Tower Balancing for next patch

[WindStrike]

Whelp, took two weeks, but it looks like some folks finally realize how strong Runic Tower is after my original top-spot using it. And Laser Tower. I was debating balancing those for some time, but I wanted to wait till people started to actually use them first, so I could get some input. Along with a number of other towers.

 

So, this is all just theoretical, I'm not applying any of this just yet, as I'd like some opinions on it.

• Runic Tower
  • I got no idea how to balance this tower. It's kinda sucky early, but once it gets all the support, it becomes godly late-game. I wanna find a way to round it out a bit, so it's not sucky early, but not as godly late-game.
• Laser Tower
  • Maybe a little bit of a damage nerf? Though, this thing really sucks vs. Temporal & Undead creeps, though I guess that's the point.
• Life Tower
  • So here's one I've been debating for a while, especially since the game got overall harder. Should the damage go down, should the effect not be as strong, or both? I'd really like some opinions on this one.
• Gold Tower
  • Admittedly, I've been slowly tweaking this tower each patch just to see if anyone would finally realize how strong it is. Damage nerf, effect nerf, or both?
• Electricity Tower
  • Strong early, but falls off so hard in the late-game cause it synergizes with bloody nothing. Probably needs a rework, though I'd like to keep the bouncing effect if possible.
• Vapor Tower
  • Strong early, stays strong through the whole game if you go the double-slowing build, but then suddenly falls off at the end-game. If you don't go the double slowing build, it sucks.
• Poison Tower
  • Does anyone even use this tower? Tempted to buff it just to see it get used, but at the same time, this isn't DOTA 2 balancing.
• Quark Tower
  • Kay, the recent changes to this tower makes it a lot better early but not nearly as strong late. I'm going to be tweaking this tower again to increase the max stacks, but decrease the consecutive damage bonus, such that it's still about as good as it is now early, but scales up partially to what it used to be late-game (aka, w/ some support core).
• Hydro Tower
  • Strong the whole game, and then falls off horribly end-game for reasons I can't figure out.
• Flame Tower
  • Strong early, falls off mid-game, goes back to strong in late-game w/ support. Not sure if it needs balancing or not. I am tempted to buff its single-target damage up a bit.
• Jinx Tower
  • Is its effect too strong? I see it get used over every other support tower by a longshot.
• Hail Tower
  • For clearing the waves, it's a decent tower. Falls off horribly late-game though, mainly due to lack of synergizing, like Electricity Tower.

 

Lemme know what your guys' thoughts on the above list is! Or heck, any other towers that feel a little weak or possibly a little strong.

[BlankMinded]

Gold towers currently give too much bonus. Builds abusing gold towers end up with 30-40k gold just from the towers themselves, which grows with interest gain. This huge networth bonus is the crux of almost all current frog hunting builds, since it is what allows you to build all the required support towers to amp up everything else. I think the high base damage is needed to make getting the effect easier, but maybe make it 15/30% effect or something. Nerfing this tower by itself will impact most of the frog builds by itself, so I'd suggest testing patches with JUST this tower nerfed, and patches with other towers tweaked but this one left alone.

 

Runic tower: This being a triple allows you to get all 4 slows (2 30, 2 10). This, in turn, can cause 10+ creeps to group on each other. This makes runic tower ability damage deal something around 1m damage (initial hit on each creap + 9 100% splash per creep) without any damage amps. If the ability affect had a target cap, like hail tower it would be better. The alternative is to reduce the ability damage. 50% damage on all targets makes it much weaker, and considering the top builds are only building them for boss rounds, to abuse gold towers, it won't impact the early game. And even then, 50% damage bonus with no slows is still an overall boost from base damage for the midgame anyways, so its not completely unusable. Nerfing runics too badly (without the added nerf of gold towers) may just see them replaced with quake towers though (I've tried more or less the same set-up with quakes instead of runics and had great success).

 

Quark towers are slightly less efficient, as the elements prevent you from getting as many slows. You can, however, get better buff towers, but with the stack cap reduction, and access to fewer damage amps as the Runic Frog Builds, I feel like this is too weak. It became popular on scoreboards simply because people copied the first guy to get a high score, instead of trying other things....which revealed the strength of gold towers into runic builds.

 

Laser towers: I don't think they need a nerf, the crux of the 222221 builds are the runic towers + mass slows + mass damage amps. Laser towers are simply in the build for cleanup duties when the runic and periodic towers are done clearing out the clusters.

 

Jinx tower effect is definitely too strong. Erosion damage bonus 30%. Enchantment Max 45%. Jinx tower max: over 100% (damage inflicted after curse and before first tick). Jinx really needs a nerf -- 15% with 3 ticks gives max amp of 51%, with the damage in middle/end being amped less than other towers (will most likely still be popular just not as effective). 

 

I feel like the hail tower problem is b/c of low damage output late game. The popular towers right now for frogs are quark and runics, which scale significantly with slows, but hail towers continue to hit only 3 creeps despite how grouped up they are. I know this was an alternate tower idea, but could make hail towers inflic bonus damage based on number of targets nearby? Nothing crazy, just say 20% per creep, might make it viable late game (although with that increase, runics will still be better).

 

As already alluded to, the biggest issue with Dual towers is that they force you to skip some support towers that can be obtained in triple-focus builds, depending on the dual you want to spam. This is most likely why vapor/moss/decay/flame/hydro fall off so badly. Quark is not affected as much due to the access to gold towers to compensate, and the way their damage scales. A simply fix would be to make these towers scale better with their 2nd/3rd tiwer upgrades, similar to the changes to single element towers previously. May require base damage reductions on some.

 

Ephemeral/Impulse Towers: Damage does not scale nearly as well with support towers as others. Not really sure how to change this without reworking the towers themselves. They are quite strong early/mid game when you get them though. Maybe these are good in some weird speed builds that I haven't tried?

 

Obliteration Towers: rushing these doesn't seem that great, although maybe I'm just playing the buidls wrong. Like runic towers, they can scale quite well with support, but are overshadowed by their fiery brethren atm. Quakes are similar, really powerful late game, but currently overshadowed.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 12, 2016 by BlankMinded

[shadowart]

It's not just the Runic tower itself that is strong, but 1150 range towers in general that can be built in several crazy good positions.

 

Lasers are really good against lone targets, but you can't build only lasers so I don't think they restrict the build order much.

Edited March 12, 2016 by shadowart

[BlankMinded]

Every tower has optimal positions. Every tower, if placed right, can get 2+ chances at the creep wave. I have been trying to say for a while though, that damage OUTPUT needs to scale with range --- longer range = less dps but more time in combat.

[WindStrike]

Yeah, there's a number of towers that have long ranges that are, well... a little too high in damage. Runic obviously being at the very top of that group. That tower has been a problem even back in the SC2 version. So... we could try to half the ability damage, or as noted, we could drop the range down to say a 700 or 900 range tower. Though that'd be ironic, given two of its elements are Dark and Light, the highest two tower ranges.

 

Gold tower, my issue with it isn't the level 1 version. It's the level 2 version. I've been considering just making it one flat percentage for both levels, and because it's also a somewhat decent finisher tower, leveling it up would still be worth it. So maybe increase the damage to 4500 / 22500, drop bounty on both levels to 20%.

 

Funny story about Quark Tower - before the max stacks was added, it was broken. Not the level 3 version, but the Level 2 version. Idea was go max support 6-ele build, then drop a level 2 quarks on the peninsulas, w/ lasers at the very end. You don't want to even know how dumb it got to. Guess I overnerfed though since that... hilarity. It is supposed to be arguably one of the strongest towers late-game, just not to the extent that it dominates everything else without question, so yeah, I'll try tweaking it a bit.

 

My only problem with that suggested hail change is that it makes it a little too close to runic, though then again, it kinda already is close to runic. There was an idea a while back that actually reversed its effect, so by default, it'd shoot at 3 targets at a time, but it could go single-target power mode for a few seconds, and the idea was the auto-cast wasn't entirely necessary, you could actually turn it off. So it could then prove to be a decent finisher tower, instead of "decent for 3 seconds, useless for 3 seconds".

 

Ephemeral/Impulse only fall off late cause in general, single-target falls off late-game. Slows provide exponential damage amplification for AoE, whereas single-target just gets a few more hits off. It's a bit of a tradeoff that I'm not sure how to really fix. Haste tower has the same issue, it just falls down into nothingness in the endgame. Laser is only so good late cause when it does solo-hit creeps, its DPS is so god darn high in comparison to the rest of the single-target towers it doesn't matter. I suppose we could attempt to nerf tier 2 slowing towers, but I'm honestly a little iffy on messing with that balance, cause it would easily disrupt the balance of the whole game. I would prefer to see if we could tweak other stuff first before resorting to such a drastic measure.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this how jinx actually works right now?

• Tier 1: 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = x1.33
• Tier 2: 1.3 * 1.3 * 1.3 = x2.19

Cause if so, that is beyond silly. That practically begs Erosion and Enchantment to get buffed a bit in addition to Jinx getting nerfed. Polar, on the other hand, I'd be seriously hesitant to buff it.

[shadowart]

That's how the damage dealt within the first 2.5s after the curse is applied gets amplified. Damage dealt within the second 2.5s period gets an X*X amplification and just an X amplification on the damage dealt in the third period, so on average a Hex tower amplifies by a factor of 1.729 and a Jinx tower by a factor of 1.214. Once the curse is applied it cannot be renewed until it runs out so the positioning of your Jinx/Hex towers relative to the majority of your damage is important -- you don't want to apply it in advance.

[BlankMinded]

7 minutes ago, WindStrike said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this how jinx actually works right now?

I went to IRC a week ago or so to ask that exact question b/c if that was the case, it was stupidly OP. And after the looked at me with heads tilted, that is in fact how it works.

 

Polar tower is a unique case. If the creeps die before frostbite duration expires, they are supwer powerful. If creeps live through frostbite, they aren't that great.

[Utoko]

18 minutes ago, shadowart said:

That's how the damage dealt within the first 2.5s after the curse is applied gets amplified. Damage dealt within the second 2.5s period gets an X*X amplification and just an X amplification on the damage dealt in the third period, so on average a Hex tower amplifies by a factor of 1.729 and a Jinx tower by a factor of 1.214. Once the curse is applied it cannot be renewed until it runs out so the positioning of your Jinx/Hex towers relative to the majority of your damage is important -- you don't want to apply it in advance.

 

That is a very important point. It is a lot weaker if you have bad positioning with your Hex towers.
 

but ofc I agree with all here that a avg boost of +73% is too strong!

32 minutes ago, WindStrike said:

 

Funny story about Quark Tower - before the max stacks was added, it was broken. Not the level 3 version, but the Level 2 version. Idea was go max support 6-ele build, then drop a level 2 quarks on the peninsulas, w/ lasers at the very end. You don't want to even know how dumb it got to. Guess I overnerfed though since that... hilarity. It is supposed to be arguably one of the strongest towers late-game, just not to the extent that it dominates everything else without question, so yeah, I'll try tweaking it a bit.

 

 

Haha I t tried massing LvL 2 Quark towers last version together with all the slows but wasn't quite good enough : )


 

[Karawasa]

Here is my take;

• Runic Tower
  • Increase its base damage. Then decrease duration and/or increase cooldown.
• Laser Tower
  • I think this one is fine. Leave it alone.
• Life Tower
  • Don't decrease the damage. Nerf effect to 4/2/1.
• Gold Tower
  • Decrease bounty bonus to 20%/40%.
• Electricity Tower
  • Decrease to 150 damage. Make bounces add 20% instead.
• Vapor Tower
  • Might be fine as is based on what you described.
• Poison Tower
  • Increase the bonus attack to 4x damage up from 3x.
• Quark Tower
  • Try a max stack of 12. Leave everything else the same.
• Hydro Tower
  • Might be fine as is based on what you described.
• Flame Tower
  • Might be fine as is based on what you described.
• Jinx Tower
  • Decrease duration to 5 seconds. So two "hits" of damage instead of 3.
• Hail Tower
  • Not sure what to do. Radical idea: ability allows this tower to attack all creeps in range.

[BlankMinded]

I think that would make hail tower a little silly (both in power output and from a particle effect/fps standpoint), but interesting none the less...Would make it the new runic tower sans splash.

 

How about Powershot? As in the dota skill: an active that fires an arrow in a straight line hitting all targets. Kind of like combining the Ice tower and a single target damage dealer, it would have better synergy with support towers late game, have varying possible build positions, and still be worth building early game to clear waves (similar to how it functions now).

Edited March 15, 2016 by BlankMinded

[Karawasa]

How is that different than Ice really? Also, abilities are passive or autocast only.

[WindStrike]

Quark tower was bloody silly with 8+ stacks with everything as is (seriously, soloing through Wave 20 with three Level 1 Quark towers on Insane? wha?). It'll genuinely need more tweaking than just a stack count change.

 

For life tower, the one I find causes the most issues is the level 2 one actually, so in vein of the dual element support towers, how about 4 / 3 / 1? Given its DPS/Gold value, it is a lot closer to a support tower than a damage tower.

 

LOL dat Hail Tower change. It'd probably have to be changed to something like "every 10 attacks, shoot all targets in range". I'd be cool with that. Heck, it may be possible to run a separate visual effect on it, like Luna's Lucent Beam, so it actually rains down from the sky. Twould be glorious.

 

For Electricity, oh man, that uhh.. well, 150 would be overkill, but given we're thinking essentially applying a damage decreasing bouncing attack to one of the single-element towers (aka current electricity), yeah I'd be fine with flipping its effect.

[BlankMinded]

6 hours ago, Karawasa said:

How is that different than Ice really? Also, abilities are passive or autocast only.

Think I forgot a few words in my haste to reply. It would be autocast with a long-ish cooldown, and would shot a single arrow / make hail rain in a line 1500 units in length, not just the 700 range or w/e of ice tower. It would also retain the current single target damage it has now. But yes, I never expected ppl to take the idea super serious since there are already ice towers and root towers that hit in a straight line

Edited March 16, 2016 by BlankMinded

[Califax]

Poison Tower is actually my favorite early game tower atm..

Got like top 25 one weekend on express using Poison-Trickery-Hail combo.. #fuckuallquark-life-gold-towerfangays

Wouldn't mind a buff or two though PogChamp

Edited March 16, 2016 by Califax

[Karawasa]

11 hours ago, WindStrike said:

Quark tower was bloody silly with 8+ stacks with everything as is (seriously, soloing through Wave 20 with three Level 1 Quark towers on Insane? wha?). It'll genuinely need more tweaking than just a stack count change.

 

For life tower, the one I find causes the most issues is the level 2 one actually, so in vein of the dual element support towers, how about 4 / 3 / 1? Given its DPS/Gold value, it is a lot closer to a support tower than a damage tower.

 

LOL dat Hail Tower change. It'd probably have to be changed to something like "every 10 attacks, shoot all targets in range". I'd be cool with that. Heck, it may be possible to run a separate visual effect on it, like Luna's Lucent Beam, so it actually rains down from the sky. Twould be glorious.

 

For Electricity, oh man, that uhh.. well, 150 would be overkill, but given we're thinking essentially applying a damage decreasing bouncing attack to one of the single-element towers (aka current electricity), yeah I'd be fine with flipping its effect.

 

Ha I thought Quark was still 10 stacks. Proves how much I know . I'd like to keep Life a multiple of 2. Let's try 4/2/1. Glad to hear you like my Hail idea. Alright for Electricity just flip the effect and don't nerf the damage then?

[DangerouS experiment]

Does not anyone think what i think? Nature Towers(at all levels) should be immediately nerfed.Next patch is the time for that.

 

Major Reasons:

1-At early game stages it is absolute advantage for multiplayer games(at all difficulties).

2-Stupidly overpowered pure tower type.(This was why you decreased pure gold advantage in older patches.)

3-Dps leveling is extremely perfect for hitpoint increase of creep waves at middle stage.

 

Minor Reasons:

1-For expert gaming, too much attackspeed to make micro managements.(I mean this tower should be able to controlled like light/dark tower to attack 1 hit for every creep.)

2-It has very big speed and score advantage when randomed.(Random element games)

3-Nature element type's combination with water element.

a)Well Tower give attackspeed, nature has also attackspeed combining these elements is kind of an automatic rifle.

b)Both nature and water towers are better(Dps) than other elements at early stages.

c)With all these information a simple thinking: while hard to counter fire element with nature element ,use best symbiotic element water to easily counter fire armored creeps.

Edited March 20, 2016 by DangerouS experiment

[WindStrike]

I dunno, ever since the nerf from I think... Version 1.1? It's not been that godly. Yeah, maybe it's a little strong for the Pure Rush strategy, but there's a number of other tower combinations easily capable of doing the Pure Rush strat, like straight Trickery Rush or going for level 2 Impulse Tower and then for a Pure Water after that. It's a great finisher tower, but... not sure I'd call it overpowered. Admittedly, the attack speed increase on it was actually meant as a temporary change. Next patch, all the single-element towers are receiving abilities, so, I mean... I could nerf it, but it won't make a difference once the abilities are added, cause then we'd have to look at balance again for all the towers again. I am running a hotfix patch in the next day or so, so... I'll look into it.

[DangerouS experiment]

1 hour ago, WindStrike said:

Next patch, all the single-element towers are receiving abilities, so, I mean... I could nerf it, but it won't make a difference once the abilities are added, cause then we'd have to look at balance again for all the towers again.

Very nice, i beleive the future innovations to other single element towers will balance the gate camping system(Pures,min quantity but max quality,etc..) that i mentioned into tower variety system (diversity, riot of colors, rainbow...)

Or a new radical idea called investment system (lose some life but earn more gold, or vice verse). Probably needs a lot of tests with gold and life towers, nontheless community grows up everday.

I want to repeat the important point again: 80% of games are played in Normal mode with amateur players, balance should include all the players, not only at leaderbords.

Well done with new patches and thanks for your attention.

Sorry, English is not my native language.

[WindStrike]

5 minutes ago, DangerouS experiment said:

I want to repeat the important point again: 80% of games are played in Normal mode with amateur players, balance should include all the players, not only at leaderbords.

 

That was a point some other folks brought up a number of times. It's pretty hard to balance between both the casual player and the expert player. For example, Gold Tower keeps getting constantly tweaked so that's usable for both, whereas back in say the SC2 version, it was pretty much only usable for experts (and by usable, I mean super broken, lol) and useless for casual players. We'll be adding new content over the next month that caters to both, or rather, new content that we add will be usable by both, obviously on different levels.

 

Not sure i like the investment system idea, it's similar to how people were breaking the game prior to the interest locking on leaks, where they'd leak a bunch of the initial waves to gain super gold. Interest is already pretty abusable, it's probably best not to make it worse.

[agentura]

 Hello creator! Try to test such innovations)
Arrow tower - 5 levels upgrade. Gold cost - 50\100\150\200\250. Totally cost - 750 gold. Tower damage for each
upgrade level increases by 25%, total damage - ~114. Just at the last level of the tower would become 
susceptible to any buffs.

Siege tower - 5 levels upgrade. Gold cost - 50\100\150\200\250. Totally cost - 750 gold. Tower damage for each
upgrade level increases by 15%, total damage - ~91. Attack Speed increases for each level of 4%, amounting to 20%.

 

Give the on 55 wave 1 lumber, for the total upgrade 4 elements to level 3. (VERY NICE)

 

Swap the elements that needed to create well tower and blacksmith tower. 
Well tower - water+earth, blacksmith - fire+nature. For the balancing combination of the tower set needed for the 
tactic based on the focused element tower. (should thoroughly test).