WCIII or SCII Ele TD?

[Xeamax]

I've been craving some Ele TD on Warcraft and came back to find out that there's a Starcraft version as well. Do you guys think it's worth downloading Starcraft for or is it not different enough to bother?

[WindStrike]

A good number of the towers are different from the WC3 version. The tower balance is considerably different as well. Plus there's a bunch of extra modes, like mazing and teams and the like. Not many people online really play by the extra modes, so you usually have to prod people at the start of the game or organize it ahead of time. I would suggest the channel if people were actually in the channel, lol.

Overall, it's quite different from the WC3 version. I'm sure a lot of my builds that work in SC2 don't work in WC3 nearly as well, and vice versa. I recall 3-element builds in WC3 being a lot harder to pull off than in SC2. Suppose I could attempt to list all the differences, lol. Well, here goes at least some of them:

• Base level elemental towers removed. Amplified is now the starting level.
• Periodic Tower's range is now that of a dark tower (I just noticed an error on the site, for WC3 version, the range, Skill, and AoE are flipped).
• When you summon a periodic essence, it doesn't summon a giant guy of doom, it just gives it to you. Plus it gives you a mineral bonus, depending on what wave you are.
• Interest upgrades are not in the game, cause having even one interest upgrade allowed you to fill literally the entire map with towers.
• Magic Tower (Fire + Dark) replaced by Magnify Tower. Still super awesome single target damage, instead you change its range. The farther the range, the less damage it does.
• Quark (Light + Earth) tower changed to a radial damage tower. It fires two orbs that circle around the tower, hitting all enemies in the way. You can also change the range on this one, though I have yet to see a non-mazing mode defense that makes use of its range increase. This is actually the WC3 Radius Tower.
• Hydro Tower (Water + Earth) replaced by Jet Tower. It fires slow-moving orbs of doom that do massive AoE damage, stronger at the center (2 AoE), and weaker at the outer end (4 AoE and 6 AoE). Can attack ground.
• Laser Tower (Light + Earth + Dark) changed to a tower that summons a bunch of fighters that shoots lasers at their targets. You can have laser tower shoot at random targets, lowest hp, or highest hp.
• Radius Tower (Light + Dark + Fire) changed to Runic Tower. Take vapor tower's effect, and turn it into a 3 second burst auto-attack with a lot of range. The more targets in one area, the more damage it'll do for a burst shot before having to go on cooldown for 6 seconds, during which time it's a mediocre damage tower.
• Drowning Tower (Dark + Water + Nature) changed to Flooding Tower (Drowning is level 2 actually). The most versatile tower in the game in that it has 4 modes, each with a different attack speed. Rapid-fire single target, fast speed w/ small AoE, normal speed w/ decent AoE, and slow speed w/ large AoE.
• Flesh Golem (Water + Nature + Earth) changed to Ephemeral. Has a rapid fire attack that does great single-target damage, though it gets weaker the longer it attacks, at which point it has to recharge, which can be done automatically or manually.
• Mazing Mode gets rid of the standard labyrinth and allows you to build your own around various checkpoints. All of the infinite fruit kill builds (on very hard) are done using extremely elaborate mazes that don't work in multiplayer, lol. Also, if you play mazing mode with certain players (like myself and Ayr), we have a mutual agreement to have vapor towers banned.
• Hero Mode gives you a hero that goes around kills stuff and gets upgrades with levels.
• Team Mode puts everyone in 2-man teams. Combine and conquer!
• Wars Mode, I wouldn't call it competitive, just a fun little mode where the towers you build send creeps at your enemies. Faster paced than the standard mode.
• Oh, and every single one of these modes can be turned on or off, giving you lots of combinations of insanity. Again, hard to get pubbers to select even any of these modes, though I have seen mazing and hero go off at the same time on several occasions.

There's probably more changes, but I can't remember really. Personally, after sticking hundreds of hours into the SC2 version (half of it for balancing the game out and testing stuff out), I'd say it's well worth it. A new patch is on the way soon that'll add a sandbox mode, allowing you to play around with any build on any wave, as well as various other fixes around the place.

[Karawasa]

Yes. There are tons of changes.

[Xeamax]

Wow thank you for the extremely thorough and helpful reply . I've convinced my friends to redownload Starcraft II and we've probably been playing or will play this game more than the actual Starcraft.

I do have a few questions though:

1. Is it me or is the periodic tower really weak?

2. Does having a hero spike the difficulty?

3. Are tier two triple-element towers generally stronger than tier three dual-element towers?

Another side comment so far is that the "casual" mode is often much more difficult to us as it feels like the monsters just pour in without impudence.

[WindStrike]

Periodic tower is actually about to get nerfed from 8000 damage to 7000 damage. By itself, it's not that powerful, but mixed with a bunch of supports, it's ridiculous, especially slowing. Try placing them at the spot seen in this guide for magnify towers - https://forums.eletd.com/Magnify-Towers-t2952.html

Having a hero gives all enemies a shield, aka double hp. Reason it's a shield and not literally double the hp is due to the fact there's a stupid hp cap in SC2 of 500,000. No one knows why. Secondly, all creeps have a chance to dodge anything, think it's either 15% or 20%, not sure.

They're roughly the same strength. The difference is that tier 3 duals are more cost efficient (3150 gold vs. 5000 gold, big difference). The reason for this is that generally, it's hard to get level 3 elementals early, they're a late-game thing.

Casual mode? Weird. Casual mode makes it so that the next wave doesn't start until everyone is done with the current wave, or until the set timer goes down, which is set to a long time. Any chance you're not confusing it with extreme, where there's no timer between waves? I dunno, I recall casual taking a long time to do, tis all. Might've been screwed over by a SC2 patch and it just needs to be checked out again.

If you guys are NA players, hop into the official SC2 channel (Element Tower Defense) and I'll see if I can help you guys out. I'll try to be on about 7:00pm EST tomorrow.