Hello,



I bought dungeons of the endless today and played for a few hours. I do like the game a lot, however I would like to see some changes to make it better :



The way I see it, there are 2 kind of games, "stress / adrenaline based" games, those that are fast paced and need good reaction time on the part of the player, often requiring a lot of clicking and micro management. The second type are the slower kind of games, that are more about strategy and tactics and the "bigger picture", they give more relaxed play time and they do not require the player to be quick on his feet, they are about thinking not reacting, and players looking for a relaxing experience not an adrenaline high enjoy these a lot more.



Dungeon of the endless is very much the second type, it is about strategy, tactics, planning, resources management, and this shows in a very big way (AI controlled heroes, area based defense and progression, etc), however in my opinion it makes the mistake of integrating a few "click fest" elements that are out of place and are a source of frustration for the players and your fans. These elements have to go, or get toned down.



The biggest offender is the "heal hero" feature. First of all, sometimes you are trying to quickly select your heroes in a fight and you heal them by mistake, because the buttons are so close together. There should be a keyboard shortcut, such as using the numbers 1 2 3 4 to select your heroes, and being able to order the heroes so your "engineers" who stay behind to manage big modules will be on the right side (3 or 4) while your fighters are on the left side (1 and 2). But most of all I strongly believe that an "auto heal" feature is needed, that when activated, lets the hero heal himself when he gets to 20% health or so.



Right now, when you get deeper into the dungeon, and get problematic spots like looping rooms that require you to defend multiple spots at the same time, you split your heroes and have to press SPACE multiple times in a second to ensure that your heroes don't die. It doesn't help that a lot of the monsters run ahead of your heroes to target structures, so you have to keep clicking room to room (with each one of your heroes) to chase problematic monsters. All that micro is somewhat okey, except the healing. That healing click fest adds lot of painful micro that has no place in a game like this, and when you lose one of your heroes because there was so much going on in multiple spots (looking for where monsters are spawning, which path they are taking, which hero is being attacked, moving hero from room to room, spawning turrets at choice spots when you're over your head with a surprisingly problematic wave, etc) and this hero gets damage burst before you could react or pay attention to him, it feels more like being cheated by the game (fighting the interface, you can't be everywhere at once) than a legitimate loss.



Another feature that I feel is necessary is adding "hero stances / modes / behavior". Isn't it incredibly frustrating when you have 3 heroes defending a room, including multiple "engineer / repair" heroes, and you still lose your modules because the monsters ignore you and go for the structures? Being able to put a hero on "repair first mode" ensures that you can let your fighters do the fighting, while your engineer is repairing the modules in combat. This would add tactical depth, as you choose between extra dps or repair, and further down the road you could even introduce gameplay elements such as repair speed.



Another hero stance would be "defend this room mode", which currently the default behavior for all heroes. And another one "chase & destroy mode". Chase and destroy would make the hero move rooms when the monster he is attacking runs ahead to another room.



Additionally to these modes, it would be useful being able to choose what type of target the hero focus on, just like turrets we could set him on attacking structure killers first, or hero killers first, and so on. Hero specialization in behavior would add depth to the game, and further down the road we could imagine heroes (or their weapon class) with bonus damage to certain types of monsters.



Those were a few suggestions with the logic behind them, but the most important one is adding the auto heal feature. People like me who are much more about strategy and tactical management will be able to enjoy the game more, and those who still want manual healing can disable autohealing, so nothing would be lost. Keep in mind, you made 2 strategy games before this one, none of those previous games were click fests, and chances are most of your fans who are buying dungeon of the endless are strategy minded and would appreciate such features that takes painless micro management out of the picture.



In all cases, keep up the good work! I am a fan of your work and will be following your games for a long time to come.

The keyboard shortcuts are indeed 1,2,3,4 as well as ~ and Q to select all heroes at once. Shift + click or shortcuts allows you to select / deselect specific heroes.

The shortcut for healing is H, for recharging your skills J (I think).

Hi,



Thanks for your feedback

About the “click fest” and auto-heal feature, we understand your opinion, here is ours (quote from a previous answer):

First of all, thank you all for sharing your opinion about this delicate question. In fact, there are still some discussions about this in the team



I don’t think that Auto-heal or Auto-pause are absurd, but here are some arguments why there are no plans to add them



Even if the core gameplay is focused on tactic, we added real time in the game to create this kind of situations and the stress associated. If the game was only about tough resource management choices (which is indeed very important), we would have done a turn based only game

As Unicron and boboanderson said, DotE is about placement and being prepared. If your heroes suddenly lose all their HPs, maybe you don’t use enough defenses or they are misplaced.

We want to give the feeling that the heroes are weak and can’t survive without power and defenses. With auto-heal, we lose that perception.





These arguments may be discussed but give you our vision about this question. I don’t say the current state of the game is perfect But we want to improve it rather by balancing and by adding more feedbacks if necessary.

Our fan base is obviously really important but with DotE, we really wanted to try something different!



The other suggestions, like hero behaviours / targeting, are really interesting and we’re already thinking about how we would implement them in the game after the release, without being too complex.



Thanks again!

I can understand that you want to do something different and I was able to get used a little bit more to the micro management part. Well, not really, but setting up kill rooms with turrets / healing / defense structures to support the heroes is helping. That's a tactical solution to a clickfest problem right there. :P



However I can't look at my heroes visuals or the monsters anymore too often, I am basicly getting into the habit of placing the heroes at key spots when an attack starts and just look at their portraits on the top right to keep healing them without losing anyone, not sure if that is intended by design. The only other solution would be to pause 2 or 3 times per second to look at all the spread out heroes, which is not really practical to me. I like to stay in real time as much as possible. This brings me to another pain / suggestion about the monsters piling up. When they pile up it is very hard to see how many there are, and thus it becomes harder to judge the amount of incoming DPS, and how early or late I can wait before healing when things get messy. In some situations a pack of monster can take half your health in a blink of an eye, and when you die to that it feels like a cheap loss that should not happen. The visuals should be clearer that you're getting in trouble, we should be able to see the number of monsters and their type more clearly. A few suggestions to solve this :



1) Make it so the monsters surround the hero on all sides (more room to show how many they are) instead of piling up on the same tile.

2) If #1 is too problematic, you could display a small number on top of the pile of monsters to tell us how many there are on that spot.

3) An indirect solution would be to spawn more ranged monsters (as in have a balanced ratio of melee and ranged monsters), and of different range. This way they won't all pile up on melee range.

4) Create a new type of monster that is the combination of smaller ones? For instance if you have 6 of those small critters that look like half life headcrabs, they combine into a bigger zombies made up of a blob of them. This zombie would have a very fast attack that is the equivalent of all 6 headcrabs, only difference is that visually we see a single monster instead of 6. (And if you are using suggestion #1 those different monsters will surround the hero and be easier to spot.) -> Small note, this could cause a problem of underestimating this powerful monster because he is only 1, however if the art marks it as dangerous by using different colors (think hornet bees or how nature marks venomous insects by making them more colorful and noticeable) it could easily compensate for this problem.

4.b) Further down the design road we could even imagine different combinations of monsters depending on what small monsters are running about in the same room. This could create more depth / some new game notions like the players prefering to defend multiple spots so they can kill the waves before they combine and creating bigger, more problematic monsters. If not, the bigger monsters will balance big powerful kill zones by being stronger than a multitude of small monsters versus area damage setups and such.