Damage type toggle

[dg86]

So I was wondering...why do certain towers do certain damage types? Why is one damage type more valid than another?

Why does a life tower do nature? Why not light?

What about my personal pet peeve--hail--why does it do light, and not water?

Well, long story short, I was wondering--what if we could toggle tower damage type, albeit with some arduous cooldown (EG 180 seconds or so) in order to be able to round out damage types? For instance, consider the hail tower--aside from the poison tower, which I have no reason to believe is any good, ice, trickery, and hail are all light based damage types, meaning they are all weak to the same element--earth. But what if I could change one of my hail towers to a water type damage? Or a dark type damage? This would allow me to diversify my elemental damage types.

This issue also compounds depending on certain builds. For instance, IMO, the new "in" build is EFLN (level 3 EF) for very similar reasons to DELN. Now in this case, both money and quake towers are earth type damage. Well, what if we could make one of these a fire type to cover the nature weakness but in turn create a weakness to water where there was none?

Now I realize that this may allow players to get away with massing a single type of tower, but on the other hand, I do believe that it would really create some excellent strategies if you consider a quad element build.

[Chiquihuite]

I've pitched the idea of allowing this mechanic for 1-2 specific towers to Karawasa and it's something he feels very strongly about not doing. I'd still be open to the idea in theory as long as we can be sure it doesn't rock the balance boat.

[dg86]

So long as the CD is long enough that we're not just switching elements depending on the wave (IE greater than 60 seconds), IMO it's just something that should make him be honest with the fact that certain builds might simply suck due to no variety in damage type, and this would allow players to address this.

I mean yeah, you can have oblit light+oblit nature, or hail water+hail light to give you a more rounded build. But IMO that's a fault of the game's for not providing us with enough different towers to get access to those damage types to begin with and has nothing to do with balance so much as an aspect of the game's design which can be improved.

IMO it's not supposed to be a feature unique to one tower, but to all towers with 2-3 elements.

[Megadramon]

Allowing towers the ability to change it's element damage is a big change.

Even if the tower had a big cooldown, if you were on random, it would just be quicker to resell the tower into the same one but with a different element. Triple towers would be able to potentially have 3 different element damages, leading to uncreative random builds.

The meta game would be build the most effective tower and just change the elemental damage to suit the level, and then resell for another effective tower that suits that level and etc.

This change would change the way of how we would play random.

[dg86]

Okay, point made--then make the tower unsellable while the element change is on CD. And if this CD is something like 4-5 waves long, then it'll be a decision not made lightly.

Also I suppose if you gave the tower a cost for changing elements (EG 10% of its total cost), that might also balance this. EG 150 for a level 1 triple, 500 for a level 2 triple, and so forth.

The reason is so that you don't have things like the hail tower tech tree, which is all light, except for poison which is water.

For instance, think about quake. (EFN). It itself is an earth-type damage tower. Its three two element towers are: forge (fire), mold (nature), and infrared (fire), so even if you discount forge due to its support tower nature, you still have all three types of elemental damage in three solid towers (arguably infrared could stand a buff).

The reason I suggested this is this:

Consider hail (DLW). It does light damage. Its two-element components are trickery (light), ice (light), and poison (water). And considering that poison sucks, this makes this even worse. Now what if you made ice a water type tower? Now consider torrent (LNW). It does water damage. Its base towers are well (water), ice (light), and perpetual (nature). So if you made ice a water type, now suddenly the torrent tree is unbalanced in terms of the damage types it has.

Hence I believe players should be allowed to change the elemental damage type of towers. Yes, this may result in some triple towers getting spammed (EG hail water, hail light, hail dark), but if every tower was useful (quite a few are not--flamethrower, celerity, ephemeral, laser, torrent, drowning are all very much useless, and in terms of duals, ice, jet, perhaps electron, poison, death, infrared, possibly magnify are all substandard), this would not be a needed measure.

However, due to the fact that there are so many bad towers, IMO the players should be able to make up for this.

[Cielo]

You could fix the problem if you could chose the element just when you buy the tower upgrade,

ie. I want to upgrade my tower to a forge tower. Its elements are Earth and Fire? Well, I can pick between a fire Forge Tower and a earth Forge tower. I, myself, would prefer to chose the tower element during upgrade phase than during game itself, since it'd bring complexity to the game. Once you chose the element you will never be able to change it (for that tower).

[Megadramon]

Dunno if I like the idea though. I'm aware that you don't like DLW due to too many light and a crappy water. Currently I'm indifferent about the idea to change hail to water or ice to water and etc, but if you wanted a specific elemental damage that badly, I suppose you could mass a lot of composite towers, and change the element damage to your likings.

I feel this is too big of a change to the game for it to be implemented.