[PvP] Tower Defence Versus Mode - not hero vs hero

Hello.

There are 2 kind of gameplays that can be implemented into Dungeon Defenders as pvp modes which brings something to the game that is not just reaching the top and loosing the goal where all you can do is grind AI enemies for the sake of grinding:

1) DDoTA kind of gameplay (i believe announced CTF will be similiar) focused mainly on heroes fighting each other (players would definitely be enocuraged to build heroes with points allocated mainly in hero attributes) - that would be a shame in tower defence based game.

2) Tower Defence Versus Mode, where each team is placed on their own island with their own crystals to defend against default waves of monsters buying towers and fighting them just like in standard mode, but also spending mana to send additional monsters of their choice to enemy island, and hold their own island against what enemy team sends to them. Trying to find balance or perfect tactic in spending mana for defence and/or offence.

This mode fits much better into Dungeon Defenders than DOTA kind of gameplay in my opinion. Imagine holding waves of pure evil, combined with those bloody mercenary monsters sent by opponenets team and wathcing your own troops advance on the 2nd island where you cannot get, but can clearly see whats happening in there. Imagine trying to find a weak spot in enemy team's defences, and send proper mercenaries in the right time to break trough their defences winning the game. :)

Create special tactics, adjust to whats happening, counter opponenet's team actions, struggle to be the last team with their crystals holding.

It could be 4vs4 or even 4vs4vs4vs4 - each mob you send would spawn on each of those 4 island and each mob sent by any of hostile players would be spawned for you.

edit:
Ideas for the mercenary positions in addition to all the default monsters to choose from:

• 
  
• Orc with huge shield - monster that do not do any significant damage, but can absorb a lot of damage if hitted frontally
  
• Specialised elemental orc - fire/lightining/etc orc, that is immune to these elements
  
• Icebomb/EMP kobold - Merc Kobold (expensive) that slows / disables heroes / towers in blast radius for several seconds.
  
• Kobold Paradrop - for several seconds its raining kobolds on enemy island ;)
  
• Goblin-throwing Ogre - throwing goblins over chockepoints
  
• Plate-Covered Orc - Orc with 95% dmg reduction on all physical attacks
  
• Pack of Young Wyverns - 4 weak, small wyverns per purchase (can overrun slow towers when purchased several times in small perdio of time)
  
• Bombardment - (very expensive and cannot dmg crystals) call for meteors/fireballs hitting random places on enemy islands - can hit both opponenet team AND all the AI mobs - so you can shoot your own mercenaries if used in wrong time.
  
• Heal Monsters - Heals all monsters (but ogres) on enemy island. (expensive)
  
• ...post your ideas :)
  

Wow, that actually sounds very fun! I would love to play something like this haha

Share your thoughts folks.

you always have my support!

I love playing the zombie/mob boss side

bump - cant watch Trendy struggling to balance thing they will never be able to balance (hold the flag mode).

I am quite interested

love the idea, please trendy read this post thoroughly. I also hope trendy is going to balance test before releasing, cuz a 5 mana cost ogre doesn't fit the bill for balanced.

this sounds very aswome. would love to see this offically implemented into the game. if not can always do this on open mode if someone spends a bit of time on it. wouldnt be that hard once you figure out the editor. I can just see things happening like with Starcraft mods and maps. i remember some completly unqiue maps that were so far from normal gameplay but it was quite fun because it was different. i cant wait for stuff to be made/released. and i hope that the devs keep an eye out on player mad mods/maps and implement the really good ones into offical ranked gameplay.

I like the Tower Defence idea. It sound similar to some of the games I used to play as Warcraft 3 custom games.

There were also Tower Survival games where four players had to defend different routes across the map and either co-operate to defend a central crystal, or compete to see who could survive the longest.

Massacre Tower defence was my favourite as I recall.

It would be cool if i able to play as a boss or control a wave of particular mobs : )

that be another cool idea. with a 4v4 map. 4 players guard their crystal as normal. and the other 4 players control the mob spawns or control certain mobs personally.

Sounds like a good idea. Always loved the speed line tower wars in War3 and this would be something similar. Up to 4v4 with players defending their base with towers and themselves while sending creeps to the opposing team. Sets up strategy on both fronts as if you send too much, you slow down your ability to defend your own base, send to little and your income stagnates on what you can send.

To prevent the game from lasting so long, mob health/damage/speed ramps up over time.

I reckon this will more likely be made as a mod rather than an unofficial game mode.
I played modes like this a lot in WC3 and they were always fun though, would be good to see it in DD.

Yeah, since this is a tower def game, not a hero based game, PvP using hero is not quite a good idea.

It would be a shame if that would be only unofficial mode...

Likewise I would much rather see effort put into this sort of Tower Defence feature, than any more time being wasted on PvP maps and arena's. This is a supposed to be a Tower Defence Co-Op game after all.

Oh, hell yeah! Just like back in the days with WC3 mods!
Same crystal for both teams, identical enemy route, and each team need's to protect their path to the crystal! Longest team to hold their crystal wins!
The only thing I found boring during these games, is if you get eliminated early. They should add some kind of mini-game or something to encourage people to stay ingame instead of leaving :)

Oh, hell yeah! Just like back in the days with WC3 mods!
Same crystal for both teams, identical enemy route, and each team need's to protect their path to the crystal! Longest team to hold their crystal wins!
The only thing I found boring during these games, is if you get eliminated early. They should add some kind of mini-game or something to encourage people to stay ingame instead of leaving :)

Why would we need the defeated ones to stay in game if its ranked game? You play to defeat them. In 4v4 (only 2 teams) it woudlnt be problem anyway, becouse the team that looses ends game for both teams, and the other team wins instantly.

In WC3 TD's defeated players were always able to leave early. The only problem I can think of with DD is that if the Host is defeated early and quits then the game would end for everyone. In WC3 gaming hosting was auto-transferred to another player if the host quit.

Still it woudlnt be a problem with only 2 teams. If either host leaves or is defeated it would bring same outcome: opposing team wins. :)

just keep the respawns for the heros. long respawns would encourage a player not to die (as if dying was every a good idea anyway).

Their would still be an opening build phase of about 1-2 minutes so each team has ample time to switch characters and build, with mana already on hand at the open. mana drops from the enemies should be very little so as to make it hard to keep the defenses up if they are open to enemy attack and not well "strategized." Maybe a timer event in game where every player gets so much mana in certain intervals, 1 way or the other.

On top of this, a shared pool of mana for the team for sending monsters, possibly accrued from players using a donation post putting their own gathered mana into the shared mana pool to make balance between building defenses and sending monsters.

their will only be that one build phase, then the rest of the game is combat phase. Tower building will be based at that time like it is in normal game, casting rate related.

First make of this game type doesn't necessarily have to involve any new monster types, but maybe a upgrade system to the monsters. Instead of progressively stronger monsters going to the enemies base, you can spend mana from the shared mana pool to upgrade a monster type. The original Ogre would be like easy-medium difficulty ogres with 30,000-50,000hp. But 1 upgrade at x amount of mana would make the ogres you send have 100,000hp.

With these specifics, matches normally won't last too long if it's done right. a poor strategy will lead to a quick defeat, especially if the heroes on one team aren't at least lvl 60+.

If you REALLY want a balanced start, you could strip all players of equipment and give them a specific set of equipment will tree-style upgrades. A huntress who upgrades her weapons can angle towards piercing shot and strong base damage weapons, or angle towards a shots per second style weapon setup. also, towers will need to be upgraded in strength as you go along (globally, 1 upgrade to huntress proximity traps will effect all traps, just as if the hero stats were being given points in reset speed, damage, trap count, and AoE). This would give an equal start to all players, and make it full blown strategy. This will have to nullify my previous statements about adding your own mana to a shared pool, and just create one huge pool of mana or give all players a specified amount of mana for upgrading their own stuff, and incremental mana to the shared pool as time passes.

Finally, yet another alternative. Tug of war style. mana given to the players and to the shared pool will be incremental, HOWEVER, mana drops from monsters will be added to the shared pool as well meaning: the more monsters you send, the more money the opponent team will have to send them back at you. This will be done best with appointing a strategist in the group and only allowing him to make decisions with the shared mana pool, as an uncooperative team can truly screw things up.

I can probably pull out a million different ideas from this one general idea of pvp tower defense. I'm not sure how many of these ideas anybody will like, i'm just throwing my own suggestions in the core idea. A strongly detailed idea will help further the devs in choosing to do this. If we work out all the kinks for the devs, all they will have to do is decide they like it, then using our notes program it.

That being said, if their is any of my ideas you see a problem with or an small specific points i've made that you like and would like to go into further detail on, quote it and add your statements. oh and if you rage over it, your an idiot, it's just a suggestion, but pointing out flaws is a good idea so as to not let the devs make a mistake on my behalf. I doubt they will read all pages of the thread anyhow tho.

I dont think that having equipment normalized would be a good idea, and i dont think its soemthing that is required anyway. The whole point of having rpg element added to this TD pvp is what makes SC2 TDpvp maps with experience and levels banked each match better than war3 TDpvp maps. RPG element is what makes people want to play it more and feel some sense of progression. If you normalize equipment you kill that progression element. Like battlegrounds and arenas in WoW - battlegrounds and arenas were fun, but the official tournament arenas with normalized eqipment makes it nothing but an e-sport for e-sport fans. Nothing to do with rpg game for casual players this game is targeted to.

very good point.. all of this was thought on the fly and it wouldn't make sense to take this to a command and conquer kind of level. I kind of figured that if a character at lvl 30 wanted to play he'd have no chance as part of a team though also. i guess lock it for lvl 70 characters only or have different league games, one for lvls 10-20, another for 20-30 so on so forth. that way everyone is properly leveled for the scenario and players can't really complain that they are "outclassed" or complain that their teammate isn't strong enough.

I understand utilizing everything i said would not work due to too many elements in the game to keep up with. So i didn't expect all of these to make sense in the end. a never-ending combat phase while having to upgrade equipment, towers, monsters, purchasing monsters, all added on top of general defense of the base would be too hard to fully keep up with.

Yeah, there would be required build and combat phases. Buying mercenaries however should be open for good and bad timings, so they should be available in combat phase, however you could aswell just queue them in the build phase, and they would go with the standard wave when combat phase begins.

Habing options to queue or buy mercenaries could work, but some things, like active abilities (heal, bombardment etc) woudlnt make sense if queued (and then be used at the very beginning of combat phase), unless they would be queued the way that it would have some random interval before they are being automatically used in combat phase.

Still having the opportunity to time mercenaries spawns and abilities would give much more fun than just queuing and having it automatic.

Hello i havent been playing since i have started this suggestion thread. Have they said something about such pvp game mode? Nothing else could possibly make me go back to this game :)