Hey Kami, thanks for sharing!
I agree with you, there needs to be a lot of balancing rework for 2.2.
Armor needs to be nerfed
Unfortunately, Knusperhexe cannot have different effects for different elements without ugly hacks in the engine. She's operating on creeps armor, that is equally visible to all towers on the field. Also Darkness already has its damage boost tower with Abyss King.
https://mazebert.com/forum/news/new-armor-calculation--id879/
I'd suggest to adjust the positive armor reduction, so that it caps at around 50% at wave 500. This would reduce the maximum damage amplifier of Knusperhexe to 4x, instead of ~7x as it is now.
For the next release I imagine some new support towers to corrupt armor (for instance one that does -X armor on attack, stacking) - would fit pretty good to the Cthulhu theme and give more options to solve the armor problem than just relying on Knusperhexe.
Light gets the beacon similar to what is proposed in the other thread.
I absolutely love your Beacon of Hope idea, gonna comment on that right after.
Nature gets Yggdrasil again
I'd rather not bring Yggdrasil back to nature... I have some plans for it for the season coming after CoC :-)
I agree, we need another unique damage boost for nature. But I'd like that to be an entirely new tower.
I thought that giving a dmg bonus if you play without activating an element
I'm not convinced of this idea. It is a bit hard to communicate to the player and I'm not sure if it is the right incentive. What about swiping an element card gives 1 card dust instead of 1/2?
https://mazebert.com/forum/news/new-armor-calculation--id879/
I'd suggest to adjust the positive armor reduction, so that it caps at around 50% at wave 500. This would reduce the maximum damage amplifier of Knusperhexe to 4x, instead of ~7x as it is now.
For the next release I imagine some new support towers to corrupt armor (for instance one that does -X armor on attack, stacking) - would fit pretty good to the Cthulhu theme and give more options to solve the armor problem than just relying on Knusperhexe.
Light gets the beacon similar to what is proposed in the other thread.
I absolutely love your Beacon of Hope idea, gonna comment on that right after.
Nature gets Yggdrasil again
I'd rather not bring Yggdrasil back to nature... I have some plans for it for the season coming after CoC :-)
I agree, we need another unique damage boost for nature. But I'd like that to be an entirely new tower.
I thought that giving a dmg bonus if you play without activating an element
I'm not convinced of this idea. It is a bit hard to communicate to the player and I'm not sure if it is the right incentive. What about swiping an element card gives 1 card dust instead of 1/2?
Fair points. But the knux nerf is not enough I think because vir will have more armor and so you will still hit more than 6 times damage for knux.
Alternatively/additionally you could make Knux neutral element like Yggdrasil that would reduce the pressure to active darkness greatly.
My goal with all of this that each element gets a chance to stand on its own. That’s why I suggested the dmg boost. To give an incentive to not activate all elements ( may it just to get the legendary cards). A unique bonus would make it stand out more. But I am open for alternatives. A full card dust is still at max half of what activating the element may yield in the Long run. Maybe you can select the card dust you get from it, I dunno.
My problem with Yggdrasil is that to play optimal you have to save up your potions until Rings and Yggdrasil drop which I find annoying but maybe others disagree.
Oh no, I mean to change the armor function to be asymptotic at 50%. Thinking about it, probably you'd have 40% or 45% at level 500 and the bonus round just slowly crawls towards 50%.
And Knusperhexe needs to stay dark, just for the lore :-D. I guess if the other elements had something to better deal with armor, that'd be fine too, right?
Ok now I understand. And that sounds good to my mind.
The lore could be changed though.
Maybe if knux affects the tower and not the creeps this could be not that engine breaking? Maybe just let it only work for darkness towers, together with the armor nerf this might balance quite well and put darkness back in the game.
A possible adjustment for other armor piercing things might be needed, but I think this could work out quite well. This way we could have at least 3 elements with possible late game strategies.
Knux and abyss for dark. No knux for the others.
Stonecutter for metro.
Beacon of hope for light.
Nature is up to debate.
But I am not adamant maybe a nice armor cap will do the trick. Maybe we could just cap the damage bonus from knux on negative armor to 50%. This would still mean tripple damage from her. And abyss knight gets some kind of buff.
And then to mix it all up we add something that a tower may change it’s Element. This would be wild;)
Oh and i totally forgot that muli needs some kind of hard cap like shadow. The current meta for high scores is super boring...