dg86

Can it be a water type damage please, since we already have hail for light in that same tree?

This tower sucks anyway. Considering that mildew does 40 (ewwwww) twice as compared to 25 once, it's not even close.

IMO the oblit reload time needs to be 7 seconds for manual. That is, if you want to reload it, you can, at any point, more or less. That's the entire point of rewarding micro. Not "well I just reloaded it in the middle of a cycle, but then it used its 7 shots again, oh crap!"

The drawback of splash towers is that they may very well have lower damage than the single target towers, and for the most part, lower range as well. (3 exceptions are oblit, hail, and cannon). So consider this: With a single target tower, you may leak 2 creeps. But with an AoE tower for the same cost, you leak 4 at half the health. For instance...quintessential AoE: the fire tower, vs. the quintessential single target: the light tower. Who wants to argue that the fire tower is better? It's a well known fact that the pure light tower is perhaps the single best tower in the game besides the absurd-to-get periodic tower.

Mildew being a powerhouse is a misnomer. It leaks element guardians and fire waves like crazy. If you go with water third element, jet absolutely sucks, and well is a support, not a damage tower. Unless you want to go with straight up water (which is also AoE, not good single target damage), fire will eat you all game. I don't think the 50->40 damage nerf was also warranted. The weakness to mildew is that if you're getting a support tower (either well or forge), both of your triples are really lacking. Ephemeral is just absolute trash, and earthquake despite me trying it over and over, just really has too little range to work. If it had 10 or 12 range, it might be something worth building a strategy around.

Hail would be MOAR viable if it was water type. And yes, ice is junk. So is jet.

Was that nerf to mildew really warranted? It was already nerfed from 60 to 50. But 50 to 40? I've tried EFN and always leak bosses and some fire waves. Is there some hidden imbalance to this tower I'm missing?

Anything else and you will never ever see anybody pick very hard in a multiplayer game. It's like a hidden difficulty if and only if you're playing with either A) other very hard players or B ) alone. Now if that's absolutely fine with you, sure, keep things as they are. But if it isn't, then IMO the highest difficulty sets the countdown. Hey, everyone else gets interest. And in the meantime, have adjustable base interests for the difficulty levels.

The difference between hard and very hard is day and night. I can basically get perfects on hard (no leak--well, maybe a couple) in multiplayer. But if someone rushes the front with normal difficulty, you're basically fucked with very hard difficulty no matter what the heck you do. Because on hard, you kill everything. On very hard, you end up leaking a bunch of red and orange health units. Okay, I'll put this blatantly: Since all the pubbies like to take the lowest possible difficulty level and rush the front because someone else is doing it... You should not be able to rush a higher difficulty level with a lower one. The end. Yes, I realize that if there's one very hard player, he will be able to sell all his towers at 1 creep left and get a kazillion interest. However, I have never ever ever seen this happen in any public game. So, IMO, hardest difficulty should set the timer. Because right now, the only reward a player gets for choosing a higher difficulty level than is necessary is personal satisfaction. If you want to rush someone, play the same game as they do. If you want to build in the front, you only set the timer if and only if you play on the same difficulty level as everyone else. IMO that's the only possible solution to the fact that right now, it's basically suicide to play very hard on multiplayer, and it's a difficulty reserved for single-player-at-your-own-pace games.

I don't think slow effects stack.

Never found them to be a problem. Don't know why they were nerfed to begin with.

Since when was infrared overpowered?

Never have I ever gotten enough minerals to fill up the map with triples in multiplayer. Not even close. Not even half of the map. This is a degenerate situation.

As I said in other threads, there's nothing competitive about people playing on easier difficulty levels. Those who want to compete should be playing at the highest difficulty level of players in the game. I see no reason that a VE player or two should be able to start the countdown for a VH player under almost any circumstances.

IMO that still punishes people from choosing difficulty levels above the normal, which would more or less defeat the purpose. What does it say when to test your strategy, someone does a single player game in very hard, rather than go to multiplayer?

I tried obliteration with polar tower combo and it worked fine. OB = darkness tower so its weak to light. So for light stages you either need something strong vs light or you stack up enough OB to take it out. You can also try getting more light towers Artillery are decent leak catchers, particularly against slowed waves. Pure Earth placement on an island is also decent, again especially with slows. You could go Dark3/Earth3/Light2/Nature2, getting Spike for that slow as a bonus. This should actually be very strong as it gets access to Invocation as well to boost damage. Booo! Light 3 >>>> Earth 3 so hard. Pure lights are the best pures in the game IMO and you really really REALLY do not need that artillery upgrade. Just mass a few more mortars because I believe the last light wave is low 50s, after which you can just sell your mortars anyway, buy more annihilations, and get deceits with them. 4 annis+1 deceit = 8-9 annis. This is AWESOME.

The point is simple...that odds are, with 7 players playing on very easy, odds are, less than 6 actually know what they're doing, and so the VH player will have a nice cushion of time to wait on because VEs 5-7 are leaking despite being on very easy. You get the idea. It's so that screwing up the game will be a team effort.

If it's competitive mode, it has to be one difficulty for everyone. Also, my opinion of highest difficulty has changed. See the thread in GD for my more rigorous algorithm.

loosely speaking, the middle guy to finish. we seem to be thinking alike. (not first not last) That's a simplified way of putting it. Consider this: 7 VEs and a VH. 7*1+1*5=12. In order to start the countdown, you'll need to have 6 of 8 players finish. Not 4. Big difference in some edge cases. You start to think like that when you code for a living.

Obliteration should not be the default choice. When I say too strong, I mean relatively. There was a recent tweak to creep HP that I think will alleviate some of this "I need one tower to win" type thing. The rest will come with tower balance. Well said. That's the goal. Towers like Celerity should be decent without micro but should be able to excel beyond average when used properly. This is why obliteration is the default choice: What does it have? Range. Single target damage. AoE. AND also very importantly, a fourth element that can fill out its weakness extremely well, AND give it access to all support towers (Earth--gives you dark+earth=cannon/mortar, and access to barb/spike, and evoc/invoc). So, it gets a 5/5. Range, std, aoe, dual element counterDamage on quad, dual triple-support on same quad. Point for range for 16+ range. Also, -1 for micro intensive. Compare this to other damage towers. Celerity (FNW): 1/5. Range, but not good damage or aoe, though it has good secondary damage (FW), but can't quad element to get both an amp and slow support. Micro intensive. Torrent (LNW): 1/5. Gets counter damage with LW and has aoe, but no 4th element will give it both level 3 supports. (Earth gives amp, darkness gives nothing, fire gives slow) Micro intensive. Earthquake (EFN): 3/5 AoE. Once again, poor single target damage, very mediocre range. Has access to its damage counter already in a dual tower with infrared (FN),and gets both supports with darkness. Haste (EFW): 3/5. Single target damage, mediocre range, no aoe, already has counter damage, gets both supports with 4th element darkness. Hail (DLW): 3.5/5 (I'll give it half a point for single target damage), with excellent range and good AoE, but its drawback is that if it gets counter damage from going nature, it doesn't have level 3 supports, and if it goes earth for level 3 supports, it loses counter damage. When it was water-based, this was a very close second to obliteration. Flamethrower (DFW): 3/5 exact opposite of haste. Mediocre range, aoe, but very poor single target damage. Gets access to counter damage and triple support by quad elementing into water. Wealth (EFL): 3/5 has counter damage via electricity, and has both level 3 supports via nature. Though the damage in both cases is so terrible that you're really dealing with light and fire and get counter damage via nature. Flooding (DNW): 2/5 because it gets counter damage by 4th elementing into light, but no level 3 supports. It has good single target damage, but no AoE and very mediocre range. Ephermeal (ENW): 1/5 because it gets counter damage by darkness (poison) but only slow towers (two of them, sludge and barb). At best, it has good single target damage, and that's a stretch. Its range is mediocre and its aoe is nonexistent. And to maximize its single target damage, it's micro-intensive. Laser (DEL): 3/5 because it gets access to both support towers and counter damage via nature. It has good single target damage, but mediocre range and poor aoe (I count it as focusing all the fighters at once--either way, it either has good aoe or good single target, but not both at once). Of course, if you go nature for the counter towers, this just becomes a bonus to the obliteration tower and should more or less not be built at all anyway. These scores can get even further skewed if you consider that pure light is arguably the best pure tower in the game, and that by going for pure light, you also unlock one of two elements for your level 3 2-element support tower. In short, it's not that the obliteration tower itself is so amazing. It's that the one-interest, quad DELN, max light and dark build is just an all-around amazing build because cannon (DE) is perhaps only 2nd to mildew (EN) in terms of the best damage dual-element towers, which nicely supports obliteration's weakness to light, and then on top of that, you get deceit tower and pure lights, and then all the other goodies I mentioned. It isn't obliteration alone, but that earth (and possibly fire, if you make radius a fire-type damage) can create for very well-balanced builds capable of taking down every single wave with potentially no problems. In fact, if you make radius a fire type, then DFLN might become the hands down best build in the game, focusing primarily on radius as the primary damage dealer, using obliteration for backup against water waves! So yeah, it's not just the one tower, but everything you can put around it. From what I hear, haste+flamethrower also works. I'll have to try that out.

What type of things could you do to discourage this behavior? I mean putting aside difficulty, how could we punish building in the front? Also, yes you're right. Getting the most fruit points is the only way to actually win the game. Any other scenario results in defeat. How do you discourage rushing from the front in a pub game? Think about the converse. How do you discourage someone from killing an entire wave besides 2-3 creeps, selling all of his towers, then leaking 80% of their lives but getting so much money that they never leak again? By making other players start the countdown. Let's apply this thinking in reverse. How do you stop a single player from ruining the game by building at 12 o clock in a suicidal fashion? By not giving him sole power to start the countdown. One extreme (highest difficulty level) has the degenerate situation that if only one surviving player is sitting at the top, they can do the degenerate "leak one creep x40" and farm LOL amounts of interest (so would everyone else, but the game would get very boring very fast--especially if he was building massive amounts of life/eternal towers to that point). The other extreme results in very hard not being feasible in a regular bnet game because some very easy douchebag can build fire/mildew/other AoE towers at 12 o clock and spawn kill everything, even though that would never ever fly on harder difficulty levels. So this is my proposal: assign a difficulty variable to each player (1-5 seems fair enough for VE-VH), which is 0 if they haven't finished their wave, or that value (1-5) if it is. The total of the completed variables will also be stored. So, say you have 1 very easy, 3 easy, 2 normal, 1 hard, 1 very hard, and go with my 1-5 assignment. Your total is 1*1+3*2+2*3+1*4+1*5=1+6+6+4+5=22. Now in a 1v1 competitive game, you want rushing to be a viable strategy. At the same time, you don't want to make it too easy for a couple of easy difficulty players to make playing very hard not viable. So, my solution is this: the threshold to start the countdown will be half of the total difficulty total, minus what mathematicians like to call "epsilon", and what anyone else simply says to sound smart, aka the smallest value greater than zero. In this case, we'll just say .00001. So, when enough players complete the wave to make this difficulty counter go to 11 or higher, the countdown starts. The countdown will be based off of the lowest difficulty level completed to start the countdown. So, going back to my example. Say you had all the easy/very easy players complete the wave, and 2 of the normals. That's 1+7+4=11, which starts the countdown. But what timer do you use? The very easy countdown, once again, to discourage suicide massing on any difficulty. Of course, there's also the problem of what happens for example, if there is only a very easy, an easy, and a very hard player surviving, and one player has more difficulty points than the rest of the players combined. This can potentially happen, so at that point, you'd make a case for "either the threshold is met, or all but one player has finished". From personal experience being new to the game, I don't think people build in the front out of malice or wanting to rush someone down, but because they're impatient. The faster they can kill their wave, the faster they start the next one, and the faster they kill that one, the faster they can reach the next one, and so on and so forth so they're not rushing other players, but rushing the waves so they can simply complete the game faster. What they don't seem to realize is that 12 o clock is one of the utterly worst places in the game to build your towers, because if you're having trouble with your last wave and someone starts up a new one, your 12 o clock towers will target the new wave rather than the old and you'll get absolutely hosed. So...that was a wall of text, but essentially, the idea in a nutshell is to keep from one player affecting the game in either direction--either by slowing it way down, or by speeding it way up to a point that's no good for anyone, including themselves (less interest!). So, here's some pseudocode: difficultyVectorExample<-(ve,ve,e,e,n,n,h,vh) difficultyValueExample<-new vector of numbers that takes above and substitutes ve with 1, e with 2, n with 3, h with 4, vh with 5. difficultyTotal<-sum of difficultyValueExample. waveCompletionVector<-0 for each player at start of wave, takes corresponding value when they finish their wave. completionSum<-sum of waveCompletionVector totalSurvivingPlayers<-some number (1-8) completedBooleanVector<-0 for each player at start of wave, 1 for that player once they finish completedBooleanSum<-sum of completedBooleanVector if(completionSum>=difficultyTotal/2 OR(totalSurvivingPlayers-completedBooleanSum<=1 AND there is more than one surviving player)){ ....start countdown, using countdown for the easiest difficulty in completionSum or completedPlayers #dots for indentation for if statement }

I mean jesus christ, is it so hard to understand? If you want to compete with me, then play the same game as I do! What's the point of you front-loading a crapton of towers on very easy mode and say "oh look I beat someone on very hard lawlz I'm so good". Furthermore, what constitutes as "winning"? In order to "win" this competition, wouldn't you also have to survive to the fruit of death as well? So what's the point in going with an all-in rush by building elemental towers at 12 o clock to clear as many early waves while you can, and then end up dying on the later levels anyway? I mean it seems that it's more or less impossible to survive if your build relies on only having one wave in your queue at a time and using both sides of a bunch of massed basic grenade towers and someone's building fungus towers at 12 o clock. That happened to me last game. Yeah, I died before I could get a single triple up, but said rush-the-front bastard died horribly on flame queens. After all, if nobody makes it to wave 60, everyone receives the "sorry, but nobody made it this time, better luck next time" screen. Which effectively says "you ALL suck! You ALL lose!" But that's going off on a bit of a tangent. Essentially, why is there nothing to discourage building in the front when that means certain death later on in the game, but at the same time, gives someone a ridiculous chance to rush someone who's planning on surviving to the end of the game?

Or rush them at anytime in the game... So in order to rush them, shouldn't they be playing the same difficulty as them?

Is this a joke? It just means that "if I'm going to be screwed no matter what I do by having limited damage types, I might as well get a tower that doesn't have any fancy crap on it at the cost of effectiveness".

The problem is that what's competitive about someone playing on very easy against someone playing on very hard? There's no competition there to begin with, so why would you want to punish someone for challenging themselves? Hence my assertion that only the players on the highest difficulty levels should affect the timer. If you want to compete with them, you should be playing on the same difficulty level as them, not pick a lower difficulty level and say "haha I beat you!"