WindStrike

Ehh, reasoning behind Poison Tower rework was so that A, it was no longer an over-glorified Cannon Tower, and B... why would a tower has a Powershot be a Poison Tower of all things? So yeah, that's a tower that'll be getting tweaked for sure, lol. And yes, we shall totally add scanner sweep, complete with Terran voiceovers- I mean what?

Yeah, at the moment, challenge mode doesn't affect your score or bounty. Reason being that's technically in beta on this patch while I try to figure out what all the most busted combos are, and once I do, I'm going to be implementing a static wave order instead of forcefully randomized, and that'll get its own leaderboard, which'll be for 1.9. In the meantime, it's just a fun mode that amps up the difficulty of the game.

Obliteration is actually a buff. Without slows, it goes from hitting 1 to 5 targets (min to max), to 3 to 7 targets. Regarding the renames, that was in preparation for a later content release.

In an attempt to make a lot of towers suck less and make some high tier towers suck slightly more, we bring you Patch 1.8, which, courtesies of hitting 1 Million Subscribers, we decided to go ahead and add a new mode to the game. Here's the patch notes: New Features Challenge Mode has been added! Every wave has two, randomized abilities. However, abilities of the same kind don't stack. For example, things you'll see includes "Undead + Healing, Speed + Shield, Regen + Bulky, etc." You won't see "Healing + Healing, Bulky + Bulky, Regen Regen, etc." Elemental Bosses now have one, randomized ability. It can only be one of the following: Shield, Speed, Regen, or Temporal This mode is possible on Insane, but incredibly difficult, so for those looking for a greater challenge than simply Insane without having to deal with the bullcrap of Rush, try this mode out! You can now buy 1 Lumber, but it's got a restriction: Costs 1 Essence Requires at least three Level 3 Elements This can only be purchased once. In other words, 3-3-3-3 and 3-3-3-2-1 are now viable builds. Chaos Mode now replaces all blank waves with Bulky Waves. Bugs Fixed Pure Essence not being purchaseable while having one of each element. Fixed a bug where if you had Autoattack set to off, and you micro'd a tower, the tower would stop attacking forever. Co-Op Base HP reduced from 65 to 50. HP Scaling is now a flat x1.18 per wave, instead of being split into multiple scalings. Overall, the game is easier at all stages of the game. Express Base Gold increased from 500 to 600. Base HP increased from 150 to 200. HP Scaling decreased from x1.304 to x1.295 per wave. Scoring Insane Difficulty score multiplier increased from x4 to x4.5 The max speed bonus per wave has been reduced from 90% to 60%. The endgame speed bonus multiplier has been reduced from 2 to 1.5 Creeps Icefrog HP Scaling increased from x1.2 per wave to x1.3 per wave. Vengeance debuff duration increased from 6 seconds to 7 seconds. AoE debuff increased from 250 to 300. Shield cooldown reduced from 8 seconds to 7 seconds. Basic Towers Cannon range increased from 550 to 700 Fire range increased from 550 to 700 Water ability changed. It now fires a focused attack, dealing full damage in 200 AoE on its attacks. Earth ability changed. It now fires a very wide splash attack with 225/450 AoE. Damage increased from 35 / 245 / 1720 / 17200 to 50 / 350 / 2500 / 25000 Nature damage reduced from 75 / 525 / 3700 / 37000 to 70 / 490 / 3400 / 34000 Dual Towers Blacksmith / Well / Trickery damage reduced from 800 / 4000 / 20000 to 700 / 3500 / 17500 Ice AoE altered from 150 to 450, to 200 to 400. Damage reduced from 200 / 1000 / 5000 to 180 / 900 / 4500 Quark renamed to Atom. Damage increased from 225 / 1125 / 5625 to 300 / 1500 / 7500. Damage increase per stack reduced from 15% to 12%. Poison ability altered. Old: Every 4th attack deals x3 damage and has 150/300 AoE New: Every 4th attack has 400/800 AoE Disease damage increased from 70 / 350 / 1750 to 90 / 450 / 2250 Electricity ability now increases damage per bounce instead of decreasing. New stats: Damage: 180 / 900 / 4500 BAT: 1.5 Damage Increase per bounce: 20% Bounce Range: 225 Bounce Range Decrease per bounce: 25% Max Bounces: 7 Life ability altered. Old: Every 6 / 5 / 4 kills, you gain a life. The number of kills needed per life is doubled when you have at least 50 lives. New: Every 8 / 6 / 4 kills, you gain a life. When you're at 50 lives (100 for coop), it gains a 30% damage increase. Damage increased from 420 / 2100 / 10500 to 500 / 2500 / 12500 Moss range increased from 550 to 700. Damage decreased from 200 / 1000 / 5000 to 170 / 850 / 4250 Hydro renamed to Geyser Triple Towers Jinx effect reduced from 6% / 18% to 5% / 15% Erosion renamed to Corrosion. Damage per second reduced from 140 / 700 to 110 / 550. Effect reduced from 12% / 36% to 11% / 33% Polar effect reduced from 12% / 36% to 11% / 33% Enchantment renamed to Incantation. Damage reduced from 575 / 2875 to 550 / 2750. Max effect reduced from 15% / 45% to 13% / 39% Nova damage increased from 275 / 1375 to 300 / 1500 Roots damage per second reduced from 110 / 550 to 90 / 450; however, it now applies a damage tick when the debuff hits. Laser damage decreased from 6000 / 30000 to 5500 / 27500 Obliteration AoE increased from 50 to 400, up to 150 to 450. Damage decreased from 1200 / 6000 to 1100 / 5500 Flooding damage per second increased from 160 / 800 to 200 / 1000; however, duration reduced from 5 to 4 seconds. Total damage is about the same, but creeps should take more of the damage. Haste BAT altered from 1 to 0.66. BAT decrease per attack altered from 0.05 per attack to 0.03 per attack. Base DPS is better, Max DPS is slightly higher, and it winds up faster. Flamethrower damage increased from 500 / 2250 (woops) to 600 / 3000 Ephemeral minimum damage increased from 30% to 40% Gold damage increased from 5000 / 25000 to 5500 / 27500. Effect increased from 25% / 35% to 30% / 40% Quake range and ability range increased from 550 to 700. Damage increased from 900 / 4500 to 1500 / 7500. Ability damage decreased from 600 / 3000 to 500 / 2500. Patch is live!

Recently, Element Tower Defense has reached a landmark: we have 1 Million Subscribers, which is insanely awesome. We'd like to thank everyone that's played the game and gave feedback (be it suggestions or hatemail), and we're working on a patch celebrating that, which'll apply more than just a bunch of balance stuff, including a new mode. This is thanks back to you all. Cheers, folks!

I have seen that done, it took a score that was close to number 1 a little while ago, but didn't make top. Other ways will be made viable, though not necessarily with "buffing everything that sucks". I got another solution that I'mma try out in testing - nerfing everything that's TOO good, otherwise the difficulty of the game effectively gets lowered..... for the fifth time, and then I'd do something to jump it back up again, so it'd be a repetitive process. We can also tweak scoring, it's not necessarily a finalized system, it seemed to do better than the last scoring system (aka, 200k+ gold builds floored everything else), but there's a number of debatable issues with it still. I'm definitely going to be tweaking the speed score multipliers, some of those are... a little too high. For a very small percentage of the players, it's about score, which is a system that was arbitrarily created in order make more factors other than just frog kills, aka speed, networth, clean bonus, etc. as actual factors, hence there's some things we can do about balancing around score, but basing the game's balance entirely around score might as well have us axe everything but the frog waves. You know what, that sounds like a mode idea we could add later - 100k networth, 11 element picks, as much set-up time as you want, and then once your defense is up, hit go to see how well you fare against the frog waves, lol. Dunno if we'll actually do it. Hmm, I guess while I'm at it, bump all the other 550 range towers up so that 700 is the lowest range. Miiiight make Quake a little too strong, but given it's apparently on the weak end and can only go in a handful of locations, I guess that's not too bad.

Hmm, on one hand, I could do a mass buff, but I'm not sure that would achieve anything other than making Insane really easy. Didn't used to be that way, at one point, 3-ele and 4-ele dominated everything, then 1.5 flipped it around, and while 3-ele and 4-ele aren't bad per se, they could be better. Fixing this will be really tricky, applying a mass of big changes will obviously change the meta, but it could easily make this issue worse. On the contrary, in co-op mode, dual-elements are arguably better than tri-elements, though part of that involves the dual support core and gold efficiency issues. I'm not too worried about actual co-op balance. Oh, I always saw it as a bruiser tower, just grab one, don't use it for actual kills, just have it damage things down and stick it on a double pass. But yeah, it's still underwhelming, despite attempts to buff it back. I'll start small. Probably going to do more than just damage tweaks, and yeah, projectile speed needs to go up. Not every tower is intended as a "damage tower", aka spam it to win. A lot of them work better prior to frogs (ie Impulse), some of them that are iffy throughout the whole game are, once supported, considered best for frogs (runic being at the top of this list). Straight buffing every tower that "sucks" for frogs will break the game. Haste Tower always sucked for frogs, but at one point it was godly for clearing the standard waves. I'm really not sure how to fix this overall issue, or heck, if it even fixable without a complete rewrite to the balance structure of the game (which is incredibly difficult and not really my worry, because before that, we need more content, not infinite balance tweaks). And admittedly, disease straight up needs a buff, lol. Super iffy on buffing ephemeral though due to its high early-mid game power.

We're actually rollin' a balance patch in the next few days, twas gonna consult the forums for feedback, and you pretty much just commented on every tower I needed to check on, lol. Thanks a lot! Probably won't be applying the consecutive hit thingy on gold tower and instead just gonna try to bump damage up some more, maaaaybe effect a bit. I'm very reluctant to increase its attack speed while maintaining DPS, cause it'd pretty much run into Life Tower's issue where it last hits everything so you don't actually care about its damage, so long as you get 30% extra bounty per wave. Fire tower, gonna make it consistent with upgrades and just go increased damage per wave, so just gonna increase its damage for now. There's a change down-the-road that'll help out fire tower, but it's gonna be another month or so before it's in. Water tower, heard someone else complaining about it sucking, bumpin' the damage up. Earth tower, I was worried it was too low, but wanted to wait till I got more feedback, and now I do, so thank ye. I've actually heard ephemeral is really good, rather than spamming the tower, you just have one or two to weaken the herd, and use it in combination with Disease or Laser Tower and it works really well, done it mahself. Haste, on the other hand, gonna revisit that tower, it's been non-existent ever since it got nerfed post-rush builds. Quake, it's at 550 range right now, twill buff its damage up some moar. As for "all non-support duals" getting damage buffs, that's a little tricky to deal with, cause straight buffing them severely affects early game balance. I could attempt to go back to the x6 scaling on the balance, though that'd also mean something like 6.5k gold tier 3s, lol. They'd be hilariously amazing and even harder to tech rush, which might be a good thing, but arguably too big of a change. Before I attempt this again, I'mma partially revert one of the previous changes that super buffed all the triple support towers, that should naturally nerf 6-ele.

You talking going to 12+ element picks? Not happening, because regardless of the means to get to 12 element picks, only the following three builds would ever be used: 2-2-2-2-2-2 3-3-2-2-2 3-3-3-3 Nothing else would be remotely viable. And allowing picks to go over that arguably isn't worth it, unless you can reach 3-3-3-3-3-3, in which case that's the only build anyone ever builds. Gold tower is in a weird spot. It's seemingly not that powerful, but if used right, it can get really stupid. Bump its damage too high, and regardless of its effect amount, you might as well live off these towers, cause you'll get more gold regardless. Bump its effect too high, and regardless of its damage, with decent support and placement, this thing is waaaaaaay too powerful (see Warcraft 3 & Starcraft 2 versions of the tower, aka The Abuse Tower). I dunno what to do with this tower, honestly.

Hmm, we actually don't have an indicator for either. Well, technically we do for game clear time via the time at the top of the screen's UI where the day/night cycle is listed, but yeah, it shouldn't hurt to add both anyways. Twill have it added for next patch, which should be out in the next few days.

New Score Thread has been posted here, should explain things a whole lot better than this one. Unpinning this one.

(I apologize for taking so long to get this up, part of it was due to constant changes) How the heck Scoring works: Each creep is worth (Wave # + 5) score. So Wave 1 Creeps are worth 6 Score each. That said, each wave is worth ([Wave # + 5] * 30). So Wave 1 is worth 180 Score total. For Express, it's worth (Wave # + 3) score. So Wave 1 is worth 120 Score total. When you finish clearing a wave, you receive a set of multiplier bonuses: Clean Finish If no creeps leaked during the wave, your score is multiplied by x1.3 Speed Bonus From the time the wave finishes spawning, should you clear them as fast as possible, you can get a multiplied of x1.9 For each second past that point, the multiplier is reduced by 0.03. After 30 Seconds, the multiplier is down to x1 After 63.3 Seconds, the multiplier is down to x0 Technically, it can go lower; however, you cannot get negative score, so regardless of whether this goes to a negative multiplier or not, 0 Score is the lowest you can get on any wave. Difficulty Bonus If you're on any Difficulty higher than Normal, you get a multiplier: Hard - x2 Very Hard - x3 Insane - x4 For next version, this multiplier is jumping up to x4.5 Calculations: Total Score = Score * Clean Finish * Speed Bonus * Difficulty Bonus When you clear Wave 55 (or Wave 30 on Express), you then receive another set of bonuses. Networth Bonus For every 2 Networth you have, you gain 1 Score. Endspeed Bonus This is a multiplicative bonus based on a set number. Here's the formulas listed, based on Minutes. Classic: ([(45 / Your Time) - 1] * 2) + 1 Express: ([(20 / Your Time) - 1] * 2) + 1 For example, if your clear time is 40 Minutes: 45 / 40 = 1.125 - 1 = 0.125 * 2 = 0.25 + 1 = 1.25 Multiplier is x1.25 Calculations End Score = (Score + Networth Bonus) * Endspeed Bonus If you're on Classic, you have the endless Icefrog Waves. Here's how their scoring works: Each Icefrog is worth 200 Score. The first wave is worth 200 * 30, so 6000 Score. However, the score of each Icefrog increases by 50 Score each wave. So the first five waves are worth: 200 * 30 = 6000 250 * 30 = 7500 300 * 30 = 9000 350 * 30 = 10500 400 * 300 = 12000 And so on and so forth. In the end, your total Score just adds on top of previous End Score. I do not have spreadsheets for this, but wah-lah, that's how Score works!

It's not disconnected players only? Whoops, that's a mistake, lol. Had it removed cause everyone's networth was the same (unless you went on a selling spree in all pck). We could add it back, though rather than having it listed for each person in the scoreboard, what we could do is add it back at the top of the scoreboard, above everyone's names. Yeah, we were intending on changing it back with next patch. It was mainly a publicity thingy. Should be up within the next few days, after which hopefully that helps fix the situation on it.

Huh, now that you mention it, that has been bugging me, I just wasn't fully aware of it cause my playstyle has me building towers far apart so I rarely run into the issue. Twill try adding something like a 300 build range next patch. Thanks for letting us know!

Actually, it should be equal to the normal game, just split up over everyone. Normal game = 30 creeps for 1 player. Co-op = 120 creeps for 4 players. 120 / 4 = 30 creeps per player. Though, in terms of interest, it tends to be less than the standard game. It was intentionally designed to be more lanes than players, or else it'd just turn into "everyone has obvious designated zones". Which, it's kinda the case here still, so on that part, we didn't quite achieve the goal. Regarding "pub is pure suicide", we had a version of co-op in the SC2 version of the game, and playing pub was pure suicide there. Testing of this mode in this version seemed to prove otherwise, though then again, none of said tests were "pubs". I'm not too surprised about "pub players" just massing their towers everywhere, cause that's what they do anyways in the standard version. Ahh, I was afraid this might happen. Now that the game is more about everyone working together, the standard dota community of flaming anyone they think is "n00b" or "holding them back" is starting to show itself here. This isn't exactly fixable, that's a fault of the dota community in general... and every competitive community out there, ie battle.net, league, counter-strike, etc. In my playtesting, long-ranged towers work better initially, but once they stop killing fast and they're not able to cross-cover cause their DPS output isn't high enough just to kill their own lane they're covering, they fall off pretty badly. Whereas short-medium range towers, in the longrun, do end up better than the long-range towers. Of course, pubs are naturally inclined to go long range, I'm not the slightest bit surprised by that. Personally, I haven't really tried pubs out yet, been busy trying to work on up-and-coming features, but I'll be sure to give it a few goes and see how it goes. I'm not gonna be surprised if co-op isn't popular in terms of leaderboard playing, but I'm not too bothered by that, because the majority of the players don't play for the leaderboard. Though, if the difficulty is indeed that bad, twill see about tweaking the difficulty next patch. I dunno, it's really hard to balance because if you have the support cores together (Blacksmith 3, Well 3, and Trickery 3), it changes the balance of the game, but until the point you reach even one of them, the creeps can't be too strong, but at the same time, once you start getting them, the game scaling has to go up or else it's a complete joke. Something I'm considering applying is instead of just a flat hp increase on higher difficulties, it also alters hp scaling, so the lower difficulties don't scale nearly as high and don't require that support core.

Patch is live!

It's gonna take probably a rework of some kind to actually fix the tower. Can't just straight bump the numbers up without making it blatantly OP early. It'll probably come same that Life Tower gets a rewor- I mean, wha? *hides*

This patch brings a few balance tweaks, but ultimately, it brings something much more awesome: Co-op Mode! It brings a new mega map that supports up to 4 players, where waves of enemies spawn from all directions. Teamwork is necessary to survive and beat the game, unless you're playing by yourself, in which case, I do not guarantee it's possible to win any higher than Normal difficulty. Anyhow, here's the patch notes: Co-op By default, when you select to play Element TD, it now selects Co-op Mode. If you want to play the standard game, change the map from ELEMENT_TD_COOP to ELEMENT_TD. You start with higher Gold, 2 Elements, & 100 Lives. There are only 50 Waves of creeps. There are 6 Spawns scattered around the map, each one spawning 20 Creeps. The lanes all converge in the middle, where the portal for creep leaks is. The Wave Order is always random (aka, Chaos Mode). All the no-ability waves have been replaced by Bulky Creeps, which have double health, spawn slower, spawn half the amount, and leak twice as many lives. Gold & Interest are split evenly between everyone. Lives & Score are shared. Modes Due to lag reasons, there is no Rush Mode available for Co-op. Due to pointlessness, there is no Same Random available for Co-op. Due to insanity, there is no Express Mode available for Co-op, though we may add this back later for hilarity. Balance Fire damage increased from 18 / 126 / 880 / 8800 to 20 / 140 / 980 / 9800. Blaze damage increased from 6 / 42 / 300 / 3000 to 8 / 56 / 400 / 4000 Nature damage increased from 70 / 490 / 3430 / 34300 to 75 / 525 / 3700 / 37000 Electricity bounce range reduction altered from 33% per bounce to 30% per bounce Tidal range increased from 700 to 900. However, damage decreased from 600 / 3000 to 500 / 2500, and maximum damage reduced from 1800 / 9000 to 1550 / 7750. Yes, it finally got nerfed. Tier 3 Duals had their Gold Costs decreased from 5000 to 4750. Patch is live!

Yep! Heck, you can even play it 1 player........ not that I recommend it cause it's complete and utter suicide, but it's playable (can't guarantee 1-player is actually beatable on any higher than normal). Tryin' to aim for release this weekend!

Whelp, this thread changed from "fix chaos" to 'fix towers", lol. Nah, tis cool. Things I'm getting in general from the playerbase over the last week or so: Apparently, despite all charts saying otherwise, Fire Tower is still too weak. Likewise, Nature Tower is also a little weak. Somehow. Tidal Tower is finally getting a nerfbat for sure next patch. Sorry folks, we know everyone loves it, but it's a tad bit too strong. Electricity still needs a bloody buff, probably gonna tweak its bounce range reduction. Tier 3 Dual Towers cost needs to go down some more. Blind Chaos is so tempting, man I've been wanting to do this for a while, I just wasn't sure anyone else was! In theory, luck actually ends up becoming the winning factor of Element TD, because say you've got this super refined build, and then you play Random + Chaos later and you just so happen to get that build and then you get the ultimate score of all time (which happened to me once for the Starcraft 2 version). There's nothing stopping that except sticking Random on its own leaderboard, which I actually don't know if that's still being done or not, but even then, Chaos has a chance to be lucky for you, in which case we could theoretically do a Chaos leaderboard, which would make the folks programming the leaderboard cry in a corner for all the ridiculous variations. Honestly, the best we can do to fix that is just patching the game up more and more so that as many builds become viable as possible so that luck is less of a factor, which is the point of every balance patch, though as every balance patch has proved, not necessarily the result. However, from the next patch on, our focus is going to be shifting from constantly balancing the game to content releases, because for a lot of people, Element TD has gotten kinda stale. Yeah, it's a refined game, but you can only replay it so much. So, we'll still be listening to feedback and analyzing shenanigans to balance the game, but balance patches are going to be a lot less frequent, unless there's something super broken that needs fixing ASAP.

Nah, this is actually intended. I recall this question popped up in development on the temporal creep, and we made the decision then to allow it to leak twice if it happens to be killed at that point.

We used to have a different donation system, but in order to switch to the passes, we had to drop it. Supposedly, there's a possibility of different tiered passes/rewards in the future, but between us not having anything to offer with regards to that (yet) and still requiring confirmation from valve, can't really say if that's happening.

Blind Chaos Mode has been suggested before (by none other than the evil me!), though it might be considered a little too cruel. Well, usually the only ones that pick chaos anyways are the more hardcore players, and it would be more hectic as a means of "just for fun". Twill look into it for next balance patch, which might happen the same time as co-op, dunno for sure. 4-element builds have always been versatile and supposed to be able to cover a lot of things... except certain builds, like Fire + Nature + Light + Dark which is almost entirely dark. Not sure if that's something I'd want to even fix anyways.

We've got a co-op hero mode in concept planning, not positive it'll be confirmed, but regardless, it'll probably involve having to make a new map, which takes our mapper quite a bit of time. In order to have as little development downtime as possible, after co-op, we'll get to work on that alt tower feature that we promised a while back, while in the meantime, ironing out that concept design and having our mapper work on it while the alt tower feature is being done. That way, by the time the alt tower feature is done and releases, we can immediately get to work on the hero mode. Ideally, we're trying to go for monthly content patches every month. Whether we have the time, ideas, and support to pull that off though is another story.

And this is why I had the original intention that once you switched, it'd be a permanent switch. I dunno honestly, right now I'm more focused on getting tower ideas up. I can see it being really fun and hectic if the cooldown was short like 15 seconds, allowing you to, for the most part, freely switch back and forth between them, especially on the co-op mode of doom (seriously, that bullcrap is hard), though yeah we'd have to do something like "upon switching, remove all buffs" to prevent that kinda shenaniganery.