On a scale of 1-10, what's the odds of you guys actually finishing this? (talking to Ahli and luzz)

10. I know I'm not included in that talking to, but they've made some great progress and the playtests are going really well.

Need to play D3 first. I just had a busy week because of an assignment.
Although, luzz has the map. I don't know. But odds are good that it will be done someday...

http://www.templesiege.com Information on how to sign up for TS2 alpha testing is there!

I've been helping Luzz test today, here are the notes I have.
My credibility comes from my skill, knowledge, and understanding of TS1.
Please take time to read this, as I will be editing it OFTEN after more testing.
@CAFG: If you have any time I'd like you to test with me, thanks just PM me if you're available so we can set up a time

Temple Siege 2: List of Questions/Concerns/Comments
Key Points to keep in mind when further developing this game:
1.) Temple Siege has always been and needs to remain a high skill ceiling game
2.) Do not make it easy on the players by auto selecting spawned units for them with triggers
3.) Make the game easily playable, but hard to master; Fun for newcomers, and competitive for pros
4.) I know this is extremely hard to adhere to, but the closer you keep the game to how it was in SC1, particularly in versions made by CAFG, the more successful it will be to start.
5.) Remember this baseball analogy: “Before you can throw the ball and make the great game winning out, you first have to catch it in your mitt.” This means don’t get ahead of yourself while making new heros and spells before even adding the traditional, time-tested, favored spells in SC1TS.
6.) A lot of people are resistant to change, and too much can be a terribly altering experience. You definitely don’t want your dedicated players to say “Hey I remember this game! This is the most badass map I ever played on SC1, I can’t believe it’s on SC2,” and then join the map and say “Wow this is nothing like TS1…”
7.) Please avoid reinventing the wheel.
8.)

General:
-Hero kills give barely any exp/minerals, full experience and minerals should go to player who kills the hero, assist experience given through the shared experience system will be given to anyone who damages the enemy hero.
-Too many units have too high DPS basic attacks
-Very happy that spawn can hurt heros
-Stim needs to only cost 10 hp, this is so important
-Shared experienced is a must, it was 1/3 the amount of exp teammates got in sc1 ts
-Splash feeding, I cannot begin to describe how important and how much depth this adds to a game
-Assault as a reaper instead of fbat..? No
-Cannons need stronger damage, way too weak as they are
-Much too easy to push, capturing outposts really mean nothing now that cannons get wrecked so easily
-I enjoy the new terrain except too much shit can be distracting

SpecOps:
• Why 3 mine limit? Now I can’t control map against units like summoner..
• Why do all my mines detonate at same time? Waste of mana if I place mines for visibility
• At night my mines don’t give vision (not talking about seeing invis units)
• Mines shouldn’t be invincible
• Gizmo is interesting, still feel nostalgia for sci vessel in L2 spot, though to provide detection and utility
• L3 for vessel? And you can only have 1? Seems weak. Sniper was better
• L4 as weapon change is very interesting but maybe implement as L3, and keep L4 as mine spawning scourge


Volt:
• L1 knockback? Return to scourge l1 spawn please, knockback backfires in teamfights
• Volt is ranged splash damage, meaning all rules that a ranged units are subject to apply



Summoner:
• Don’t like the leash on lings… While it does encourage better summoner micro, it discourages players from micro-ing groups of lings across the map out of summoners reach, making it really easy for any unit to find summoner at night if lings aren’t losing hp
• I really like his spells, especially the swarm as a spell instead of consuming lings, good way to limit the usage.
• Not sure why L2 isn’t instant
• He is visible while burrowed at night by spawn and enemy heros


Assault as Reaper:
• Way too strong
• Is a support unit meaning stuns, sim, anti-light, tanker
• Reaper seems more of a chasing unit, heavy damage, basic attacks make it arguably highest DPS
• Consider remodeling to restore assault as fbat

Light Mage:
• He’s a glass cannon, his l1 is strong but when it’s finishes he gets killed easily (good). L1 is now un-selectable, making it harder for him to kill who he wants in a tight situation. What if a tank unit runs in first, followed by DPS’er you have no chance if your ai auto targets the tank?
• If L1 auto targets champions, how can any units hope to get close enough to even kill him, especially with increased L1 range? Also much, much, too easy to trap melee units now with that force field
•

Assassin:
• He’s so fast, now he can kill LM with ease at night, and escape even more easily at day, consider reinstating full tele to base and slower speed.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 25 2012, 10:18 pm by Vortex-.

This is something I've thought about as well, and I would prefer if there was some way to target the spell, if possible.

This is a good thing summoner in TS1 was honestly broken as a hero. Not necessarily OP, but broken.

We aren't trying to bring all the old TS1 crowd back with TS2, so your complaints that things are too different won't necessarily be listened to much it's a new map on a new game, not just a remake of TS1.

Most of your comments in the General section seem reasonable, except for the one about assault as reaper.

Vortex-, some of the things you said were great, but others arent so much because they stick to the TS1 style of spells when we can do so much more. I would love to do the spawning units for damage type spells, but people expect more with an editor as powerful as the SC2 one.

I can understand where you are coming from though, I feel like the Reaper as Assault doesnt feel right. He needs a different name, how about Guerilla, cuz he literally hits and runs, he is too squishy to do anything on the front lines.

I believe we should stick with assault as a firebat and keep with the original TS. But we would need new abilities for him.

Also, with volt, his l1 synergizes with his other 2 abilities. l2 draws them in, and then you can knock them to the perfect distance for you to attack with. Also, l3 is a circle of storms that has an Eye in the center where volt is at. Melee characters can enter this eye to not take damage, but they risk being knocked back out from Volt's l1. It synergizes well.

The weapon swap idea was from Flashbeer, I just threw it in as Spec Ops l4 because he needed one, and we are going to give the UAV another ability that can be used with Gizmo's abilities to maximize the damage output, we just need l4 for him, and the scourge minelaying thing can be done, but as I said people expect more, no matter how much I would love to do something like that xD

Reaper L2 is totally OP right now.
I would suggest we lower the attack speed bonus.

Reaper details: 2*9 damage, 0.7 attack cooldown and each weapon upgrade raises the damage by 2*2.

Atm the buff lasts 7 seconds and raises the attack speed by 70%. That lowers the cooldown to 0.41.
That means that the reaper can make 17 attacks during these 7 seconds. Normally it only does 10.
So we get a damage dealt bonus of 7 attacks which are 126 damage (with a reduction of 14 per armor value and an increase of 4 per weapon upgrade). I think it scales to much and is to strong with the combination with the movement speed bonus of 70%.
This is comparable to Light Mage's L2 which deals AoE damage and raises its damage by 11, but the light mage's spell musn't always hit while Assault's L2 has a 100% success rate.

I reduce the attack speed bonus to 50% now. So it can perform 5 extra attacks over 7 seconds.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 26 2012, 1:28 pm by Ahli.

@Volt
Can you explain what you mean by "Ranged rules", and the problems with that?

@Special Ops
Do you think a maximum of 5 mines would help even things out?
An L3 Sniper move is a solid gameplay mechanic, but may be uninteresting. Maybe penetrating round?
At the moment, we are thinking about changing Special Ops in some way that allows his spells to synergize. On the other hand, we can clump everything into the gizmo/UAV and add in another spell.
We are currently missing an L4. The Weapon Swap is a good idea but I don't see it being an L3 or L4.

@Summoner
Then we'll just have to make micro'ing the summoner better.

@LM
No comments on L2 and others?

@Assassin
Is the speed too fast b/c of the Special Upgrade which increases its speed at night, or just in general he's too fast?

EDIT:@Assault
We can definitely lower his DPS and his L2's attack speed bonus and Increase his HP to compensate.
There is only one perceivable reason to make him a Firebat, and that is how, in TS1, he is able to use his L2 and L4 for stunlocking. Therefore, making him a ranged unit that can stunlock is absurd. Moreover, it was impossible to fine tune the Marine's DPS balance issue in TS1 because it was either +2 bonus or +3 bonus... one's too little and one's too much. The stunlocking mechanics in TS2 is downplayed, so that it won't be as easy to do such a thing. This raises the skill level and makes it less aggravating for other players. Finally, the new spell mechanics of Assault do not fit Firebats. We can decreases his attack range if need be.

Finally, I understand that sticking to SC1TS is important, but the game mechanics has evolved, and so the heroes have to follow. I would say that it would be better to come up with new mechanics that work better in SC2 than copying SC1 mechanics.

EDIT: Btw, Thank you for helping us test. We greatly appreciate it!! Please keep helping us test! (We may sound defensive sometimes but we really do want you to criticize us)

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jun 26 2012, 8:27 pm by UnholyUrine.

Special Ops L1:
That's a remote explosive now. it can't be destroyed, it doesn't give vision and it can be thrown into units/buildings. So you can hide it under a pylon.
Instead of scouting it can be used as a grenade (throw & immediately press detonate).
You can place 3 of these. It can be used to place stuff onto escape paths forcing the enemy to run around or you kill/slow the enemy with it. Then you might be able to finish the enemy with stimpacks.

edit:
If anyone wants to test the map, he/she requires the arcade beta and needs to somehow get me there to host it.

The whole appeal of Summoner is the ability to remote control units from relative safety. I get the rest of the changes to units and abilities, to update them since there are no longer the restrictions SC1 had, but making Summoner stay near his units is doing the exact opposite: It's imposing an unnecessary restriction that wasn't there before.

The Summoner was never "broken". It is just different. That's not a bad thing. I share the opinion of others, in that units summoned should be free to go where they want, and the units/class/game should be balanced accordingly. Maybe being near the Summoner can give the units some other kind of benefit, but outright forcing them to always be together destroys the entire point of the class, and seems like it's just a cheap, lazy way to simplify balancing at the cost of the playing experience.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 26 2012, 9:26 pm by Azrael. Reason: Typo.

@Summoner

At the moment, the range of that the Zerglings can go is pretty big and can be further balanced.
However, you make a great point that we've seemed to glossed over
"...outright FORCING them to always be together..."

This is a legitimate gameplay problem. I think we should change it so that the zerglings are weak when outside of the range of the summoner, but stronger when inside the range.
We are also planning to make the micro'ing of the summoner a bit better, such as giving it an Acceleration, better max speed, movement while burrowed, etc.

If they were just weaker when outside the range, that would definitely be better. A possible debuff to consider to make them weaker, rather than reducing their attack or defense, would be reducing their movement speed. It would make them sitting ducks to heroes, while still allowing them to feed and potentially ambush someone at night (via burrow) without the Summoner present. While they could assist with captures, they'd be a lot more useful while within the Summoner's range.

It seems like it would combine well with the Summoner being able to move while burrowed, which would be a good offset for the speed disadvantage suffered by the summoned units outside his range.

I think something like this, where the Summoner has an optional incentive to keep units within a relatively large range, would be a good way to go.

Responses to concerns:

UU:
@Volt
-Was able to inflict full damage to my lings under summoner swarm I think

@SpecOps
-Love the idea of remote mine
-Really miss traditional mines and their epic utility which made rine viable as a hero
-Mines should give vision so the team can have map control
-Mines shouldn't be invince, but I don't have my reason why yet
-I can really see L2 being sci vessel, with abilities of detection, irad, emp, and maybe one ability that costs gas, like a debuff. (Can consolidate gizmo idea into this unit)
-I can really see L3 being sniper, as an anti light killer. Remember you can always implement penetrating round (ignores armor) into a unit like Ghost from SCBW
-L4 is tricky, I'm sure many players would like to see mine spawning scourge make an appearance. This spell gives rine the long range he deserves since he has no TRUE escape from stun.

@LM
-Didn't test much, only used L1 a lot to see how it did, as it is I feel it's way too strong because it easily killed a starting enemy hero after I put 1 civ into minerals.
-Autotarget would make it semi-imba

@Assault
-Still want it as fbat
-Reaper is more of hit and run style, stand behind and DPS rather than run in and stun for "nuker" type units

@Summoner
-Anything is better than that leash effect summoner has imo...

@General comments
-Definitely love the feel of this game so far
-Love the UI even though it's not finished or polished
-When I say keep old spells I don't mean keep the old mechanics, just keep the old effects recreated using the editor. Everything in sc1 is definitely possible to make in sc2.
-As for the amount of heros this game should have, I'm not sure. Too many might be bad. 5v5 will be super hard to balance, consider having multiple game modes? I think it'd definitely be easier to balance by studying the game mechanics of a 3v3 and seeing how it changes in a 5v5, or 4v4 even...

Thanks for points Azrael

Also, I really feel it's important to have more people (of all types) to give feedback on this game or what they want to see

Vortex, all of your concerns have been taken into account, and we have made quite a few changes already.

@Spec Ops
- Remote mines should have a limit, they should also have vision, and HP. I believe all of this because currently only the hero themselves can capture and disrupt a warp capture. I believe we should change this to all the player's units, remote mine included. This would make it so that spec ops can capture with a remote mine, and also disrupt with it. Giving it HP would make it possible for enemies to kill it if it was blocking their warp capture.
- I'm not sure how we will make his l3. The Raynor sniper ability does not work in multiplayer because the line targeting UI doesn't work with multiple raynors, which causes problems.. xD However, I believe the 1.5 arcade is adding support for a line targeting UI, which should solve this problem.
- we are probably going to combine the Gizmo and UAV into one unit for his l2 to provide support and harrass. Not sure what we are going to do with this yet, xD

@LM
- Ahli discovered the problem with the orbs and why they did so much damage, i accidentally made them deal the same damage as the light mage (My bad xD). That problem is fixed, so he isn't OP anymore.

@Assault
- I want to name him Guerrilla because he even says "Hit and Run!!" and yes, assault has a connotation of a tanky get in there and own kinda guy.
- His upgrades make him able to destroy most melee units because he can keep them away from him, and also micro around them. This isn't very much like an assault xD

@Summoney
- His leash has been removed (Kinda*)
*It does not kill his zerglings when they leave the circle, simply slows them down, and reduces their damage, we hope this will make players still try to use the summoners abilities.

In my opinion, I want 3v3, 5v5 is too hard to balance as you said, and it just doesnt feel right for temple siege. xD

Thanks for your help Vortex =)

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 27 2012, 5:45 am by luzz.

Finished a play session with Ahli, and, as always, here is a list of changes

• EDIT: Spec Ops L4 idea
  
  BUILD NUKE for 120 mana.
  The nuke(s) are stored indefinitely until deployed by the Gizmo. Deploying a nuke does not require any mana.
  we can shorten the time in conjunction with smaller AoE and lower Damage of the Nuke to make it easier to Nuke successfully.
  
  Once Penetration Round's fixed, I think it should be L3. Maybe have it do 350+23 damage on the closest unit, and of course lowered damage on the following units. (recall that the phantom does 230+15 damage per shot as an L2)
  
  
• Another problem is this: spec ops' L1 is 70+7 and LM's L2 is 200+11
  Technically speaking I can do two L1's per 1 L2 so Spec ops is doing 140+14 dmg per LM's L2.
  This, plus the fact that Spec Op's L1 is not a split upgrade, makes spec ops L1 pretty good compared to Lm's L2
  So let's make Spec Op's L1 70+5 and LM's L2 200+12 instead.
  Let's also make the Gizmo Suicide do 120+6 instead, since it's not a split upgrade.

Post has been edited 8 time(s), last time on Jun 27 2012, 11:00 pm by UnholyUrine.

remaining TODO list:
- your problems with L2, L3 damage (second point in the list)
- terrain texture (fourth point in the list)
- Splash Damage
- Shared XP
- Nuke L4/penetration round (first thing outside the box) [the mapper Kueken made a workaround to allow penetrator round for a specified count ingame. So the red targeting line might be no problem anymore]

edit:
changes:
- buffed Volt's L3 damage to 46 from 30 and upgrade from 5 to 7. It will deal 460 - (10*armor) + (7*10*splitAttack) damage now.
- Special Ops attack upgrade raises L1's (remote explosive) damage by 5 now. Before it didn't raise at all.
- Raised Light Mage's L2's (energy blast) damage by 12 now from 11. His Magic essence's (L3) version of energy blast deals now 100 (+ 7 per split upgrade).
- Raised Gizmo's self destruct damage (Special Ops L2) to 120 from 100 and lowered its damage per attack upgrade to 6 from 8.

I've a question regarding the capturing of the warpgates:
How many cannons are supposed to fire onto the hero during capture? Atm mid is 2 (I modified the beacon and one cannon by a little bit to make sure only 2 cannons fire onto the beacon in most cases), top is 2, bot is 1. Capturing an enemy warpgate takes now 25 seconds and you lose like 1800 hp without armor per cannon while doing that.

edit:
I can capture top with only 1 cannon shooting with a small unit.
I can capture bot with NO cannon shooting with a small unit.

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Jul 1 2012, 4:29 pm by Ahli.

I don't see a clear answer to the recapture warpgate

I'd say just try to set it so that you feel it's not too difficult to recapture, but not too easy for a hero like mutant to run in and try to capture it during at night.
I believe at least one cannon should be firing at hero.

In TS1 the warpbeacon behind the temple changed colour when someone was capturing the top base. It became a map awareness thing, knowing when someone was capturing top. Once my map awareness was good enough I was never surprised by a top base capture. If someone goes missing in their lane they're either ganking or capturing top or healing (or afk ). You could then check the minimap beacon colour to see if top was being captured.

And because of this, it became really dangerous for heroes to try capture top at night because if the whole other team came and attacked him it was really hard to get out of top without dying.

Unfortunately, the minimap colors are somewhat diminished in SC2.
I've already found that certain player colors are incredibly problematic, such as Red (units blink red), most light colors (white/light green, yellow) and most dark colors (dark blue, dark purple, brown). They are incredibly hard to see.

I'll take this opportunity to say that we should set a better color for the teams.
North Base should be white, and Bottom base should be Black
Neutral (Uncaptured) bases can either be Peach or Light Blue.

Player Colors can be

• Orange
  
• Lighter Shades of Blue
  
• Light Green (but not too light that it melds with white) like Teal
  
• Darker shades of Yellow
  
• Pink
  
• Lighter shades of Purple
  
• Cyan

I am not too sure what the limits are of the colors in SC2, but basically try to avoid dark colors and colors that look similar.
I think the reason for this problem is because they put black borders on all the unit dots on the minimap...

I have suggested that we change the appearance of the warp prism that lets you teleport, but changing the color of it on the minimap may be a good idea as well.

EDIT: Oh I almost forgot.

Please make sure that the icon for the split upgrades for heroes other than the Light Mage corresponds to the upgrades themselves.
For example, the summoner's "Split Upgrade" showed LM's L2 icon, when it should be showing an Icon of acid (since it ups fungal growth and banelings)

Finally, we should being naming the upgrades rather than just calling it "Split Upgrades"

Here are some name ideas for the split upgrades
Light Mage - Arcane Damage
Summoner - Corrosive Damage/Acidic Damage
Assault - Explosive Damage
Volt - Potential Damage/Voltage Damage/Storm Damage/Surge Damage/Capacitance/Voltage Potential/Electric Potential/Electric Strength etc. etc.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 29 2012, 12:43 am by UnholyUrine.