I haven’t had much time to play yet, but I like what I’ve seen so far. Let’s talk strategy.
Most of my playtime has been with Rook. I’ve had the most success focusing on Hammer Slam, Structural Transfer, and Enhanced Attributes.
Hammer Slam is my go-to weapon for dealing with enemy Demigods; even if it’s difficult to kill anyone that runs away (Rook is not exactly speedy), it does a good job of forcing them to run away.
Structural Transfer is great for taking down the enemy defenses. It does significant damage, while healing you.
I haven’t had much luck with Power of the Tower. Towers don’t last all that long, so I have difficulty of taking advantage of the higher levels of the skill. (By the time the eighth tower is down, the first one is already gone.) I’m also unclear on whether you get experience for kills made by your towers; if not, PotT looks even less attractive to me.
Tried Boulder Roll once, didn’t get much use out of it. Maybe I’m missing something. Rook Towers seem weak compared to upgrading Hammer Slam some more. Haven’t tried God Strength at all.
Boulder Roll is all about getting speedy dg’s to stay still so you can hammer them. Definitely worth it.
Power of the Tower isn’t that great, you’re right – until you realize that it enables portal scrolls. That alone makes a single rank unbelievably good on coordinated teams.
Personally, I’m in love with the Queen. I’ve got two builds (which are the obvious ones, to be sure) that I use depending on map/mode/teams. Shamblers/Mulch/Bramble Shield as ranged support – the shamblers do surprisingly awesome damage, and Mulch restores a TON of health as well as a nice little damage burst if you can catch enemies in it. Bramble Shield is the best healing spell in the game (is there a dispel ability? haven’t had it happen yet). With this build I generally buy regen and minions; the sturdiness of it makes speed less necessary (and I usually don’t go for kills so much as support; this build doesn’t have the burst to force kills against decent players unless their backs are really against a wall). But get some siege demolishers and bishops rolling with this thing, and it’s a complete bastard to take down. Plus low money requirements to get this build rolling generally let me put a bunch of cash into the citadel in my experience.
The nuking build is a lot of fun, too. Ground Spikes, when you keep it upgraded, can wipe an entire wave of reinforcements – hello, crazy-easy XP! Spike Wave slows, which can let you force kills if enemies let themselves get low. Uproot is crazy siege damage – you only have to be in (the already long) range for the 1.5 cast and bam, 1200 or whatever damage. Easy to grind down towers and fortresses with minimal losses during normal back-and-forth fighting. This is especially awesome on maps with towers really close to each other/flags – killing the enemy tower in that kind of setup gets you a LOT of breathing room, which is pretty key. I usually spend my money like an assassin in this build – speed, health, mana. It’s a much more mobile build, which just gets minions killed most of the time.
Is Power of the Tower the rook ability that lets you build towers? I’ll assume so. It’s useful for protecting flags from easy de-caps. Throw up some towers as you’re capturing a flag and it suddenly becomes a lot harder for the enemy team to get it back.
Boulder Roll has a stun, right? Boulder Roll enemy Demigods before they get to the “oh shit gotta run” phase and then hit them with Hammer Slam.
I’ve had both of these things happen to me, and man does it make me hate the Rook.
I’ve pretty much only used the Torchbearer, and only as fire. His AOE DOT works great for helping your minions damage towers; it does damage to the tower and also any enemy minions who come try to mix it up with your mans.
Hat stacking is key. You will never run out of mana.
I’ve been playing the Unclean Beast and grab Ooze as my first ability as well as the boots with speed boost as my first buy. These let me rush minions in the early game really effectively and tends to let me out-level my opponents. I only have ooze on when fighting minions. It lets me essentially tag all the minions as they’re dying so I get the xp rather than my own minions getting the kill (that is how xp gain works, right? That’s the way it appears to work at least).
Foul grasp is my favorite ability for the beast, so I grab that and level it up as much as possible. It’s great for grabbing running enemies and for standing toe-to-toe with most demigods. I love the rage ability that gives a temporary 25% to weapon damage as well. I tend to focus all my buys after the first on weapon damage upgrades and can get massive damage out of just wading into melee. With the big speed, this build seems to work against most demigods as I can catch most fleeing opponents.
I grab all the health upgrades in the skill tree as soon as they appear and never level ooze past its first level. It doesn’t seem to scale well.
My general play with the build is: buy three health potions and two teleports. Port near opponents, fight till low in health, use potion, repeat till out of potions, tele back, buy new potions, etc. It keeps me constant in battle so I level quickly and I usually get money fast enough I can keep him well equipped on top of the constant health and port buys. It’s also really fun to play.
Isn’t that the one that regens you out of combat? Not helpful when the issue is getting pasted in a few seconds by Regulus or whoever. The 800HP +4HP/sec one is what I usually get, with Boots of Speed. Still, TB is one of the more fragile DGs, and the hardest thing about the game for me is staying alive vs. competent assassins. Thus he’s not my first choice ;)
I had good luck last night playing a hybrid TB and starting with Rain of Ice, then Fire Ring, then Rain of Ice, repeat. Bought the first level of the interupt in ice as well as the ice nova.
I would Start in Fire mode, stance change to ice for +50% attack damage, then rain of ice or ice nova depending on range followed by the opposite. Stance change to fire, ring of fire and run while the +50% mana regen of fire is active. Then repeat. Rain of ice is back up by the time you can stance to fire, ring of fire and stance back if you want to stay in combat.
With the Heart of Life, you pop it when stance changing after an ice nova and get in-combat heals sometimes.
This worked exceptionally well on tower destruction since ice nova freezes towers and lets minions and yourself kill them unharmed.
By the end of the game my normal attack when switched back to ice mode did almost 500 a pop and fired off super fast. Another advantage of being primarily ice is the fact that he shoots ranged attacks while running making it very hard for enemies to run away.
When I get some time I’ll post my UB strats, but I only get the first level of Foul Grasp because you need the stun. The damage scaling on it combined with the mana usage really doesn’t seem appealing to me. I do much better off boosting the vomit combined with speed/attack speed and the snare ability with a few points in the frenzy for when you catch someone off guard/towers.
My complaint on UB is that against most teams that have a lot of ranged (which seems to be all of them) your spit is the only viable tool so I feel like a one shot pony. I’d rather just wade in and frenzy, but Ring of Fire singlehandedly makes this a non-possibility.
Also it seems a full 66%+ of the people I play with play TB.
It’s incredibly hard to survive the first couple of levels as TB but, once you do, he becomes a powerhouse. Fire mode TB, all the way.
For Regulus, I think going Snipe/Mines/Angelic Fury is the way to go. Regulus focusing on one path is alright. Regulus with all three can do it all. He’s got crazy DPS with the Angelic Fury for late-game pushing, he’s got Mines for map control/demigod killing, and he’s got snipe for even better demigod killing/harassment. Plus, Snipe and mines can put out thousands of damage all at once when used together.
So, for folks that have played some, how do the favor items work out? My fear is if I ever go test online play, I’ll be so far behind the favor hogs that I wouldn’t stand even a remote chance in hell.
I think it balances well by virtue of the fact that no matter how many you buy, you can only use one at a time. Additionally, a couple of the cheap ones are really good, and are still worth using even when you have some of the more expensive ones. So someone that has played a lot has access to more choices, but is not necessarily going to outstrip you in effectiveness. Maybe by a little, but nothing game-deciding.
Favor items are specifically designed so that the early ones are very powerful. A lot of experienced players take the 15% movespeed item despite it being like the 4th-cheapest.
I use Erebus as an assassin. Max Bite, Max Mist, The healing aura and lifesteal plus a point in stun and max Bat Wave.
As long as you keep your gear updated this build completely dominates the early and midgame. There isn’t a Demigod that can stand up to this.
Do the following inside a crowd.
Start with regular attacking, once your health dropped a bit, Bite. This usually puts them into panic mode because their health plummets because of the bite and the lost armor causes extra damage from the reinforcements as well. If they break and run at this point they’re dead. Even if they are faster then you, Batwave through them, follow up with Bite which at this point will be up again.
And if they manage to put you in the danger zone just switch to Mist or Bat Wave away.
The only downside is that if you run out of mana you will be dead in seconds and at lvl 20 the damage of the skills doesn’t match up against artifact gear.
Yet, I’m fully expecting the cooldown on Bite to be nerfed soon because it’s just silly now.
Is there a website that lists class info or a Character Builder tool? Maybe my google skills are weak but I wasn’t able to find any. Kind of surprising considering the game has been in beta for awhile.
The game balance changes from the beta to release almost makes it a different game. A build tool from the beta would have you chasing faries in the release version anyway.
Is there a screenshot key in the game? The game creates a “screenshots” folder, and hitting PrintScreen causes the game to pause momentarily as though it were snapping a screenshot, but nothing ever shows up in the folder.
I’m playing mostly regulus and Lord Erebus. With Regulus, i’ve been working on an angelic fury auto-attack build. Basically you pump all of your points in angelic fury, sniper’s scope, stat upgrades, and also maim when I can afford it. With items, I buy one that helps with the mana (Vlamish helmet or something like that, it costs 1750), and the rest are full of attack speed and weapon damage buffs. Obviously this build is less hands-on and exciting as one that is full of abilities to use, but eventually you get an attack speed of below 0.70 where you’re dealing close to 400 damage each shot. It can usually kill a demigod in a handful of seconds.
I’ve only played Unclean Beast so far, trying out lots of different builds. I tried a DoT build with plague and ooze, getting +health/regen items. It was fun, but ultimately not very useful. His rage ability seems nice, but any time I activate it the enemy just runs from me.
What I’ve found most effective so far is trying to get as much +weapon damage and +attack speed as I can, and trying to get quick kills on opponents before they react. It works great endgame with great gear, but I have trouble reaching that point.
The explosion ability (first plague one) is…kind of nuts. Taking out entire groups of reinforcements seems really good. Do you actually get xp for all the guys who die from being thrown back?
I’m not very good yet, but it seems like with UB I almost always lose trying to go toe-to-toe with other demigods. Especially the fire mage guy, regulus and queen of thorns. The chick on the tiger and the guy with the huge axe often cause some problems for me too. Hell, basically everybody.
As for favor items, I usually equip mard’s hammer, which is like +40 weapon damage and 5% attack speed. I try to get similar items too, but they’re usually too expensive. I fall behind quick midgame.
There’s a teleportation one that eliminates the need to carry teleport scrolls. It has a cooldown (25 seconds, IIRC), which reduces your ability to just pop to your citadel and back, but the tradeoff of having a free slot for other items (and also not having to spend money on teleport scrolls) is pretty compelling.
