This happened to me on level 11. All 3 heroes defending the room, with high health high defense, got one shotted by a group of explosive monsters.



I don't mean died in half a second where there was the slightest chance of healing, I mean literally instant dead with no chance of pausing or healing.



This can't be by design, this situation has no counter at all and feels like a very cheap way to die.



It could be solved by adding a timer to the other explosive monsters each time one of them explodes in the same room or same area. Supposed you add a 0.1 second delay for each explosion, that would give a little bit more time for the player to react and heal.

Happened to me in a game last night, also on floor 11... I'm thinking that maybe floors 11 and 12 just aren't balanced yet because they're new... which is pretty lame, because people still have to play them right now.

Also same problem with buildings.



Could it be that explosive monsters ignore defense?



I built the +200% to defense to modules structure, yet my buildings keep dying to explosive monsters at the exact same speed. My conclusion is that explosions ignore defense, and really should not ;defense should mitigate explosions. Another solution would be to make it so that 200% defense to buildings become +200% to HEALTH of buildings.



That doesn't fix the hero problem, but while we wait for them to do that I recommend you choose meaty heroes like the butcher and avoid taking any support / engineer heroes. Engineers seem to get stuck at 800-1000 health even at high level, same with most heroes, but the butcher for instance goes up to 2000+ health around level 12 or so. I am not sure how many heroes can go up this high in health, but choice of hero the solution : I don't think the developers want us to use the same heroes every time that would be very boring.



Another potentially related problem is that explosions hit everything in the room no matter the placement. I tried to counter explosives by building defenses in long corridors, so my turrets and ranged heroes could be at the back of the room, while my "healthy tank" hero is in the front taking the brunt of the attack, but that doesn't work as explosions hit everything in the room and all defenses and turrets (and heroes) die when you get 3-4 explosions at the same time.



What could solve the problem :



- Delay on explosion chain to give player time to heal

- Make defense count in mitigating explosions

- Make explosions area of effect instead of affecting all the room, this way at least heroes can run away... right now running away is useless as they can't leave the room before monsters explode.

Hi,



Thanks for this feedback.

The zone damage does not ignore defence: the damage is slightly reduced with the LAN module (could be more efficient, you're right).

We will work on a solution to reduce the problem!

Thanks for listening.

DrakenKin wrote:
Another solution would be to make it so that 200% defense to buildings become +200% to HEALTH of buildings.

This is how defense already works. The damage formula comes out such that 1% defense is equivalent to 1% more health.



I agree that multiple exploders feel pretty cheap. If two or three come out with overlapping sprites from an unlucky spawning pile, it can become basically an unstoppable 1hko to whoever you decide to sacrifice. You can pull your mans back from the room, but then sometimes they won't explode until they catch a hero guy. I am also not sure which turrets would prioritize them - are they 'anti-module,' 'anti-hero,' or 'special?' Sort of all those.



They're probably the single biggest threat to everything right now, which is maybe by design. I would like a clearer way of dealing with them - maybe a more obvious phrase saying which turrets will shoot at them, or an earlier warning of which room they're going to explode in, as with the door smashers. By the time they start puffing up, it's too late to move anyone out of the way, and there's no way to tell all your heroes to jump on it before the pop. Maybe they could start smoking or something?

I was working under the asumption that they are considered "special". However designing rooms with anti special turrets, they won't die fast enough and will still explode before you can damage burst them, especially when there are many. (Big room full of turrets + 150 + 120 dps heroes)

This happened to me in my recent previous game. I was left with only max . He did alright until the same 1hk mobs got to him, again..

I had this happen to me on floor 12 very easy as well, right at the last wave, the hero (sara) was around level 13 with the um body armor, was the highest defense I found and I panned to look at one defensive side, and suddenly she was dead.



It really was just out of nowhere, and was hard to see coming. It was my first (well second after I figured out monsters endlessly spawn when you pick the crystal up hehe) run but was very spiky.



I think it is a hard problem to solve since monsters by their nature will stack up and come at an uncontrollable pace, so getting into spike damage situations seems to be the nature of the game. Still, I would rather see a health bar dropping rapidly rather than it disappearing all in one go unless hit by something predictable.



Some things that might work is if it is just the exploding guys causing the big problems is to have them pause and play a sound and glow or go into an anticipation animation for 3 seconds or so and then they pop. This would catch people not paying attention or unable to leave a room with a fair amount of incoming damage. For the rest you could pause when you hear the sound and retreat a room, or even run into a forward room to trigger their pop then back again.



Another problem I think the game has is related, the stacked up mobs are hard to see what exactly is going on, who is attacking what. That might be part of the games chaos, but would be interesting to have mobs and heros position themselves in each room, maybe line up almost rpg like, say divide the room in half based on where mobs and npcs are entering and the melee heros/monsters line up close to it with the ranged moving towards the back, while module bashing monsters go hit at the modules. This probably wouldn't work for every room configuration, especially the tiny rooms though, but still would maybe be a way to add a bit more visual feedback with what is happening.



A lot of monster abilities were not clear to me until I read the wiki, even after having cleared it on very easy. I knew for example the crystal guys would go right for modules. I did not know why all of my module's health bars were dropping, I just assumed in the pack there were some that specifically target them, not that they do AOE damage to every module in the room.



I like the 'rogue' idea of having to discover what is happening, but with no UI tooltip, debuff icon/animation, or visual feedback on what is going on, it can be hard to understand everything. Even with those kinds of things, I think with the amount of creatures getting jammed up on corridors and effects triggering at once, it might end up making everything more chaotic.



I'm not sure its an easy problem to solve (if it is even really a problem) but just thought I would add my feedback.



Also if I wasn't clear, I really think this is a great game, when I saw the 'doors as turns' mechanic in it I immediately went and purchased it, it was so clever, and the game hasn't disappointed at all.

This still seems to be a problem, or at least from my experience as I had my most powerful hero, with 60+ armor, die in 0.5 seconds due to a pack of suiciders, that is NOT supposed to be able to happen, at least make some kinda limitation on how many suiciders can spawn and some algorithm to keep them from bunching up in one massive ball of death, because there is seriously nothing you can do against them except run, at least make them more visible, like have some icon over them perhaps.

I had similar problems with "purple-explosive-fatmans": when a wave consist mostly of them it's unstopable. But I've also had this much troubles with "door crushers", who is overpowered in my opinion. It's ok that they can take away resourses, related to door opening, release additional pack of monsters, but it's not when they causes floor size respawn in every unpowered room, new waves of wich are likely to include new "door crushers", what is trigger long chain of door opening/ monster spawning, what ends with wipe out mostly (had 3 or 4 times of those). It's even worse with library pod, when a player doesn't have enough hero's dps to just kill door crusher in time. Also I've noticed that a single door crusher can open more than one door at once, what is probably another point to balance.

Generaly, the difficulty of DotE growns up smooth level by level, exept the final ~3 floors depends on luck in some way, so maybe those balance fixes could improve the situation.

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