Rudolpho Emulio @RudolphoCH ยท Sep 30 .@Manb0t - Increased radius of Death Meld from 1 to 3. Woah. More difficult adventure (adventures?) incoming?!
Death Meld to 3 range = no burst mages, no waiting for start round trigger damage to off oozes and no chops, really. It will make level four of Swamp King tricksy for beginners, but experienced players will still clean it up with two warrior / one support priest combos. Card cycle + heavy stab cards for the zombie king + MF/nimbus/martyr's/heal + targeting one ooze at a time will do it. I struggled with this level quite a bit until I dropped the mage out of the party and went heavy hitter.
been using 2 frenzied obliterating chop warriors + 1 priest for swamp king awhile now, I carry a few crushing attacks for the 2nd stage skellies so as not to switch loadout, Occasionally can chop slimes from full hp to dead so heal doesn't matter too much. Maybe not ideal but it gets the job done Spoiler Slimy Priest Level 20 Human Priest Demon's Golden Blade Nimbus Blade Mail Of The Martyr Hexagon Shield Bertha's Big Clogs Bleneth's Frenzy Medallion Black Token St. Bethan's Charm Novice Command Manifold Healer 1 x Polearm Slash 3 x Mass Frenzy 1 x Surging Shield Block 3 x Obliterating Chop 2 x Martyr Blessing 1 x Reliable Mail 1 x Officer's Harness 1 x Demonic Revenge 1 x Help The Weak 1 x Horned Plates 1 x Triple Heals 1 x Strong Bash 1 x Cautious Sneak 1 x Vulnerable 1 x Fiery Stab 1 x Unholy Wellspring 1 x Run, Team! 1 x Demonic Feedback 1 x Walk 1 x Touch Of Death 2 x Talented Healer 3 x Impenetrable Nimbus 2 x Unholy Frenzy 2 x Pushback Parry 1 x Savage Curse 1 x Team Heal Dwarf Slimester Level 21 Dwarf Warrior Reaper's Scythe The Strongarm Mazzaram's Mighty Mattock Xander's Mail Jaguar Buckler Necalli Cap Dorimer's Boots Raging Rock Angry Attacker 1 x Escaping Run 1 x Obliterating Bludgeon 1 x Flanking Move 3 x Able Bludgeon 5 x Obliterating Chop 2 x All Out Attack 1 x Impaler 2 x Quickness Aura 1 x Surging Shield Block 1 x Weak Strike 1 x Disorienting Block 2 x Dodge 1 x Toughness 1 x Reliable Mail 3 x Blind Rage 5 x Strong Hack 1 x Pushback Parry 1 x Quick Run 2 x Officer's Harness 1 x Bruiser Slimed Dwarf Level 21 Dwarf Warrior Master's Battleaxe Bloodchopper Maquah Of Ancient Blood Spiked Platemail Hexagon Shield Necalli Cap Corian's Boots Raging Rock Savvy Attacker 1 x Impaler 1 x Bloodied Block 2 x Pushback Parry 1 x Trained Bludgeon 1 x Reliable Mail 5 x Obliterating Chop 1 x Slicer 1 x All Out Attack 2 x Unnerving Strike 2 x Quickness Aura 1 x Nimble Strike 2 x Officer's Harness 3 x Strong Hack 1 x Shimmering Aura 1 x Toughness 1 x Powerful Hack 1 x Surging Shield Block 2 x Blind Rage 1 x Quick Step 2 x Ouch! 2 x Strong Chop 1 x Horned Plates 1 x Team Run
Is there any point to this, other than making chops and burst wizards less playable in The Viscous Tombs, The Pools of Slime, and Dungeon of the Swamp King? Based upon forum posts, many (if not most) players hit a wall when encountering the first slimes. Most new players will probably still be running a 1/1/1 at this point. Considering the nerfs to Highway Robbery and Ruby Demon Portal, this seems exactly backwards.
We're kinda way off topic here, but I'll run with it... That really has me worried. The astral maps are already the most difficult / annoying maps aside from AotA lvl18, even with super-awesome-legendary builds. *shrug* I'm sure Jon knows what he's doing, and it's not like I play those maps anyways, even when the fairy pops up there. ^_^
Might as well. I started a new thread for tweets, but people seem to like this one better. We can always blame Flax for posting the Twitter link on the previous page. There are all kinds of changes being posted, but very few specifics. I believe Jon knows what he's doing. I'm just wondering whether we're going to like it.
I'm hoping what they are going to say is that they want to make playing the campaign more rewarding, but in order to do that they have to raise the difficulty. And when I say more rewarding I mean more and/or better loot. So this may translate into taking more time to complete the adventures, but in the end we'll end up with more items. One of the issues that neoncat has said is that SP is great to get gold and MP is great to get items when it seems like the player-base wants it to be the other way around. Maybe this is a step in switching that.
Increasing the baseline difficulty of the campaign is definitely not the goal. Hopefully we can get more info to you guys soon about what the goal is
Do you think it's faster than fire? I have fire wizards for Dungeon of the Swamp King (volcanos, wall's of fire, controll, firestorm, fireballs etc..) .. and they never lose and are quite fast .. ~10-12minutes. I've tried 2war+pri .. and it seemed slower and not near that consistent.. but I'll try your build .. if anything it's more interesting playing melee
I'll be interested to see reactions to the campaign changes. In general, I believe the campaign is quite a bit easier now. However, there were several monsters that got tougher, including the oozes, astral guardians, trees and geomancers. Counter-balancing this is that I made a bunch of what I thought were "unfair" boards more fair. For example, the two very hard boards in Ogre Pass and Swamp King were largely hard because you had few tactical options with the monsters starting very near you and no room to maneuver. That should now be fixed. In addition, even the monsters that did get harder didn't get uniformly harder - I have been trying to make them better at doing the "thing that they do". So, for example, the trees are now very clearly distinguished between maple trees, which are hard hitting at range 1, and beech trees, which have range 2, 3 and 4 melee attacks. However, the beech tree attacks will now not work at range 1 at all! So, you can counter them by closing to very short range. Similarly, astral guardian decks are now much more refined to work along axes (for the rook/bishop types) and at melee range (for the pawn types). Previously these monsters had both axis aligned attacks and a sprinkling of just regular ranged attacks, which made them rather bland in my opinion. This went along with an AI tweak that makes them better at positioning to use their axis-aligned attacks. The geomancers used to be easily beaten by waiting for them to use rockfall and standing on the harmless rubble terrain, as they would never put down lava or acid onto that. This has now been fixed. It's NOT the goal to make the campaign harder, in general. I do look forward to your feedback on all of these changes and, as usual, they are unlikely to be final.
Sounds great, im newish to the game (about 1 month), and still grinding the campain to get the gear to be good for pvp. Anything that makes the campain harder (in terms of more thought required) is great to break up the same old routines. i'm finding it very hard when you know what gear you 'need' to get that gear. for example there was 1 item i needed and it took me 3 weeks to farm lv 13 runs to find 1 of the item. Us newer players need faster ways to get loot so we can play the real game (pvp) and stand a chance. (yes you can buy pizza, i did that spent $100 and did not find any of the items i needed). Also 1 addition I think would be great would be when in single player to be able to see the multiplayer chats and to see who is online so when a friend comes online you know. Great game, keep it up, here for the long haul. Led (1st post)