One of the more interesting debates I’ve seen in reviews and blog posts has been on the value of dragons. Some reviews think they’re incredibly cool and powerful, while other people find them to be too expensive to be useful. Canceling slow effects also lower their appeal for some players. I’m curious to know if this is really just a play style question (I personally use them all the time for cleanup close to Azra) or if Dragons really do need to be made less expensive. Thoughts welcome, as we’ll likely push changes in the next update.
Dragons: Suck or Awesome?
I personally never used them throughout regular gameplay. Compared to full powered Berzerkers, Archers, Healers, and even Ice Mages, they were just far too expensive, and if you decided to shell out the massive dough (600 for the final upgrade?!), you would immediately realize, they’re roughly as good as everything else…
However, once I beat the game and started going for Advanced and Extreme stars, I found myself putting the dragons near Azra as last minute defenders, and with stuff like Nom and Fireball they filled this role very well, dealing very decent damage to large amounts of enemies, as well as killing all the enemies that have been weakened up to that point.
So I don’t know. It really is 50/50 on them as far as I am concerned.
Looks like we all agree that their main/only purpose is to serve as a goalkeeper. They aren’t compatible with anything.
Healer’s inspiration promotes the creation of small death strips, were you focus units into one spot. Zerkers being amazing but very limited in range, are not cost effective if they can only hit a few enemies. An ice mage is able to nicely support this spot of doom with freeze and chill, while your armor destroying knight can also add some DPS whenever free. This chemistry between units is amazing, and very effective. Then you can add a supplement of archers to add more damage into this one spot, and nothing goes through.
Everything is working together to control this one spot/strip/path in either a direct role or a support role. The dragon is a standalone package that can’t do anything on its own and is a disaster as a group member.
I also didn’t use dragons much at first, but then found them quite essential on the last/harder levels. They hit pretty hard after a couple upgrades and on some levels you have quite a bit of psi. Their stun and high health is probably their most useful attributes. I used them the most on the last level near the green spawn to slow down those going straight for Azra, and on other levels in places where they take quite a bit of damage but can survive without a healer where other units could not.
I tried them for last-minute cleanup but didn’t find them that effective. Their small melee range means they would only get a couple chomps in with the fast enemies they’re supposed to clean up. If you want them to be effective at it, you have to upgrade them a couple times and by then they’re too expensive for a unit that isn’t really getting used. I prefer to spend the psi on other units, and if anything gets past it’s either a losing battle because your strategy is flawed and more and more will get past. Or if it really is just 1 low health guy, then its cheaper to nuke down with fully upgraded lightning.
In general, I’m okay with the dragons being more standalone units. There are good synergies elsewhere, but the dragon is supposed to be an all-in-wonder type of unit, with high strength and an appropriate cost. It sounds like the problem at this point is primarily cost, or weakness of attack. I’m leaning towards easing off the cost a little, and maybe increasing melee range to berserker size instead of knight size.
Current costs are 100, 175, 250, 400, 600. Next most expensive is Mage at 60, 80, 140, 270, 375. So perhaps we’ll drop to 100, 150, 200, 325, 450. That should even things out a bit, while still maintaining the cost as a “premium” unit.
I found them useful later in the game while trying to 3 star stages.
I used them in one of two ways.
The first was the most common I read about it being used as. The goal-keeper. I would put one or two near azra (depending on how many paths go to her and how it was set-up). My main force would usually be a decent distance away, so the slow effect of the ice mages never got affected.
The second was on stages with three seperate paths. I would use ice mages on two of the paths and one path would have dragons included. I only did this once or twice, but it worked out alright for me on the few stages I needed it.
But overall, it was definitely my most under-utilized unit. The cost was definitely not worth it for the most part.
EDIT: Also, I would force myself to use them sometimes, just because… well… They’re dragons 
I felt them being overpriced when Azra was at a low level, i.e. time of unlocking dragons. However, as the game progressed and Azra was at a much higher level I could use the PSI for a dragon or two, leaving them as you say cleaning up the mess. I find them to be the most damaging tower in the game, with both range and melee and amazing skills. So, of course they will be a little overpriced.
Dragons are awesome, when used in conjunction with rangers. They are expensive, their upgrade costs could be reduced somewhat (cap at 450 or 500) otherwise great unit.
It definitely feels like Dragons are lacking. For double the amount of a Knight, the only real advantage they have over them is a ranged attack. I would take the Knight’s ultimate any day over a Dragon’s ultimate since the splash damage is pretty negligible and Ice Mages (by far my favorite unit) cancel out the fire anyway.
Also, the fact that both are largely single target make them both inferior to berserkers, who are cheaper and have splash.
Maybe have the dragons ranged atk be something that hits radially and quicker? Like upgrade the amount of degrees the atk effects along with damage upgrades. So it might start out as only 45* at XXXdmg and each level will get you 5* +XXXdmg more or something like that ?
I’ve completed almost the entire game on extreme without the use of dragons; literally just obliterating the enemy next to arza with mages/zerkers/healers/rangers. My problem with them is that they just don’t hit enough units. Perhaps if you could rework the claw ability to hit multiple enemies (a claw attack would ‘sweep’, so multi hits seems logical) then a dragon would be more useful. However, with every other unit having such strong multihit/target attacks, they are MUCH more valuable than a dragon.
Also; maybe if Fire Mouth was on a different skill path so that you did NOT have to take it; players could opt out of the fire DoT effects and use the dragon WITH mages. Likewise with firebreath/ball; make them branch off of claw with roar being it’s own branch as well. (Check included picture attachment for example)
I find it interesting that so many people use dragons as goal-keepers, which I never do. My dragons all maxed out their fire DoT, and when I use them (not too often), I always place them near the monster spawners, and I rarely upgrade them at all. If I set them on Strong, they then inflict a potent DoT on nearly every unit that passes them, and that DoT has a long time to tick before the monsters get near the Ice Mages I typically put near Azra. This is pretty effective for only 100 PSI, but it is a little weird that it’s a strategy that doesn’t seem to get any cost-effective benefit from Boost.
Dragons are incredibly powerful which justifies the expense in my opinion. I use them as goalkeepers sometimes, but they’re more useful when their fireballs are put to good use. The damage and DoT is worth 600 psy, without question. The freeze-cancelling aspect of burning is interesting and encourages strategy. For example in Endless 1, I put all my dragons on the left side and all my mages on the right.
So, dragons: Suck or Awesome? Awesome.
Interesting debate.
I love dragons… the key is specialization. I have a couple that specialize in DoT, who work miracles when placed at the entrances. If you really pump your stat points into the DoT skills, it’s pretty incredible what they can do to bosses. They’re not as useful against lower-level creeps, but hey, is every tower supposed to do everything?
I have two that specialize in Nomming to act as goalkeepers. The last two aren’t used much, and are pretty much generalized to be some of the last towers on the map if I get that far in - really, typically only in endless.
Dragons? Love 'em. Dropping their psi boost requirements will MASSIVELY overpower them.
It’s the ice mages that I find totally underpowered.
I would say they aren’t that bad. Just other units are better. I would use them more if they wouldn’t interfere with ice mages. As it is I sometimes put them next to Azra just in case something slips past my defences but that almost never happens. They would be mediocre without “nom” and If I’m correct it works without upgrading them so I do it only if I have nothing else to do with PSI. I could certainly see myself using them in the endless mode provided I can put them so their range doesn’t interlope with my ice mages.
In the middle of the game dragons aren’t worth it because you just cannot afford them. End game though they are super powerful…
I like the idea of moving the skill that gives their basic attack a flame to a different skill path, that way you can have level 2 dragons mixed in with other units, but if you really want to use their other skills, that deal massive damage, you have to poisition them smarter, or risk cancelling your slow.
They also have the most hp out of anything…which is very useful when getting hit for 500 an attack by ranged units in the endless mode.
I would not change the price at all
The main problem I have with dragons is the fact that being a partially ranged, partially melee unit is anti-synergetic with good tower placement in general, not just good placement in a killzone with zeal+slows. The number of truly excellent melee spots on a lot of maps is limited, especially since you’re usually going to want them near a spot an ice mage can cover two paths/a lot of one path and with two spots for a berserker and knight. So with all the good melee spots delegated to good melee units, dragons have to be placed in spots that are more marginal for melee attacking, which means they need to be upgraded a bit to get their range, which isn’t great. Combine with the fact that roar is a skill that’s very synergetic with killzones, but that you have to have bites and ranged attacks that stop the rest of the CC in your killzone, and you’ve got a unit that just lacks focus and lacks good placement options, even if it’s got really solid DPS.
Plus, I’m pretty sure that almost any damaging unit with one or two upgrades more than a dragon (which is what you can currently get) will actually outdamage the dragon, so those high base numbers aren’t great.
Strong endorsement of milski’s first paragraph.
I don’t want to bias anyone’s unfiltered opinions with my own thoughts as a dev, since I spend more time coding then playing through the game, but I thought I’d weigh in here:
I agree that dragons are generally under-powered. (caveat: most of my reasoning is based off theoretical design stuff)
One fix I generally favor is to move fire breath to boost 2 out of sheer principle. For any dual-purpose class, such as healers, it makes sense to get the secondary ability going at boost 2, as even large-party, passive-trait heavy strategies will generally at least boost a few characters to 2 early on. Healers used to have ether flash at boost 3 and group heal at boost 2, and this made them a lot less useful. If this were to unbalance things in any way, I would still support the decision and offset it with number tweaks because it makes them qualitatively more interesting.
In terms of opportunity cost, I think dragons will be balanced when it becomes equally valuable to place a dragon and boost it rather than summon and boost whatever other combination of units you could summon for that same price. Right now, Dragons fall a bit short of their intended all-in-wonder status because it takes so long to unlock their ranged attack, and the cost is prohibitive for what’s on offer. This becomes less of a big deal in late game where you have gobs of PSI, but it’s still a problem.
My natural inclination - swap fire breath to boost 2, lower cost by a bit (perhaps keep base cost the same, lower the ramp-up, as Anthony suggested). I’d have to test this to see how it works in practice, but that’s my hypothesis.
In addition to using dragons as sweepers, I also used them as “outposts” towards the edge of the map as they don’t require healer coverage and it gave them room for their burn effect to work. That said, I think the only time I used more than one was in the endless mode when I had already deployed and maxed out everyone else.
Summoning dragons doesn’t provide synergy to other units. Knights break armor, healers restore, buff, and are necessary for fighting dark enemies, ice mages apply slow, archers deal with fast, grouped enemies, and berserkers, while often outclassed by archers are still a cheap source of DPS. Dragons seem to be a jack of all trades and a master of none (milski’s post covers this perfectly), and their cost seems fairly high given that the meta (based on my experience) revolves around establishing blocks of units to maximize synergy. Lowering the cost to something more in line with the other units would probably balance them, and it might be interesting to see the skill tree reflect a focus on operating alone, such as giving them the archer’s armor pierce skill or switching their +HP to lifesteal.