Battles, Abilities, and Unit Control [TW2 Megathread]
How do battles feel? Battle pacing, battle micro, abilities, mercenaries, upgrades, charms, etc.
When providing feedback, please use the following format:
- X happened
- It made me feel Y (or I’d like to feel Y)
- (optional) Here’s a suggestion to improve it
Comments
I told my artillery cubes to target a tower, and I was confused and frustrated because I couldn't tell whether they were attacking or not, and they seemed to just be walking up to the tower.
The specific instance happened starting at 29:15 in the rightmost red starting base in replay G5b46189e26564b8e86dd583d4e522693.
Watching the replay, there seemed to be 3 distinct things going on:
1. There seems to be an attack cooldown bar above the players health that shows when the attacking will happen. I did not notice any of these while actually playing, perhaps it should be made more obvious?
2. The tower lasers and the cube lasers were overlapping, so even when the cube did fire, the cube's laser was hidden behind the tower laser, so I couldn't see it. Perhaps a "muzzle flash" style animation on the actual unit is in order so that it is always obvious when it is attacking?
3. While waiting for the attack cooldown, the cube would continue walking up to the tower, even after it is in range. This just feels wrong, as I always want to attack at maximum range to enable a quick retreat.
Charms, Are literally the best thing you could have put into this game, given it's nature. I feels so rewarding when you fight with it and every game no matter the circumstance you want them. Some are better than others in certain squads, and that is where the meta game kicks in. I hope to god the concept of charms is never changed.
I felt bored with Mercenaries (I picked ground) because, they can only attack buildings and other mercenaries, the tier 1 are all supportive in nature healing/defending.
Once people get to the point of buying even the weakest ones you want them to feel engaged with the game and the tier 1 mercenaries don't give me that immersion that I look for in a game.
The battle pacing feels organic IE not rushed or super slow and the Micro seemed so much more fun then the last time I played prob due to unit collision I can predict where things are going and at what speed more easily.
When I was playing as Grath and using the Terrapin Trooper stun-dash ability, I was disappointed because the ability felt clunky and lost its effectiveness in large-scale battles.
The dash would often cause the Terrapin to get stuck on stationary friendly units (any unit that is attacking or being healed by Grath's ability). Normally they push units to the side if those units aren't doing anything or are just moving. They would occasionally path around the units but only if they didn't dash into them straight on. Basically, if there were any other units between the Terrapins and the enemy, very few or none of the dash-stuns would connect. Even if the Terrapins were in front, they would get in the way of each other, preventing others from re-stunning or connecting with other enemy units. In the beginning of the game when few units are involved, it is easy enough to babysit the Terrapins and manually move them so that they have a clear path towards the enemy. But once more units become involved, and those units are also moving around and re-positioning constantly, it becomes very difficult to line up good dashes, to the extent where the ability seemed to become obsolete and mostly useless.
It also felt unresponsive because I could not cancel the dash before its allotted time was over, so if a Terrapin ran into another friendly unit or a wall or missed and went way past the enemy it would be out of the fight for a couple seconds.
The targeting of the ability also didn't seem very intuitive to me. When I cast it, I target a specific location on the ground, so I would expect the Terrapins to charge to the location, and I would expect to be able to control the range of their dash by targeting an area closer or farther away. What seems to actually be the case is that the targeting just determines the direction the Terrapins dash and that they always dash for the maximum duration. If a Terrapin runs into a friendly unit and is able to path around it and not get completely stuck, it won't redirect its course to where I targeted it. Rather, it will continue in a straight line in the direction it was deflected when it pathed around the friendly unit.
My suggestion for improvement would to be to:
First game;
I don't envy whoever writes your final tutorial, because this game is hard. As I said on the discord; this game is like dota, and sc having a kid, which got brought up by LoL and Supernova, and then had a teenage rebellion. However, it dumbs down interestingly.
Few things
Being new, I did the thing new people do, super unit spam! I defended (mostly staying behind towers and focusing on clearing camps; the fire guys DoT effect is kinda amazing and keeping camps from respawing while you get lure ally bots into helping you) and built up gem expansions till I had five leviathans and way to many people in my squad, then it was too easy. I want to think you guys addressed this and it was the bot's fault for letting me defend.
I played a half a game on Sapling guy, and he felt either super mircoy or just plain old weaker then everybody else. I went into a couple of engagements with other groups which (I looked at stats) were weaker then my guys, and still got my but handed to me because special abilities, and mine just weren't as good.
There will be more.
I'll be investigating the replay to see if any buggy behavior is happening. Artillery cubes do have a very long cooldown so sometimes it can be confusing to tell immediately what's being targeted. The cubes + their FX are completely temp (as you might imagine) so hopefully when we do an art pass we'll address those issues
Hooray charms! We will absolutely be expanding charms dramatically in the coming months. They are an extremely safe, interesting, and reliable system to introduce counterplay and complexity to the game.
Mercenaries can attack/interact with everything. The only exception is the Juggernaut & Ion Cannon (can only attack structures). Try building some mercs to address squad vs squad problems! For instance, if you're playing Vela, I recommend going for Raiders. At low tier, you can build a merc that plants chilling traps on the ground that slow enemy movement for 12 seconds. It's an amazing way to keep the enemy at a distance.
There have been countless changes to movement/pacing/damage/armor etc. Let me know where the points of pain are as you play more so we can adjust :D
Hello Artillery,
One quick thing, on the UI, upgrades are not underneath the unit they are upgrading, I know that there are multiple upgrades for some units, but even for the base two units on several squads, the upgrade for the tier 1 unit is under the tier 2 and vice versa. It was very confusing at first, and makes me have to read it every time even if I know what the upgrade does. I think it would feel less confusing if the upgrades were strait down under the unit it corresponded with.
Just realized this might not be in the right section, and can't see a way to delete the post.
So I haven't hit all the squads yet, but here's some initial reactions to some of the abilities I've fiddled with so far.
(Brief personal background - the RTS I most actively play currently is League of Legends, but I played a good bit of Starcraft 2 in the Wings of Liberty days and 4gated2diamond, before that I played casual Warcraft 3 for years. Have also had a handful of other RTS experiences, namely a few of the Warhammer 40k releases and a bit of Age of Empires/Wonders)
Vela:
I'm really enjoying Vela's squad. I think you've already received a lot of positive feedback on the snipers, but I might as well chime in - when you land a successful Fair Warning into a Basic Snipe barrage, it feels powerful and skillful. When you miss, it feels like you aimed poorly or didn't anticipate the enemy's movements correctly.
But, when you give a Reward Turret, Mega Node, or the enemy Nexus 'Fair Warning' that it's about to be sniped and crit like crazy, it feels perhaps a bit like cheating.
Grath:
The first squad that really clicked for me, I enjoyed the simplicity of Grath's early to mid-game play. Using Stone Form to save low health units as well as tank damage feels very strong and satisfying.
Howling Commando's are some of my favorite units in the game right now. I've always been a sucker for passives, being generally to lazy to aggressively manage activated abilities. They feel powerful with their splash damage and immortal-style absorbing shield, and while they don't need micromanagement, they still benefit from skillfully ducking out of combat when their shields run out. Gives a nice ceiling for mastery even as an 'a-click' unit.
Now, as for the Terrapin Troopers, Rocket Rush is funky. I've had a bunch of varying experiences with it. First time activating it, I was somewhat surprised and delighted as my turtles rammed headfirst into a wall and kept on jetting along it. Utilizing it in combat, it feels challenging to use without an ideal unit formation already in place. I had initially expected them to push allied units aside, and felt stupid when I wound up ordering them to poot about in the bums of friendly ranged units. It felt not only like I'd wasted the cooldown, but also the full duration of the rocket boost in potential new movement/attack orders as they slid about sideways against obstacles. I did have an "aha!" moment that felt great when I realized on the fly that I could use Rocket Rush to get my Troopers safely away from a chase after a fight had gone south. The brief charge delay made for a nice moment of tension while the enemy came closer, but then the speed and distance covered by the rocketeering made up for the lost ground and the enemy gave up the chase.
Vex:
I also enjoyed Vex quite a lot, but often didn't have any real sense of how much damage I was leveraging out of his squad's combined immolation-themed abilities or whether or not I was properly utilizing them. I suspect much of this will actually be alleviated with closer-to-final art and audio assets. Would personally suggest flame VFX that somewhat pulse synchronized with damage ticks, as opposed to more soft fade-on/fade-off emission rates.
I really like the Pyrosaurs. One of the first things that struck me in watching the tutorial video by Sean was the targeting UI you have in place already and that it has a feature most RTS games lack - indication of which unit would be casting the given ability. This is particularly nice for abilities like basic snipe, but it also felt extremely helpful for Flamethrower. Additionally, I felt like the Pyrosaurs behaved extremely intuitively with Flamethrower on, continuing to approach enemy units and generally keeping the cone of flame in position to deal damage as they strafed about. It felt like there was room to be super micro intensive and really manage where they went with it, but that the default AI was handling itself well enough that not managing it directly wasn't ever a disaster.
Ok, now I wanna go play more.
Generally I've found unit control to be difficult, partially due to sluggish response times, and partially due to the path finding / unit collision. Frequently I'll be trying to due a camp early by pulling back targeted units to force the AI to re-target a higher health unit and space between units that look clear will still cause the unit to be stuck and unable to pull back, or the sluggish response time will cause me to fail to move a unit back quickly enough because I'm anticipating the response time to be a little more immediate. These kinds of small micro moments are important, and can mean the difference between clearing a camp or being set back.
What happened: I played as Vex. I would engage my opponent’s army and use Vex’s abilities. I have since been fiddling with the abilities of a few other heroes and I feel like it applies to many of them.
It made me feel: Pyroblast is clearly quite noticeable when it happens, it’s satisfying and the damage I cause gives me some feedback. However, I felt like the Scorch ability gave me little feedback about what was happening, and this has been a recurring theme with the abilities of many of the units. In fact, there are many things that made me feel like battles were not interacting with me, they weren’t giving me the information I needed for me to understand how the fight was going. This is unfortunate because one of the most satisfying things in these types of game is seeing the result of your actions. If my ability hits 4 dudes, I'd like to know that somehow. As it is, hitting 3-4 dudes with Scorch and those types of abilities doesn't feel good. The opposite of that to me is Ryme, because his Frostbolt ability is satisfying to land, Cold snap (by the rangers) tends to have an immediate noticeable and very battle-altering effect, and Frozen Orb just feels good to land correctly. The synergy with the other units is just very fun. And I can see this leading to some very interactive "oh ****" moments.
A possible solution: I think it’s very important for there to be some form of very obvious feedback when something happens. Perhaps with experience these things become more noticeable, but I had trouble keeping track of what was happening. I would like if spells did more of this. Another part of this is, when units die, I felt like they were just fading out of existence. In some other RTS’s, you hear things going down because spellcasts make a very noticeable noise, or put fire all over the place, and units explode making a satisfying « boom », or become a puddle of blood. Without going crazy with the particle effects (glad that Atlas hasn’t gone crazy with those), I think it’s possible to give the player more information. To be fair, there already is feedback, I'd just like for it to be "stronger". When an ability lands, it's great for there to be a "thump" to the chest, you know?
I felt disappointed when Celesta's owl just disappeared after a few seconds. I had expected something that could assist allies on the other side of the map, possibly due to the endurance profiles of owls in other games. So I suggest a range indicator on the mini-map or stronger wording than "long-range". Such as "Long but finite range" or "Range 450".
Further investigation reveals that for both the owl and the ion cannon (where I had a similar problem) they do indeed have an on-screen range indicator circle. Both circles are just slightly larger than my screen, so I can only see the indicator if the unit is in one corner and I look at the other.
It's good that there is mini-map casting already, which is a plus! I do enjoy mini-map casting my longer range abilities. Upon further inspection, this one might not be quite that long though.
Quite nit-picky, but the Backdraft passive for the Spitfire references it as a "Sparkbot", not a spiftire:
Backdraft
Passive
When the Sparkbot attacks, it gains 5% attack speed for 4 seconds. Maximum 5 stacks.
The Sparkbot's attacks deal 10 bonus Magical damage to Ignited targets.
just played a PvP match. I knew how strong Juggernauts were I implicitly chose Assault for the Teleporter Juggernaut combo, engage in a fight super far away and then bam 3 juggs bashing on nexus. However I never really looked into actually just straight up rushing Juggs. My opponents did in this game and its very clear how imbalanced they can be in the early game. My opponents did a good job of 3v2 crushing our armies so they were on cooldown but i highly doubt it would of mattered, at that stage in the game there was no way we could DPS down 4 juggs without hero ultimates.
replay ID
G74f63146b0904faab6e361abc4e2a758
its one of those things where you realize something is good then you see someone else do it EVEN better and you go, "whoa I thought i was giving myself an edge but these guys make it look like cheating!" lol wp to my opponents but if this persists i can clearly see a 15 min game meta of who can rush juggs and base race better
I've played only a few matches so far and haven't tried all of the heroes yet, but my complaint is that I feel very underwhelmed when using a heroes big ultimate ability.
While playing as Vex, I would cast Pyroblast at a group of enemies. While the notable damage was exciting, I felt that the animation and sound were not very well done. It may be intentional, but when playing a game like Smite, and you use your ultimate ability, there's usually a huge animation making you feel very powerful. Everyone around you would know that you used your ability because they could see it, hear it, and fear it. Again, it may be your intention to keep it more subtle, but I feel like something as epic as Pyroblast should look and sound bigger.
I did play a game as Vela and would love to pass my compliments on to whomever made the ability design for the Deadeye's Take Aim. It feels very satisfying to see the target cone (for lack of a better word) and try and line up the shot. The "Critical" that appears when a marked enemy is hit is a nice touch as well.
@Shambles299
Hey Shambles! over the coming months we'll be adding in a ton more feedback for big abilities. our VFX artist is hard at work replacing the many many placeholder and underwhelming particle effects in our game. Once we get to sound we'll have the frosting on the cake and hopefully you'll feel that awesome feeling you feel when you ult someone in smite with Ares or Ymir or something like that.
Experience: Landing a giant F ability from Ryme onto a bunch of units and watching them all die.
Feeling: Similar to an OP Azmodan's Orb in HOTS. Like I just hit a home run. Like I was Gandalf showing up at the last moment on a white horse with gryphns and murdered the whole army and the other team just cried, yelled 'WTF IS THAT BULLS#$T' and rage quit. It was wondrous. Den outta Den. (10/10)
Solution: I have no idea? An earth shattering ka-boom? "c-c-c-c-c-ombo. GAMECHANGER"
Experience: using the D ability from Ryme. The freezy one which holds the enemy in place for a few seconds. I used it a lot when kiting/pulliing mobs. It felt good and not bad for CC, especially since the collusion rate is high, it significantly puts a barrier almost like a force field between you and the enemy army.
Feeling: I liked it. It's hard as hell to aim at flying units but I really liked it as an escape plan or kiting. It felt like I was getting away with something to exploit the high collision rate with that.
Solution: N/A
Feedback after a few games vs bots:
Felt helpless. I'm in the 1v1 lane and opponent has a hard counter to my squad.
Trying to target flying npc. Targeting ground npc. Can't figure out why my units are attacking the wrong thing. Realize I have to click on the actual character model rather than the circle it projects onto the ground. Felt confused and annoyed. I would prefer to be able to click on the circle on the the ground and the model.
In the thick of battle I would become confused as to how much health friendly and enemy units had. I realized that the cast bar and health bar look very similar and would confuse me when things got tense. This annoyed me. I would prefer some obvious color coding to differentiate the two.
The rally point for my building would keep getting screwed up and sending my units into the middle of nowhere. I eventually realize this was because I had set it to my hero and then my hero had died. It seems that it was continuing to send units to where my hero died. This was frustrating. I would prefer that the rally default to right outside the building while my hero is dead, and possibly rebind to my hero as soon as he spawns.
Since many of my units are immortal it felt wrong that they dropped from my hotkey when they died. I felt like after they respawned they should rejoin the group they had been bound to. I was constantly frustrated that I had to redo the binds each time.
None of the effects in the game really seem to have punch. By this I mean that I don't feel like I'm doing a ton of damage when ignite enemies and then burn them down with Spitifires, and I don't feel like I'm really rejuvenating a unit when I hit it with Hydros healing ability. It may just be that this stuff is placeholder art, but it just doesn't feel visually or aurally like my abilities are making an impact. Especially that snipe ability on the second tier units of the sniper hero. It felt like a peashooter. Even when it landed and a unit died, it was just sort of an intellectual acknowledgement on my part that it landed rather than a visceral experience. One exception I just thought of was that a deployable ground unit, that I don't know the name of, but is good at hitting structures, sounds powerful. So that was cool.
I already mentioned this in the PVP feedback, but playing Hydros felt bad. I had less units than everyone else. My units seemed much less effective, and I had really hard time gathering resources so I fell even further behind. Gem warfare seems to revolve around hit and run skirmishing which this hero feels terrible at.
1) When I placed wards, I was very excited to see through the fog of war but I felt very confused as to how they functioned; are they invisible? Can other players tell if they are there? Do they get killed when the enemy A-moves through the area? These are questions that might be answered in a tooltip.
2) When I built an engineer (which happened ALL the time by accident, hitting W when I was accidentally selecting the merc building - need to change my hotkeys) I had no idea what an ion cannon did. So I built a defensive one and was disappointed. Again, the tooltip could tell me it only damages buildings!
3) When I had a few leviathans at the end and I was attacking the enemy nexus, I was initially excited that I outranged the defensive building's attacks. Then one of the leviathans in the back nudged the others forward and they began taking damage. It took a lot of control to try and place them all optimally so that they could each be in a sweet spot - able to hit but not be hit. Design flaw? I don't know, but I thought you guys might like to hear about my experience / frustration.
4) When I am in the middle of a game I have a hard time knowing what is going on at all times. "Your base is under attack" is really misleading when I am alone on the bottom doing my own thing and the top two players are handling things fine back home. It would be nice to hear "Your army is being attacked" or "Your workers are under attack" or "Your expansion is besieged" etc. etc.
Looking forward to future versions of the game!
Need to head to bed so hopefully I haven't missed someone else giving this feedback.
Working with units like the Ion Cannon and Celesta's rooting ranged unit. I had trouble knowing what would be in their range when trying to place them. This was especially trying with the Ion Cannon which proved completely useless, since it proved to be not in range of the building I was hoping to get. It may be that I missed something, but some way to telegraph the range from the ability (like on mouseover of the icon that places the unit) could be helpful.
My simple feedback is the problem I ran into when trying to select individual units among the group I had already selected. When I hit the ~ key to select my whole army, and then on the bottom bar tried to click on one of the units portraits, not the actual unit, my selection would stay on the whole army, and instead the little information panel on the right showed up with the stats for the unit.
This was not ideal for me when trying to micro individual units within the army, as I had to find the actual unit and give it orders separately instead of being able to select it remotely when looking somewhere else.
I would suggest simply giving this functionality. I don't know if I was just not understanding how to use the interface well enough, but it seems like some micro interactions with selecting parts of your army are not entirely fleshed out yet.
I was attempting to micro my units when fighting NPCs to spread damage across the units equally to maintain DPS but the units felt clunky and difficult to control well. While this may be corrected in final polish, it was a little frustrating to see units try to walk the long way around when told to move backwards because they're "hit box" is too big to fit between two other units even though the model size is small enough.