Minion armor items are impractical. They do exist, but they're things like God Plate, All Father's Ring, and the Bulwark of the Ages. There's probaby one or two more, but they're few and far between.

Furthermore QoT can reduce armor to -1500, meaning 280% damage, which would buff the AoE effect to 560 DPS against minions at level 10 if your build included both, and in spite of that you would rarely get much usage out of the ability without the presence of a Rook.

The ability with the suggested effects just focuses way too much on countering a single character, not to mention if your intention is to make it do Z damage why start it at X damage and then assume it'll be modified by Y? Just make it do Z, in other words if you want it to do 40% less damage because of armor, just make it do 40% less, remove armor from the equation, and be done with it.

When it comes to countering tower stacking QoT already does that excellently with Ground Spikes and her splash damage autoattack. She wrecks tower stacks as-is, why design a new ability that trivializes them outright and serves little other purpose?

I don't think a tower regaining health at 200 HP/S would be unkillable by any means, btw. QoT doesn't have infinite mana and just as they do now the tower would fall when she died or went home to shop/regen. Not even 500 HP/S is going to save the thing if you're not there for 30 seconds and two DGs plow through it before you arrive to help.

When I'm Rook a single regulus can tear down towers as fast as I build them late game if they focus on them even though I can drop a 2800 HP tower every 7'ish seconds; I'm basically producing 400 HP/sec worth of towers and he can still prevent the production of a tower farm, three people focus firing a tower is going to require 2-3 other players to stop regardless of how strong the heal is, unless you really take it to crazy town. I really can't reiterate enough that it's not the healing quantity with which I take issue, it's the concept of the ability.

The concept is simple: You drop points into an ability which buffs towers, but towers don't always exist. Therefore the ability is always going to be very, very situational. Assuming A rook is present, I kid you not that 15 damage per level, so 15/30/45/60 (unless you really, really gutted the radius) would make the ability sufficiently powerful, but when rook isn't present not even 100/200/300/400 would necessarily be enough to make it worthwhile.

That's my real issue and I have no idea what the solution is. There's no other ability in the game which is so dependent on your opponent's character to function. That's not to say some builds don't work better against certain characters than others, but there's nothing comparable to Rock/Paper/Scissors in the game currently.

I'd like to once again thank you for taking the time to think about these issues and provide constructive responses. I do value your input. I'll try to address the points that you brought up. If I miss any or mistake your intent, please correct me.

Minion Armor Items that you missed:

1. Pendant of Grace (dodge actually, but similar mechanic)
2. Ironwalkers
3. Forest Band

I had thought there were a few more, but it now does seem more underwhelming than I had recalled.

Currently in this mod, Ground Spikes doesn't reduce armor by a set value, it reduces armor by a percentage, so that part of your argument doesn't hold up.

I'm not certain why you have the belief that I'm targetting the Rook with these changes. It is really a side effect. I wanted to give the QoT an ability to support towers, and to punish demigods who decided to try to do that extra 1k damage to finish off a tower. This way if they stay around to do it, they will be hurt a little bit more.

If you jump back to the original change list you'll recall that Ground Spikes no longer matter against towers. Even so, I'm not sure a queen would want to engage a stack of 4 or 5 towers by herself (even with minion/creep support). That's a ton of damage she would have to soak before they go down. Plus the Rook isn't going to stand around and watch. Then again your Rook is very good, so you might have different experiences against better QoT's than mine.

I'm trying to buff uproot to make it worthwhile, not to diminish other skills.

As for the 200 HP/S being unkillable or not, at this point the mana cost for uproot is trivial, the QoT could keep it operational indefinitely.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. I modified Uproot to be more useful in general, not to focus on the Rook. The coincidence is that they both have powers that involve structures. The major aim in the uproot buff was to provide both an offensive and defense use for the power. Previously the offensive damage was too little, so I enhanced the damage with an AOE and a mana cost reduction. The healing effect was added as a defensive ability, and the AOE went with it to push back or kill whatever is harassing the tower.

I'm not really understanding how the 25/50/75/100 would be overpowered (assuming the presence of a Rook). As I understand it that would be 250 aoe damage over 10 seconds + 500 base tower damage. Will 250 damage against a Rook at Level 1-3 make that big of a difference?

Currently if a rook gets to one of your portals and has catapults walking out of it into your base you've gotta dedicate a massive amount of resources into driving him off that portal. A rook with 8 towers, priest support, and extra DPS from cats is extremely difficult to deal with. However, with this change you could literally just uproot one of his towers and then attend to the front of your base, the entire creep wave would die without pressuring the citadel at all. The previous advantage of the strat -the buildup of creeps in the front due to inattention because you're focuing on saving your own port- is completely negated.

It's the same to a less dramatic effect early game. Don't forget that even those little archers and minotaurs are doing a good 20 damage per hit to the structures, and that priets do literally 100+ per hit to them. The little hits add up against even a DG.

Early game tower rook can't drop a creep wave quickly. He needs DPS from his own creeps to bring them down, which in turn frees his towers to fire on monks and DGs. When you negate that creep wave you significantly increase the HP buffer your own waves grant you before the towers target you and you have to think about retreating, not to mention the damage they do to the towers and possibly rook himself.

Conversely if you're support a rook the opposite effect occurs. Enemies can no longer hide behind creep waves, and they become even less able to kill the towers themselves in the short window they have before their creeps fall and they have to withrdawl.

When you buff the ability to be so good against towers that people will take it even though there aren't even towers around the majority of fights you throw it way out of whack when rook is present. That's not coincidence, that's just how things are.

This is why I suggested swapping Structural Transfer's level 15 ability (which gives a % mana boost) with Violent Siege. With a mana boost and your toned-down mana costs for Uproot it could become a viable tool. On a map like Cataract it would be useful at all stages of the game. Early game you have a tower near the flag you could hit constantly and have a dual effect of keeping it a live. Later on you can either siege the enemy tower in the same position or fall back/forward to gold/cooldown, or you can hit the first set of corner towers defending the citadel. Late game you can hit the citadel itself. It would be useful for the majority of the game on any map but Exile and Prison, not to mention QoT often has mana problems.

On the other hand Rook might actually get some mileage out of Structural Transfer, and unlike the fire and forget damage of Uproot it would have built-in counters because of its limited range and vulnerability to interrupts. Also it would remain more consistently useful for rook as an offensive ability because he could always drop a tower when needed.

I'm still thinking about what you wrote, however I do have two minor points.

1. "Demigods is about killing demigods, not about killing towers"

I'm not convinced this is completely true. If it were the case then losing towers wouldn't really matter. In my experience losing towers does make a difference, a huge difference.

2. "Uproot is t"he best tower destruction ability"

I'd like to compare two Unclean Beast's Spit versus the QoT's Uproot.

At max level uproot is 2000 damage for 905 damage, +100 aoe with violent seige for 10 seconds, 8 aoe radius. 2.2 damage per mana. (Compost boosts the damage by up to 1000, but costs another 3 skill points)
At max level spit is 1650 damage for 950 mana, +100 aoe with putrid spit for 5 seconds, 6 aoe radius. 1.73 damage per mana.

The UB isn't built or mana or mana regeneration so a direct comparison isn't exactly fair. However, the UB is also the best melee class, so one would expect its ranged attacks to be worse than demigods specifically designed for skill based magic attacks. Spit also works on any unit type, whereas Uproot is only able to target structures. Uproot is ~25% more mana efficient, however I don't think anyone would disagree with concluding that Spit is a much better skill.

Also for comparison

• Fireball is 1050 damage for 540 mana, 1.94 mana efficiency.
• Circle of fire is 1500 damage for 800 damage, 1.875 mana efficiency.
  

As it stands Ground Spikes is a soft counter to towers anyway. No, you can't just waltz in and fire them off safely and then wail on his towers without getting in trouble, but if you move in with an ally you can demolish his whole farm very quickly, not to mention if you're pruning a tower farm under construction you can keep them in check quite easily.

Also your idea of interrupting a .5 second cast ability with another .5 second cast ability that has travel time is retarded absurd. Does shit happen from time to time? Sure. I've gotten Sedna heals when I anticipated it correctly, but considering a QoT is likely going to be hovering inside the 20 yard range at all times (you do realize that's greater than tower range, right? Why exactly would she be at 25+ yards all fight?) it's very unlikely that a decent one is going to get interrupted outside of blind luck.

Some people, apparently hedgie included, seem to think that QoT is a vastly underpowered character in need of major changes. She is not. QoT is a mediocre character who needs minor changes which need to coincide with some minor nerfs to a few of the more powerful DGs.

So, I thought more about HorseStrangler's post.

First off, would you care to address my previous points about why you think uproot (in 1.20) is so good (especially when compared to similar skills) and about how important killing towers (your examples even demonstrate that tower destruction is the goal)?

As it stands now, a QoT could do everything you described (in your Rook captured portal defense example) using violent siege (except the AOE is 8 instead of 10). However, because Uproot is so useless, no one does. This is a problem.

While awuffleablehedgie is a bit exaggerative, his point is still valid. A more viable character counter to Tower Rook builds is desirable. The QoT may have been intended to be his nemesis, but Uproot didn’t turn out to be that useful and neither did she. I find it troubling that you describe how useful the Rook is in that sort of circumstance, however when it comes to finding a niche for the QoT, there aren’t any such stories (that really hold up under scrutiny). (When is a queen “difficult to deal with” in a way that really makes a difference. You may cite early game advantages, or shield support for a top tier demigod, but seems to be a weak argument.) It may also be the case that the Rook needs a little bit of a boost to make more nontower builds viable. He definitely needs some work done to Structural Transfer (as you have stated).

I’m not sure I can support your statements that are based on the design concept of the Rook. Unless I am missing something, you don’t have direct access to GPG’s design goals (if you do, let us see them for goodness sake). That being the case, then your statements are based on your perception of the Rook’s design goals, which may or may not be completely valid (we are all human and biased to some extent).

You continue to cite Ground Spikes as a counter to towers, but in this mod I’ve removed that aspect of Ground Spikes. Likewise, I’ve also been making changes to the mana requirements for the QoT, that reduce some of your arguments for her needing more mana regeneration abilities.

You continue to also cite Uproot as being involved in Demigod/Demigod fights. I’m picturing it more on the end of Demigod/Structure fights. Either for the QoT to push towers by herself, or to come in and stop a push against her own towers. I still don’t believe that towers are as trivial as you have suggested.

The Structural Transfer/Violent Siege swap troubles me somewhat because the QoT would be forced to spend mana to heal a nearly if not completely healed tower, to gain a mana regeneration buff. To be more explicit:

Towers are typically nearly dead, dead, or almost full. The number of times I can recall towers that would benefit from a little topping off is very few relative to the other cases.

Most QoT builds should probably get in order: monks, hp/armor, mana helm. That leaves her until level ~5 before she has a boost in mana regeneration. Without anything else effecting her, her mana regeneration is ~6 per second while closed. The base mana regeneration effect for Energizer is 150% for 10 seconds. Assuming that costs remain at 400 mana for Uproot, she would need to make up that amount plus a reasonable mana surplus to make the ability worthwhile. How much gain should she get for it? 500 mana, 1000 mana? That would either require an insane mana buff (1000% for 10 seconds), a longer but smaller buff (200% for 60 seconds), uproot be relatively useless as a first skill, grant a set amount of mana instead of a regeneration bonus, or some other compensation.

Furthermore, if it is left as a level 15 skill, no one would get it anyway. It should have a meaningful contribution at level 1.

I don’t think we will be able to get any nerfs to the top tier demigods to help provide balance. I’m also not sure that we should try. I much rather prefer the idea of increasing the usefulness of the current demigods. As a side note, you may have noticed the Rook targeting thread in the bug reports forum. If someone can figure out how to fix the targeting locks for the Rook’s shoulder mounted weapons, Rook DPS may increase an average of ~100 dps over the course of the game.

I also figure that if we can hand Frogboy a mod with all of the changes already made, that he can get GPG to allow Sorian to implement them. It is the part where GPG makes Sorian figure out how to code things from scratch that really costs them time and therefore interest in it.

So as it stands, Uproots healing effect is fine. The cost is fine. The problem is with Violent Siege’s effect. It either should be left at level 15 (wherein it will still cause problems and keep Uproot as undesireable), or its effect should be moderated.

Some ideas:

• Make the AOE shorter ranged, mitigated by armor,
• Replace the AOE damage with an AOE debuff.
• Change the net effect of the Uproot AOE to do the same damage as an equal level v1.20 Ground Spike? That would keep the relative effect the same as against a v1.20 QoT, while still increasing the worthiness of Uproot.
• Make Uproot a channeling skill for an infinite duration (i.e, a cheap version of Structural Transfer) while keeping the dps the same. If unopposed she will devour your entire defenses.
• Replace the AOE with a single target effect that hits X targets per second for the same DPS.
• Replace the AOE with a summoning ability. Whenever you use Uproot you get a shambler or a new type of shambler. The type of shambler might even depend upon the team of the structure you target or even the type of structure you target.

That's also ignoring the early game effects of Rook's towers decimating his own creep waves. Honestly I think you're underestimating its effect, they really do a lot of damage.

Some people, apparently hedgie included, seem to think that QoT is a vastly underpowered character in need of major changes. She is not. QoT is a mediocre character who needs minor changes which need to coincide with some minor nerfs to a few of the more powerful DGs.

THIS

No. I actually play this demigod.  Reg can't outkite queen, they have the same range. Don't be stupid. Yes his mines are very iritating, but once again he has no AA to speak off and one spike combo is lethal to him9since he lacks armor too). 

Sedna is useless against queen since her pounce is shielded off and her AA is so pityfull we don't even have to take that in the picture. Also she is easily outdamage by spikes +shamblers. 

Tb can outaoe her and kill minions which is iritating and freeze, but for the rest meh queen heals/shields everything off. Also when you take TB... I mean you're an easy target. 

DA is so useless against queen is laughable.

UB is fucking OP and indeed his spit bites through shield. But again in a long match you will beat the UB.

Erebus, shield off his bite, kill his minions with your shamblers. This is prolly the easiest Tier I fight.

Oak, iritating spirits, damaging pent. hard fight against a good hybrid, but easy against assasin.

Rook... spikes.

"Sedna is useless against queen since her pounce is shielded off and her AA is so pityfull we don't even have to take that in the picture. Also she is easily outdamage by spikes +shamblers."

Only time Sedna is pouncing is if you open to do ground spikes. This has the dual effect of stopping your spikes while bursting through your shield. I can't say I always and forever intreppt ground spikes but do think I get it a decent amount of the time. Even when I don't I just pop a Heal III and I'm good to go again. (Of course early game like levels 1-4 you'll be me fair and square, most poeple know Queen has a strong early game. I'm saying mid game so levels 5-9 or so)

Plus, Sedna has a stronger DPS than Queen..... so can I like, not take your AA into account? So if I pounce your spikes do you cease to exist? That would be a pretty awesome ability for Sedna.

So lets say you are level 7. You've got Spikes III and Shield III and then Shamblers I. Not sure if that is exactly your build but that is one of the more common builds so I'm going to use it I've probably only shopped once as Sed and I'll have gotten currency for sure, then Scaled Helm-Banded Armor-Scailmail.

If you didn't get currency you will probably most likely be able to bully me out of the way because you'll have Vlemish which means you are actually able to spam Shield and Spikes since Vlemish basically gives you 2 ability uses.

Going to also assume you have Cloak. Don't know if that is your build or not, sorry if it isn't. So you have 2500 Mana (youg et Scaled Helm-Banded Armor-Scailmail as well) which is enough for 4 of your abilities. (You summoned your shamblers at the crysatl). Anyway, this is what I'll do;

I will walk up to you engage. After you take some damage you'll shield (because you're smart and letting your monks heal you as much as possible). Then I walk away. Seriously.

I wait 20 seconds. Then I walk up to you. Engage. You take some damage, shield maybe. I walk away.

That's all I do. If you don't have Vlemish I will oom you. It takes about g'damn forever but I can do it. Once I shop a second time, hit level 9 then I say fuck it. I have counter healing, your monks are useless (mine are too mostly, since you will typically AoE them down but at least it is worth a try). And I have silence and heal III.

So to begin

Uproot.

I liked the idea that it heals friendly towers, damages enemy, and aoe damage to everything around thus tower. The problem is the aoe damage to everything around the tower is simply too great and can even be used to kill reckless demigods along with their minions and creeps all in 1 or 2 casts. If the damage at later level was reduced a bit and added the ability to target demigods as a stun while still holding its siege effects; then it would be more user friendly.

Ground spikes.

I’ll need to focus on this more in a later play through as the first was to just get me into it.

Bramble shield

Again it still needs something more than just adsorbing damage which it really doesn’t do. If the shield adsorbed damage that it would be transformed to hp, mp, or some other stat to help Queen of thorns better, and at most I would say is that it nulfs damage. Still there is more needed.

Spike wave

Haven’t taken this yet, but I reslly can’t see any serious change.

Compost.

Was it this skill that gave Queen of thorns the vampire affects? I really took this skill out of boredom and begin to notice she was stealing a good amount of hp even from demigods. If this was the affect than I loved it and thought it was perfect.

Open form.

The increase AA range is a good idea, and makes it much easier to chase as Queen of thorns.

Closed form.

Hmmm, still need to do more testing.

Note:

You should have also increased the number of shamblers Queen of thorns can summon to make her more generally and maybe give mulch an auto target capability seeing how the range is basically unlimited; it could save a lot of dying Queen of thorns from scrumbling trying to select and find dying shamblers in a pile up.

Uproot

It seems obvious now, but what about matching the cost and aoe damage to the Circle of Fire? So 600/900/1200/1500 damage over 10 seconds for 450/600/700/800 mana.

Bramble Shield

Reading the other currently active balance QoT thread I was considering the idea of stun and slow immunity while the shield is up. At early levels where shields stay up I can see this being useful. However at higher levels, given the short life of the shield I'm not sure that would accomplish much. However, it did give me the idea that an effect could occur after the shield is desetroyed. Themeatically the shield would blow up and magic residue would cover the area having a beneficial effect. Some possible ideas for post-shield effects for Shield levels 1/2/3/4 include:

• a 0/0/.5/1 second aoe stun
• a 300/600/900/1200 aoe mana drain
• a 5/10/15/20% aoe slow for 5 seconds
• a 5/10/15/20% aoe ally attack speed buff for 5 seconds
• All of the demigod death effects
• A random effect selected from a list of possible effects

Compost
I didn't include a Life Drain effect with compost. I just boosted the bonus it gave shambler damage (I left the uproot bonus alone). I'm pretty sure I didn't leave any of the life drain aura code I helped write for the nutrient extraction code.

Shamblers

I want to be conservative when it comes to increasing the number of shamblers the QoT has. They are ranged attackers and not melee like vampires/yetis. They are also getting a ton of buffs from skills right now, up to 120 dps per shambler. That being said I have been considering it. I do have this belief that Lord Erebus should have quantity minions, Sedna the quality minions, and the QoT somewhere in the middle.

Mulch Shambler

I've been torn on this one as well. Sometimes you want to detonate a particular shambler to get the aoe damage. Sometimes you want to detonate any shambler fast to get the life. I'm not sure that removing the targetting function is the right way to go. I was exploring options to have a secondary skill trigger that would autoselect a shambler, but never got it to work (something like '3' is normal mulching, while shift+3 is auto-mulch).