electronX

Greetings! It is long time since I last posted on these forums, nice to see them renewed. I see that you have greater plans with EleTD and as such, 4.2 is likely one of, or the last branch using War3. (Seeing the amount of DotA games on Northrend-Europe, I don't think W3 is dead on its own.) I was taking a huge break from EleTD and came back to play lately, and the last few days I spent a few hours online, playing thanks to GamersEdge bots. I have some experiences now that concern me, and I think it's better to share them. When playing alone, I usually pick hard. I'm not that awesome, I often lose the trail around the end of the forties, especially as I prefer random play. (1) Playing online, most players choose the Very Easy difficulty. This would not be a real problem if they would be newbies, noobs, but often they aren't. As I felt ashamed to get annihilated around my usual levels, I am chosing Normal level now, which makes me more competitive. I feel the reasoning behind Normal is, that players try to pursue high Ronald and of course win the game, and easier modes by definition offer an advantage. I remember I voted for this system myself in the past in favour of allowing different skilled people to play together, yet now I feel its bad side. (2) Very easy difficulty allow players to nuke every level down as a single pass around position 7, falling back to a long pass in case of some problems, like an immunity level. Chosing harder difficulties doesn't allow for such fast nuking, especially as easier levels allow for less towers early on, thus more money, which can be well spent on even more powerful towers later. (3) The successful - and quite boring - nuking of the very easy players result in constant 20+ second wait times between levels. I see no way to pressure them. (4) Probably as a result of 1-3, the new LFW (looking for work?) easymode build of version 4 is born: LN, life towers. Most pressuring players are successfully using life towers exclusively and very successfully. They tend to defeat waves just about the time when I kill my 3rd mob out of 30 at my position 4-5 placement. Life has an excellent range to patch placement 7 into a double pass location, which extended to 4, 5, 8, 2 is just pure awesome. A guy just before picked IIINLNLNLPP, ended up with a net worth of 800k, fully built his map with life towers, killed 300 and some Ronalds. This altogether makes these games (the game instances) very boring, and disappointing. I would love to race for fun, improve to lessen the gap from the better players, but when I check their territory after my defeat it's always the same: Very Easy with Soul Catchers. Seeing how easy it is to "master" this game online, it lifts all my motivation to go again. I saw that there are responses for all these points alone. Playing VE means you're a nab, Life isn't good for competitive play or Ronalds, but life proves it the other way around. What do you think? Was this expected? Is there any potential treatment incoming? EDIT: and one thing I consider a bug. If the host choses Short Mode and All Pick, it is practically impossible to go -random.

Today I have built an abomination tower (as I got NEW rolled) and discovered it is sending the meat, but no creep health was dropped. Normal attack damage reports 1-1. To be tested & verified yet.

Kindle can solo hard till about 18; many triples till much later. Flame is (was) unable not because it is weak, but because it often enflamed creeps with lower health and then those with higher (or simply with luck) walked over. It's just like Quaker: if it stomps often / lucky, it can solo till very late, if it doesn't, it can fail like level 20. Of course if we are talking about high levels, it is rather true.

Must test it, I agree. Earlier only 2 (or 3) could be built of these towers, so being overpowered was a good balance. This tower could not do a no-leak after all, because of some of its logics. Now it's stacked. Since it is the same as corrosion including AoE DoT, I'd just compare their price & dps ratio. (Corrosion is unstacking at the moment, right? I only build 2 of them as well, 4 & 6.)

I'm content with Quaker. It is good to be spammed since the 20% damage is a bit low to make no-leaking sure. ^^ But when spammed, I get more than excellent results. I always use this tower at 2, 4, 6 plus on the top edge of 5 (as 500 range makes it a long pass in corners). Probably a slight increase to 550 wouldn't hurt (as range 500 means that building it on the left side of 6 will barely hurt creeps on the right side so I always end up 1-pass).

The Ronald system introduced in the first post would not balance but make differences even larger. Say, you're fast and kill all the 30 ronalds while the others kill no one (say you have tons of pures, whatever). Then you will only be spawn 1 ronald for 1 average kill of everyone (who are very slow at the moment as their damage is even more spread along ronalds), while you will only have 2-3 ronalds running around. Just build 5 pure natures at pos 784, somewhere around. You will never have more than 2. Of course this is not likely soon, but, as soon as your Ronald count tends to go down, you will have more concentrated damage, less leaks. It may even happen that you run out of ronalds (you kill your last, the opponent does not, and dies leaking) and your game never ends. This would prefer players who are able to kill more Ronalds quickly (i.e. who have high tier towers). However, I could agree with a solution like this one. If any player's Ronald count gets under 30, 1 ronald is spawned to everyone. So the fastest still has the minimum count but the others can get spammed (and enjoy AoE).

This is not that bad, after all. This happens mostly because of the excess. If I need to get down a level with darkness, I simply build 4-5 of them instead of amplifying one. Then excess gets low (if they are also built spread). At level 16, when elemental towers start to come in play, amplified / more normal is already needed.

Technically I see no reason for excluding a vote on how much levels do you want - 60, 75, 90? Especially since there are two short modes, so a 31-90 game would also last about an hour. The harder thing is the health limit of creeps (1 million). Level 90 would surely be higher so all towers would need a downscale. Not a hard job, Blizzard TD starts with a tower doing 2-3 damage. I don't vote for further upgraded towers, though. When I support longer games I think on having more elementals (and harder game as a compensation) to build up. Most players experience high tier towers once or twice in their whole life.

Darkness deserves higher dps than Light. Darkness range is 1100 (quite new), Light is 1500. Darkness does higher one-shot, what means more excess. (Say, it is (almost?) impossible to defeat a whole wave with one darkness tower. It is with light.)

Support as it is? Maybe. I usually built normal golems and put only 1 or 2 to link. I realized that buffed shots do 6000 damage while normal golems do 4000 and buffers don't attack. Two normals would have done 8000. I also don't know what 1 second is in the game and how fast towers are attack wise. Link mode also doesn't tell me which tower is helped. Random? 26 golems are 40K gold, but even 10 are 15K. That is level 40 and above. I'm unlikely to rebuild my whole towers between levels that late. For me that means instant mass leaking. If golems could boost *any* tower then I might use it as a supporting tower. (As it buffs towers with *my* chosen damage kind and not only nature. Otherwise I still not understand, why to build an expensive tower to add relatively low damage to the attack of another.) The trick is the exponential, but I never put both sides into an ln() to find the point where it starts to be worth.

Magic: The tooltip says "fire up changes the cooldown". I never realized it being buffed by BS, might just have missed it. Flamethrower: I vote for the change. The kaboom-effect doesn't scale with the level nor stack, so at early levels it is way too über (30 creeps die at the same moment), at later levels it is simply nothing while the damage itself is still bad. At early levels I tend to build it, later on I sell it. FDE contains FD which is excellent, as well as DE.

Thanks. Jinx is cool, though I only use one of that (at P5), otherwise I feel that ineffective. Quaker is nice, but sometimes the AoE is not working for me (placement for sure). Does it come from the tower, like nova? Is its range 500? Then it is the best in corners' inner spot (say, upper P5). I like Impulse ^^ How much tidal do you use endgame? As it takes 2 levels to grow up to 10 and the damage is constant.

If I reach 51 When I do, that helps a lot. That is a biiiig-big barrier. Probably I'm not completely precise as I often talk about 5 element builds. Jolin is right in the next post... I'm not only using duals but also the highest available single elementals. Clever sense I'm trying to figure out, what to do. Also by re-watching replays. I think my playing problem is, that I try to build balanced: if I need 10 more towers, I always add Well & BS to them what slows the upgrade process. (And I often fail the triples, yesterday I was pretty sure Muck is F+D+E or something else and had to sell the dual.) I try to build one kind of tower at a time in masses, and let's see. My learning curve is toooo slow... Level 1 triples vs. Level 2 duals vs. Level 3 elementals: Duals & elementals are more dps oriented, so I prefer to have them. (At least, I have a wider range to choose from.) Triples usually have some specialties that start to not work when massed: flamethrower's incinerate is not doubled nor reaches 1% at the end, water splash does 5-10% damage to the creeps, drowning and gold are unlikely to kill, impulse placement is limited, zealot would be nice but just feels weak (slow) now, windstorm doesn't stack (damage maybe does), corrosion doesn't stack, and so on. So I rather build twice as much Magic2, Electricity2 towers, or elementals instead. Some triples are dps, I like them, say: Hail, or the previous version of Golems, and surely more.

Let's collect here all the sound things we don't like. Mine only is the Gunpowder and upgrades. It is very loud and triggers often, so once I have it I reduce the volume and hear nothing but chittsh-chittsh I discovered the biggest fun in the game. Flamethrower vs. Nature level till early 20s. BOoooooooooooooooom. ^^

Probably In the meanwhile I figured out why do I think that this change is bad. 1. It is mostly related to random mode. 2. I agree, balance does lie in prices. Said more generally, a 4 element build - usually - contains one buff, while the 6 element build contains all, so with good placement and AoE ratio it is more effective. So, having higher tiers must be compensated. (It is.) 3. Until some point (level 50-55) higher tiers can do serious excess damage what is to be compensated. (It is.) 4. In the name of making the game harder, creep health ratio has been increased and buffs have been seriously reduced. Now, in the name of playability, as creep gold drop is unchanged, prices go down. Simply, it is nothing else, but the effect of real price of damage percentage (macroeconomics ). The game is playable and hard enough (balanced) if all the gold must be spent on towers which can hunt down everything. Creeps got tougher, so either gold must be more or towers cheaper or stronger. It is nothing else but (negative) inflation. Also because of the lesser synergies along towers, their utility is lower, so their real price is higher while the nominal is the same. Why is 6 element build not working? - It is not microable. In random, I *always* end up with a full built map. 65+93+4+12+87, this is my growth order. - Even if microed, it is very hard to get one mob down. Those times one shot does less than 1% of health. - Damage gets spread. It is extremely visible in case of level 60: the first 3 mobs get hunted and then all others walk around with 50% +-40% health. - Having some level 2 duals doesn't change much - compared to level 1 triples. All in short: while a 2 interest, 9 pick, 5-6 element build takes the good 40-60 seconds to hunt a round down, I go to my bed and cry when I watch a 4 element build hunt everything down in less than 20. Well, for now (this beta) I think I talked a lot, maybe too much, so I finish. I await the next beta with any kind of fixes, and let's see!