dg86

What's to discuss? Hail on water = weak to dark. Weak to dark = covered by electron, focused light->amplified->pure light towers. Hail on light=weak to earth=needs a nature type source of damage to make up for its weakness like oblit has mortars. With this change, you'll be extremely weak to earth-based levels because... Light+Water=Ice=>Light damage Dark+Water=Poison=>Water Damage=no strength against Earth. Dark+Light=Trickery=>Light damage Dark+Light+Water=hail=>Light damage Now, we have several fourth element candidates: Fire: still gives no access to nature type damage. Earth: still no access to nature damage. Nature: DLNW is a terrible combo since it has no slow or amp damage combos. In short: by allowing hail to be water, you could back it up with all of your other towers which do light damage. However, by making it light, you will get utterly wrecked on earth waves.

Congratulations--you just killed the hail tower again. Water allowed you to compensate for its weakness with light towers (focused light/masquerade/laser). Now that it's a light tower, you need nature type damage to make up for it. EPIC FAIL.

Also...hail/comet needs a manual cooldown restorer ala oblit reload.

Actually the laser tower needs a massive buff in general. 55x5=255 at 1 speed 12 range compared to the obliteration tower's 400 damage at 16 range at the same rate of fire, with splash. Or the hail's 300+ damage to 3 targets at 22 range.

temporal is trash, but not exactly blitz. i'll use the lower level versions for dps comparison haste (EFW) - when it gets fully charged, it has 1- .88 attack speed, which is 200 / .12 = 1666 dps on a single target. thats basically equivalent to the seige tank tower, cz u can say it averages full damage on 3 targets, and half damage on 2 more. so 400 damage x 4. maybe a bit more. if it hits 2 more targets, or combined with slow. In any case, you can say the dps is comparable to the seige tank tower's dps, except it's focused onto a single target. it has its role and option. i dont see a problem. ephemeral (ENW) now this guy is crap. not only do u have to micro it 24/7, (and even more so b/c it has fast attack speed), but the dps is 560 / .66 = 848 maximum on a single target. im gonna be the broken record player again: if we're going to have towers the REQUIRE 24/7 micro, the dps better damn well be worth the clikcing. the dps of ephemeral should be greater than haste, since haste doesnt really require micro. if haste can achieve dps of 1666 for a good majority of the time, then the ephemeral tower should have dps of around 2000 or more. or something like that. That makes it around 1300 damage with attack speed of .66. yeah ridiculously large. but that's how it works out. Celerity and Ephemeral require constant micro, so reduce the load by makign the attack speed slower, but with stronger damage. Adding AOE would reduce the need for ridiculously high damage-per-volley, if you don't want it to be a single target specialist. Even if what you say would be true, the fact that the obliteration has that critical 4 extra range allowing the top right of the middle to shoot to the very last turn and the bottom right to hit the bottom edge means that the obliteration is much better. Not to mention that the haste has to get fully charged. I suppose that these are a bit more effectively massable since 16-22 ranged towers are only fully effective in those 8 middle tiles.

Slow towers: Spike (DEN) Mire (DEW) Plasma(FLW) Supernova(FLN) Amplification Towers Glacial(ELW) Invocation(ELN) Erosion(DFW) Hex(DFN) All 8 of these are useful for obvious raisins. Now onto the other 12: The two really awesome towers and should be the standard for damage for any triple element tower (wealth notwithstanding from what I hear): Annihilation (DLN) Comet (DLW) Both have uber AoE and a strong source of backup damage to be strong against their weakness. Now for the other 10... Flamespewer (DEF): From what I've seen of this tower, it seems to be a glorified mold tower. Basically, you need to get it to hit a long line of mobs to come anywhere near the annihilation or comet tower's damage output, and considering you need 38 stacks of napalm = 8 shots on one mob to get 2000 damage (one shot of an annihilation tower's damage), it seems to be a very hit-or-miss mass-and-set-off-chain-reaction type of tower. Phasor (DEL): DELN and DELW give you this guy as a bonus. Make no mistake, it's as terrible as they come. Here's the math: 225x5=1375 at 12 range on a single target tower. Even if you doubled it, it would barely outdo the annihilation tower on one target, and with a critical 4 range lower! Considering that Mortar towers are so amazing as backups for annihilation though, I suppose it's worth it to quad element DELN despite DEL sucking. Odds are that fire would be a better support for the comet than earth though. Orbit (DEF): Doesn't exist yet. I am hoping it'll be on par with annihilation and comet. In my opinion, it should be light based damage. Drowning (DNW): Instant kill tower, meaning either you instant-kill entire waves or you die horribly. Looking at the fact that it's a damage-dependent tower, that makes the instant kill effect redundant, meaning this tower is junk. Wealth (EFL): Money money money! From what I hear, you can mass enough of these things to be able to fill your entire field with level 3 duals and level 2 triples. In all seriousness though, this tower has three amazing duals with atom/potential/factory, and seems to be a solid triple element tower on its own as well. Once again, couple with water or nature and you'll get both types of triple-element supports. The issue is that unlike DELN or DELW that you lose out on access to pure light or the level 3 dual element support. Seism (EFN): This is an aoe tower with short range. Why use a short range tower when you can get a long range aoe tower like comet or annihilation? Blitz (EFW): Single target, short range. TRASH. Temporal (ENW): Copy paste that last line here too. Velocity (FNW): A refined Darkness does about the same DPS with no micro, and using only 3 elemental summons instead of 6. Tsunami (LNW): See Seism. Except this one requires micro on top of that.

Hmmm...leaked a couple of reapers and a commando before fruits and got 23 kills on hard in a multiplayer game. Had like 40k I forgot to spend though >.< Overall, it seems they're about equal considering the range. However, IMO, the deceit is the worst of the 3 support towers because of the issue of placement. In that it might instead place towers in a bad position when the other two support towers simply make your good position tower even better. Also, hail/comet is a water type, not a light type--and I certainly prefer to keep it that way (just change the tooltip and tower description). That said, for an equal duration of firing time, the obliteration tower is still far better than the hail when you factor slows in, because level 2 slows can cause 3-4 mobs to step right on top of one another, making the annihilation tower hit 4+ targets at once easily.

Honestly it seems this strategy would fail pretty miserably because you'd have very little in the way of killing bosses and fire waves. What difficulty were you playing on?

For the TLDR people: Mold+Pure Light = profit.

The idea is that u have to micro it. it's essentially the same as celerity tower, with a different way of requiring micro. both towers should be buffed. the temporal tower, unlike the celerity tower can be placed in such a way that it will automatically change targets almost always. It's short range makes this possible. but the celerity tower is total junk cz you can't even do that (thanks to huge range), and perfect micro is barely on par with level 2 dark tower, which only takes 2 elements. I'm not sure where you can place a celerity tower to always change targets. That said, I think you're forgetting about range. For instance, a light tower has less damage than a dark tower in any stretch of the imagination. However, it has far more range.

Can't watch replays. They crash SC2.

Single target crap range with decreasing damage. This tower is absolute junk. A single mold tower hitting two targets does more damage.

Nerf occurred. It's 400 dmg instead of 500 now.

Oblit already got nerfed.

Maybe increase range to 22? or remove the cooldown period for the tower? When only comparing hail vs obliteration. Hail = 100/0.31 on 3 targets Obliteration = 400/second on 1 target with splash. Let see the math here.. ~300/second x 2/3 = 200 damage a second vs 3 targets for hail 400/second x 7/9 = ~311 damage a second vs 1 target with splash Looks fair to me lol. Only downside to hail is that it doesn't have a manual cooldown like the tank does. The damage is pretty even assuming auto cd for both and tank only hitting 2 targets while hail is hitting 3. This is exactly where your assumption breaks down. Ever seen what happens when you combine tank with a spike tower? Those annihilation towers are hitting 5+ targets easily. IMO the best solution here would be to give hail/comet a slight splash to hit overlapping targets such as if you'd manage to slow like 5+ on top of the same spot with a mire tower, for example.

I'll take a look tomorrow, is there a changelog somewhere? Check the versions at bottom of forums.

Not sure if I agree with you but here goes... Dark Light Nature: Annihilation. Probably the single best non-pure tower in the game, no questions asked. Dark Light Water: Comet. Wannabe annihilation. Fails miserably. Dark Light Fire: Orbit. Doesn't exist. IMO should be a long range aoe fire type. Dark Light Earth: Phaser. Really really meh. I suppose it's decent light damage, which isn't anything to get angry over. Now let's go down the rest of the list. Slow towers--obviously useful in all cases: Supernova (FLN) Plasma (FLW) Spike (DEN) Mire (DEW) Okay, 8 down, 12 to go. Amp towers--all more or less do the same thing, all are pretty useful: Corrosion (DFW) Invocation (ELN) Glacial (ELW) 11 down, 9 to go Short range aoe towers--I don't understand why you'd ever want a short range AoE when you can get more damage from massing obliteration towers: Tsunami (LNW)--this one just sucks like hell because you need to micro its ability and get it once in a blue moon. Sorry, but no bueno. Seism (EFN)--short range, low regular damage, and entirely dependent upon triggering the ability while the creeps are in range. Flamespewer (DEF)--if you do the math in terms of how many stacks of napalm you need to apply to get the damage of one annihilation tower shot, it's slightly less than 38. Divide that by 5, and you have a number between 7 and 8. In other words, to get the damage upon death of ONE annihilation tower, you need eight flamespewers. If that's not garbage, I don't know what is. 14 down, 6 to go. The remaining 6: Blitz tower: tri-elemental and single target? Junk. Temporal tower: See above, now add the fact that it fires slowly, only does 4400 damage on a single target (NOT 45000!), and decreases its damage, and you have a recipe for complete disaster. In other words, if you were planning on using the mold+fountain strategy, your tri-elemental tower blows. Drowning tower: see, with instant kill towers, they're either worth massing in large quantities to reliably instant-kill entire waves, or they're a complete waste of resources. Obviously, the latter in this case. Velocity tower: Even at max range, they do 2124 damage (22/14.5)*1400. So for 6 more range than annihilation towers, you lose splash and the tower becomes far worse as creeps get closer. Wealth tower: I remember in warcraft 3 that this was only earth+light--what the atom tree replaced. Once again--a slow-firing, single target tower is rarely justified. I do not think it is in this case. Hex: Once again...low range, single target, low damage. See, it isn't that the dark+light+X towers outperform everything else. It's that 7 of these are either the very useful slow/amplify damage towers, 6 are just single-target miscellaneous effect junk, and the other 3 try to be an annihilation/comet tower, yet give up all range, have far less effective AoEs, and their two-tower trees also stink. Now hopefully the annihilation tower won't get brutally nerfed by having its damage cut in half. IMO considering that annihilation is mid-long range with 2500 damage and gets support from the masquerade or possibly deceit tower, that's about as good as you can get in this game outside of essence towers. Well yeah a lot of the towers right now aren't balanced to the point that is cost efficient. However, what I mean is that if you want to have a fully up'd dual element support tower (clone, speed, damage) you need to have tier 3 of the 2 respective elements. that leaves you with 5 other options to choose from. What I'm saying is that light+dark+X+X is greatly better than earth+fire+X+X or water+nature+X+X. There doesn't seem to be many good towers with the latter 2 combination. I guess the glacial is a pro tower, but doesn't have much strong towers to support it. Correct me if I'm wrong Glacial is ELW, and is an amplification tower, not a main-source-of-damage tower. If you go DELW, your main source of damage would be hail/comet, and your secondary source of damage, to cover for the dark weakness, I presume would be laser/phasor and then the solo light tree once you get light 3. However, hail/comet IMO is still by far and away worse than obliteration/annihilation because it's target capped as opposed to AoE capped. Both DELW and DELN have A) a mainstay AoE long range tower (hail/comet vs oblit/anni), a slow tower (sludge/mire vs. barb/spike) C) an amplification tower (polar/glacial vs evocation/invocation) and D) the laser/phasor tower, which really sucks compared to both oblit and hail. Both have access to the trickery/masquerade/deceit support tower, as well as the mortar tower, but DELN benefits far more from it since mortar covers oblit's light weakness, while hail/comet is water and has a dark, rather than light weakness. Now as for the rest of them... When you're talking about a 5000 mineral tower, there are three different kinds of towers you want, and no others: 1) Damage--namely, the massive AoE kind. If it's single target, it sure as hell better be out of this world. At 12 range, considering that the pure dark does around 18000, a 3-element single target damage tower should match around half of that. 2) Slow 3) Amplification And then you want a secondary element that covers your primary damage dealer's weakness for a fraction of the price.

Tried DELN on hard in a pub game again. Aside from leaking the level 2 earth guardian once (doh!), I had no leaks the entire game, and 29 fruit kills. IMO just going conceptually, when you have two long range to ultra long range high-damage AoE towers (Obliteration and Mortar), coupled with a fantastic support tower (deceit), a slow tower, and an amplification damage tower, and are building pure light towers for your 2 essences... What exactly are you missing? That combination literally has no weakness whatsoever. Not to mention that early game, a mildew tower or two at the front door makes life so much easier, and those two towers then transition into invocation and spike. On top of that, you also have quark, mildew, and life towers early game while you transition. Overall, DELN simply misses no pieces whatsoever. If DELW doesn't perform in a similar fashion, then my only conclusion would be that the comet tower is still nowhere near as good as the annihilation tower, and the math of 500/.31*3*2/3=3225.80645. when hitting 3 targets, the comet tower does 1.6x the damage of an annihilation tower on a single mob. So if that annihilation tower hits 2 or more mobs, it's waaaaaaaay outdamaging the comet tower. (Aka hail vs obliteration). Have you ever seen what happens when you put a 30% AoE slow tower on a U-turn? You get like 10 mobs clumping up on each other NPNP. Result? Obliteration tower wins mightily. I can test that theory when I wake up, but the fact that you have hail/comet capped on targets, while the obliteration tower is simply capped on AoE means that the obliteration tower wins by flying colors when you bring a slow tower into the equation. Couple this with 16 range and 2000 damage a shot, and it's also capable of taking down elemental guardians--something which the hail/comet would have far more trouble doing.

Just looking at the changelog, I will tell you right now that DELN will still be the game's #1 combo, no questions asked. Yes, obliteration lost 20% damage. Big deal. So where you had 4 before, you'll need 5. This is really really not the end of the world (thank you). However, looking at Hail, it still doesn't address the fact that the damage doesn't come close. You have 300/sec (assuming 3 creeps hit) vs. an obliteration that hits 2 mobs doing 800. You should probably make comet hit 9 mobs instead of 3.

Not sure if I agree with you but here goes... Dark Light Nature: Annihilation. Probably the single best non-pure tower in the game, no questions asked. Dark Light Water: Comet. Wannabe annihilation. Fails miserably. Dark Light Fire: Orbit. Doesn't exist. IMO should be a long range aoe fire type. Dark Light Earth: Phaser. Really really meh. I suppose it's decent light damage, which isn't anything to get angry over. Now let's go down the rest of the list. Slow towers--obviously useful in all cases: Supernova (FLN) Plasma (FLW) Spike (DEN) Mire (DEW) Okay, 8 down, 12 to go. Amp towers--all more or less do the same thing, all are pretty useful: Corrosion (DFW) Invocation (ELN) Glacial (ELW) 11 down, 9 to go Short range aoe towers--I don't understand why you'd ever want a short range AoE when you can get more damage from massing obliteration towers: Tsunami (LNW)--this one just sucks like hell because you need to micro its ability and get it once in a blue moon. Sorry, but no bueno. Seism (EFN)--short range, low regular damage, and entirely dependent upon triggering the ability while the creeps are in range. Flamespewer (DEF)--if you do the math in terms of how many stacks of napalm you need to apply to get the damage of one annihilation tower shot, it's slightly less than 38. Divide that by 5, and you have a number between 7 and 8. In other words, to get the damage upon death of ONE annihilation tower, you need eight flamespewers. If that's not garbage, I don't know what is. 14 down, 6 to go. The remaining 6: Blitz tower: tri-elemental and single target? Junk. Temporal tower: See above, now add the fact that it fires slowly, only does 4400 damage on a single target (NOT 45000!), and decreases its damage, and you have a recipe for complete disaster. In other words, if you were planning on using the mold+fountain strategy, your tri-elemental tower blows. Drowning tower: see, with instant kill towers, they're either worth massing in large quantities to reliably instant-kill entire waves, or they're a complete waste of resources. Obviously, the latter in this case. Velocity tower: Even at max range, they do 2124 damage (22/14.5)*1400. So for 6 more range than annihilation towers, you lose splash and the tower becomes far worse as creeps get closer. Wealth tower: I remember in warcraft 3 that this was only earth+light--what the atom tree replaced. Once again--a slow-firing, single target tower is rarely justified. I do not think it is in this case. Hex: Once again...low range, single target, low damage. See, it isn't that the dark+light+X towers outperform everything else. It's that 7 of these are either the very useful slow/amplify damage towers, 6 are just single-target miscellaneous effect junk, and the other 3 try to be an annihilation/comet tower, yet give up all range, have far less effective AoEs, and their two-tower trees also stink. Now hopefully the annihilation tower won't get brutally nerfed by having its damage cut in half. IMO considering that annihilation is mid-long range with 2500 damage and gets support from the masquerade or possibly deceit tower, that's about as good as you can get in this game outside of essence towers.

I'm doing both actually . But why nerf obliteration? Obliteration is perfectly fine. Okay, fine, maybe drop its dmg to 450 down from 500, or maybe drop its shots to 6 from 7. But don't go overboard!

First of all, I do not believe the obliteration tower needs to be nerfed. Second of all... Why is the hail/comet tower just so much worse than the obliteration/annihilation tower? They both have 16 range and are allegedly used to kill mobs en masse. However, even when hitting one target, the O/A tower smashes for 500/2500 (7 seconds out of 9 unless you manual reload), while the H/C does 80x3/400x3 at .31 speed (but with a 9 second CD on a 6 second duration). So if the obliteration just hits one target on auto reload, it does 500*7/9 damage~=388. The hail does 80x3/.31*2/3=516--assuming it's hitting all 3 targets. Now, if the tank even so much as hits a second target (and how often do those tanks hit 3+), it WAAAAAAAAAY outdamages hail/comet. Now Karawasa says he wants to nerf obliteration...I say buff hail! It's junk right now!

Noooooooooo! Why?! Why why why why? Fast mobs screw it over so hard D: I've also been trying replacing nature with water and going for comet instead of annihilation and it just doesn't seem to work anywhere near as well.

IMO this combination by far and away puts any other tower combo to shame. Reason being: 3 extremely useful 3-element towers (annihilation for damage, invocation for amplification, spike for slow) 4th triple element isn't all that bad (laser/phaser) None of them require much micro. The mortar (or possibly artillery, if you so choose to upgrade) tower covers the annihilation tower's weakness of light-based waves. Masquerade towers are decent support, and deceit towers are phenomenal, perhaps second only to fountain towers. Access to pure light (or darkness!) towers later in the game. For gravy purposes, eternal and electron towers also have their uses. So...best quad element in the game? And if you go interest, 2 of all 4, light, dark as your element order, can it be the case that this is perhaps the single best order in the game? Discuss.

Okay, let's list the four slow towers: Ion/Plasma: FLW Nova/Supernova: FLN Mire/Muck: DEW Barb/Spike: DEN Now, after listing the 15 4-element combinations in a separate document, I got this list of 5 4-element combinations without a slow tower: DEFL DFNW DLNW EFNW ELNW The first of these has the missing tri elemental tower DFL (radius/orbit). This is a good candidate for a slow tower. Next, the tower in common with the next two combinations is DNW, which is the godawful flooding/drowning tower. It's pure garbage because it overlaps damage types with the comet tower, which should be the be-all-end-all source for water damage aside from perhaps pure water towers. That, and its ability is absolutely worthless. Right now, DLNW, while it has two fantastic AoE towers (comet and annihilation) seems infinitely inferior to DELN, which is just phenomenal in so many ways (has a primary aoe tower with annihilation, a secondary aoe tower with mortar (made so much the better by being earth damage, which covers for the light waves that annihilation would be weak against), a damage amplification tower with invocation, and a slow tower with spike, and a fantastic support tower with masquerade (or if you'd like, deceit)). Its primary source of damage (dark) gets covered by its secondary source of damage (earth), and the laser/phaser tower is so much gravy on top of that. Lastly, the tower in common with the last 2 combinations is the ephemeral/temporal tower--a single-target, low-range, slow-firing piece of junk. Yes, the damage is nice, but if there's anything I'd like when playing ENW, it's more time for my fountain'd mold towers to shoot straight.