Playtest 226: One Less Advanced Unit slot; Unit Balance; Basic Unit Experiment
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Playtest 226: One Less Advanced Unit slot; Unit Balance; Basic Unit Experiment
General Gameplay
Context: Some feedback we've gotten, and some things we've been noticing, indicate to us that players tend to seldom feel like they're limited by how many units they can have when coming away from choosing their unit deck. Often, players could get everything they needed and there wasn't much of a feeling that the player was making an interesting choice. We want to make that choice more interesting, and sometimes more difficult, so we're trying this!
- Advanced Unit Slots: 5 ⇒ 4
Upgrades
- Adjusted the efficacy of offensive stat upgrades at all ranks by 50%!
- Attack Damage: 10/20/30/40% ⇒ 15/30/45/60%
- Ability Power: 10/20/30/40% ⇒ 15/30/45/60%
Units
Basic Unit Experiment
Context: The prevalence of basic ("T1") units has skyrocketed in the last few weeks, partly due to the strength of support units. One cheap experiment we're trying for tonight's playtest is to reduce the efficacy of basic units across the board, and see what gameplay differences come out of it. Please note that this change is not permanent, and that we are aware of the dramatic side-effects this will have on several unit interactions.
Temporary Unit Changes
- Basic Units have had their Health and Damage reduced by 15%!
- Heroes have had their base Health and Damage reduced by 15%!
- Creep Camps have had their Health and Damage reduced by 15%!
- Spitfire Bonus Damage to Ignited Targets: 6 ⇒ 5
- Raptor Bonus Damage to Marked Targets: 5 ⇒ 4
Blue
- Shadow
- Nether Zone
- Damage per second: 10 DPS per pool, stacking ⇒ 5 DPS, non-stacking
- Damage interval: 1 second ⇒ Continuous
- Nether Zone
- Aquadillo
- Health: 950 ⇒ 1200
Green
- Terrapin Trooper
- Increased the size of the Terrapin Trooper by 12.5%
- Batterhorn
- Health: 1150 ⇒ 1350
Red
- Devilkin Dervish
- Context: We've seen and heard over the last few weeks that there are a handful of units players see as "mandatory" in their lineup. In some cases, this wasn't only true for a player's Hero color choice, but rather for the team's composition. We began working towards less "mandatory" units with the Windray (the biggest offender at the time), and now the Dervish is the King of that mountain. These changes should keep Dervishes in line as an effective damage buff, but restrict Dervishes from taking over the map with infinite mobility. for entire armies.
- Unit Cap: 8 ⇒ 4
- War Dance has been slightly reworked
- Still provides 20% Attack Cooldown reduction for 7 seconds
- Provides 30% Movement Speed for the first 3 seconds of the War Dance.
- Lavaspitter
- Rooted Range: 11 ⇒ 14
- Rooted damage: 50 ⇒ 35
- Pyrosaur
- Health: 650 ⇒ 500
- Unit Cap: 8 ⇒ 2
- Flamethrower
- The Pyrosaur now moves 50% slower while channeling Flamethrower
- Damage per second: 80 ⇒ 70
- Cooldown: 20 seconds ⇒ 35 seconds
- Iron Lung (Upgrade)
- Range bonus: 3 ⇒ 2
White
- Purifier
- Rooted Range: 14 ⇒ 15
- Deadeye
- Fixed a bug that allowed Deadeyes to attack while casting Take Aim
- Conduit
- Has received new Attack VFX, and new VFX for Drill Laser!
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that prevented modal units (Purifier, Lavaspitter) from receiving stat buffs/debuffs in some circumstances
Replays
- Removed 8x fast-forward
- This will be restored when we do a larger-scale pass on replay usability. For now, 8x leads to behavior that frequently causes crashes while viewing replays, so it's simpler to remove it.
Comments
Grath felt helpless. Batterhorns seemed okay the little I got to use them, but we were too far behind to support them.
Strangely scuttleguards were awful to play against, yet terrible to play with; never even got to aquadillos since was building so much stock.
Vex ult is really easy to miss before it's too late. I don't remember it being an issue before the visual change.
Devilkin seem fine. I don't like having to think about two durations with one effect, but I certainly don't wont two separate keys to manage.
I also think Vex's ult is very hard to see now (it was fairly hard before but moreso now), and is contributing to its overall power-level.
Why is his ult much harder to see than Celesta's? It already has a very short startup. Losing troops because I can't see a graphic feels really bad - compared to losing them when I failed to move in time, I feel like I've been cheated out of my army/game because I simply wasn't delivered the proper information rather than that I failed to act on it.
tl;dr: Please make high-impact abilities easy to spot, because nothing feels worse and more unfair than being unable to see something that kills you if you don't dodge it.
I haven't played much in this patch (aside from daily playtests this week) but I have to say I like the removal of one advanced slot. I have to think a bit more about the selection, but not by much - honestly one of my slots was always a throw-away for a unit I'd probably never build. It also rewards team coordination. I hope I have enough time this week to play enough and provide some more meaningful feedback.
On a side note, and because I haven't written this anywhere else yet (and in part b/c the convo came up tonight in Discord with @Metruzero ), I think the auto-production portion of the game is a SERIOUSLY underrated component. Yes, Atlas already has less production to manage than a typical RTS. But the fact that there's any means that unless someone is comfortable using that production, they can't do ANYTHING else in the game. This has the potential to be an amazing stepping stone for some people (starting out on automated controls and then later refining their play), or just a crutch for others who will use it indefinitely and play the game more like a MOBA. Sure, they may be in lower leagues/rankings as a result but as long as they're having fun it doesn't matter.
I know plenty of folks who find macromanagement not only tedious, but outright intimidating. I can't tell you the number of friends I've tried to get into SC2, only to end up failing because it was too overwhelming. Even if it wasn't, the ones who could handle the macro at a bronze league level were always frustrated because it was very punishing when they'd either overproduce or outright forget to maintain something. There will always be a learning curve with these types of games but this has the potential to seriously ease the entry-level portion. No doubt it's part of the reason MOBAs enjoy so much popularity over RTS's these days - my friends approach them with a "oh, WHEH, I don't have to worry about all that, just my hero/champion/etc". There's an insane depth to the game but the depth doesn't hit them upfront, so they learn more over time without realizing it.
I just wanted it voiced that any improvement on the automated production system is a good investment IMO. This stuff has potential, folks.
Additional patch already went through it looks like
ALL UNITS increased in hp by ~15%
Tier 1 units/heroes/camps back to their original damage/hp
Toxin Alchemist: 11 range 1.5 attack speed
The first part I think is intentional in light of upgrade changes, but there's a chance it could've been an accident.
@Millea Moobeat, is that you?
15% increase in health to all advanced units wasn't a mistake =)
Were seedbots changed? Their slow feels bigger than before but I'm also a crazy person
There were no changed to the seedbots slow, only graphics.
brutallll I'm just confused