Playtest 227: Basic Unit Experiment Revert, Advanced Unit Health Buffs, Balance!
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Playtest 227: Basic Unit Experiment Revert, Advanced Unit Health Buffs, Balance!
General Gameplay
- Added new casting indicator reticle styles for Area, AOE, and Line abilities!
- Also includes range indicators for Saplings and Needleferns; and trigger radius indicators for Slow Traps
- Improved the uniformity of units' minimap impressions
- Most units now have a normalized minimap impression size
- Spawned units (Beetles, Saplings, Needleferns) have smaller impressions
- Titans now have much larger impressions
Upgrades
Context: This week, we discovered and fixed a critical bug that was affecting Ability Power upgrades beyond the first. The bug, simply, was that ONLY in the case of Ability Power, we were not rolling back the effects of the previous upgrade when applying the new one. As such, high-tier Ability Power upgrades were scaling out of control, and in all the chaos, while we felt AP was strong, we didn't notice it was broken. So, we fixed that, and anything that scales with Ability Power should now be much more in line and scale more reasonably! As Sean often says, "THIS IS WHY WE TEST!"
- Ability Power: 15/45/90/150% ⇒ 15/30/45/60%
Units
Basic Unit Experiment
Context: Simply put, this experiment was a success. We saw a lot more involvement from higher-end units in games when de-emphasizing basic units. I mentioned last week that we were making a set of temporary changes to get this effect in the quickest way possible. This week, we roll back those changes and double down on the concept itself!
- Reverted the temporary Basic Unit changes from Playtest 226
- Increased the health of most advanced units by roughly 15%
- More detailed number changes will be denoted in each unit's changelogs in the Units section!
Blue
- Frostcaller
- Health: 200 ⇒ 230
- Unit size increased by ~20%!
- Frostfall
- Pulse Damage: 15 ⇒ 20
- Kingpin
- Health: 180 ⇒ 205
- Plated Warrior
- Health: 230 ⇒ 265
- Shield Slug
- Health: 220 ⇒ 255
- Quadrapus
- Health: 125 ⇒ 145
- Unit size increased by ~15%
- BioShard cost: 75 ⇒ 125
- Intervention
- Damage reduction: 60% ⇒ 40%
- Shadow
- Health: 150 ⇒ 175
- Ancient Ice Frog
- Health: 1200 ⇒ 1380
- Aquadillo
- Energy cost: 7 ⇒ 10
- Health: 1200 ⇒ 1650
- Movement speed: 3.6 ⇒ 4.3
- Cannonball
- Damage: 15 ⇒ 25
- Slow duration: 3 seconds ⇒ 4 seconds
Green
- Howling Commando
- Health: 250 ⇒ 290
- Bramblethorn Goliath
- Energy cost: 12 ⇒ 11
- Health: 1150 ⇒ 1525
- Grove Tender
- Health: 225 ⇒ 260
- Needlefern
- Duration: 120 seconds ⇒ 45 seconds
- Health: 210 ⇒ 180
- Toxin Alchemist
- Health: 200 ⇒ 230
- Range: 8 ⇒ 11
- Damage: 3 ⇒ 12
- Attack cooldown: 1.9 seconds ⇒ 1.5 seconds
- Lethal Toxin
- 3-Stack Damage: 50% of max health over 2.5 seconds ⇒ 40% of max health over 2 seconds
- Abominable Sludge
- Health: 3200 ⇒ 3680
- Batterhorn
- Energy cost: 10 ⇒ 11
- Health: 1350 ⇒ 1850
- Movement speed: 4.6 ⇒ 4.8
- Trebuchet
- Health: 450 ⇒ 520
Red
- Beetle Fighter
- Health: 180 ⇒ 205
- Devilkin Dervish
- Health: 200 ⇒ 230
- Lavaspitter
- Health: 280 ⇒ 320
- Scarab
- Health: 550 ⇒ 635
- Apocalyte
- Health: 275 ⇒ 315
- Ignitor
- Health: 225 ⇒ 260
- Pyrosaur
- Health: 500 ⇒ 575
White
- Sprinter
- Health: 115 ⇒ 130
- Deadeye
- Health: 160 ⇒ 185
- Purifier
- Health: 200 ⇒ 230
- Zephyr
- Health: 185 ⇒ 215
- Conduit
- Health: 250 ⇒ 290
- Range: 8 ⇒ 11
- Leash range: 11.5 ⇒ 14
- Added more information to Drill Laser's tooltip!
- Precognitor
- Health: 200 ⇒ 230
- WindRay
- Health: 275 ⇒ 315
Mercenaries
- Engineer
- Health: 240 ⇒ 275
- Healer
- Health: 160 ⇒ 185
- Auto-Heal
- Healing: 20 ⇒ 18
- Heal Targeting Lockout: 0.5 seconds ⇒ 0.9 seconds
- This lockout represents how frequently a unit can be the recipient of a heal from a Healer.
- Trapper
- Health: 200 ⇒ 230
- Chiller
- Health: 350 ⇒ 400
- Sentinel
- Health: 160 ⇒ 185
- Transport
- Health: 150 ⇒ 175
- Teleporter
- Health: 500 ⇒ 575
- Corrected the cost and research time of the Warp Thrusters upgrade
Comments
Titans are too easily confused with heroes on the minimap with this change.
Unrelated note: I'd really like the casting range indicator back for the lava spitter like the purifier currently has. It allows me both playing with them and against them to make decisions more easily.
Another unrelated note - Shadows get damage taken reduced when channeling, right? It isn't listed on the tooltip.
Weird - this topic isn't showing up recent discussions.
Bug Report: When quoting Millia it only quotes the bottom line of his post. Try it yourself.
Titans are too easily confused with Heroes. Can you just change their color on the minimap to green or something?
Alchemists
Are
Actually
Good
Now
??
Everything i know has been wrong.
I would need some serious convincing of this
I tried mixing in one as grath and it helped a lot.
Maybe it was a fluke.
Did the range on Purifiers change? Last I checked it was 14 not 12.
edit I forgot about the range upgrade so ignore this
General Gameplay
Interface
(1.1) - New reticles are awesome. Big QoL add.
(1.2) - Perhaps just due to the visibility changes, it felt as if the layer setup also changed? From today, I'd guess stacking (masking) goes Titan>Captor>Units? Regardless, based on the two cases where I notice this, when spawning from the mini-map (in late game when I rarely keep track of what is actually going to spawn), or when split up and controlling one set of units from the map while focusing on another, anything that adds to fast readability is welcome.
Art
(1.3) - Not sure when this went in, but at minimum I didn't remember the new captor lasers. These things rock, love the style and the activity, subtle yet talks of a process underway besides just an activity bar.
Units
(2.1) - I'm not sure I'd have noticed the experiment if not being foretold, but I liked how things played. I'd tend to play with the high end units preferentially before, and here it felt more natural rather than being an additional challenge to work them in. Still not necessarily easy, but once you got there, it felt like they were easier to get involved in the fight as opposed to, what, single use items that you have to move around.
(2.2) - I was looking for, but couldn't tell: is a burrowed scarab still available to be healed by a Healer?
Felt like as Rhyme I got crushed by Alder, and as Alder I got crushed by Eris.
My game with Grath featured a lot of dying; seemed to do okay about when batterhorns came out (and/or defense upgrades) even though I misused the charge a lot, and haven't quite figured the best situation for it.
The top-position capture lasers are a little hard to notice - they are about the same color as gems and kind of blend in to the shape.
I've been meaning to say for a while: When there are more than two armies in a fight (and increasing proportionally with more armies) I often need to look at the minimap to figure out if we are winning or not, and where I am relative to allies and enemies - the main screen is a confusing mass of unit models at that point.
I'll second this - especially since there can be two of any given Hero, the difference in color between the units can be pretty hard to find.
Also, the UI - mostly the left side of the UI - feels a little too big. Sometimes it gets in the way when I'm trying to control my army. I'd love to be able to scale it back and make it a bit smaller.