Apologies for the lack of updates recently. The upcoming Version 0.50 has a lot in it, and it's not something that can be released one piece at a time. Many of its pieces rely on each other, so it's taking longer than usual. Rest assured, it should release in about a week and a half!
In the meantime, here's some balance updates to look forward to!
Map Tweaks
For Lava, the oddball top-left corner has been adjusted so that it's actually buildable there, and part of the path on the right side has been removed, adding a bit more difficulty to this map.
And for Tropical, the first island has been outright removed, causing creeps to immediately head down on that first bend. The path is roughly 20% shorter now, and it makes it so Earth & Quake aren't superior to everything else on this map. Still useful, just not blatantly OP.
Tower Tweaks
The Tower Table is receiving a format update! Yes, this means you'll have to relearn the tower spots, but I'm sure you'll get used to it in time. With this updated format:
- Elements run left-to-right, just like your build bar and HUD.
- All Buff towers are now in a single row.
- All Slows & Amplify towers are now in a single row.
- Utilities are still scattered, but we'll fix that in a future update. Namely when new towers finally get added.
In general, it's much more organized and consistent. Though in order to apply those consistencies, you might notice a few towers got their damage types shuffled around:
- Electricity - Used to be Fire, is now Light
- Arcane - Used to be Darkness, is now Fire
- Wisp - Used to be Light, is now Water
While this does harm a few builds (namely two 3-element builds that were a tad too perfect in multiplayer anyways), it fixes several redundancies, like having both Solar & Electricity or Arcane & Disease.
Lastly, two towers are getting some ability tweaks:
- Trickery:
- Before - This is a Buff Tower. Every 15 seconds, it clones a Non-Buff Tower for 10 / 20 / 60 seconds. A cloned tower cannot be cloned again for 60 seconds.
- After - This is a Buff Tower. Every 15 seconds, it clones a Non-Buff Tower that deals 65% / 130% / 400% damage for 15 seconds. A cloned tower cannot be cloned again for 60 seconds.
- In other words, Level 3 Trickery will no longer block out the entire map from being used when you have too much gold.
- Golem:
- Before - Each time it kills a creep, this tower loses 300 / 1200 damage for 2 seconds.
- After - After attacking for 3 seconds, this tower stops attacking for 3 seconds.
- Golem was always meant to be a finisher tower. However, its previous effect was counterintuitive to its nature. With the new effect, its average damage is lower than before, but its burst damage is insanely high. If you can maximize its uptime and minimize its downtime, it'll be a powerful asset in your defense.
A number of other towers will be receiving balance tweaks, but they're still in testing and not quite finalized. Exact tweaks will be revealed on patch release.
And that's it for this preview! We'll have a preview out next week, which will show off the other juicy part of Version 0.50 - cosmetics for your Builder!
If you want to stay up-to-date on previews, as usual, join our Discord server:
Element TD 2 Discord