[balance]Team games feedback
Demigod Forums
Disclaimer
This thread will convey the feedback from our group of players, featuring beginners to decent players. We use teamspeak during our test sessions and alternate between test builds and strategies we are comfortable with. I only express here my feeling and the others are welcome to express their own. They correspond to average games and situations, And I also apologize for mispelling and errors, as I'm not a native english speaker.
If you don't want to go through this lengthy post, here's the main points.
Team game are centered around damage burst, stun and interruption more than resilience.
Minions, minions boosting ability and items are totally useless
Logically, Generals have narrower builds choices than their assassin counterparts.
There is a power shift from fixed value abilities to fixed length abilities on the later levels.
There is a power shift from support/harass demigods to brute force assassin on the later levels.
Some meta game items are almost must have.
General teamplay
So the main idea in team games are the way most fights are decided. There are mainly to kinds of battles : endurance ones and explosive' ones. In the first case, the winner is the one who can sustain most damage while dealing it to the foes. Of course any protective ability/heal is important in that case. When boosting your dps/armor/health you're aiming for winning this kinds of fights.
The second case is what happens when severals demigod focus their firepower on a single target. Real DPS doesn't bear real importance, since all cooldown skills maybe activated at will. The key abilities are burst damage ones, movement and evasion.
When players try to assist their team whenever possible most fights revolve around the explosive kind of fight. This tends to make some builds quite ineffective. The most daring issue being all the whole minion system.
Minions are a kind of extension of one demigod, able to provide some additional DPS and in the case of priest, secondary healing. They can be interesting in endurance battles with one on one situations. They are interesting against reinforcements flocks. But since they cost precious skill points/gold/items, that their AI is far from perfect and they don't provide any kind of burst damage/impeding effect, and in most cases don't provide effective focus against an important target neither can really help to deliver precious killing blows, our players have gradually come to totally abandon them.
There is some kind of illogical setup there, since from beta 2, the morale stat has been added, as well as many minion dedicated/enhancing items. The sad result is that entire layers of the game are currently useless and general have become quite predictable : they max out all attack and support skills which doesn't leave many different strategies. The worst case may be with the Queen of thorns whose the shamblers/mulch/morale/entourage and in a way compost skills can't be the core abilities.
The constant increase of players stats along the game tends to create some distorting effects. The issue arises mostly with the few last levels. The game tends to subtly shifts from a mix of brute attacks/heals/and tricks to a display of unstoppable monsters. Correctly itemized, maxed level Rooks and Beasts tends to mock the effects of heal/bramble shield, and can be stopped only at the cost of huge focus from the other team. Of course, items such as warp stone make cunning players quite immortal at this point of the game.
On average, players don't have any issue with selecting assassins, whereas mix of generals aren't considered able to tackle heavy hitters, mostly in late game. Early game is far more balanced. The minions issue actually means generals lack firepower and mostly help to build the most of their allied demigod power. This may be the way the game is intended to work.
Gold is well handled in most cases, sufficiently scarce to force players upon difficult choices, while letting big items available later. A few elements seems unbalanced, though.
Buildings upgrades : they won't make a real difference while being an heavy load in early game. While reinforcements upgrade make sense with heavy units (catapultosaurii, giants) the final 25% hp for towers doesn't play any role.
Some item have such useful use that almost everybody ends up with them, the most blantant case being the warpstone. Variety could arise from different kind of item with this effect : longer/shorter cooldown/range, etc.
Finally our feedback and suggestion with the UI :
In team games, the battle can become a huge mess. And players absolutely hate loosing because of failed targeting and such. Auto targeting is especially critical. Demigod can become very mixed in the crowd.
While any demigod can check his stats and see his damage output, things are quite obscure as soon as minions are involved.
Suggestions :
Let players cast spells on themselves by clicking on the portrait of the UI. Such a mechanism could exist with allies but is not mandatory.
Increase the size of all the “little” biped demigods : Regulus, Erebus, Torch Bearer. These guys absolutely no stand out when in the middle of late game reinforcements.
Let players see the weapon damage of their minions and reinforcements.
Give players a way to see the radius of instant cast skills that lack any kind of indication : silence above all.
Let players see the active buffs on their teammates and debuffs on hostiles. Anything they are susceptible to provoque. Give auras a distinctive radius. This could be set to a “show auras” key. So far the game lacks all kind of indication when trying to play in synergy with others.
The important thing with order interruption. While doing any action reset the current order is quite logic, many many players complain about it. Maybe instant actions shouldn't reset long terme actions (auto attack, movement...) maybe with a fixed pause to keep things balanced (while fleeing/pursuing players)
Finally, give a “halt current acton” key. So far one must give useless move orders to break a cast, and that's kinda dumb.
More precise feedback with demigod will follow later. So far my feeling is that there are incredibly versatile demigod like the Rook and less fun ones. This is a question of passive vs active skills, and lack of balance between the different branchs of some demigods.
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