Fruit Round

[Venny]

I'd like to suggest altering the Fruit Round to attack in waves, the same way waves 1-60 do.

- Fruit numbers are kind of ridiculous, and I think the sudden increase in creeps on the map explains why the fruit round lags so much more than the ghost round. Keeping the same numbers as wave 60 should keep the lag the same as round 60, theoretically.

- The tendency to hyper-cluster gives an advantage to splash-oriented damage-press strategies. You don't even HAVE to invest in overlapping slows to make fruit cluster up. They do it for you! Poison and Infrared FTW

- Range becomes irrelevant. Long-range towers have lower damage because they can keep firing for longer periods during waves 1-60. During fruit that doesn't even matter because even an 8-range tower will always have a fruit in range to shoot at. As far as fruit-round is concerned, Pure Nature is a hard-upgrade over Pure Dark or Pure Light.

- From waves 1 to 60, your defense against your opponents' defense is a matter of total damage capability against a set assault. Fruit throws that out the window and turns the game into a straight DPS race. I'd like to point out that towers are currently balanced towards total damage capability and not a hard DPS-race.

In general, you play the fruit round completely different from the rest of the game, which... just seems odd, not to mention constricting in terms of strategy choice. The game is amazingly well balanced from 1-60, but NOT for fruit.

[WindStrike]

Towers currently invalidated or hurt by current fruit setup:

• Ephemeral
• Torrent
• Hail
• Light and Dark towers (Nature is superior in all ways for fruit)
• Cannon
• Magnify (if you abuse its extra damage off the range)
• Perpetual
• Obliteration
• Celerity

Pretty much, towers that are long-ranged or are intended for double pass (except Runic and Electricity).

Towers buffed or just straight up superior by current fruit setup:

• Infrared
• Poison
• Haste
• Runic
• Vapor

I vote waves like Venny suggested.

[WindStrike]

Alright, so since fruit changed to waves, a lot of those invalidated towers suddenly got a lot better. However, some towers became practically useless, namely single-target towers. I tried mass haste earlier, it died on round two because image was the first thing added. Mass splash seems to always kill until speed hits. So rather than adding one whole ability to all creeps every few rounds, how 'bout it's still in waves, but every ability is alternating on the fruits on wave 1? Say, 6 mech, 6 healing, 6 fast, 6 image, 6 undead, and 6 normal, all alternating (or it could just be randomized). About wave three or four in, every fruit has two creep abilities. Six or seven in, three abilities and so on.

This would make it so that single-target doesn't get instantly invalidated. And because it's still waves, all those other towers that were previously invalidated still work.

[Ayr]

I like the idea of random fruit. could be interesting.

[WindStrike]

Something else, if it's going to be randomized, it needs be the same randomization for everyone so that it's at least fair in that respect.

[Ayr]

You mean game specific? So it will still be random every time we play the game, but each player will get the same randomly generated fruit, right?

[WindStrike]

Randomized as in... if one player gets 3 mech in a row, followed by a healing, two undead, and an image, everyone else gets that same thing and order.

Something else that's bugging me - the lines "the fruit grow stronger" are still evident and well... whoever is fastest ends up forcing say the undead enhancement on everyone else's fruit. Shouldn't it be purely by wave rather than time based, or whatever it is? The fruit round really should be solo and have no influence on other players. Maybe it does already, but I've seen the speed buff get added before the speed round even starts.

EDIT: So yeah, something else.... with the current fruit format, every single bloody defense I make in a pub game gets pwned by the speed round. I think my flood build is the only one capable of getting past it, though it's not fully tested w/ pure waters instead of pure natures in pub games. I just tried infrared the other day, slaughtered first four rounds then didn't kill a single one on speed round. Tried jet, same thing. Flamethrower/magnify/cannon, practically the same thing. Most of my best builds pretty much kill the first four waves without much trouble, then it struggles trying to kill a single one on the speed round. Runic w/ 5 element got screwed over too. I'm not even going to mention single-target towers cause... as I originally stated earlier, they become practically useless on wave 2 and then even worse when undead stacks on top of it.

If there's a build, in pub games, capable of killing through that speed round (and I'm not talking about maze mode either), I'd love to see it, cause other than potentially my flood build, I'm stumped. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.

[Ayr]

Hence:

Mazing >> Standard