Post by Skeppartorsk in Bannerlings comments

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Better AI for the Cleric is pretty high up on my list. I feel like it just blows through its mana pool instantly without it really doing much good. Maybe changing it so that instead of capping the number of emblems on T1 units, making it so T1s can only use common emblems. Currently the time/money investment into making something like a cleric actually do *something* is simply too much, and honestly all a Cleric really wants is just a spam of commons to get enough mana regen to actually sustain.

The above would also make going "wide" instead of "tall" a lot more viable.

The power difference between a lot of the "higher end" units doesn't seem worth the loss of tempo of how rare they are in the shop. Say I wanted to not use my Footman and instead tank a Knight. Between the extra 50% unit cost and how long it would take to actually get 4 in the shop. The tempo loss compared to just having a T2 Footman doesn't seem worth the trade-off at all.

For Swordmen I feel like the issue is that due to them having both cleave and crit based emblems added, their pool is simply so full of utility and lategame emblems. That it's relatively unlikely to actually get the consistent single target DPS upgrades you need for those to matter. Also, how come the Swordmen come with cleave, but can also get cleave as an emblem? That just seems odd. Would love if the cleave tooltip actually stated how much cleave damage it did.

For the mages, same issue, really. It would take too long to get 4 mages and cost too much, and overall you don't *really* care about cleaving. you care about killing their strong big targets ASAP, since by the time you actually care about cleaving. You've already won. So even if you get a mage to be strong, it would pretty much just be "win more" at that point. And baseline, the single target DPS of the mage is too low to stall out until it becomes strong. Whereas Strongbowmen start out with acceptable single target DPS and due to their pierce end up doing a tonne of AOE end game anyways.

Archer is fine if you high roll. But Light is just such a bad damage type, since almost all the things you'll lose to are resistant to it.

Oh, and how come attack damage emblems are multiplicative, but attack speed emblems are additive? Makes taking more than one +ASPD feel awful, unless you're setting up knockback archers for the memes.

Probably all the spells could stand being cheaper, having to build for so much mana regen to actually get them going off often enough means you don't have those emblem slots to actually scale damage. Whereas with stuff like multi shot and attack speed you get both real/faux single target DPS and AOE at the same time.

Armor, in general, is just insanely strong, which then translates into armor shred being insanely strong. This leads to some level of "illusion of choice" where if you're offered armor shred or true damage. it doesn't matter what the other options are, you simply have to take them.

Having played a few more runs, some "bad luck protection" would be nice. Just had a run where I got offered Rare emblems 2-3x before you earn enough to afford them/have a T1 to put it on. Then purposefully held 250 gold to be able to buy any Rare emblem offered, but wasn't offered a single Rare emblem until Wave 19 (which ended up being a +50% damage, but too little too late). Not like anything you can do choice wise matters at that point. It's just a scheduled loss, basically. Boss lived with like 5% hp.

Frostwind13 days ago(+1)

I just updated, and there are some changes that i made based on your suggestions :) Feel free to try it and let me know your thoughts

Skeppartorsk12 days ago (5 edits)

Armor nerf was too much (or rather it was fine, but damage probably needs to come down a bit). Final boss just mows down even full tank Footmen now. Orclings are also very, very strong. Considering how many of them spawn, and how much damage they deal. It's a bit much that they also have that much HP. Feels like it swung the balance too much in the opposite direction. From AoE being useless, to being nearly mandatory. The armor nerf also means that Werewolves are absolutely insane, if your units actually focus fired them, it'd be fine. But they purposefully spread their damage between them perfectly to make them all have infinite attack speed. Last patch it was fine, because you could just out-tank it. But now it's nearly un-tankable. At least with footmen, could just be that footmen are bad now. Need to test a Knight tank run and see if it's the same there. Could also just be that holy trinity (footman+cleric+random dps) is dead and you have to go 2x dps 1x tank now and just out-race the untankable damage. But that would be pretty boring.

Okay, so if you don't just go straight T2 footman + T2 cleric rush. The lack of armor means early/mid game is now also pretty much entirely unbalanced. Because that early, basically none of the enemy power comes from armor, and a lot of your power comes from armor. So you just kind of lose even against "normal" encounters. You just get stat checked.

T2 Footmen full tank with 2x T2 Cleric with near perfect mutations and a T1 Cleric and a T0 Cleric still has the footmen insta die against the boss. Yeah, enemy damage needs to come down so that the post armor damage is the same as last patch, by having lower enemy damage. That way the overpowered nature of armor pen gets taken down a notch, while still having the same base tankiness targets as before. Currently you just cannot tank with T2 Footmen, but if you try and make Knights your tank and don't hit T1 Knight super early, you just auto-lose to being stat checked early/mid due to how weak your armor based units are against the non-armor based enemy units (skeletons are so bad, since block RNG means you can lose at pure random to them, even if you're stronger on paper).

Okay, so the literal strongest possible god comp does still work, if barely. T2 Footman+T2 Cleric+T2 Strongbowman. With +5 Armor 65% Evasion Footman, 2x 20% spell power 3x mana regen 1x +1 Unit Cleric and an admittedly pretty mid Strongbowman, but with the rare +15% pierce. Let the orc adds die fast enough that only one Footman got one-shot before we stabilized and won on the final boss. But that comp is pretty much a war crime. So the fact it was *required* to get a win and I had really good mutation RNG on top of that, is probably a pretty good sign that this patch isn't really balanced. I'm guessing that perma stun Fire mage would still very much get the job done too. But haven't tested that yet.

Didn't get full permastun Fire Mage but even 2s stun was enough to get the job done with only the initial burst one-tapping another 65% evasion T2 Footman.

Also what i assume is a bug, not sure if this applies to the Clerics as well. But the Fire Mage's Fireball isn't actually fully decoupled from attacks. As in if it has enough mana to cast it. It will not cast it until its next auto attack happens. If this is true for Clerics heal as well (harder to tell). That might be part of the tank issues and dying to burst issues. If they are meant to heal every 0.3s but are capped to only do it once per attack cycle.

Frostwind12 days ago

The idea is that you shouldn’t be able to beat every match up, unless you really high roll. Thats what the rerolls are for, so if you have alot of single damage you reroll when see orclings for example. With the armor/attack types change more units have different roles and matchups. Werewolfs are light armor so you might want to avoid them unless you have the set up to kill them for example. But I was a bit unsure about having archer be light damage or medium damage. We also have taunt now on the armored orcs so that might be also a thing to consider if you go up against armored orcs and werewolfs, as that could be quite dangerous. But yeah probably things still need to get tuned, but I dont feel like any unit is useless currently, i won with berserker and swordsman as carry for example.

Skeppartorsk11 days ago

I actually kinda like that the orcs have taunt. That way your units get forced to kill them first, so by the time the werewolves are low hp. You don't have to deal with armored orc damage on top of it. But honestly, the werewolves only felt really, really bad when I used Archers. It's just that with targeting being what it is, the difference between a wave where your units all target one werewolf (free win) and one where they go "let's be useless!" and perfectly spread their damage on, say all 3, is basically needing 3x the tank to live that. Which is a very big swing to have from RNG.

I'm not ever really sure how the targeting logic of the units work. It seems to be just attack closest, but then sometimes they stick to a target until it's dead. Regardless of proximity. I kind of wish it was just "pick closest -> stick to target until dead, unless taunted". It would feel a lot less prone to just getting got by RNGsus (and reward positioning more). But idk, maybe it would make it too deterministic? That just feels like what a unit would *actually* do. Back when I played TFT somewhat seriously, winning by correct placement was just a very rewarding aspect of the game. I feel like that's somewhat missing here. Could just be skill issue that I haven't fully figured out how to utilize it yet though.

It would also be cool if units with armor shred would prefer targeting armored units and clerics with holy water would prefer high damage units. Maybe they do? But doesn't seem like it.

Frostwind11 days ago

The lifesteal was actually the factor making the werewolf very strong as it healed based on the damage roll and not the actual damage (after armor etc), it also healed off from overkill, which made it so strong, I changed it so its based on the actual damage it deals that for the next update. But might be a bit too weak now, but ill leave it as is for now.

In regards to targeting. Its currently: pick nearest target and stick to it until dead or invalid.

But I was considering adding targeting that's weighted towards attacking the Armor type you are strongest against, but I haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.

I also had the idea of like for example making the orc rider try to kill ranged units/backline so you have to kill it fast or have taunt.

Skeppartorsk11 days ago

That explains why it feels like they heal so damn much even when you're super tanky. Did they also heal on evaded attacks? Because I swear it felt like they did against my 75% evasion footmen. Or they just attacked so fast, they still got heals out that often. It's kinda hard to tell what is going on in the mosh pit.

What might make a target invalid? Because it's very common for swordmen to *not* have aggro, none of my tanks have died. Yet all of a sudden a rogue werewolf is just eating the Swordman's face. Same with archers, they swap to swordmen quite frequently.

Also the "floating blob" effect. Where sometimes the "mosh pit" of melee units fighting each other will just start drifting in a random direction slowly. Is this intended, or some weird physics interaction? Sometimes it causes my AoE units to drift into enemy archers (on those 20+ archer waves) and sometimes it causes enemy werebears to casually stroll into my backline and murder it, leading to an instant loss. It overall feels very random.

I think overall attack nearest, possibly with exceptions for units based on mutations/enemy variations is probably a good targeting. There being some way to bypass frontline to hit backline would probably require there be some reasonable counter. Not just taunt, cause taunt kind of either forces you to go knights (and imo knights are just worse footmen due to tempo loss). Or you *need* to roll a rare. Feels like it would lead to a lot of "scheduled losses" if you don't roll into specific things. And if you add it to the enemy, you really should add it for the player as well. Might give archers a niche if they are allowed to attack back to front. But overall I think being able to "cheat" the frontline like that in auto battlers usually just leads to it being mandatory you do so. Or backline units would need to get a lot tankier.

Frostwind12 days ago

About the footman cleric combo, do you really think that should be a viable strategy, as I see those two units as supports units, one being damage soaker and one being healer, im unsure about that being a winning strategy for the game.

Skeppartorsk11 days ago

The T2 Footman + Cleric spam run wasn't meant to "win" it was meant to see if it was possible to tank the final boss at all with absolute max tankiness+sustain. It was more a balance check than anything, and if max tank + max sustain doesn't have any chance at tanking something. Then its damage is probably overtuned. That was the mindset behind that test.

But yeah currently if I wanted to win every run, I'd just rush T2 footmen, T2 Cleric and then either Strongbowman or Fire mage as the 3rd. Swordmen can be solid, but the RNG of then randomly being cleaved/target swapped to doesn't make up for their upside (what is their upside over mage, actually?). Berserker is too RNG for me. It just feels so bad unless it spins, and if you get one early and it just decides to not spin at all 3 waves in a row. You just lose, and there is nothing you can do about it. No choice was "wrong" it was just RNG. So that's not an enjoyable gameplay experience to me personally. Same can somewhat be said for Strongbowmen's pierce, but since there's two of them. You get more normalized outcomes.

Archer feels like they are in a weird spot. I was super excited about the damage swap, thinking it would be great. But so far they have just felt bad. There being 3 of them should be an upside, but most the time it just means they will split their damage in ways that are entirely unhelpful.

My issues with the orclings was mostly just a skill issue not being used to the new patch. Having played against them some more, they are not really a threat, unless you get the 40 orcling wave where they aren't actually showed in the UI, unless you scroll and just hit "resolve fight" on muscle memory. Which was what happened the first time I got wrecked by them. So that was probably more of a slight UI issue leading to a misinformed decision, than an actual balance issue. Paired with me playing too fast.

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