Classification Shakeup

[Karawasa]

I have had this idea for a awhile now, and finally have decided to act upon it. In my opinion, the Undead/Mechanical classifications do not have enough impact on the game. If you are on pick, chances are you will avoid the towers that interact with them (25% cost to sell). There is nothing really special about the waves, for most towers there is no difference in gameplay. I thus propose significant changes to them, as follows:

Undead/Mechanical classifications will cease to have an impact on towers. That means:

[*]Poison/Crypt work for all(can be renamed etc.)[/*:m:xoln7gva]

Undead/Mechanical classification will become unique as fast/healing are, here is where we would need to brainstorm. I have come up with two possible ideas:

[*]Mechanical creeps are slower but harder to kill. They are the "Tank," idea thrown out awhile ago. Perhaps 250 movespeed instead of 300, and X% damage reduction, X to be decided.[/*:m:xoln7gva]

Thoughts?

[Guest 1mpulse]

hmm... the idea of the resurrection means that you would also have to lower the overall hp of undead waves or else it will be overpowered levels. As well, if they revive then its like they had their basehp + X% hp anyway.

im no expert on balance, but the undead revive would be better if something else happened on revive, like armor change, ms change, or anything else you wanna decide. maybe even reviving as 2 weaker units? idk, thats for you to decide. otherwise the only difference it will bring is those few seconds where you cant hit them.

the mechanical idea sounds good though, slower but harder to kill. it makes sense kind of for mech levels.

[Cisz]

I like the resurrection idea. Brings back quake1 memories..

If they gain notable less health than a healing wave, it's ok.

[Guest mrchak]

What if on the undead ones the ghost idea happens:

Undead unit dies, an invincible ghost version of it still exists for like 5 seconds and keeps walking, then disappears. If it leaks, you lose a life and it does not re-spawn.

Those are interesting ideas. Sure lets give it a shot. But Tanks are still going to be mechanical right? Like you plan to use the same models (Toy boat, siege engine, etc?)

[Guest Sancdar]

What if on the undead ones the ghost idea happens:

Undead unit dies, an invincible ghost version of it still exists for like 5 seconds and keeps walking, then disappears. If it leaks, you lose a life and it does not re-spawn.

That's lame, how often are you only killing the creeps at 9?

[Karawasa]

Models aren't changing for either Undead/Mechanical.

[Guest mrchak]

How about cannibalize.

Unit dying (regardless of type, but maybe not mech, if that makes sense) can regenerate nearby undead units by like 5% of their HP. The radius can be small, like 50 units of distance. Sortof like how cannibalize works, the undead units feast on the corpse of a fallen unit, regain HP; but its instantaneous, they don't have to stop walking to get the effect.

This way, undead are stronger when they are in groups clumped together. If they are slowed and clumped, then they are harder to kill than normal units. So the strategy for undead would be to thin them out a little bit, so they can't cannibalize each other.

Alternatively, there can be a variation on vampiric Aura. Undead units regain health for damage sustained by nearby units, like 5% or 10% conversion for example. This would work out the same as cannibalize in many ways, except the health gain would be gradual instead of all at once when a unit dies. But the strategy of thinning out undeads would still apply.

[Guest 1mpulse]

the idea of cannibalize fits better with an undead them... undead units reviving again? the undead undead?

[Guest mrchak]

undeads reviving again would be like those trick birthday candles.

[0rb3r]

I really like the reviving idea for undead, a vampiric aura would be hard to balance but also pretty neat. I also like the tanking concept for mechanicals, at least, they appear as more resistent then normal waves.

What I miss are more skills interacting with the classes, things like a waterdamage based tower that makes mechanicals rost reducing ther armor, or a light based attack that slows undead mobs.

Back on topic:

I would set resurrect to about a 20% maxlife (remember how ennoying it it having your high damage towers wasting 1.5 secs on retargeting and killing the creep, even a 1% of original life would be enough), the higher the % is, the more it harms splash towers, so 20% may be enough, needs to be tested o.c..

About the mechanicals tank skill, I would vote for armor increase instead of damage reduction, it encourages to build armor reducers.

[Cisz]

What about all the armour ignoring towers?

[Guest AlienFromBeyond]

How about cannibalize.

Unit dying (regardless of type, but maybe not mech, if that makes sense) can regenerate nearby undead units by like 5% of their HP. The radius can be small, like 50 units of distance. Sortof like how cannibalize works, the undead units feast on the corpse of a fallen unit, regain HP; but its instantaneous, they don't have to stop walking to get the effect.

This way, undead are stronger when they are in groups clumped together. If they are slowed and clumped, then they are harder to kill than normal units. So the strategy for undead would be to thin them out a little bit, so they can't cannibalize each other.

Alternatively, there can be a variation on vampiric Aura. Undead units regain health for damage sustained by nearby units, like 5% or 10% conversion for example. This would work out the same as cannibalize in many ways, except the health gain would be gradual instead of all at once when a unit dies. But the strategy of thinning out undeads would still apply.

I like this idea. The revive after death thing seems to similar to healing waves, while this causes you to rethink how you place towers, and even what towers you build. Would be fun in random when you sell everything so you don't have a bunch of slow towers that clump them up like mad.

[Guest mrchak]

Especially since the whole strategy of the game is slow them, bunch them, use AOE damage. It would be interesting if undead were specifically strong vs that strategy. Would really make the game more interesting.

[Karawasa]

That is a very interesting point about Undead units. We can test both, and see which we like better.

I'd like to bring the focus of the Dev Team back to the Element Shakeup (most important), and Creep Shakeup(important) threads. Those two threads are really going to determine how the game will play, so I'd ask your attention be placed on them for the time being.

[Cisz]

If I get this right, we are about to lose the concept of imunities, as all towers are supposed to work on all creeps. I think thats a big change and would make this a different map.

I agree that many towers didn't get used on pick, because there were to many creeps immune against them (tech, or the instant kill towers). But losing the concept sounds like a loss of complexity and diversity.

So how about having towers that don't work on certain types, but make them work on more types. Like this:

Drowning, ageing - affects all but undead.

Poison, paralyse - affects all but mech.

Corrodic gas, and, er, maybe acid snails? - affects all but fast.

I'm still looking for things that affect all but healers.

[Karawasa]

Yes, the proposal is to eliminate the idea of immunities. In 3.0, there were 8 towers that were affected by creep classification: tech, life, crypt, drowning, undead, death, poison, flesh golems. Out of the 35 towers with abilities, that is not really that significant. For all other towers, creep classification had zero impact. Also, a good portion of these towers sucked on pick, for the very fact they had immunities.

I don't view this as a big change, that will make this a different map. I view undead/mechanical gaining characteristics as a much more significant change. Instead of having 16 unique creep waves (9 healing, 7 fast), we now have 28 (7/7/7/7)!

Flesh Golems are being changed to damage based, and death/drowning/undead got axed. So, in order to keep immunities we would have to brainstorm them into towers that have been proposed. I believe that with elemental armor, and now two different types of creeps (for a total of 4), players have enough to plan for.

[Guest Sancdar]

I'm still looking for things that affect all but healers.

Steam

[Karawasa]

Hey, for that characteristic that is anti-splash, where a unit dies and it heals nearby ones, what about Mechanical? After all, these are machine parts that are on the ground, for other machines to incorporate. I do like the reincarnation idea a lot, and the "Tank," idea just seemed drab.

[Guest Sancdar]

I think "tank" is much better than reincarnation.

[Guest mrchak]

If the question is whether a passive "I heal because my friends near me got hurt" spell works better for mech or for undead, I think it seems a little more intuitive for undead. In the Warcraft 3 world, undead tend to have this ability in different ways, but no mechanical units can self-repair. I imagine that the blood splashing in the air is rejuvinating for the undead units, whereas having broken mechanical parts quickly taken and reincorporated into a moving vehicle seems a little more on the unrealistic side.

I don't know why we can't have undead have this "I heal because my friends get hurt" ability, and mechanical have the "I am big and heavy so I am slow and take less damage" ability. They both make a lot of sense and I think they've both met with some pretty good reception among the development team.

The important thing is that these 4 characteristics (undead, healing, mechanical, fast) require different strategies, or are difficult for different reasons.

Undead: More difficult to kill if they are clumped together when they are damaged (i.e. slowed / aoe damage)

Tank: Slowing is not as important, focus your strategy more on high damage

Healing: Damage them and kill them fast before they can heal

Fast: Slow is extra important

This is a pretty good mixture, and really drives home the need for a balanced strategy. What do y'all think?

[Cisz]

I agree. Karawasa seems to think that tank is a bit boring, but that's not the case if you have to bring the damn things down. Just raise the HP till the players start to sweat.

[Guest mrchak]

Not to shake things up too much, but I had an idea that I just wanted to share

Additional Possible classifications:

Hydra:

Has lower HP (say 75% normal hp), Spawns 2 little guys (each with like 15 or 20% hp) after it dies.

Decoy:

Half the units are decoys, give no bounty and don't leak lives. The other half give double bounty, leak 2 lives.

Stunning:

If attacked, has a 5% chance to stun the attacking tower! The tower cannot attack for 2 seconds.

Anti-Magic:

Doubles cooldown time of nearby towers abilities, thereby making special abilities and magic less effective

Just brainstorming. If not used in this TD, maybe another one!

[Guest Sancdar]

Hydra:

Has lower HP (say 75% normal hp), Spawns 2 little guys (each with like 15 or 20% hp) after it dies.

A classification that makes splash even more effective than normal...no thanks.

Decoy:

Half the units are decoys, give no bounty and don't leak lives. The other half give double bounty, leak 2 lives.

If you leak a lot, doesn't matter. If you leak a few, it's based on luck what happens. No good.

Stunning:

If attacked, has a 5% chance to stun the attacking tower! The tower cannot attack for 2 seconds.

Hard to balance vs. attack speed, luck can lose you the game. No good.

Anti-Magic:

Doubles cooldown time of nearby towers abilities, thereby making special abilities and magic less effective

Eh...kinda cool, but annoying to implement and really, that only affects like half the towers. Sometimes you don't have much of a choice but to use things with cooldowns (acid) for damage.

[0rb3r]

Hydra: A classification that makes splash even more effective than normal...no thanks.

We already have classes that harm splash effectivity, so, one classification helping splash wouldnt be thaaaat bad

Decoy: If you leak a lot, doesn't matter. If you leak a few, it's based on luck what happens. No good.

Agreed. It doesn´t makes much sense to me to have an absolutely uncontrollable factor in the game, if you lose control about how many lives you lose as it depends on luck, it is in my eyes no improvement.

Stunning: Hard to balance vs. attack speed, luck can lose you the game. No good.

I think this one makes lot of sense, if you build your entire strenth in one only place, the mobs will disable your towers and pass, splash and fast attack effectivity is harmed, and high damage´s and slow´s effectivity is enhanced; good for massers, bad for splashers. Good idea, possibly hard to balance. Maybe adjust it: each received attack has 3% chances to disable the casting tower, does not work for damage auras and mass damage spells.

Anti-Magic:Eh...kinda cool, but annoying to implement and really, that only affects like half the towers. Sometimes you don't have much of a choice but to use things with cooldowns (acid) for damage.

I like this one also, but it may overcomplicate things, creeps with resistent skin make more sense (-X% spell damage receives and -X% spell effect durance)

[Guest Sancdar]

I like this one also, but it may overcomplicate things, creeps with resistent skin make more sense (-X% spell damage receives and -X% spell effect durance)

Resistant Skin actually just makes creeps take the hero-type damage and duration for a spell, which I think is already used by the Elementals (although I could be wrong on that). Instead, they could gain Spell Resistance, which reduces spell damage taken by X% (like Runed Bracers from ladder)

Instead, I think all spells should be changed to deal physical damage, whether composite or related to their element I don't care. Purely duration-based spells COULD be changed based on difficulty level, but I don't know that they warrant that.