The other big debate (if you read the dragons thread…if not then, well, that was a confusing start) is whether or not the rangers (archers) are over-powered. I’m leaning towards yes myself - I think I may drop the damage benefits when boosting a little in the upcoming version. What do you all think? Too much damage? Range too big? Or are they fine as-is?
Rangers: Over-powered or just right?
Personally I like them the way they are, and find they are a huge help in certain levels. Also when harder levels and difficulties and such are added people are going to need the archers at what they are now.
I just got my 90th gold star, and spent much of the campaign thinking archers are underpowered. They seemed to have a lot of trouble with armored enemies which are plentiful later in the game. However whenever I would try a setup with archers, and then retry the level without I was surprised at how much worse I did. So they must be useful after all. Mostly I find them useful to place after some big hitters like knights or dragons for cleaning up snail mobs that spawn from the fatties and other enemies that have had their armor broken.
So overall I’d say just right.
I really like them, they are the center of my strategy and I’ve gone through the game with just two of them. That’s a problem.
They are too efficient. I used to love zerkers but at the end of the game, most of my strategy was knight, healer, ice mage and an archer. And that combo pretty much wins every level. I think the problem is that there is no other alternative for this unit, it got range, it got damage, and it got debuffs. The next best thing is the zerker, but it can only control a handful in its small window.
On that one level where you can’t use archers, you can see how effective they are. Without them, you basically form a line of units, instead of just placing one archer.
the only people who should have less trouble with armored enemies than Archers are Knights, since they can armor break. Archer’s however have an Ignore Armor buff of their own, which make them MORE than capable taking on some Armored enemies if need be.
I would say Archers are indeed OP, because they have one of, if not the Highest DPS of all the classes (Berzerkers might beat them out, not sure.), they have the largest range, allowing them to do the most damage by FAR over an extended period of time, They have skills that deal damage over time and INCREASE the amount of damage dealt to enemies (Poison and Bleed), and to top it all off, they can ignore armor, so even the big tough Armored enemies that are supposed to be tanks all the way to the end get shot down before they’ve even made it half way through the map.
Also, because of their insane range, you can have one archer in the center of a map, and then have the entire map covered just by putting 4 or 5 more guys into the Archer’s deadzone. I would definitely label them as over powered.
Ah ok, I see my mistake was not upgrading their armor break then! I think I only had 1 point in it. Knights were my primary anti-armor but I also found dragons to be quite effective at it.
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Ah ok, I see my mistake was not upgrading their armor break then! I think I only had 1 point in it. Knights were my primary anti-armor but I also found dragons to be quite effective at it.
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No, wait. There is no point in upgrading armor piercing for archers. A lv2 knight set at strong is enough to cover your armor needs. You have to make sure they are leveled to destroy armor instead of bypass armor though. And if that isn’t enough to contain your problem, add a second lv2 knight set at strong, and that should complete your anti armor department, or it did to mine. Cheap and effective.
Archers should stay the same. People have trouble without them in battle but same goes with any other class, if the are nerfed, people are going to be bugging why and might just make the game harder upon releases of new levels and bonus levels.
I wouldn’t be looking to full nerf them, I was just getting the impression from comments that they’re a bit over powered. If so, I’d rather tweak them down a bit so that the game doesn’t devolve into “get some high level archers and you win”. Armor pierce was a bit controversial, but I think it helps provide a second solution to a problem as long as it’s not a cheap way out. I may just lower the damage a little to keep things more equitable given their range and firing rate. When balancing them in the spreadsheet (this game is a giant, insane spreadsheet on my computer) I think I failed to properly consider the benefit of the range.
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I’ve “beat the game” (I type in quotations because last two levels were on casual) and I felt the rangers helped out maybe a little too much in the early stages when you only had the three towers. I.e. Demo version.
However, when the three new towers were unlocked I felt that it was a bit underpowered due to the armour of some enemies. This may be due to how I adjusted the skill points for my rangers,
I just read Anthony’s post of armour piercing, and I only had one point on my ranger so that is probably why…haha.
I do agree with your point Anthony of “get some high level archers and you win,” because then the game becomes a one tower based tower defence, which defeats the purpose of the other five towers.
They might be slightly over-powered, but it’s not by a ton.
For the majority of the game, I never considered them to be too useful at all. Near end-game I found them to be invaluable.
Honestly I think what makes them so powerful is their skill tree. They have multiple powerful debuffs in it, which allowed me to specialize each archer in a different debuff and pair them up, or put them in groups of three. They became incredibly powerful at this point.
It’s a huge exaggeration to call it “build a bunch of archers and you win” type of deal, because I never would’ve won a stage without my knights knocking the armor off, my berserkers bumping the health off of everything, my ice mages slowing, and my healers keeping everything going. Oh, don’t forget my dragons using up all my spare scrap 
I wouldn’t be upset about a minor nerf, as long as you don’t go overboard with it.
I found Rangers super useful for like 99% of the current game. Max Sharp Shooter and Deep shot, then set to strong in battle. They wreck all but the biggest enemies. I think the main problem is other classes don’t have great passives to make them as good as rangers, minus the armor break on knights. And I think the active abilities for all classes are lack luster to level up. 18 points in the two abilities above, is massive. Leveling up two single shot types, not so much in the grand scheme of things.
Rangers are awesome, and my entire strategy is based on rangers and dragons. Secondary units are the zerkers, and ice mages. Knights back up the dragons and Rangers.
I find rangers essential to my strategy to play the game and all melee except dragons to be almost an after thought.
Are rangers overpowered, maybe slightly, but with their costs, rangers are no more overpowered than dragons are underpowered vs their cost.
I fell they are slighlty over-powered.
They’re the one unit it’s almost impossible to live without. Other than the level you’re forced to, can you think of any other level you could beat on extreme without them? You could live without any other unit if you had to, but rangers damage per second and range are so high, you couldn’t exist without them. Their boost costs are really probably what’s under-priced.
I could live without rangers and having them around makes everything easier. But the same could be said for any other unit. As far as over-powered, sharpshooter with rapid shot + poison/bleed? I was hitting like 5000 an arrow against non-armored enemies (and my knights get rid of the armor anyways). My thought is that drop rapid shot down to fewer arrows or increase the cool down. I just did the escape level and I effectively killed all the enemies without them even leaving the spawning circle with 3 rangers on each side, max boost.
If you are looking for a BIG change, get rid of their deep shot and buff the zerker’s bleed. This will make zerkers more useful on front lines for bleed and make rangers less powerhouses.
EDIT: Escape was done on extreme.
Archers are always the first unit I upgrade…because they can cover more then one path very easily. This way you are dumping psi into covering all paths, and not psi into just covering 1 or 2 paths. So early on, they really save you. Late game they do almost nothing though, especially if you do not have much armor piercing on them. To balance them I would just suggest getting rid of armor piercing entirely on them. Replace with a +DMG or something.
Rangers are problematic for two main reasons:
A: They’ve got the best passives in the game. In this game, the passives are basically all that matter; generally, levelling up any individual skill will give you a benefit that is slightly above, if not actually less than the benefit a passive would give you (look at the bonus you get from levelling up damage on a Knight or Dragon; it increases the damage of all skills by a pretty fair chunk of what actually levelling any one skill would). Rangers have skills that let them deal a huge amount of the damage any individual blow does over time, and massively multiplies all damage. A point in armor pen (allowing them to shred through, or at least significantly hurt, all but the most armored enemies) doesn’t hurt. This wouldn’t be problematic, except…
B: Rangers are the only unit that can effectively cover multiple paths. Healers won’t kill anything effectively unless you’re overlevelled or you’re fighting the extreme sheep level. Ice mages are good for dual lane crowd control, but they’re not going to put much down on their own. Dragons are incredibly expensive and mostly melee. That leaves rangers, who, depending on the map, can almost cover every path from start to finish with one ranger, and with two you can easily cover the entire map and have parts of the path that all monsters have to travel covered by the archers as well.
If archers had passives like Berserkers (meaning two nearly meaningless defensive ones, an effective attack speed buff, a minor buff to one skill, and a significantly worse bleed than they currently have), they might not be too powerful for their range. But at the moment they (seem to) almost out DPS bersekers, or at least significantly aid the DPS of other units, due to bleed, and the range they bring is just absolutely phenomenal, since until a few waves in archers are unlikely to have trouble clearing even the most armored enemy, and knights are cheap and break armor almost too easily if that really is a problem.
The way I’d currently rank it is
Ranger
Mage/Healer/Knight
Berserker
Dragon
The problem I see with rangers is that they’re pretty much an upgraded version of berserkers. They’re good at dealing with large numbers of enemies, inflict status effects better, have a much larger range, and greater defense (through both positioning and armor). It’s also very easy to position them in a way such that they have a good shot at all the lanes while still being in-range for healer buffs. The challenge for the nerfs is that some of the maps, such as the sheep and the “enemy spellcaster” boss battles seem to rely on rangers being able to output a steady stream of single-target damage. A way to restore the niche of the berserker while not impacting this might be to decrease the ability of rangers to hit multiple targets (i.e. 2-3-5 instead of 3-5-10), which would lower their ability to deal with groups as well as apply status effects.
I don’t know much about how powerful the armor-piercing ability is, as I didn’t level it. There also may be problems with range scaling given that the growth is exponential rather than linear, but this doesn’t seem to affect game balance as it doesn’t affect damage and being able to cover a large area is the ranger’s niche.
I’d take anything I say with a grain of salt though, given that I haven’t run any hard calculations and you probably have.
My playthrough heavily depended on rangers, and I’ll tell you why I think they’re way OP:
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They just deal more damage because they have a lot more opportunity to attack. My rangers were basically attacking nonstop. The beserkers and knights would have to wait until units were right next to them to attack. Even though the beserkers/knights do more damage, they don’t get as many opportunities to attack, and so do a lot less damage overall (in my playthrough).
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Bleed. Foes take 89% more damage? Hell yes! At a 21% success rate it means basically every unit is bleeding. It doubles the effectiveness of the ranger - and anything attacking the unit in addition! Beserker’s bleed isn’t as good (and it can only be applied right next to a beserker), and healer’s inspire is significantly weaker (since bleed works as an AoE). (Of course, combining inspire + bleed is insane.)
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Safety from attack. As if they weren’t already the biggest damage dealer in the game, they are also the most removed from harm.
All you need to do is stick a few knights/healers near the spawn to get rid of armor, then let the rangers take care of the rest.
That said - it was fun to play the game even with rangers being so good, so a major nerf would be a disappointment.
It seems there’s a pretty strong consensus that rangers are a bit OP.
One of the big things we wanted to do in DefQ was redeem the melee-unit from being totally useless, which is the standard situation in most TD’s. The simple fact is that a ranged unit is just going to cover so much territory that their natural tendency is to outshine the melee who only have one quick shot at a baddie.
As I see it, rangers have several things going for them:
- Awesome passives (bleed, critical, poison, armor pierce) - this lets them deal with nearly everything in the game and gives them no natural “weakness”
- They can wear armor, and there’s no point in front-lining them, which makes them pretty good at not-dying
- Spread/rapid shots make them great at crowd control.
So you have a fairly cheap class that can hit almost anything, a lot of times, and can be specialized to deal with anything that thwarts them. Their only major weakness is armored enemies, but armor pierce, critical, bleed, and even poison give them various ways to overcome that.
Before release, the biggest nerf we gave to archers was to expand their minimum range, this helped a lot by differentiating them from melee units, so that rangers couldn’t attack both near AND far. Given that they’re still overpowered after all kinds of pre-release nerfing shows you how absolutely insane they USED to be.
Here are some tools at our disposal for tweaking rangers:
- Change/remove passives, or make them less awesome
- Increase minimum range
- Decrease maximum range
- Decrease number of shots per attack
- Decrease overall damage, so “hitting lots of stuff on the map” takes precedence over “high overall DPS”, and makes armor more of a natural foil, encouraging synergy with knights
Those things I think could help make rangers less of a dominant strategy. That being said, my general balancing approach is to find the smallest tweak that correctly addresses the problem without seeming like a total nerf or throwing everything else out of whack, so I don’t plan on doing all 5 - they just seem like a reasonable set of knobs to twist to various degrees.
Thoughts?