Dragons: Suck or Awesome?

#21

I thought I’d add my two cents - untainted (haven’t read the rest).

I never really used dragons throughout the game. It wasn’t that they were too expensive but more that I was worried about the lack of synergy between them and ice mages. A lot of levels have their best choke points right next to Azra, and between ice mages and dragons I’d rather have the slow than the (relatively low per cost) damage.

A lot of levels, too, it made no sense to spread out my units (mostly due to wanting to overlap healers). I couldn’t sacrifice both a healer and a dragon just to get a few early whacks in.

On the endless bonus, I tried using dragons as last minute defenders (I put most of my units near the top, and the dragons next to Azra). It was completely ineffective then as well. For most of the endless bonus the units at the top handled everything just fine. It only started falling apart when my units would die in one or two hits due to attacking mobs, at which point those mobs also breezed by the dragons.

#22

An idea I just had:

Since dragons have such high health and are the only unit with natural armor (their defense stat grows as they level, unlike all other units), I thought an interesting synergistic role for them could be as “super tanks.” Knights have a counter ability that not only causes them to counter-attack, but also draws fire from enemies, so any knight with an active counter-attack skill is the preferred enemy target.

We could do a similar thing with a passive skill for dragons that makes them more likely to be attacked, so you could use them to protect other units.

Another random thought, though this might take things into insane OP land: contagious fire passive skill. If an enemy has “contagious fire,” whenever it comes into contact with an enemy that is NOT on fire, that enemy will be set on fire with a copy of the original fire effect, at a lower intensity. This could lead to some interesting strategies and could make the choice between fire/ice more interesting. Upping the skill could increase either the % of effect intensity that is transmitted, or perhaps the fire contagiousness is on a die roll, and it increases the chance per second of contact or something.

#23

The maps are sort of small, so that it isn’t always possible to use both fire and ice. It would be nice to burn them, put them through an ice-and-swords gauntlet, and then nom the stragglers, but there just isn’t space.

Maybe enemies who were unslowable and/or extra flammable would help. If there were a mix of resistance types making fire more valuable, it might be used more. But eventually it could get too complicated and un-fun.

#24

I never used them through the whole campaign (I have all gold stars). The only time I ever played a dragon down was because ALL of my other units were at MAX and I was reaching full Psi again. They are great but are so expensive that they are unnecessary. Roar is amazing though, so if you do decide to throw down a dragon at least get him/her to level 3 where they can stun stuff.

#25

For me, the dragon was a slightly weaker version of the knight. Heavy damage, a lot of useless skills. Bad synergy with other units. Not something I’d buy unless I had nothing else I wanted. Their high health was rather weaksauce given that most enemies don’t do much damage, their range isn’t hugely useful since it’s fairly rare.

It’s definitely a wonder unit. Overexpensive and not nearly as useful as conventional units, like most wonder weapons. Every other unit has a use.

#26

You can’t use Mages and Dragons in the same killzone, so I almost never use them. Mages(who also freeze and slow) and Zerkers can do crazy amounts of damage alone, add in Knight knockback, bleed from Rangers, and Zeal from healers and I’d lose damage if I used Dragons.

So they get to hang out by me, fireballing that random enemy that gets by twice a map.

#27

Dragons are quite useful throughout the game in my opinion (or at least one is) for the natural high defense they have and high max hp. That being said…I think fire mouth should be replaced completely with a melee ability of some sort, and fire breath should be optional (off shoot from claw is required to get roar. Could make it so fire breath is required for fire ball, and claw is required for roar.

A dragons base attack does more then an equal level knights (both with attack bonus skills maxed and the knight with a +40 sword). The main difference is the knight has some nice other abilities (gets rid of all armor, knock back…and a lesser version of stun (only 1 enemy).

The dragon has roar…which is the best stun in the game…higher max hp, and better armor/natural damage, but it also costs WAY more. Even if you fix the whole forcing you to add fire thing (so it doesn’t disrupt slow/freeze) the dragon still does not compete well vs a knight for a spot in a lineup…and won’t make much sense adding till you have maxed all your knights first.

I would NOT reduce the cost of dragons, but instead increase their usefulness. Make all fire based attacks optional to start, but then add something dragons can do that nobody else can. The stun from roar is already a big step in the right direction. Making that useful near ice mages would already make dragons pretty good to have and much more worth it to spend so much on.

Perhaps replace fire mouth with chance to knock back (or throw back) an enemy when you bite it. Small chance at first (say starts at 5%), but increases by 1% per point invested and increases the knock back distance by .1 tile (starting at .5) per point as well.

That would make dragons about as good at melee as knights (without the ability to remove armor though), but add the ability to have them breathe fire if you want, have higher max hp etc.

#28

dragons do suck if you use them as a cleanup unit next to Azra. But, when placed at a spawn point, with target set to “strong”, they can wreck whole groups. They will only hit each target once, spreading the maximum amount of burn.
An unboosted dragon can do almost 2k dmg/sec. Level (boost) 3 dragon does 4.5k/sec. Level 5 does about 8k/sec.

To give some hard numbers:
Fire mouth scales with bite. A level 40 dragon with 9 bite, fire mouth, and strength does 1500 dmg per bite (counting the 1k burn) at unboosted. Just place your kill zone a little further back, so the enemies can burn for a few secs before hitting the ice mages. 1500 dmg on 0.8 sec cd for 100 psi that seems to burn through dark monsters and armored ones.
A dragon boosted to 3, does 2400 per bite, 3600 per fire breath on 0.7 sec and 4.5 sec cd’s
A maxed dragon has a large 4 sec aoe stun on a 9.6 sec cd, has a 5600 dmg fire breath on 3.8 sec cd, and does 3755 dmg with bite on 0.6 sec cd. ~plus fireball.

I always use a couple dragon at each entrance, and sometimes I use all 6 from the start. I usually leave them at level 1 though, and almost never take them beyond 3 (for fire breath). If claw and fire breath were swapped, I’d never take them past 2. The stun is nice, but unnecessary since I can’t place them in my killzones anyways. A Level 3 dragon can often take down half of a wave or more solo on the end levels in extreme.

#29

Using dragons for CC instead of ice mages is shooting yourself in the foot. Even at level 30, you can barely place one dragon with Roar at the beginning of the level. And then the dragon can’t hold a lane with the 100-200 psi you have left over for others, so you start over, building everything except dragon, and then you win.

If the game went into higher levels and/or dragons cost less, you might be in situations where experimenting with dragons for CC and damage would leave you with enough psi for the knights, berserkers, and archers you tend to need. Healers too, I guess, if they have Dark.

#30

— Begin quote from "larsiusprime"

An idea I just had:

Since dragons have such high health and are the only unit with natural armor (their defense stat grows as they level, unlike all other units), I thought an interesting synergistic role for them could be as “super tanks.” Knights have a counter ability that not only causes them to counter-attack, but also draws fire from enemies, so any knight with an active counter-attack skill is the preferred enemy target.

We could do a similar thing with a passive skill for dragons that makes them more likely to be attacked, so you could use them to protect other units.

Another random thought, though this might take things into insane OP land: contagious fire passive skill. If an enemy has “contagious fire,” whenever it comes into contact with an enemy that is NOT on fire, that enemy will be set on fire with a copy of the original fire effect, at a lower intensity. This could lead to some interesting strategies and could make the choice between fire/ice more interesting. Upping the skill could increase either the % of effect intensity that is transmitted, or perhaps the fire contagiousness is on a die roll, and it increases the chance per second of contact or something.

— End quote

Or you could give Roar a % chance of inducing fear (knockback) based on skill. I think a contagious fire skill could lead to a lot of problems, but adding a DoT effect to the passive lure skill you mentioned would be interesting. Call it immolate, makes a dragon the prime target and causes attackers to catch fire for X dmg/sec for Y seconds, increasing with skill.

#31

I really don’t like where this thread is heading. At the moment it’s my tactic for the level without rangers to place two dragons at the starting point and instantly fully upgrade them. This actually feels more then wrong. We are talking about a dragon. They are huge, evil and completely devastating. To achieve this it would be much better to double or triple the cost.

On the other hand I agree, that he really needs a boost in damage. The dragon should be the unit with the highest DPS against a single target. And with increased cost he definitely would need a long-range attack at level 2.

I’m also worried about the fact, that the knight and the dragon have a very similar nice. So I’m not sure if a counterattack is such a great idea. At the moment he fits well in his place, but just don’t have enough BOOM and GROWL.

#32

I’ve actually started using Dragons here and there in my latest play-through (using version 0.9.01), and have come to a couple of conclusions:

  1. Boost costs are much, much better than they used to be. Getting a Dragon out and Boosted to 2 (for double Melee attacks) no longer feels like you’re doing that at the expense of half your normal unit load-out.

  2. Overall strength is up, and with enough points in the Strength passive skill, you can get their Attack Power up high enough that they can even deal moderate damage to heavily armored units. That’s “over the top” of their armor, not what they deal after it’s been hacked off by a Knight. As far as I can tell, this is something that no other class can really do - they might pierce through it a bit, but they can’t get their attack power so high it deals damage despite high armor values being present.

  3. I missed the memo that told me that NOM is ridiculous. Stick a Boost 2 Dragon at the end of a lane, and watch them eat every single Snail or Dark Revenant that’s flying past your last Berserker with a sliver of health. NOM has allowed me to get Perfect scores on the hardest Extreme maps a full 4 to 5 levels earlier than I could manage it on my initial play-through.

  4. Sticking Dragons “in the rear” so that they and the Ice Mages aren’t canceling each other’s debuffs out is awkward and totally kills the feel of “I AM A GIANT UBER DRAGON WITH AN HP POOL THE SIZE OF TEXAS. CLEARLY, I SHOULD BE IN THE FRONT LINES EATING THINGS, MORTAL!”

  5. Related, I still find their “Boost Tree” of Melee- Melee- Ranged - Debuff - Ranged to be awkward and overly un-synergistic. So, you just spend the several hundred Psi points needed to get your Dragon up to Boost 5, watching them raining down fire and brimstone and death from above… oh wait, except that your Ice Mage is putting out all the fires and making you regret your decision to put your Dragon anywhere near your Killzone.

Other ramblings:

Regarding numbers 4 and 5 above, I can’t imagine being able to set up Killzones on Extreme maps without the stacking slows you get from an Ice Mage - a high-Boost Dragon might be able to deal considerable damage, but each high-Boost Ice Mage acts like an Inspire-centric Healer, in that they buff every unit in range of the Mage. Any mob that is slowed or frozen is taking more damage from all sources because they stay in range of each attacker for - potentially - much longer.

Having up to several units all being indirectly buffed by each Ice Mage is going to trump the high damage of each Dragon every time, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? Is there some sort of build that successfully uses Dragons with Roar instead of Mages with Sleet and Ice Splash? Do you memorize every map and make Dragon-instead-of-Ice-Mage Killzones only in lanes you know will never send Speedy mobs at you?

#33

as for the ice/fire clash, well, I never used ice mages a lot anyways :slight_smile: . You’ll never have enough PSI for that on most maps anyway - so it’s about choices. Just as you can either counter armored enemies with knights to break the armor or with archers to pierce it and poison them or dragons to simply bruteforce it…

#34

— Begin quote from "coyot"

I mean, the game is not designed with the goal of “place some units of all types on the map and enjoy the harmony and synergy” :slight_smile:

— End quote

Actually, this is what I do on any given map, believe it or not. I start off with 4-5 classes present in various lanes, usually Boosted to 3 at the maximum (depending on Azra’s Level/how deep into the game I am). I guess my playstyle preference is to funnel the mobs into a Killzone placed just after an Ice Mage, so the slowed enemies are being AoE iced, hacked up by 'serkers, slashed by Knights, and shot full of holes by Rangers all at once.

By biggest problem is always the Speed-type mobs that run through the pack of slowed monsters from the previous wave. When my Ice Mages can’t keep them all slowed, I run into trouble.

So…what do you do? Focus on a smaller number of units at higher Boost Levels? Put a focus on Rangers and Dragons instead of Berserkers and Ice Mages? I’m curious.

#35

I went for something like 4 zerks, 4 rangers, 2 and later 4 knights.Typically, place two rangers (with good bows), boost them to level 3, then place knights up front (if needed for armor breaking) and zerks all over the place as needed. Good choice of targetting would make the difference on tough maps.
In most cases, for me “killzone” was defined more as “units in range of one healer” :slight_smile: . Rangers with maxxed bleed would target strong, provide the debuffing. Zerks placed just a few steps behind ranger’s range and typically boosted to 2 or 3 would maximize the usage of the bleed. Rangers with critical maxxed would be the third line of damage, targetting first, making sure that nothing gets through.
Especially in multi-lane maps, I didn’t think I could afford the PSI for upgraded ice mages to cover all zones - I would instead upgrade all rangers intially to level 3 (with rapid shot being a very effective damage dealer even without extra skill points).

But my comment of course didn’t want to imply that people should not TRY to reach synergy - I just meant that the game isn’t attempting to be “focused” on it. Meaning that if some units don’t go well together, that’s life, we’ll use them separately. If somebody goes Dragon-heavy, they’ll quite likely pass on ice mages and vice versa.

And anyway, with the exception of extremely tough creeps, killzones are not really necessary - it’s about the total DPS from the party, about good targeting choices - and about placement that prevents concentration of multiple waves of different speeds so that your total DPS will then turn inadequate. A typical problem of killzone-oriented approach - if you make one killzone where the paths join, even with optimized placement of creeps, you might easily get overwhelmed because a fast wave arrives there at the same time as another, slower wave. I’ve turned disasters to perfect victories many times just by placing the same units (with the same boost levels) in less concentrated manner. (A few berzerkers boosted to 2 and set to strong can do wonders in softening the whole wave for archers. If you forget to set them to strong, it might turn up completely different)

#36

Thinking about it, I can see no reason in game balance to make dragons not work with ice mages. There’s no real strategy it aids or punishes except to not use dragon. In reality it’s utterly absurd. As anyone who has reheated a leg of lamb after freezing repeatedly, it’s clear it does horrific damage to the meat.

#37

— Begin quote from "Nepene"

Thinking about it, I can see no reason in game balance to make dragons not work with ice mages. There’s no real strategy it aids or punishes except to not use dragon.

— End quote

Yeah, that sums up my feelings on the matter almost perfectly.

Right now, with they way they “fight” with Ice Mages, that just says to me, “Dragons are for NOM only, so save up your points and get that to 9 as soon as it becomes available, leave your Dragons by Azra, and never Boost them past 2 unless you’re swimming in Psi at some point.”

#38

Really, what this tells me is that ice mages are over-powered. People keep talking about poor synergy with the dragons, but what they really mean is that dragons don’t work with ice mages. Dragons play very nicely with everyone else, and can combine with armor breaks, bleeds, poison, knock-back, etc. to great effect. But with everyone so focused on ice mages it appears that I’ve simply made that class so powerful that the dominant strategy is just to bunch everyone around an ice mage rather than have a few synergistic parties around the map, which is unfortunate.

I hesitate to mess with the ice mages too much at this point - they are indeed pretty crucial, and if I nerf the freeze/slow substantially it’s gonna throw a lot of balance way off. We could just go with a “you can be frozen and on fire at the same time” thing, though that just is bizarre logically.

I think we’ll probably just press forward as-is. Dragons and ice mages are somewhat at odds in the story, and the abilities are exclusive in a real world, so it makes sense to keep the current mechanics and just have players figure out the best way to use everyone. Some will just stop using dragons, but plenty of people do use the dragons - the fact that there isn’t a perfect dominant strategy is good with me. :slight_smile:

#39

— Begin quote from "Anthony"

But with everyone so focused on ice mages it appears that I’ve simply made that class so powerful that the dominant strategy is just to bunch everyone around an ice mage rather than have a few synergistic parties around the map, which is unfortunate.

I hesitate to mess with the ice mages too much at this point - they are indeed pretty crucial, and if I nerf the freeze/slow substantially it’s gonna throw a lot of balance way off.

— End quote

This has been an issue with Tower Defense since it’s inception. I remember playing the hard mode of a WarCraft III Tower D map that I was helping to “beta test”, and the only way to win was to stack Poison turrets (slow one), Magic Turrets (slow two), and Ice Turrets (slow three), and then stack up the explosive/AoE turrets around that.

Anyway, the whole point is, once you introduce any way to slow things down, it creates a sort of “reverse buff” in that all slowed units take more damage, because they are in range of all the towers in that lane for a larger period of time. This effect also stacks as you add more Ice Mages and/or slowing effects. This multiplication of effectiveness - of everything - is what creates the imbalance.

Once it’s in, I’m not sure what you can do to “fix” it, aside from something silly (and number-tweak-test-extensive) like upping the damage of all their abilities by varying amounts while simultaneously decreases the duration and speed of all Slow and Freeze effects. And that’s not including tweaks that might have to be made to other classes in order to allow the player to deal with (suddenly faster and effectively higher health) mobs in every map and difficulty setting.

So despite all my complaining about Dragons, I can understand why they are the way they are. It would be nice if you guys could brainstorm a way to get them into the Front Lines (as opposed to always being Azra’s Bodyguards with a NOM spec), but if you can’t, they still have a valid role, at least.

#40

— Begin quote from "Anthony"

Really, what this tells me is that ice mages are over-powered. People keep talking about poor synergy with the dragons, but what they really mean is that dragons don’t work with ice mages. Dragons play very nicely with everyone else, and can combine with armor breaks, bleeds, poison, knock-back, etc. to great effect. But with everyone so focused on ice mages it appears that I’ve simply made that class so powerful that the dominant strategy is just to bunch everyone around an ice mage rather than have a few synergistic parties around the map, which is unfortunate.

— End quote

This is actually quite normal in TD games. Granted that I don’t consider TD to be my favorite playstyle I have played several of them and it seems that if a slowdown turret or spell is available it almost invariably becomes integral to any strategy because, quite simply, the longer you can keep the creeps in range of your DPS the better. It’s an ability, like stun effects in standard RPGs or juggles in VS fighters, that very easily tips over gameplay and is generally quite simple to ‘abuse.’ Getting the balance right is tricky.

I did just have a thought about dragons. Right now they’re pretty much the standard D&D red/gold dragon archetype. If you completely overhauled their skill tree you could, for example, add an option to give them lightning breath instead of fire. You’d probably have to make the different types mutually exclusive somehow but I can think of at least one way to do it that might not require a great deal of work.