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Have you tried the non-lightning gems in a way to maximize their utility? Knowing that helps better know how to balance and provide better information in the game.
That said, I am debating on very slightly increasing the stun immunity a invader gets after being stunned (from .5 seconds to .6 seconds) in order reduce the power of many non-synergized lightning towers, and bring them in closer balance.
Let's just say things did not go well. It took me until almost year 30 before I managed to kill the first boss.
So after that I started switching out my life towers for lightning and now mobs barely make it around the first bend. (I didn't change anything else but downgrade all of my life towers for lightning towers of the same type). I'm on year 45 now and still nothing makes it past the first bend. I plan on swapping out all of the ice towers for fire next to see how that goes as well.
But a few thoughts.
The "debuff" for life towers in my opinion is actually a buff. Since the mobs are smaller they can group up closer and it's now easier for them to move around each other. So if the lead mob has a lower movement speed either because of the ice towers or just because one mob type is just naturally slower, they can now move around them and go on ahead.
Lightning can stunlock a mob. If it stunlocks the lead mob, all mobs behind it can't get past it and thus I get significantly more time attacking everything. Ice on the other hand allows mobs to keep moving and if used with life, it just makes it so that the mobs you do leak are usually at full health, as the ones not getting hit just move around the lead mob that's taking most of the damage. . And since I only get time on a couple mobs, I usually end up leaking A LOT.
Now I'm still experimenting with ice+water+lightning vs water+lightning+fire, so I can't comment there, yet. And I haven't really used any of the other elements (for damage) yet. But on paper some seem interesting (sun / wind) and others seem rather weak (terra / life). And the problem here is this only leaves 4 elements that seem like they can synergize at all together.
Long story short my quick criticisms of each element:
Fire - Very strong but really only goes well with wind boost as more hits means even bigger dots.
Lightning - Too strong and almost feels required in order to progress at all. Again pairing it up with wind boost just makes it even more broken.
Water - its buff means it synergizes with any other damage tower. As long as that tower doesn't negate it's effect. Pairs up well with all boosts as well, especially Fire, Wind and Sun.
Ice - the max slow effect here still seems too fast. Having an entire line of these towers and the mobs still feel like they are just walking through your maze. Doesn't pair well with any boosting tower, except maybe Sun as anything else the mobs get out of range too fast.
Life - See above, but this effect feels more like a buff than a debuff for the mobs. Any booster just makes this worse except maybe Fire.
Sun - Ok this seems cool. The damage potential here is insane. But the two adjacent elements are really lacking IMO so I'm not sure how to fill in the gaps that are Suns weaknesses.
Wind - Again this seems cool (haven't used it yet) but depending on how powerful the knockback is, this could be as powerful as Lightning. Should also Pair well with itself for boosting.
Terra - it only buffs the damage for itself? This just seems like Water but, well, less versatile. I get that it might buff more per hit but water will have more hits per second dealing potentially more damage over time as water boosts the damage of all other towers not just itself. If I was to use terra I feel like I can only use that element.
I have to agree with the @marsara9 above me - Life SUCKS! as a debuff it is just comically bad. I don't see any practical benefit to mobs squeezing closer together. They all have to run past the same towers anyway, regardless if they are in a clump or in a line. And as mentioned above, their smaller size means they easily slip past each other when the front mob is CC'd.
Even as a boost, Life is lame. To utilize life boost, seems like you would want to go with (at least) 2 tiles thick on the walls of your maze (so the boost can boost your boosts). That sounds like a huge waste of space vs just popping a boost every other line with a single-tile wide maze. I would always prefer a longer maze over a shorter one with boosted boosts.
Terra yields some huge-looking bonuses (swear I saw +500 Terra dmg on a mob), but they didn't seem to translate to actual huge damage. And mobs immune to Terra will ruin your day if you lean on it too much.
So yeah.. imo:
- Fire-Water-Lightning : Best
- Sun-Terra-Wind: it's uhh.. ok.
- Anything with Life: Worst
Which leaves Ice -- my main beef with Ice, is it's too close to Life, and going the other way on the wheel doubles up your CC: Ice-Water-Lightning... giving you CC-Debuff-CC Way too light on direct damage (compared to other choices)
There are planned reworkings for the life damage effect in the near future. Stay tuned. Thanks for the feedback!
I might rename it "nature" and have it do poison dmg or other classic nature things, like "roots" or "thorns"..
the name "life" makes me think heal. but ofc towers don't take damage (yet!). if you introduced a tower damaging mob, then having a healing tower in the mix would be crucial.
regardless.. looking forward to play test whatever you decide to go with..
Fire - More damage, awesome, but put it on a Terra or Water tower and you can start to see some really high damage numbers. Works really well on Lighting and Ice as well, but mostly because of Water. All other towers, Fire boosting doesn't really do much.
Lightning - Chance at a double attack -- compared to wind, which is more consistent and applies more stacks over time, this just feels lacking.
Water - adding an aoe to single target towers. Essentialy turning your large towers into mini bombardment towers that attack faster, can't go wrong here. I need to double check how this stacks though. Does it work like terra and increase the aoe?
Ice - random increased damage. This can really help against high hp mobs. But comparing it to other towers that increase damage you're sacrificing consistency for higher spikes. I need to see how having multiple ice boosts affects a single tower though. If it just further increases the max damage, Fire just seems like a better option. This tower also only really works well on Terra, Water, lightning and Ice.
Life - hands down this goes into every build I end up using. Without a life tower the absolute maximum number of boosts a single lone damage tower can receive is 24 (5x5 square around central tower). More than enough but impractical for mazing. Add in a life tower and now you can put more on that side of the tower. Life also allows your single boost tower to affect many more towers as well.
Sun - longer range -- have a long corridor with a blast tower at the end? Boost it with a sun tower and now it can go all the way to the other end. Have a spiral maze with a central high damage bombardment or large arrow tower, boost it with a sun tower and it'll keep firing longer. I never use more than one or two on a tower but the extra time on the mob helps. Especially with damage towers who have stacking effects.
Wind - overall the best boosting tower in the game in my opinion. Since this game is all about synergies between towers, having your towers apply more of their effects more often, exponentially increases their effects. A single water tower hits say 8 times before the mob is out of range and it now takes 32% more damage from all sources. Add in a wind tower and now it's hitting say 10 times before it is out of range and now it's taking 40% more damage from all sources. (And those two additional hits did almost 50 damage each)
Terra - increased aoe. Towers can already be placed so close together that most of the extra area from the increased aoe is wasted, in my opinion, as half of the new area is encroaching on the area your towers already occupy. Add a bunch of these and you might be able to splash across multiple corridors but rarely do the mobs stay that spread out for it to be beneficial. If you maze with very short corridors and turning frequently, this might be better but I tend to keep my corridors as long as the range of most blast towers.
All of that being said. I always see everyone commenting on which damage towers are the best. I tend to always go with Wind+Life+Fire with a little bit of Sun mixed in for boosting. And I tend to build 3-4 layers deep of boosting towers near the corners of my maze. I want to test with adding more water but I already use a lot of my water gems for damage towers so I don't have much to spare there.
Even Sun only gets real useful when you have the room needed for 2 separate stages of maze. Then Sun can be decent against single bosses despite the fairly mediocre synergy choices.
Beat the game and only ended up relying on Sun as a secondary on the last island. The rest of the islands pretty much just lightning-slatterned my way through.
15 hits per second => 30K damage per seconds.
A fire setup would have done 2.5K per seconds from dot and 500 from towers or 10 time less than terra.
But terra scale badly again lots of monsters. Twice the amount of monsters mean twice less hits and twice less stacks.
again 2 monsters:
fire would do 1.5K damage per monster or 3K total.
terra would do 7.5K per monster or 15K total (twice as less than again 1 monster)
If I follow this rules again 10 monsters terra and fire are about the same. And again 20 monsters fire is twice as strong than terra.
terra is weak again a lot of monsters and totaly insane again hight health monsters. terra vulnerability again weak monsters can be mitigated by aoe at the start of the setup.
A "trap or mine" like defense is something that is on the possible development list, we will see where it goes.
For those interested - I've been redeveloping the life damage effect to be "Elemental effect amplification of [1% | 3% | 9%]. Stacking effect. Stacks have a diminishing effect and max out at a bonus of 100%." So far, internal tests are looking promising with there being many more fully legitimate powerful combos. I will be pushing out a test build to get feedback tomorrow. (Info on how to get access to this build is on the discord server).