Blight is overly complex, towers require too much micromanagement, Pokemon "net" league 2.0

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raics wrote:

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EnjoyTheJourney wrote:

trying to nail the intended tower "upgrade" button with namelock melee

There's your problem right there. And they gave us a hint, hell, they gave us more than a hint.

It's one thing to build a league around a mechanic that's highly unbalanced across different builds. It's another to make it a permanent part of the game -- which is obviously going to be under consideration and which is a key motivation for my OP.

Whether it's towers or nets, both mechanics involve mid-battle clicking on a specific target and we're asked to do it too frequently in blight. If GGG cuts down the micro-intensive nature of tower management then it won't disadvantage many builds as much as it currently does.

They should allow you to bring cassia in your hide out and give us a menu there to allow the upgrade routes we desire.

For example, if you click meteor for the fire progression, then it will instantly build that if there is enough resource available when you click the fire tech.

It gives you the option to sacrifice some tactical variance for QoL.

Which, as op already mentioned, is highly needed for melee and this mechanic since we don't have the luxury to stand around a tower to tech it while we kill off-screen red dots.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem wrote:

They should allow you to bring cassia in your hide out and give us a menu there to allow the upgrade routes we desire.

For example, if you click meteor for the fire progression, then it will instantly build that if there is enough resource available when you click the fire tech.

Very good idea, actually.

+1

Lmao this is 2 brain cells league

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girng wrote:

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Boem wrote:

They should allow you to bring cassia in your hide out and give us a menu there to allow the upgrade routes we desire.

For example, if you click meteor for the fire progression, then it will instantly build that if there is enough resource available when you click the fire tech.

Very good idea, actually.

+1

I agree that this could help a lot, particularly if you've anointed rings to boost particular skills.

There is still the question of the order of priority for upgrades among towers when you have a fair number of them, especially in blighted maps. So, cutting down on the number of upgrades per tower -- especially when blight screens are at their busiest -- still seems worthwhile.

It's not that it's complex, it's that this version of "tower defense" is poorly designed.

God knows how many people have tried to explain this to GGG already. Probably thousands.

THIS.IS.NOT.HOW.TOWER.DEFENSE.WORKS.

Tower defense has waves for a reason. Actually for that exact same reason - to allow you to manage your resources and build your towers before the next harder wave. With the current "mechanic" it is just an endless stream of stupid and a complete clusterf*ck. You don't know where the portals will spawn, you can't stop for half a second or the pump explodes by some offscreen ranged pack of ridiculous mobs, portals keep spawning close or on top of the damn pump so you're stuck babysitting them till the end... Absolute chaos.

Especially in Blighted maps the encounter eventually reaches a point where you need a very specific build if you want to keep managing your towers. Let's see... a build that allows you to not do anything so you can click towers but still keep killing while you do this... Hmmm, what could it be? Oh yea, the current forced meta shoved deep inside your throat - summoners. "FUN".

Or just say "f*ck it", pour all your exalts into some uber dps build and forget about the towers. Which is what I did with... oh yea, another meta slave - icicle mines. So I just build couple of slowing towers (if any at all) relatively close to the pump and sit between them spamming mines like a moron since they don't need targeting, they just one shot everything everywhere. That's not what I would call "complex", that's what usually is referred to as "dumb".

Bad design is just bad design. But I'm afraid we're shouting into the void. By the time GGG actually decides to do something, it won't matter. And that is if that time actually comes at all because by the end of the 2nd month (and I'm being optimistic here) most people have stopped playing anyway. So they may actually not do anything at all.

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t's not that it's complex, it's that this version of "tower defense" is poorly designed.

God knows how many people have tried to explain this to GGG already. Probably thousands.

THIS.IS.NOT.HOW.TOWER.DEFENSE.WORKS.

Tower defense has waves for a reason. Actually for that exact same reason - to allow you to manage your resources and build your towers before the next harder wave. With the current "mechanic" it is just an endless stream of stupid and a complete clusterf*ck. You don't know where the portals will spawn, you can't stop for half a second or the pump explodes by some offscreen ranged pack of ridiculous mobs, portals keep spawning close or on top of the damn pump so you're stuck babysitting them till the end... Absolute chaos.

Ironically Breach has enemies in pseudo-waves, and Harbingers have actual waves of enemies. There are more bosses in the game with phases than those that don't at this point. It's weird if such a thing doesn't exist for something that should have pauses in how the enemies are delivered.

Thinking about a "pause" mechanic, it could be that Sister Cassia hands us the rough equivalent of dynamite in delve; we can essentially kill everything in a radius around where we land the anti-blight-bomb and put everything else in a larger radius into a brief state of hibernation (including the portals, which spawn no new mobs for a short period). That would give players agency over whether (and when) there are waves.

Forced pauses at times decided by the game wouldn't be welcomed by all players any more than immortality phases are welcomed in boss fights; slowing things down isn't always desirable.

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EnjoyTheJourney wrote:

Forced pauses at times decided by the game wouldn't be welcomed by all players any more than immortality phases are welcomed in boss fights; slowing things down isn't always desirable.

In this case it is, very much so.

I was looking forward to a TD-league as promised. I'm utterly disappointed by it though.
The concept of the towers is sound.
The spawning of the mobs is ridiculously stupid, fire portals spawning cold resistant mobs, physical portals spawning minion resistant mobs... wtf is this shit?
Bosses able to gain modifiers from other mobs around, yeah... it's absolutely fun to have a boss run to the pump in tripple-speed while literally ignoring ALL build defenses, you and even your minions on the lane trying to stop it, just making a beeline to the pump.
Also the lack of pauses in blighted maps. Not that hard to say 'oh, wave is over, now you got 20 seconds to build up, if you're happy then just skip it!'

There are more issues with the league then good things sadly. Not only is the Syndicate (once again) bugged but we also get crashes at Legion and the league-mechanic is utterly broken by mobs ignoring lanes, mobs attacking you off-screen without being on a lane, mobs running through defenses they're not supposed to run through, mobs ignoring you when you're actually in their way and on the lane, pump loot-explosion being utterly ridiculous, 99,9% white bases (wtf? Stop with that shit GGG, NOBODY, absolutely NOBODY needs white bases in maps, whoever does should use a fucking scouring on a rare and be happy. And yes, that counts for leather-belts too)

It's a disaster, the third league in a row which is an utter disaster.
We had Synthesis crap-a-stash which the majority of players didn't even have enough space to store the items and had no in-game helper of how stuff determined (we needed friggin data-mining to even know how that shit's supposed to work!), then we got Legion which had no end-game for 99% of people as HH ruined it (Surprise surprise if you don't balance items around the game but the game around items, it's a ridiculous thing to do) and now we got a broken TD which is an insult to any flash-based TD even, and we got that in a AAA-title. It's ridiculous.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

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t's not that it's complex, it's that this version of "tower defense" is poorly designed.

God knows how many people have tried to explain this to GGG already. Probably thousands.

THIS.IS.NOT.HOW.TOWER.DEFENSE.WORKS.

Tower defense has waves for a reason. Actually for that exact same reason - to allow you to manage your resources and build your towers before the next harder wave. With the current "mechanic" it is just an endless stream of stupid and a complete clusterf*ck. You don't know where the portals will spawn, you can't stop for half a second or the pump explodes by some offscreen ranged pack of ridiculous mobs, portals keep spawning close or on top of the damn pump so you're stuck babysitting them till the end... Absolute chaos.

Ironically Breach has enemies in pseudo-waves, and Harbingers have actual waves of enemies. There are more bosses in the game with phases than those that don't at this point. It's weird if such a thing doesn't exist for something that should have pauses in how the enemies are delivered.

Based on some of their press tour stuff it seems to me they left out waves on purpose in order to appease the typical POE go-go-go demographic. They wanted to keep the encounters short without the long delays between action, like in some of the Delve encounters. People would have complained either way probably.