Feature Suggestions / Changes

[ShadowZz]

I don't think your getting it...... There is no problem lol......

-ShadowZz

[Burn]

Can try giving Tauren a fortified armour research like Demonologist for around the same gold in ARC, so he can be tanky late game like his other fellow supporters without AR.

-Burn

[ShadowZz]

The idea that a builder that is supposed to be the squishiest unit you have and the one you need to protect above all others needs to be tanky as f*** is ludacris to me..... Tauren is still tanky, you just can't run out solo and try to kill a minion anymore and to be honest its a team game, one person should never really be able to solo anything. He's still a tanky base support with great abilities and can still contribute fine in ganking minions without being able to run around and do dumb stuff and get away with it because it took 20+ hits to kill him. Tauren having fortified armour late game is more of a problem due to the fact that that is when he has the most HP which means more armour will only give him more effective hit points which was the problem which was trying to be solved. The only reason people are now moaning about tauren is because they still think they can just run out and solo minions or go and auto attack titan for exp in the middle of the map. No builder should ever be capable of that.

Bit of a rant, but why can't people just accept that fortified on a unit with so much HP potential and so many other benefits is ridiculous.

-ShadowZz

[Burn]

Let me start off to tell you what Tauren's role in Island Defense is. Tauren's main role in a base is to rewall, stun the titan, and do massive damage with Pulverize, Maul and Charge. He gets HP and armour from aftershock, which gives him a tonne of EXP. Tauren is a huge annoyance to titan, and is really tanky against magic damage due to healing ward and magic resistance. He needs to do all this without getting ward blocked and die in 2 hits.

Tauren's solo base is very bad, because there are only a limited amount of bases he can base in with enough towers to do enough damage to titan's health, unless he has a craptonne of gold and wood to afford both AR and towers.

I think I disagree with everything ShadowZz just said. Let me try.

The idea that Tauren is supposed to be the tankiest unit you have and the one you need to protect above all others needs to be tanky as fuck is correct, as he needs to be upfront and attack the titan in ward block range. Tauren needs to be tankier, you can't run out solo and try to kill a minion anymore, and never used to be able to. The way Tauren kills minions without gold is to wall a minion in, then poke it to death. Fruit trees are optional.

Every builder should be able to solo a minion. Hell, you can solo minions with just walls and fruit trees. Tauren is not a very useful minion killer any more, since he can't make use of his abilities which requires him to be up close to minions and titans to poke them, and he is too squishy to do that. Tauren does not have much HP and armour compared to Mag and Morphling, which have similar roles. Tauren always had the least effective hit points out of both of them, with around 90g and 30k lumber, which is around 30mins ingame without gold. The problem with tauren was that he could gold at mound early game at like 29:00 without fear of dying because of his charge skill, not late game tankiness. The main reason people are now moaning about tauren is because they die in 3 hits with AR on if titan pops berzerkers gem and has HotD.

My suggestions to improve Tauren:

Make the magic resistance (include it in with battle training) and/or the fortified armour (10g 1500w) researchable in RC to nerf. Tauren early game, and improve late game. Make Tauren start with 0 armour to further nerf early game, and give 5 armour per level.

I've read every single reply to ShadowZz's replies in this thread, and the common theme is defending every single one of Neco's changes, and can't help but to feel bias in his replies. I have every respect for Neco's changes, and has the most genius ideas that most people will not think of, but he is still one man. A problem arises when every single decent player who has played tauren notices a common theme: Tauren is not tanky late game, and thus, is a problem. Neco's idea was heading in the right direction, it fixed Tauren's early game OPness, but it wrecked what tauren needed, which was Tauren needing to be tanky enough to poke minions and titans. Neco has already agreed to give fort armour in AR, which will probably fix most of the problems, but I feel having fortified armour and magic resistance researchable will be the better of both worlds.

Even if Tauren gets fort. armour in AR, there is still one problem left - Tauren with excess gold still makes him extremely squishy. Morphling, Magnataur, Sat and Ogre still out-tank him with ease, and all have very decent escape skills late game.

With around 90g:

Morphling has fort. armour, 16 armour, evasion +100hp.
Magnataur has fort. armour, 12 armour +100hp.
Ogre has fort armour and 15 armour while fart +200hp +50% resist. (this is a baser, mind you)
Satyr has Evasion and speed poke for insane gold income
Tauren has +100HP & magic resist.

Morphling has deadly spines, slam, howl and low cooldown beast switching.
Magnataur has WW, arctic armour, inner cold, snowman blocking
Ogre has 10s fart and 15s bloodlust
Satyr has Dash/blur and wall walk
Tauren has Charge, Enfeeble, drums boost (+ms), healing ward and Earthshock

All 5 of these builders have really good and numerous low cooldown escape abilities too, late game, and can easily get out of mid if WW'd upon, except Tauren is the squishiest. PW and AR are not included because they have long cooldowns and long durations which is terrible for golding.

-Burn

[n3w_3ra]

I don't think your getting it...... There is no problem lol......

-ShadowZz

Have you not played a game as tauren since the update? In AR you die in close to 5-6 hits from level 7-8 titan, its a waste of gold now lol

[ShadowZz]

"Every builder should be able to solo a minion. Hell, you can solo minions with just walls and fruit trees."

In a 10v1 teamgame there should be no reason for a builder to be able to solo a minion. So Tauren has limited basing options - he can still base fine in specific places - if anything tauren got a buff to basing due to not needing arc anymore but noone seems to bother with it - his entire playstyle has changed and instead of people adapting to it all they have done is bitch and complain about it and wonder why there dying. He can't solo minions - but with a single other person he kills minions just fine or if minion is under leveled he stills walks up and solos. He still has great walls earlygame and lategame hes still a good support. So boo hoo if he puts himself in a dumb position he dies. I feel like your all mad that tauren now has a weakness.

All the decent players your talking about have gone on about how good tauren is since forever and now your seriously all saying boohoo he got nerfed?
Literally the problem with tauren was how tanky he was through the entire game and now he takes 25% more damage everyone is crying. Everyone going on about how taurens die in 6 hits to lvl 8 titans, well it would have took 8 in previous versions and noone whined then. Given the attack speed it basically took you guys 5 secs of doing nothing but walking to die.

P.S. The fact that you are attacking a level 7-8 titan is plain retarded to me. If your reply is going to be "oh he just caught me running" well is that fortified armoured fault that you have 0 map awareness. "oh he hit me in walls" congrats you died to melee in walls. Feel free to enlighten me.

-ShadowZz

[Nigth2]

Even with an overbuff to tauren it'll be still bad.
Consider buffing a bit tauren (I like burn's suggestions) and nerf the others, Tauren was on the overpower club, they just kick the poor out, so the tauren's nerf is not balancing game. not even his 30k wood joke base.
About armors, the incompetence of having heavy armor and not having any counter (magic) >.> one of the first thing to avoid in games I do. Also derp to have an armor that can't be countered because of almost total lack of counter (fortified) is crummy. I'll cry out LOL'ing if you say Minion's summons can even scratch a base.
For the thread, XD, the bitching. Like I grabbed a popcorn basket before watching the thread.

[Stealer]

I feel like your all mad that tauren now has a weakness.

Tauren's weakness is that he can't make a real base and to do anything with tauren requires a lot of lumber.

This is the third round of nerfs to a builder that most of us didn't even have a problem with.

[Burn]

Alright, let's keep this simple, ShadowZz.

1) Problem right now, compared to other supporters, is that Tauren is far too squishy, for someone who pokes the titan in melee range.
2) Problem we had before, was that Tauren could gold all he wants without a care in the world, because he is so tanky.
3) Tauren uses 2000w + 20g for supers, which is incredibly expensive for his 4x4 towers, which makes him very weak as a solo baser.

Second and third problem is fixed. First is a fact.

Also, Tauren being able to solo minions is not an issue, no problem at all. If you lose your minions to a Tauren, then you deserve to lose anyway.

Are you still going to argue that Tauren's squishyness is balanced, given that two better basers - Ogre + Morphling are both tankier than a Tauren who is supposed to poke for EXP?

-Burn

[ShadowZz]

@nigth2 no ones bitching, were all friends here and often talk on skype just heated.....

I agree problems 2 and 3 are solved or are at least moving in the correct direction. Do I think he is squishier than other supports? Probably. But then I also think that no other support of similar tier can tower or solo base at all. I feel like him being slightly squishier than other supports is a fine compromise considering he can still base if needed. When you take the fact that he has the ability to make towers into consideration when comparing him against other supports then I think you will agree he should be more squishy than them.

Edit: Didn't read the last sentence.... - As for Ogre and Morphling. Do you not think the problem with that is that they should be less tanky? Not that Tauren should be buffed in order to match them.... I quite agree that Morphling can get ridiculously tanky purely due to his armour and especially if he has the gold for gold towers with +10 armour to him as well. But I just don't see it as Tauren being bad. More as Morphling being too tanky. I don't think Ogre is a huge issue as he is tanky at the start after he gets bloodlust but unless he upgrades hp then he doesn't really get much tankier. After all every builder could hp all day and be tankier

-ShadowZz

[Lynx]

-ShadowZz

I laugh every time i see this

As for making tauren more tanky (I assume, read fast). Who cares if it changes, a meta change is always nice to this dino-game.

[narbtit]

Really enjoying this epic thread

I think we need one or two more egg items because we allow people to buy eggs now. I'm not sure what exactly but I would like to see two more cool egg items.

Maybe even something crazy like a pudge skillshot hook/pull item that could be used to rescue builders with. Or pull things.

[Burn]

Spoiler!

Edit: Didn't read the last sentence.... - As for Ogre and Morphling. Do you not think the problem with that is that they should be less tanky? Not that Tauren should be buffed in order to match them.... I quite agree that Morphling can get ridiculously tanky purely due to his armour and especially if he has the gold for gold towers with +10 armour to him as well. But I just don't see it as Tauren being bad. More as Morphling being too tanky. I don't think Ogre is a huge issue as he is tanky at the start after he gets bloodlust but unless he upgrades hp then he doesn't really get much tankier. After all every builder could hp all day and be tankier

-ShadowZz

No, Morphling is fine, his towers just need a slight -5 damage nerf to all towers., or a -50 range nerf. As for supporter/baser, no baser in their right mind is going to spend the amount of wood/gold needed to get beast form at 90g, which is the amount of gold we are talking about for decent games.

Ogre's fart is hands down the worst starting builder in the game since it has a cast time, and needs to be preemtively used in order to survive, and is easily countered by a wotw. He needs bloodlust to not be a squishy mofo.

The point is, though, when Ogre is safer at gold mound than your Tauren at 90G, something is definitely wrong. So to answer your question, no. I don't think Morphling/Ogre needs to be less tanky, just that Tauren needs to be less squishy.

-Burn

[ShadowZz]

I don't think we will ever agree on this so lets agree to disagree

-ShadowZz

[n3w_3ra]

I don't think we will ever agree on this so lets agree to disagree

-ShadowZz

I see where you are coming from, but... Magnataur is Taurens closest builder in terms of support roles, maybe beast morph.

No one ever complained about mag being OP except for spell immune in wrath (Now fixed with anti-wrath wand) What made tauren so OP wasnt the fact that he had fort armor.

Sometimes a teeny-tiny nerf can have giant game changing consequences. Mag has fort armor, morph has fort armor, demo can get fort armor, and satyr has hero armor. No one complains about demo having fort armor. Not once have I ever heard someone say aww shit demo needs nerf because fort armor is OP.

No, the reason tauren was OP is as follows.

Charge baseline right off the bat. A good baser can set up a full deny base and be at mid within +- 5 seconds of titan spawning. So tauren is already at mid waiting for titan to go and feed.

TItan goes bottom left for a lumber base. By the time the titan gets back to mid or TP's the tauren could have upwards of 50+ gold, and soon enough he will level. +75 hp you can easily buy 30g hp upgrade and have 475 hp before titan was even done with the first lumber base. Now you have a 400-475 hp tauren with one of the best escapes in the game, potentially costing 10g for the titan to counter it. The cooldown is so short you dont even have to worry about wasting it risking.

This allows the tauren to become retarded fed throughout the game. If you replaced his charge with enfeeble baseline it would cause the tauren to play more carefully at the start of the game caring for WW and titans MIA. This would allow the titan to catch up in terms of feed. Tauren increased at a rate of 200% to a titans increase of 120%. The longer the game goes on the greater the disparity between how strong the tauren and titan are. Wrath and AR arent something that should be able to be obtained every game, they should be similar to the titans ultimate ability.

Tauren should be reverted to fort armor at start, and swap enfeeble baseline and replace enfeeble with charge in the research tree, It would be similar to Mags frostbite, and WW. If mag had WW from the start he would be able to risk a lot more, but still NO WHERE as close as charge allows you to risk. If you are an uber player and keep workers in mid to det WoTW Taurens Charge is unstoppable and is THE BEST escape in the game hands down, The cooldown is short, the duration is long, and the speed increase is crazy.

I believe that a small little nerf swapping charge and enfeeble would solve many many problems with tauren, and he can retain his tanky status.