It's going to take time to merge, balance, and polish our server the way it needs to be. Some of your suggestions were on point but as Jefe said, core issues are something best left to more experienced folks.

For example, we all hate the fault with the engineer when he dies but better folks have looked for the cause and could not find. Also, trying to merge everything takes a lot of thinking and what if's that may seem a good solution at the time but later shows nope.

Be patient and enjoy what we have right now but realize that your list is still being looked at.

Affirmative. I hope more people chime in.

I've only played once but I will look for items that need tweaked.

Thank you Demon, Jefe, Zog! I have dipped my toes in once today for the first time. Going back in game shortly. I will refrain from submitting any suggestions until I have logged many hours. For now I just want to thank everyone involved for their efforts and making this happen. I appreciate killing monsters with you all!

One other thing to keep in mind is that so far, all I've done for the merger is import the DC players and add a couple of DC's mutators, like the telefrag explosion. Everything else, monsters, map list, class configs, are still the setup I've used for D-E-K for the past few months.

D-E-K hasn't been around as long as DC, so it didn't have any maxed out players yet. Some balance issues don't become apparent until classes have all their abilities maxed. Class balancing is also closely tied to how monster waves are set up. One thing I tried at D-E-K is putting in some waves that are intentionally harder for some classes to encourage teamwork on the later waves. For example, the gold/ghost (yellow/blue) wave is designed to be hard for classes without resupply, and hard for AMs to simply zap through. Weapon masters shine on this wave when they have super heat and ecto weapons.

Demonslayer and I will be looking at opinions in this thread in the coming weeks and as we make changes based on this feedback.

Monsters:
1. There are too many titans on wave 6 . . . and titans should not spawn too close to players. -Wave 6 is very, very difficult. Biggest pet peeve right now. Can't get past this wave as my level 60+ General or my 130+ Weapon Master, but maybe that's normal . . . or maybe I don't play right. Successfully had my level 73 engineer pass this wave, but barely.
2. Bulbasaur needs better death recognition. -Hard to tell when this monster dies.
3. The ghost and gold (cosmic I think) should instead be vapor and inferno monsters, the weapons could likewise be vapor and inferno weapons. Inferno weapons would defeat vapor and be somewhat ineffective against inferno monsters, and vice versa for vapor weapons. -Weaknesses aren't very obvious. Cool hit/death effects can be used. Uses already-existing fire monsters.
4. The birds on wave 5 should be larger. -They're hard to hit because they aren't much to shoot at.
5. It's important that flies should not be able to attack multiple times in a very short amount of time. -Got triple-hit by a giant fly on wave 5 and died due to close quarters.
6. Nali should not have super weapons. -Oh gosh.
7. Exploding bunny explosion initial effect should be differentiated from Engineer shield blasts.
8. Skaarj shouldn't knock the player back so hard. -Personal preference.

Weapons:
1. Telefragging should work. -It currently does not, regardless of the telefrag explode mutator.
2. Weapons that affect enemy movement such as freezing and null entropy (as in DC) should not be able to debuff enemies immediately after their debuffs wear off. -Null entropy can get overpowered. This might also help balance pvp.
3. Friendly fire should not push other players. -So super weapons don't push others off of space maps, among other reasons.

Classes:
1. Healing blasts should cost 35 adrenaline. Their range should be between DC's and DEK's ranges. Their healing falloff range should be between DC's and DEK's falloff ranges. -The spirit of the server merge.
2. Another alternative to #1: lower-level healing blasts (25 adrenaline, shorter range) should be given at a lower-level Loaded Medic skill, and higher-level healing blasts (35-40 adrenaline, longer range) should be given at a higher-level Loaded Medic skill. These would not be separate artifacts but instead an upgraded version of the lower-level one. -This would be interesting.
3. Engineers should have an artifact that deletes the oldest and newest sentinel, vehicle, etc. -This would be nice to have
4. Engineers should be able to spawn a 3-block single row. -Like DC had.
5. Blasts with a delay should still work when a player enters a turret before the blast explodes.

Bots:
1. Bots should prioritize avoiding real player shock balls. -Usually they hop right in the way.
2. Bots should not go for large bonus items such as double damage or health kegs. -Not nice.
3. Bots should have more varied skins/characters. -Personal preference.

Monster Ideas:
1. There should be a monster that shoots deadly projectiles, and players have the option of shooting down these projectiles. -Inspired by Redeemer Nali.

Miscellaneous:
1. Debuff overlays (such as null entropy) should work on all monsters. -They don't work on all monsters.]
2. The loading icon that sometimes appears at the beginning of a game should be raised up higher on the screen. -It blocks the artifact menu.

Current Glitches:
1. When switching weapons inside of the link turret as an engineer, the link turret stops shooting and uses the player's link gun as the projectile. The projectile is shot from inside the turret and collides with the turret, thus rendering the turret useless. It also attempts to use the players ammo, but it replenishes the ammo.

(It should be noted thus far that these are recommendations that were quickly thought of and not well-thought-out-and-balanced ideas. They're just to help inspire other, more balanced ideas. Future posts will focus more on class balance. Now . . . if I could just get past wave 6.)

I have an icon I made for the DC startup app (that is currently obsolete ). It could be used for the server if desired. I can make it bigger:

Thanks for the post. I'm not going to say much more because I want other people to put in their two cents, and I don't want to influence the discussion too much.

Also, I wanted to post this:

Before


After

Nice lighting fix. Might look cool with fake volumetric lights too.

I remember that map having weird collision on vehicles.

General:
1. Players should be able to enter the game regardless of if they are ready. Entered a game, realized I wanted to use another character, reconnected, and lastly couldn't enter the game until I left the server completely.
2. When first entering the game, players who aren't fully loaded (stuck on the loading screen) should be invulnerable until they log in . . . plus a few seconds. -This might work.

Monsters:
1. Gold monsters' blood splat effects are strange. It isn't clear what is happening with the ground and how it relates to the monster. As probably intended, faces on the level's geometry light up yellow where the blood should be. The effect looks very pixelated and abnormal. The effects varies based on how the nearby level geometry is laid out . . . and this can sometimes be a bad thing (especially near highly-stretched polygons).

Classes:
1. Engineer raptors should be nerfed. -They're very overpowered on open maps. Was getting a consistent 5k on a level 60+ General. Only the Doom wave posed a threat due to hitscan projectiles.

Artifacts:
1. Monster-dropped artifacts should be picked up instantly by players that don't already have the artifact. If the player does have the artifact, that player must wait until the dropped artifact "activates" and disappears. -Bots steal artifacts.

Current Glitches:
1. Halloween masks shouldn't be left behind from ghost deaths. -But you knew this already.
2. Players shouldn't be considered "out of bounds" when driving vehicles for an extended period of time. -This has always been an issue.
3. Driving the raptor for an extended period of time shouldn't alter the first person view controls. -But it does: it forces players in a fixed view. The player can still choose a third-person camera perspective, which works normally. Was activated via the third/fourth time entering the vehicle.
4. Weapons are hidden behind each other when using multiple weapon-giving skills (magic vault and loaded weapons, for example). -This happens to weapons such as the mine layer, the cryoarithmetic equalizer, and the singularity cannon.)

EDIT: I said I was going to write something about the current experienced healing setup. All I can say is that bots should give no experience, and all Medics should be capped at a 10-15 experienced healing level. Combined, this might work to stop that sort of experience farming. Maybe.

I've uploaded a monster config that is about 80% the DC config. I was suprised how simple the DC monster config is, most waves have between 4 and 8 monsters in total variety. Later waves are a lot shorter, and wave difficult ramps up a lot faster. All waves are the same length, making later waves shorter than my config. Wave length and difficulty is now 100% the DC setup.

I had to make a few monster substitutions since I don't have the newer DC monsters like the flame titan or the stone slith in my build (monster builds are closely tied to the RPG mutator.) I also removed metal monsters from my build a long time ago because gold monsters take on their reflective properties, so those had to be substituted as well.



I took a look through the server chat logs and pulled some comments:

the health on these sents are poop

is it just me or are engineers super powerful lol

eng stays alive so easy lol
but i hate just sitting in turrets

A you have to try the raptor vehicle
A do you think it's overpowerd?
B yeah, sort of
B should at least cost a lot more, or have 2 versions, or something
B it seems like it should be close to the ultimate vehicle or something in its current state

dc raptors were so lame compared to this

A wow adrenal surge has really been nerfed, at least for the cost
A guess it's not so bad though, am is less am and more wm here
B general is crazy
A op?
B got healing blast and shield blast
B loaded artifacts 2
A yeah, i noticed that, general seems kinda like the "easy" mode, a bit
B max's out quick thought, most stuff is lvl2-3 max
A 2 infinite weapons, vamp (2?), plus many of the best things of the other classes
B no mwm though
A no, but you can max your own weapons

is it just me or are medic weapons super crippled

try the avril it's kinda op

D-E-K AVRiL of Super Heat +3 * this saved me lol
it's kinda cool that they have weaknessesa

so I guess you're supposed to use ectoplasmic weps on the yellow monsters and super heat weps on the blue (That's backwards, seems to be a lot of confusion on this)

A the blasts really r weak
A like 1/3 as much
B yeah am is nerfed here lol

A loving the new stuff
B me too!
A seems like engineer was made too powerful though
A cause so many ppl play eng, they overpowered it
B o i c
A thats my only complaint lol everything is amazing
A pokemon rock
A its like u combined the best fps with the best rpg lol
A i think everyone said yesterday the new avril is op too but, its nice xD
A its a good backup gun
A great for leveling

A man warrior class is hard
B havent tried it yet
A you start off with nothing
A had to get resupply
A no speed or vamp or damage bonus

B yeah they should balance that a bit
A yeah im sure they will, they put so much stuff on, theres always gonna be stuff to edit
A lots of awesome new stuff, maps, guns, monsters

definitely needs some editing, game is too hard now too many monsters at once
some stuff way overpowered as everyone has pointed out lol, although it helps

A new server is harder i think
B yeah
C yea it is, more balanced too
C lots more maps is nice

A its almost too good to be true
A that theres pokemon monsters
A always thought gasbags looked exactly like geodudes
A and now we have both!
B yea
A demon said yesterday they were gonna take off the doom and pokemon monsters eventually
A i like the pokemon ones a lot but the doom ones are buggy
A not much exp
B pokemon one's should stay idk about doom
A yeah agreed, they work really well
A the doom ones load slow, freeze game for a sec
A not much exp either

A nice, new map
B tons of new maps
B vehicles too

jefejefejefe wrote:
demon said yesterday they were gonna take off the doom and pokemon monsters eventually


LOL

Sorry I haven't been on this week--been busy while the wife's gone.