Inferno Tower Unmanageably Difficult

[Friend of Animals]

I play a lot of roguelikes and deckbuilders, and I loved this game's demo. I also really love the towers in the Inferno set, but I'm giving up on it after spending more than four hours trying to get through a single run. I feel that the game has some weaknesses that the royal set addressed through mechanics that were removed for the Inferno set, making it unplayable.

The main weakness of the game in general, IMO, is that players are not given the tools to adapt to what the game randomly throws at them. You have to commit to a build fairly early because it's so difficult to remove towers, but then if you don't get the right towers or tokens to complete your synergies, your run is just over. You don't get tokens early or frequently enough to change your plan once you commit to it. The Inferno set makes this worse by:
- Limiting the ability to reroll the shop so you can't assemble your synergies quickly
- Encouraging you to play with an empty mana pool so you can't save for rare towers
- Providing very few towers with good DAMAGE scaling, especially in the early game, so you're forced into a few really restrictive builds just to survive the first boss.

When you can only re-roll a few times (for the Inferno set), you can spend ten full rounds just hunting for a particular tower that is REQUIRED for the rest of your board to scale appropriately. Most of the runs I lost, I felt that there was nothing I could have done differently to succeed, especially since most viable strategies require a very specific arrangement of particular towers that may not even show up in time to be helpful. What a bummer.

Edit: Had to switch strategies to beat Inferno, but I got it eventually. Mole is really the only tower that scales damage enough unless you get a god-tier start with another uncommon or rare.

[Oceon]

I absolutely feel that.

I often start the run by trying out different strats than the one I am used to, but end up going for either builds that stack strong enough because otherwise I would not be able to survive ♥♥♥♥.

Heres the strats that I go for.

Ifrit Build (The Red Genie) stacking him damage wise enough that he survives the first wave of monsters, and then demolishes the second with his suicide damage.

Prism Build
If I manage to get a Prism first or second round, then its all in for that one, since they stack so strong. I NEED a level 2 Prism tho to actually get to the end game, but that happens all too rare as well.

[S♥ShiMe]

Agreed! and Prism is the easiest and least effort.
https://imgur.com/a/WEkUMGQ

[Rooster]

Prism is the only one that scales into endless. Ironically Portal Tower allows you to get the better towers from Royals once you get it. None of the other synergies works. Health/Regen/Mandrake/Potions absolutely nothing is good. Not even the rares. By the time you get their requirements/synergies you are swimming in mana and better synergies are available so rares are not a welcome sight.

[pushinruslan]

Originally posted by Rooster:

Prism is the only one that scales into endless. Ironically Portal Tower allows you to get the better towers from Royals once you get it. None of the other synergies works. Health/Regen/Mandrake/Potions absolutely nothing is good. Not even the rares. By the time you get their requirements/synergies you are swimming in mana and better synergies are available so rares are not a welcome sight.

Welp, the same thing goes for ascensions and royal. Only cats really work once you hit the no rerolls rule. So I don't think endless viability is a good metric. Though I agree that Inferno is quite tricky to get to work even in the base game,
While you can basically win with any kind of build, but most of them is too hard too grow fast enough for the second boss. And if you want any stability you're forced to cerberi-promise.
Some towers are literally useless - Lab is the worst offender, since it produces imps for mana, while you can double them for free with lasher.
And I can't find any use for devil(slow, hard to get to 6 and the payoff is pretty weak at that point) or forge(worse slime without growth opportunities provided by cat-milk/flower-honey/obsidian-temp) or glutton(you need to start fooding fast for it to work and if you already started fooding a tower, swapping it is too big of a downside)
Also we have two pairs of similar towers functions: lab-lasher and mole-cauldron with one seemingly just superior to the other and no real way to combo them.
Finally succubus combo basically requires blood and don't work without it, while root-mole requires you to get mole before you place roots. While you're required to use chaos tower(since whirlwind is too rare and costly to actually utilize).

All this combined make inferno both rigid(mandatory stuff) and random(you need to get some stuff before other stuff works) compared to royal. Would prefer to have more synergious towers instead of useless. Something like glutonous getting all the rations that was already eaten this game, Lab doubling the bonuses from impi(latest upgrade for them made impi builds really nice, since they make your main tower really matter till the act 3) etc

[AwesomeCool]

It is slowly getting fixed.

Imp + suc + blood + drover is much better now because of the imp buffs. Still weak to the first boss, but that is because the first boss counters health focused builds (it really needs to be changed for the sake of build diversity).

The buffs to tower of promise really help make a potion + sulfur to obsidian possible. Put a sulfur + promise + Cerberus up front, then get a potion generator online. Give regen to the doggy tower and temp potions to the sulfer when it is level 3-4 (to turn it into obsidian). Laboratory towers can make the potions become steroids on steroids. Kind of wish poison builds by themselves were better, but that seems like it would better fit the third necro theme coming in the future anyways.

Genie + Ifrit really takes off...getting it past the early game is VEEEEEEEEEEEEERY difficult. Really needs some other kind of support to help it. Gargoyle will not work because it only adds health and the first boss just LoLs at health.

It is possible to win with a ration build, but it really needs a big buff. You need to get the pot asap to make it workable at all. Not really fun to use with all the resets you need, but it is possible.

Prism is pretty easy if you can get it to level 2 early. You can easily beat the game with three towers with this build. And you can go insane if you can get the well + prism to really high levels.

Mole + root is in a good spot. The easiest build, but it is pretty boring. Just use your mana to infuse the roots and get the roots as high as possible.

Most rare towers suck. Like unless you are doing a slime + insolent build in the royal special game mode that allows you to get inferno towers (aka stupidly specific), good luck making the devil tower useful at all. Level it up a bunch and most of your rerolls are exclusively cursed towers. By the time you can actually safely use it, the buffs it gives are really weak as we are talking near the final boss here. Tbe Smelter tower needs to just be reworked completely, it just is not a inferno tower and a lamer slime.

Laboratory, portal and glutton are possible to use. But portal is pretty lame and the abilities of glutton seem to be pretty weird. It should buff all other towers with the ration buff and the other ability just does not seem usable with the other while not being good enough on it's own. How can you even use roots and rations together at all?

Glutton should be turned into two towers, where the two abilities are buffed heavily and on separate towers.

From he wave right before inferno hits level 2 to the first boss are the real problem though. The RNG is only bad early, but the game ramps up so fast that bad rng is devastating. If you can survive to the middle of world 2, you probably are going to win pretty easily at that point.

[zonie]

I think a large part of the reason for people having problems with Inferno vs Royal has to do with how the resource and rerolls are arranged differently.

The Chaos tower seems somewhat mandatory to get for rerolls since the Whirlwind is uncommon and thus not reliable to build up to even get as much as 3-5 rerolls, but that means spending a load of mana on 'just' procuring the option to reroll the tower store.

The other side of that is that the scaling of the Well tower vs. the Whirlwind for resource generation is.. well, incomparable really, since the Well tower scales superiorly by doubling mana output with each level, which is really a bit crazy on its own, but cool crazy..

It just makes the Whirlwind tower feel like a pick you only do a few times and then never again, even if they *can* work out somewhat, they just need too much RNG and feeding of mana to get anywhere, leaving you to instead pick the Chaos tower for rerolls and the Well for mana, because that's two tower slots doing more work for your build than five slots of Whirlwinds, which you may only get in 1 out of 100000 runs because of the difference between common><uncommon tower rolls.

I think some 'small' changes could make very meaningful differences though, i.e. if adding rations to Whirlwind towers would be counted as 'mana eaten' towards them getting experience (perhaps removing the ration buff so the Whirlwind doesn't get stats from them).

This kind of approach would both be a buff to the Whirlwind and Ration towers, as well as the Ration buff itself, and could majorly upset the weighting between Wells and Whirlwinds, as well as making Ration-based builds much more viable by making Whirlwinds combo well with Ration towers and buffs :)

[shmafoo]

My main problem with Inferno is, that you always miss one of the below:
- Enough mana
- Enough damage
- Rerolls / getting what you need

Either I get lots of mana but still have such bad RNG that I just can't get the things I need or I simply cannot build up enough damage to go beyond the first boss or I just don't get any kind of towers that provide mana.

RNG is good and all but I just can't get beyond ascnension 3 with Inferno. I finally managed to get to the 3rd boss only to have it beat me with 700 hp left.

/edit: If you just try long enough... finally beat ascension 3 with lots of luck

[TheHairz]

The problem with Inferno is clearly not enough damage scaling before the first boss. I've actually had some good builds put together that would have worked if the damage could scale faster. Royal tower gives you many options to play and be successful, that just isn't true with Inferno.

[Shmebulock]

cant even beat the first boss, most of the tower seem to have potential but need to many pieces to work or come online to late. dunno if there is some hidden strat with evil towers but i feel like to many lackluster towers that could be good but lack the tools

[Archmystic]

Originally posted by Shmebulock:

cant even beat the first boss, most of the tower seem to have potential but need to many pieces to work or come online to late. dunno if there is some hidden strat with evil towers but i feel like to many lackluster towers that could be good but lack the tools

you do need a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of rng luck espc on higher ascensions
the easiest one to get going seems to be mole + roots
or mana economy + prism
most others usually need a cerb + temp buff + poison to take down 1st boss unless you are super lucky, and then you can sack the cerb/poison for your builds needed towers to not get too behind on scaling.

[TheHairz]

Inferno lacks damage scaling, that is what makes it so difficult to play. Sure there are plenty of interesting combos that COULD scale and be fun to play, but they come online WAY too late. IMO Inferno needs a major rebalancing. It is not fun to play inferno atm.

[Banelas]

Have mana infusion spend one mana at a time so you don't have to either bank all mana or bust it all on one tower. Very RNG dependent otherwise.

[deathcaster]

I have been playing the demo, played a couple of hours... game is way too hard for me. But I am glad I played the demo. So I will not waste my money on the full game.

The problem is the enemies have way too much attack and health in early levels.... you don't have anything that can tank that much.... I only defeated the 1st boss 1 time... maybe 30 runs.

Too much luck involved to make a build.

[pushinruslan]

It's a bit punishing to new players, that is for sure. Casual mode is what it really needs
>Too much luck involved to make a build.
Well, no. With royal there's almost no luck involved, you can win nine time of ten or even better, but it requires some experimentation.

[Firellius]

Infernal set's biggest problem is that so much of it is focused on either randomised scaling or health scaling, while any health gets effortlessly bowled over by the first boss. Succubus, Rations, Gargoyle, Genie, all of them have abilities that are overall fine, but are completely useless against the first boss.

The complete lack of attack scaling makes it a crapshoot to get past stage one because you just don't have the damage, unless you go Promises + Cerberus. That is the ONLY way to have any consistency early, but that pigeonholes your build.