Ideas for a new aoe slow tower

[Cisz]

It seems we are one aoe slow tower short, as glacier and ice are to similiar.

I've done some thinking, and came up with a few ideas, but maybe you have better things to offer. None of my concepts really make a big difference to existing towers.

1.) Make the tower affect the ground, so that it gets sticky, or muddy, or slippery. The creeps over that part of the ground get slowed.

2.) The target is a single creep, it get's a debuff that will slow it and the surrounding creeps. The aoe moves with the creep and is lost when the creep dies.

3.) Similiar as 2, but the debuff is aplied instantly to the targeted creep and the surrounding ones, as if a nova tower goes of on one creep. Think of a shocking blow hitting the creep and shaking up the surroundings.

4.) The tower fires multiple single target slows at different targets.

Not to good yet, feel free to help out wiht your ideas.

[Guest Sancdar]

I like the first one as a replacement for Glacier. It would still be able to make use of Attack Ground, for example.

[Karawasa]

I like where this thread is going .

[Guest Sancdar]

The other nice thing about the first suggestion is that there's already a spell that does that. Whee!

[Cisz]

Sounds like no. 1 is the best so far.

We might have only two aoe slow towers with water in it (if my build distribution...), so this might end up the new roots. Or thorns? Oil?

[Guest mrchak]

Oil could be Nature, Darkness, Earth (Fossil fuel, so its nature, its dark and its underground)

That could fit well, since the storm is Water, Fire, Light!!!!

Plus it gets rid of crypt, which is sortof a duplicate.

Oh man, its all coming together.

[meateor]

Cisz asked me to post my suggested AoE slow tower concept. The fairly traditional idea of "fear" would integrate well with Darkness and is an easily justifiable reason for slowing. Beyond that, there are many different mechanics for how the tower could work, but a wave of bats (Darkness hero / Sun tower) is how I initially saw it.

[Karawasa]

How about this:

Tower sends out some sort of wave (carrion swarm, tidal wave etc.). This wave pushes back creeps as it hits them. Thus, it wouldn't be a slow, but more of an AoE disable.

[Guest Sancdar]

With poor placement, would it also push creeps forwards?

[meateor]

How about this:

Tower sends out some sort of wave (carrion swarm, tidal wave etc.). This wave pushes back creeps as it hits them. Thus, it wouldn't be a slow, but more of an AoE disable.

This sounds like an exploitable nightmare, especially if its effects are easily compounded.

[Karawasa]

@Sancdar: Yes

@meateor: I'm not sure how it would work out to be honest. The creeps don't have to stop their action as they are being pushed back, they could continue moving throughout (sort of like fighting the push perhaps). The thing is, with poor placement or usage, the wave would actually hurt you (push creeps forward).

At any rate, curious as to what you guys think.

[Guest Sancdar]

It would be interesting, but balancing would be real awkward. The towers would have to have a very weak push alone, or else a "perma-push" could be set up given enough gold. And if you built it all at once, you wouldn't suffer the double-edged effect normally. On the other hand, it's a really neat idea. Perhaps any perma-blockage could be prevented by having the waves also push out to the sides slightly, kind of like Primal Roar in DotA. That would also split up the creeps a bit so that splash wouldn't combo with this quite as well without very careful placement.

[Karawasa]

AoE channeling spell, freezes ground in AoE. Creeps that run over the frozen ground have a X% chance to slide every X seconds, for X seconds.

[Guest Sancdar]

Slide how?

[Karawasa]

It would just slide along the ground, like Spirit Breaker's greater bash.

[Guest Sancdar]

Uh...so they would slip and slide forwards?

[Karawasa]

They slide in whatever direction they were moving in. They would slide slower than their movement speed, so even forward would still be good. If a user was to cast it at a bend, it could be devastating.

[Karawasa]

So, what do you guys think should be the new AoE slow tower?

[meateor]

So, what do you guys think should be the new AoE slow tower?

In my opinion, development is not progressing as I had expected. It seems that the focus of too many threads is special features and other unimportant cosmetic details. The map should be built initially with place holder towers, allowing us balance the distribution of towers and other concepts important to game play.

Only once the infrastructure is in place should these discussions be the focus of our attention.

[Guest Sancdar]

Uh...it is. It's called version 3.0. I'm not entirely sure how changing tower abilities is an unimportant special feature when the focus of the redesign is...rebalancing and changing towers around.

[Cisz]

It's version 3.1 or 3.5 or 4.0, but not 3.0.

And I don't care for what tower exactly, because only if I playtest it in an actual map I can start to find out if it works. If I was to do the map, I would make some "freeze the ground" effect, that simply makes the creeps move slower over that area, because I know for sure that this will result in a working balanceable tower. No weird side efects or abuseable interactions.

All "wouldn't it be cool" towers with complicated "we move the creeps around" effect could be great or horrible, I just can't tell without trying.

If the actual makers think the chance of the tower beeing actually balanceable without too much trouble is worth the risk of having to remove the tower again, ok, go ahead.

[Guest Sancdar]

I meant that 3.0 is the framework/infrastructure already established.

[Guest MasterTenor]

Of the ideas so far, I like the "oil" idea the best -- like mrchak said, we would still get to make use of attack ground, which is good. It adds a new twist to what we can do -- also good.

It wouldn't have to use water....great!

[Cisz]

Yeah, we need an aoe slow that doesn't use water as an element. Oil, roots, hooks, thorns, fear, paralyse, something like that.

[Karawasa]

I think idea one would be a great backup plan. I am actually most interested in trying idea three. I was thinking it could work like this:

Tower attacks creep, some effect happens at creep that slows in AoE. AoE slow percentage is small, but it stacks. Perhaps 2.5/5.0% slow each attack? Could last five seconds.