Trickery Towers.

[Twilice]

What will happen to trickery towers?

Personally for me I wote Redesign because they are pretty much imba sometimes. And as it seems hard to balance.

[Cisz]

They are meant to be imba.

I'd say we need a fix for it's ballance.

[Cisz]

Ok, let's work on the trickery tower.

The tower is meant to be the following: I'ts one of three towers that are meant to greatly boost your build (well, blacksmith, trickery). Those towers provide are to provide a % bonus to your entire dmg output. Well gives extra % speed, blacksmith extra % dmg, and trickery is meant to give extra % towers.

The bonus of well is 25%/50%/100% right now (and it might get higher in the later stages of ballancing), and that's the reference for what trickery is meant to do. It should provide you with 25%/50%/100% extra towers.

As it is now, you build support and one dmg tower and mass trickery. As a result that should give you an effective 125%/150%/200% of dmg output. So it should be cheaper to mass trickery and copy one damager than to mass the damager itself. Trickery requires micro, so it should be a bit better than 25%/50%/100% to reflect this. The damage output of trickery is a part of this calculation, so all trickery builds are light dmg heavy for now and if trickery has a low dmg/gold itself, it needs to give extra towers to compensate this.

All of this means, that one trickery tower should be able to provide a copy of a tower 25% of the time, assuming trickeries own attack would have the dmg/gold ratio of a dmg tower. If trickery is weaker than that, the provided extra towers will have to be more. So trickery would give a copy for X seconds with 4*X seconds recycle, or maybe a bit better (3.27*X seconds recycle or whatever) if the dmg of trickery is low.

This leads to the problem of waiting times between firing. If the tower can idle a lot between waves, the effective extra towers go up. The trickeries could accumulate uncast abilities to fire them after a prolonged extra time. This could be achieved by playing a very slow build sinlgeplayer.

This problem gets worse, the longer X is. If, for example, the tower can create an extra tower for 15 seconds every 60 seconds, a player that can delay the next wave for 45 seconds, can effectively get +100% towers for 15 seconds every wave. If the times are reduced to, say, an extra tower for 4 seconds every 16 seconds, trickery also gives +100% towers, but only for 4 seconds, which is well below the time it takes to clear a wave, and every level will take several castings of the duplicate ability. Imo the time the copy lasts has to be short enough to run out ~2 times or more during one firing period.

Basically this is the same problem as with the 3.0 magic and tidal. Those towers get worse if played on a fast placement, as they have a bit of extra fire power after a period of recovering, so they are less effective on fast paced multiplayer games. Rage in 4.0 also suffers from this.

My suggestion for trickery is:

Closely examine the dmg/gold of trickery. Give the tower the ability to create a tower for X seconds with X < firing time of a wave, with a recycling time that is set to make the resulting combined dmg of the trickeries, the created copies and the original damage tower worth a bit more (to compenstae for micro) than 125% of the dmg/gold of a damage tower.

The problem is: The overall dmg/gold of a trickery build greatly changes with the level, cost, and dmg/gold of the replicated dmg tower and the number of trickeries used. I'm working on a calc sheet to provide data for different scenarios.

> To be continued. <

[Guest mrchak]

Well provides at max 4 towers with a 25% bonus attack speed(since it lasts for 60 seconds and has a 15 second cooldown)

likewise the Blacksmith gives 4 towers a 25% bonus damage

Blacksmith can only affect each tower ONCE, well can only affect each tower ONCE

So to make Trickery tower really balanced, we need a few things:

1) The Trickery tower should only be able to copy a tower if that tower DOES NOT ALREADY HAVE A COPY in existence, and you can't copy the clones - (Affect each tower ONCE)

2) The clone should do 25% the damage of the original (25% bonus)

3) The clone should last for 4x the time of the cooldown of the spell (e.g. clone exists for 60 seconds, spell coolsdown after 15) - each trickery tower can buff at max 4 towers simultaneously.

When a tower is copied, give it a buff that lasts for 60 seconds (cloned); If a tower has this buff, it cannot be copied. Give this to the clone as well. This will take care of requirement 1.

You can easily give the "Clone" a damage handicap ability, and triggers that calculate damage can look at whether a tower has this handicap ability, and use it as a scalar for damage calculation. This will take care of requirement 2.

Requirement 3 is simple.

When you upgrade well, it doubles the speed of the increase to 50%, still can affect 4 towers at a time, each tower can only be affected ONCE, for lv3 its a 100% boost on max 4 towers. Same for blacksmith.

So for trickery lv2, clone should do 50% the damage of the original

For trickery lv3, clone should do 100% the damage of the original.

The other rules still apply (1 clone at a time, can't clone clones, 15sec cooldown, 60 second duration)

Of course, if you sell a tower that has "Spring Forward" or "Fire Up" you loose that boose as well. So if you sell a tower that has been cloned, THE CLONE MUST DISAPPEAR AS WELL. That's essential to keep players from exploiting the ability.

This should make the trickery tower totally balanced with the well and Blacksmith. (Also, its a pretty simple solution) What do you think?

[Cisz]

Well provides at max 4 towers with a 25% bonus attack speed(since it lasts for 60 seconds and has a 15 second cooldown)

likewise the Blacksmith gives 4 towers a 25% bonus damage

Ok.

Blacksmith can only affect each tower ONCE, well can only affect each tower ONCE

That's an unnecessary restriction. Nothing will change if this wasn't the case, it's only harder to implement multibuffs on a tower.

1) The Trickery tower should only be able to copy a tower if that tower DOES NOT ALREADY HAVE A COPY in existence, and you can't copy the clones - (Affect each tower ONCE)

Unnecessary restriction, and hard to implement.

2) The clone should do 25% the damage of the original (25% bonus)

Someone told me that this would require to have extra towers, to represent the copies. So we would need 2 extra towers for all towers on the map (100% doesn't need a different tower)? And that was too much work? So Karawasa wouldn't do it that way?

3) The clone should last for 4x the time of the cooldown of the spell (e.g. clone exists for 60 seconds, spell coolsdown after 15) - each trickery tower can buff at max 4 towers simultaneously.

Ok.

When a tower is copied, give it a buff that lasts for 60 seconds (cloned); If a tower has this buff, it cannot be copied. Give this to the clone as well. This will take care of requirement 1.

Not required. Only extra coding, w/o any usefull effect.

You can easily give the "Clone" a damage handicap ability, and triggers that calculate damage can look at whether a tower has this handicap ability, and use it as a scalar for damage calculation. This will take care of requirement 2.

If that would work, it would be really nice.

Requirement 3 is simple.

Agreed. And agreed to the rest as well.

If that cloned tower with % damage is possible, I don't need to calculate anything. So I'll wait with that till I know it's actually necessary.

[Guest Sancdar]

Cloning with %damage adjustments is very possible - I can think of a couple fairly easy ways. However, many important towers are currently good because of their abilities rather than their attack damage. If I'm cloning a Poison Tower and it does 25% of 1 damage on attack but still shoots its imbawave, I got a pretty good deal.

[Guest 1mpulse]

then you might have to sacrifice clones being able to use the spells, similar to how berserk doesnt do much for poison..

[Guest mrchak]

So for arguement's sake, lets assume that it is not a doable option to have clones be less powerful than the original (although I think it is a good solution that keeps trickery towers balanced). Let's assume that the clone will be 100% as powerful as the original.

Another way to think about well towers is this: Because well can give a 25% bonus to 4 towers at a time, each well tower gives you the equivalent of 1 free tower (FOR EACH 4 towers you own). At level 2, each well tower gives you the equivalent of 2 free tower for each 4 towers you own, and at level 3 each well tower gives you the equivalent of 4 free tower for each 4 towers you own. (same for blacksmith).

So at any given time, a Trickery-1 should be able to support 1 free tower (1 clone) for every 4 towers you own.

A Trickery-2 should give you 2 free towers for every 4 that you own

A Trickery-3 should give you 4 free towers for every 4 that you own

Bear with me, this will make sense.

So how do we accomplish this? There has to be a way to control how many clones you can produce. If when a tower is cloned, you get a 100% bonus for that tower for a certain amount of time, and also lv1 trickery should only give you a 100% bonus for each 4 towers, you control, make the clone last for 15 seconds, and the trickery tower must then clone a different target; within a 60 second period, a single tower can't be cloned more than once (by lv1 clone).

How can lv2 clone be twice as effective? Simplest solution is to create 2 copies.

Here's what we can do:

1) The # clones is:

Lv1: 1 clone created

Lv2: 2 clones created

Lv3: 4 clones created

2) The clone lasts for 15 seconds

3) The cooldown on the clone ability is 15 seconds

4) After a tower is cloned, it cannot be cloned for 60

So Lv1 trickery can give you 1 free tower for every 4 towers you own.

If you have 1 trickery tower and 4 other towers, it can consistently keep 1 tower cloned at all times (it will give a 1/4 of a 100% bonus to 4 towers). But if you build a second trickery tower, you will get no additional benefit. Similarly, if instead of a trickery tower you had a well tower, building a second well tower will give no benefit.

Clearly casting Lv2 clone will be twice as effective as casting Lv1 clone, and you cannot get the same benefit by massing trickery towers, no matter how many you buy; just as you cannot get the same effect as Lv2 spring forward by building many lv1 well towers.

And clearly lv3 clone will be 4x as effective as lv1.

The problem? Your map will be filled with clones.

What if the trickery tower BECOMES the target of the clone ability, and it is modified to be x% as powerful: lv1 100%, lv2 200%, lv3 400%, and the same cooldowns apply to re-cloning a tower.

But is 15 seconds of a 400% as powerful tower too much, even if you can't create another clone of the tower for 60 seconds? Maybe.

Hopefully we'll come up with the solution soon. My brain hurts.

[Guest Sancdar]

The damage modification doesn't work all that well unless support abilities and spells also get more powerful, which is unfeasible. So, making extra clones seems the more logical path here.

Sidenote: Blacksmith should do slightly more than Well (30% instead of 25%?) because attack speed is more valuable than damage - you get equal DPS with less overflow and more activations of procing skills in the same amount of time - this affects Jinx, Tidal, Quaker, and probably some others. A damage boost is only superior on Rage (or any attack speed boosting tower), Death, and Gold out of the towers I can remember.