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[Dungeon Defenders] Now with Awakening Beta flavour!!

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    VelmeranVelmeran Registered User regular
    My wife actually wanted to try out Dungeon Defenders 2 last night, after we've had it for...a very long time but not having the time/energy due to a baby coming along. There was a little learning curve at first, but she got her first taste of victory and is now asking if we can play again tonight. Now I'm just hoping if we make it through hard difficulty that we're not stuck with time limited building on the harder difficulties like we were in DD1 which killed the game for her as she's not good and running around the maps, but likes the strategic tower placement and management parts of the game.

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    The Dude With HerpesThe Dude With Herpes Lehi, UTRegistered User regular
    edited August 2016
    Played a bit last night. Bought the gun witch and lavamancer but ended up playing Abyss Lord most of the time until I get them leveled.

    I was under the impression that there had been a change to share xp in your deck, i.e. full sharing; but that clearly doesn't seem to be the case unfortunately. Guess i'll be spamming Harbinger for awhile instead of leveling them naturally while doing other stuff.

    Regardless! The past few patches and balance changes have made some pretty substantial changes in content flow! A few months ago (around when the Carnival ended) I could do maybe the first round or two of NM1, any map, and pray that a thing or two dropped to try to gear up to actually handling NM1.

    Now I can actually do NM1 without much headache! It feels awesome, and I'm getting my Abyss Lord close to ilvl to do NM2 to see how that is. Right now I've been doing it with Abyss Lord, Squire, and Monk; but I imagine with a bit more planning and better gear stats, I could do it with Abyss Lord or Squire alone (i.e. either or). I'm just putting that out there so new players can know that there is plenty of progression to be had before you hit the wall of really wanting multiple classes for their specific defenses. A solo or duo (class, not player) setup will pretty much always result in more flexibility, but with the power surge update, it feels like you can now go with your favorite class if you really want and not feel like you can't progress past hard. :rotate:

    Aaaanyway, dunno how much I'll play this spurt, as I've got family in town and a million other things going on, but I want to check out a few more changes before the tidal wave of life takes me away from DD2 again for awhile.

    Also, just as kind of an aside, Abyss Lord feels so good. I haven't put much time into the other new classes yet, but the synergy between its abilities and towers is unlike any of the base classes and feels far more active in your participation and interaction between yourself, enemies, and your towers. Highly recommend it if you're considering checking out a new class and either earn the coin, or buy the crystals.

    EDIT: I don't think @Hitmonchan107 frequents these boards anymore, alas, but just in case he still occasionally reads them....pleasepleasepleaseplease put something in the tooltips in-game that explains to players how what stats effect any given ability or tower/trap. Beyond the obvious effects on straightforward traps like the cannon tower; what stats effect, say, boost aura? Defense Power makes it stronger, but what interaction do other stats have with it? On Abyss Lord what stats are effected with I empower a tower? Does it multiply the towers stats, or does it use my ability power to increase it? With what ratio?

    Things like that. DD1 had a similar problem, but since DD2 is still in development I'm hoping to get some in-game explanations so builds are less nebulous.

    Also a clarification on XP sharing in a deck would be good. From what I could gather the 3 cards you're not currently controlling get some XP, but I don't know how much, and not nearly as much as the current active character (which makes leveling classes while doing NM1 maps problematic, and harbinger farming is god awfully boring). The daily XP bonuses for first time completions is nice, but isn't nearly substantial enough to compensate for how much quicker you get xp farming harbinger and there's the problem of trying to remember to change to the lower level class before the stage completes so they can get the XP properly.

    The Dude With Herpes on
    Steam: Galedrid - XBL: Galedrid - PSN: Galedrid
    Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
    Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand

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    The Dude With HerpesThe Dude With Herpes Lehi, UTRegistered User regular
    Oh, also, DD1 (not eternity) got a small update that added a map (or two?) a couple achievements, and cards. Haven't checked it out as I haven't even had it installed in ages.

    Steam: Galedrid - XBL: Galedrid - PSN: Galedrid
    Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
    Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand

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    DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    Oh, also, DD1 (not eternity) got a small update that added a map (or two?) a couple achievements, and cards. Haven't checked it out as I haven't even had it installed in ages.

    It also added a boss and a new enemy type

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    Magic PinkMagic Pink Tur-Boner-Fed Registered User regular

    I was under the impression that there had been a change to share xp in your deck, i.e. full sharing; but that clearly doesn't seem to be the case unfortunately.

    That's definitely what's happening on the PS4. I've just been playing Abyss Lord but my unplayed Apprentice is the same level.

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    The Dude With HerpesThe Dude With Herpes Lehi, UTRegistered User regular
    Magic Pink wrote: »

    I was under the impression that there had been a change to share xp in your deck, i.e. full sharing; but that clearly doesn't seem to be the case unfortunately.

    That's definitely what's happening on the PS4. I've just been playing Abyss Lord but my unplayed Apprentice is the same level.

    I'm confused then, because it isn't that good for me on the PC. I did a NM1 throne room with a level 1 lavamancer in the 4th slot and 50s in the other 3 for the bonus xp, and at the end with ~300k xp he was level 5. A single Harbinger (100k ish solo on normal iirc) gets a level 1 to about 13 if they're active in every round.

    I don't get it.

    Steam: Galedrid - XBL: Galedrid - PSN: Galedrid
    Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
    Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand

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    VelmeranVelmeran Registered User regular
    Anyone know if there's been any statements about local co-op on PC? searching their forums which doesn't seperate DD1 and DD2, nor show last post date in the results is just horrible. Seems like back in 2014 they were waiting for PS4 stuff to be finished, not I can't find anything talking about it besides a few request for info which went unanswered.

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    DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    Not that I know of. As far as I know, I thought they had said they weren't going to implement it for whatever reason. I could easily be wrong though.

    Since no one else has mentioned it, they announced some cross over content with Terraria! Both games will get some content from the other and it all looks pretty rad.

    http://youtu.be/71J5iuBiKek

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    DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    Okay, the new update is live with the Dryad and new map and such! I haven't had much of a chance to check it out, but it seems good so far. You gotta build the dryad's world tree and then put her defenses inside it's range, but you can upgrade the tree to boost it's range and also it's healing and buffing power so that's pretty cool. The only thing that sucks is that the new map is nightmare difficulty only, and I don't have any characters geared for nightmare.

    Also, since I last started playing this game again, they boosted my existing characters to level 50 for some reason. Bug? Feature? I don't know, but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the vagina and I'm using them to help level all my newer characters.

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    DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    Okay, so there's a big update coming out soonish for this game. In it, they'll be changing how a lot of things work and will allow you to have a lot more control over your gear and passives and such, and make it easier for your characters to be both builders and DPS. Here's the blog post with a ton of info on it, and here's a video of a livestream they did a couple of days ago about it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3ymkQzBMQ

    Does anyone even still play this? I realize this is the third post in a row I've made about updates, and nobody else has posted in here since November, so I'll stop bumping this thread if I'm the only one keeping it alive.

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    VelmeranVelmeran Registered User regular
    I keep paying attention to it, but due to lack of split screen and my wife's computer being across the house next to the baby room with paper thin walls, we haven't had much chance to play together lately. The new big update looks really great though, simplifies things greatly which my wife will like.

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    The Dude With HerpesThe Dude With Herpes Lehi, UTRegistered User regular
    edited March 2017
    So...

    I think I'm done.

    This update is mind boggling.

    If this were a clean launch, how the game was out of the gate, it would probably be fantastic.

    But it isn't. People have hundreds of hours played, hundreds of dollars spent.

    I have more time in DD2 than most any other (not MMO) game I own (125 hours atm, according to steam), and for all the time spent leveling, farming, gearing, grinding, I might as well have nothing.

    On paper, the update sounds great. The systems are fine. In fact they're pretty much flat better than what they had before, functionally; but that is less because the old system wasn't workable, but because so much of the old system was haphazard and unfinished. Skill spheres have been broken for months, or longer in some cases, never to be fixed, and now they're gone. The new shard system is fine, but is objectively grindier than anything they had before. Now each item has several slots you can put a shard in, but shards aren't like spheres where you unlock and you're good. You just get one at a time and they are occupied when you put them in something, meaning no other hero can use them. So, for instance, a +defense power sphere; before you bought it, you had it. You could use it on any number of heroes. Now, you get a +defense power shard and you can use it on one item on one hero. So even for just a 4 hero deck, which is minimal, you would need at least 4 shards to get any bonus on all 4 characters. And more, each tower now has its own relic slot, so that +defense power shard is only for one tower, on one hero. Want +defense power on 4 towers on 4 heroes? 16 shards. And that is on top of the already existing gear grind, though to be fair, since they're not class locked anymore (via passives) it is easier to farm for gear since the pool is limited to a small handful of archtypes that you can use on any character.

    Which is better!

    Again, many things in the patch are better, most objectively, some subjective.

    Why I think I'm done, however, is that the 125 hours I've spent playing is virtually worthless. Yes, I can do Chaos I, probably some maps of Chaos II (they renamed Nightmare Chaos, presumably to use Nightmare again later for harder stuff because people were complaining that Nightmare in DD1 was actually the highest difficulty stuff). Here is the problem. Problems, I should say:

    Gear drops in Chaos I/II are far below the gear I carried over from before. Meaning gearing new characters, or characters I didn't have geared before, will get them gear that isn't sufficient to clear the content it drops in.

    Which is terrible.

    On top of that, all of my class specific passives are gone. Straight up gone. Time spent farming a good Toxic Shock bow for Poison Dart Tower, or Infernal Combuster for Serenity Aura? Wasted. Those passives are gone, the weapons are completely generic now. Assuming those passives even exist at all as a shard, I have to farm chaos maps in the hope that one of the shards unlocks said passive (it is completely random, with no limitation on duplicates). Time spent looking for a good relic with a nice Idle Flow number? Nope. Not that it would matter because Serenity Aura is gone entirely.

    So in order to have even a small chance at getting shards to give me the passives I already had on gear I spent many hours farming, I have to farm content that provides gear that is completely useless, in the hope that maybe I get a shard to use to bring me anywhere close to where I was before.

    Oh, did I forget to mention that towers, across the board, are profoundly weaker in every regard than before? I think that the change to stats (armor/weapons are hero stats now, period, relics are tower stats, period) is supposed to account for this, making your heroes stronger in whatever regard they were weak before, should balance out the difference. I think that is their going theory. But it dismisses entire playstyles. I personally don't care too much for hero builds. I had a good EV and Gunwitch I kept around to DPS, but I primarily built tower heroes. Now you can have both. Great, right? Not if the trade-off is towers with substantially reduced range and damage, missing passives that made barriers actually functional, and other passives that synergized various types of towers to create feasible builds.

    Currently, on my Squire, for instance, despite the numbers saying my towers should be really good, my Ballista, in a position it can't just get one shotted, can't reach enemies that can reach it, and especially can't reach enemies who can reach the blockades. The Cannons are even more laughably short range, behind a Blockade they may as well be point blank towers with no range because they can barely shoot (functionally) past the first row of enemies attacking the blockades. Plus, losing any passives that gave them AoE (Splody) or stun (Shellshock) makes them straight damage. Which has been reduced a lot.

    The towers feel like they did at level 1, before gear, spheres, or passives. But I can do more damage with my sword! Which...isn't what I wanted? I don't want to run around to every pack of enemies swinging away, I want to set up good defenses and let my towers do the heavy lifting so I can focus on the trickier enemies like ogres or rollers. Now I have to babysit my towers because they functionally can't do much besides hold back waves until I can go and manually clean them up.

    It feels terrible.

    And I am not going to spend another 125 hours farming shards to get back the passives and abilities I already spent 125 hours earning in the first damn place.

    The last thing is Ascension levels. Another system, had it been in from the get go; great. But now? Having lost any interesting passives, combos, abilities, having my towers be painfully weak shells of what they were even a day ago; to think that not only would I have to grind for the hope of getting shards for passives I already earned, but then earn Ascension levels to regain stats (namely tower range) that I already had on gear, and suddenly don't?

    No.

    The things they gave veteran players (up to 36 generic shards, and by generic I mean generic, some gold, and that is it. No ascension levels, no passives to replace all those taken away on unique or legendary gear, just a bunch of gold and a handful of pitiful shards) don't remotely make up (I cannot express how far away their consolation items are from what many of us had gained) for what was lost, and the only recourse would be to buckle down and regrind everything to maybe be somewhere in the same ballpark of capability that we were prior to the patch.

    No.

    Again, if you are a new player or haven't put much time into the game, these new systems are probably fantastic. They're solid, the end-game map difficulty is set up to scale more like DD1, which people were begging for, gear isn't the only upgrade path now, so even if you're not getting decent shards, you're still getting ascension levels...etc.

    If you were starting from square one, all the new things would probably synergize really well.

    But I'm not at square one. I have 12 level 50's, several who were well geared, and had unique weapons and spheres providing a lot of gameplay options. And aside from having the heroes, still, my options are gone and I'm not going to spend time reearning what I already earned and was taken.

    Which really sucks. Because it is a good game. But this update completely dicked me over, and I can't imagine how much people who put substantially more time and energy into the game must feel. Maybe they will be happy for a change of pace. I don't know. I just know I can't do this again.

    The Dude With Herpes on
    Steam: Galedrid - XBL: Galedrid - PSN: Galedrid
    Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
    Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand

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    VelmeranVelmeran Registered User regular
    On the opposite side of things, I feel a bit overwhelmed as I never got that far into things, lvl30 or so was my highest character as I have been waiting for a situation where the wife and I can play again. Now I logged in and all my characters are level 49, new gear, new stuff I gotta figure out what goes where, and I have no idea where I should be going as it unlocked all the maps for normal/hard too. I kind of want to just have it reset all my characters to lvl1 and start new again as that would make more sense, but then grinding also kinda sucks so starting from here isn't terrible once I figure out what I should be doing.

    I agree though that the equipment wipe really sucked as I don't care for the base bow and EV gun that I have at the moment, can't wait for something else to drop.

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    The Dude With HerpesThe Dude With Herpes Lehi, UTRegistered User regular
    edited March 2017
    Oy, every patch since the revamp has been more clueless than the last.

    After my big post I gave a couple maps a go again and figured out I could actually do a handful of Chaos 3 maps, primarily with the Dryad. Not that it mattered, because they were still dropping level 46 gear with less than half a dozen level 50 items, none of which were remotely close to the gear I already had that was letting me do Chaos 3 at all.

    The next patch nerfed the Dryad.

    Then I heard Abyss Lord was actually decent with the right setup.

    The next patch nerfed the Abyss Lord.

    Todays patch? It changes some enemy spawn groups in Chaos, which is fine, I guess; but everything else it did for xp, gear and shards was a nerf.

    I should just stop following the patches, because it is just an exercise in frustration. I just keep hoping...

    Bleh.

    The Dude With Herpes on
    Steam: Galedrid - XBL: Galedrid - PSN: Galedrid
    Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
    Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand

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    DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    So this game apparently came out of early access back in June, and there've also been several subsequent updates since then that have all changed things, added stuff, etc. I haven't gone through all the changes or additions yet but it seems there is now a mastery game mode that adds "hyper shards", golden pets, cosmetic items for your characters to wear, plus the usual tweaks and such to characters. Also, apparently the female apprentice and monk got added as well? I just spent a couple of hours this morning fucking around in-game and seeing which of my characters needs new gear, shards, applying ascension points (apparently all my points got refunded so I got to reallocate them which was nice)

    What got my attention though was Trendy's latest devlog about their upcoming update. They're going to finally add Onslaught mode, more cosmetic stuff, and a huge map that has quite a lot of possible crystal and path positions and it chooses from those possibilities every time you play on it. Seems kinda neat so I'll keep my eye on it

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OXWOhTV6Vc

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    Gnome-InterruptusGnome-Interruptus Registered User regular
    Necro arise

    Dungeon Defenders Awakenings has just been released for presale on Steam with Open Beta access for anyone who prebuys

    Trying it out, it feels like they are going backwards in some ways from FTP DD2 with having to choose between DPS, Walls, Towers again

    Also the animation/ walk speed of mobs feels a bit janky at first.

    Anyone else playing this?

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    MWO: Adamski
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