hey its a life and death situation so we cant leave it to 8 out of 9 games.

Pardon me if I'm slow, but as I understand it HorseStrangler (btw, weren't you obscenitor at one point?) is very much against the current version of uproot because:

1. Uproot AOE damage against rook tower farm is insane (200 dps forever)
2. Uproot AOE damage against any demigod trying to break down the rook tower farm is insane (200 dps + tower attacks forever)
3. Uproot healing effect makes taking down a tower guarded by a QoT virtually impossible.
4. The AOE effect destroys minions and creeps.

Now, the question is how to deal with these situations.

1. The damage is very nasty, true. Perhaps reducing the damage against structure would resolve this or reducing the AOE size? If a rook stacks all his towers in one spot, he is abusing a game mechanic (towers do not block movement or placement of more towers) and may deserve what he gets.
2. The AOE only effects melee demigods, but it is really strong. Armor mitigated AOE damage would reduce this to near Ooze level, but without the attack speed debuff.
   
3. As a forward tower guard I don't see an issue with this, however with a rook providing a moving tower field the combination may prove too much.
4. Minotaur warriors aren't important, they die too quickly anyway. Shamblers, Archers, priests and catapults do not move within AOE range. That leaves, yetis (trash regardless), vampires, and giants.
   

• Versus giants: the QoT could wipe them out using ground spikes, is this any worse?
• Versus vampires: I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for Lord Erebus (I am a little biased here). Is this a real concern?
  
• Versus yetis: They are complete trash, I'm not sure they should matter.

Now I have my own questions:

1. Minion Lord Erebus completely dominates autoattack Regulus, is this level of domination acceptable? If so, could we use this as a rough balance equivalent? (I am rephrasing from a previous post).
2. As I understand it, part of the problem is that Rook + QoT form an unstoppable tower/flag pushing combination. Do you think increasing the skill recharge to 30 (or more) seconds would nullify this? 
3. There are items that grant minions armor, would these items be useful in finding a balance against the AOE?
4. If these ideas aren't enough, what about dropping the AOE from the healing effect and replacing it with a damage reflection shield, or just removing it without providing a replacement?

Minion armor items are impractical. They do exist, but they're things like God Plate, All Father's Ring, and the Bulwark of the Ages. There's probaby one or two more, but they're few and far between.

Furthermore QoT can reduce armor to -1500, meaning 280% damage, which would buff the AoE effect to 560 DPS against minions at level 10 if your build included both, and in spite of that you would rarely get much usage out of the ability without the presence of a Rook.

The ability with the suggested effects just focuses way too much on countering a single character, not to mention if your intention is to make it do Z damage why start it at X damage and then assume it'll be modified by Y? Just make it do Z, in other words if you want it to do 40% less damage because of armor, just make it do 40% less, remove armor from the equation, and be done with it.

 

When it comes to countering tower stacking QoT already does that excellently with Ground Spikes and her splash damage autoattack. She wrecks tower stacks as-is, why design a new ability that trivializes them outright and serves little other purpose?

 

I don't think a tower regaining health at 200 HP/S would be unkillable by any means, btw. QoT doesn't have infinite mana and just as they do now the tower would fall when she died or went home to shop/regen. Not even 500 HP/S is going to save the thing if you're not there for 30 seconds and two DGs plow through it before you arrive to help.

When I'm Rook a single regulus can tear down towers as fast as I build them late game if they focus on them even though I can drop a 2800 HP tower every 7'ish seconds; I'm basically producing 400 HP/sec worth of towers and he can still prevent the production of a tower farm, three people focus firing a tower is going to require 2-3 other players to stop regardless of how strong the heal is, unless you really take it to crazy town. I really can't reiterate enough that it's not the healing quantity with which I take issue, it's the concept of the ability.

 

The concept is simple: You drop points into an ability which buffs towers, but towers don't always exist. Therefore the ability is always going to be very, very situational. Assuming A rook is present, I kid you not that 15 damage per level, so 15/30/45/60 (unless you really, really gutted the radius) would make the ability sufficiently powerful, but when rook isn't present not even 100/200/300/400 would necessarily be enough to make it worthwhile.

That's my real issue and I have no idea what the solution is. There's no other ability in the game which is so dependent on your opponent's character to function. That's not to say some builds don't work better against certain characters than others, but there's nothing comparable to Rock/Paper/Scissors in the game currently.

Sure they do. They constantly run past friendly towers.

There's a massive difference between killing them with a near melee range, interruptible skill and a fire and forget shot

• Versus vampires: I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for Lord Erebus (I am a little biased here). Is this a real concern?

  End of quote

Honestly if you're being reasonable, yes, it is.

I'd like to once again thank you for taking the time to think about these issues and provide constructive responses. I do value your input. I'll try to address the points that you brought up. If I miss any or mistake your intent, please correct me.

Minion Armor Items that you missed:

1. Pendant of Grace (dodge actually, but similar mechanic)
2. Ironwalkers
3. Forest Band

I had thought there were a few more, but it now does seem more underwhelming than I had recalled.

Currently in this mod, Ground Spikes doesn't reduce armor by a set value, it reduces armor by a percentage, so that part of your argument doesn't hold up.

I'm not certain why you have the belief that I'm targetting the Rook with these changes. It is really a side effect. I wanted to give the QoT an ability to support towers, and to punish demigods who decided to try to do that extra 1k damage to finish off a tower. This way if they stay around to do it, they will be hurt a little bit more.

If you jump back to the original change list you'll recall that Ground Spikes no longer matter against towers. Even so, I'm not sure a queen would want to engage a stack of 4 or 5 towers by herself (even with minion/creep support). That's a ton of damage she would have to soak before they go down. Plus the Rook isn't going to stand around and watch. Then again your Rook is very good, so you might have different experiences against better QoT's than mine.

I'm trying to buff uproot to make it worthwhile, not to diminish other skills.

As for the 200 HP/S being unkillable or not, at this point the mana cost for uproot is trivial, the QoT could keep it operational indefinitely.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. I modified Uproot to be more useful in general, not to focus on the Rook. The coincidence is that they both have powers that involve structures. The major aim in the uproot buff was to provide both an offensive and defense use for the power. Previously the offensive damage was too little, so I enhanced the damage with an AOE and a mana cost reduction. The healing effect was added as a defensive ability, and the AOE went with it to push back or kill whatever is harassing the tower.

I'm not really understanding how the 25/50/75/100 would be overpowered (assuming the presence of a Rook). As I understand it that would be 250 aoe damage over 10 seconds + 500 base tower damage. Will 250 damage against a Rook at Level 1-3 make that big of a difference?

I'm having a hard time seeing the situation you are addressing here. The QoT is only going to have 1 Uproot in effect at one time. I'm thinking about the Uproot AOE being like a TBs flame circle or the two cheap artifact AOEs, I don't seem to recall these being a problem, how does the Uproot situation differ?

Okay, I can see that. Is the problem then just damage scaling? Again I don't see big problem with the flame circle/aoe artifacts. Giants have a base health of 1650. At max level, uproot would do 200 aoe dps, which gives them 8.25 seconds of time in the radius before they die. You might also compare them to the TB's AOEs (ice rain, flame burst, etc), except that instead of being cast around the TB, it has to be cast around a structure. I can understand your concern, but I'm not convinced that it can't be adjusted to be reasonable.

I, perhaps, have too much faith in good Lord Erebus players. I have yet to see them really set back by anything. As I see it, Lord Erebus will be able to call his minions back before the damage really starts racking up and then either target the QoT, do go elsewhere to destroy towers with his superior mobility. In late game where the tower destruction really starts happening, there are going to be lots of fresh corpses, so even is he loses them at a high rate, replacements will be very easy to come by. Hence my casual disregard of this issue. I see however that you see things differently. How do you envision this being an issue to Erebus?

Yes, at level 1 it will still matter, but it's easier to describe late game when Rook is doing what he's best at: holding a portal indefinitely.

Currently if a rook gets to one of your portals and has catapults walking out of it into your base you've gotta dedicate a massive amount of resources into driving him off that portal. A rook with 8 towers, priest support, and extra DPS from cats is extremely difficult to deal with. However, with this change you could literally just uproot one of his towers and then attend to the front of your base, the entire creep wave would die without pressuring the citadel at all. The previous advantage of the strat -the buildup of creeps in the front due to inattention because you're focuing on saving your own port- is completely negated.

It's the same to a less dramatic effect early game. Don't forget that even those little archers and minotaurs are doing a good 20 damage per hit to the structures, and that priets do literally 100+ per hit to them. The little hits add up against even a DG.

Early game tower rook can't drop a creep wave quickly. He needs DPS from his own creeps to bring them down, which in turn frees his towers to fire on monks and DGs. When you negate that creep wave you significantly increase the HP buffer your own waves grant you before the towers target you and you have to think about retreating, not to mention the damage they do to the towers and possibly rook himself.

Conversely if you're support a rook the opposite effect occurs. Enemies can no longer hide behind creep waves, and they become even less able to kill the towers themselves in the short window they have before their creeps fall and they have to withrdawl.

It's not a coincidence, it's a conceptual flaw with the ability. As-is Uproot is seriously one of the best demolition spells in the game and no one (good) takes it because the game isn't about fighting towers, it's about fighting DGs.

When you buff the ability to be so good against towers that people will take it even though there aren't even towers around the majority of fights you throw it way out of whack when rook is present. That's not coincidence, that's just how things are.

This is why I suggested swapping Structural Transfer's level 15 ability (which gives a % mana boost) with Violent Siege. With a mana boost and your toned-down mana costs for Uproot it could become a viable tool. On a map like Cataract it would be useful at all stages of the game. Early game you have a tower near the flag you could hit constantly and have a dual effect of keeping it a live. Later on you can either siege the enemy tower in the same position or fall back/forward to gold/cooldown, or you can hit the first set of corner towers defending the citadel. Late game you can hit the citadel itself. It would be useful for the majority of the game on any map but Exile and Prison, not to mention QoT often has mana problems.

On the other hand Rook might actually get some mileage out of Structural Transfer, and unlike the fire and forget damage of Uproot it would have built-in counters because of its limited range and vulnerability to interrupts. Also it would remain more consistently useful for rook as an offensive ability because he could always drop a tower when needed.

Also AoE artifacts have very significant cooldowns and RoI is TB's only ranged AoE. On top of that it's 900 damage every 15 seconds, or 60 DPS at max rank.

The base health of giants isn't especially meaningful because very few maps (if any, I think it's just fort mode on one map) lack valor flags and by the time you get giants they generally have 2100+. In fact on the maps where there is no valor flag it's generally a bad idea to get giants because they feed so much gold and xp to the enemy. Only against a sedna would I get them if they weren't a 100% quick and certain game ender.

I'm still thinking about what you wrote, however I do have two minor points.

1. "Demigods is about killing demigods, not about killing towers"

I'm not convinced this is completely true. If it were the case then losing towers wouldn't really matter. In my experience losing towers does make a difference, a huge difference.

2. "Uproot is t"he best tower destruction ability"

I'd like to compare two Unclean Beast's Spit versus the QoT's Uproot.

At max level uproot is 2000 damage for 905 damage, +100 aoe with violent seige for 10 seconds, 8 aoe radius. 2.2 damage per mana. (Compost boosts the damage by up to 1000, but costs another 3 skill points)
At max level spit is 1650 damage for 950 mana, +100 aoe with putrid spit for 5 seconds, 6 aoe radius. 1.73 damage per mana.

The UB isn't built or mana or mana regeneration so a direct comparison isn't exactly fair. However, the UB is also the best melee class, so one would expect its ranged attacks to be worse than demigods specifically designed for skill based magic attacks. Spit also works on any unit type, whereas Uproot is only able to target structures. Uproot is ~25% more mana efficient, however I don't think anyone would disagree with concluding that Spit is a much better skill.

Also for comparison

• Fireball is 1050 damage for 540 mana, 1.94 mana efficiency.
• Circle of fire is 1500 damage for 800 damage, 1.875 mana efficiency.
  

An Uproot Queen would only be effective against the towers. And the awesome thing about this game is that you can... hmm... adapt? Is that what it is called?

Hoesntly, if a character is putting 1 or more points into a skill for the sole purpose of countering another characters' skill points how is that any different from sayyyyy oh iono. Mist and Spit? Mist and Penitence? Mist and ... everything?

So. Level 2, investing a point in both Uproot/Compost you can do 1100 damage to 1 tower with an AoE effect (assuming Compost is at 3 which requires 2 creep waves). Wait a second! That's like, less than one tower. 400 mana for a tower (but only 1 skill point) versus 400 mana for Uproot. Check. Oh and more powerful versions of Uproot cost more mana while you pay the same amount of mana for stronger towers so it doesn't even scale perfectly.

Cooldowns?

Uproot: 15 seconds Tower: 10 seconds (even less with Renewel).

So an Uproot Queen would be able to pretty much equally match a Rook in terms of pushing him back at roughly the same rate he pushed forward. Hmmm isn't that what Balance is about?


How would the Rook Counter?

First is pretty easy: switch to Aggro or only get 2 points in Towers (enough to keep another demigod at bay). You break even for the skill points (2 or more for Queen, 2 for you at most).

How else (you stil want to go towers)? Just don't clump your towers together so much. Wait. This sounds familair. Isn't that what you do when you're laned against a reg? You adapt and split up your towers? Holy shit that is insane talk.

Is the Uproot damage hurting you? Walk backwards. Oh noesss now you aren't being AoE'd. (10 yards is quite large though that would probalby need to be dropped down to 8).

Oh, and I'm sure you would learn how to identify when she is about to Uproot. Starting level 5 just throw a fucking boulder at her and laugh. Isn't that what you do when a TB does Circle of Fire. And oh shit that does like. AoE damage as well. Unthinkable! Oh, and it hurts you too! Who would have thought different abilities could be countered in the same way?

Or, use of one of Queen's counters: TB's Deep Freeze. Freeze her when she comes forward to Uproot and she'll regret it if she does it. Team game and all.

He didn't extend the range of it either (unlike gkirit). It's still 20 yards. If you can boulder a UB spitting on you you can sure as hell boulder a Queen using uproot since the cast time is slightly longer.

And I mean, if this queen is using Uproot/Compost (lets say she puts in 3 of her fist 5 points into that) she is goin to have a shitty shield or no shield at all and just Shambler/Mulch or she is going to have a few points in Spike Wave/Ground Spikes.

If she is playing pure open then you can switch to Aggro quite nicely, I think you'll win that fight.

And if you refuse to do alllll this?

Switch lanes


I mean. Seriously. If a Queen is putting points into uproot/compost then they arne't getting much else. Another demigod should be able to wipe the floor with her. And Queen is one of the stronger demigods as well.


The RPS anecdote is really an exagerration: you have the ability to change builds at any time. Hopefully an Uproot Queen would switch to a different build when she notices t 5at you did the same thing. What's this evidence of? Good balance and good play and good players. You should NOT be able to do the exact same build every time regardless of who is on your opponent and friendly teams and whatever their respective builds are. I mean, there may be key skills you won't pass up (eg, Boulder Roll @5) but still. There should not be a win-all build and if that's the case then doing REVOLUTIONARY BALANCE UPSETTING changes is the way to fix it.

If I'm playing a Reg or UB that gets Poison Dagger, I adapt my playstyle. It's pretty amazing I sometimes even amaze myself.

I mean. If the Queen gets your towers down it's not like she can actually kill you. Annoy you maybe but that's it. Now, her teammates can switch lanes and rape your face but if she fights anyone but you she is screwed as well.

Edit:

Also, Ptarth, don't take anything Obs says to heart: he really doesn't want any changes in the game >.<

 

No, that's not balance. You lack a critical understanding of what exactly Rook does. When he warps into a fight he's not dishing out his max DPS like UB, Oak, TB, whoever. He has to sit there 7-10 seconds per tower (depending on map/favor) and start building. Is he useless when he warps in? No, of course not, but his character concept is that he builds up momentum slowly and then pushes forwards. His design concept precludes being easily pushed out of a lane by a single DG because he needs 21+ seconds to reach a reasonable power level. I'm not saying that he's entitled to have more than 3-5 towers out at all times, but he certainly deserves more than two. If you change that then you have to make fundamental changes to the character, from his speed to the whole concept of towers in general.

As it stands Ground Spikes is a soft counter to towers anyway. No, you can't just waltz in and fire them off safely and then wail on his towers without getting in trouble, but if you move in with an ally you can demolish his whole farm very quickly, not to mention if you're pruning a tower farm under construction you can keep them in check quite easily.

Also your idea of interrupting a .5 second cast ability with another .5 second cast ability that has travel time is retarded absurd. Does shit happen from time to time? Sure. I've gotten Sedna heals when I anticipated it correctly, but considering a QoT is likely going to be hovering inside the 20 yard range at all times (you do realize that's greater than tower range, right? Why exactly would she be at 25+ yards all fight?) it's very unlikely that a decent one is going to get interrupted outside of blind luck.

Are you fucking with me here? Are you seriously telling me it's easier to interrupt Boulder Roll than it is Circle of Fire? Circle of Fire is a melee range 1.0 second cast, Boulder Roll is a .5 second cast long-range ability, aka exactly the same as Uproot and it takes a damn miracle to interrupt a max range Boulder Roll. You must have reached a new plane of rook skill if you can reliably interrupt other rooks' boulder rolls from 15+ yards out. I salute you.

Oh yeah dude, wiping out creep waves as they pass through the tower is totally negligible. Wouldn't it be great if your team were capping a tower with catapults out, you warped in and laid a tower or two to help out, and then they all screamed at you "WHY THE FUCK DID YOU LAY A TOWER, NOW SHE CAN UPROOT ALL OUR CATAPULTS YOU MORON!!!1!!" That sounds fun, laying one tower and inadvertently setting an anchor for a 200 DPS AoE that would literally kill everything that came out of a portal but giants (and maybe angels depending on how ridiculous their pathing happens to be at the time.

Nonsense. I've made plenty of suggestions, in fact the idea of QoT healing with Uproot instead of just damaging was originally mine, as was the idea of spreading out violent siege over its different ranks. I posted it back in September.

Some people, apparently hedgie included, seem to think that QoT is a vastly underpowered character in need of major changes. She is not. QoT is a mediocre character who needs minor changes which need to coincide with some minor nerfs to a few of the more powerful DGs.

And break a bunch of other shit in the process. Lemme quote Frogboy here:

It ain't happening. Decry my moderate approach all you want, but it won't get you anywhere. Not even the minor changes I'd like to see are going to happen.

I was thinking about sieging from safety rather than total DPS so I reached an erroneous conclusion. You're absolutely right , Spit is a better demolition skill.

It's not that it doesn't matter, it's that the majority of the game doesn't involve it. Generally speaking the corner towers on cat come down between 4 and 7 no matter what. They set the boundaries of the fights up to that point, but they generally have little impact on the fights themselves, until you reach that point where you actually start sticking your neck out a bit to get the tower down. That's why I wrongly said that Uproot is the best siege skill, it allows you to bring down those towers without extending the way you normally have to. However, even in that context Trebuchet and Coven are still better.

Then once the corner tower is down you get started on the portal towers. These ones generally stick around from 7-10, but again there's not usually a lot of combat in range of them. The goal at this point is to either kill the enemy DGs so the towers are unguarded and vulnerable or to corner them by the towers so that they have to sit outside of the creep lane and fall behind on gold/exp.

 

Lemme just ask two questions:

1. Would you be willing to start up a game starting at war rank 10, filty rich game with this mod active and just buy up to cats or giants, waddle over to the my portal and cap it, and then see what happens when I cast Uproot on one of your towers in synch with the creep wave? It will kill everything but the giants, and then the lonely giants are just free gold/exp. It'll only take a minute or so to display so we can end the game afterwards without it counting.

2. Would you really take this skill in its current form (full 200 AoE dps) if there were no rook present? Do you feel that even at this damage level it's worth skipping shield, ground spikes, or mulch for? Without a Rook I honestly wouldn't take more than a single rank of even this souped up version because if I can safely fight to the enemy towers in the first place I can decimate them with ground spikes or whittle them down with siege gunners anyway.

 

*edit* I keep forgetting you nerfed Ground Spikes against structures. Honestly I think most QoT fans would be very unhappy with that and then everyone else would be really unhappy with the ability to increase autoattack damage by 100% late game.

So, I thought more about HorseStrangler's post.

First off, would you care to address my previous points about why you think uproot (in 1.20) is so good (especially when compared to similar skills) and about how important killing towers (your examples even demonstrate that tower destruction is the goal)?

As it stands now, a QoT could do everything you described (in your Rook captured portal defense example) using violent siege (except the AOE is 8 instead of 10). However, because Uproot is so useless, no one does. This is a problem.

While awuffleablehedgie is a bit exaggerative, his point is still valid. A more viable character counter to Tower Rook builds is desirable. The QoT may have been intended to be his nemesis, but Uproot didn’t turn out to be that useful and neither did she. I find it troubling that you describe how useful the Rook is in that sort of circumstance, however when it comes to finding a niche for the QoT, there aren’t any such stories (that really hold up under scrutiny). (When is a queen “difficult to deal with” in a way that really makes a difference. You may cite early game advantages, or shield support for a top tier demigod, but seems to be a weak argument.) It may also be the case that the Rook needs a little bit of a boost to make more nontower builds viable. He definitely needs some work done to Structural Transfer (as you have stated).

I’m not sure I can support your statements that are based on the design concept of the Rook. Unless I am missing something, you don’t have direct access to GPG’s design goals (if you do, let us see them for goodness sake). That being the case, then your statements are based on your perception of the Rook’s design goals, which may or may not be completely valid (we are all human and biased to some extent).

You continue to cite Ground Spikes as a counter to towers, but in this mod I’ve removed that aspect of Ground Spikes. Likewise, I’ve also been making changes to the mana requirements for the QoT, that reduce some of your arguments for her needing more mana regeneration abilities.

You continue to also cite Uproot as being involved in Demigod/Demigod fights. I’m picturing it more on the end of Demigod/Structure fights. Either for the QoT to push towers by herself, or to come in and stop a push against her own towers. I still don’t believe that towers are as trivial as you have suggested.

The Structural Transfer/Violent Siege swap troubles me somewhat because the QoT would be forced to spend mana to heal a nearly if not completely healed tower, to gain a mana regeneration buff. To be more explicit:

Towers are typically nearly dead, dead, or almost full. The number of times I can recall towers that would benefit from a little topping off is very few relative to the other cases.

Most QoT builds should probably get in order: monks, hp/armor, mana helm. That leaves her until level ~5 before she has a boost in mana regeneration. Without anything else effecting her, her mana regeneration is ~6 per second while closed. The base mana regeneration effect for Energizer is 150% for 10 seconds. Assuming that costs remain at 400 mana for Uproot, she would need to make up that amount plus a reasonable mana surplus to make the ability worthwhile. How much gain should she get for it? 500 mana, 1000 mana? That would either require an insane mana buff (1000% for 10 seconds), a longer but smaller buff (200% for 60 seconds), uproot be relatively useless as a first skill, grant a set amount of mana instead of a regeneration bonus, or some other compensation.

Furthermore, if it is left as a level 15 skill, no one would get it anyway. It should have a meaningful contribution at level 1.

I don’t think we will be able to get any nerfs to the top tier demigods to help provide balance. I’m also not sure that we should try. I much rather prefer the idea of increasing the usefulness of the current demigods. As a side note, you may have noticed the Rook targeting thread in the bug reports forum. If someone can figure out how to fix the targeting locks for the Rook’s shoulder mounted weapons, Rook DPS may increase an average of ~100 dps over the course of the game.

I also figure that if we can hand Frogboy a mod with all of the changes already made, that he can get GPG to allow Sorian to implement them. It is the part where GPG makes Sorian figure out how to code things from scratch that really costs them time and therefore interest in it.

So as it stands, Uproots healing effect is fine. The cost is fine. The problem is with Violent Siege’s effect. It either should be left at level 15 (wherein it will still cause problems and keep Uproot as undesireable), or its effect should be moderated.

Some ideas:

• Make the AOE shorter ranged, mitigated by armor,
• Replace the AOE damage with an AOE debuff.
• Change the net effect of the Uproot AOE to do the same damage as an equal level v1.20 Ground Spike? That would keep the relative effect the same as against a v1.20 QoT, while still increasing the worthiness of Uproot.
• Make Uproot a channeling skill for an infinite duration (i.e, a cheap version of Structural Transfer) while keeping the dps the same. If unopposed she will devour your entire defenses.
• Replace the AOE with a single target effect that hits X targets per second for the same DPS.
• Replace the AOE with a summoning ability. Whenever you use Uproot you get a shambler or a new type of shambler. The type of shambler might even depend upon the team of the structure you target or even the type of structure you target.

 

1. I believe your point here. There is no need to test it. However, things are a little worse and a little better than you imagine. First off with 10 AOE radius, it can sometimes hit adjacent towers. That's double the dps damage. When used against enemy towers mid field, most of the time is just weakens the wave before it hits (a decent amount mind you). However as she stand now, the QoT is a creep killing machine, the difference is somewhat negligble. A side note, in your example, when you cap an enemy portal, your side automatically gains full xp and gold from whatever manages to come through on your side. In that case you won't be falling behind, however they will (as you state) be less effective method of pushing towers (as there is only giants). You will still however tie up the QoT. Either she fights you and can't get to the front -or- she drops the uproot and goes to the front, leaving the Rook to destroy the towers by himself. Eitherway it isn't a free lunch for the QoT.

2. With the current changes, the QoT is a sieging machine. If you leave her unopposed on cataract, the corner towers are gone by 3, the portal towers by 5. It is very different than what it is now. If you haven't tried it, do so. It is a wierd feeling to be pushing the enemy's portals level ~5 with the QoT. Almost as fun as my Rook Trebuchet mini-nuke machine gun mod.

The key difference is that the portal caps begin in earnest around level 9 and it's a long trek to 15 from there.

That's also ignoring the early game effects of Rook's towers decimating his own creep waves. Honestly I think you're underestimating its effect, they really do a lot of damage.

I know I'm being a bit petty here, but if rook weren't present would there be any noticeable change at level 1 (besides the ability to heal, which I support)? Who really spends much time at the enemy tower at that point?

I think that ultimately you're going to be constrained by the distance from creep waves' path to the corner towers on Cataract. If it can't hit those waves it's not big enough, and to hit those waves it's gotta be pretty big.

This is probably what we're most likely to agree on. That being said, what kind of debuff would be useful in a game without a Rook? That's my main sticking point, make the ability useful without Rook in the game.

I like the idea of there being a second DoT in the game, it's weird that UB has the only one. Does the animation need to be changed for i though? Does it look goofy sliding around with a DG?

"

I know I'm being a bit petty here, but if rook weren't present would there be any noticeable change at level 1 (besides the ability to heal, which I support)? Who really spends much time at the enemy tower at that point?"

 

If Uproot had a Violent Siege ability I would do the following build:

BotF + Scaled + Banded (you can kite out monks)

1. Shield

2. Uproot I (don't use)

3. Compost (start using Compost)

4. Shield II

5. Spike Wave

6. Uproot II (for harassing double-towers)

7. Shield III

8. Ground Spikes I

9. Ground Spikes II

10. Ground Spikes III

11. Ground Spikes IV

12. Shield IV

13. Spike Wave II

...

 

Queen is already more than capable of pushing most other demigods early game, so let's make the assumption that Queen has control of the flag.

We will awesome assume that the enemy has monks and they are standing near their tower healing up.

Once I hit Compost II or III (the power levels, not the skill itself) I would be able to Uproot from the tower which would cause AoE which would damage the monks and also prevent the enemy from just standing by their tower. Although it's unlikely I would be able to kill the tower with Uproot alone (it would take 6 full Compost III Uproots to take it down which is a lot of mana and a lot of cooldowns), most likely I would scare one of them away into buying Regen. Then me and whoever is next to me can 2v1 the tower and take it down.

Then I would switch sides.

After about level 4 my defensive abilities would be behind everyone else's offensive abilities and this build would REALLY struggle levels 6-8 before I can get Ground Spikes level'd up to a respectable level. However, hopefully the 600 gold early-game advantage along with their mobility difficulties without having towers (as well as the early shop they had to get, loses them some xp)

 

In plenty of games I've died taking down a tower. I (generally) regard this as a bad thing. HOWEVER, once that tower is destroyed their ability to support the nearby flag is extremely crippled. It would not be unreasonable to make the assumption that the destroyed tower prevents a port-in that would have either caused a gank or prevented a gank-kill, making it a short-term loss, long-term gain, it's just very difficult to measure how much I gained.

Some people, apparently hedgie included, seem to think that QoT is a vastly underpowered character in need of major changes. She is not. QoT is a mediocre character who needs minor changes which need to coincide with some minor nerfs to a few of the more powerful DGs.

 

THIS

"

Some people, apparently hedgie included, seem to think that QoT is a vastly underpowered character in need of major changes. She is not. QoT is a mediocre character who needs minor changes which need to coincide with some minor nerfs to a few of the more powerful DGs."

There was something you said to me.... don't remember exacctly what it was but we s were discussing scalin defense and scaling offense. Queen has scaling offense (even moreso now with the reworking of the Armor debuff that I may or may not agree with) but her defense does not scale at all. Extremely poorly in fact.

Queen can never 1v1 anyone. This isn't a huge deal, Demigod isn't about 1v1. However, in a 2v2 she is still a major liability since she can't survive if she pops open and she is useless if she stays closed. In 3v3 she can sorta pop in suddenly, blow her load, then close and shield like mad so that chaotic combat helps.

But, seriously. All the people here who talk about how awesome Queen is ... don't play her! I know that Obs has that replay against Wip (which I guess was unwarranted because Wip was testing a new build and blah-blah). But, I mean. Thunder and Cosmoe/Celmare (I forget which I get those two confused all the time) played Queen for months.

Months. Before Sigils were popular and even monks were popular.

And they pretty much are like yeah "Queen is awesome early game, compromises my team late game". These people have hundreds of games against a wide variety of players. I would actually /trust/ these peoples' opinions here.

i mean, I know that Obs doesn't like to micromanage monks because he is a lazy greedy bastard (I'm the exact opposite: I can't trust anyone to properly micro it, and I like having my monks under my control anyway). So maybe that is why he doesn't play Queen. I just see, time and time again, people come in saying that Queen is perfectly playable when the rest of your team is tier 1 and ... don't play Queen. I just don't get it.

I've played 10-20 online games (maybe a bit more but not that much more) with Queen. I've played against premades using Queen (high-ranked players). I've played in premades as Queen.

I've personally decided that Queen is rather effective on Prison and her shield is awesome on Cata but her late-game is weaker on Cata than Prison because Prison doesn't have lanes -> More effective AoE and also portals can't really be ninja'd on Prison so her weakness of not having an interrupt is minimized.

So yes. Queen can be played in high level games. But in the words of Sarmis: "The best way to beat a Queen is to not feed that meat-grinder until level 8". Ignore her (but don't abandon her in a lane!) for 15 minutes and then you win. It's not quite so bad on Prison since ignoring means a massive disadvantage in WarScroe but still.

Queen has two solid counters (Silence for Sed, Deep Freeze for TB). Anything with good burst can pop the bubble just as fast as it is put up and by level 10 or so you can just AA down a shield in about 6 hits anyway, why use mana? Boulder-Roll-Hammer is unavoidable. Pent pops it in one hit. Spit wears it down (not to mention UB laughs at your pathetic AA).

Regules can out-kite the Queen and mine her (she is huge, easy to mine). I mean. Every demigod has an easy way of dealing with the Queen and she really can't do much about it. It's not mediocre. If you take the Demigod-v-Demigod perspective of things, she costs you the game.

No. I actually play this demigod.  Reg can't outkite queen, they have the same range. Don't be stupid. Yes his mines are very iritating, but once again he has no AA to speak off and one spike combo is lethal to him9since he lacks armor too). 

Sedna is useless against queen since her pounce is shielded off and her AA is so pityfull we don't even have to take that in the picture. Also she is easily outdamage by spikes +shamblers. 

Tb can outaoe her and kill minions which is iritating and freeze, but for the rest meh queen heals/shields everything off. Also when you take TB... I mean you're an easy target. 

DA is so useless against queen is laughable.

UB is fucking OP and indeed his spit bites through shield. But again in a long match you will beat the UB.

Erebus, shield off his bite, kill his minions with your shamblers. This is prolly the easiest Tier I fight.

Oak, iritating spirits, damaging pent. hard fight against a good hybrid, but easy against assasin.

Rook... spikes.

What? She has a 15% flat damage reduction. QoT, UB, EB, and Oak are the only ones with scaling defense. That's not to say it's sufficient, but it's there. I just think it's a bit backwards that she has to use spikes to take advantage of it. I'd rather see it attached to shield.

Also getting a new rank of mulch at 15 is massive. 2250 is a huge heal.

QoT just has a few issues:

1. Shamblers spawning with low HP means they can die to AoE right after you summon them before you can mulch, which shouldn't be happening
2. Players just potioning or teleporting in your face is a bit silly
3. Targeting mulch can be a bit impractical. Is it possible to make the Shamblers light up when you're casting it instead of just providing a targeting pointer?
   
4. Shamblers require too many points to max. She breaks from the other DGs here by requiring two minion stat trees, and that's not even counting morale. Either Entourage or Compost need to provide a meaningful benefit independent of Shamlbers the way Inspiring Presence does. Personally I think changing Entourage into an aura would be the ideal solution, you could  pad QoT's low stats a bit with it with it and provide a unique team buff, but since Compost has a cool animation it'd be neat to see that worked with as well.
   
5. There's just not enough mana for everything necessary to make QoT a force to be reckoned with. I'd like to see a rank IV shield cost reduction, but that's problematic since you don't really have a static mana cost on the ability the way rook towers do. I don't have a good solution.
6. Honestly negative armor's functionality is a bit outrageous. I know this is a QoT nerf, but it would probably make sense to give structures some armor as you rank up fortitude for them, it would help with minion swarms and Trebuchet too.

"Sedna is useless against queen since her pounce is shielded off and her AA is so pityfull we don't even have to take that in the picture. Also she is easily outdamage by spikes +shamblers."

Only time Sedna is pouncing is if you open to do ground spikes. This has the dual effect of stopping your spikes while bursting through your shield. I can't say I always and forever intreppt ground spikes but do think I get it a decent amount of the time. Even when I don't I just pop a Heal III and I'm good to go again. (Of course early game like levels 1-4 you'll be me fair and square, most poeple know Queen has a strong early game. I'm saying mid game so levels 5-9 or so)

Plus, Sedna has a stronger DPS than Queen..... so can I like, not take your AA into account? So if I pounce your spikes do you cease to exist? That would be a pretty awesome ability for Sedna.

 

So lets say you are level 7. You've got Spikes III and Shield III and then Shamblers I. Not sure if that is exactly your build but that is one of the more common builds so I'm going to use it I've probably only shopped once as Sed and I'll have gotten currency for sure, then Scaled Helm-Banded Armor-Scailmail.

If you didn't get currency you will probably most likely be able to bully me out of the way because you'll have Vlemish which means you are actually able to spam Shield and Spikes since Vlemish basically gives you 2 ability uses.

Going to also assume you have Cloak. Don't know if that is your build or not, sorry if it isn't. So you have 2500 Mana (youg et Scaled Helm-Banded Armor-Scailmail as well) which is enough for 4 of your abilities. (You summoned your shamblers at the crysatl). Anyway, this is what I'll do;

I will walk up to you engage. After you take some damage you'll shield (because you're smart and letting your monks heal you as much as possible). Then I walk away. Seriously.

I wait 20 seconds. Then I walk up to you. Engage. You take some damage, shield maybe. I walk away.

That's all I do. If you don't have Vlemish I will oom you. It takes about g'damn forever but I can do it. Once I shop a second time, hit level 9 then I say fuck it. I have counter healing, your monks are useless (mine are too mostly, since you will typically AoE them down but at least it is worth a try). And I have silence and heal III.

 

QoT does get a DPS advantage over Sedna because she can wipe out creep waves while you fight. They'll build up if you do actually get into an extended endurance fight and they'll do a good 100 DPS. That being said, Healing Wind is huge.

So to begin

 

Uproot.

I liked the idea that it heals friendly towers, damages enemy, and aoe damage to everything around thus tower. The problem is the aoe damage to everything around the tower is simply too great and can even be used to kill reckless demigods along with their minions and creeps all in 1 or 2 casts. If the damage at later level was reduced a bit and added the ability to target demigods as a stun while still holding its siege effects; then it would be more user friendly.

 

 

Ground spikes.

I’ll need to focus on this more in a later play through as the first was to just get me into it.

 

Bramble shield

Again it still needs something more than just adsorbing damage which it really doesn’t do. If the shield adsorbed damage that it would be transformed to hp, mp, or some other stat to help Queen of thorns better, and at most I would say is that it nulfs damage. Still there is more needed.

 

Spike wave

Haven’t taken this yet, but I reslly can’t see any serious change.

 

Compost.

Was it this skill that gave Queen of thorns the vampire affects? I really took this skill out of boredom and begin to notice she was stealing a good amount of hp even from demigods. If this was the affect than I loved it and thought it was perfect.

 

Open form.

The increase AA range is a good idea, and makes it much easier to chase as Queen of thorns.

 

Closed form.

Hmmm, still need to do more testing.

 

Note:

You should have also increased the number of shamblers Queen of thorns can summon to make her more generally and maybe give mulch an auto target capability seeing how the range is basically unlimited; it could save a lot of dying Queen of thorns from scrumbling trying to select and find dying shamblers in a pile up.

 

That's what NR is for. I don't contest that Queen will push a Sed out of a lane before 2 shops.

Uproot

It seems obvious now, but what about matching the cost and aoe damage to the Circle of Fire? So 600/900/1200/1500 damage over 10 seconds for 450/600/700/800 mana.

Bramble Shield

Reading the other currently active balance QoT thread I was considering the idea of stun and slow immunity while the shield is up. At early levels where shields stay up I can see this being useful. However at higher levels, given the short life of the shield I'm not sure that would accomplish much. However, it did give me the idea that an effect could occur after the shield is desetroyed. Themeatically the shield would blow up and magic residue would cover the area having a beneficial effect. Some possible ideas for post-shield effects for Shield levels 1/2/3/4 include:

• a 0/0/.5/1 second aoe stun
• a 300/600/900/1200 aoe mana drain
• a 5/10/15/20% aoe slow for 5 seconds
• a 5/10/15/20% aoe ally attack speed buff for 5 seconds
• All of the demigod death effects
• A random effect selected from a list of possible effects

Compost
I didn't include a Life Drain effect with compost. I just boosted the bonus it gave shambler damage (I left the uproot bonus alone). I'm pretty sure I didn't leave any of the life drain aura code I helped write for the nutrient extraction code.

Shamblers

I want to be conservative when it comes to increasing the number of shamblers the QoT has. They are ranged attackers and not melee like vampires/yetis. They are also getting a ton of buffs from skills right now, up to 120 dps per shambler. That being said I have been considering it. I do have this belief that Lord Erebus should have quantity minions, Sedna the quality minions, and the QoT somewhere in the middle.

Mulch Shambler

I've been torn on this one as well. Sometimes you want to detonate a particular shambler to get the aoe damage. Sometimes you want to detonate any shambler fast to get the life. I'm not sure that removing the targetting function is the right way to go. I was exploring options to have a secondary skill trigger that would autoselect a shambler, but never got it to work (something like '3' is normal mulching, while shift+3 is auto-mulch).