Endless Mode Needs Balancing

[[TRU] mbm]

I've got just under 30 hours into OMD3, coming from OMD1,2 accumulating an embarrassing 946 hours total play.....

OMD3 endless mode needs a balancing to enable longer play. I’ve been soloing sludge shelves on endless. I’ve used countless number of trap combo’s and have reached wave 21 as a high. I don’t see why 20x armored ogre’s need to run through all my traps and enter the rift on almost every round after wave 15. It’s just unnecessarily hard at that wave. It’s like a stampede that renders all traps (that prior to this haven’t let a single mob through) useless, as if they aren’t there.

Is it me or is anyone else used to that type of stampede to occur after round 30 in the old game? It’s like the game took you from wave 16 to wave 40 for no reason. This then kills the group which was hard to find in the first place.

Don’t take this the wrong way, I love the challenge and punishment of losing and reconfiguring traps/weapons and so on, but it takes time to find a group or get a buddy online to play and when this happens, there goes the fun!
I notice this happens a lot after the 2nd or 3rd moneybags appears, not sure if this is a trigger or not.

[Hubert Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen]

Well endless missions "finish" (5 skulls) at wave 25, so that's not entirely inaccurate. Get some lightning damage in your kit, with either the ceiling lasors or upgraded spike traps.

[Necrotic]

got to wave 30 a few times never played orcs games befor btw.

but its rough u right might need some tweaks for sure.

[Termagant]

I struggled a bit as well during the beginning....and then i tried the sawblade thrower. That thing is absurd. Blades ricochet from walls and barricades and do ludicrous amounts of damage. Build a maze with some of these babies, add some tar traps and maybe the frozen dart thrower for flavour and you can play up to 40.

Sappers can be easily countered with the laser ceiling. Need ~4-5, though, but once set up you'll never have to worry about them again.

[You Kissed a Boy and Liked It]

I'd much prefer BOSSES start arriving at, say, intervals of 12 or 15 waves -- really powerful bosses, that need constant player attention -- as distinct from Benny Hill Show style enemy speed-ups and spongy health increases.

The latter method of difficulty spike, that they went with, pretty much renders all traps set-ups moot, and more or less ends the round dead -- unless one has a cheesy set-up using flowers and/or flippers. Thus formula makes longer Endless runs very map specific; rather than strategic.

I reached wave-29 on that "One Path" map, at which point (or thereabouts) the speed-up came, and I just gave it up -- they barely took damage from my kill box that was almost AFK moments prior. 'Til that point, I hadn't lost a single Rift point. This tells me that the game hits a very sharp difficulty spike at whatever wave the speed-up kick in...

ENDLESS++

💡 periodic bosses in Endless -- smashing barricades / seizing traps as the proceed
💡 speed-ups more subtle -- example: 5% increased speed every ten waves
💡 HP increases more subtle -- example: 5% more very ten waves
💡 more wave specific enemy combinations -- example: a gnoll rush wave; an ogre rush; flier rush (can be considered a "sub-boss" waves, interspersed with the bosses waves proper)
💡 wave pauses (no 3-second timer) after boss and/or enemy specific waves
💡 Spellbook access at wave-25, 50, 75, 100...
(*leaderboard / Achievement records can be forfeit where the above mode is selected)

[Shatterlight]

I got to wave 38 solo with my strategy so far . It is my first tower defense game, having a blast!

[[TRU] mbm]

i have all the traps necessary, been playing a while i was just trying to state that the game waves generate mobs at such a strange accelerator so early on.

[derw4tz]

got to 49 today, they are becomng fast boiis; haven´t tried flip traps yet in omd3 but i´d imagine they will be much worse than in omd2

[Necrotic]

correction just did wave 52 13m points was afk like most the time ;)

[akimbojoe]

I got to wave 39 last night on the great room or w/e. I do agree it needs balancing. Towards the end I was just replacing baracades that sappers blew up and freeze+ shotgunning everything with the flip traps set to flip big targets as a last line of defense. It never felt fun and when they finally blew a hole in the wall and ran in I was grateful it was over. It felt like if I wasn't out there contributing damage nothing was going to die and it gets to point that anything that hunts you down is going to kill you in one hit so you just run them to the rift to get rid of them.

I'd really like a break. Ideally for me the enemies would only get so strong and then cap out but a break at least every 7 levels would have saved my sanity for sure. You never get any time to fix anything or adjust anything, maybe only some time while that last heavy ogre is getting stunned or confused or frozen and you can't sell or repair anything then.

[Celicni]

I get to about ~50 every time before what you described slowly starts happening. If you're getting rekt at wave 15, make better killboxes.

And I disagree, by the time I'm "beginning to lose" it's just about the time I start getting bored (usually around an hour) so it's basically just about perfect for me.

[StupidSexyBigChunga]

Sludge shelves is one of those maps where the normal way of doing things goes out the window. I got to wave 17 with confusion flowers and flippers for the super heavies and then levitation beams with physical damage upgrade and acid gesyers for the mobs. I had archers line the plateau of the rift. I then had to go to work :(

[Octob3r]

It's the score that counts. One of my friend got wave 50+ at only 9m, another at 27m at wave 44... Your problem if it's draggy.

[akimbojoe]

Originally posted by PROGAMER:

correction just did wave 52 13m points was afk like most the time ;)

Just got to wave 59 on the first map:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2562047361

Dunno what map you were on (maybe sludge shelves) but you can't really be afk. Too much stuff destroys the barricades, the traps end up not doing enough damage, and the enemies get waaay too fast. Eventually no traps will kill the sappers or fire elementals before they get to the walls except maybe you might get some with physics traps. I probably should have sold all the door traps I had with flip traps since by like, level 40 something they weren't stopping the sappers anyhow.

[Multihog]

It should get hard fast. Who wants to play 10 hours in Endless? It's boring as f*ck when you have to wait a year for it to get extremely hard.

OMD2 Endless was boring because it took too long to ramp up. I haven't played Endless in OMD3 yet, but I hope it's not like OMD2.

[akimbojoe]

Originally posted by Multihog:

It should get hard fast. Who wants to play 10 hours in Endless? It's boring as f*ck when you have to wait a year for it to get extremely hard.

OMD2 Endless was boring because it took too long to ramp up. I haven't played Endless in OMD3 yet, but I hope it's not like OMD2.

Definitions on what's hard or not are debatable. I just ended a run of Side Entrance that ran for 54 rounds, lots of that was waiting for traps to slowly kill beefy mobs. Took literally hours. By the end I could not stop ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ from getting in and was doing very little damage to enemies who were running really quickly and who had also sped up their CC recovery rate (my freeze shots onto them were clearing after one shot, which felt very unfair). I don't think many people would argue that at level 54 the game has gotten pretty hard... but is that fun? It's not much fun to take 3 minutes to chip away at one enemy's health pool that just won't drop (only to have him run right into the rift at the last second) or to not really be able to stop a whole line of ogres or mountain trolls from getting in despite having spent hours building that setup. There's a balance between hard and punishing, and how hard is fun is subjective. It takes a while to ramp up, but as you can see from this discussion, some people have trouble at even the very low waves.