• Use "Fixed player settings" to prevent players from choosing "forces of darkness" force
• Your terrain is very sparse. At least cover map edges with boundary or trees
• Many tooltips don't have hotkeys, and some that do have hotkeys don't work. Make tooltips a big priority as they're often one of the first things your players will look at
• Use breath of Fire instead of Shockwave as your base abilities for line damage. They don't cause terrain deformation and hence produce significantly less lag.
• Don't use 'active' icons for passive abilities
• Environmental props which are not meant to be destroyed should be doodads, not destructables
• In the home base camp there was no indiciation that camp fires heal you passively. You should somehow inform players of this.
• Monsters very close to home base are quite tough. I don't know if this was intended but I died at level 1.
• Everything feels very unimmersive. After playing for 10 minutes I haven't discovered any quests or interacted with anything. All I've done is wander and kill things.
• As far as I can tell, creeps don't have a way of respawning. I think that will be a problem.
• Your map is perfectly playable for 1 player. You should list the players as "1-3" instead of "3"

• your map is called trio RPG and has the recommended players as 1-3. but in the game lobby there are four slots.
• your creeps have very poorly chosen experience and gold bounties. satyr trickster and zombies give the same amount of gold and experience...
• you still have bare edges at the edge of your map
• you still have not improved your ability tooltips. Huge number of misspelled words, poor grammar, missing hotkeys, abilities with hotkeys that don't match the "global" QWER system
• your respawned creeps don't drop items
• in your quests menu you say that "if player one is playing alone, they receive the bravery buff (+33% armor)" - but I played in slot 4, so didn't receive the bonus. Maybe make this work for any solo player, or better yet - make it an option when someone is playing solo.
• my hero (mountain king) had a very boring level 6 ability - basically just avatar from wc3. Maybe make a custom ultimate ability - I think a "leap" like ability would be fun with him. Maybe something like:
  • Ferocious Leap (R): Leaps up to 400 units in the target direction, fearing enemy units near his landing position. If the hero kills a unit under the affects of fear, the cooldown on ferocious leap resets. Fear duration improves with ability level.
• when i died, a timer dialog popped up but failed to display a number for my respawn.
• after about an hour of game time my FPS dropped from 60 to a number that oscillated between 51 and 57, leading me to believe you have some kind of leak. I suspect that after about 3 hours of game time it would start to properly lag.
• your hero selection area could look better. The units aren't lined up or facing the same direction. You also spawn a shade for yellow player (why?)
• I literally played for a whole hour without any dialog or story

Constantine said:

Thanks for the tips!
1. What if I make them scale off intellect so you can either build him as a tanky melee or a combat mage?
2. I've nerfed the mana costs and scaled things back accordingly
3. Woop! it was meant to be a 10x Strength (50str -> 500 heal). That was a bug!
4. Stance's not having cooldowns I thought would encourage more fast paced play, i.e. if youre low and need a heal, you should be rewarded for swapping weapons before bolting, then swapping back to maximize dps... You think I should switch it?

Thank you so much for the testing! I'd love any feedback on the other heroes if you're so inclined. Though bear in mind when doing so, its supposed to be a team game, so some heroes are less equipped to fly solo.

Click to expand...

Constantine said:

Thanks for the heads up about the text. I know there are a lot of typos -- they will be fixed but are a low priority.

Tanking is viable. This game is meant to be played with more than one player.
A Tank's job is to reduce the damage being dealt to the rest of the part, often by soaking it up themselves with greater efficiency. The Ward does this.
- Wrath (the core ability of the character) is one of the shortest "ranged" abilities in the game and serves to grab stray agro.
- Warcry did have a slightly too high mana cost, but its small range and % damage reduction is the essence of tanking.
- Shield wall is a passive chance to block.
- Stormfront, most efficiently cast on the self also requires close range 'tank' play.

From your review it sounds as if the only skills you tried were glaive + wrath.
Naturally the abilities are more powerful than auto attacks, otherwise why have them.
The tank isn't about damaging abilities. Or damaging attacks. The tank is about effectively and efficiently protecting the party and taking the hits. I believe the Ward's skill set does this. If you feel it does not, I'm open to suggestions.

I'm sorry If my reply is harsh, but I take a certain pride in my hero design and I believe your assessment to err. Again if, given my analysis you still disagree and would like to help, I'm always open to suggestions and would very much appreciate future testing. (Be sure to use the most current version of the map as I am constantly fixings and balancing things)

Click to expand...

My map is shit. Please take it down.

Click to expand...

jondrean said:

Dat description! :O Best I've seen yet! +rep

Click to expand...

• You've fixed the bare edges on your map, but I noticed at least one example of a GATE (destructable) being used to block these edges. Use a gate doodad (untargetable) if you want to keep this visual effect - right now I can destroy the gate and see the void again.
• You need to go through ability tooltips and improve imperfections. You're missing linebreaks, using over-saturated colors, failing to include hotkeys (and in those cases, "global" hotkeys don't work; I tested with battle master)
• Your creeps seem to have stopped respawning
• You added a cinematic but there is still no NPC interaction.
• Suggestion: Add an effect around units who I can interact with (shops?) and give the locust ability to units I cannot interact with (Why is there a "Medivh" standing by the campfire. He doesn't talk, clicking him is useless, he doesn't move, etc)
• Suggestion: Use map naming scheme which includes both the player number and the version number like: (3)TrinityRPG052.w3x - maps are ordered in the map list by player number so the (3) prefix will order your maps folder as well; the version number will prevent battle.net from butchering your filename while overwriting maps.
• Suggestion: Make scroll of town portals purchasable items, and give them some recommendation as a starting item
• Suggestion: Add some intermediate level items, and balance the basic ones. Since I can't kill (or even find) the first boss in an hour, the most efficient items for me to buy were 4 Kite Shields
• I found an item called corrupted heart which doesn't seem to do anything.

• 
  This is a biggie. Some heroes are just boring, particularly the some supports. Some abilities are uninteresting and close to default Warcraft 3 abilities. The descriptions are dull looking and don't describe the abilities well enough.
  
  I recommend cutting out nearly ALL heroes. Make the same heroes off Diablo 2 with similar skills. If you had 6-8 really good heroes with so much work put into them, people would have so much more fun playing a 4 hour game with them, than some boring hero. Think about it. Diablo 2 only had 5 heroes. 7 in the expansion. Why do you need 40? It's just too hard to make 40 heroes. Blizzard knew it. You need characters which are very different from one another and all strong in their own way.
  
  Imagine shooting molten boulders with a druid? Having bears and wolves following you. Skeletons protecting the necromancer and shooting teeth and amplify damage? These custom skills would be so much fun to use, but difficult to make and time consuming. That's why you should just make 6 or so heroes. Probably difficult making all the skills in Diablo 2, so just include 6-10 of the best and popular ones.
  
  Think about it. You've probably spent lots of time into you 40 or so heroes so you maybe reluctant to remove them, but I think 6 really well developed heroes would be more interesting. Btw I didn't play all your heroes, so maybe some of them are really cool. If so, keep them, but I'd still remove lots of your heroes and work on making less but better heroes.

• 
  Compress the files in your map. All files but models can be compressed. Also, see if you can delete some of those nasty 400-500 KB models and replace them with other ones. All your skins and interface can be compressed. I think you can save 3-4 MB in your map. Imagine what else you could do with 3-4 MB?

• 
  Add some Diablo 2 music. The nostalgia would be awesome! If I heard this, I'd melt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTjVqEnCvYo
  
  TBH I'm sick of hearing Warcraft 3 music in games. It doesn't suit so many maps and I've heard it way too many times. Music is such a powerful way to make atmosphere. If you added some of Diablo 2 music, your map would feel a little scarier and darker. If you didn't want that, you could only pick the ones that arn't as dark like the one I linked. And this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2evIg-aYw8
  
  But stay away from Warcraft 3 music. Its just frustrating to hear now. Diablo music would be SO much more fitting for this game.

• 
  You should add some sound effects. Maybe when you enter a bosses room, have them say something intimidating. Kind of like How Diablo says "Not Even Death can Save you from Me!" Don't go overboard with quotes otherwise it'll sound lame.

• 
  You could also cut out some boss fights. You have lots of bosses but some of the are very uninteresting. This is because the more you have, the repetitive it becomes. And like heroes, making so many good boss fights is time consuming and you'll run out of ideas. Most of the bosses just run at you and auto attack with maybe a splash attack. Throw in a carrior swarm here and there. Boring? Its difficult to setup 20 awesome boss fights. So just scrap the idea of having so many, and only make a few. Minibosses shouldn't be so tough as to be confused with a big boss either.
  
  Please read this tutorial: http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/general-mapping-tutorials-278/creating-bossfight-94684/
  
  To give you an idea forget the text and just watch the videos on the tutorial. Level 1 Boss Fight, Level 2 Boss Fight and Level 3 Boss Fight. They will show you what you are doing, and what you can do to make it interesting.

• 
  I doubt you want to lock the camera to your hero, but its something you could consider if you really want a Diablo 2 feel. If your thinking about it, ask others. Some people find locked cameras annoying. I'm a little undecided myself for which I'd prefer.

• 
  You could add some vision at camps to make it feel a little more warming, less lonely and easier to locate shops. Giving vision of a square region may look strange (it may look strange. you can experiment), so maybe you could give players shared vision of the campfire, important buildings, the guards and the villagers who are selling items. Just a thought.