This Game Is WAAY too Easy

I thoroughly enjoy the game and there are ways of creating challenges for yourself or your party if you truly want to. You can start by limiting your gear and/or defenses.  No one forces you to use archers, PDT and proton beams on every single map.  A few of my friends and I have been playing NM4 and NM4 INC matches with just blockades and frosties only. That creates a pretty significant challenge that is fun for our DPS heroes.

No matter how much they revamp, people will eventually come up with builds and strategies to easily clear the content. Then other people will just clone those builds, leech gear, and then complain that the game is too easy once again.This just creates a never ending cycle of Trendy having to increase the difficulty. Eventually a point would be reached that maps could no longer be cleared.

To solve this (as I said in another post), an infinite or near infinite scaling mode, paired with some leaderboards needs to be implemented that allows us to select the starting wave. Then with each passing wave the enemy’s health, speed and attack will increase.  This would allow hardcore players to constantly challenge themselves and the leaderboards would add some competitive aspects to the mode. Teams would likely start forming to compete against each other on highest waves cleared. Trendy could possibly award badges to players/teams the own the top spots of completed waves for a particular map.  Onslaught should be revamped to something similar.

@Rebel Gnome quote:

Strategy. You can literally dump towers in any place and still win. How does not being AFK by making you shoot one mob per round is any harder because they're tower resistant?

Uhhhh, power difference between archers and any tower from the 4 basic heroes? My fully buffed achers at max level have 270k DPS and like 165k per hit or something around those numbers. My earthshatter is dealing ~500k per hit, or 1.5 mill every 0.27 secs if I bother bugging it... the only down size is not hitting air, but I can go full american sniper with gunwitch and frost shot air for the lols. I can also use a ballista tho, 100k per hit, hitting 9 per javellin and still exploding nearby? Traps! Ah boy, I managed to make them have 700k damage with 3 frosties... by my maths and experience, that's a 40% chance one shot kill on +35% health drakins if the large spheres sets off, which are the tankiest of mobs. Towers are inbalanced, but it's not between each other right now that really matters. It's towards the mobs themselves.

Come on man... Increasing damage on mobs is hardly noticeable. They could make them deal 50k damage and I would only notice once they hit me in the face, because they certainly don't hit the walls except for the kobolds, and that's one rogue kobold per like 3 maps. Increasing HP would make them sponges, not meaningful in any way either, nor useful. Do you really think the ones discussing these matters in the forums in various threads haven't tried thinking a way around the easyness of the game? That's almost like an insult.

Strategy is where it's at. You need 0 strategy to beat the game right now.

That's not the point he was trying to make. He's saying that your statement of "Being forced not to be afk because you have to kill or CC specific mobs doesn't count as harder" does not add up. Right now, the game is easy since almost everyone who has an adequately geared tower AL and EV2 can afk maps due to the monotony of mobs being spawned, save for the occasional ogres. Just by being forced to not AFK, it means that the game has gotten slightly harder to the point that there must be hero input or your risk of losing the core or your towers increases.

Players needing to kill/CC specific mobs does count as making the game harder, and I'm not referring to just the ogres. Trendy has already posted teasers to dark elves, projectile-blocking mages, and the gremlin steamroller, all of which would spawn more often than ogres and most likely require hero intervention lest they lay waste to your defenses.

Right now, I'm forcing myself to stop using certain towers once I've already proven it can obliterate a map. I use my good setups to farm my daily five, but any play time after that is pure "This is probably a bad idea" experimentation, which I tweak until it wins, then I try something a little different. 

I really don't know what else a game like this could offer without expanding into other genre ideas. Pick a dungeon, defend it, repeat, and have fun doing it or take a break until it's fun again. Grind loot and experience to continually expand your hero deck into an unstoppable (impenetrable?) force.

I refuse to get Abyss Lord or EV2. Those Archers and Protons just make the game a joke.

@Hom-Sha-Bom quote:

I refuse to get Abyss Lord or EV2. Those Archers and Protons just make the game a joke.

I don't use EV anymore myself. After the first proton nerf and before their retune, I experimented with other stuff and realized I had more fun building without her period.

Abyss Lord has other good options besides skeletons though. Ramster is now a fun tower, and he has good waller options, so I'd say he's still worth grabbing even if you refuse to use archers.

@Vagnar quote:

@Hom-Sha-Bom quote:

I refuse to get Abyss Lord or EV2. Those Archers and Protons just make the game a joke.

I don't use EV anymore myself. After the first proton nerf and before their retune, I experimented with other stuff and realized I had more fun building without her period.

Abyss Lord has other good options besides skeletons though. Ramster is now a fun tower, and he has good waller options, so I'd say he's still worth grabbing even if you refuse to use archers.

I dont even use PDT's, let alone Abyss Lord, EV2, Gunwitch or lavamancer.
Though I am gearing an abyss lord and PDT in case they release the revamp and make Monk builders obsolete. 

Unfortunately playing with 2 monk builders (SA + LA/SGT) and a monk dps is not something that can cope with a much harder version of the game. Just building public games for me is not possible without failed maps due to poor upgrading,  not spending DU and not repairing by other players.

Yeah... I hit 50 for the first time a couple days ago.  I started playing around in Nightmare 1, and expected there to be a jump in difficulty similar to DD1.  Instead, it's actually beginning to feel like things are getting easier for me.  My ilvl juimped up about 50 after only around 4 matches and have already started to do incursions with little difficulty.  I completed Chrome Enemies and Wyvern Enthusiasts on my first attempt, which doesn't seem like it should happen on NM.

I should also point out I likely have far from an ideal build.  I haven't really looked at any build guides and am just winging it based on what feels fun to me.  I don't have any of the new characters.  I use a huntress DPS with monk, squire, and apprentice builders.  But I really have yet to encounter a map where using basically the same set-up (spike blockade, first/frost towers, boost/lightning auras, with some additional squire or apprentice towers thrown in where needed) doesn't work.

I know they're planning on retooling enemies and hopefully that will provide more of a challenge, but I can't help but wonder if part of this is similar to what happened with DD1.  Stats on gear increased much faster than the difficulty of the game was able to keep up with, so content that was supposed to be difficult became trivial instead.  In my opinion, that was one of the biggest flaws with DD1, and I'd hate to see that repeated here.

This game honestly has a different problem. The base stats are nice and all, but they're not as important as you'd think atm. Passives are the hot topic currently, and towers atm are simply more potent than enemies. The enemies are still based on the old system where they had more modifiers amd resistances, and aside from a few select enemy types, everything is just mindless fodder that walks to their doom. If your setup can clean out the problem enemies, the rest don't even feel like they're there, and actually are beneficial to you due to a lot of detonate on death style passives. Revamp hopefully will change that.

@Tattis quote:

But I really have yet to encounter a map where using basically the same set-up (spike blockade, first/frost towers, boost/lightning auras, with some additional squire or apprentice towers thrown in where needed) doesn't work.

So firstly I would say dont base your opinion on DD2's Nightmare system on DD1, I have not played DD1 but from what I am hearing it had a very different difficulty ramp up. 

Secondly, End game DD2 if their is such a thing is NM4 incursions only. When you get to that, you will find spike blockades, Frosty Towers and Lightning Auras are greatly under powered even after the buffs, but it is fun and it is possible to consistently beat those maps with relative ease once you are geared to the teeth. 

Their was a time however with your build, that the game had maps that were unbeatable due to the weakness of Lighting Auras, but those days are mostly behind us now with enough near perfectly rolled gear.