Sykomyke

Hmm, I kind of figured as much. The main issue here is that I prefer the challenge that hard/very hard creates. While I don't mind normal, my only "beef" with normal is that it is more favorable to mono builds. I still see a great deal of Poison/Trickery builds succeeding which is frustrating to have people do nothing but spam one tower on normal and win.

I don't know if this is what it should be doing, but I remember that on Casual mode, everyone can choose their own difficulty. I frequently choose hard/very hard and lately since the map change has made competitive the default (I like it!) I noticed that I always end up getting "normal" difficulty even though I chose hard/very hard. Is this a bug or intentional for everyone to share the difficulty on competitive?

I think it's fine as is. What you are modestly referring to is the "Gambler's Fallacy" in which you believe that with every non special attack that executes, your chance for a "Quake" attack gets higher. This is untrue. You had a string of bad luck mate.

If that's what you just got then I'd say that's about normal though. If all you do is build poison/trickery and got about 75 fruit kills, that falls in line with most mono builds.

I've seen the fruit count points with Poison/Trickery combo reach ~300 before. It was definitely overpowered. The difference between the Trickery/Poison combo and the Immortal/Trickery combo was that the Immortal combo required farming up a plethora of lives (200+) before wave 60 so that you essentially outlasted your opponents at the end fruit wave. It was annoying and somewhat OP, but at least it was somewhat valid. The poison combo didn't do that at all, it straight up murdered fruit. Period. With no diversity in towers at all. When you can win the game by spamming only two towers, it's a sign of that being broken.

I actually haven't had a chance to play in awhile. I was at level 9 (my builder level) before, will I still keep my current builder level or did that get reset in all these updates? Also. Has the -random penalty for losing XP been lessened/removed yet or is that a WIP? Another thing, what is this new "mono/trickery" build? I'm aware of the Poison/Trickery combo being blatently overpowered, but I have to agree to some extent that with the new options it will promote more "cheese" builds rather then experimentation with different towers.

Honestly, I think that hit's the nail on the head. Vapor is ok early on, but infared is such a bad tower...I've never found any viable use for it. Well is a great support tower but only if you have a good damage dealer, which clearly in this build it lacks hard hitting towers.

You gain more experience for harder difficulties. The October 31st update actually increases the experience gain for people playing on normal/hard/very hard. The optimal playing level to gain experience now would be hard, which should be a significant challenge for those who played on normal or below before. And level shouldn't really denote an advantage, because then the game becomes cyclical in it's purpose. You level only, to level up more. When you create actual advantages to leveling up, you create an imbalance because at a certain point, the disparity in levels detracts from new users wanting to play. Think if a Rank 15 EleTD player got 50% bonus minerals from creeps just because he was Rank 15. As a rank 0, you would find it hard to play against him because he would nearly always have a mineral advantage, and thus a higher chance of winning. The same issue is apparent in that other SC2 Map, Mineralz Evolution. It's a self-serving game that only seeks for you to level up to gain better advantages. Once you reach max cap, there's no purpose to play anymore because the game then becomes "easy mode". With EleTD you gain experience points for a cosmetic builder, this encourages you to play for fun while gaining a small cosmetic benefit from playing more often.

I'm really happy with these changes. Having competitive as the standard should remove a lot of the "cheese" builds from viability. (Less down time/interest farming between waves, more focus on killing each wave as efficiently as possible). While I know I'll miss the range on the hail tower I think it will still perform well, it just won't cover up as many mistakes with it's long range now. It did surprisingly well against it's weak element (Earth) because of that extra long range. I didn't know that Magnify didn't work properly with Forge so that's good to know. ( I always liked microing my Magnify towers but they proved weak overall in the long term for a game.)

I like it! If the Tower Wars is implimented well it could be fun, though I'll admit I'm not the hugest fan of tower wars style games. (Especially with selected spawns, you could essentially force someone out real fast if everyone focused one person) but again if it's down well it could work out to be fun. I actually really enjoy competitive, I played it for the first time a week ago and it was a blast. Also, renaming Standard to Casual definitely would help along with making default competitive. This would 1) help encourage it through sheer psychology. And 2) most people just select finish voting anyhow, so those who don't take the time to read the different modes would be helping those of us out. Thanks Karawasa!

So I read some of the balance suggestions and read some posts to try and ensure that this hasn't been covered in another post, but I apologize if this is a duplicate. I love Element TD, first off. So thank you Karawasa for making such a fun game, I played this in WC3, and it's my favorite TD in SC2 as well. (Only thing that comes close is Skibi's TD and I don't think that's coming to SC2 sadly....anyhow...) Comet Tower, does feel a wee bit powerful but manageable, and the Immortal Tower, like others said doesn't perform as well on higher difficulties. However, the Trickery Tower really seems like the problem here. I used to see Immortal+Trickery tower dominating until someone found out that Pollution+Trickery was better. I've seen people dominate fruit level spamming nothing but Pollution and Trickery. Now, is Pollution the issue? Perhaps....there could be tweaking needing adjusting. However, the real problem is that while Trickery is a support tower...it's a *better* support tower then say Forge or Well. This is simply because that when created in groups of 4-5 with max tier on both the tower you are cloning and the cloning tower, it will always create 2-3 free towers for you. Now granted some support towers work better for some damage towers, (Quake utilizes Well better then Forge due to it's aoe attack for example) the trickery tower does it's job much better by always being an improvement to whatever it clones. I think the duration needs to be reduced to 60 seconds. I know that all the support towers go from 1x ---> 2x-->8x for the support utility increase per tier, but I think that trickery gains too much value for this. Now, my second part regarding difficulty is in relation mainly to the fruit level, but let me preface that I always play on either hard or very hard and always play random. I don't blame random for anything, and sometimes I just don't get lucky. I can concede to that. However, I find myself consistently doing well and getting to the fruit level, only to be "outplayed" and I use that term loosely, by people who use the aforementioned above builds. So there I am, playing on random/very hard able to succeed, and some guy on normal is building Pollution+Trickery towers and ends up winning and gaining a ton of fruit points. (and experience consequently). I know that sounds like a rant, but I feel like not enough of a reward in experience is conceded to those who play on harder difficulties. My thoughts here could are to increase the experience gain but that would require reworking of levels somewhat. The other thing is I believe this would be resolved by balancing trickery/immortal/pollution towers. I hope that illuminates my balance suggestions a little bit.