Element Rebalance

[Karawasa]

After reading the post by Cisz about the range balance changes, I decided that this would be a topic worth creating. I will be removing a lot of the long range towers from the game, so the only primary ones left will be Darkness and Light probably.

So, I want to discuss the power of the six elements here. How do they rank up against each other, and what can be done to balance that?

Earth

Fire

Water

Darkness

Light

Nature

Is that the order of the tower balance? They should definitely be more equal.

[Guest Sancdar]

Looks right to me. Splash will always be stronger than comparable single-target damage, because allowing creep clumps through slows is necessary for the map. The more splashed creeps, the higher the DPS. So, wider-splash towers are better, because they take less clumping to be effective. This explains the top 3 rankings. For single-target towers, DPS and effective damage time are what governs the ranking. Nature has a very low EDT, because it has a low range. So, even though it has the highest single-target damage of the elements, it doesn't do that much total damage. Light and Darkness, on the other hand, put out a lot of total damage, even though they have nowhere near the damage output of the splash towers generally.

While I'm assuming the info page on eletd.com has correct damages listed for towers, it would be nice to get stats on their attack speed so we could get a more accurate estimation of DPS for each element.

Regarding long-range towers, I suggest one long-range dual or triple, or maybe one for each. Change either Dark or Light to mid-range, and have the other be really long-range.

[Cisz]

Whats EDT?

Balance changes with the situation.

Cannons have half the damage of arrows and without slow, cannons and arrows are equal. With clumped creeps cannons are much stronger. The advantage can go as high as 200%. While vs single creeps arrows take the lead with 200%.

Arrows and cannons are typical opening towers, and it's good they are balanced for a "no support" situation. If the earth tower gets balanced for the monsoon scenario, splash towers will end up extremely weak in non support situations while nature will end up the mayor single target tower for early rnd.

I disagree a bit on the ranking.

Here is my version for early rnd (no support, amplified towers):

• Earth

Fire

Nature = Water

Darkness = Light

• When rnd-ing, most better players love early earth for its huge splash and damage. It outperformes fire mainly because of the much greater range. Water is clearly weaker than both.

And here the list for lategame with maximum slow:

• Earth

Fire

Water

Darkness = Light = Nature

My suggestions:

• -Nerf earth damage slighly, improve water damage a tiny bit more than earth got nerfed. This should bring the splash towers on par. (Earth down to 60, water up to 11, fire stays at 23 should do the trick. Water has a very low base damage, so a single point changes a lot. The other towers can be changed more easily to adjust to a water with base 11 if needed.)

-Buff nature damage so that it outperformes all splash towers in early game. I'm not sure how much is needed, but I expect about +30-60% damage. Needs testing. The result should be that nature is not automatically useless in lategame and surprisingly good early game.

-Increase all long range towers damage to at least 75% of an equally fast single target short range tower. 80% would be on par for a range of 1500.

-If you want to change one long range tower, maybe make it a tower with 700 range, single target attack and low damge/high speed, like water without splash. Maybe this kind of attack fits nature the best, so make light work like nature is in 3.0, make nature the "mg tower" and keep dark as it is, but with said higher damage.

[Guest Sancdar]

EDT was my fancy term for how long a tower gets to attack.

Obviously splash towers shouldn't be balanced for a full support scenario, because then they would blow. However, they shouldn't be balanced for no support either, especially with the planned new distribution of AoE slows. They improve so much faster than single-target towers with AoE slows that it doesn't make sense to balance them for a no support build. Without support, single-target towers need to be stronger than splash towers.

[Guest mrchak]

As long as a map allows for AOE damage, you're going to get this imbalance, unless the AOE towers have a significant disadvantage on which you can't rely on them. For this game, the disadvantage of earth is that it is very weak against Nature. However, another AOE damage tower is strong vs nature, which works out well for the player who uses earth and fire...

As long as AOE damage towers are in the game, balancing them against single target towers is next to impossible ; without slow, you don't want them to be too weak, with slow you don't want them to be too strong. It's like apples and oranges.

Better controls can be created by

(1) Raising minimum walk speed

(2) shrinking the AOE and increasing damage

Maybe.

[Guest Sancdar]

Without slow, you do want them to be weaker than single-targets. With average slow, you want them to be only slightly better.

Shrinking the AoE makes them significantly weaker without slow, because they end up not actually doing splash. Raising minimum speed is necessary anyhow, or rather reducing how easy it is to get creeps to move super slowly.

As for Earth's "disadvantage", that's crap. The single-target elements are all weak versus an element as well. Even if Fire didn't take care of the Nature weakness, Water would. That's why even though Fire is weak to water, Earth-Fire doesn't do that bad against water levels (although they are the weak point of the pure-elements build).

[Guest mrchak]

I'm just saying, as long as you have aoe damage, you'll run into this balance issue.

Unless you could do something with Jass to make a AOE damage tower do a Max amount of damage per attack (divided among its targets somehow that is reasonable). This could be done with JASS maybe, but I don't know if rebalancing requires such drastic measures. Then it wouldn't be TOO weak when there's no slow support, or TOO strong when there is slow support.

[Guest Sancdar]

And I'm saying that while the issue will always exist, right now the towers are unbalanced and should be put more equal to each other.

You could make an AoE tower do X damage divided among Y targets, but it would be kind of lame.

[Guest MyVoiceHurts]

I posted about Dark, specifically, in the minor changes forum, but here's how I see the ranking:

Fire

Earth

Water

Light

Nature

Dark

I put these in rankings based on pure element power and combinations. Water's important in most combinations, I know, but it's pretty weak as far as damage goes. Fire goes above Earth because of its high damage and splash (especially in the case of pure elements), as well as its importance in certain combinations. I can't stress how bad Dark is, though. I posted more about it in the topic on the minor changes forum, but I'm surprised to see it ranked as high as it is here.

[Cisz]

This thread is about single element towers only, so please give us a second rating that doesn't include buld issues.

[Guest Ryukira]

And I'm saying that while the issue will always exist, right now the towers are unbalanced and should be put more equal to each other.

You could make an AoE tower do X damage divided among Y targets, but it would be kind of lame.

Ur so right, if a aoe tower had a damage cap like that it wouldnt really be a aoe tower, it would be more like a bouncing tower with really small jumps, hus the more creeps the more it sucks, but with less creeps its alot better