Playtest 228: Gem Region Experiment, Creep Rewards Reworked, Balance Update
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Playtest 228: Gem Region Experiment, Creep Rewards Reworked, Balance Update
General Gameplay
Gem Regions
Context: We want to try tightening up the interactions a bit around Gem Regions, and try to make the act of summoning a Titan more contentious and active. We also want to ensure that a player's attention is on the act of summoning their Titan while that's what they're actively working on. To do this, we're keeping Gems closer to the spawners, and increasing the frequency and collection rate of spawned Gems. What this means, essentially, is that while you're collecting Gems, your Hero will be a bit more "tied down" to the region.
- Gems Needed to Summon Titan: 10 ⇒ 20
- Gem value: 20 Shards ⇒ 10 Shards
- Gem lifetime: 30 seconds ⇒ 5 seconds
- Gem Collection Time: 30 seconds ⇒ 5 seconds
- Gem Spawn Radius: 16 ⇒ 6
- Gem Spawn Interval: 10 seconds ⇒ 5 seconds
- Gem Collector health: 140 ⇒ 70
Creeps
Context: While having physical objects on the ground allowed time for your teammates to share in the rewards for defeating a Camp, having those physical objects was actually not doing a whole lot for the act of defeating a creep. Similarly, because there was a disconnect between when you defeated the creeps and when you got the rewards, it wasn't uncommon to not actually know where your money was coming from. Having the rewards come straight from defeating the creeps should make it considerably easier to figure out where the money is coming from!
- No longer drop Gems and Energy Orbs
- Now splits its rewards among every player that participated in defeating them (i.e. dealt damage to them)
- Energy rewards reduced by 33%
- Considerably increased EXP reward for defeating creeps
- This is to compensate for the EXP reward previously gained by collecting their Gems.
Units
- Disabling effects that prevent abilities from being cast should now interrupt active channeling when applied.
- For example, if a Frostcaller casts Frostfall, and a Terrapin Trooper stuns it with Rocket Rush, Frostfall and its channel will be canceled.
- Note: There is a known bug that causes the Deadeye's Take Aim telegraph to not disappear when Take Aim is interrupted.
- Default decks have been adjusted.
- Each Hero's default deck has its two "associated" units with it (those familiar with Squads will be familiar with these unit associations)
- Each default deck now also contains the Healer and the Sentinel
Blue
- Quadrapus
- Intervention's tooltip has been updated to match the recent balance adjustment.
- Shadow
- Nether Zone now clarifies that the caster has bonus resists while channeling.
- Aquadillo
- Movement speed: 4.3 ⇒ 3.6
- Attack recovery time: 0.0 seconds ⇒ 0.4 seconds
White
- Wisp
- Damage: 7 ⇒ 9
- Conduit
- Drill Laser
- Range: 24 ⇒ 20
- Drill Laser
Bots
- Improved bot pathing
- Bots no longer start the game by warping in near the main base
Comments
Can the creeps give rewards to both teams or just the team that dealt final blow?
Nerf on Conduit? is that really necessary....
Aquadillos didn't seem terribly effective by themselves, might work better with other units or teamwork. They had some staying power, so maybe if we weren't losing and outnumbered they would have held up better.
I didn't find Celesta with default units and auto-build to work very well. I didn't have enough wisps or purifiers for critical mass, and too many healers or precongnitors.
I was never able to contest a gem region, so I can't say much about that.
I didn't notice the immediate collection, but I'm so accustomed to numbers going up at random times I've kind of trained myself not to look at them. I've definitely felt uncertain where resources were coming from.
Squad Changes
(1.1) - Only got one game in today, on Hydros. 'Dillo movement speed reduction wasn't too noticeable, though overall output of the comp did feel reduced. In general, basic loadout, except Shadows in for Sentinels, for some reason even jungling felt more difficult.
(1.2) - In general, from a stylistic sense, one thing that always seemed kind of off to me with Hydros and his traditional units is that, on heavy defense against either Siege Cubes or now Titans, what is normally a very defensive, stalling style of unit feels at a disadvantage against the one thing it should work really well at. The combination of melee damage, titan unit walking yet units not able to (functionally or otherwsie) stack under the opposing titan (to increase surface area), and titan immunity to slow, means you can get one or two scuttleguard attacks in occasionally on a moving titan. You pretty much just chase it until it stops (and then do what feels like little damage to it).
Gems
(2.1) - Gemming felt more active on this build. It felt like you had to pay much closer attention to your captor, both to keep track of what you were doing, but also to try to keep the opponent from dinging. Even at 20, it still felt like Titans appeared very quickly.
Exp
(3.1) - I didn't get much time to try to adapt to how one needs to efficiently spread creep rewards around. Therefore, I definitely missed the ability to decouple taking a camp and getting the reward (as in, before you could take a camp ahead of when an ally would be passing through, which was a nice bit of game timeline management). However, I did like the immediate feedback of getting the reward when defeating the camp. It made economy management more consistent.
Creep Collection
Immediate rewards for clearing camps felt good to me. I expect that it will eventually have some stronger visual effects to indicate that you are gaining resources (i.e. creeps explode in a shower of green eggs and ham).
Eris' Dis-Array
I always feel like I'm missing damage when I play Eris because I can't be bothered to constantly fire off her ability. I think the short, variable cooldown is asking too much for an RTS (consider that it is basically analogous to HotS Medivh's Arcane Rift). Perhaps there are other players that really like this aspect of Eris' kit?
Beetle Warrior Controls
Something I forgot to mention last week; Having the spawned beetles added to my current control group made the ability more troublesome to use. I think that you want the beetles to run ahead of your army or cover your retreat, so I found myself pressing W for the swarm and then immediately pressing my control group button to reselect just my army. For me, the most intuitive solution would be to make the ability targeted, so that by holding W and clicking so that the beetles spawned with an attack-move order already in place.
Undocumented change in this patch:
Could have been unintentional but not sure.
Medium camp total shards given 120 - > 80.
Easy/Hard Unchanged
Also experience EXACT new numbers.
Easy camp exp = 400 (Same as before)
Medium camp exp = 2000 (I think that this is an increase by far) (1600 on Mantis Flower and 200 on each caterpillar)
Hard camp exp = 2000 (The fliers give 800 and pitcher plant gives 400. Seems like it should be other way around or something)