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Maxwell's Shadow Duelists are so useless


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I think Duelists need to have their summoning cost increased to 3 fuel, and get a basic 40% damage resistance against non-player enemies. Try this in the code, you'll notice they are far more effective, without being overpowered or tanky.

Against other players, they should retain 0% damage resistance (same as they have now) so they do not become a concern for PVP.

On 3/4/2017 at 7:09 AM, HamBatter said:

Wendy has AoE, Webber has swarm, so ranged can be Maxwell's thing. For balance the ranged attacks can have long delays or a timer/way for the puppets to off themselves.

Though it's iffy in the parity area in terms of both single player and damage reward... I guess it could be a new puppet

Maxwell should probably get boomerang duelists, as an alternative to melee ones: Having a slow attack rate, standing still when throwing the boomerang and waiting for the return, and dealing low damage. They'd be mostly intended to hunt and provide "some" assistance against bosses or enemies that you know melee ones would just die to.
You would still only be able to have 2 duelists max, at any given time, no matter what kind (2 ranged ones, or one ranged one melee, or 2 melee. Never more than 2.)



PS: My name was chosen because duelists are funny looking, and useless :)

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I've proposed before that shadow puppets should have the ability to be given nightmare fuel to improve their durability, but if you are looking to improve duelists specifically, a good way might be for them to check Maxwell's target or state tags each time they attack.  This way it could be set up so that if a duelist confirms that Maxwell is attacking when it goes to attack, it will forego the hit-and-run part of its sequence, and instead perform consistent and repeated attacks as a player holding the attack key would;  the moment the check goes through without Maxwell being in an attack state, it will attempt to hit and run as normal, not checking for his involvement again until its next attack.

What you can expect from this behavior would be a greater amount of control as to when a puppet attempts to hit and run, so you encounter less issues with monster swing timers and offset duelists getting hit every time, and instead have it put on you, the player, to dodge at the correct times so that duelists dodge at the correct times too.

An expansion of this idea that I personally do not like, but would probably be the most effective means to ensure duelist survival, is that instead of attacking on their own, they ONLY attack when Maxwell is attacking, and back away to hover at a slight distance (or large if the monster has the epic tag) until then.

Both of these proposals do put more pressure on Maxwell to play better in order to be effective, but I think that adding a measure of player input is a much better solution that the AI simply being better at knowing exactly what to do and when with an opponent.

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The Shadow Puppets should be reworked in general. It is highly obnoxious and amateurish that the gatherers destroy everything around them. They should make them only gather from what Maxwell gathers, or allow Maxwell a unique click option that directions puppets to interact with certain things. Additionally, the Duelists need more defense or health; and making it so that gatherers can participate in combat would be another boon to allow them to be more useful as a whole. Having archery based duelists would also be interesting, although they would need to be well balanced to avoid being an endless-boomerang alternative.

 

Maxwell is a handicap without his puppets, yet the Gatherers are exclusively useful only to gather and they are obnoxiously programmed. Meanwhile, the Duelists spend half the time kiting and have so little resilience that they can only survive against low end enemies.

It is the same with Abigail. She is around all the time, and obnoxious because of it. She floats around your screen, making noise and interfering with your activities. If she was redesigned to be spawn-in-spawn-out on command, she could avoid dying in less foolish scenarios, be less of a constant sensory annoyance, and avoid disrupting players who are trying to avoid confrontation.

 

And honestly, making Abigail more useful would not even be a balance problem. Wigfrid is already 50% stronger in body and 50% stronger in equipment then every other character, and saps energy from enemies, with nothing more then a paltry diet limitation. Combat balance in this game is hardly stable.

 

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Maxwell needs a "stop gathering" button and an entire window for gathers to harvest and what not to harvest.

If it was up to me,I would prefer a classical rts micro management style,but I know it's kind of impossible on this game engine.What I mean is the classic click hero->give order,click unit->give order option.This way it wouldn't matter if duelists had my hit points,but I could micro them around spiders and order them around instead of bein a dead weight.

The only viable buffs which are also easy to implement for Maxwell are these:

-Option to deactivate gatherers and have a follow-only command (the do not gather those things menu would be a HUGE bonus)

-Make duelists have the option of LITERALLY becoming my moving shadows .These duelists would literally be copying my wasd movements and my hit attacks . Just imagine a one time only chance of fighting a giant with triple the damage output of a regular hero with the only downside of losing ALL your shadows when you get hit by their aoe attack. It would be even cooler if shadows could somehow extend from my left and right arms as if shadows grow out of them to attack the enemies.

 

Am I wishing too much?

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18 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

Just imagine a one time only chance of fighting a giant with triple the damage output of a regular hero

It would only be triple the output damage if you were using a spear. Duelists deal 40 damage while spears deal 34 damage. Duelists don't copy the damage of the player's held weapon.

18 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

-Make duelists have the option of LITERALLY becoming my moving shadows .These duelists would literally be copying my wasd movements and my hit attacks .

Now this would be pretty neat.

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On 23.03.2017 at 9:30 PM, Sinister_Fang said:
On 23.03.2017 at 2:35 AM, StarvedKasad said:

-Make duelists have the option of LITERALLY becoming my moving shadows .These duelists would literally be copying my wasd movements and my hit attacks .

Now this would be pretty neat.

That would make Maxwells dps too high imo. It indeed will be somewhat low-survivability, but high damage output, but in the right hands it would just make him OP.

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16 minutes ago, Diaboliko said:

That would make Maxwells dps too high imo. It indeed will be somewhat low-survivability, but high damage output, but in the right hands it would just make him OP.

Easy fix: Their damage could be reduced or they could still have a delay in their attacks instead of copying every attack Maxwell does.

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8 hours ago, Diaboliko said:

That would make Maxwells dps too high imo. It indeed will be somewhat low-survivability, but high damage output, but in the right hands it would just make him OP.

Maybe.But those shadows would die in one aoe hit.A glass cannon hero.

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3 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

Maybe.But those shadows would die in one aoe hit.A glass cannon hero

But only two bosses have aoe
and the dragonfly's aoe is the only hard one to dodge
so that would be OP

I like Fang's suggestion better
with delay and reduced damage it wouldn't be that bad

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We can even make shadow duelists be untracable to enemy monsters and can die only to shenanigans (aoe damage). Having them drain Maxwell's sanity each by half would or even dying after a few days would make them perfectly balanced and totally better than the useless minions they are now.

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2 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

We can even make shadow duelists be untracable to enemy monsters and can die only to shenanigans (aoe damage). Having them drain Maxwell's sanity each by half would or even dying after a few days would make them perfectly balanced and totally better than the useless minions they are now.

"Perfectly balanced"...

Monkeys provide enough fuel and fruit coctails to never care about health and fuel.

I heard of no solo strat that involves fighting dfly in enraged form for long.

Rather make them reduce his current health and make them last for about 45-60 seconds, being untargetable (though that would require some dps decrease in pve) and immune to damage(or like have 999999 health). Its manageble both in pve and pvp.

It still would make him sorta OP, but he would be usefull for both newbies and pros at least.

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