SC2Mapster

@Resistance682: Go

For starters jump around, and learn how to use the slow shield when hard hitting SIUs approach. Blitzers aren't even noticeable as Blaze even on lunatic, as you just air strike yourself after they're stacked and one shot them off yourself. In most cases, you don't even have to bother - your life leech on weapon hit blood talent will keep you up just fine once weapon speed upgrades are in.

You have no single target damage weakness - air strike remains among the most powerful single target damage abilities, rivalled only by a couple of single target abilities with little to no use for AoE. You ignore open season as the shitty skill that it is, and stop using it around wave 5.

100k+ air strikes aren't theory, and you don't become viable only in end game. You have a bit of a slow start as you have to get weapon speed upgrades first to max fury generation, but once you have those, you become a death machine. Hell, even stalkers are funny, you see one when you're alone, you just air strike yourself - time it right and it likely will KILL THE STALKER WHO JUST SAT ON YOUR FACE. The only other character who has this much solo capability is Krug, and he's nowhere as powerful in terms of damage dealing.

And frankly, if you die to blitzers or any SIU but the slowpoke tank melter in midgame, you're doing it wrong. You should have around 20 armor in defensive stance at least by wave 20, and at least 40 by wave 30, taking almost no damage from them if they start to really push down on you. That is of course if you for some reason utterly failed in rage generation, as your normal answer to seeing blitzers or weaker SIUs is to pop shield to slow them, shoot them to slow them to a crawl and air strike them to death as they crawl to you. Later on when blitzers can actually run through dual slow at decent speeds, your armor is so high that shooting stuff to generate fury will generate enough health and shields from talents to safely ignore them even in berserker.

The only weakness Blaze has at the moment is the fact that his teleportation ability activates late (you're considered to stay in your old spot during animation), so you tend to get killed if you jump at the last second. Which is just a just punishment for terrible playing. The only other reason to die as Blaze is because you forget to switch stance when being hammered.

Or if you fail your build and spec into pure offence, overkilling everything and wondering why you're dying, which seems to be your story. But that is just doing it wrong.

@Resistance682: Go

Wrong. Sure, it takes a long time to max out Blaze's airstrike damage, but this is true for every other class. Your damage doesn't magically jump above every other class' damage when you put that 30th point into tier2 upgrades. You do far more damage than any other class starting from level 1, and this is true for any given wave.

And of course, you don't need to put points into weapon damage. You don't need weapon damage or OS points when airstrike can rip apart everything alone. You can just focus on air strike damage. However, as I said before, you can still tank perfectly fine even when focusing on damage. For some reason Blaze gets a TON of free armor just from being in protective presence. And with the Desecrator's armor proc along with that you barely need to spend minerals on armor. I could tank everything, including bosses, with the 1 base armor that I started with until around level 15. The presence alone gives +4 armor, and Desecrator adds about 10. I can't give you exact numbers because I'm not playing the game at the moment, but with these two things I was around 15-20 total armor without investing a single mineral into my armor. The game gets drastically harder at level 21, so that was the first time I had to invest into armor. I spent about 7000 minerals to get to 8 base armor. This put me above 30 total armor, allowing me to tank anything until around level 40. I'm not sure how Blaze's armor is calculated, but the protective presence seems to first double your armor, then add a few additional armor, instead of just giving +2 armor like the tooltip said.

By the way, I don't need Dead Eye to cover for my "weak" 1v1 damage when I can oneshot SIUs since they are large enough to eat 5+ missiles. Or I can just stun them with my grenades, since I also have the best crowd control in the game. I also don't need Salv to heal for me, I can heal myself faster than he can heal me thanks to my faster firing speed having a ridiculous synergy with the 1.5 health/shield per shot blood skill. And I don't need Seifer to tank for me when I have more armor than he does even though I spent less than 1/10th of the minerals on armor of what he had to.

@luckyo1: Go

I am a Blaze player, and I can certainly say that Blaze is not overpowered.

The skills you mention, you realize, are skills that you have to invest ALL your income into in order to get good results.

The game of Blaze goes like this: you either focus weapon damage, or armor, or Open Season, or Airstrike.

If you spread out evenly the investment of Blaze, you will end up with very little EXP.

So let's consider this - say you invest heavily in OS or Airstrike. Now you have no armor to protect yourself against imploders, stalkers, spewers, and BLITZERS. However, you have the power to wipe out mobs cleanly with enough invested damage.

In return, the job of OTHER characters is to make up for that weakness. Seifer will tank for you. Dead Eye will cover for your weak 1v1 damage. Salv will heal you. Psion also serves as a mob controller. Krug can use decoy turrets.

As a level 25, I've come across numerous people and different styles of play.

Blaze only becomes "OP" near end game, which takes more than 5 hours to get to. (Round 110+) And even then, without proper help from others, you will not be able to handle the # of mobs, SIUs, Blitzers, etcetera all on your own.

Blaze only seems OP in theory - 11k-15k per missile. But this comes with 5-6 hours of play, when you have maxed absolutely everything out, even in the blood tree (which is quite impossible at the moment until Round 120+)

Seriously, pick other classes, follow the guide and play. You will realize how useless Blaze is against strong bosses (Hades comes to mind.) How fragile Blaze is until Round 100+ when you max out OS -> Airstrike -> Armor. How much money it takes to make Blaze worth it from Rounds 80+ (weapon damage, airstrike, open season, armor.. so much to upgrade..).

And let me remind you, 1 stalker and 1 imploder is the end of all that hard work for Blaze. :)

@Oddlot0930: Go

You appear to believe that GRIEFING YOUR TEAM is a proper way to answer to one specialist being overpowered. And even that wouldn't help, because even if you spammed black holes and towers, all I'd have to do was shower black holes and tower surroundings with missiles. The hit area is very wide, and missiles AoE hits even wider.

Additionally both black holes and knockback tower are extremely detrimental to team success in the end game when you have blaze for extremely obvious reasons - you want the funds and you don't want to have a massive stack of mobs on you because they aren't dying fast enough. Your insinuations that people I played with are bad are quite presumptuous as well - we were all on voice comm, and they were quite good in both terms of individual skill and team play.

Problem is, you're talking about "woo 11k from ability damage" as if it's something worth talking about. Air strike missiles deal 11-15k PER HIT. Each air strike fires EIGHT missiles, and each missile hits everything in range. This totals at 88-120k damage per skill use per mob, and you can keep those air strikes coming on top of each other if you want to due to extremely short CD. This literally melts SIUs and bosses away like nothing else. Trash infested just get one-two shotted, and remains of the missile shower keep killing new infested that walk into range.

That's with zero upgrades to ability damage from experience levels at start of the game. Get those and you'll start hitting even harder.

Seriously, pick the class, follow the guide and play. This isn't a theoretic discussion - it's something you can test on your own. Blaze isn't OP because of esoteric tactical or strategic options, or skill level - it's OP because its skill does somewhere between 6 and 8 times the damage that second best ability user's AoE skill does, and unlike Psion, this damage is constantly spammable with no downtime unlike other classes that need to wait out for energy to recharge in between bursts.

I believe that if people fufill their roles, and use their abilites in proper succession and timing when needed, no character is stronger than the other. Overpowered vs. creeps, maybe. But that's just more incentive to keep playing and get your player level up. The balance between characters is relatively okay. There's work to be done and fine tuning, but there's no reason other than skill that one player should be gaining more experience than another.

@luckyo1: Go

I believe blaze can be op at times, but that's just more pressure on other classes to DO THEIR JOBS. Sure, the airstrike is powerful, but the damage doesn't happen quickly, and it happens in waves, and in what might be considered random locations. It doesn't always hit every creep every time. A simple solution to a blaze taking all the kills with airstrike, might be using the push tower Dead Eye has to disperse creeps. Salv can also pull in with a black hole, easily spammable, too, and dealing 6k+ each hit last game. Psion's lightning storm can be incredibly overpowered just the same, too. It's very quick to use, if you have high energy regen, you can spam it indefinately. If we think of the maths, 100 base damage at lvl 5, 30 levels @ 10 damge = 400 damage. Add 120 damage over 30 levels, 4000 damage. Just from base and damage levels. +175% from infested blood, you end up with 11k damage a shot. Even if the cooldown is 3 seconds. You still have the aoe base to hit a LOT of creeps at once, PLUS damage to SIU's, and I haven't even factored in damage from the flight form.

I should also note, @Etravex, that if there's a black hole, and you place another on top, if the creeps weren't killed inside the first one, the second one deals aoe damage to the creeps inside the first black hole. I don't know if this was meant to be, but iirc, it didn't happen in the first infested arena, and I assume that's how it was supposed to be.

Even a Seifer with high damage and aoe can make kills. I've had games as seifer, building a tank to be invincible, AND do enough damage to beat out, or at least keep on par with a good dead eye. If you're complaining about the imba that benefits you in kills and xp, then you're playing with very poor people. As it sounds, you should be complaining about your party, and advising them on how to do better, get more kills, and rack up more experience. I'm not saying you're a bad player, I'm saying you're acting like a lone ranger.

Great mod so far, surprisingly fun to play considering the simplicity of the core idea. I guess the implementation just hits the sweet spot. I do keep on running into a couple of balance issues that eem to be somewhat annoying and take away from the sheer fun factor of the map. Addition of sniping SIU was excellent to rejuvenate late game, as it forces people to actually stay awake now if they don't have Blaze in the group.

There are some major balance and gameplay issues still though. First of all, I have to confirm Gachatar's observations: Blaze is absolutely ridiculously overpowered at the moment. Speccing into air strike and every energy gain skill causes him to essentially keep one-shotting everything but SIUs with it, while capable of showering them down as fast as skill's cooldown allows.

I just did a hard game as a premade with some friends, and I was literally 2-3 times higher on experience gained and kills then them, pushing over 12k experience in 80 waves. There's simply nothing left to kill after blaze constantly showers the map with air strikes, swiping everything away. I suspect even nerfing scaling of individual missile damage by half won't be enough to fix it - it's just too overpowered and will keep two shotting everything small even with missiles doing half the current damage with each strike shooting EIGHT missiles. It will just become slightly slower to kill bosses and SIUs with.

As a point of comparison, skill damage specced Psion takes 2 storms while airborne to kill most trash infested in end game, and has a severe single target damage output weakness (buffs others very well but weak by himself even with lightning strike spam on beamed target). At the same time Psion is extremely fragile while Blaze can tank better then Seifer due to superior armor and shield that stops all ranged damage.

As far as I can see Blaze was designed around having a weakness in fury regeneration. Problem is, with proper upgrades his fury generation is off the scale, allowing him to spam skills as soon as they're off cooldown. Possible solutions include making air strike cost 100 fury, giving it a decent CD and nerfing damage massibly, or several of above.

On another balance note, Krug seems to be one of the most underrated characters in the game at the moment as well. With proper build he can carry the team - spec high turrets, high attack power, high attack speed and put your exp points into attack speed (IMPORTANT!). Then your gameplay becomes using allies for first 10 seconds of each wave to build up turret farm. Then you can mow everything down solo even if they leave. Turrets scale in proportion to amount of them you have out, and therefore putting everything in attack speed early on, resulting in heavy amount of nuclear charges allows you to maintain a farm of 15-20 turrets, in which you can replace turrets as soon as they die to damage/timer even on hard+. His thermal sight buff is all but insane as well provided you have specialists like Deadeye in the group that focus on attack power rather then abilities.

Finally, the game seems to hit total unit limit on later waves all the time. This results in both late game goals like "kill x infested" become unattainable, as well as bringing difficulty scaling to a halt early. Essentially your specialists continue to scale until they max out, while infested stop increasing in numbers much sooner then you top off. Perhaps focus more on upgrading infested damage then numbers for scaling purposes? And late game bosses are just hilarious. Perhaps add a proper damage scaling, slow immunity and immortal-like shields to them to make them less of a cakewalk? Bosses lasting <10 sec around wave 100 are a real disappointment compared to, for example, SIU waves which tend to be a bit hectic at times.

@ioGlInTheEnd: Go

It's lucky really. Sometime you'll get people who will leave after first death, but sometime you'll get people who will stick with you for 5 hours.... like I did.

Correct me if i'm wrong. Frenzy works by increase your character speed relative to the game time. That means your characters' stats are normal, but he does everything faster compare to normal game time. Think General Relativity xD

@ioGlInTheEnd: Go

Maybe it's just not your kind of game. Shortened survival games takes out the feeling of being rewarded for effort, and anyways, there is a channel where you can find groups that won't ditch you. It's a common thing in all maps that random people leave early because they've got no clue about what they're doing.

The length on this map is fine.

And by the way, there's no end to it. Goes on until you die.

Does frenzy work for sure... cuz it doesnt work for me in cd reduction for Psion.

Hey there

When I am playing the game, I was thinking how empty it is when a round doesn't have objective. Maybe you could make the map have objective for every rounds, to make it more interesting. Also, I could suggest some ideas for new objectives, such as "base hold' or 'collector' round

• -Base hold involve a person or a group standing on a designated area (don't have to be small, could be a big area that allow small movement) and try to hold it for 10 sec. Afterward, they have to hold another area doing the same thing. The objectives would be to hold 3 areas in 1 round, and only 1 areas could be hold at a time. You could have a progress bar that track completion, and go up when the area is stand on, while decrease when there is no one standing on it
• -Collector involve spawning an items specifically on that round only, and those items will be destroyed when the round is over. The goal would be to collect enough items to complete the objectives

There are also a couple of things that I like to mention

• Also on higher level, the objective of killing a certain number of infested set the goal very high (in the 700s of kills) which are quite impossible.
• Another problems would be the 'Stop' command for DeadEye. It just doesn't do anything, although it is quite hilarious that I sometimes die this way
• Krug's nuclear recharge skill and Blaze's open season cause their character to sometimes stop completely after the spell is cast

@Gachatar I never used Airstrike much on Blaze, always thinking that Open Season are much better. You give me a new perspective on the skills, and after trying it out, it feel like I am Psion, but on some extreme steroid. Combined with the fact that rage get refilled much much faster than mana does (with the speed buff, infested frenzy, Rage presence, Licker's rejuvenation) that I basically can afford to cast Airstrike every second

• (100base dmg + 300tier1 dmg + 3600tier2 dmg) x 8 missiles x [1.75 (psionic fusion buff) + 1 (spell dmg increase)]= orgasm damage (88,000 per Airstrike)

@LyimSwiftblade Not really. I can have enough armor upgrades to have him as a viable tank while still maintaining this damage. I'm not sure if it's a bug, but Blaze's protective presence's tooltip says +2 armor, but in reality it doubles his armor and more. On starting level you have 1 base armor and protective presence adds another four. With 10 base armor the presence more than doubles it. At around wave 30 you can get away with as little as 7-8 base armor, with Desecrator armor buff from the blood talent and Blaze's protective presence that puts you to around 30 total armor, enough to reduce all non-SIU damage to 1. And thanks to Blaze's superior attack speed and multi-targeting abilities he gets MUCH faster shield and life regen from the +1.5 health/shield per attack infested blood talent. I easily tanked bosses that destroyed full tank spec Seifer characters with their 40+ base armor thanks to me regenerating health 3+ times faster. If you add the protective shield to this that provides full immunity to all ranged damage (fully negating the new Insecticide SIU) you get a character that's a much better tank than a full tank spec Seifer character, can heal itself faster than a non-heal spec Salv while having several times the damage output of a spell specced Psion at the same time. Also, if you take the three blood upgrades that reduces all cooldowns by 10% for a total of 30% you can have an almost 100% uptime on his immunity shield, with only about 1 second of downtime between them.

Try out the following build and tell me that it's not overpowered: Magic DPS specced Blaze, full +ability damage upgrades chosen on character start from persistent level bonus pool Stay in protective presence (unless someone else tanks, in that case go Fury for more energy gain) and only take armor upgrades as you start taking damage (you can stay on starting armor until level 10-15 or so), dump about 75% of your minerals into air strike upgrades and from the other 25% buy the weapon range upgrades, attack speed and multi-target upgrades for faster fury gain. In blood tree, first go up the tanking tree so you get health regeneration and armor proc, then take the five energy regeneration talents and finally max +ability damage.

With this build, I can guarantee that you'll be able to tank everything from the first level while doing about five times the damage of any other member of your group. Oh, have I mentioned that you also have the best crowd control in the game, too? The grenades can stun SIUs from far away, negating the only realistic threat against you, while Seifer tanks remain helpless against them. They also take double damage while stunned, and with air strike you can kill any SIU alone before the stun ends.

Don't get me wrong, I love Blaze and I play a lot with him. But this is just not right, as much fun as it is.

@Gachatar: Go

In some aspects that isn't a bad thing. Because in order to get him that high around level 50, you have sacrificed armor and other aspect to improve one skill to the max, making him a kiting character, and if you get cornered. You are dead.

Blaze's air strike seems amazingly overpowered. It does around the same damage as other classes' area effect spells, so around 10-12k maxed, but a large target can be hit by multiple missiles, and with 8 missiles that's close to 100k damage with one keypress. It's enough to kill SIUs even around wave 50 with a single hit or two-three at the most and destroy bosses in 10-20 seconds.

Can u tell me how Psions and Arcs 50% thing works?

What if Psion has 10 armor and Arc has 11 armor. Does that mean an infested that has 22 dmg does 11 dmg to each? So 1 dmg to Psion and 0 to arc? Or does it do dmg to Psion first so 12 dmg to Psion but 6 to Psion and 6 to Arc. And if Arc has 11 armor doesnt that negate it?