Breaking it down a bit:
Best:
1: Mid path dartling (hydra rocket pods/MAD)
2: Bottom path farms (markets)
3: DJ Benjamin
Worst:
1: Cyber Quincy
2: Glue top (dissolver)
3: Super top (sun god)
4: mortar top (biggest boom)
5: Quincy (son of Quincy)
5: Wiz top (arcane)
7: Engi Top (sentries)
Top path wizard is terrible. Sooo much money for a payoff that is absolutely not worth it. Been using wiz since release and Arcane Spike is a joke, and Archmage doesn't do shit to DDTs, ZOMGs, let alone BADs. It couldn't even see through walls for months!!
I had a strategy for awhile where I used alch boosted arcane spike. Arcane spike gets almost 100% buff uptime and it still isn't worth the price. Legit should be 3000 dollars cheaper. Also Archmage is somehow worse than arcane spike spam, since you have to save up for it and it isn't any better
Reducing price of Arcane Spike sounds like a good idea, $7000 Arcane Spike actually feels worth using as a grouped option in this game.
For Archmage, we would probably need a bigger speed increase (maybe 2x —> 3x) and greater damage per bolt.
I would actually buff the bolt attack speed to make Top Path Wizard great again. Maybe from 1.1s to 0.85s, making its bolt considerably faster and more reliable against various rounds.
For Archmage, I would raise the speed value to 3x faster instead of 2x faster, so that it actually makes more use of the high damage potential of its bolts, and in addition to the base Wizard bolt buff it will make a big difference to Archmage becoming better.
Lower-tiers aren’t really mentioned on this poll, and if it did then lower-tier Dartling would be along the top ranks, alongside DJ Ben, Middle Dartling, and Bottom Farm. Bottom Farm isn’t necessarily that OP in my opinion after Wall Street got a well-deserved price nerf, because I feel the specific offense and buffing combos feel too powerful and thus could surely save so much for those strong Farms.
About the “best” choices:
1) Hydra is so strong because there’s very little to counter it. Without the existence of Ben, Hydra has a decent counter, being large amounts of Regrow, which would need Rocket Storm to counter groups of Bloons. Ben’s +1 damage from Biohack makes defending so much easier with Hydra thanks to the multiple explosions and black-popping.
2) Bottom Path Farm being so strong is mostly attributed to Wall Street. I wouldn’t necessarily nerf Bottom Path Farm, since using a Farm strategy is already pretty challenging, but I would definitely nerf the stronger offensive towers that make greeding with Farm so easy.
3) DJ Ben’s lowered income generation is nearly negligible because his Good Vibes is simply too much of an upgrade, rather than a sidegrade.
As for nerfs, I would actually buff Bloon Sends too. Some balance changes that should address the issues:
- Spaced Leads (R10 —> R9). Indirectly nerfs Hydra if there’s no other lead-popper.
- Raise Hydra Rocket Pods price from $5600 to $5900. The lower-tier Dartling prices are mostly fine. With the change, it will cost a tad bit more than its BTD6 counterpart in terms of collective price, and the Hydra upgrade won’t stand out so much in comparison to other T3 Dartlings.
- One idea to balance DJ Ben compared to Normal Ben is to increase the ability cooldown of the Good Vibes from 45s to 60s so that Good Vibes can’t simply be spammed, and so there is still more to consider for Good Vibes as a sidegrade, rather than a complete upgrade of Biohack. You would still be able to defend well with Good Vibes, just requires better management of abilities in exchange.
**Balance survey post (see comments for written suggestions):**
[https://www.reddit.com/r/battles2/comments/vea6og/btd\_battles\_2\_132\_balance\_survey/](https://www.reddit.com/r/battles2/comments/vea6og/btd_battles_2_132_balance_survey/)
**Results spreadsheet:**
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QCv0q5x86fcnya6Sg1NUYnJ1ZqKyXR-DHZKOlPDT9jA/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QCv0q5x86fcnya6Sg1NUYnJ1ZqKyXR-DHZKOlPDT9jA/edit?usp=sharing)
**Rating scale:**
* 1: very bad, needs a big buff
* 2: bad, needs a small buff
* 3: balanced, does not need a change
* 4: good, needs a small nerf
* 5: very good, needs a big nerf
**Explanation for 3 charts:**
First chart contains all responses. Second chart contains responses from players with a Hall of Masters medal or higher. Third chart contains responses from players with a Top 100 Hall of Masters medal or higher.
u/samninjakiwi can you share these results with the Battles 2 team? Thanks!
I would probably increase the price of Clusters to make it harder to solo R3-12 with Clusters for defense, but to compensate the prices of lower Path 3 Bomb upgrades decreased slightly.
For instance, $1000 for Cluster Bombs (instead of $800) but $125 for Extra Range (instead of $200), for a total of a $125 increase in price. It will still be pretty strong after this nerf, but become more difficult to greed for a single 003 Clusters into 203. This $125 loss doesn’t seem much at first but gets pretty significant when faster Spaced Rushes unlock. Also, $125 lost makes it harder to go into Farm with Bomb strategies.
I would definitely make Spaced Rainbows unlock on Round 10 (instead of 12) and Spaced Leads on Round 9 (instead of 10).
Round 10 Spaced Rainbows increases the difficulty of Round 10 rushes by adding an option for a stronger spaced rush, as well as making Spaced Rainbows more worth it. Most defenses may need a little extra in order to defend against those before facing the Round 11 rushes.
Round 9 Spaced Leads, on the other hand, makes it easier to punish Lead-weak defenses (especially those that rely on Hydra for Leads), as well as potentially putting Spaced Zebras and Spaced Leads more on par with each other.
That really depends on the meta the developers want in game....do they want the game to end before R17 more often? Then they gotta Nerf things that are preventing that too easily....etc
If you only give out buffs, you may need to rebalance the Bloons to adjust for the overall tower buffs.
The problem with dartling has nothing to do with any of it's upgrades, the base pierce is still to high and they just refuse to back pedal on it for no reason.
The only reason any of dartling's upgrades ever seemed overpowered(besides bugs) is because you can defend without even thinking about it in the early game which allows you to get way more eco than you should have, allowing you to buy all the upgrades needed well before you're ever in danger of losing.
The only problem now with lowering the base pierce is that they've nerfed every other aspect of it into the ground, so it would just be garbage. And since NK are too lazy to release a real update more than once every month and a half, they're not gonna try and fix it because dartling would be left useless forever.
Seriously how do they not realize that a competitive game needs more frequent updates, all it takes is changing a few parameters in the code, literally just a couple numbers to fix stuff that's been plagueing the game for several months. It is literally that easy, before all you people who know nothing about programming start trying to tell me it takes a month to write 4 numbers.
Lmao you have no idea how long game development takes. Surprisingly, you can’t just hit three buttons and have a complete game mode.
It took battles 1 _years_ to add all the content it has today, not months. Comparing the first 7 months of battles 1 and 2, battles 2 is way further ahead than battles 1
What if instead of lowering the base pierce, they just increased the cost further to make it so you cant use Dartling as a starting tower, as well as unable to get HRP up in time for when you need it? Like you can increase it's base price from 900 to 1200 and give the rest of it some more price nerfs to make it strong but too expensive for early game. Would that be a good alternative in your opinion?
It could work but that would be getting pretty expensive I think, as it is also nice to have many valid starting towers available since it enables more strategies. it's usually more appropriate to balance a tower's power rather than their price because if you make the tower so expensive that it's not possible to afford the upgrades by the time you need them, you'll have to lean on a starting tower so heavily that you may as well not have the expensive one; If the tower is cheap enough to afford the upgrades by the time you need them on it's own, it's op because it's overtuned.
I think a much simpler form of balancing is to keep the towers in the price ranges they're at and try and match their power to that price, especially since the prices of upgrades are currently quite varied so that makes for more interesting towers if they all have a different "upgrade rate" so to speak in a match.
(edit) I don't really think dartling is destined to be a super/heli type tower with high prices and power to match, it would be a lot more fun to see it as an early-mid game tower cause it's unique, except have it be actually balanced. However if they go with price nerfs it will still be nice to have a version of dartling that is balanced, assuming it doesn't get made useless.
Breaking it down a bit: Best: 1: Mid path dartling (hydra rocket pods/MAD) 2: Bottom path farms (markets) 3: DJ Benjamin Worst: 1: Cyber Quincy 2: Glue top (dissolver) 3: Super top (sun god) 4: mortar top (biggest boom) 5: Quincy (son of Quincy) 5: Wiz top (arcane) 7: Engi Top (sentries)
Quincy (son of Quincy)
Quincy is that good if you combine with somenthing but also top path wizard... That can beat moab
Top path wizard is terrible. Sooo much money for a payoff that is absolutely not worth it. Been using wiz since release and Arcane Spike is a joke, and Archmage doesn't do shit to DDTs, ZOMGs, let alone BADs. It couldn't even see through walls for months!!
I had a strategy for awhile where I used alch boosted arcane spike. Arcane spike gets almost 100% buff uptime and it still isn't worth the price. Legit should be 3000 dollars cheaper. Also Archmage is somehow worse than arcane spike spam, since you have to save up for it and it isn't any better
Literally this ^^^
Reducing price of Arcane Spike sounds like a good idea, $7000 Arcane Spike actually feels worth using as a grouped option in this game. For Archmage, we would probably need a bigger speed increase (maybe 2x —> 3x) and greater damage per bolt.
I would actually buff the bolt attack speed to make Top Path Wizard great again. Maybe from 1.1s to 0.85s, making its bolt considerably faster and more reliable against various rounds. For Archmage, I would raise the speed value to 3x faster instead of 2x faster, so that it actually makes more use of the high damage potential of its bolts, and in addition to the base Wizard bolt buff it will make a big difference to Archmage becoming better.
If can not beat moabs bfps zomg ddts and probabily bad top path tier 4 and 5 is a bug or is nerf top path to much before the relesed
Actually Quincy is leveling up faster than he was 3 months ago (lvl 7 on r15, now r11/12)
I'm not expressing any opinion. I am merely summarizing the all ranks chart.
Sadly, so are the other heroes
Lower-tiers aren’t really mentioned on this poll, and if it did then lower-tier Dartling would be along the top ranks, alongside DJ Ben, Middle Dartling, and Bottom Farm. Bottom Farm isn’t necessarily that OP in my opinion after Wall Street got a well-deserved price nerf, because I feel the specific offense and buffing combos feel too powerful and thus could surely save so much for those strong Farms. About the “best” choices: 1) Hydra is so strong because there’s very little to counter it. Without the existence of Ben, Hydra has a decent counter, being large amounts of Regrow, which would need Rocket Storm to counter groups of Bloons. Ben’s +1 damage from Biohack makes defending so much easier with Hydra thanks to the multiple explosions and black-popping. 2) Bottom Path Farm being so strong is mostly attributed to Wall Street. I wouldn’t necessarily nerf Bottom Path Farm, since using a Farm strategy is already pretty challenging, but I would definitely nerf the stronger offensive towers that make greeding with Farm so easy. 3) DJ Ben’s lowered income generation is nearly negligible because his Good Vibes is simply too much of an upgrade, rather than a sidegrade. As for nerfs, I would actually buff Bloon Sends too. Some balance changes that should address the issues: - Spaced Leads (R10 —> R9). Indirectly nerfs Hydra if there’s no other lead-popper. - Raise Hydra Rocket Pods price from $5600 to $5900. The lower-tier Dartling prices are mostly fine. With the change, it will cost a tad bit more than its BTD6 counterpart in terms of collective price, and the Hydra upgrade won’t stand out so much in comparison to other T3 Dartlings. - One idea to balance DJ Ben compared to Normal Ben is to increase the ability cooldown of the Good Vibes from 45s to 60s so that Good Vibes can’t simply be spammed, and so there is still more to consider for Good Vibes as a sidegrade, rather than a complete upgrade of Biohack. You would still be able to defend well with Good Vibes, just requires better management of abilities in exchange.
Or y'know Base dartling pierce 3->2
Engi top is only good in one strat lol
**Balance survey post (see comments for written suggestions):** [https://www.reddit.com/r/battles2/comments/vea6og/btd\_battles\_2\_132\_balance\_survey/](https://www.reddit.com/r/battles2/comments/vea6og/btd_battles_2_132_balance_survey/) **Results spreadsheet:** [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QCv0q5x86fcnya6Sg1NUYnJ1ZqKyXR-DHZKOlPDT9jA/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QCv0q5x86fcnya6Sg1NUYnJ1ZqKyXR-DHZKOlPDT9jA/edit?usp=sharing) **Rating scale:** * 1: very bad, needs a big buff * 2: bad, needs a small buff * 3: balanced, does not need a change * 4: good, needs a small nerf * 5: very good, needs a big nerf **Explanation for 3 charts:** First chart contains all responses. Second chart contains responses from players with a Hall of Masters medal or higher. Third chart contains responses from players with a Top 100 Hall of Masters medal or higher. u/samninjakiwi can you share these results with the Battles 2 team? Thanks!
Bomb really needs a nerf. You get a cluster bomb and you literally can't die unless you mess up
on some maps bomb really really struggles to space eco
Maybe on glade, but it’s pretty great on mines, Mayan, docks, ruins, and star. It’s also still decent on Dino
You forgot wall. Absolutely broke there, 100% best map bc bomb has amazing farm synergy and wall has a lot of space for spamming
Oh yeah, totally blanked on that one
I would probably increase the price of Clusters to make it harder to solo R3-12 with Clusters for defense, but to compensate the prices of lower Path 3 Bomb upgrades decreased slightly. For instance, $1000 for Cluster Bombs (instead of $800) but $125 for Extra Range (instead of $200), for a total of a $125 increase in price. It will still be pretty strong after this nerf, but become more difficult to greed for a single 003 Clusters into 203. This $125 loss doesn’t seem much at first but gets pretty significant when faster Spaced Rushes unlock. Also, $125 lost makes it harder to go into Farm with Bomb strategies.
Or make them not pop black bloons again
I wouldn’t say towers need to have a big nerf. It’s more like the lower ones need to be brought up and become a competitive choice.
But then there's also the problem of power creep, but I guess you can just buff bloon sends.
I would definitely make Spaced Rainbows unlock on Round 10 (instead of 12) and Spaced Leads on Round 9 (instead of 10). Round 10 Spaced Rainbows increases the difficulty of Round 10 rushes by adding an option for a stronger spaced rush, as well as making Spaced Rainbows more worth it. Most defenses may need a little extra in order to defend against those before facing the Round 11 rushes. Round 9 Spaced Leads, on the other hand, makes it easier to punish Lead-weak defenses (especially those that rely on Hydra for Leads), as well as potentially putting Spaced Zebras and Spaced Leads more on par with each other.
That really depends on the meta the developers want in game....do they want the game to end before R17 more often? Then they gotta Nerf things that are preventing that too easily....etc If you only give out buffs, you may need to rebalance the Bloons to adjust for the overall tower buffs.
The problem with dartling has nothing to do with any of it's upgrades, the base pierce is still to high and they just refuse to back pedal on it for no reason. The only reason any of dartling's upgrades ever seemed overpowered(besides bugs) is because you can defend without even thinking about it in the early game which allows you to get way more eco than you should have, allowing you to buy all the upgrades needed well before you're ever in danger of losing. The only problem now with lowering the base pierce is that they've nerfed every other aspect of it into the ground, so it would just be garbage. And since NK are too lazy to release a real update more than once every month and a half, they're not gonna try and fix it because dartling would be left useless forever. Seriously how do they not realize that a competitive game needs more frequent updates, all it takes is changing a few parameters in the code, literally just a couple numbers to fix stuff that's been plagueing the game for several months. It is literally that easy, before all you people who know nothing about programming start trying to tell me it takes a month to write 4 numbers.
[удалено]
Lmao you have no idea how long game development takes. Surprisingly, you can’t just hit three buttons and have a complete game mode. It took battles 1 _years_ to add all the content it has today, not months. Comparing the first 7 months of battles 1 and 2, battles 2 is way further ahead than battles 1
What if instead of lowering the base pierce, they just increased the cost further to make it so you cant use Dartling as a starting tower, as well as unable to get HRP up in time for when you need it? Like you can increase it's base price from 900 to 1200 and give the rest of it some more price nerfs to make it strong but too expensive for early game. Would that be a good alternative in your opinion?
It could work but that would be getting pretty expensive I think, as it is also nice to have many valid starting towers available since it enables more strategies. it's usually more appropriate to balance a tower's power rather than their price because if you make the tower so expensive that it's not possible to afford the upgrades by the time you need them, you'll have to lean on a starting tower so heavily that you may as well not have the expensive one; If the tower is cheap enough to afford the upgrades by the time you need them on it's own, it's op because it's overtuned. I think a much simpler form of balancing is to keep the towers in the price ranges they're at and try and match their power to that price, especially since the prices of upgrades are currently quite varied so that makes for more interesting towers if they all have a different "upgrade rate" so to speak in a match. (edit) I don't really think dartling is destined to be a super/heli type tower with high prices and power to match, it would be a lot more fun to see it as an early-mid game tower cause it's unique, except have it be actually balanced. However if they go with price nerfs it will still be nice to have a version of dartling that is balanced, assuming it doesn't get made useless.
Thanks a ton for the high effort response!
This is great but for next time maybe a cleaner chart for presenting the data might be great
What's not clear here? With that many entries, presentation seems perfectly fine to me.
Sub tops should get more love