WindStrike Posted May 13, 2013 Quark Tower: Currently, the quark tower has the issue that it's stupidly strong early (to the point where its damage literally needs to be halved), but in the lategame, it's very meh, and if its damage was halved, it'd suck. There's triple-element damage towers that do this, but it takes 1500 minerals to build them. Quark is currently an early game tower with nearly the power of a triple-element tower at only the cost of 500 minerals. It is straight up stupidly powerful, and you get stupid amounts of interest gain. Now Quark has the same problem as Electricity tower - they both scale great with the dual support towers, but the triple support towers don't do nearly as much for them, namely the slowing towers. So if we were to give Quark a new ability (still AoE area damage tower, be it the orbs or the old version), it'd be something that might get some decent scaling from slowing towers. Here's my suggestion: First, halve its damage. It genuinely needs to be halved in order for it to not be broken in the early game. Quark Tower now causes an infinitely stacking debuff on creeps. When an orb hits a creep, the next Quark Tower orb to hit that creep will do 1 extra damage, then 2 extra damage, and so on and so forth. If a creep hasn't been hit by a Quark Tower in 3 seconds, this wears off. This has to be flat damage rather than percentage damage, or else Quark Towers will affect Electron and Atom Towers at the same level of scaling. As you can tell, the more Quark Towers you have, the more this stacks and the faster this stacks. Quite frankly, this isn't any worse than Infrared tower, which also infinitely stacks and exponentially scales with itself. The previous weaknesses of the tower stay - mechanical and undead. It does make it a bit better against healing. It does have a new weakness however - it hits creeps on the back end a lot better than the front end. This is a new idea in general for towers; no other tower hits like this. Originally, I was going to suggest that Quark Towers just have an infinitely scaling damage buff on themselves (borrowing from WC3 version) so long as they keep firing, but that would make them busted on Wars mode, even if that damage buff had a cap (in which case, it might as well just have a flat damage). I think the debuff suggestion would be better anyways. For Electron, the flat damage is 5, 10, 15 etc. and for Atom, it's 25, 50, 75, etc. EDIT: Thought about it again, it hits creeps evenly, ignore that strike through part. Electricity Tower: Just reverse how it works. It starts at the high damage point and then drops 20% on each bounce. So the new numbers would be: Starting Damage (100%) - 60 First Bounce (80%) - 48 Second Bounce (60%) - 38 Third Bounce (40%) - 31 Total DPS hitting maximum number of targets - 177 This should help the tower out considerably. If it still feels weak, then there's the crazy suggestion that it drops by a percentage based on the distance between creeps. Dunno how I feel about that. Runic Tower: Know how Vapor's base damage is higher than the aftershock damage? Same thing should be applied here. Runic has the issue that early-game, it's not all that viable (especially by itself), because its standard attack is pretty crappy, and it's only good when activates its ability (for 3 seconds). Once you get slowing towers (namely two level 2 slowing towers), the exponential damage scaling from its ability is stupidly high. Increase its base damage by 50%. Gives the tower some purpose outside of its ability. When it activates its ability, its damage is halved (75% of what it is now). Makes its ability not scale anywhere nearly as bad. Something else that's been bugging me is the overlap between Mildew and Ice Tower. Since Ice Tower is a more original idea, I vote that Mildew Tower gets a rework of some sort. Not sure what exactly, though it should fulfill a similar purpose to what it currently does (line-drive damage that's good at weakening). Go to top Share this post Link to post
WindStrike Posted May 14, 2013 More Quark Tower How much damage does a Quark Tower do in total? I decided to see how many times the orbs hit the creeps given optimal positioning (center of the top-left peninsula, 10 range), and the creeps are hit by a total of 10 times. Each orb does 30 damage, so that makes a total of 300 damage to the creeps. Now, if you look at the creeps, it takes till wave 21 for it to survive that (162 * 2 = 324). The only reason it doesn't solo that far is due to the wave line-up and creep abilities that happen to prevent it from doing so. Now why are Atom Towers mediocre in the late-game, especially against fruits? Well, 300 * 25 is 7,500. With an optimal build of having it Foundry buffed and with a Supernova and Invocation, that would be 7,500 * 1.9 * 1.3 / 0.7 = 26464 damage. That's in the most optimal position. Wave 1 Fruits have (127,048 * 2 = 254,096) hp. One tower knocking out a tenth of the wave's hp, that doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, keep in mind that total damage amount is over a period of time. Most other Level 3 dual-element towers can do the same if not far better in half the time. It is to a smaller amount of creeps, but you're usually able to cluster them enough through slowing that it ends up outdoing Atom by a longshot. Also, that's only wave 1 of the fruits. Not to mention the limited optimal positioning with the Atom tower, dropping its total damage output by a bit depending on its location. I decided to an Excel sheet comparing the damage output of the current Quark Tower and the suggested idea listed above (the stacking debuff). Attached is the file, and it contains two pages - the first one is without slowing (can hit a maximum of 10 times). This is (in a nutshell) what it shows. At one cuil Quark Tower, the old one does a maximum of 300 damage, whereas the new one does a maximum of 195 damage, effectively only 66% of the strength. At four Quark Towers, the new one passes up the old tower. In reality, it's probably equal. The damages on both are skewed due to lack of optimal positioning. The more towers added, it's probably skewed about 20-25% higher on the old tower and 25-30% on the new version. At ten Quark Towers, the new one is double the strength of the old tower. Again, skewing, but it'd still be roughly 80% stronger. To get ten Quark Towers, of course, it'd take a considerable amount of money and investment, something only reasonably possible really in the late-game (at this point, referring to Atom towers). The second page in the Excel sheet is with a supernova tower helping slow everything, allowing for a maximum of hitting the target 14 times. At one Quark Tower, the old one does a maximum of the 420 damage, while the new one does a maximum of 301 damage. So it starts at 70% of the strength, which is fine, because even in the mid-game, the tower still felt too strong. At three Quark Towers, the new one passes up the old tower. Due to damage skewing, it's probably equal. At seven Quark Towers, the new one is twice the strength of the old tower. Damage skewing would make it probably 80% stronger. At ten Quark Towers, the new one is (with damage skewing) no more than triple the strength of the old tower. In theory, this should fix the Quark Tower considerably, making it not so busted and interest abusable in the early game, not as overpowered in the mid-game, and genuinely viable in the late-game. Ice Tower Just did a damage check, it's completely inferior to Mildew tower, buff its damage please, and so the explosion can actually hit something, drop its range to 10. Yes, it's 44 DPS in a line. Mildew says 27 DPS, but if it fires in a line just like Ice Tower, that amount is doubled to 52 DPS. Mildew Tower To make Mildew more original, what it could do is as it passes through each target, it successively does more damage (that way, slowing genuinely helps it). This is currently what Electricity has, but the suggested change to Electricity reverses it, so applying what Electricity currently has to Mildew would be pretty awesome. Its base damage would need to be lowered some. Quark Tower.xlsx Go to top Share this post Link to post
WindStrike Posted May 22, 2013 This is just an update on all the tower suggestions. Quark Tower: As suggested above. Vapor Tower: I just ran a test with vapor to see if this tower is any good, and the answer is that it's crap. Complete and utter crap. Even with double slowing and full buffs, bloody drowning towers are outdoing it. Quark is one thing where it's absurdly good early and still good throughout the whole game except for fruit. Vapor... is alright in the early game and crap the rest of the way. I'm not kidding when I say this. Double the aftershock damage from 5 to 10. It genuinely needs it. The tower is that bad. Even then, it might be low. The reason I'm not suggesting buffing its base damage is that it may make it too strong early, whereas jumping its aftershock damage would help it at all stages of the game and really help it out endgame. ... except in mazing, but it might as well be banned in mazing anyways. Runic Tower: Revamping damage amounts: Buff its base damage by 50% (from 120/600 to 180/900). When it activates its ability, each ADDITIONAL shot does 33% (40/200). The base shot does not lose anything. Hail Tower: Make its ability permanent. There's no reason for it to just have a cooldown of 3 seconds. And then drop its damage to 100/500 from 120/600. Ice Tower: 10% damage buff on both the line drive and the explosion. Electricity Tower: As suggested above, reversing its effect, same DPS. Flood Tower: Increasing its damage from 300/1500 to 320/1600. Torrent Tower: Increasing its standard attack damage from 100/500 to 125/625. The Site: DPS numbers are cool. It should also list damage per shot and fire rate. Condensing it ingame is fine, but the site really should list all of it (especially since the upcoming UI changes will probably allow you to see all of the numbers ingame)/ The following are some various changes for various towers (site): Due to the Electricity change, it'd be 60-177 Ephemeral should instead list its max DPS down to its lowest DPS. 1613-323 / 8065-1613 Obliteration should just read 500Ephemeral and Obliteration numbers essentially won't include the downtime anymore. Runic should read 181-Infinite / 905-InfiniteTechnically, Runic and Vapor have caps. However, due to there being a realistic maximum number of targets alongside that it takes slowing in order to reach those benchmarks, they should stay listed as Infinite. Go to top Share this post Link to post
