave + 20) Express Endspeed Forumla: Old: ([(20 Minutes / Your Time) - 1] * 1.5) + 1 New: ([(20 Minutes / Your Time) - 1] * 0.5) + 1 I checked the calculations, Speed > Networth for high scoring still, it's just not as horribly dominant Frogs gain 80 Score each per wave, up from 40 Score Towers Basic Nature damage decreased from 70 / 490 / 3400 / 34000 to 64 / 450 / 3100 / 31000 Light ability damage decreased from 3 / 21 / 150 / 1500 to 2 / 14 / 100 / 1000 Duals Level 3 Duals gold cost reduced from 4750 to 4250 Level 3 Blacksmith / Well / Trickery gold cost increased from 4750 to 6000 Level 3 Trickery clone duration increased from 70 seconds to 75 seconds Electricity range reduced from 1150 to 900. Damage increased from 180 / 900 / 4500 to 240 / 1200 / 6000 Magic damage increased from 650 / 3250 / 16250 to 700 / 3500 / 17500 Triples Flamethrower damage increased from 320 / 1600 to 360 / 1800. Napalm damage increased from 160 / 800 to 240 / 1200. Napalm AoE reduced from 400 / 350 Haste damage increased from 1600 / 8000 to 1800 / 9000. Projectile speed increased from 900 to 1000 Obliteration AoE range decreased from 150-450 to 150-300. Damage increased from 1200 / 6000 to 1600 / 1800 Ephemeral damage decreased from 2000 / 10000 to 1800 / 9000 Runic damage increased from 1200 / 6000 to 1300 / 6500 Patch is live!

You might wanna wait a bit on the graph, there's another patch coming up within the next day, it's not as big a balance patch, but an attempt to adjust a few things in particular... Including, of course, Nature gettin' nerfed back down a bit. Hail Tower is overall a buff. It deals less damage on a focused front, but way more damage in a spread, and overall is way more consistent.

Lol, that explains a bit. Twas testing some tweaks on obliteration in ETD Test, and it was doing abnormally well against OP avenger.

Personally, my favorite spots for Haste are on the far left of 4 or the lower section of 6, so they get a decent double-pass. I still gotta run some test builds of it for latest version though.

See if it's up there now. Sometimes it can take a little while to get onto the leaderboard. If it isn't still, let us know and we'll see if thar be somethin' wrong.

Just toss it into Suggestions --> Modes. Also, at that point, what happens when you manage to blow up just one creep? Do your towers explode as well? Do all the bananas in the land reveal themselves?

It's even worse now, cause Avenger got buffed in 1.9. They're really mean now.

Pretty much. Ironically, I'm actually not fond of the interest system personally, buuut I don't intend on getting rid of it either cause then everyone will rage at me and toss me death threats and whatnot. I think I fixed it more than previous patch... but I don't know. Should someone actually beat 5 or more frog waves, I get the feeling the balance will upturn on itself and I'll have to tweak it again. Regarding haste, I'm still tweaking its balance, I know that late-game, it's about on par with various other towers, might actually still be a little weak by comparison, but early-midgame, you might be able to spam the level 1 version just because its DPS/Gold output is so ridiculously high, and because of value of wasted shots falls off from its slow projectile speed, it's arguably overpowered. I dunno, I haven't quite tried the spam tactic on it yet. Tweaking the balance on this tower is disturbingly hard. I seriously might need to break the consistency scaling to balance it.

Definitely not intended, twill be patch fixed ASAP. Twill check out ze score thingy as well. Not too surprising, most players out there in multiplayer are newer players, plus that's a genuinely strong strategy. Kinda surprised you don't sell the remaining impulse towers for Level 3 Vapors at the front, since Pure Natures pretty much outclass Level 2 Impulses in every way. Either way, kudos! Also, predicting it now - I probably overbuffed Haste and be the new standard of speed killing everything, buuuut buffbatman mode says I don't care that much purely for the sake of overbuffing everything that sucked.

Patch is live!

Sorry for the delayed release folks, there's a game breaking bug with random mode right now that's preventing us from releasing. Hopefully it'll be fixed by tonight and we can release!

Regardless of the dead time or theoretical fixes for dead time (ie, forced wave timer so that after a minute, the next wave will start no matter what. Twould also prevent trolling via the power of one leak going 50 times purely to spite everyone else), that does beg the question - how does the endspeed bonus work like that? Cause everyone waiting on everyone else means everyone's endspeed bonus = the slowest player's endspeed bonus.

Honestly, given dota version seems to be less about killing each other (unlike the players of the SC2 version) and more about top scoring, we might just make something similar to that the default. It won't make it in for 1.9, but maybe for 2.0 or something.

-WHAT 9000?! Not sure what's better... uber Hail Tower... or overdrive Haste Tower. They're both epic now.

This patch is also known as "Buff batman", for its many buff bats, man, as well as scoring alterations, a Short Mode, and a few nerfs as well. Here's the changelog below! Features Short Mode added! Starts you on Wave 16 with 1600 Gold, 4 Lumber, 10000 Score, and the endspeed score bonus is based on 35 minutes instead of 45 minutes. Random should now cause 3-element and 4-element to happen more often, 5-element about the same, and 6-element less often. Scoring Each creep on Classic has been bumped from (Wave # + 5) to (Wave # + 10) score each. Each creep on Express has been bumped from (Wave # + 3) to (Wave # + 5) score each. The per-wave speed bonus has been removed. The end-game networth bonus is now equal to your networth instead of just half of it. Each Icefrog has been bumped from 200 score to 400 score each. Each successive Icefrog wave now only jumps by 40 score each now, down from 50 score. Wave Timers Hard reduced from 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 seconds to 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 seconds Very Hard reduced from 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 seconds to 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 seconds Insane reduced from 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 seconds... to 1 second at all stages of the game. ENJOY! Creeps Healing effect reduced from 25% to 18%. However, AoE bumped from 250 to 300. Now, without slowing, it can affect up to 4 creeps, up from 2. Avenger effect AoE reduced from 300 to 250. Duration increased from 7 seconds to 10 seconds. Undead now revives creeps with 60% of their health, up from 50%. Temporal backtrack increased from 4 seconds to 5 seconds. Towers Basic Arrow damage increased from 30 / 90 to 35 / 105 Cannon damage increased from 35 / 105 to 45 / 135 Fire now switches per attack to the closest target, meaning its effect will cause much less wasted overkill damage. Earth ability reverted back to 1.7. AoE reduced from 225/450 AoE to 150/300 AoE. Delay now takes a full second to occur. Water damage increased from 55 / 385 / 2700 / 27000 to 60 / 420 / 3000 / 30000 Nature effect increased from 10% per creep to 15% per creep Darkness damage increased from 300 / 2100 / 14700 / 147000 to 330 / 2300 / 16700 / 167000 Duals Disease damage increased from 90 / 450 / 2250 to 100 / 500 / 2500 Electricity initial bounce range increased from 225 to 300 Flame damage & effect damage increased from 45 / 225 / 1125 to 50 / 250 / 1250 Geyser effect AoE increased from 250 to 300 Life Level 3 effect now only requires 2 kills per life, instead of 4 kills Magic range reduction per attack is now 50, down from 75. Max stacks increased from 12 to 16. Its minimum range is now 700, up from 600. Poison damage increased from 300 / 1500 / 7500 to 400 / 2000 / 10000 Atom damage increase per attack from 12% to 15%. However, max stacks capped at 13, down from 15. Vapor secondary shockwave AoE reduced from 450 to 350. Damage and effect damage increased from 22 / 110 / 550 to 30 / 150 / 750 Triples Incantation minimum effect increased from 5% / 15% to 6% / 18% Polar effect reduced from 11% / 33% to 10% / 27% Corrosion range increased from 700 to 900 Jinx range increased from 700 to 900 Muck range increased from 700 to 900 Flamethrower damage reduced from 600 / 3000 to 320 / 1600. Napalm damage increased from 100 / 500 to 160 / 800. Napalm AoE increased from 300 to 400 Flooding damage per second increased from 200 / 1000 to 220 / 1100 Gold effect increased from 30% / 40% to 35% / 50%, damage reduced from 5500 / 27500 to 5000 / 25000 Hail range increased from 1150 to 1500. Crit increased from x4 to x5. Damage reduced from 1000 / 5000 to 800 / 4000 Haste damage increased from 1000 / 5000 to 1600 / 8000. However, projectile speed reduced from 4000 to 900, and due to its overdrive, it can no longer be micro'd. Impulse damage increased from 4000 / 20000 to 4400 / 22000 Obliteration damage increased from 1100 / 5500 to 1200 / 6000 Patch is live!

Is there any way to fix that, cause we don't wanna just endlessly screw over anyone with less than 8GB RAM.

What's that you say? Vapor sucks and I'm reverting it to SC2 balance level which makes it blatantly OP early? Yeah, for next patch, half of it is a bunch of temporary fixes that potentially make various towers a little too strong. Everyone else on the dev team is on break, so asides from Earth tower ability reversion, everything is just gonna be numbers changes, aka everything I'm capable of doing myself as a dev, lol. Also, I found a hilarious way to make Haste Tower good without making it horribly OP early. Yay science!

Ahh, the glorious weakness of games with incredible nostalgia factor - change 'em too much, even if it's a step in a good direction, and people will rage. Things I personally wanna change but can't/won't due to the playerbase being simply too attached to something that's just an established standard: Screw interest abuse Heck, screw interest in general Remove Cannon & Arrow Towers Remove pointless first 5 waves Make it purely about the elemental towers, screw composite. Add elemental based stage hazards for the lulz Replace frog wave with more and more waves, specially designed with multiple abilities, boss creeps, etc. Make the game theoretically impossible to win, and it becomes more about how far you can get.... which might actually be what Challenge Mode ends up being. Various other shenanigans The only possible way major changes to the core game could actually happen and be justifiable to the current playerbase would be to develop an Element TD 2....... which isn't happening for a looooong time.

We can actually set up an in-game poll next to the patch notes while the game is loading. We've already got a set of things we're going to work on and add for the next big patch, and potentially for the one after that, but we could set up the poll anyways. "Why do you play Element TD? For fun For score" Something like that.

Except that this is a remake of a remake of the original. Although it's latest incarnation is relatively new, it's actually really old, and not a whole lot has been changed in that time, it's mainly be endless amounts of refining. On the contrary, refining takes waaaaaay more time in the longrun. We can release 10 patches in the next 2 weeks addressing refinements and balance, but the problem is, with a game with this much depth and complexity, hitting that ultimate level of balance where everything is viable is incredibly theoretical. It does exist, but in reality, it's a trap. I've fallen victim to trying to find this ultimate level of balance, not just in EleTD, but other games. It seems like a quick fix at first, but in order to refine this level of game, it takes a ton of analysis, theorycrafting, and testing. Aka, thousands of hours of grunt work that causes an endless loop of "hey, we fixed this, but three more things need fixing now because you change one thing, you affected a bunch of builds thereby making this or that underpowered or overpowered". Point is, we're still going to do various amounts of refining, but it takes a lot of time than you'd think. It's not simply "buff this, nerf that, game is fixed". In the meantime, as we balance the game, we're also still going to add to the game and develop it further. That sounds counterintuitive towards finding ultimate refinement, but as someone that personally knows how nearly impossible that is, I'm not aiming for that. Next patch will be buffbats! Buffbatman, that's what we'll call it.

Express mode was intended to replace this; however, because it runs off a different high score than Classic Mode, and because the first half of the game often boils down to gaining lotsa interest before the rushbat, I actually will consider adding this back. Respectively, it'd be for: Short Mode - Start Wave 11 with 3 Elements and 1000 Gold. You would also start with some amount of Score. Extra Short Mode - Start Wave 26 with 6 Elements and 6000 Gold. You would also start with some amount of Score. I gotta double-check the gold values, but yeah I could go for this mode being back.

Likewise, trying to develop for balancing the leaderboard is a pain and not really worth it. To some extent, I can drop balance patches that help fix it, but without new content, the game's playerbase is going to drop off until there's only literally "the top 10/20 of the leaderboard". Also, infinitely refining something over and over is incredibly not fun at all. I do have some balance thingies I wanna try to apply for next patch like blowing up the per-wave speed score bonus that's been screwing over all my calculations all this time (might do a 1.8.1 next week), but ultimately, most of our focus is going to be on actually adding stuff to the game, adding more ways to play, more ways for people to play for fun while also expanding the number of viable builds for leaderboard. Patches are going to be slower than the initial release rush of patches, but that's because it takes a lot of time to add these things.

I had issues tweaking with the bounce range on electricity due to issues with the engine, might've tweaked it down a little too much. That's actually what I wanted to go with, buuut the overall vote from the devbase went with x.y, so blarghity. I'll give the policy a shot next patch, which'll probably make every tower that gets buffed completely slaughter the early game without even trying, which... I guess is alright... for now.

Alrighty, twill bring Earth ability back for next version. It might help if its AoE is reduced and then damage increased. Part of the issue with having too high of an AoE is too much dependency on slows, so that should help it out. I'm actually not against the stacking slow on the Poison Tower, it's just that it gives it a partial support ability, which messes with the balance structure of the game. So, if Poison Tower gets it, then, at the very least, all the other non-support Dual Towers should get something like this... or deal hilarious amounts of sheer damage. Yes, I'm aware Life Tower technically falls under this category, but adding more than that could be very messy on balance. Odds are, this probably won't happen next patch, or heck, anytime soon.

That'd actually be pretty decent, minus the stacking slow (late-game, just yoink 10 level 1 poison towers, it don't cost that much, and you have silly amounts of slows). Instead, twould rather do some sort of on-death effect, based on the number of stacks on there or something. Won't be able to apply it for at least a week though, the devs are busy with other stuff for a little while. Plus, along with Poison Tower change, we'd probably also apply a change on Vapor to make it somewhat calculatable, and then overhaul Hydro with... something, though I got no clue what.