1601

Okay, I give up:

How are you supposed to beat Bramble shield? QoT can seemingly cast it indefinitely, and the amount of damage it absorbs is ridiculous!

1602

Focus fire or Torchbearer deep freeze. It also doesn’t scale well at very high levels. Alternatively, you could attack a player that’s unshielded.

1603

She can’t use it if she can’t cast. TB can raise the refresh on it, also he can stun her and freeze her. He can also lower her mana regen 10 sec at a time. The tradeoff is that you’d have to play an Ice TB and that’s no fun for anything but screwing with Sedna, QoT and Erubus (for me anyway).

Regulus gets Mark of the Betrayer which can do up to 800dmg to her when she casts it. Though I can’t remember if it hits her before or after the bramble is applied.

Sedna gets 3/4/5 second silence. This can give you time to beat QoT down between recasts. Cast Time is 0.3 though, and bramble is instant, so you will need to time and wait 5-6 seconds after she casts it to use silence on her, since bramble has a 7 second recast.

Erubus stuns, but they have a 1.0 second cast time, so you’ll need to do the same thing here, time them for when her bramble cooldown should be popping. Of course, she can chain cast it much faster with -15% cooldown items and -15% cooldown flags.

There are mana items to use on her too:
Theurgist Cap has a 5% chance to reduce enemy mana/health regen by 50% 3000gold
Gauntlets of Despair 15% chance to take 100 mana from enemy 1750gold
Warlords Punisher: Clicky item Removes -400 mana from enemy DG time they are hit by the AE from this 2250gold
Deathbringer: Clicky Item Casts Silence, 5 secondduration, instant cast 30second cooldown - 20k

Her pets can do some damage to you if she’s chain casting bramble on herself, but she won’t be able to do anything but melee damage to you without using tons of mana, leaving too little for sustained Bramble.

If the game gets far enough where she’s picking up stuff like Stormbringer (which virtually gives unlimited mana in battle, unlike Heart of Life that won’t work when damage is taken), you or your team will hopfully be similarly equipped.

Besides trying to screw with her mana or casting ability there’s always good old fashioned damage: Ashkandor can help you there with x4 crits. Although it’s bad form to suggest Artifacts as part of a strategy the only reason you’d need it is if she was also similarly equipped by upper teir Art items.

1604

My problem was that I was playing as Oak against her, and he doesn’t seem to have anything that he can do against it except ignore her entirely. Warlord’s Punisher seems like a good solution.

1605

Just played a really good 2v2 that ended with a backdoor. Their Erebus batswarmed across to our spawn portal by the citadel, capped it, and then locked it. He kept doing that every time we pushed back out, so we couldn’t make progress. I don’t know if that’s intended or not, but I don’t like it. Otherwise an awesome game, though.

1606

Frank: Yea, I think think of much Oak can do against her 1 on 1 other than trying to out-buy her if she’s gonna spam Bramble. It seems like certain DG’s are much more suited to take on specific DG’s than others, but I don’t know enough about all of them to make all the connections yet.

Mike: Sounds like you were playing the Crucible map. That is a detestable exploit that annoys me too.

1607

I played mostly as Queen so far.

Spamming Bramble Shield is very mana-intensive. While it absorbs more damage at lv 1 than most attack skills do it alone is not able to prevent a damage spike from the midgame on.

If the queen spams Bramble Shield and has minions (shamblers or summon token ones) you should attack the minions. A queen can’t spam the shield and revive her minions for very long.

A queen going that route also is pretty much useless otherwise. Until the endgame (with several mana items and enugh regen to spam the shield and her attack skills) her damage output will be negliable, she is relatively slow, has weak armour and not many HP. Pressuring her will work well, even if you don’t outright kill her.

1608

How exactly does Pantheon work with the scoring system? I was ranked 37 saturday night with an 8-1 record and 1,032 exp points. I played a couple games sunday night and got another win, another loss (though I didn’t lose) and a disconnect (I didn’t leave a game, but twice I had ‘players dropped’ before I got ingame, and just beat up on the AI).

Today, I find that I LOST exp points and have 900-something. Is this right? Can you lose exp points?

Jorune

EDIT: nevermind, seems the online ranking is borked too. http://forums.demigodthegame.com/351275

1609

I would use the dedicated servers instead if I knew then what I know now. :)

1610

It does sort of sound like one of the biggest issues is that Demigod’s multiplayer experience, from game to lobby to Impulse overlay and so on, is just comprised of too many different moving parts that all need to fit together. Too many points of failure, and too many parts that could work themselves but fail in their communication to the other parts.

And when it doesn’t work, it sounds like the solution is “more parts! STAT!” :)

1611

Too many moving parts is indeed my view too. The solution has been to slowly have Impulse take over more and more of the responsibility.

1612

Well Brad here’s the nice thing: I know this has been a stroll through hell but you might walk out of this with a stable and mostly effective P2P matching service that can help you leverage publishing some big future properties.

1613

Actually, now I’m more interested in the documentary of the “walk through hell” than in Demigod actually working.

1614

New patch is out.

The sound/performance issue persists making the game unplayable unless I play with /nosound.

Joining a game is (still? again?) a nightmare.
There are like 30 games right now (a nice change from the 0-3 games I saw the last few days), but it is very cumbersome to join them.
I don’t even talk about the connection issues, which may have been improved but are still a huge obstacle, but mostly about the game browser.
The last 10 games I tried to join had me stuck at “connecting” or give a “game is full message” despite them being shown as having free slots even after being rejected.
Either the game browser is very slow updating the game information or it counts players trying to connect to those games as in already while not adding them to the player count.

1615

[I]Heh, Brad’s PM folder is full… what a surprise. :P

Message for Brad:
[/I]
[B]Hello Brad,

I’m sure you are very stressed with Demigod so I will try to keep it as short and precise as possible.

I am one of the people who cannot play Demigod with sound as that causes terrible performance drops (I played with /nosound).

I have a personal dislike of those developer/publisher videos you have to click away after every start of practically any game…
So I thought about “handling” them (simply renaming the movie folder worked for Galciv 2 and games from other companies, I don’t remember right now if Impulse tries to redownload them though).
Then I remembered something. A somewhat similar problem occurred with another game for me.

The Demo of Grand Ages Rome had 5 second freezes every few seconds for me and deleting the movie folder helped solving that issue.
Accoring to a developer of Grand Ages Rome here:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1626824&postcount=55
in this thread:

it is an issue (on a noticable percentage of machines) with the FMOD sound system and the bink player (both also used by Demigod).
So I renamed the movie folder in the hope that Demigod will start anyway and lo and behold the problem is gone.

I’m aware that the connectivity issue is of much greater importance to Demigod as an MP game right now (and rightly so), I’d just thought I give you a pointer as for the possible causes and approaches to that very annoying problem.[/B]

1616

Wow, good find man.

1617

A lucky one. :P

I really despise those logos…
Ironically Demigod is not as bad in this respect as pressing escape one times skips all the movies.
That made the logos much less annoying and almost prevented me from dealing with them. :P

Even then if a similar problem had not already happened to me with Grand Ages Rome I might have just deleted the logos and kept the menu background, demigod portraits etc. which are also bink videos. This in turn would have prevented me from discovering the solution to my problem. :)

1618

Well done dude.

Well I tried the new patch and it still sucks dicks but at least you can quickly tell that it’s not working. I didn’t get in until my seventh try but each try only took a minute. Still unacceptable, but improving.

1619

If you are on the sidelines waiting for the okay that MP is better… you might want to set-up a campfire and dig in for awhile.

I just tried to join a few games with the new non-beta update. All kinds of new issues are coming out of the woodwork. I appreciate the effort Stardock is putting in, but man, I hope there are no super high up windows and someone is going desk to desk collecting any sharp objects. It has got to be a frustrating time there.

At this point, it is a mix of emotion when trying or even thinking about trying to play Demigod. It is a good game, and it keeps calling me…

but every time I click to enter a game lobby…something buzzes around in my mind…

1620

I just played two Pantheon games. The first one was a domination on Exile which I won by using capture locks on the regen flags a lot. I’m really liking capture locks more and more.
It’s clearly better out of beta, many more people around, so there are enough with decent connections to get Pantheon games (assuming you are configured right). I’m enjoying it much more now.

Go Brad!