Lets talk about Darkness, and indeed the races in general.
*********THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MADE IN 1.1 WHEN PRE SHADOW'S NERF***********
Okay, so in the new patch after some testing it appears that darkness is still the go to race for the late game (4000+ seconds in bonus). So, lets do some comparisons and see just why this is.
Metro;
Pros
Massive carry tower in Biofield and possible secondary carry in Muli.
The Best support in the form of Mr. Iron.
Cons
Highly money reliant and falls off once its money stores are depleted from drinking and attacks from biofield.
Weaker early game.
No Potion or item generating towers.
Nature;
Pros
Free level 99 tower with xp aura in Ganesha
+2 Multicrit aura
Attack Speed aura towers
Holgar potion generation.
Cons;
Weak carry tower that doesn't infinitely scale (Holgar)- yes Balu does, but not that hard.
No viable late game carry.
Darkness***
Pros;
Two extremely high scaling late game towers (Shadow and Ripper)
Item generation (Dark Forge)\
Acolyte of Greed Spam
Armor Reduction
Instant kill towers (Jilly)
Massive Damage increase to all towers (Abyss king)
Cons;
No Aura towers such as the Herb witch
No Natural AoE for late game.
So, lets do comparison. In my opinion Metro is completely worthless late game and picking it as a possible drop will only reduce the amount of Acolytes of Greed you can get, which directly translates to massive amounts of potions and items late game. Darkness nets you the Blade of Darkness, which is +3 multicrit. Compared to nature, which gives a +2 aura, this seems worse. But that auras will only actually be helpful on your, at most, two carries. So a total of +4 multicrit. I think that the argument can be made here that the +3 and damage increase is in fact stronger than +2 for two towers. Next the carries, Shadow is still the king of late game. The scaling he undergoes is just insane, with ripper being a close second.
So, why make this post? Because I want to see diversity. I want to see options for the extreme late game in other races. It would be hard as giving each race their own version of a shadow would make a tri element build far too powerful, but what if Darkness provided your damage, Metro provided some form of targeted buff on a tower, like a unique that drained its damage and gave it to another tower at a penalty of say 50%. And Nature provided killer support auras like attack speed and multicrit.
I'd love to see if anyone else is sick of using only darkness or darkness/nature to achieve high bonus times. And I'd love to try to come up with possibilities of buff/nerfs and new towers or items to introduce.
*****Note; I do not have the black market items or even the +2 multicrit hero, however I can't see those making darkness any less good or the other races better*****
Edit Time; This is some data from an ongoing run as I post this. Current time; 82250 seconds in bonus, with zero signs of leaking any time soon.
Nature/Darkness Run
Current Shadow stats; 129000% adaption on all elements minimum. I can't even read the vex number at this point.
Current SeeLenreisser; 74516% Damage
Current Abyss King; 43596 Stacks
Current Knusperhexe; 15535 Stacks
The amount of free damage you are getting here is absolutely insane. This is why I think darkness is far above all the other races at the moment. Something needs to be done.
Edit 2: Electric Bogaloo
So, after some minor testing in 1.2 I have come to some conclusions. Initially it seems that darkness is far too powerful relative to the other two. But why is this?
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Most of the reason is Abyss king; 1% damage and 1% crit damage is just far too powerful when it stacks as high as it does late game. I tried a triple element run so I would have everything I needed to go deep and actually ended up getting my highest score for the patch, however this was achieved through use of the Biofield, which drops off hard as your gold value drops, which it always will. I was having a Muli drink the whole game(basically from wave 150 on) and he was at well over 3000% crit chance to give you an idea of how much he drank, and he did less that 1/10th of the Biofield when the Biofield could no longer keep up with the units being sent at the end. This makes me think that darkness is still the way to go and seems to be confirmed by Cola (another high ranking ladder player). I want this game to be more fun and in a similar way to YouTD, the game this most closely resembles, have multiple carry opportunities in the various races.
Romeo
Level: -
Rank: -
I do agree, the other races need a buff. I used to use Muli a lot, because I find his concept so interesting, but both he and Blofeld Laser Satellite are basically worthless in the new updates. Black Widow could be cool, but they need to retweak her a little (More Base Damage?) to make her the Support/Carry she's clearly intended to be.
Balu's ability could be made more useful late game by actually increasing the delay in cuddles, but having them scale with speed. The amount of time a tower would be taken offline would be flat (Say, five seconds). So a high-level Balu would end up taking a tower offline every 'x' amount of times per second, for 5 seconds each. Would help make him a more "focused" tower, as the better he got, the worse everything around him would perform.
I like all the Darkness Unique towers as is, though I'd still like to see Gib go to the Rare tier, and get buffed as a result.
I don't hate the concept behind the darkness towers, I just hate that it's basically a requirement if you're shooting for the top 10 in bonus times. And ya, Gib could stand to be a bit stronger. Mostly what I'd like to see is for the other races to be given the tools to hit late game in the way a darkness build can now.
Romeo
Level: -
Rank: -
I agree fully. Prior to what was the 1.1 update, Metro could be pretty useful with Muli, but combining huge income draw and the lack of items (Which Muli needs quite a few of to get going) makes him waaaaaay too risky to use now, I'd like to see Nature and especially Metro get a healthy buff to bring them back to competitiveness.
I cannot agree when shadow Scaling is mot infinite (10K max) and holgar's one is under the form of potions...
Romeo
Level: -
Rank: -
Holgar is not sufficient to carry a late game, not by a longshot. Hell, as weak as Muli is, even he is a better pick.
Holgar's utility peaks out early with the potion generation.
This post was made in 1.1, most info on shadow is not not relevant. HOWEVER, my point that darkness is REQUIRED for a long run still stands and that anything else is just not as powerful.
Sure is required, but not sufficient. But then again, it's hard to go higher thqn 5k seconds bonus round without the demon blade boosting base damage... so my insight about late game may not be very accurate...
Since I don't have it i'm not sure, but theoretically and mathematically speaking...
1. As per the effect statement, every life point (not percentage) from your current to 1% should be the value. So it should be quite huge when you see how many life point is required to lose 1%.
2. This value, still as per the effect statement, should be added to the base damage. So it should be added BEFORE all the potions and other items percentage effect are applied.
3. put that on a well stuffed ripper (dark blade and cie), and I would think that it could generate some 5 to 10k seconds more in bonus round ^^
I was thinking maybe demon blade is pivotal to any run over 20k. the benefits from knus and abyss and selen are far better because 1% of 200dmg is essentially 2% of 100dmg.
Combine skull of darkness with soul flask and have no leaks until then and you're gold.
I know I could have hit 20k before this patch, but beyond adding demon blade and tweaking my knus placement and using ripper I'm not sure what else could make the difference.
I'm working on a board now but I feel kind of uninspired since I've spent close to a thousand relics and they have been mostly all duplicate cards, it's very frustrating. I'm lucky I got selenreiser and potion of luck so quickly when I started playing.
The main reason that Shadow is OP, and indeed still is after the nerf, is that the bonus damage from adaptation works as a separate multiplicative instance which is multiplied after other damage calculations, instead of simply being added to the +damage%. Thus, the 10000% bonus translates into a 100x damage bonus - calculated after crits, multicrits, etc.
To make it even clearer how absurdly OP this is, a shadow with 10000% adapation will do the same damage as a shadow with 0% adaptation, but 100x base damage, i.e., around 25000 base damage. Thus, the shadow effectively becomes a Blofeld satellite, but without the loss of damage per attack.
All the shadow needed to balance it was not a cap on adaptation, but rather simply making adaptation be added to the +dam%, like seelenreiser is.
Romeo
Level: -
Rank: -
I like that idea Argon. Make it pre-MultiCrit and it would've helped "tame it down". That, or lower the odds of it occurring a little.
High risk, high reward is the whole Darkness theme. Taking that away means they become a bit more bland...
