Playtest 209: New Map, Balance, and the Return of Green!

TreiskTreisk Member, Administrator
edited May 8 in Patch Notes

Playtest 209: New Map, Balance, and the Return of Green!

TL;DR - New map; Green is back, T1 units nerfed, lots more balance changes!

Following up on Wednesday's very rough build, we've re-added Green! Alder has seen some significant changes as a result of the new unit-picking world, Tier 1s have been toned down across the board, and a brand new map promises to bring with it some very different interactions! Let's get started!

General Gameplay

  • New Map!
  • Shield Battery

    • Shield Points: 500 ⇒ 1000
  • Basic Tower:

    • Physical Resist:67 ⇒ 0
    • Magical Resist:167 ⇒ 100
    • Now has 250 Shield Points

Units

General

  • Heroes now begin with slightly lower stats, and their stats scale slightly less with level
  • Maximum hero level: 14 ⇒ 20

Green

  • is back!

Heroes

  • Alder, Lord of Vines

    • Basic Ability: Living Vines ⇒ Tree of Life
    • Tree of Life (Basic)

      • No longer needs to be cast on a Sapling!
      • Healing and radius reduced, but now scale with Hero level!
    • Deeproot Terror (Ultimate)

      • No longer needs to be cast on a Sapling!
    • Basic Unit: Seedbot

      • Health: 235 ⇒ 195
      • Damage: 15 ⇒ 12
      • Attack cooldown: 1.4 ⇒ 1.6
      • Attack range: 6.5 ⇒ 7
    • Sapling

      • Health: 100 ⇒ 80
      • Damage: 14 ⇒ 11
  • Grath, Primitive Engineer

    • Harden can now be used on any unit you own
    • Basic Unit: Terrapin Trooper

      • Health: 225 ⇒ 190
      • Damage: 20 ⇒ 15

Alternate Basic Units

  • NEW UNIT: Chain Attacker

    • Medium-ranged unit, fairly fast, not terribly durable. Attacks bounce to other nearby targets.

Advanced Units

  • Grove Tender

    • No longer has Tree of Life, Needlefern no longer requires a Sapling; duration up, cooldown down, holds 2 charges.
  • Bramblethorn Goliath
  • Howling Commando

    • No longer has Energy Shackles
  • Rustborn Rhino
  • NEW UNIT: Toxin Alchemist (HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL)

    • A weak combat unit with a very slow attack. Applies a Lethal Toxin to its targets. At three stacks of Lethal Toxin, units will lose 99% of their max health over 3 seconds.
  • NEW UNIT: Bruce the Moose

    • Incredibly durable, slow melee unit that can stomp the ground, dramatically slowing nearby enemy units.
  • NEW UNIT: Abominable Sludge

    • Incredibly durable slow melee unit. Has no unit collision; deals damage to enemy units inside it and slows their movement speed.

Blue

  • Ryme

    • Frozen Orb (Ultimate)

      • Path damage: 40 ⇒ 20
      • Destination damage: 80 ⇒ 40
  • Glacial Ranger

    • Health: 170 ⇒ 140
    • Damage: 24 ⇒ 18
  • Scuttleguard

    • Health: 275 ⇒ 225
    • Damage: 18 ⇒ 14
  • Voidling

    • Health: 270 ⇒ 240
    • Range: 7.5 ⇒ 7
    • Attack cooldown: 1.2 ⇒ 1.3
  • Frostcaller

    • Frostfall

      • Damage per pulse: 30 ⇒ 15
      • Movement slow: 45% ⇒ 50%
  • Shadow

    • Scrap cost: 75 ⇒ 150
    • Health: 400 ⇒ 375
    • Movement speed: 5.1 ⇒ 5.3
  • Aquadillo

    • Health:1050 ⇒ 950
    • Cannonball

      • Effect Radius: 4.5 ⇒ 4
      • Damage: 20 ⇒ 15
      • Movement slow: 80% ⇒ 65%

Red

  • Sandstinger

    • Health: 75 ⇒ 50
    • Damage: 28 ⇒ 21
  • Spitfire

    • Health: 135 ⇒ 100
    • Damage: 12 ⇒ 10
    • Bonus to Ignited Units: 10 ⇒ 7
  • Beetle Fighter

    • Stock cost: 6 ⇒ 5
    • Damage: 22 ⇒ 20
    • Attack cooldown: 1.0 ⇒ 0.8

White

  • Celesta

    • Cleansing Light (Ultimate)

      • Radius: 7 ⇒ 8
      • Delay: 4.0 ⇒ 4.5
  • Vela

    • Diplomatic Measures (Ultimate)

      • Cooldown: 100 ⇒ 50 seconds
  • NEW UNIT: Zephyr

    • Fragile, fast control-based spellcaster. Can create winds that slow your enemies and speed up your allies, and breathes a strong gust that pushes enemies away.
  • NEW UNIT: Conduit

    • A long-ranged unit that attacks with a Chain Lightning effect.
  • Raptor

    • Health: 60 ⇒ 65
    • Damage: 20 ⇒ 14
    • Movement speed: 4.4 ⇒ 4.5
  • Wisp

    • Health: 105 ⇒ 75
    • Damage: 9 ⇒ 7
  • Sprinter

    • 170 ⇒ 160
    • Movement speed: 4.7 ⇒ 4.6

Comments

  • wondiblewondible Member

    Core combat seems fairly solid, most battles seem be determined by unit interactions that will be part of the meta once things are tuned. Interesting one from today: sandstingers wreck raptors, so I switched to sprinters and wrecked the sandstingers.

    I don't have a good sense of the progression of the game. Some of this could be UI (e.g. voice call when a battery gets destroyed)

    The economy is functional. I want a better UI to really decide how I feel, but there are other systems that are probably more important right now. Since all resources are kind of equivalent, I'm wondering if the distinction between stock and scrap will be significant; It does make it clearer when you can afford to use advanced units.

    In the previous build I would sometimes go engineers and scouts when I ran out of stock, but now they are too expensive (scrap wise) This version is better at preventing low resources, but I miss having inexpensive yolo strats for when nothing is going right. Maybe I haven't found them, or you'd rather just make sure there are always better options.

  • DeaucalionDeaucalion Member

    I had a lot of fun this playtest. Battles were exciting. Researching Tech Level 2 right away makes me feel like I should build Tier 2 units right afterwards, but the scrap flow makes me wait until the mid game before I can really start to build up a significant number of higher tier units.
    It is lovely to have the scarabs back, especially now that they can be paired with Devilkin. I got really excited when I discovered that sandstingers could push your other units when they dashed. I know you guys said that this was an unintended feature, but I had a lot of fun sculpting my formation into a shaped explosive charge and blinking my scarabs on top of my enemies' backlines. I hope that something like this can stay in the game, if sandstingers pushing when they dash causes problems, perhaps some unit could have an activated ability that caused units in front of it to dash in the targeted direction.

    The Map
    This map felt a lot better than Wednesdays. The corridors felt considerably less cramped. My impression is that the chokes are not really much wider, but they are shallower, so they feel less "narrow."
    Right now the top and bot sides of the map seem to be symmetrical, which makes them somewhat strategically interchangeable. Ideally, the top and bot fountain areas would be shaped differently to create distinct tactical situations (but of course this is pretty low priority).

    The Economy
    I wasn't as frustrated with the economy system as I was on Wednesday. There were several contributing factors: a) I have gotten better at managing it, b) I was on the winning side in both games, and c) the scrap payouts late game are such that I had more than enough scrap and stock. Though they were on the back foot for some portion of the game, it didn't seem like my opponents were starved for resources either (though I haven't watched the replays, so I'm not entirely sure).
    The system still feels a bit annoying because I don't like having to constantly manage the generator. I'd much rather take a moment between engagements to spend down my accumulated resource.
    The current system actually makes me feel a bit like I am moving an extractor around to harvest different resources, sort of like a nomadic expansion...

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