0rb3r

Wow, amazing work Cisz, great. This is my Image summary fo duals: Trickery - needs brainstorm on skill balancing. The tower fits. Quantum - needs brainstorm on concept, tower name and model. The tower does not fit. Gunpowder - needs brainstorm on concept, tower name and model. The tower does not fit. Hydro - the attack type looks weird, it should be water on attack, earth on skill. Flame - needs brainstorm on tower model, the rest fits All other towers are ok. This is my balancing summary: Trickery - needs brainstorm on skill balancing. Well & Blacksmith - should affect all towers. All other towers are ok. Coincidences: You wrote down excelent almost all issues I saw. Differences: I included hydros attack type as not fitting, I didnt included life, it is imo not that ugly but not 100% as well, I wouldnt mind a change. To the questions: Q: Is Ice, Electricity, Life, Poison, Death, Kindle, Hydro & Flame balanced? A: I think so, once Kindle is armor affected and deals slightly more damage compensatively. Q: Do we have a racing build? A: Dunno, im not a racer, it is anyway harder to rush due to new classif. Q: Does life look ugly? A: Not specially, no. In general I don't like efects as "buildings". Same goes for Flame. So, it is not that bad but I would'nt mind if it is changed to buildings, totems or units which fit more in a building role. Q:Is long range a ballance problem? A: I think it is. Not for singles, but for more commonly used duals and triples. Q: Armour-Ignoring? A: If Armour ignoring can be axed it should be it. No tower should be AI for balancing and Esthetic purposes.

I would be against that. You are correct that most of the players choose to play middle and extreme difficulties, not much choose the actual Easy and Hard difficulties. But I think it is important to keep a good scaled difference on the difficulties. In example, if I, as an average player think that I dominate the game enough on Normal I will go for Hard and not for Very Hard. If we remove the Hard difficulty I would be too good to play Normal and suck on VH (which is pretty close to my situation now, after so much testing Normal is becoming too easy for me). Specially now on 4.0 there are big differences from Normal to VH, and I think its important to keep this in-between step. Curiously on bnet I see often people hosting games forcing VH and dying before or on midgame. The much more interesting question would be why somebody hosts VH if he already would be bussy on Hard. Many answers are possible. Maybe they just want to see other players die. Dunno, but I tip it is some kind of "roof" effect (take the hardest possible). The easy difficulty is a different story, I never needed it. If I think back to my first games I think to remember to have stepped directly from VE to Normal. So, I dont care about easy but keep H & VH as they are now.

er, jolin012, maybe small misunderstanding *maybe*. If "fast" would have to start after 35 secs the "timer on leak"-thing would be poinless. But that brings me to an idea. It is interesting on solo because it simulates a bit a multi game, on multiplayer it helps pros on making preassure on easier difficulties. This mode is just a bit faster then normal. The more you slow the sooner you have to kill the creeps. You may have to choose between slowing creeps or building a 2-pass on average & slow locations It is damn faster then normal and on multiplayer it forces to build on as fast locations as the fastest killer. It tops extreme for solo players giving you as well a 40 secs countdown on the wave, if you slow you need to kill much faster; on multiplayer it would be about the same like "Extreme" with the exception that if all players take longer than 40 secs to clean the timer starts anyway. Does this sound better then before?

I don't. When do I use Tower query? In most cases i remember my elements and thus my duals, as they are pretty easy to remember. I want to know which triples I can build. When I click tower query I only memorize the names of the triple towers, nothing else, I repeat, only the names. If there is one i'm interested in, and dont remember the elements its made of, or I click again tq or I go F9. In some cases I get a bit lost but in those cases I watch top right part of my area and watch which elements i got first before I do anything else. Now let's say you or any other player is unable to remember his duals and what they do, or what triples do. In case 1, "don't remember my duals", you would do the same then I do with triples. In case 2, "don't got a plan what towers do", even if you triple the time the text stays you wouldn't be able to read all details, then your adress is F9. Now what I am suggesting is that, If you are unable to read the names with the actual text speed (which could happen to anybody else as well), instead of simply incresing the time the text stays (which would bother in certain situations), we should cut the list in 2 parts, one dual-query and one triple-query, with the text staying double of the time. As the list is shorter now, the time your screen is texted should be about the same and you have more time to read as well. Everybody happy.

I got a better idea. (I hope so) Give the builder 4 passive skills on the second line: 1 has an icon of the letters "ve" or "e" or "n" or "h" or "vh" Skill description: Your difficulty is ........ (shortcut), and list of settings 1 has an icon of the letters "p" or "ar" or "sr" or "tr" Skill description: Your element spawning is ........ (shortcut), and list of settings 1 has an icon of the letters "n", "sh", "cm",... Skill description: Your gamemode is ........ (shortcut), and list settings And one last icon that shows the gamespeed. Done this way after maximum of 3 games everybody will remember, the icons shouldnt be too hart to do as well and shouldnt have much impact on filesize.

What are you talking about 13est. Do you mean that you almost beated Extreme+ "timer on leak" on b6? Or that you almost beated Extreme without "timer on leak" on other betas? Because if it was on b6 like my suggested "heartstopping mode" we could add an aditional rule . If you take longer then 35 secs. to clear your wave the next wave starts right away.

The thing is, if you have to kill the elementals you get plenty of time to think about your strategy, point 1; and, point 2, everybody should immediately realize what the thing is about, even if the host is not mentioning anywhere that he will choose short mode. It is much easier to figure out then expecting some crappy wolves coming and dying nearby immediately because you dont know short mode. It's a more noob-friendly setting what i am purposing. And besides, I dont think that those 30 secs are so bothersome compared with the 12 minutes it would take to finish the first 15 waves. Just my thoughts.

I mostly just read the names of the towers and then go F9 or do it a second time if it is necessary, which isnt happening often. I think increasing the time you have the tower list on the screen is a bad idea. Normally you are under preassure when you click Tower query, if the text stays longer it would bother me more then anything else. If it is too fast and you think about increasing the text durance then I would highly suggest to make the Duals and the Triples in 2 separated lists, one Dual-Query and one Triple Query. Both can stay then a bit longer and the information would be more specialised. I mostly am just interested is knowing the triples anyway, duals are just too easy to remember.

Am I the only one that felt that his destiny was on the edge at reading that? @topic: If somebody is to dumb to find "any key" he is to dumb to play. Remove that "press any key" story, if somebody goes to toilet while waiting the 15 secs this game needs to be loaded, it's his own fault. @Mapdescription & Loading screen: Well, the description and some other minor cosmetics should be revised before going public, I agree. But i prefer to have ppl reading something while they wait to start the game instead of just watching a nice loadingscreen. Maybe the best would be to combine both, nice loadingscreen with a wide area to read.

Er, I'm not sure if its the issue here, but... when you try to play solo and you are not Player1, blue, you can't play (or was there a bug? can't remember) due to option menus. Is it necesary to force solowers to play as Player1?

@Short mode 3: Now that you mention it, it really sounds like a good thing to axe element towers and start on amplified towers right away. It is pretty bothersome to upgrade them all the time to get duals and triples and (excepting earth maybe), they are just playable for a very short amount of waves. Good idea. @Trickery: It's clear that we remove mana always when possible, and that trickery has to transform into the tower, not copying it. What if: Trickery would set the duration as a ratio (Triquery value/Transformed value)*constant duration. Like: Trickery Lvl1 cost 500, 12 secs constant, can transform into: Elemental Arrow/Cannon for (500/162)*12= 37 secs durationLvl1 Dual Element for (500/500)*12= 12 secs duration Lvl1 Triple Element for (500/1517)*12= 3,9 secs duration Lvl2 Dual Element for (500/2000)*12= 3 secs duration Lvl2 Triple Element for (500/6068)*12= 0,9 secs duration Lvl3 Dual Element for (500/8000)*12= 0,75 secs Single Element pure (500/20502)*12= 0,3 secs Trickery Lvl2/3 cost 2000/8000, 12 secs constant, can transform into: Elemental Arrow/Cannon for 148/592 secs durationLvl1 Dual Element for 48/192 secs duration Lvl1 Triple Element for 15/63 secs duration Lvl2 Dual Element for 12/48 secs duration Lvl2 Triple Element for 3,9/15,8 secs duration Lvl3 Dual Element for 3/12 secs Single Element pure 1,2/4,7 secs That should do the trick. Cd/mana could be 20 secs. In case you missclick you can use the sell button and get mana/cd back depending on how long the skill has been used (if you copy a cannon for a total of 148 secs but sell after 74 secs, still remaining 50% of the time, you get 50% of the mana back). I would anyway prefer that the skill would be used to set which tower you want to copy as soon as trickery attacks rather then have to use manually this skill each wave. Specially if you own many trickerys. Just showing some channeling graphics of which trickery is set to which tower. That whould automatize much work of the clickwork.

Sorry sancdar and echinodermata, it was a bit late when I wrote that and misread. Thanks for correcting me out.

@jolin012: Hmm, good point. A VH player could post on 7 and rush, Didn't thought about that. 12 secs switch duration should make it about equal fast to rebuild or to switch. But if you missclicked and then have to switch it would be no benefit at all . @echinerodata:"equal cost multiple upgrade paths". I dont get that. It would be a skill like a upgrade with 0 cost and 12 secs building time. It wouldn't cost more to create a fire arrow tower directly then to create a water arrow tower and then upgrade to a fire arrow tower. The upgrade from a lvl2 dual to a lvl2 triple was removed because on 3.0 upgrading this way was more expensive then goin from a lvl1 triple to a lvl2 triple. I don't see the problem.

After countless testing I finally found the 4 element Black Sheep. There are actually 3 builds of 4 el. that own no slow and no reducers. FWEN DLWN DLEF On FWEN you can go Quaker + Zeal (vs. Nature), supported by Blacksmith & Well. gg. On DLWN you go on Tidal + Hail (vs. Darkness) and Drowning to catch, backup with Well. fine. On DLEF, you sit on your chair hoping that Flamethrower, Laser, Jinx and Gold do enough damage to survive the next round, and not overrun your magic dead end and make you laugh when Blacksmith is casted. Thus, I would like to nominate DLEF for the Black sheep award of 4 element builds. Balancing issue: Buff Flamethrower & Jinx. Comments?

It should follow the following pace: set gold to 1000, set interest to 0% or interest counter to stick 10 secs dead time spawn element1 on death 10 secs timer spawn element2 on death 10 secs timer spawn element3 on death 20 secs timer set interest to actual or start the interest counter start wave 16. I just dont like that you don't have to kill the elementals and that you don't have time to organize your build according to what you got. Thoughts anybody?

I think the important thing is that blacksmith sinergizes well with its correspondent triples. It synergizes good with with gold and flamethrower where kills count, excellent with quaker and single earth as splashers, and just average with zeal. But of course if I had to choose between supporting a quaker with more damage or more speed, speed is way better. Blacksmith is imo a good supporter, but well is way better. I find a good place for both in builds, so I don't mind if one is better than the other.

More then 8 players? Er, well... The problem is that the maximum of allowed players is 12, right now the spawns are controlled by 4 pc players to improve the performance of the game, each 2 human players get their spawns from a different pc player. If you watch on the minimap during a multiplayer game you'll see that the spawns have 4 different colors (brown, grey,...). So there is no more reason than to keep a good performance and reduce clumping and lagging. 10 human players would mean only 2 pc players, no idea what consequences exactly it would have but they are supposed to be bad . I think there is no other reason than this. About the bigmac alien assault at the end, we had actually a bunch of interesting ideas to change it and ... whoosh, we ended up again avoiding our beloved earth being conquered by redheaded freaks. No idea why. Maybe Karawasa can clarify why we are still shooting at childs on wave 61. Dunno.

It is not, think about how often you get 5 elements on random but don't get enough of them up to level 2 to get good tier2 triples. You depend absolutely on supports like slow and armor reducers. Btw, changing AoE slow % to 20/35 sounds pretty decent to me, I'm not convinced that max slow cap really needs to be increased to 70% but it sounds alltogether like a good purposal.

I like the actual settings for armor types. I handle composite waves as like mechs and undead waves, I always prepare for them. It makes the game challenging. I play atm on normal difficulty, so I can imagine that VH must be a real b_._._._ right now. I think that it is good as well that the effect stacks composite+mech like sandcar exposes, its the "spend all you got or die"-wave. I just fear a bit that 80% of the players out there do not prepare for the upcoming wave, it's hard to say in advance how the acceptance will be of these implementations. Actually I hoped some of the new testers would say something about.

We are mostly balancing the game on VH and Normal difficulties, towers with AI deal on easy difficulties the same damage, that is, less then expected. As long as easy difficulties remain it there is not a problem. We should be just careful on towers supposed to be main damagers. So, atm it is more a cosmetic issue than anything else. I prefer elemental damage then direct damage. I just insist that the tooltips should be colored with the damage type the spell does to leave things clear from the very start. More noobfriendly as well.

You are right at this point, but its a balancing try worth. We have 4 main slowers, Roots, Sludge, Storm and Nova. On 5 element builds you can combine 3 slow-triple types to reach max slow, so the first tiers should add together 66%, max slow. On 4 element builds you can mostly build 2 lvl2 slow triples excepting the case is that the elements you miss are L+D or any of them, in which case you get Well and Blacksmith to compensate. 2 lvl2 Triples with slow should add 66% max slow. I exclude 3 element builds as they are rare and mostly not focused on support but more on single damage and duals. I'm getting to the point; I think, even if it may sounds a bit weird, that the values for tier 1/2 of slowing triples should be 22% slow and 33% slow. First to encourage building many and secondly because it gets closer to game practice and less to pure mathematics. The actual 40% slow is too much for a lvl2 triple, just think how valuable windstorm is for its price. Quoting your calculations: (1 - 1/[1-0,22]) = 28% more damage on 22% slow --> cost 1517 gold (1 - 1/[1-0,33]) = 51% more damage on 33% slow --> cost 6068 gold (1 - 1/[1-0,44]) = 79% more damage on 44% slow (2 lvl1 triples) --> cost 3034 gold (1 - 1/[1-0,66]) = 200% more damage on 66% slow (3 lvl1 triples, 2lvl2 triples) maximum. --> cost 4551, 12136 gold Now, bearing in mind that the towers do damage as well as they have slow, and that the damage is about 5x higher on lvl2 triples (1x tier1 triple= 1 damage value, 1x tier2 triple= 5 damage value): 1 lvl1 triple: (cost 1517 gold/(1,28*1 damage value))= 1185 inverted efficiency per gold (the lower the better) 1 lvl2 triple: (cost 6068 gold/(1,51*5 damage value))= 803 inverted efficiency per gold 2 lvl1 triples: (cost 3034 gold/(1,79*2 damage value))= 847 inverted efficiency per gold 3 lvl1 triples: (cost 4551 gold/(3*3 damage value))= 505 inverted efficiency per gold 2 lvl2 triples: (cost 12136 gold/(3*10 damage value))= 404 inverted efficiency per gold This value is just indicative for mentioned towers soloing, so, extra towers make more slow builds greatly more efficient then above stated ratio comparing i.ex. 1 lvl1 triple and 2 lvl2 triples, but it shows that the values i purpose for slow% are pretty fair comparing it to invested money. Here a real table of the armor strenth token on beta 7: Armor --> Damage%0 --> 0% 3 --> -15% 6 --> -26% 9 --> -35% 12 --> -42% 15 --> -47% 0 --> 0% -3 --> 15% -6 --> 26% -9 --> 35% -12 --> 42% -15 --> 47% The problem is that the basic Wc3 formula makes the % of reduction increase, lower the higher the armor points are, so that a 100% reduction can only be reached on infinite armor points. If you watch closely on the list, you'll realize that -3 armor benefits hugely VE players and does not benefit much VH Players. If i remember correctly this formula can be changed in the editor, and it should be changed to be something like this: Armor --> Damage%0 --> 0% 3 --> -10% 6 --> -20% 9 --> -30% 12 --> -40% 15 --> -50% 30 --> -100% The armor reduction would be this way not be affected by difficulty and thus provide always a same damage increase. So, comparing it to the values of extra damage of slow for tier1/tier2 (28% extra damage on 22% slow, 51% extra damage on 33% slow), if this change is applied, corrosion tower should be -9/-15 armor for having the same extra damage which is 30%/50% (and -15/-25 armor for enchantment which is 66% stronger then corrosion). I think the fact that a tier 1 triple combined with a tier 2 triple is already enough to reach the top is a bad thing, specially knowing that the difference on extra damage is very high over 46% slow (85% extra damage) up to 66% (200% extra damage). Your calculations gave me the best reason to insist that it needs to be nerved, specially to reach top slow. Making it necessary to have 2 tier2 tripples to reach the top makes the game much better under the light of the facts.

Yep, these are really not bad specs. Ok, your pc is not brandnew but is that pc really that old? I would have tons of parts for an older pc than yours, you maybe just need a good graphic card, which is the only thing I dont have extra. Shipping would be troublesome anyways from europe. Good luck on your search.

Good point, i mostly dont use lvl3 duals, hmm... I think the main problem actually with the lvl3 duals is their exorbitant price, reducing it would be a good balancing change, they are just too expensive for the fact that they dont have an aoe. Corrosion/Hydrochloric should have -3/-9 armor reduction and Enchantment/Incantation should have -5/-15 armor. I think that the difference between lvl1 and lvl2 of these triples is just too high. Doubling armor like you purposed would make the the lvl1 triples pretty worthless (the difference on a creep having 30 armor and 27 armor after being hit by a corrosion tower would be how much? 5% less damage reduction?), i think it's more correct this way (quoted: -9 Armor means about a 30% less armor reduction, receiving 60% more damage). Nerfing a bit triples slow and the damage of lvl3 duals sounds good to me, the actual windstorm and supernova are a bit imba atm. And Voodoo/Witchcraft needs a buff, maybe 30%/60% extra damage should be equal to the new slow value of triples (quoted: 30% slow means 60% more time spent getting attacked) and a small buff on aoe (2 voodoos should be enough to maledict all creeps). This way all should fit in all corners.

Again creeps wont spawn at wave 60, preceeding wave was not classified, no idea what it is this time. Replay: http://rapidshare.com/files/80758518/No ... 8.w3g.html

I would like to suggest that we make the extreme mode selection on 3 different levels. Normal - Fast - Timer starts upon leaking with an adjustment of +1/+2/+3/+4/+5 seconds for the difficulty of the player & only the shortest between rounds delay will be applied on multiplayer games Extreme - Increased creep speed & All between round delays are set to 0 (the way it is now, the "Gipface" mode) Extreme fast - Timer starts upon leaking, Increased creep speed, all delays set to 0 (basically its extreme mode with timer starts on leak). The heartstopping mode. I am suggesting it because i think we could try to save the timer on leak thing as a mode and with the actual configs both things would primarily affect the game speed.