Balance Issues with Trickery/Difficulty level

[Sykomyke]

So I read some of the balance suggestions and read some posts to try and ensure that this hasn't been covered in another post, but I apologize if this is a duplicate.

I love Element TD, first off. So thank you Karawasa for making such a fun game, I played this in WC3, and it's my favorite TD in SC2 as well. (Only thing that comes close is Skibi's TD and I don't think that's coming to SC2 sadly....anyhow...)

Comet Tower, does feel a wee bit powerful but manageable, and the Immortal Tower, like others said doesn't perform as well on higher difficulties.

However, the Trickery Tower really seems like the problem here.

I used to see Immortal+Trickery tower dominating until someone found out that Pollution+Trickery was better. I've seen people dominate fruit level spamming nothing but Pollution and Trickery.

Now, is Pollution the issue? Perhaps....there could be tweaking needing adjusting. However, the real problem is that while Trickery is a support tower...it's a *better* support tower then say Forge or Well. This is simply because that when created in groups of 4-5 with max tier on both the tower you are cloning and the cloning tower, it will always create 2-3 free towers for you.

Now granted some support towers work better for some damage towers, (Quake utilizes Well better then Forge due to it's aoe attack for example) the trickery tower does it's job much better by always being an improvement to whatever it clones. I think the duration needs to be reduced to 60 seconds. I know that all the support towers go from 1x ---> 2x-->8x for the support utility increase per tier, but I think that trickery gains too much value for this.

Now, my second part regarding difficulty is in relation mainly to the fruit level, but let me preface that I always play on either hard or very hard and always play random.

I don't blame random for anything, and sometimes I just don't get lucky. I can concede to that.

However, I find myself consistently doing well and getting to the fruit level, only to be "outplayed" and I use that term loosely, by people who use the aforementioned above builds. So there I am, playing on random/very hard able to succeed, and some guy on normal is building Pollution+Trickery towers and ends up winning and gaining a ton of fruit points. (and experience consequently). I know that sounds like a rant, but I feel like not enough of a reward in experience is conceded to those who play on harder difficulties. My thoughts here could are to increase the experience gain but that would require reworking of levels somewhat. The other thing is I believe this would be resolved by balancing trickery/immortal/pollution towers.

I hope that illuminates my balance suggestions a little bit.

[Cypher]

I kinda know what you're going through dude, I play very hard random and it's extremely frustrating to be in a competitive environment when you see the same lame trick being used game after game and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. A big part of why I made my complaint about hail and immortal towers a while back was exactly that. Every game I was in had at least 1 person using those builds and sometimes everyone in the game was doing it. Fortunately pollution / trickery wasn't a well known build at the time or I'd probably have been annoyed by that as well.

Something I've noticed though is that cheese builds tend to be a flavor of the month. After a while people get bored of doing the exact same trick over and over again. They either try to toy with other builds, fail, and quit or they find another build and realize "oh hey I'm doing the exact same thing just using different elements". Random keeps the game interesting, I just wish more people would play that way and learn to appreciate the depth of the variety of towers.

There is some potentially good news though: https://forums.eletd.com/index.php?showtopic=2712

The current competitive and race settings work very well but no one ever uses them. All random and same random have the same problem. The more broad changes they're working on will hopefully put an end to the robotic arranged builds and require players to stay on their toes. Let's just hope they do a good job, I'm sure they willl.

[holepercent]

Random is the way to go. Getting to fruit isn't too difficult if you're competent unless you get randOOmed, which is part of the fun of -random anyway. However, it is unlikely the build would outlast a planned build in pick. Most players are stuck to one build which does very well in fruit and farming the xp. One possible solution is to modify the xp system to give a better bonus to players who play on harder difficulty/modes.

Draft league was intended to show off possible builds but no one joined the league to play.

[Karawasa]

Indeed, the switch to Tower Wars will fix these problems. But, in the meantime I will work on tweaking XP. Giving more XP for random and increasing the divide between difficulties (XP wise).

I could also rename Standard to Casual and swap it with Competitive. Meaning, the default selection is Competitive.

[Sykomyke]

Indeed, the switch to Tower Wars will fix these problems. But, in the meantime I will work on tweaking XP. Giving more XP for random and increasing the divide between difficulties (XP wise).

I could also rename Standard to Casual and swap it with Competitive. Meaning, the default selection is Competitive.

I like it!

If the Tower Wars is implimented well it could be fun, though I'll admit I'm not the hugest fan of tower wars style games. (Especially with selected spawns, you could essentially force someone out real fast if everyone focused one person) but again if it's down well it could work out to be fun.

I actually really enjoy competitive, I played it for the first time a week ago and it was a blast.

Also, renaming Standard to Casual definitely would help along with making default competitive. This would 1) help encourage it through sheer psychology. And 2) most people just select finish voting anyhow, so those who don't take the time to read the different modes would be helping those of us out.

Thanks Karawasa!