Environment Tiles discussion

Unknown

I would like to see D3 revamp environment tiles. Only 2 such tiles are useful, oasis and forest. The tiles that need to be addressed are hot dog stand.....Really +50 life points. Smh. Latverian embassy 3 strike tiles that do 3 damage. Snow drift, stun target, -1 all tiles actually not terrible but could be something like -3 all tiles. Last but not least containment breach also not terrible but could be improved ti maybe 2 ir 3 critical tiles. Changing these would make the game more interesting and make matching environment tiles worthwhile nit worthless.

Unknown

Postby IceIX » Thu May 29, 2014 7:52 pm

alphavs0mega wrote:
A lot of the user base have been demanding a buff to the "hot dog stand" environmental move. I myself have been effected by this by collecting said environmental tiles only to receive 50 health. Please consider upping this to 100 health to help us vets survive these matches. Any updates on this critical patch would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and have a great day!

We've had a bunch of conversations internally about what to do with EO abilities. There are a bunch of underpowered ones like Hot Dog Stand, a bunch that are too powerful for cost like Oasis, and none that we'd actually consider just right. They're definitely one of those things that keep popping up on the agenda for "what's next in the improvement queue". We do appreciate the stories about how a level 230 Juggernaut will stop in his rampage of Headbutts to eat some of New York's finest All Beef footlongs for a whole 50 health though.

Unknown

I also am not sure why they have a different point value system to them rather than 1 tile=1ap. Never made sense to me. But glad this is being looked at.

Unknown

I believe certain characters gain more environmental tiles in certain areas than others. I'm not 100% sure on that tough. If not the case then maybe it should be something they can start including.

Unknown

mak3482 wrote:

I believe certain characters gain more environmental tiles in certain areas than others. I'm not 100% sure on that tough. If not the case then maybe it should be something they can start including.

Certain characters have higher environmental damage and environmental damage is affected by the crit multiplier, so Punisher and GSBW are always the best at environment damage (4/4X). But no character gains more environmental damage as a function of the environment itself. A match 3 crit on environmental by Punisher gets you exactly 48 environmental points in any environment in the game.

Unknown

Thanks fir clearing that up phantron.

Unknown

Also: could the second environmental abilites not require so much AP as to be functionally non-existent? I think I've fired a secondary ability - Forest Fire - once. Seriously, even if you're outright *trying* to fire a secondary ability and nothing else, odds are you'll match your enemies to death before you have enough AP.

Unknown

Compared to thorned rose, forest fire isnt worth it.

Unknown

Yeah I agree with u guys its like there was no thought process that went into the 2ndary abilities. Kinda just slapped on there. These improvements will change strategy and game dynamics immensely

Unknown

50 HP is a bit of a joke lol. It should be easy enough to scale that to, say, 10% of the lowest character's health (just as an example).

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Compared to thorned rose, forest fire isnt worth it.

I may have the name wrong - I mean the secondary ability for the Winter tileset - the one that turns all the blue tiles red - or possibly vice versa, I can't remember.

Unknown

BelligerentGnu wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

Compared to thorned rose, forest fire isnt worth it.

I may have the name wrong - I mean the secondary ability for the Winter tileset - the one that turns all the blue tiles red - or possibly vice versa, I can't remember.

I think that's Cold Snap? It's about the only higher environmental ability I've ever used. It also stuns for 3 turns which doesn't hurt.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

BelligerentGnu wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

Compared to thorned rose, forest fire isnt worth it.

I may have the name wrong - I mean the secondary ability for the Winter tileset - the one that turns all the blue tiles red - or possibly vice versa, I can't remember.

I think that's Cold Snap? It's about the only higher environmental ability I've ever used. It also stuns for 3 turns which doesn't hurt.

Cold snap is less than 1/3 the cost of forest fire, and while still somewhat rare. BWGS can usually make this happen. Helps to have a good output for blue.

Forest fire happens to deplete the opponent of all ap in addition. But if you use env ap for thorned rose, the opponent shouldnt survive.

Phantron. You werent playing when they gave all those crazy buffs to env and crit tiles?

Unknown

-Increase cost of oasis
-make thorned rose do 300-400 damage (or a percentage) to the entire team instead of only 100 to one. Hotdog stand heals for 8% of max to all.
-Latvia tiles totally change so that they convert 3 enemy strike or def tiles into basic tiles and, if fewer than 3, adds weak black strike tiles (15 dmg) up to 3 (if they have 1 strike tile...then it converts that one to a basic color and adds 2 15 dmg tiles).
-Ice lvl's lvl 1 STEALS ap,meaning you gain the ap as well as them losing one of each color (plus the 1 turn stun).
-lab lvl is fine for lvl 1.
Am I missing one?

Lvl 2s mostly need a revamp to allow them to have a purpose to earn them and a purpose to use instead of multipl rises of the lvl one. They really should just be stronger versions of the lvl 1 in some way....but most are fine as ling as costs are lower and you weaken thier lvl 1.

Examples:

Oasis lvl 2 is fine, but give it some way to be more directed. Maybe turns up to 5 blue tiles into crit tiles.

City lvl 2 building ap for destroyed tiles on the sides is fine, but lower the cost...its way too high.

Ice lvl 2 is fine, cost is decent...its kinda an upgrad of the lvl 1 builds builds ap instead of stealing any...plus blue=even more stunning/ap grabbing.

Forest fire is fine once you nerf the lvl 1.

Lab lvl 2...does what again lol.

Basically I feel, ap wise, the lvl 2 should cost around 2.5x the lvl 1. Maybe 3x. Certainly not the 4x+ many seem to cost, furthering the use of the lvl 1 over them. Saving up for the lvl 2 should be an advantage...not a negative or just a spamming of the lvl one.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Phantron wrote:

BelligerentGnu wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

Compared to thorned rose, forest fire isnt worth it.

I may have the name wrong - I mean the secondary ability for the Winter tileset - the one that turns all the blue tiles red - or possibly vice versa, I can't remember.

I think that's Cold Snap? It's about the only higher environmental ability I've ever used. It also stuns for 3 turns which doesn't hurt.

Cold snap is less than 1/3 the cost of forest fire, and while still somewhat rare. BWGS can usually make this happen. Helps to have a good output for blue.

Forest fire happens to deplete the opponent of all ap in addition. But if you use env ap for thorned rose, the opponent shouldnt survive.

Phantron. You werent playing when they gave all those crazy buffs to env and crit tiles?

I played back then. I remember with Modern Hawkeye you can make 2 environmental match 3 on lab, get a random crit, match that into 2 more environmental for like 300 enviornmental AP, and then just keep on click on environmental AP continously and it generally feeds itself forever because you'll eventually have an enviornmental tile pop up next to 2 enviornmental tiles to feed the cycle again. I remember getting a Forest Fire off but it only did like 3000 damage. I guess you have 30 red AP too.

Unknown

When talking about buffing environment effects, keep in mind they're supposed to be the worst tile in the game. Media cover says 'hinders your efforts by converting (colored tiles) to environment'. It's not supposed to be good to have environment tiles based on the in game description.

over_clocked

Environment tiles are you best friend when fighting against the Hood and not having your own, don't match environment under any circumstances, unless you're a few AP away from Thorned Rose.
I fire secondary environment abilities sometimes, usually only happens with the Punisher, cMags and mStorm around though. I remember madly scrambling for that secondary City ability once, back against Maggia (was it in Prologue, with cHawkeye?), as eating Hot dogs wouldn't get me anywhere when Maggia abilities straight up murder people.

Unknown

I got quite a lot of lvl 2 from enviromental in forest and and oasis but that was way back when buffed characters (in LRs for instance) had their crit and environmental tiles x9 and such, so a crit on 4 environmental tiles would net you ~200 tiles. Good times

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

When talking about buffing environment effects, keep in mind they're supposed to be the worst tile in the game. Media cover says 'hinders your efforts by converting (colored tiles) to environment'. It's not supposed to be good to have environment tiles based on the in game description.

I don't put much weight in thier wording at this point given how many odd or downright wrong lines of type they have had. On top of that, I could just as easily assume hinder merely refers to converting whatever color tile is converted (pretty sure its specific colors)...which is also more likely the meaning anyway. It could just as easily have said "hinders you by changing red into purple."

Also, remember you are doing 0 damage with each env match. That's a loss of about 50-60 dmg per every 3-4
tile points." Just off that you are talking about losing out on 600+ damage in order to get off your avg lvl 1. That's not including any missed strike tile damage.

for a 50 env move to be better than ap it would have to (assuming a high end env character like pun @4) outdo 600+ dmg + 13 ap. Most decent 3*** moves use 300+ dmg/ap...many considerably higher. So assuming that, 13*300=3900. 3900+600 means the a 50 point enviornment move has to have a value above 4400 damage to even be considered an issue. 50 env for 30 ap outstrips that (30*300=9k...though realistically a lot of that is wasted ap on subpar moves...so I will say its closer to a value of 6-7k)7k-4.4k =2.6k. So....maybe 2.6k/3 or 1.6k/3 should be the self damage done by thorned rose. I don't think -800 dmg to each character is a totally unfair value for using yhornes rose...and it would certainly make Forrest fire more relevant. -500 to each is a nicer number, and I don't mind the enviornments not all being uniform...as uniform is boring anyway.

Using 4.4k/50 each env tile is worth 240 dmg. Healing to dmg ratio seems to be around (spidey does ~2400/12 or 200 per ap vs 300 per ap) 2:3 ratio so you should expect a little over 2,900 dmg of healing for 50 enviornment ap. Something like Latvia and oasis are too hard to put a number on like that, but oasis is clearly op and Latvia is clearly a joke and needs to do something entirely different than just weak strike tiles. That said, these are jjust values before enviornment become better than .normal ap. So doing something like, 50 ap healing 8% (8% of 5800 is 464. 8k is 640) means likely getting around 1.5k of healing ...hardly op compared to getting ap.

Also to note, is that 2.5x50 or 125-150 enviornment is the same thing as 30+ap. So these moves really should be doing 7-9k worth of effective damage anyway. Also, note that for everything I was using enviornment negative values, so all these values are already giving a slight nudge fo keeping them underpowered compared to ap.

Finally, imo, the enviornment should be a middle ground tile, not a useless tile. It does no damage but allows for moves that can cover something your own characters might not be great at (stuns, ap steals, ap generation, tile destroy, large damage (crit tiles) etc). You shouldn't feel like you horribly lost out when having to match an env tile....you should feel like you are gaining something special that doesnt related to your charcter...

Effectively enviornment tiles should be like having a higher base value ap that doesn't scale with your characters beyond the diff enviornment points a character collects.

Unknown

@Snoenottelling

A thing to bear in mind about comparing Environmental tiles to the AP you would have generated is the different interaction with critical tiles. A colour crit is some extra damage, an environmental crit is potentially a LOT of extra environmental AP, especially if you get a 5 crit...

That aside I quite like your ideas for balancing tiles, personally I think i'd go for..

Hot dog stand - heal of 10% of starting health rather than flat amount. So that would be from about 500 to just under 1k for maxed 3* heroes. Still less than an OBW heal so not too excessive IMO.
Oasis - increase cost to 40 and review again if still too good
Thorned rose - does 10% of starting health as damage to user rather than a flat 100. Wouldn't be completely against it eing to whole team but that might be a little harsh
Snow drift - not sure it needs a change, maybe cost down to 40 but a tun and -1 to all AP is pretty decent
Containment breach - Fine as is
Latervian terrain - I would change this to destroying a number of random tiles, maybe 5. Claim it's doctor doom's traps going off 8). Alternatively tie strike tile strength to level of triggering person, 3 tiles at 20% of the person who matches env tiles level. that would be 17 for a maxed 2* and 28 for a maxed 3* which is decent but not excessive IMO.

As for lvl 2 abilities only cold snap really works for me because all the others are too expensive to bother with unless you have a good way of generating crit tiles where you want to so you can make environmental matches. Even M.Storm's red struggles to get those going generally. I'd drop the cost and effect of them. Maybe 2.5x the lvl 1 ability cost would be a decent level and balance accordingly.