Patch 1.1

[WindStrike]

Patch should be up very soon.

 

Courtesies of the slow game of networth winning by default, and with AoE apparently being too weak, have a patch that hopefully fixes that, or at the very least, puts us in the right direction.

• General
  • Custom Wisp Set & Custom Builders for our amazing and generous supporters!
  • Matches have Steam ID Match Tracking! Now you can copy your favorite player's build faster than ever!

  • You can now set your lives for Sandbox.

• Bug Fixes

  • Fixed remainder frog kills not adding towards the final score

  • Fixed slow adjustment on fast creeps

• Scoring

  • Frogs base points lowered from 250 to 200 per creep

  • Wave Speed bonus points increased from +2% to +4%, up to a maximum of +120% and down to minimum of +0%, so you can now no longer get a negative speed bonus.

  • Each wave now has +5 base score per creep (+3 on express), making early waves have more value overall.

    • For example, on Classic, instead of Wave 1 giving '1 * 30' score, it now gives '6 * 30' score.

  • Updated fast scoring to use the intended 30 seconds as the tiebreaker.

• Balance

  • Express Random Mode can now select a level 2 element at wave 6 (down from 9) and level 3 at wave 15 (down from 18).

  • Bulky Creeps have gone out the window.

  • In their place comes the fearsome Temporal Creeps!

    • When its health drops to 25% health or less (this includes death), it'll warp back in time by 3 seconds, restoring both its position and health.

  • Avenger Creeps' debuff increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.

  • Quark Towers have a bit of a revamp bat. Base damage reduced from 200 to 160 and their max stacks have been reduced from 15 to 7; however, when they switch targets, instead of losing all stacks, they only lose half the stacks.

    • Overall, this is a buff early-game, and somewhat of a nerf late-game; however you can now stick 'em in more than just the peninsula locations and they can still be good.

 

We're not touching Life Towers just yet; basically, we wanna see if this patch effectively nerfs them due to the speed bonus amp; if not, expect some changes next patch. There's a number of other towers that apparently need some rescaling as well, namely dual element towers.

[BlankMinded]

The in-game patch notes regarding quark towers say stack cap is 10.

 

Also, quake tower ability tooltip says 600/3000 damage. Should be 900/4500 now

Edited March 12, 2016 by BlankMinded

[Crooked]

5 hours ago, WindStrike said:

Custom Wisp Set & Custom Builders for our amazing and generous supporters!

 

Custom builders. Nice!

Stole those links from Noya. It may be subject to change I don't know. ^^

Looks very good and it is a good way to support the devs as well as show off their support and it's not p2w. 

[kerb]

@temporal creeps: with the spirit breaker/sea witch wave, its hard to tell which creep still has it ready (color wise, as the effect has almost same color as the texture of the model).

edit: same goes for pl wave

Edited March 12, 2016 by kerb

[WindStrike]

9 hours ago, BlankMinded said:

The in-game patch notes regarding quark towers say stack cap is 10.

 

Also, quake tower ability tooltip says 600/3000 damage. Should be 900/4500 now

 

Woops, in-game should say 7, and I knew I missed a tooltip somewhere. Thanks!

[Black.ttk]

I noticed that in rare cases, temporal creeps time lapsing waaay to far, like ~20 seconds back.

 

I also think that life towers should probably get charges for last hitting temporal creeps before they used time lapse, like with undead ones.

 

[WindStrike]

1 hour ago, Black.ttk said:

I noticed that in rare cases, temporal creeps time lapsing waaay to far, like ~20 seconds back.

 

I also think that life towers should probably get charges for last hitting temporal creeps before they used time lapse, like with undead ones.

 

 By ~20 seconds back, you mean they go the way back to the entrance? Huh, we had that bug in testing, thought we fixed it. Guess not.

 

 

Wait, Life Towers get charges for hitting undead creeps before reincarnation? That's actually a bug, not the temporal thingy.

[Utoko]

 

They get charges : ). I thought that was a feature : D rip 10 life!

 

I also think it is quite funny that you lose a life again when a temporal creep triggers right after it leaks.

 

 

There are some towers(Quark, Lifetower, Goldtower.. (I think all with a attack logic)) where the stop command doesn't work. The way it is now I need to spam 10 times stop/sec to prevent the towers from hitting.

 

I might have to sue you for my hand pain : D.  

Edited March 12, 2016 by Utoko

[shadowart]

Stop also doesn't work if you have it bound to space, as Ele TD overrides that key to bring up the tower list (which really doesn't need a hotkey).

[WindStrike]

22 minutes ago, Utoko said:

 

They get charges : ). I thought that was a feature : D rip 10 life!

 

I also think it is quite funny that you lose a life again when a temporal creep triggers right after it leaks.

 

 

There are some towers(Quark, Lifetower, Goldtower.. (I think all with a attack logic)) where the stop command doesn't work. The way it is now I need to spam 10 times stop/sec to prevent the towers from hitting.

 

I might have to sue you for my hand pain : D.  

 

That's cause stop was never intended to work to stop towers from attacking, lol. We aim not to create the game of APM; you want that, just go play SC2 and enjoy having to manually select 'spawn larva' every 20 seconds or so. Who needs autocast when you've got 500 APM?

[Noya]

The Stop not working is due to the autoattack logic needing to interrupt the attacks ASAP to chose a better new target. I can consider a 'Hold' command, making the tower stop attacking altogether.

[Utoko]

Well if you take away the option to micro towers they would be 100 times the same score +-100 in the top 100 after a while.

 

e:and you only need high apm now because stop doesn't work else you would be fine with 10 apm

Edited March 12, 2016 by Utoko

[WindStrike]

Note to self - develop that god darn PvP mode faster. I mean, what? We totally don't actually know what we're planning, right?

 

Eh, I like to see micro as choosing what does what at any given time, not causing arthritis at a rate of 100 seconds per second, however the heck that even works.

[BlankMinded]

I think "10 apm" micro is fine tbh. It could be the difference between a high score and average score with identical builds. However, you shouldn't need SC2 level apm to max things in a TD game. Turning off auto-cast for the Mirage towers near the end of a wave for example.

Edited March 12, 2016 by BlankMinded

[Black.ttk]

1 hour ago, WindStrike said:

By ~20 seconds back, you mean they go the way back to the entrance? Huh, we had that bug in testing, thought we fixed it. Guess not.

 

Here you can see, how arrows travels from the point where they almost hit the creep, back to where it tp'ed

p.s. how to make a spoiler for screenshots?

Edited March 12, 2016 by Black.ttk

[Noya]

That's a bug, problem with not choosing the time properly or forgetting to clear a time on the sequence, gonna look into it

[Helpstone]

I also experienced the issue with some towers not actually stopping to attack if you tell them to do so.

Back when income did not freeze when a creep leaked you would just tell your towers to stop attacking in order to let them walk through and thus get a lot of income^^

Actually used a click bot in order to simulate me pressing the "s" key 10 times a second back then

Now that the income abuse isn't doable anymore it doesn't actually matter that much, but I still think people shouldn't be rewarded for using external tools like a clickbot or something similar..

That's why I think either there should be an option to rly make a tower stop attacking until you tell them otherwise or remove the option of stopping specific towers completely so that no one can do it anymore.
It may not matter that much atm, but maybe there will be problems with something like that in future patches^^

[diox8tony]

 

Quote

you can now no longer get a negative speed bonus.

I am still getting the red "-25% speed bonus" shown.

 

I had a concern with temporal creeps but I did not test to see for sure what happens.

When the temporal creep goes through exit (-1 life), then my towers hit it to 25% and it warps back to behind exit and walks through again...
Does that temporal creep take 2 of my lives total?
if yes, is that intended? that would theoretically allow a temporal creep wave to take 2 times as many lives as other waves.

 

"current: Boss wave 2",,,"Next: boss wave 2"

 

and lastly, i have a suggestion/complaint for 1.2...towers that do not have a special targeting method(EG: basic nature), should prioritize the creep closest to exit. I'm not too knowledgeable about the algorithm currently used...but i have had creeps within 1 shot of death, going into my exit, be ignored by my towers. they had a good 2-3 second window to kill it, but focused instead on the next wave. I'd rather not have to micro every obvious choice target for my towers.

Edited March 13, 2016 by diox8tony

[Kpop fangay]

2 minutes ago, diox8tony said:

 

I am still getting the red "-25% speed bonus" shown.

 

I had a concern with temporal creeps but I did not test to see for sure what happens.

When the temporal creep goes through exit (-1 life), then my towers hit it to 25% and it warps back to behind exit and walks through again...
Does that temporal creep take 2 of my lives total?
if yes, is that intended? that would theoretically allow a temporal creep wave to take 2 times as many lives as other waves.

 

and lastly, i have a suggestion/complaint for 1.2...towers that do not have a special targeting method(EG: basic nature), should prioritize the creep closest to exit. I'm not too knowledgeable about the algorithm currently used...but i have had creeps within 1 shot of death, going into my exit, be ignored by my towers. they had a good 2-3 second window to kill it, but focused instead on the next wave. I'd rather not have to micro every obvious choice target for my towers.

This has been mentioned by one of the devs and was intended to be a nerf to income builds, likewise killing the temporal creep within its first 3 seconds of being spawned also immediately kills them without timelapse proccing.

 

As for targeting rules, I can't say much about them apart from the fact that without them its extremely beneficial to the life/gold tower builds as you can have your other towers without targeting rules to stop attacking by pressing S while having 'auto attack' turned off. I'm sure if there was a toggle spell on towers to switch between targeting rules (First, Weakest, Closest, Furthest Strongest, Last) it would greatly benefit players that want to relax but get good scores with the gimmicky towers that require last hitting or builds that do varied damage based on current health.

 

Personally I would like to see an option which makes towers constantly switch targets, this would be beneficial to a few of the debuff towers which currently have default targeting.

Edited March 13, 2016 by Kpop fangay

[Noya]

3 hours ago, diox8tony said:

I am still getting the red "-25% speed bonus" shown.

 

Yes, the score will just cap at 0 for the wave depending on other values. You can get a -2000% speed bonus and it will end up in 0 score.

 

3 hours ago, Kpop fangay said:

This has been mentioned by one of the devs and was intended to be a nerf to income builds, likewise killing the temporal creep within its first 3 seconds of being spawned also immediately kills them without timelapse proccing.

 

As for targeting rules, I can't say much about them apart from the fact that without them its extremely beneficial to the life/gold tower builds as you can have your other towers without targeting rules to stop attacking by pressing S while having 'auto attack' turned off. I'm sure if there was a toggle spell on towers to switch between targeting rules (First, Weakest, Closest, Furthest Strongest, Last) it would greatly benefit players that want to relax but get good scores with the gimmicky towers that require last hitting or builds that do varied damage based on current health.

 

Personally I would like to see an option which makes towers constantly switch targets, this would be beneficial to a few of the debuff towers which currently have default targeting.

I wanted to do an "Attack Stance" UI for tower attacks (I basically have the backend implemented) but it's really so convoluted, first there is the "Switch targets after each attack?" option, then there's "Target Closest/Furthest/Highest HP/Lowest HP" targeting choice, and finally a "Keep focusing after leaking" flag on the mix. And potentially a "Hold attacks" option? The default dota behaviour (no extra script logic) is basically "Target closest and keep attacking it until it leaves range", we have done specific attack logic for all towers that made sense to have one, but I feel adding a floating UI with +6 buttons could cause a lot of confusion and miss-use. 

 

If you guys really think this is necessary I'm sure we can do something, but as it is now I don't have a clear idea on what does this interface actually need.

[Black.ttk]

We definetely dont need this much options. The only thing i'd like to use is a toggle skill to switch the attack type of towers from normal, into the one we have now. Sometimes it becomes realy absurdly when all of your life and gold towers last hitting the same creep which have 1-hit hp, this also annoying when creeps are near the exit and you have to micro your towers, otherwise you will leak.