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1

Hammerwatch Discussion / Re: Beta test the new campaign.

« on: August 17, 2014, 05:01:25 AM »

Developed a ranger for Hard specifically with the last boss in mind.

Phase 3 was manageable with the addition of the crystals.

The final phase is impossible, at least solo.

The tracking fireballs are the nail in the coffin there. It's just too much deal with.
They're fast, numerous, and almost impossible to avoid when they're the ONLY thing after you.
They are impossible to dodge when the crystals and minions are also hounding you.

You die in 2 seconds, boss heals another 30% back, and you've pretty much lost all hope of ever taking his full life bar away when you can't even get a hit on him.


Now I could see 4 people being able to do that a bit better, as the attention of everything on screen would be divided and ideally at least 1 person could stay alive long enough so the boss can't heal... but if the fight is going to stay as it is, it would be lovely if it scaled based on number of players in the game.

Any one of these would make it feel less impossible:

- Healing rate scales down with fewer players
- Less tracking fireballs with fewer players
- lower tracking fireball damage in general
- longer cool down between tracking fireball usage
- change them from tracking fireballs to a predictable pattern swirl out around the boss (I thought it already did this until I tried it again)

Again, the boss is a great challenge and it's been a blast trying to beat him. But the final phase could really use something to help games with less then 4 players not instantly explode upon trying to step on that platform.


This was a 150 HP ranger with, I would guess, somewhere between 10 and 14 armor. The tracking fireballs were pretty much instant death every time. No way to escape (usually crystals), no room to dodge them (other fire balls/minions on screen) without still taking damage, and even the gold I could still get, I couldn't see another 30-40 health or 1-3 more armor saving me. And I hadn't even died against the boss until the final phase.

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Hammerwatch Discussion / Re: Beta test the new campaign.

« on: August 16, 2014, 04:18:34 AM »

On the second boss, we were able to get out of bounds during the fight. Somehow the wall in the upper right corner of the room you start in could be walked through, despite visually still being there.

There's a section in Temple 2 where you can walk out on the blackness. It's a 4 square vertical strip roughly in the middle. You enter from the bottom left side. Again, doesn't break anything, but odd that you can do it. Sorry no screenshot, I can't seem to get my computer to capture/save anything.

Temple 3's Teleporter didn't give us a return option. The bottom left rune didn't show up on the circle when we returned to the surface. This was a hard online game with infinite lives, wizard/warlock duo. A few other teleporters were also not active (by choice or missing them). I'll look into which other ones we didn't turn on if that would help.



Here's some enemy feedback now that I've spent more time with the campaign:

BOSS 1 - They all wanders off way too much. I don't think it would hurt if they were a tad more aggressive to give more chances to actually land a hit, particularly for melee heavy characters. Even having them stay out a half second longer would be a much appreciated change to the encounter. All in all, the most frustrating part is still waiting for it to come back, only to get one chance to attack and have it wander off... again.

BOSS 2 - The blast radius on his far around him orb circle is freakin' huge! (at least on hard difficulty). It's almost impossible to approach him without getting hit by it at least once. A slightly longer wind up time before it has a hurt box or a smaller blast zone would make that attack not feel like it needs pixel perfect timing to avoid.
Also, do the icicles need to be there? It's tricky enough trying to dodge all the tracking projectiles to get a shot at the boss. Throw in frequent instant kill gigantic AoE adds an element of randomness that sometimes slowed the fight to a crawl. It would be nice if they were less frequent and/or smaller in size, like the dragon's meteor strike.

BOSS 3 - Holy crap, this guy on hard difficulty, holy crap. Is it actually possible for a player to solo him on hard? With just two of us we couldn't cope with the sheer number of enemies and attacks going on. He had healed himself back up to almost 50% because we were dying so often. No suggestions here, just felt the need to comment. Talk about a daunting encounter!

FIRE/ICE ORB WIZARDS - The hit box for their attacks seem to show up instantly with no indicator other then your own sense of timing, similar to the Boss 2 orbs. A few more frames of visible start up before they deal damage would make these guys feel far less cheap. Difficulty doesn't seem to make a difference for these attacks.

PLANTS/PINK HAT ENEMIES - They both do an out of the ground below the player attack. The wizard really struggles against these because he must stop moving to us any attack. I suppose this is more a wizard issue then the enemies themselves, but I still felt it was worth noting.

MINI-BOSS MUMMIES - If these guys are designed to be enemies you need to bait into traps to kill safely, job well done! If there is a way to actually melee them without being eaten alive by locust, it wouldn't hurt to offer a tip about it in game in a hard to miss spot.


SUN BEAMS - could you maybe open up the hallways these pass through so travelling past them isn't a chore in very careful button tapping to get a wall hug going? It hampers exploration and really turns into more of a frustration then a fun mechanic.



Overall it's a solid campaign. The difficulty has been frustrating in the good way. It makes me want to play smarter and try new strategies. Definitely feels like it was made with multiplayer in mind, as playing solo is actually pretty daunting! This is all meant as feedback, and is completely subject to opinion, at least for the enemy suggestions. The bugs are... well, bugs. XD

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Hammerwatch Discussion / Re: Beta test the new campaign.

« on: August 13, 2014, 11:45:17 PM »

The mole hole boss, is meant to reset his health, as every mole i think has their own hp bar. I killed like 4 moles, and there was one left, which had it's own hp bar, and it actually went down, unlike the others, and once it went down, i won.

Interesting. Then rather then being a bug, is it that the display is unclear?

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Hammerwatch Discussion / Wizard's Spells - What am I missing?

« on: August 13, 2014, 06:21:53 AM »

I just completed a solo run as the wizard on hard with no extra lives and no mana regen challenges turned on. The entire run was completed without actually using my mana. While the success of the run was surprising spamming my fireball the entire time, I feel like maybe I was overlooking an important aspect of the Wizard's mana consuming utilities. To shed some light on it, here are my rationals for skipping the extra spells:

FLAME BREATH:
- sucks up mana ridiculously fast
- barely does more damage then the basic fireball
- greatly obscures the view of what enemies are doing
- can't move while using it

Not being able to move was the main gripe, as standing still against enemies is practically a death sentence for every class on hard mode

FROST NOVA:
- No damage
- Snaring never felt necessary
- Good utility effect for the price
- Further upgrades not so good for the price

The advantage of the snare does make sense for lagging online play or a more aggressive/reckless play stile. It's still easily ignored with smart maneuvering.

METEOR:
- High mana cost
- High gold investment
- Must stand still briefly
- Limited boss usefulness
- upgrades come really late

This spell is fun. It's incredibly satisfying to blow up the entire screen. Act 4 especially has many situations where it could be a big help. What feels lacking is the sense of synergy.

The best example I can give is the Priest. At the start of the game, beam has the advantage of higher damage to a single target and better range then the basic attack. The priest also suffers NO movement penalty from this. It becomes clear pretty quickly that that priest is a character that will need to invest heavily in mana to be effective. This is continued with the drain circle, which is a huge boost to offensive power. Even the slow aura has a sense of utility in combination with the rest of the priest's arsenal.

The wizard, however, I was met with an almost immediate sense of "Well this is junk" when trying to make flame breath work. Frost nova doing no damage just made enemies take longer to get into fire ball range, and of course doesn't work the one thing you'd really like it to: bosses. Combine with how fragile the wizard is and having to stand still for every damaging attack, the natural progression focused on the fireball itself and being durable enough to survive a mistake. Then 2/3 to 3/4 through the game you're suddenly introduced to Meteor with basically no investment in mana to use it. In fact, if you somehow never got a  two +10 mana boosts through the first half of the game, you won't even be able to cast meteor until you buy a mana upgrade!



The TL:DR version

Flame Breath - Feels pointless because of high mana cost/rooted to cast
Frost Nova - helpful to unlock, poor good investment for further upgrades
Meteor - Holy crap amazing! but really feels like a gimmick super move then an actual combat option due to poor synergy with other mana based attacks, high gold investment, and late arrival.



I'm a habitual min/maxer with a tendency towards sustained DPS, and focusing gold towards fireball damage, combo, and enough durability to survive a mistake keeps winning out every time I try to play the wizard. There you have it.

So what am I missing?
The benefits of team play perhaps so you can be more of a glass cannon?
Have I grossly underestimated the power of flame breath?
Does chill do something else on top of slowing movement speed?

I'd really like to try something else on the wizard, but any attempts to beef up his spells just ends in death, frustration, and relying on fireball anyway because I'm out of mana again.

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Hammerwatch Discussion / Re: Beta test the new campaign.

« on: August 13, 2014, 05:36:50 AM »

Just got started. Having a sense of people and towns is a nice change after so many dives through the main campaign always being waist deep in monster!

Is there anything you can do about the dialog interface?
A button to scroll through to the next message would be great. I've walked away from 2 different people now having read what they said, only to find they had more to say.
If you can make it button sensitive, it might be easier to read through the dialog if each sentence had its own box with a (more..) or some kind of icon to indicate they have more to say on each box until they dialog is complete.

That seems pretty intuitive to me when it comes to talking to NPC's. It also, hopefully, would reduce the size of the text boxes. Large blobs of text are daunting, and I have friends with this game that wouldn't even bother to read it the moment one of those huge boxes filled their screens.

EDIT: Right after posting this, I found the guest book. That's really nice to look at and gives you an idea of where you are in flipping through the book. Must better then trying to talk to the NPCs.

EDIT 2: Arena boss mysterious reset his HP bar on me. I had killed 3 of the mouths and the HP bar was at about 65-70%. Did a little damage to it in the south central part of the map. It wandered off, and suddenly had full HP again. Another mouth finally showed up and died quickly without changing the boss HP. The rest of the fight went fine with the final mouth going showing boss HP bar damage until I won.

Playing as Cleric on Hard. Inf lives. with Run Speed 1, Smite 1, Move Penalty 1, Drain Circle, and 1 mana upgrade. Picked up 4 damage upgrades, 2 armor, 1 mana, and 3 health. Had around 343 gold during the fight. Is there any other info that would be helpful for these situations?