I guess this game is never meant to be played alone?
- The necromancer is too strong early game it literally one shots the basic heavy unit.
- The demon waves are next to impossible, Fel Ravagers at round 6?
- Mass Draenei Seers are too much for rounds 15+
- A Vile Tormentor's single silence can guarantee a defeat (but then again we have dispels, just hope they don't get hit)
- Or maybe the demon waves are just placeholders?
- I'm not gonna say anything about the boss fights since I guess we need 2 players by default
- The round 26 Bone Horror is literally impossible to take down, it has hero armor, three times the abomination tier 3 health, lifesteal and unholy aura, combined with those death coil healers, he is insane.
The game is definitely more suited for 4-8 players, however we didn't want to limit people who wanted to try the factions out by themselves or play in 1v1 scenarios.
I think the main issue you were having here is that you might of had a lot of tier 1 units without upgrades, which would mean the more units and unit value you have the minions of Lothrim will spawn in more and more units. If you have a few Tier 3 units with some health upgrades, you will easily turn around the tide of battle against the minions. Keep in mind this doesn't always work when you're going up against a bunch of upgraded lower tier units.
The solo round against Lothrim's minions do not take upgrade value into consideration, so imagine if you have 1400 army value but you have 6000 upgrade value; Lothrim's overall army that he spawns will be the same strength as you having an army value of 1400 with an upgrade value of 0. So keep that in mind as well, as upgrades start out some-what weak, but a few T3 unit with lots of upgrades is strong enough to take out big group of non-upgraded T1 units. However a lot of upgraded Tier 1 units can be pretty hard to take out, as numbers only help you when you've got better upgrades.
The Bone Horror's are definitely really tough but they get taken out easily by chaos and hero damage. One thing you want to do to survive against them, especially once you're getting past round 25, is to have a very strong and upgraded front line and have as much chaos and hero damage you can get for your backline. Some units are great early on with piercing, normal, or magic damage, but your primary focus should be end-game damage out-put and sustainability.
Also, just to further elaborate, upgrades are VERY worth the gold put into getting them. One thing you may not know about yet is putting gold into your Spell Points income so you can have lots of spell points mid-late game to spend on the "Upgrade" spell from the Spell Vault which will save you a lot of gold in the long run when trying to max out upgrades as best as you can.
(As a tip: The undead minions that spawn give more bounty but are typically stronger units overall. The Draenei and Fel Ravagers and other similar units spawn in bigger numbers but are typically weaker in overall health and attack damage but give a little bit less bounty.)
Also, about the units:
- Rune Golem's damage return doesn't really do anything, I wish you'd make it from 20-40%, and is it only meant for enemy melees?
The damage return on all units that have similar damage return abilities are scaled off of the Rune Golems %'s. Their main purpose is for countering melee DPS units as well as for boss rounds like the Doom Hydra and facing Lord Lothrim too. I've considered increasing them by some further, but didn't want to make it any easier to kill Lothrim in the end.
- Right Hand's cannon says average attack speed but it just attempts to shoot many times before releasing an attack after too long
- If I'm not mistaken, siege units are supposed to hit the backline and the towers first, the AI just focuses on the melee mobs, which makes them almost useless in base castle sieges.
This sounds like the attack priority is changing in between its attack which is common with a lot of different armor types and unit types with different priorities coming into attack range. We'll try and take another look at the different priority levels and see if there's areas we can improve, namely for hitting towers first over units.
- Tinker falls off late game, his mecha boar doesn't scale with upgrades and its kaboom doesn't deal any damage anymore after rounds 20+
The Tinker is best suited early on by itself. However later into the game will better be complimented if you have tier 3 Goblin Mechs up front because the Tinker can rebuild (revive) tier 3 mechs, which in the long run is a great strategy to go with Lashar because Lord Lothrim has hero armor and the tier 3 mechs have hero attack.
- Battle Priests have very long cast backswing (to be fair, you could just give everyone the standard chaplain and just give the Priestess the Battle Priest since... it's her speciality)
We can look into the backswing cast, I believe most healers were based off of the priest or chaplain to be honest. But in the sake of keeping each faction fresh and unique, we would rather stray away from having the same unit across all factions.
- The shockwave/impaling spearman doesn't go for the clumped units/hero and just uses its skill on the first enemy it sees, making it almost useless
- Some units won't use their skills (healing ward, roar, etc.) on boss rounds.
With normal WC3 A.I. there needs to be about 3 units in range of the attack before the unit casts their line damage or AoE spell such as shockwave or impale which may not always hit all the units depending on their casting angle after the spell is sent out.
Concerning healing wards not being casted, that has been an odd issue we've noticed but they typically only cast when that unit takes damage. I'll talk with Krath to see if we can possible program the healing ward spell priority to go for other units and not so much for themselves.
(Tip with AoE buffs: You can cast them right before the round timer ends and your units will spawn into the arena with the bonus buffs.)
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Thank you for taking the time to give us your thoughts about the new game man. We'll be trying to improve its replay-ability as much as possible through our next big planned updates. There are 3 new factions planned out, an air unit planned out for every single faction, and we'll also be adding in a pair of legendary-type units to each faction too.