• (rephrased) The 15% damage reduction from Goddess of thorns should be put on shield instead.
  • I've looked into this. The problem is that shield absorption occurs before damage reduction (which occurs before armor mitigation). This means that there is no effect while the shield is up (it takes full damage) and when it drops the damage reduction goes with it. I could alter the damage code to have damage reduction occur before shield absorption, but then why don't I just increase the amount of damage shield soaks. I could also create another buff to be applied at the same time as the shield effect or to trigger when the shield drops.

• Also getting a new rank of mulch at 15 is massive. 2250 is a huge heal.
  • If you consider shield a heal (which it kinda is, it just creates health that does have any damage reduction), you can consider the two skills complimentary. They might then also do comparable amounts of "healing" per cast and by mana efficiency.

• Shamblers spawning with low HP means they can die to AoE right after you summon them before you can mulch, which shouldn't be happening
  • I wrote a patch for this that should hopefully be implimented into the next Demigods release.

• Players just potioning or teleporting in your face is a bit silly
  • I do like the idea that the QoT doesn't have an interupt. I know it isn't balanced in some sense, but I also like the diversity. <insert more whining about unique gameplay>

• Targeting mulch can be a bit impractical. Is it possible to make the Shamblers light up when you're casting it instead of just providing a targeting pointer?
  • Hmm. I'm not sure. I don't know if it is possible. I know there are some thing that are possible given the demigod only selection key. However it is straightforward to make it auto-mulch an existing shambler without having to click on one.

• Shamblers require too many points to max. She breaks from the other DGs here by requiring two minion stat trees, and that's not even counting morale. Either Entourage or Compost need to provide a meaningful benefit independent of Shamlbers the way Inspiring Presence does.
  • I addressed this somewhat by making Shamblers much more viable with only a single skill line. With both skill lines Shamblers are really powerful. I've never really been sold on Morale being useful for the QoT. It would be best for Lord Erebus, but he has so many good skills he doesn't typically bother with it.

• Personally I think changing Entourage into an aura would be the ideal solution, you could  pad QoT's low stats a bit with it with it and provide a unique team buff, but since Compost has a cool animation it'd be neat to see that worked with as well.
  • I've still mixed feelings on morpheas768's Nutrient Extraction revision of compost. I like my scaling debuff/buff aura idea better, but I'm not sure what would be best.

• There's just not enough mana for everything necessary to make QoT a force to be reckoned with. I'd like to see a rank IV shield cost reduction, but that's problematic since you don't really have a static mana cost on the ability the way rook towers do. I don't have a good solution.
  • I've been lowering mana costs for skills. Hopefully some of it will help out. Increasing her mana regeneration rate may be necessary. How does given her a +5 mana/second regeneration sound? (at level 1: 300 per minute, 450 per minute while in closed)

• Honestly negative armor's functionality is a bit outrageous. I know this is a QoT nerf, but it would probably make sense to give structures some armor as you rank up fortitude for them, it would help with minion swarms and Trebuchet too.
  • I replaced the static armor reduction ability of Ground Spikes with a percentage reduction. (Although it should be noted that if Erebus reduces armor into the negatives with a bite, if the target is then Ground Spiked it will actually gain armor, or lose negative armor). I'm not sure that the replacement will work out (the percentage drop needs to definitely change). It also might make more sense to make it more like Penitence and just increase damage taken by a certain amount.
  • I like the idea of giving towers armor, but I'm not sure it has a real functional purpose that couldn't be accounted for by simply increasing the health of towers. Uproot/Structural Transfer/Spit are the skills that come to mind and wouldn't be effected by the armor increase. Ground Spikes is the only structural armor reduction skill.

Automulch is problematic though because you've gotta send in shamblers manually to get them into damage range. Great for healing but limits the functionality of the skill quite a bit.

• Shield
  • I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that I want to shorten shield's life. I've increased lifetime to 60s and increased the amount it absorbs. The additional or replacement boosts would only function to buff it.
• Shamblers
  • v1.20 Shamblers are weak. I think you'll find these shamblers more of a match, especially with the upgraded skills. I'm not saying that we shouldn't raise the number, I am however suggesting we experience the current buffs before doing so.
  • Also if Entourage and Compost are modified we will have to go back and modify the basic shambler.
• Uproot
  • Current Structure damage and heals would remain constant. It would only be the AOE damage that would change.
• Mulch Shambler
  • Positioning of Shamblers for key mulching damage may be a useful strategy. I've never been able to reliably pull it off in game, but others may be able to. I can see how it would be useful for creeping multiple waves and for assisting in combat, 750 damage makes a difference.

• Mulch Shambler
  • How do you guys feel about taking the AOE away from the Shambler that is auto-mulched, and instead to focus it on the QoT's current location -or- to have all shamblers produce the AOE effect (Keep the damage the same, but distribute it out among all living shamblers. So that you would have multiple weaker AOEs that do the same damage (approximately))

No, That seems even more situational than actually having summon, find, and mulch shamblers. Also if I am reading it correctly it seems the aoe to work would have to put QoT in damn near suicidal positions.

You over look the fact that theAuto mulch is random; while doing what you said is devastaing it can still be done in qot current form and much more accuratly than with auto mulch. With auto mulch only way to me sure that the one you send out will be the one to explode you would have to leave 1 point in shamblers which at higher levels would be very unwise. Suicide bombing using automulch just isn't a viable build as you are giving up a valuable tool which could be used for later survival or just plain exp farming.

While Shamblers aren't night walkers or spirits they already have the longest auto attack in an unmodded, and while they are alittle bucky in game quantaty will be quality. Shamblers may attack more enemies at once, but spirits and night walkers have numbers on their side, and those numbers will block out the sun over shamblers sadly ripping them to shreds.  Thus making them a shitty quality, and lets not forget unlike shamblers and yetis; night walkers and spirit require no mana to spawn putting QoT in a mana and cooldown problems to fight the swarms of minions.

Right now you are trying to add idols to the scenarion and even still A fully built minion night walkers will rip a full built shambler qot. For shamblers to actually win they would actually have to be suicide bomb like ou said.

Then it isn't the strength of your shamblers that are winning, but just you spamming an ability. It would be much more effective than if you just have shamblers attack and you ground spikes. That way if your are out of mana then you still have some support.

I agree with most of this but part I disagree with are

Compost and entourage; while I do understand where you are coming from these two skill actually makes complete sense to me. It all fits into the "Open form destroys armies; Closed form build armies." Which some people on the board doesn't seem to understand (I gave my understanding of the phrase in another topic, and will find it if you wish.) Meaning unless you are going a minion build than you shouldn't even bother looking at these skills. And mulch, the effect of mulch sould not be changed but the whole 3 second wait for the damage to enemies does need to be changed and greatly. I also still stand behind the auto mulch idea. When it comes to seiging I think just like the cetidale that the towers all should grow stronger automatically with each war rank. That would show qot abilities a bit more love, which is currently being taken by ub, tb, and reg.

Screw rooks I got Queens

Maybe make entourage add an additional minion with each level of shamblers. No I don't mean just another shambler but something new let her be the only general with 2 types of minions. Make it a bit stronger melee tanking minion. Also distributing damage throughout the shamblers and qot could make mulching hard when she needs to do it if she is about to die and he last shambler just died. And within that split second it takes her to re-summon them she could be dead already.

Finally how about making QoT only access Assassin items, artifacts, and favor items in open mode. And access only general items, artifacts, and favor items in closed form.

3 different lines of morale is not exactly build diversity. Would you really consider compost for siege alone?

This is sort of the point I am homing in on here. If shamblers become good, then there is always going to be a line of abilities that are much more useful or much more useless if so many trees are for shamblers. 

eg:  Shamblers? So what's better... morale, entourage or compost. Does taking ground spikes make shamblers better than taking entourage or compost? What if spikes/entourage/compost/shamblers become so good that you are an idiot for taking shields?.... and so on.

• Auto-mulch
  • I should be able to scale the damage based on the number of living shamblers. When Mulch Shambler is used, one shambler will be destroyed. All shamblers will produce an AOE Attack. The total damage done by all AOEs combined will be equal to the original damage done by Mulch Shambler. This will reduce the ability to pinpoint sucide bomb shamblers. It will make mulching faster. It will keep the same damage if your shamblers are all in a group. It will allow you to spread out low level damage in a wider area. The damage for Mulch Shambler is 250/500/750. With 4 shamblers the individual AOE damage is 62.5, 125, 187.5. I need to look at the death animation a bit more, but I should be shortening the delay between Shambler death and damage resolution.

• re: Lord-Orion: "You don't really need to mess with QoT too much to fix her."
  • Without a more quantitative measurement, I'm not sure what you mean. In your list you include most of her skills, her mana pool, and her late game scaling as being problematic. The only skills that seem to be okay by these standards are early levels of Bramble Shield, Spike Wave, and Ground Spikes. As I understand your post, there is still a large amount of things to adjust.

• Compost as Life Drain, Mana Drain, or healing.
  • I want to be careful in not duplicating the Oak's effect for making kills. This is why I've been considering other possibilities.

• Entourage displaces damage
  • The net effect would be to either give the queen a 20% damage reduction or to give her a 25% health buff. (This does assume she has maxed shamblers, etc. at all points of combat. Given the large health value of minions, unless the enemy is AOEing the shamblers won't die). Shield already gives her a 1450 hp boost. This would be giving her an extra shield that is essentially mana free. To get it however, she has to spend 4 more skill points to get Entourage, plus another 3 (or 4) to get Summon Shambler. That's almost half her build in skill points. It however, isn't as versatile as Bramble Shield, and is effectively less efficient than Bramble Shield. It would require a base health of 5800 gain an effective health bonus of 1450. Although to be fair she would also increase the effects of friendly healing targeted at her by 25% percent.

• Tribute
  • Consider the following replacement power inspired by Voltron and Starcraft's Archon and Ultralisk.
  • Ent Merge
  • The QoT directs the evolution of her Shamblers to mature them into the adult form of Shamblers, the Ent. All active shamblers are merged together to create a single, stronger unit, the adult Ent. The Ents stats are based upon the number of Shamblers used in its creation. The Ent loses the ranged attacks of its youth, but becomes a larger, tougher, and stronger melee attacker.
  • To create the ent model, the Shambler model is rescaled approximately four times larger, and recolored. All of the animations should stay consistent and they are useable. The stats of the Ent would be roughly equivalent to the number of Shamblers used in its creation plus the effects of the buffs from the Entourage chain (Since they are not shamblers, they would not benefit from the skill line. However, all levels of Entourage are required to have the skill, so including the bonuses into the base stats just removes the necessity of having to change the Entourage buffs or create a new one to have the same effect) The skill would be thematically more appropriate than Tribute as the end of the Entourage chain.

• Uproot Changes
  • At this point with the proposed ability changes to reflect the Circle of Fire, I want to have the skill tested more before additional changes are consider. More game play testing and less hypothetical crafting is necessary at this point.

• Ground Spikes Buff
  • I'm not sure if I can add a item use disable. It provides a pseudo-interupt to the queen, which I'm not sure is something that should be done yet. I still like the idea of an interupt-less queen. I'm also not sure it can be done. I think it could be achieved by adding cooldowns to all items, but I'd have to look into it. Otherwise it would require adding a new function to basic game mechanics.

• Goddess of Thorns
  • It is currently under-utilized. However, I don't want to make any drastic independent changes without having a better grasp on how Bramble Shield and Ground Spikes will be modified. The effect of Goddess of Thorns should reflect the upgrades and enhance her. I like the idea of boosting her stats, but also fear it would be somewhat like the stats line on Assassin demigods, a very under utilized skill line.

• QoT Form Shop Changes
  • If I'm not mistaken there are only different Achievement items based on what type of demigod you are (plus minion idols). I'm not sure what this would accomplish.

• Different buffs specializations for Entourage, Compost, Morale
  • I'm not sure about this one. The pre 1.19 patches did do something like this. Compost did damage & life, but only while the buff was active. Morale did all stats. Entourage was a constant damage & life buff. I'm not sure if Entourage is Shambler only, I know Morale is all minions, and I think Compost is Shambler only. The problem was that Shamblers were rather unappealing. As a dps focused game, you want to focus on skills that give damage. If your Shamblers die, you can always summon more to replace them. I'm cautious about the range increase enhancements because that would effectively result in QoT having 6 Siege Archers. That's a lot of damage that outranges towers. It is also several few bodies between her and the tower.

Also I updated Uproot for version 1.01. Try it out. It is linked in the original post.

(QoT Form Shop Changes)

Some favor items are assassin or general only, qot open form would give her access to assassin favor items only, and closed form would give her access to general favor items only.

(It is currently under-utilized. However, I don't want to make any drastic independent changes without having a better grasp on how Bramble Shield and Ground Spikes will be modified. The effect of Goddess of Thorns should reflect the upgrades and enhance her. I like the idea of boosting her stats, but also fear it would be somewhat like the stats line on Assassin demigods, a very under utilized skill line.)

Just like every other general.

(I want to be careful in not duplicating the Oak's effect for making kills. This is why I've been considering other possibilities)

For QoT to kill a demigod other than Rook alone; she would have to be playing against a really stupid opponent even before level 7. Give compost the ability to still both hp and mp with each attack.

(

Consider the following replacement power inspired by Voltron and Starcraft's Archon and Ultralisk.

• Ent Merge
• The QoT directs the evolution of her Shamblers to mature them into the adult form of Shamblers, the Ent. All active shamblers are merged together to create a single, stronger unit, the adult Ent. The Ents stats are based upon the number of Shamblers used in its creation. The Ent loses the ranged attacks of its youth, but becomes a larger, tougher, and stronger melee attacker.
• To create the ent model, the Shambler model is rescaled approximately four times larger, and recolored. All of the animations should stay consistent and they are useable. The stats of the Ent would be roughly equivalent to the number of Shamblers used in its creation plus the effects of the buffs from the Entourage chain (Since they are not shamblers, they would not benefit from the skill line. However, all levels of Entourage are required to have the skill, so including the bonuses into the base stats just removes the necessity of having to change the Entourage buffs or create a new one to have the same effect) The skill would be thematically more appropriate than Tribute as the end of the Entourage chain.

)

Stronger shambler good, but one shambler bad. Unless you are making it a bit weaker than say ub. Look at giants out of all creeps they are deadly together, but alone they are a joke. Shamblers are ok now but making them grow into one would make them a yeti; unless you giving them a demigod type stt build. If the are going to mature and grow like plants then they should multiply, and if you want to still give them the base stats of UB than I am all for it.

(The net effect would be to either give the queen a 20% damage reduction or to give her a 25% health buff. (This does assume she has maxed shamblers, etc. at all points of combat. Given the large health value of minions, unless the enemy is AOEing the shamblers won't die). Shield already gives her a 1450 hp boost. This would be giving her an extra shield that is essentially mana free. To get it however, she has to spend 4 more skill points to get Entourage, plus another 3 (or 4) to get Summon Shambler. That's almost half her build in skill points. It however, isn't as versatile as Bramble Shield, and is effectively less efficient than Bramble Shield. It would require a base health of 5800 gain an effective health bonus of 1450. Although to be fair she would also increase the effects of friendly healing targeted at her by 25% percent.)

In this game ways to reduce damage taken is better than gaining more health; their are too many ways to increase the damage a demigod can take for damage for a hp buff to matter.

(I should be able to scale the damage based on the number of living shamblers. When Mulch Shambler is used, one shambler will be destroyed. All shamblers will produce an AOE Attack. The total damage done by all AOEs combined will be equal to the original damage done by Mulch Shambler. This will reduce the ability to pinpoint sucide bomb shamblers. It will make mulching faster. It will keep the same damage if your shamblers are all in a group. It will allow you to spread out low level damage in a wider area. The damage for Mulch Shambler is 250/500/750. With 4 shamblers the individual AOE damage is 62.5, 125, 187.5. I need to look at th)

I'm not budging on this; auto mulch!

I'm starting a new post so I don't mess up the table formatting.

If every skill point is worth approximately the same value, consider the differences between Morale and the Queen Shambler Specific Buffs.

Each level of Morale offers the following

• +50 Health
• +0.5 Health per second
• +2% Attack Speed
• +50 Armor
• +4 Weapon Damage
• Applied to ALL of the minions a general has (QoT & Senda 10, Erebus 16).

In contrast v1.20 Demigods version of Entourage offers per level:

• +6 Weapon Damage
• +165 Health
• Only to Shamblers (max 4!)

So, +115 Minion Health and +2 Minion Weapon Damage for 4 Shamblers is the equivalent of the remaining buffs for the Shamblers:

• +0.5 Health per second
• +2% Attack Speed
• +50 Armor

PLUS all of the buffs for idol summons (up to 6!)

• +50 Health
• +0.5 Health per second
• +2% Attack Speed
• +50 Armor
• +4 Weapon Damage
• Applied to ALL of the minions a general has (QoT & Senda 10, Erebus 16).

I have to say I don't see that as being quite fair (rough comparison of an increase of 12 DPS for Entourage versus 20 DPS for Morale (plus all the other buffs)). Even my outrageous buff to Entourage isn't that great. Would you trade the above list for an extra +6 Weapon Damage (don't forget Shamblers attack once every 2 seconds, that's an extra +3 DPS per shambler or overall a boost of 20 DPS per skill point with 4 shamblers. That's the same damage boost that Morale provides). My version of compost does a little better with a 60 DPS boost with 4 shamblers after killing 2 creep waves. However, each successive level of compost after the first only adds 20 DPS (again the same as every level of Morale).

There may be some validity to arguments that suggest that buffs to a single skill line are more useful than buffs to a variety of skills. The single skill may be modified with a force multiplier and become much better than equivalent skills. However, to counter this argument, all damage increases seem to have been balanced assuming the QoT has 4 shamblers at all times. Additionally, her Shambler buffs require a huge skill point investment leaving her very unbalanced if she invests much into them.

In conclusion:

• The proposed +10 damage per skill point effect for Compost & Entourage is probably too weak
• The +60 DPS makes Compost 1 a really good buy, perhaps too good.
• Minion specific skillines for the QoT are really, really bad, worse than one would expect.