Tweaks to scaling of spells

#1

This goes way beyond the “tack something into place to make Direct Damage spells useful” that I was not-really expecting to happen.

I’m thrilled. It makes me question my ignore Lightning/Pump Frenzy/ignore Healing/Pump Crystal build that I’ve been using since my 2nd play-through - that’s great! Lightning that does more than tickle? Excellent. A bigger, stronger Crystal? Fantastic; Crystal was already my favorite “oh crap!” spell and now it’s going to be better.

The changes to Dragon’s Breath make it worthwhile to cast for reasons other than “I’m swimming in Psi and roflstomping this battle and it’s off cooldown and it looks pretty, so hey”. Now, you could use it to seriously soften up waves of monsters that are overlapping (say, some snails that spawn after a slow wave of Zombies) and the new 75-Psi cost makes it a little more likely that you’ll be able to whip it out when needed instead of only when you’re already dominating a map, as is the case currently.

Also, the buff to Healing opens up a lot of options for quite a few maps, including the hardest modes of all the maps pre-Healers-joining-the-Party. Faster, better, cheaper heals sounds like a great way to challenge yourself on those early maps with Attack Mobs without having to go back later with Healers in tow and a few more Levels under your belt. Again, great!

I’m not an expert here by ANY stretch of the imagination, but the numbers look good to me “on paper”, as you’ve said. And since this system is basically nothing but adding Moar Maths to the spell damage equations, they should be fairly simple to tweak if something somehow becomes Too Good.

Final Thought: now that Azra’s attack power actually does something, does that mean that some pure Attack Power Books are in the works? That would be an interesting alternative to Books That Do Unique Things; you would have to choose between Unique Effect Books and “Make All Your Spells a Bit Better” Books. Or even throw in a third tier, where the effect isn’t as good/as unique but also has some Attack Power “baked in”. Of couse, you guys have probably thought of all this already and have all the Book ideas more or less laid out on the table, as it were, but I thought I’d throw it out there nonetheless.

At any rate, I gotta say I really appreciate the detailed post and the heads-up on this topic, so thanks! Looking forward to Gold even more now, if that’s possible. :slight_smile:

#2

Thanks everyone - good to get some positive feedback for a change, haha. :slight_smile: I’m sure we’ll do some tweaking once more people get their hands on it, but as you surmised it’s just some simple numbers to change to get the balance closer. Now I just have to get those new unique items a little more under control, haha!

As for book ideas, I’m honestly trying not to come up with any new ideas. Lars and James had a bunch, but I wanted to reign them in a bit so we could focus on finishing. This whole process has been a continuous stream of “ooh, what about this?” and “wouldn’t it be cool if?” At this point, we’re trying to do nothing new and have pretty much a code freeze. The more ideas you give us, the longer it takes for the Gold version to come out - so stop sending awesome ideas! Or at least we should start up a “Defender’s Quest 2” thread to collect ideas. Of course, we don’t know if we’re doing a sequel or anything (we each have new game ideas that are quite different too!), but I think I can say that no new features or items are going to be added to Gold that aren’t already in there.

(Also, I jest on the “positive feedback” joke - you guys are critical, but because you care about the game, and that means a lot!)

#3

Still don’t buy it (the reason for PSI Burn).

Following your logic, i could apply the same thing to towers:
I’m pumbing in like 50 PSI for Berserker first level, and after some time he has done like several thousand damage. Following your arguments, that would mean that psi-burn has to be added to the Berserker as well, because you get more PSI out of it then you paid…

I don’t see a difference. Saying “towers have a shorter range” is not a real reason for me. So what? They still do a lot of damage and give you back more PSI then they costed, so i don’t see the reason y spells can’t. I mean spells are ALREADY a waste of PSI. Not only because they don’t do much damage (as it is now), but they are also a one time thing.

But well, it’s your game. But it will be all the more reason for me to simply not use damage spells but put all my points in Push Back, Frenzy and Heal, ignoring the other threee because they’re a waste of PSI.

#4

— Begin quote from "Yinan"

Still don’t buy it (the reason for PSI Burn).

— End quote

This game is supposed to be played mainly with the defenders, the role of spells being support (pushback, frenzy heal) and firefighting (damage spells).
In order to make the damage spells worth casting at all in later NG levels where HPs of common creeps are really huge and lightning 200 simply doesn’t make difference, spells have been pumped up as we’ve asked.

Lars and Anthony don’t want the game to be a “defend your castle by shooting spells” one, they want you to rely on defenders. And in order to make us happy about damage spells AND not allow us to play the game in a way they don’t want, they’ve introduced PSI burn.

— Begin quote from ____

Following your logic, i could apply the same thing to towers:

— End quote

Sure you could, if you had a “castle defense shooter game” with added fighters and changes to their mechanics would mean that people could play the game as a TD instead of a shooter.

— Begin quote from ____

But well, it’s your game. But it will be all the more reason for me to simply not use damage spells but put all my points in Push Back, Frenzy and Heal, ignoring the other threee because they’re a waste of PSI.

— End quote

Well, since heal is not really needed as it is now, you’ll find by level 30 that you have nowhere else to put spellpoints into :slight_smile: . And just a reminder - the goal of the game isn’t to collect PSI, it’s to defeat all the creeps.
Sure, if you play the game at a leisurely pace, you will probably never NEED damage spells, but once you go for any of the number of possible self-imposed challenges, you’ll soon realize that to defeat this or that particular wave combination, upgrading a defender with 100 PSI simply doesn’t help, but a large crystal explosion does :slight_smile:

#5

I will point out, that through using mod functionality, you can remove psi burn from any spell you want, as well as tweak the numbers to whatever you think they should be :slight_smile:

We still think this is the right decision for the core game, but I understand everyone won’t agree, and that’s what mods are for - it’s impossible to please everyone with one fixed design.

#6

May I suggest toning down the base power of the Crystal spell? (Not in-map crystals).

I’m currently past the first Zelemir - and in Eztli-Tenoch’s forces, Azra level 12 and no books, level 1 crystal is still strong enough to wipe out revenants, worms and swimming revenants in any wave. And with just one point invested, it’d wipe out even the shadow worms easily.

The reduction needn’t be big, but I think that without skill point investments, the crystal spell should not be able to wipe out any creeps that are rouhgly 2.5-3* the level of Azra. (Azra level 12 does 410 dmg with Crystal 1, worm level 30 is 334 HP, worm level 36 would be near 400 - and THAT should not be 1-hit kill for the crystal spell unless the player decides to put at least one or two skillpoints into it.

#7

It seems to me like psi spent on defenders should be better even without psi burn, or else spells just aren’t balanced too well. It should take, maybe, ten seconds for a lvl 1 defender to do its psi value’s worth of spell damage, as measured against lightning. If the psi payout per creep health is so high, then either the level is too easy, or defenders are not strong enough.

But maybe that’s how we got the worthless/OP dichotomy in the past. A sort of OP magic system with psi burn and cooldowns is one way to make it rewarding but not broken.

It just feels like the solution should be rebalanced psi payout, not an ad hoc cap on the power of lightning. Though I guess the plus side to an OP magic system with this safety measure is that it opens up the luxury to blast lots of weakened stragglers, maybe allowing the maps themselves to get harder overall to balance everything out. It feels like an odd approach to me, still.

#8

I don’t remember what has and hasn’t been said so far, but a more natural-feeling fix, imo, would be a sort of spell fatigue system.

The cost of casting Lightning increases per cast, gradually returning to base cost over time. It could be a rather dramatic curve, so that a player feels little guilt for casting once or twice per wave, but still absolutely can’t afford to spam it. There could even be a hard cap rather than endless cost scaling, sort of like a cooldown timer, but a more continuous one where you only “heat up” a little each cast, and you can keep casting until you heat up all the way, at which point there’s a few seconds of full heat before the bar starts falling and you can cast again; maybe a yellow state for “the next cast will put you into overheated state”. A hard cap like this could either take the place of scaling costs, or could be used in conjunction with a more forgiving version of scaling costs. Or it could take the place of all psi costs entirely.

Maybe psi burn works fine in practice. It just sounds fishy to me. I’m sure just going into the files and modding out psi burn would upset the balance and open exploits, and I’m sure it’s a valid solution. It just feels fake and it would be a bit hard as a fan to mod something else in its place

(I also think a new resource for spells, like mana instead of psi, would also solve the problem. Even when it works, the looming specter of Psi guilt just makes me paranoid that I’ve already lost, taking any spell use as a sign of a possible beginning of the end. btw, I haven’t played since the last full release, so I can’t speak to what the new pre-release feels like at all.)

#9

coyot - yeah, the crystal spell may be a bit too powerful, but the long cooldown helps balance away from that. It gets me out of some rough spots pretty effectively, which is getting necessary in NG+ (but perhaps at the detriment of making the standard game a bit too easy).

MTaur - the balancing point for spells traditionally has been cooldown rather than cost. Many spells will generate a profit if you’re in a tight spot, but the long cooldown means you have to be judicious with the timing. I like your idea of a progressive cost/cooldown, but a) it’s a bit late for that now and b) I don’t think it fundamentally changes most of the spells in practice. The one exception is lightning, which is a quickfire spell with minimal cooldown (0.25 seconds). In this case, we have to be careful that you can’t turn a profit or the game can be won just by hitting the lightning spell enough (assuming the 0.25 second cooldown doesn’t get prohibitive, which it would eventually, but not for a while). Psi burn is perhaps a bit of a hack, but I think it patches up the problem pretty cleanly without having to do some pretty major overhauls.

#10

I think crystal would work fine if the base damage got nerfed by some 30-50% and compensated with higher increase per level… that is, I don’t mind for the spell to have a big kick, but it should require some point investment.
It’s OK if it catches up just within a few/several levels…

killing a bunch of worms spawned from montrosity is the typical use case in normal game - and IMO it should not be possible with level 1 crystal… at least in non grind modes, playing the levels as soon as possible…

#11

— Begin quote from "Anthony"

MTaur - the balancing point for spells traditionally has been cooldown rather than cost. Many spells will generate a profit if you’re in a tight spot, but the long cooldown means you have to be judicious with the timing. I like your idea of a progressive cost/cooldown, but a) it’s a bit late for that now and b) I don’t think it fundamentally changes most of the spells in practice. The one exception is lightning, which is a quickfire spell with minimal cooldown (0.25 seconds). In this case, we have to be careful that you can’t turn a profit or the game can be won just by hitting the lightning spell enough (assuming the 0.25 second cooldown doesn’t get prohibitive, which it would eventually, but not for a while). Psi burn is perhaps a bit of a hack, but I think it patches up the problem pretty cleanly without having to do some pretty major overhauls.

— End quote

I was thinking mostly of Lightning, yeah. Cooldowns are a good enough constraint in all other cases. I can appreciate the convenience of it, and I’m sure it won’t be your last project ever anyway.