Playtest 193: Atlas 2.0 - Sharper, Sleeker, Simpler
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Playtest 193: Sharper, Sleeker, Simpler
As we close in on our second test weekend, we're striving to ensure that we deliver a clean, playable experience. As you play this afternoon, please let us know of anything that remains frustrating or unintuitive to grasp. Also, we're trying to create variety in strategies and variance in battle outcome. So, if you're noticing any merc/charm strategies that are overpowered or any squad matchups that are unfun to play against, tell us so we can tune them before Wednesday!
General Changes
Everyone's hotkeys have been reset once more!
- Recall has been removed. Players can now restore the health of their units rapidly in any allied main base.
- "Soup" has been replaced with "Scrap."
- Added support for using Alt to modify control groups.
- Alt-3 will assign the current selection to control group 3 after removing the selection from all other control groups.
- Alt-Shift-3 will add the current selection to control group 3 after removing the selection from all other control groups.
- For example:
- A player creates 5 Whelps and Deploys them.
- The player ctrl+clicks their icon in the Selection interface.
- The player presses Alt+3, adding the Whelps to Control Group 3, and omitting them from ~ and other control groups.
Base-building and Construction
- The main base now consists of a few structures by default
- Squad Production / Upgrades - Now with Tier 1 units unlocked by default
- Mercenary Production / Upgrades - Now with Tier 1 mercenaries unlocked by default
- Charm Shrine
- Mercenary and Squad AddOns
- To unlock tech levels for squads and mercenaries, simply upgrade the addons from the main structure!
Items
- Charm Shrines now only sell Charms
- Players may now hold 2 Charms
- Ground and Air Wards have returned to the Hero, and no longer require purchases.
- Healing Totems have been removed
Map Changes
- Reward Tower
- Range: 13 ⇒ 10
- A structure has been added in the main base that provides 80 healing per second to friendly units inside it. It also has an incredibly potent attack.
- Several expansion and titan locations have been changed.
- The in-base Gem expansion has been removed.
User Interface
- Has received myriad changes! Please let us know what you thought of the new UI elements and changes!
- Minimap is now in the bottom-right by default. A UI setting exists to flip the UI, reverting to the previous layout.
Mercenary Changes
General
- Players may now only have 10 Mercenaries active on the map at any given time.
- Your basic Mercenaries (normally unlocked from your first Mercenary structure) are now available at the start of the game
- Autocaster Mercenaries (Phantoms, TimeLords, ChillerMen, and Motivators)
- Attack damage: 0 ⇒ 10
- Ion Cannon
- Hotkey moved to G.
- The Sentinel has received a new model and animations
Assault Corps (Square)
- Splash Tower
- Range: 13 ⇒ 10
- Orion
- Ground Damage: 5 ⇒ 3
- Ground Attack cooldown: 0.2 0.25
Raiders (Triangle)
- Archer Tower
- Range: 13 ⇒ 11
- Slow Trapper
- Trap slow duration: 4 ⇒ 12 seconds
- Movement speed: 4.0 ⇒ 4.2
- Now has combat stats
- 20 attack damage
- 7 range
- 3-second attack cooldown
- ShielderMan
- Absorb Shield: Lasts 5 seconds or one hit
Squads
- Corrected some problematic passive, per-level Hero upgrades that could reduce hero basic ability cooldowns to 0 seconds.
Eris
- Devilkin Dervish
- War Dance has received new VFX!
Grath
- Grath
- Stone Form (D)
- Cooldown: 20 ⇒ 16 seconds
- Cooldown reduction per hero level: 0.9 ⇒ 0.5 seconds
- Bestial Rage (F)
- Cooldown: 60 ⇒ 90 seconds
- Duration: 10 ⇒ 20 seconds
- Attacks while active: Stun for 1.25 seconds Slow for 3 seconds Slowed units have:
- Attack cooldown increased by 400%
- Movement speed decreased by 90%.
- Stone Form (D)
Ryme
- Ryme
- Restored Frozen Orb (F) as Ryme's Ultimate Ability
- Frostcaller
- Removed Shatter (E)
- Restored Frostfall (E) to the state it was last in on the Frostcaller
Vex
- Vex
- Scorch (D)
- No longer a grenade
- Now fires a line-shot that Ignites targets it passes through, and detonates at the target location, dealing burst damage and Igniting foes.
- Scorch (D)
- "Sparkbot" has been renamed "Spitfire"
Questions:
- What UI/UX elements did you like / dislike? Were there pieces that particularly caused you friction?
- What region/matchup did you play? Was the battling fun/tense or boring/flat? Why did those battles feel that way?
- Did you find any OP merc strategies? What were they?
- What bugs did you find?
Comments
I had to move the minimap to the left hand side but that was no problem with this build. It remembered the setting and updated as expected. I'm okay with resources and respawn timers being on the top left, although others have raised concerns about it.
I only played in the top 2v2 region. Battling actually felt kind of boring. It was manageable, I knew how to react in most situations, it wasn't overly stressful nor did I feel a strong need to change my approach or strategies.
I was playing as Grath, which has a serious lack of anti-air so I build a bunch of Orions which very nicely covers that flaw. They are great for taking camps (+grath's ability Stone Form) and denying enemy flying units (the harassing unit and leviathans alike). You take all of the camps immediately and punish any oversteps the enemy makes, gives you lots of experience and income. Then to finish off the game you just switch over to Juggernauts (you only need 2-3) and push through for the win. This works with a melee or ranged ally. Vela, Ryme, and Eris are all great additions. If I could find a way to better spend my soup/scrap then it would probably be way OP but as it is it's just generally really solid.
Some replays:
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At one point the upgrade to T3 pop-up info tab thing was stuck on the screen and wouldn't go away. I would roll over others to get tooltips and they'd show up overtop, but when they went away the T3 tooltip was still there. I don't know what caused it but rolling over the T3 again didn't fix it.
At first the resource location was weird, but I got used to it. Overall the UI looks more what it is expected to look like, but I feel like the controls are somewhat of a downgrade.
The global hotkeys was one of the best improvements of Atlas. I feel at least each squads core units should have some global hotkeys, and for mercs somehting worked out as well, so we don't have to focus the specific building to build the units.
Even if it was the old hotkeys for units, with a shift or alt modifier for merc rows?
Also I felt the charm hotkeys were quite out of place.
UI itself is acceptable I think, but the controls along with the UI still needs work.
Mostly 2v2 but travelled a bit. The map design feels a bit boring imo, and I didnt really like the expansion locations. It wasn't too obvious which expansion minions we should go for in which order, so the teams I was in usually didn't' take them until very late in game.
The expansion locations also were vulnerable for being able to attack from ground to kill workers. I feel it would work out better if they had to travel around to kill workers for more traditional style harrassment - this felt a bit too "Safe".
I feel like the map is some combination of too open or too big. Most of my time was spent travelling, and I was hoping for more "hot spots" of action.
Also, the bottom players base (at the far bottom) felt placed strangely. Seemed like it was blocking one of the main avenues of attack in map. But you can't engage it without getting blasted by the super-tower. Which makes me wonder why that path down bottom even exists?
I haven't found any OP ones yet, and overall I feel the merc systems a HUGE improvement from the old systems!
I see a lot of potential strategies - ones with drops, or the fast flyers, teleporting, "observers"... Seems like there is a lot of potential for fun builds!
I do worry a little bit if they are somewhat exploitable. For example, if you mass up enough points and do enough of the fast fliers (forgot hteir name) it's basically like a muta tech switch. I worry strategies like this may not have adequate counter-play. If this mechanic is intended to stay in game, there should at least be some mechanic that players could scout as an indication that "something" is coming, to where they have to prepare and try to figure out what.
None!
But games did seem to go on very long. Last game was I believe nearly an hour. I was going to link my last game, but the replay is not showing up in my match history. That may be a bug, unless the replay takes time to process.
Some side feedback of feelings I felt during these games - I did feel a bit bored at times, simply due to so much travel time, or feeling like there wasn't much to do after losing a battle. It feels akin to what would happen after a wipe in a MOBA. But compared to an RTS game, it feels strange.
I'm not sure what type of solution would be best for this case. Too much "macro" might ruin the feel of the game for many potential players. But on the other hand, giving players too strong of a way to "stay in the game" after losing their army might make games go on long (and that already seems like it might be an issue).
I do like the streamlined approach to macro, where you still make strategic decisions, but do not have a mechanical requirement to keep up. I wouldn't want that to be ruined. And I wouldn't want to make death insignificant. But being bored when dead doesn't seem too ideal. This may just be a negative aspect of team strategy games.
OP merc strat: So, as I discovered, you can teleport sieged purifiers.
Bugs associated with OP merc strat:
1. They appear as if they are flying in the spot they teleport to (shadow is where an air unit's shadow is).
2. The all siege in the same spot once teleported, even if they were not in the same spot pre-teleport.
3. When you click on the purifier the first time, it will only select one of the purifiers. Double clicking gives you all of them, but they move as if they are one unit. Then it sort of bugs out so that they separate into the individual ones to position.
Another bug: I could not see countdown timer for teching to T2 or T3
UI/UX Elements
(1.1) - I originally had some trouble getting my fingers to remember what I needed to do to get the mercs into separate groups from all-army, but once I got that working, the only thing left over with control groups was the double tap sometimes going to a tower or other spot on the map. Sometimes this happened just in the course of the game, but one thing that definitely seemed to confuse the client was issuing a move command to a control group (in this case all-army), and then alt-tabbing out, waiting a bit, and then going back in. A double tap in this case would sometimes go to where the units had been when initial alt-tab occurred, and sometimes to a (perhaps) random spot on the map (didn't try enough to detect pattern, only repro).
(1.2) - On the interface, it seemed like some of the building icons with countdown didn't show, like for the merc upgrades. (I think that was the one)
(1.3) - Match summary screen could benefit from indication of victor (at least, would help remember what happened in the games when feedbacking).
Regions/Matchups
(2.1) - Definitely the longest and most tense battling was in the marathon 61 minute game we played, P:Alder(Triangle?), T:Grath/Celesta top vs. Vex + Eris/Hydros. Match up was tough bottom, lost early expansions, Vex took the middle brush and towered it up. However, abandoning it all game didn't seem to have much impact. Game maxed out, Gloriporter kept us in it, feel like game came down to siege capability, and Alder/Celesta could set that up much faster at base after a failed push. Max engagements didn't seem to lag, and pathing shined, so good stuff there.
(2.2) - Mirror Ryme with Vex against Grath early game was positional, but once our Vela and their Eris got in the mix, felt a lot tougher to play out well. Nothing explicit about the match up felt broken, though engagements felt like things just disappeared with out obvious cause.
(2.3) - Mirror Vex with Hydros against Ryme ended up feeling a little fragile early game, didn't feel like we had effective initiation. I fully expect this could be built around, and nothing explicit about the match up felt broken. Battles felt stretched out geographically and temporally, susceptible on the flanks. Feeling was as if it was tough to bring everything to bare effectively. Would look to mercs and charms to mitigate this.
OP Merc Strategies
(3.1) - In game, didn't really run into anything I felt was OP. Still would prefer if things didn't stack on top of each other (this was discussed in the call, as well).
(3.1) - Had an interesting time seeing what is possible with the Teleporter. Glori also has talked about some of these, so there is some cross-posting here, but what I found:
The best application for the Scuttleguard might actually be starting the roll mid teleport, to get the largest amount of time at speed.
Bugs
(4.1) - From 1.1 above, alt-tabbing out of the game and back in seems to mess up control group location (and scrolls the game screen down to the bottom right corner).
Same thing applies to Alder's stuff (tried teleporting a whole set of all of them at the same time). Generates the weirdly pulsating tower of deadly, healing, spitting vegetation. Scuttleguards maintain their separation, as might be expected.
I played Vex bot against CohLysion on Alder in the hour-long game he mentioned:
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In an earlier game Cerebral09 had shown me the effectiveness aggressively building Orions, so that's what I did this game. The Orions helped me take all the camps on my side quickly, and in pvp they added just a little extra dps and meat-shielding to help me win engagements with Alder and have enough strength remaining to do get work done on his defenses.
I took the bottom gems and managed to also colonize CohLysions middle "jungle" expansion. At this point I was churning out Orions, though as the squads grew their value diminished as they began to simply add to the bulkiness of my ball of units. I switched into juggernauts, and I feel like a sunk almost twenty into their nexus in groups of two to four. The problem was that both sides kept repairing their nexus back to full with engineers.
Engineers being able to repair the nexus is the problem, and hopefully games will not go so long when this feature is removed. I did feel that fights got a lot more frustrating as the game went long and our squads started to max out on units and upgrades. The passageways and nexus areas are really too narrow for maxed squads to maneuver in, and Celesta's ult and purifiers become very effective and difficult to avoid or engage.
Recall Removal
It occurs to me that the teleporter mercenary can function as an emergency defensive recall, so players have that option provided that they choose a particular merc faction and fully develop that tech branch. That functionality could also be put on a charm. I would also kind of like a charm that would allow me to recall individual units on a short cooldown.
P.S. Very happy with the mini-map switch. Didn't miss-click once this playtest!
What UI/UX elements did you like / dislike? Were there pieces that particularly caused you friction?
Not quite UI/UX, but just gotta say, the new War Dance and Leviathan VFX are SO SICK. Liked the minimap on bottom right (coming from a league player), and the option to move it was great. Manage to adapt to a lot of the new locations for the information, but not sure how easy-to-find/understand things (like "units ready to spawn") would be for someone seeing it all for the first time.
Lack of XP bar is poopy. Alt as a control group tool is the best idea in the world. Single biggest frustration is likely the overall lack of communication that exists for mercenary factions: can't look them up on atlaspedia, can't see what units are in what in squad select, can't see what allies (or opponents!) have selected both in squad select and in game. Additionally, some source of information on current charges available for autocasters would be super cool, because to my knowledge there is no current way to tell.
New/refined base management was nice, felt more like Atlas 1.X. Only issue was that the super heal tower is really difficult to get units to because of the wall of buildings in the way.
What region/matchup did you play? Was the battling fun/tense or boring/flat? Why did those battles feel that way?
Played top most games. Grath makes an exceptionally strong ally for both Eris and Vela, but unlike Shrike (my Grath ally in both of those matchups), I found the combat to be exciting. Skirting around the edges and taking out key targets while an ally CCs them and soaks damage is just exciting.
Played a game as Eris vs Vela bot lane. It was entirely one-sided in my favour and there was no way for my opponent to come back after I used the Rabbit's Foot charm to punish an overextending harassment play. The lack of large outer tower on the far bottom near the "neutral" gem expo made for what felt like interesting play from my side, as I was able to swing around and attack an expansion and get some additional pressure in, but I could imagine it being frustrating to have to defend that more actively.
Did you find any OP merc strategies? What were they?
Nothing felt "OP" from my usage side. Cycle pooped on me with shieldermen though. And blindermen and leviathans are both cool, but the only "win condition" unit right now seems to be Juggernauts. At the very least, they make for a reliable win condition.
What bugs did you find?
Biggest bug is the tilde-centering-camera-on-tower bug. I noticed a few odd instances of graphical glitches, but they were momentary after moving the camera a long distance. Melee titans still bug out when fighting ranged units at the edge of their leash circle, I was able to handle them easily as both Eris and Vela.
Edit: Combo UI/maybe bug - T2/T3 and merc tier upgrades don't show on the sidebar production list. (I say UI over bug because someone pointed out that they show up on the buildings).
Boring in what way? Not as intense as you wanted? Too intense? Too predictable? What troubled ya?
We've located the likely repro of this bug; not certain that we'll have it fixed in time for the test weekend, unfortunately.
Thanks!
Want to highlight this really quickly. Right now, the big "game-enders" are the Juggernauts. We're going to, for this test weekend, buff Leviathans to be equally-powerful "game-enders." After this test weekend (though not necessarily immediately after), we're going to investigate our end-game and work on tightening it up.
We're going to make some tweaks to the map after this test weekend, largely to shape up the 1v1 region and provide more opportunities for the two regions to interact. As we do this, let us know if that feeling of boredom during travel times persist. In terms of downtime after a wipe, I think this will largely stay as-is. That said, this is great map feedback. Hopefully the restructuring of the map will help alleviate these bored feelings.
Thanks!
I think we've got a fix for this coming shortly!
This may be a different issue. Passing this along.
Should be added to the interface by TW2, I think. Not certain though.
Passing this along as well, good catch.
WOO!
Will dig in and find the replay link for this. Doesn't necessarily sound unhealthy, but warrants investigation.
Likely investigating this before the test weekend.
Passed along. In fact I'm just going to pass this whole post along, haha.
Thanks!
This last one, we may have a fix for in soon. The others are going to be longer-term cleanup of those interactions if we keep the Teleporters around.
It's definitely part of the problem; we're removing this particular functionality soon though based on data from a few games (including yours).
WOOHOO!
Thanks!
I found the games too predictable, it didn't get shook up enough. Like I was just running through the motions. There were cool moments (sick snipes by @MeltCat for example) but otherwise weren't terribly exciting.
Added for tomorrow! :D
MercPedia is coming! Also, lists and short descriptions of Mercs will be in on Squad Selection!
Both features coming soon....ish
Likely optimizing this later.
Two quick things. IN BULLET-POINT FORM BECAUSE I LOVE THOSE, WOO!
The struggles of being Vela in the 1v1, I'm afraid. Expect to see some tweaks to this in the future.
The Leviathan has received significant buffs this patch. Please note that the difference in the Juggernaut and the Leviathan is that Leviathans can attack units.
Fixed! Woohoo!
We're calling this too high-risk of a change to make for this test weekend, but hope to get the Titan leashing behavior cleaned up post-TW2. One likely solution is, after "leashing" twice, to have them hard-reset to their location until their health reaches max.
If I understand you correctly, I believe this may be fixed. Not certain.
Thanks for testing as always, and for always leaving very thorough feedback! <3