Post-patch issue: Ceiling Lasers not performing intended role

[Solodric]

I want to open up with saying I felt the August balance patch mostly did a lot of good for the game. Sawblade launchers aren't quite as insanely dominant as they were for killboxes due to the bug being patched, the swinging mace is slightly better when used outside of tarpits (though it seems to have the same performance in tar, maybe due to tar being debuffed) and many other traps got some much-needed attention. The Decoy remains, in my opinion, worthless in this game, but that's a topic for another thread. In general, good job, Robot.

Now for the part that's a problem. I recently played through all of Drastic Steps. I have a habit of playing levels and looking for what the developer intended, especially when they introduce a new trap on a given level. I've actually been very impressed with the level design in OMD1 and 2 in this regard, where a new level generally really highlights the usefulness of a new trap.

OMD3 has generally held to this trend, and I discovered a lot of really awesome ways of using traps because I stuck to this pattern. I even intend to write guides for the three games discussing this in a lot more depth. Unfortunately, the new August patch seems to have broken some of the intended 'tricks' for the Ceiling Lasers in Drastic Steps.

In level 4 of the DLC, Order Enclave, there's the obvious flier/ground entrances where ceiling lasers should theoretically be great (and hence why shock bats are introduced on that level). Very clever, except that ceiling lasers are so incredibly unreliable now that not even three layers of this very expensive trap guarantees that all runners/kobolds will be taken down - in fact, even setting them sideways for max coverage and buying SIX of them doesn't guarantee that, with a MAJORITY of runners slipping past in my experience. This means push traps in the many areas of the map that support them will end up being rendered useless pretty often, as well.

Despite this, the ceiling laser is somewhat-useful on the sapper entrance of Order Enclave... somewhat. But the real kicker comes from Canyon Keep and more egregiously, Slag Field. In Canyon Keep, investing in lasers above the central walkway (in order to fry fliers and put chip damage on enemies who get into the fortress) ends up being nearly pointless, as the fliers tend to weave through the lasers very effectively and the ground forces barely notice them.

In Slag Field, I noticed two spots where walkways intercepted the flight path, and I thought, "okay, this is definitely where the devs thought lasers would be great." They're not. It's a complete waste of runecoin - out of over 100 flying enemies, we counted 9 deaths from lasers. Shockbats aside, the nerf to laser hitbox has rendered them so unreliable outside of mazing/killboxing that... well, that that's all they're good for anymore. Mazing/killboxing.

Mazing is, in my opinion, a somewhat dull playstyle that largely ignores a lot of the great trap design in these games. It encourages you to reuse the same traps on every map, just seeking out a good box to copy/paste your design into, and OMD3 has done a good job of trying to thwart that. But if a trap is rendered useless outside of killboxes, even in the levels of the DLC where it was introduced, this constitutes a major problem for that trap - not the least of which is that you can use just about any traps you want in a killbox and make it work with a little creativity. Lasers aren't necessary for brutal killboxes, they're one of many, many options. That makes the trap entirely redundant outside of its current niche role as a sapper-killer (which a dummy barricade and some brimstone does more cheaply anyway on most maps).

To clarify, I've tested Slag Field with filling every single available point of intersection between the walkpath and the flightpath with lasers, even placing two more lasers in the opposite orientation for good measure, and filled the walkpath with arcane spikes to both increase the lasers' damage and slow enemies down on them a bit, with the idea being the lasers would wipe out runners who would otherwise spoil the spike traps.

I had runners making a break for the rift despite it all, and only the enemies who hit the spikes took any more than negligible damage from wading through five lasers in a row.

I assume the developers primarily tested lasers in tandem with the very expensive tar trap, and did their balance primarily around that use-case, though it isn't applicable to fliers and often isn't affordable in tandem with a sizable laser array.

In general, I understand why lasers were nerfed, but this was a step too far. The trap has lost its identity and its primary role outside of maze killboxes, which are a dominant strategy for reasons entirely separate from this trap. I'd like the devs to reconsider this balance issue, and try to tackle the problem of copy-pasted killboxes some other way.

[jdash417]

That is a well written description of the problem with the lasers I just would have said they suck and are not worth taking

[Felio]

Reducing the hit box for the lasers was a bad idea. We said as much when it was announced.

On a note related to map intentions, we are obviously supposed to use archers in the first map in Drastic Steps, but they are trash. They die to the fliers or archers immediately.

[ShadowAngel]

The problem with the hit box i think it would just kill the flyers. At least, that's what i can guess from the laser nerf. If you keep the old hitbox, flyers just drop the same.
I still don't see the complaining, so the youtube videos don't work anymore, there are other ideas though, find them out, like ceiling zapers, that's how we dealt with flyers in OMD2

[Sunraku]

Great post! Now that they've did something and it ended being worst. They should do the opposite. This time they should make the lasers hitbox larger, but lower the damage a little once again. This result of such changes is obvious: you increase reliability, but diminish the return, especially against larger enemies. Robot, write that down for next update...

[Sunraku]

Originally posted by Felio:

Reducing the hit box for the lasers was a bad idea. We said as much when it was announced.

On a note related to map intentions, we are obviously supposed to use archers in the first map in Drastic Steps, but they are trash. They die to the fliers or archers immediately.

After testing, if there was any, and feedback from stadia players (even less likely), such results are disheartening.

[Min]

I agree with OP, while the laser felt too powerful at launch, reducing its damage or area would be enough, doing both was overkill, the same goes for Tar trap already having a ridiculous price of 750 for a regular size floor trap, making it even weaker was just stupid.

I keep thinking that the developers just watch Endless videos that goes over 100 waves and likes to nerf traps used there without any regard for the standard Rift Lord difficulty.

One of the problems is that unlike OMD2, traps doesn't seem to have any "anti-air" properties attached to them. Case in point, Guardian Archers in OMD2 dealt extra damage against flying enemies and took less from Orc Archers which immensely increased their utility, but here they have neither, with the aggravating issue of having low damage AND low health.

If Lasers and Archers had a lot a flag like "do extra damage to flying enemies" then this would at least partially address some of the issues with these traps.

Flying enemies in general were done extremely poorly in this game. The fact EVERY SINGLE MAP they show up makes them attack in huge swarms instead of gradual numbers was something I have no idea how it get past the development board.

I have played with dozens of people and watched others, but NO ONE went without Stone Staff in those maps, not because the weapon is that good (it is pretty good), but because those maps are so unbalanced. And like OP mentioned, the traps meant to deal with them (lasers) just can't handle them anymore.

[Solodric]

Originally posted by jdash417:

That is a well written description of the problem with the lasers I just would have said they suck and are not worth taking

Thanks, did my best.

Originally posted by Felio:

Reducing the hit box for the lasers was a bad idea. We said as much when it was announced.

On a note related to map intentions, we are obviously supposed to use archers in the first map in Drastic Steps, but they are trash. They die to the fliers or archers immediately.

I figured the devs could use some actual testing/confirmation that they're not working. Regarding archers, they work extremely well on that map IF you pair them with the right build. For instance, you can split-route the foe and dump all large enemies into the drink while putting the light enemies through a gravity pillar/wall blade meat grinder; with this set up, you only need 3-4 archers per flier entrance to totally lock down the map. Try it! The archers can also be effective against the land enemies as long as you can keep enemy archers/gnolls off of them, which can be done using haymakers or other knockdown traps, or just confusion flowers. That being said, autoballistae work even better.

Originally posted by ShadowAngel:

The problem with the hit box i think it would just kill the flyers. At least, that's what i can guess from the laser nerf. If you keep the old hitbox, flyers just drop the same.
I still don't see the complaining, so the youtube videos don't work anymore, there are other ideas though, find them out, like ceiling zapers, that's how we dealt with flyers in OMD2

The problem isn't being unable to deal with fliers, the problem is a trap not doing what it's meant to do. Like, imagine you were playing OMD2 and the boulder chute suddenly stopped doing damage based on height. It becomes pointless and the maps built around giving you cool boulderchute spots suddenly become more dull. Same thing happened here; the devs put intentional flier/ground enemy convergence spots so the ceiling lasers can be effective against both, but they're actually not working against either, because the devs balanced the lasers against a barricade-maze design, not open-floor usage.

Originally posted by Minoru Leo:

I agree with OP, while the laser felt too powerful at launch, reducing its damage or area would be enough, doing both was overkill, the same goes for Tar trap already having a ridiculous price of 750 for a regular size floor trap, making it even weaker was just stupid.

I keep thinking that the developers just watch Endless videos that goes over 100 waves and likes to nerf traps used there without any regard for the standard Rift Lord difficulty.

One of the problems is that unlike OMD2, traps doesn't seem to have any "anti-air" properties attached to them. Case in point, Guardian Archers in OMD2 dealt extra damage against flying enemies and took less from Orc Archers which immensely increased their utility, but here they have neither, with the aggravating issue of having low damage AND low health.

If Lasers and Archers had a lot a flag like "do extra damage to flying enemies" then this would at least partially address some of the issues with these traps.

Flying enemies in general were done extremely poorly in this game. The fact EVERY SINGLE MAP they show up makes them attack in huge swarms instead of gradual numbers was something I have no idea how it get past the development board.

I have played with dozens of people and watched others, but NO ONE went without Stone Staff in those maps, not because the weapon is that good (it is pretty good), but because those maps are so unbalanced. And like OP mentioned, the traps meant to deal with them (lasers) just can't handle them anymore.

Alright, I need to clarify a few things. 1: I don't ever use the Stone Staff. 2: I don't have trouble beating the fliers overall. 3: I actually really like the archers as they are post-patch, they're quite potent and can rip fliers apart in moderate numbers.

That all being said, you're right that the Tar trap's price is absolutely absurd for a 'trap' that doesn't even harm enemies, and that stems from the enemies being so fast by default that they can't be hit without mazing/tar/both. As best I can tell, the devs seem to think of tar/barricade as the standard, which in turn makes it absolutely essential as they balance around it and make traps useless outside of it. That's a serious problem.

The lack of anti-air properties is also problematic, yeah - in fact, I think I might make an entire post about flying enemies, because there are several other little issues that drag the experience down (In OMD1, you could actually hit fliers with floor traps if they got close enough, and they could be knocked around - in OMD3, all fliers have Chromatica's "can not be moved" property, making the boss kind of a joke. I assume this is a bug. Push traps used to be an excellent counter to fliers if used properly.) That said, I respect the developers not wanting to throw a bunch of complicated extra damage variables into the game to confuse players - it's bad enough people still think acid does damage over time (it just adds physical vulnerability).


Since two different people were under the impression that I was complaining about the ceiling lasers out of difficulty with the maps: No. I can clear the maps just fine, but to do so I have to rely on more universal (read: copy-and-pasted) tactics, rather than taking advantage of the unique level design. It's obvious what the devs had in mind, but rather than being able to use the cool new trap in what is obviously the perfect spot for it, I had to kick it off of my trap set roster entirely in favor of more killbox stuff. I'm more of a fan of combo stranding over killboxing (See my forum post on the patch for details), so I find it bothersome that an attempt to balance lasers for killboxes/Endless mode ended up ruining its original level applications, that's all. This is less, "You made these levels too hard", and more, "You made them more boring."

[galdon2004]

Yeah, ceiling lasers pretty well suck as they are now. Setting up gravity traps and dart spitters instead seems to be the way to go. If you give the gravity traps the physical damage special they will kill runners and sappers instantly without needing to trigger the dart traps. Given that I can watch a LIGHT ORC walk through all five beams of a ceiling laser trap and survive it, there just doesn't seem to be any reason to spend so much on one of them.

[⇧⇨⇩⇩⇩]

I agree somewhat, the hitbox of the lasers was probably nerfed a bit too much, however the intention to "kill all the fliers with them" is a part I disagree with.
My reasoning is simply based on the traps role. It has constant uptime and infinite range. It also has a slim profile so you can fit lasers and still have room for other things. In my eyes this means the role for this trap should be complementary to other things, not as a high damage option. High damage traps need some kind of drawback such as cooldown, placement restriction, and/or price.

What use them for is combo points or protecting barricades from sappers and the do a good enough job of those for me to still want to build them, but I only ever build a killing field of lasers if I have absurd amounts of money and Im using a really high ceiling that wouldnt be good for anything else.

[Mez Koo]

Use haymakers for easy flyer kills.

[⇧⇨⇩⇩⇩]

Originally posted by Mez Koo:

Use haymakers for easy flyer kills.

Do haymakers instakill any fliers hey knock around?

[Solodric]

Originally posted by morrganstain:

Originally posted by Mez Koo:

Use haymakers for easy flyer kills.

Do haymakers instakill any fliers hey knock around?

No, fliers right now seem to have a bug where they can't be physically knocked around at all. The haymaker does do a lot of damage to them, though, so it usually kills them. The dart spitter is more effective for the price, taking out a lot at once, generally.

Originally posted by galdon2004:

Yeah, ceiling lasers pretty well suck as they are now. Setting up gravity traps and dart spitters instead seems to be the way to go. If you give the gravity traps the physical damage special they will kill runners and sappers instantly without needing to trigger the dart traps. Given that I can watch a LIGHT ORC walk through all five beams of a ceiling laser trap and survive it, there just doesn't seem to be any reason to spend so much on one of them.

Yeah, this is basically the issue. They're just fine in killboxes, but killbox-only traps are kinda worthless when you can build killboxes in dozens of different ways anyway.

Originally posted by morrganstain:

I agree somewhat, the hitbox of the lasers was probably nerfed a bit too much, however the intention to "kill all the fliers with them" is a part I disagree with.
My reasoning is simply based on the traps role. It has constant uptime and infinite range. It also has a slim profile so you can fit lasers and still have room for other things. In my eyes this means the role for this trap should be complementary to other things, not as a high damage option. High damage traps need some kind of drawback such as cooldown, placement restriction, and/or price.

What use them for is combo points or protecting barricades from sappers and the do a good enough job of those for me to still want to build them, but I only ever build a killing field of lasers if I have absurd amounts of money and Im using a really high ceiling that wouldnt be good for anything else.

It doesn't need to kill ALL of the fliers (thought it absolutely should when used in such absurd numbers), but it should be doing substantial harm to them and making it easy to clean them up with a few backstop archers. Right now it's doing almost nothing to the fliers OR the ground enemies, making it a worthless trap outside of killboxes and sapper-defense. In killboxes, you force the enemy to hit the lasers - they should still be FUNCTIONAL outside of killboxes.

[Mez Koo]

Originally posted by Solodric:

Originally posted by morrganstain:

Do haymakers instakill any fliers hey knock around?

No, fliers right now seem to have a bug where they can't be physically knocked around at all. The haymaker does do a lot of damage to them, though, so it usually kills them. The dart spitter is more effective for the price, taking out a lot at once, generally.

I used them the other day and it knocked them around plenty, I mean it doesn't kill them line ice or stoned but definitely stops them going forward.

[DarkenDragon]

if you're using JUST ceiling lasers to take care of sappers and runners, then you're clearly doing it wrong. with 3 ceiling lasers and proper tar placements, they easily take care of sappers and runners that are not buffed from endless. its not as op as before where just 2 of them was enough to deal with them as that was just too strong.

a lot of this complaining just sounds like you wanted an unbalanced game and just want stupidly strong traps that make the game mindless.

the point of the trap is to be constant damage that applied shock or fire to the enemies. which in itself is just a constant application of 2x combo (well almost 2x combo since the shock needs to kill it's target and the 2nd combo point comes from the explosion it does) and no other trap can do this consistently either. everything else has a cooldown or charges or something that causes them to have a downtime.

so no I dont agree that the ceiling lasers dont do their jobs, they do it fine and people just need to understand what their role is.

dealing with fliers are easy enough with a stone staff, if anything maybe that should be nerfed if you want the traps to be stronger, since you can just stone them all to death and if you run out of mana, jump to your death to replenish your mana and do it again until they're all dead. you should only spend the coin on making a kill box to deal with the ground units to the point that you dont need to be there to catch leaks and you deal with the flyers yourself with the stone staff. and if you dont want to play that way, then thats your choice to make the game harder on yourself.

[Morphic]

Originally posted by DarkenDragon:

if you're using JUST ceiling lasers to take care of sappers and runners, then you're clearly doing it wrong. with 3 ceiling lasers and proper tar placements, they easily take care of sappers and runners that are not buffed from endless. its not as op as before where just 2 of them was enough to deal with them as that was just too strong.

a lot of this complaining just sounds like you wanted an unbalanced game and just want stupidly strong traps that make the game mindless.

Then you aren't listening to what people, especially, OP are saying. Most people don't want "stupidly strong" traps, they want viable/balanced traps where "everything is good".

You just said you need 3 Lasers + "proper" tar placement. Do you know how much that costs? That's ~5,250 - 7,500+ just for an "easy" 2x combo and stopping runners/sappers. Meanwhile 3 properly placed Brimstone will wipe ~90% of runners/sappers alone, throw in a Dart Spitter and you have a 2x combo for ~3,300. Add some other traps or more Brimstone...or bring a fully upgraded Trap Trinket and their cooldowns are practically non-existent.(could always use the active during early stages when box isn't able to sustain)

Originally posted by DarkenDragon:

dealing with fliers are easy enough with a stone staff, if anything maybe that should be nerfed if you want the traps to be stronger, since you can just stone them all to death and if you run out of mana, jump to your death to replenish your mana and do it again until they're all dead. you should only spend the coin on making a kill box to deal with the ground units to the point that you dont need to be there to catch leaks and you deal with the flyers yourself with the stone staff. and if you dont want to play that way, then thats your choice to make the game harder on yourself.

So your argument is that all traps are for ground units while the player is specifically for Flyers? That's completely antithesis to what Orcs Must Die and Tower Defense games are...

EDIT: Personally, I'd like to see the "extra lasers" upgrade switched to "can be placed on walls" for lasers. IMO, their hitbox won't be a problem, placing them too high would make them not hit runners, you wouldn't be able to make them do fire, their large size would take up valuable space for other/better wall traps, their DPS shouldn't be an issue since small hitbox means only brief contact between lasers but it would reward stunning/slowing/freezing enemies... and if it is "too OP" from that change, you could either make the upgrade increase their cost to 1250+ or lower their damage. Only way I see it being busted is on certain maps that would allow 1-3 lasers on a backwall to hit the entire corridor/lane.