After a lot of randoming...

[GoatAss]

i speak only from a classic mode insane perspective, i dont know about others

 

1. all non-support dual-elements need buffs. none are decent for frogging. i think moss3, magic3 come closest but not even close.

2. fire towers should have range buffs per level. purefire should receive significant range buffs to make it useful against frogs. its totally unusable as it is right now... the only exception is when you have 2x slows, which you dont always do, and even then thats only useful for first few levels coz of range limitations.

3. water tower dmg is just too slow for any level.

4. earth tower -- pure earth needs more buffs for it to be useful against frogs. perhaps increase splash range, dmg.

5. gold tower -- as ive suggested before, perhaps dmg increase per consecutive hit so that they scale as game goes later and later. such that, instead of requiring 3 hits to kill a creep later on, maybe 2 hits will do.

6. ephmeral/haste - the weakest amongst runic, hail, laser, haste. requires more damage. give it dmg, or add a 1% slow per hit or something to it. haste is second worst. both dmg and speed should be part of its buff.

7. quake tower -- i think moss3 does more dmg tahn quake2 overall, with 100% splash. perhaps good only when a lot of creeps are gathered.... (revive, temporal) or slow creeps....... but with so many conditions, this tower is just bad. just buff the range. to 500 or something.

 

at the moment, PURE water, fire, earth are completely useless against frogs. buffs are definitely necessary.

 

because these towers are so weak at the moment.... i think tahts why people rely on very same towers to get a high score. perhaps not all my recommendations will be accepted.... but i guess you could try buff in one upcoming version and if the idea is bad.. they can always be nerfed in future versions..

 

also, for early game. nature is always the best (in fact, the best from start to end), early game also, fire is on par with nature. water, light, dark, earth just clear much too slow lvl1-10. while light, dark have their single target purpose, thats fine. earth/water dmg are lacking a bit.

Edited May 11, 2016 by GoatAss

[WindStrike]

We're actually rollin' a balance patch in the next few days, twas gonna consult the forums for feedback, and you pretty much just commented on every tower I needed to check on, lol. Thanks a lot! Probably won't be applying the consecutive hit thingy on gold tower and instead just gonna try to bump damage up some more, maaaaybe effect a bit. I'm very reluctant to increase its attack speed while maintaining DPS, cause it'd pretty much run into Life Tower's issue where it last hits everything so you don't actually care about its damage, so long as you get 30% extra bounty per wave.

 

Fire tower, gonna make it consistent with upgrades and just go increased damage per wave, so just gonna increase its damage for now. There's a change down-the-road that'll help out fire tower, but it's gonna be another month or so before it's in.

 

Water tower, heard someone else complaining about it sucking, bumpin' the damage up.

 

Earth tower, I was worried it was too low, but wanted to wait till I got more feedback, and now I do, so thank ye.

 

I've actually heard ephemeral is really good, rather than spamming the tower, you just have one or two to weaken the herd, and use it in combination with Disease or Laser Tower and it works really well, done it mahself. Haste, on the other hand, gonna revisit that tower, it's been non-existent ever since it got nerfed post-rush builds.

 

Quake, it's at 550 range right now, twill buff its damage up some moar.

 

 

As for "all non-support duals" getting damage buffs, that's a little tricky to deal with, cause straight buffing them severely affects early game balance. I could attempt to go back to the x6 scaling on the balance, though that'd also mean something like 6.5k gold tier 3s, lol. They'd be hilariously amazing and even harder to tech rush, which might be a good thing, but arguably too big of a change. Before I attempt this again, I'mma partially revert one of the previous changes that super buffed all the triple support towers, that should naturally nerf 6-ele.

[GoatAss]

The problem with fire tower is mostly range. Can you honestly tell me if they are overall useful to build when frogging? You just need one creep on shield or speed for it to lose its effectiveness tremendously. It would do 3 hits before some frogs just run off, even with slows present.

 

I would think that pure towers are meant as highest damaging towers for lvl50 onwards, but, more importantly, for clearing frogs. I'm very sure you too wouldn't like using pure fire for frogging.

 

Earth tower needs a bump of at least 1.3. Any less it's still useless. Or maybe.... make it hit a bit quicker? The animation is so bad.

 

At the moment, I can close the game with any tower combination without excuses. The difference is speed, efficiency. With some towers, I can get higher scores. I can certainly tell you that, disease and ephemeral towers will not add producing a high score.

 

The game has 2 combinations that will produce a high score. It's either slow+amp or speed/damage.

 

In other words. 222122 or water-nature + amps.

 

The problem with damage is that, only few towers are able to fork decent damage. Eph/disease won't cut it. Laser is the best tri-element for frogging, runic and hail are second best, the rest are just terrible. Moss3/Magic3 are best dual elements for frogging but im sorry they are still really bad. In fact, there any reason to build them at all? If i were to allpick, im surely never going to build moss3/magic3/quark3 for damage. i do like ice3 though. tri-element towers are just better than dual element towers. Please think about this.

Edited May 11, 2016 by GoatAss

[WindStrike]

Hmm, on one hand, I could do a mass buff, but I'm not sure that would achieve anything other than making Insane really easy.

 

4 hours ago, GoatAss said:

tri-element towers are just better than dual element towers. Please think about this.

 

Didn't used to be that way, at one point, 3-ele and 4-ele dominated everything, then 1.5 flipped it around, and while 3-ele and 4-ele aren't bad per se, they could be better. Fixing this will be really tricky, applying a mass of big changes will obviously change the meta, but it could easily make this issue worse. On the contrary, in co-op mode, dual-elements are arguably better than tri-elements, though part of that involves the dual support core and gold efficiency issues. I'm not too worried about actual co-op balance.

 

4 hours ago, GoatAss said:

The problem with fire tower is mostly range. Can you honestly tell me if they are overall useful to build when frogging? You just need one creep on shield or speed for it to lose its effectiveness tremendously. It would do 3 hits before some frogs just run off, even with slows present.

 

Oh, I always saw it as a bruiser tower, just grab one, don't use it for actual kills, just have it damage things down and stick it on a double pass. But yeah, it's still underwhelming, despite attempts to buff it back.

 

4 hours ago, GoatAss said:

Earth tower needs a bump of at least 1.3. Any less it's still useless. Or maybe.... make it hit a bit quicker? The animation is so bad.

 

I'll start small. Probably going to do more than just damage tweaks, and yeah, projectile speed needs to go up.

 

 

4 hours ago, GoatAss said:

 

The problem with damage is that, only few towers are able to fork decent damage. Eph/disease won't cut it. Laser is the best tri-element for frogging, runic and hail are second best, the rest are just terrible.

 

Not every tower is intended as a "damage tower", aka spam it to win. A lot of them work better prior to frogs (ie Impulse), some of them that are iffy throughout the whole game are, once supported, considered best for frogs (runic being at the top of this list). Straight buffing every tower that "sucks" for frogs will break the game. Haste Tower always sucked for frogs, but at one point it was godly for clearing the standard waves. I'm really not sure how to fix this overall issue, or heck, if it even fixable without a complete rewrite to the balance structure of the game (which is incredibly difficult and not really my worry, because before that, we need more content, not infinite balance tweaks).

 

 

4 hours ago, GoatAss said:

Eph/disease won't cut it.

 

And admittedly, disease straight up needs a buff, lol. Super iffy on buffing ephemeral though due to its high early-mid game power.

[DBX_5]

Increase the range on fire and that will do a lot for that tower tbh, goat is also right about a lot of the t2 towers being pretty useless by frogs some times even by the time you hit 50 I find they lose a lot of effectiveness.

 

I find the game is at a point where you need to really watch your income in the 45-frog rounds so you can fit as many damage/speed/amp towers in as you can to get far during this patch I usually find my self selling off a lot of t2 towers and even some t3 towers just so I can get more T3 elements/pures just before frog rounds because I find most other towers pretty much useless.

[GoatAss]

I can only speak from my perspective -- I'm at a stage where I can always clear the game with any towers, dual, tri, etc.

 

 

Quote

Not every tower is intended as a "damage tower", aka spam it to win.

 

Like I said, the difference is only score. A lot of towers are really useless 50 and above... Haste is one of them. All duals. Pure fire is VERY situational (works only with certain combinations yet against only certain creep waves) and yet definitely still half the efficiency that of pure nature. So yes, it's not about winning the game..... it's about score. Also, for the record, impulse are only OK for frogs. Runic is not that superb either... Laser is #1 for this.. and then runic,impulse,hail... and after that haste, ephemeral (the worst).

 

I'm not saying that insane should be made really easy. But there are only 2 ways to top 20 right now, water3+nature3 or 222122 (check leaderboard). In fact, those are the only builds in top 20 other than (me, my cousin dogbollocks and bercut32) EVery other way is just much slower. You can check my profile, believe me I've tried. The only thing I've not tried is dragging the income game with gold tower to 200k+ gold, but mostly coz I dont have the patience for it. Question is.... are other ways going to be made viable?

Edited May 12, 2016 by GoatAss

[WindStrike]

1 hour ago, GoatAss said:

The only thing I've not tried is dragging the income game with gold tower to 200k+ gold, but mostly coz I dont have the patience for it. Question is.... are other ways going to be made viable?

 

I have seen that done, it took a score that was close to number 1 a little while ago, but didn't make top. Other ways will be made viable, though not necessarily with "buffing everything that sucks". I got another solution that I'mma try out in testing - nerfing everything that's TOO good, otherwise the difficulty of the game effectively gets lowered..... for the fifth time, and then I'd do something to jump it back up again, so it'd be a repetitive process. We can also tweak scoring, it's not necessarily a finalized system, it seemed to do better than the last scoring system (aka, 200k+ gold builds floored everything else), but there's a number of debatable issues with it still. I'm definitely going to be tweaking the speed score multipliers, some of those are... a little too high.

 

 

1 hour ago, GoatAss said:

So yes, it's not about winning the game..... it's about score.

 

For a very small percentage of the players, it's about score, which is a system that was arbitrarily created in order make more factors other than just frog kills, aka speed, networth, clean bonus, etc. as actual factors, hence there's some things we can do about balancing around score, but basing the game's balance entirely around score might as well have us axe everything but the frog waves. You know what, that sounds like a mode idea we could add later - 100k networth, 11 element picks, as much set-up time as you want, and then once your defense is up, hit go to see how well you fare against the frog waves, lol. Dunno if we'll actually do it.

 

 

2 hours ago, DBX_5 said:

 

Increase the range on fire and that will do a lot for that tower tbh, goat is also right about a lot of the t2 towers being pretty useless by frogs some times even by the time you hit 50 I find they lose a lot of effectiveness.

 

 

Hmm, I guess while I'm at it, bump all the other 550 range towers up so that 700 is the lowest range. Miiiight make Quake a little too strong, but given it's apparently on the weak end and can only go in a handful of locations, I guess that's not too bad.

[GoatAss]

Do pm me your solution/ideas if you do not mind. I do enjoy the devel line and conceptualizing if you do not mind me sharing my opinion at all.

 

Games generally require some form of benchmarking to make it interesting. Ranks, challenges are interesting. Scores, hall of fames especially for this type of game is what keep us playing this game. Otherwise I would just clear the game and move on. But you are right, the mass majority of people are still struggling with this game, and they will continue to with any version or any meta. The reason is because they do not understand "efficiency"... and perhaps also, they don't know how a lot of towers work in general. You could buff a lot of towers a lot, and they will still have trouble closing the game. Dota is a fairly balanced game... but a mass majority if still stuck in low tier for a good reason. Hence, development and tweaks should focus only on balancing the minority -- those trying to accomplish scores.

[DogBollocks]

1 hour ago, WindStrike said:

bump all the other 550 range towers up so that 700 is the lowest range. Miiiight make Quake a little too strong, but given it's apparently on the weak end and can only go in a handful of locations, I guess that's not too bad.

 

If it would make it too strong for quake if it has the range, then its base damage can be reduced and increase its stack damage.

[kerb]

I haven't played normal eletd much this patch, was more into trying out the co-op mode. But what goat says about the towers is mostly true for co-op as well. With the exception of the nature-water one, as the range of nature is too bad for co-op and in general long range aoe towers are the go to there (tri-ele ones).