Balance Wishlist going forward

[dg86]

Ice and Hail towers--damage type changed to water.

Justification: because you already have light damage with trickery tree, and the basic light towers are without a shadow of a doubt the best single-element towers in the game. Right now, the hail tree has a massive imbalance of light-based damage. If hail and ice would be water-type damage towers, that would allow this build to complement with light-type damage, giving a more complete build. In fact--generally, anytime you have light damage on a two-element tower, odds are, it doesn't need it. Why? Because light towers are the best single damage element in the game. Good damage at 22 range = thanks.

Obliteration tower--damage moved back up to 400, manual reload time moved down to 7 seconds, auto reload time up to 4 seconds.

Justification: this tower is not imbalanced. I repeat: this tower is not imbalanced. There is nothing particularly overpowering about it. It simply has the basics that it needs: damage, range, aoe, all 3 support towers (both triples and a dual) with a quad element trip into earth. IMO this tower could stand to be less effective as a fire and forget tower, but if someone has the micro to watch each and every one of their oblit towers, they should be rewarded, not punished with an absurd cooldown.

Earthquake tower--range increased to 12.

Justification: the only thing that makes this tower really lacking is its horrid lack of range.

Steam: range to 12

Justification: 10 range=crap range.

Magnify: haven't tried it yet. Will have to see how it works in practice. So far, I don't have my hopes up on this.

Poison: double its damage.

Justification: has anyone ever found a use for this thing? Looking it, the old obliteration used to do 2000. This does around 800. Even after accounting for the fact that it's 40% cheaper, that does not explain the massive damage discrepancy. (And once again, I only use oblit for comparison due to range+aoe comparisons...oblit dmg is not OP and in fact wasn't at 400)

Death: Up range to 16, see what happens.

Justification: 8 range single target? Are you serious?

Laser: have to try this one...when did it get damage boosted from 225 to 600?! Holy crap. Anyway, IMO this should be a darkness-based damage tower.

Justification: if you have a Light-damage tower and it's not splash, then you should spend your minerals on just upgrading light towers because they have decent damage, but great attack speed and amazing range. There is no need to sacrifice that range for any other type of light damage. Period.

Torrent/Tsunami: autocast douse at every second upgrade. (2, 4, 6, 8, 10)

Justification: because you have one AoE attack every 14 seconds? Really? So your damage over time on that 10000 damage, even assuming 14 seconds thanks to a fountain tower, is still abysmally low at a low range. So this is 714 AoE damage at 10 range per second. Now the seism tower, without a factory tower, does 500 damage in an 8 range aoe. With a factory, this is 1100 damage per second.

Flooding: Remake this tower completely.

Justification: it's a complete waste right now, because either the instant-kill is worth it and you can build a strategy around instant-killing entire waves, or you can't, and it's garbage. There is literally no in between. This falls firmly into the latter camp.

Radius: Get this tower implemented. Right now, DFL is a no-go due to the missing triple tower. Also, make this fire damage as you already have darkness on so many triple-element damage towers.

All other mono towers except light: suck compared to light.

Difficulty levels: whatever solution was put in still does not address the fact that if you play VH on multiplayer, you're going to need eternal/immortality towers to survive, and that's that. Try it without it, and odds are, you will fail--no matter what you do, because there are douchebags that like to camp the front on very easy. And that's that.

IMO: bounty should be adjusted to .66, .83, 1, 1.1667, 1.333. Similarly, the base interest should be 2%, 2.25%, 2.5%, 2.75%, 3%, respectively. Basically the bounty comes from the fact that even with the same HP, very hard armor vs. very easy armor makes those creeps about twice as hard to kill. And on top of that, they have double the HP, so they're about 4x as hard to kill as on very easy. From personal experience, if you know what you're doing, you can basically get a perfect run on any difficulty but very hard. On very hard, you will leak in a multiplayer game, and you'll leak consistently. This must be addressed.

[holepercent]

In full competitive, long range is actually a disadvantage. Find the correct placements for the short range towers.

You do know that the torrent tower's douse can be cast manually at any level (besides zero)?

It's not so straightforward to just change elemental damage types of individual towers without looking at the overall distribution.

[dg86]

No, I mean have it autocast and keep GOING in levels. So you go to 2, wham, douse, keep going through 3 to 4, wham, douse->all the way to 10, reset.

[holepercent]

if you know how to use it properly, there is rarely a need to douse more than once per wave (unless in random mode)... save the douse for the waves that you need the damage.

[gwho]

Flooding: Remake this tower completely.

Justification: it's a complete waste right now, because either the instant-kill is worth it and you can build a strategy around instant-killing entire waves, or you can't, and it's garbage. There is literally no in between. This falls firmly into the latter camp.

you can use it as "guaranteed" finihsers. it's a single target tower that specializes in finishing off targets. u can use a few, while u have most damage in the front. why do u have to go all flooding? (that doesnt mean i'd use it, since picking those elemetns means u can't pick other towers.)

All other mono towers except light: suck compared to light.

light better the lower level the wave is. once u get to fruit, every tower will bve attacking all the range is essentially wasted. light has the lowest dps of all the pure towers if you are working under the framework that all towers are always attacking. in earlier waves this is not the case, and the light can fire longer which is why its better. but its the worst on the fruit level.

perhaps if the pure towers are to be adjusted, the existing tradeoff btw range and dps is simply be magnified. but the correct idea is already there.

Difficulty levels: whatever solution was put in still does not address the fact that if you play VH on multiplayer, you're going to need eternal/immortality towers to survive, and that's that. Try it without it, and odds are, you will fail--no matter what you do, because there are douchebags that like to camp the front on very easy. And that's that.

be host, open to public, and force everyone to play on very hard ^^

[Karawasa]

I really appreciate posts like this. They are an invaluable source of feedback. As to some of the points;

Ice and Hail towers--damage type changed to water.

I will look into changing Hail to Water. As holepercent suggested, there is more involved than just a simple change.

Obliteration tower--damage moved back up to 400, manual reload time moved down to 7 seconds, auto reload time up to 4 seconds.

My own experience tells me that the damage was high enough at 400 that you could get away with not manually reloading. How would you feel about 12 manual/4 auto?

Earthquake tower--range increased to 12.

This tower purposely has low range. Perhaps it needs a damage buff or an increased percentage to fire?

Steam: range to 12

Do you think this tower is underpowered?

Poison: double its damage.

That might be a little extreme, but this does need a buff.

Death: Up range to 16, see what happens.

That much range would run counter to its intended usage. But, 8 does seem a bit short.

Laser: have to try this one...when did it get damage boosted from 225 to 600?! Holy crap. Anyway, IMO this should be a darkness-based damage tower.

I will look into changing Laser to Darkness. As holepercent suggested, there is more involved than just a simple change.

Torrent/Tsunami: autocast douse at every second upgrade. (2, 4, 6, 8, 10)

The autocast is there to simply help you in the event you forget. In fact, you're expected to manually use this at your discretion.

Flooding: Remake this tower completely.

This is one of my least favorite towers. We already have a random chance effect in the game with Quake/Seism. Problem is, need some idea to replace it with.

Radius: Get this tower implemented. Right now, DFL is a no-go due to the missing triple tower. Also, make this fire damage as you already have darkness on so many triple-element damage towers.

I agree! I can't wait to use this tower. It may seem like a lot of Darkness but if you look at the overall distribution it is fairly balanced. Just check the towers page on the main site.

All other mono towers except light: suck compared to light.

I don't know if I agree with this completely, but I do notice a lot of Light being used. Do you feel a nerf to 3 damage at level 1 (from 4) would be too much?

IMO: bounty should be adjusted to .66, .83, 1, 1.1667, 1.333. Similarly, the base interest should be 2%, 2.25%, 2.5%, 2.75%, 3%, respectively. Basically the bounty comes from the fact that even with the same HP, very hard armor vs. very easy armor makes those creeps about twice as hard to kill. And on top of that, they have double the HP, so they're about 4x as hard to kill as on very easy. From personal experience, if you know what you're doing, you can basically get a perfect run on any difficulty but very hard. On very hard, you will leak in a multiplayer game, and you'll leak consistently. This must be addressed.

I will look into tweaking the bounty numbers. It does seem VE people are simply accumulating too much mineral by virtue of not having to build much to survive. I'm not sure I agree with the base interest though.

[Karawasa]

@holepercent: Can you look into making Hail into Water Damage and Laser into Darkness Damage? What other towers might need to change to maintain some balance in the distribution?

[flyjum]

Light towers are great in single player

In public game they are terrible.

They dont need buff or nerf imo.

Quake should get a chance increase its to random.

[Chiquihuite]

Flooding: Remake this tower completely.

This is one of my least favorite towers. We already have a random chance effect in the game with Quake/Seism. Problem is, need some idea to replace it with.

Why didn't you say so?

Brb drawing board.

[Karawasa]

Keep it coming.

[joesi]

light better the lower level the wave is

Not really. It's just a bit worse on fruit level, and still excellent on all other levels 1-60. It could still be good on fruit level because you can use more towers (light towers) to pick off the low HP fruits that can be killed before getting to the exit, as opposed to being forced to attack a more narrow-range of targets, such as only the ones near the exit being able to hit, while all the ones by the entrance have to attack new full-hp ones even though you might be dead by the time those ones would get to the exit.

Death: Up range to 16, see what happens.

Justification: 8 range single target? Are you serious?

It's range 10, isn't it? IMO they are pretty good, you just want to use them on targets with less than 30% health (good with cannon towers or other AoE).

The problem is that they can kinda get owned by medic type waves, especially if you have a big gap between the AoE and the death finishers.

IMO: bounty should be adjusted to .66, .83, 1, 1.1667, 1.333. Similarly, the base interest should be 2%, 2.25%, 2.5%, 2.75%, 3%, respectively. Basically the bounty comes from the fact that even with the same HP, very hard armor vs. very easy armor makes those creeps about twice as hard to kill. And on top of that, they have double the HP, so they're about 4x as hard to kill as on very easy. From personal experience, if you know what you're doing, you can basically get a perfect run on any difficulty but very hard. On very hard, you will leak in a multiplayer game, and you'll leak consistently. This must be addressed.

I really agree with this, except I also agree with Karawasa that the base interest should be lower for very easy, maybe 1 or 1.5%, and then .75% per upgrade (interest upgrades could have re-worked mechanics so that they buff base interest rate by 50%)

I also think a bounty of .66 might be too little for very easy— it's supposed to be very easy after all, and even at the current 1ish bounty, people sometimes don't even get to round 50. Maybe having it like .8 base, then .87, 1, 1.15, 1.3 (which is almost symmetrical, unlike yours which punished easy more than it buffed hard)

Other suggestions (remarks):

• Haste tower is OP... 800% DPS = 10000 DPS, tons more than any other direct damage tower that I know of (and efficient per cost). If you didn't realize, the haste stacks with itself (multiplicative), so it's 111%^20 =~ 800%, as opposed to 100%+11%*20 =322% (which would be a bit underpowered at it's current damage)

• Mimic/speed-buff/damage-buff towers don't seem too scale linearly enough for their upgrade levels... they are kinda useless at level 1, are overall good at level 2 (because of their base damage combined with their special) but still sucky special, and are ridiculously strong, if not OP, at level 3 where all of a sudden their special is 4 times stronger than level 2.

I think the towers should scale more like 33%, 66%, 100% (20/40/60) and deal less stand-alone DPS, or very possibly none at all.

• Poison tower is terrible, as you seem to know. Doubling it's damage might or might not make it OP, but it still wouldn't really make it a good tower IMO. I think it's ability must be re-worked. I think it would make sense to give a tower a DoT (damage over time)... especially with a name like poison. Is there a reason you haven't (to my knowledge) added hardly any (I think I saw one?) DoT towers? Would probably be good to be AoE to keep some semblance of similarity to the old tower, and maybe another tower could have high-DPS single-target DoT (maybe a burning one)

• Ice tower seems a bit weak compared to mold tower (based off website, which I think is accurate), but I may be wrong? Should probably be water damage like someone once said before

[dg86]

Argh.

Well, what I have to say is this: there are tons of strategies that work spectacularly well on hard on down that simply do not work on very hard. In many cases, a normal player can rack up crazy amounts of interest where the very hard player would have to build more towers. I wonder if it'd be fair to make the bounty based off of effective HP--that is:

50% HP, 10% DR=.5/.9=.55

62.5% HP, 20% DR=.625/.8=.78125

75% HP, 30% DR = 1.0714

87.5% HP, 40% DR = .875/.6=1.458133

100% HP, 50% DR = 2.

Right now, I believe that very hard gets 1.1x bounty, and I believe very easy gets 1x.

I suppose now that the countdown timer is 60 seconds, it's independent of other players, but the other day, I was seeing normal difficulty players fill up the field with seism towers. Tried it on VH, had like 40k left unspent and died to the last two commandos because I kept hoarding, with like a network of 100k.

Maybe I was doing it wrong but ehhh...

Hail tower still needs to have damage changed to water type. I mean consider this: light+water=light damage. Dark+light=light. Dark+water=trash (don't get), and dark+water+light=light.

Obliteration tower needs to have its manual reload time down to 7 seconds. If you don't want to manual reload, fine. But if we're vigilant enough to reload at just the right time, I think we shouldn't get screwed by manual reload cooldown. That is, if a tower works better through micro, we should at least be able *to* micro it.

Tsunami is nowhere near as good as quake. It's not even close.

Can we please address tsunami, hail, and the fact that very hard doesn't get enough $ in comparison to lower difficulties?