Infested Arena 2
Now On B.net NA and EU!
Welcome Back...
It has been 43 years since your last encounter with the Infested, which took place on a space station in a remote part of the Universe. You thought you were victorious after defeating the Broodmother. Little did you know that the Infested followed you back to your home planet in the Galminus system and have since been mutating, evolving and multiplying directly above you. It is clear to you that the Infested are far more powerful than they were last time. Mutant strains and cross breeding has brought about new and terrifying Infested units. But, you are not easily discouraged...43 years has brought about advancements of your own. Prepare yourself the Invasion is about to begin...
Evolving from Infested Arena to Infested Arena 2
New Arena Invasion Dynamic
Infested Arena had 4 hallways which spawned the same amount of Infested units (a total of 2 different types: ranged and melee) at the same intervals with randomized Special Infested Units (SIU's) spawning at 1 of the 4 hallway locations at set times.
Infested Arena 2 has a randomized Invasion dynamic where at the beginning of each round randomized Drop-pods will fall from the sky in random locations. Once the Drop-pod lands it will begin generating eggs which after a short time will hatch and release the Pods designated spawn unit (i.e. Spewer Pod will spawn several infested spewer units). There is also a % chance based on active players and difficulty selected to generate new Drop-Pods at varying locations and varying times into the Arena. There are 4 basic Infested units (Infested Arena only had 2) each has it's respective Drop-Pod. Furthermore, you will easily be able to identify, with the "Infested Pod" dialog, all the current pods found within the Arena. In addition, Special Infested Cocoons will drop from the sky into the arena and after the duration will hatch a random SIU, all of which can be tracked using the "Infested Pod" dialog.
New Special Infested Units
There are now 10 SIU's including new ones, such as: Behemoth, Vile Imploder, Stalker, Desecrator. Some of the SIU's from Infested Arena were removed because...,well, they just weren't any fun.
Infested Blood Transfusions
Infested Arena 2 Introduces "Infested Blood Transfusions." Each time a Special Infested Unit or Boss is killed there is a chance for them to drop "Infested Blood" when one Specialist picks this up all specialists receive 1 Infested Blood. You can use a new menu to load up a stat tree in which you can further modify your Specialist by injecting yourself with the Infested Blood - Things ranging from increased movement speed, damage, extra shields, armor to having a chance to apply the "plague" or chain explosion reaction each time you attack.
Each available stat change found within the Infested Blood Transfusion Tree is modeled after Infested units you are fighting (Infested Bulwark Plating - Increase Armor +1/2/3/4/5)
Specialist changes
My original plan was to incorporate several new Specialists in Infested Arena 2, but after consideration and plenty of feedback I decided to change the fighting mechanics with each specialist. In Infested Arena everyone had energy and all abilities had close to a 10-15 second cooldown. Many times people would run until there ability was up. This wasn't to much fun. How could I make battle more fun and enjoyable? I decided to go with an action game battle dynamic. Each Specialist now has a total of 6 abilities (up from 4) and cooldowns are down around the 1-3 second mark.
Infested Arena witnessed 5 specialists who almost were identical in operation but with different special effects.
In Infested Arena 2 each Specialist is completely individualized everything about them operates differently from other specialists. Read on for details
A Few Examples of The New Battle System
Seifer's New Battle Mechanics
Built for Tanking.
-Seifer uses fast regenerating Energy to perform his abilities.
-Seifer has a "charging up" mechanic known as Ravager's Roar to boost his attack power and armor. With each roar Seifer receives 1 Ravager's Mark which will keep Seifer's damage and armor up until he uses "Igniting Wave." Once used all Marks will be removed. How do you get the most out of your Igniting Wave? Keep charging up with Ravager's Roar.
Fulgore's New Battle Mechanics
Built for damage from the shadows
-Fulgore uses Fast regenerating energy for a few of his abilities
-The rest of Fulgore's abilities operate off of a combo system known as Marks of Death. Each attack Fulgore executes has a 20% chance of awarding 1 Mark of Death. Other abilities and upgrades can apply additional Marks of Death just by using them. Fulgore can then choose to use his other abilities powered by Marks of Death. Once a Mark of Death ability is used all Marks of death are consumed. Depending on how many Marks of Death Fulgore had when executing the ability will determine the effectiveness of that ability (i.e. Vexing Shadows requires at least 1 Mark of Death. For each Mark of Death consumed when Vexing Shadows is executed Fulgore will teleport and deal extensive damage to 2 enemy units. If Fulgore has 5 Marks of Death then a total of 10 enemies will be warped too and attacked).
Blaze's New Battle Mechanics
Built for Siege and AoE
-Blaze uses Fury to power the majority of his abilities. Blaze's Fury meter starts at 0 and as Blaze attacks his Fury meter will begin to rise reaching a maximum of 100. As Blaze reaches certain thresholds of Fury he will be able to perform various abilities. Blaze also has abilities that require no Fury and will actually add a certain amount of Fury to Blazes Fury meter when used.
-Blaze utilizes "Presences" - Blaze can only have 1 Presence on at any given time and depending on which presence Blaze has on they will positively/negatively effect him (i.e. Fury Presence grants 150% additional Fury increase with regular attacks, Increases damage by 40%, and movement speed by 10%, but at the cost of degenerating Shields, and 50% increased damage from all Infested attacks.)
and much more.
Dead Eye's New Battle Mechanics
-Dead Eye uses Fast regenerating Energy to power his abilities. Dead Eye has the capability of dealing extreme damage to single targets as well as using superior crowd control abilities to protect his teammates. Dead Eye has access to Critical Strike Upgrades which allows every attack and ability a chance at dealing 200%, 205%, 210%, 215%, or 220% damage depending on critical strike upgrade level.
Salv's New Battle Mechanics
Salv can be used to focus directly on damage and AoE or Healing. Salv has access to Quick Access Heal buttons which allows him to cast his healing spells (via buttons on the leaderboard) at great distances. This way Salv can keep track of his teammates health and still remain an effective damage dealer.
Salv uses fast regenerating Energy to power his abilities and has great Crowd Control abilities such as "Mind Sync" which allows Salv to convert up to 10 Infested Units (SIUs included) to his side for a duration. This ability can turn the tide of battle quickly if the right units are "Mind Synced" (i.e. Mind Syncing a Special Infested Behemoth - sends the Behemoth to do massive AoE damage to all nearby Infested Units).
NEW SPECIALIST Psion's New Battle Mechanics
Psion is a new addition to the team and although requires a persistent player level of 7 Psion is a power addition to Infested Arena.
Psion uses fast regenerating Energy to power his abilities. Psion's main purpose is to rain down destructive electrical magic from above. All of Psion's abilities have some form of electrical attribute. Although Psion's Health and Energy starts out low Psion Energy Reserves start out higher than the rest of the Specialists.
Psion is capable of enabling "Flight Form" which increases his Electrical damage and increases his movement speed. Psion can traverse cliffs and has the ability of summoning his favored ally "Arc." Arc's weapon is increased along with Psion's weapon. Whenver you upgrade Psion's weapon the benefits transfer to Arc.
Psion is also capable of restoring teammate shields via the Quick heal keys located next to the leaderboard. Instantly clicking on the appropriate team icon will heal the corresponding teammate.
Persistent Player Level
All of your kills are permanently recorded within Infested Arena 2. Whenever you start a new game of Infested Arena too you will notice that your kills refelct all prior kills you have recieved while playing Infested Arena. As you Level up (via your Persistent Player Level) you will be granted access to exclusive Hero Specialist Units. In addition, you will partake in the Persistent Level Player Stat Menu.
The Persistent Player Level Stat Menu allows you (upon starting Infested Arena) to add upgrades (dependent on your Player Level) to your Specialist. In other words, the longer you play and the higher your Player Level the more initial upgrades you can make to the Specialist you have selected.
Latest Patch Notes
This Map was created for the NA Server. If you are from EU server please include the version you are playing in your comment
Comments
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_ForgeUser4426202 Owner
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Posted Jul 8, 2011LoL There hasnt been an update in a week.... Etravex... did you die?
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Posted Jul 8, 2011@Etravex: Go
You should update the game or something soon..
Infested Arena 2 is slipping in the ranks with 1.87.
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Posted Jul 8, 2011@Randomjoe266
This idea is very cool. I would love to be able to change difficulty during the game, although every 10 rounds seem quite long
This change would make for a more exciting game, and avoid a more repetitive late game when a lots of upgrades have been purchased
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Posted Jul 7, 2011This game is pretty damn easy imo, I would like to have a more rewarding experience for my time playing this game. After a point in the game is where you will have maxed upgrades and near maxed on all blood upgrades.
I feel that you should be given an option to spend your unneeded minerals on, -Xp -Blood -more continues/lives
The game takes way too long to get to "the fun part" as in every game it starts off from scratch but then just becomes a breeze through, waves 1-20, after that it becomes a little challenge from waves 20-40ish, beyond that it becomes rather easy as your team will have sufficient dps and maxed upgrades.
I suggest in adding -vote to skip waves -vote to add more waves into the current one (like instead of waiting for waves 1-5 one by one, just play them all at once) -add more unique bosses (current ones are pretty much unchanging in what they do and usually die withing 5sec or less)
I am not sure if you played the game called "Gemcraft Labrynth" on armored games, but one of the cool options about it, is that you can further change the difficulty by changing the settings before each battle, such as increasing waves, speed, monster hp, type, etc (each option that is modified to make the game harder will add an according bonus xp if you win)
What I would like is to further customize the option for difficulty, so that the nubs that always choose normal or easy, would like to get a feel for a challenge for a faster rate of xp by voting to change the hp of monsters. I am wondering that every 10 waves you can vote if you want the game to be even further harder.
Well so far that are some of the ideas have, discuss, tell me what you think.
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Posted Jul 7, 2011@Sandman366: Go
It was mentioned a few times already that the Frenzy blood skill's effect isn't displayed on your weapon tooltip, but it 100% works. And the Pyro tree definitely works, but it's only up if you're actively shooting at enemies.
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Posted Jul 7, 2011Oh BTW, a bug. +Attack Speed blood things don't seem to work on Blaze. Once for giggles I got the "Overall Speed Improvement" and my attack speed didn't seem to change-same problem with the Pyro thing (it's one of the blood upgrades, the middle tree) it doesn't seem to help at all.
And one more bug, this seems to happen every time. Maybe it's just me. Whenever it's a round that has the "SIUs Killed" counter for a bonus objective, they NEVER spawn on those rounds. EVER. Anytime I get those rounds I never see ANY SIUs spawn.
And I don't know if this is a bug or just some strange coincidence, I think 90% of the time when I get either the bonus hydra or zergling to kill for a bonus objective, almost all of the time (if not all of the time) they're a mutated SIU. Why bother making them 100% to be mutated when you can just buff them and make it regular chance to be REALLY hard....
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Posted Jul 7, 2011@rngrrandall08: Go
There is a blood counter. It's on the canister you click to bring the blood menu up in the first place. It doesn't seem to show the number in Windowed mode, but if you maximize, it's there.
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Posted Jul 7, 20112 quick things, their needs to be a counter for how much blood you get, and 2 my kills don't seem to be adding up lately......
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Posted Jul 6, 2011@Etravex: Go
Sweet!
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Posted Jul 6, 2011I will add it to my list of considerations :)
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Posted Jul 6, 2011Alright, I just had an amazing idea after my last game.
Sandbox mode. When you run out of continues, but still want to keep going for the hell of it. But, I propose in sandbox mode, you do not gain carbon steel, player xp, or a highest round count. Some games I would've loved that one more continue, or just to keep going with my character, because I was having fun. Then like a bat out of hell, you get licked, imploder comes, and a stalker hits the other player.
If you could find a way to implement that, that'd be really sweet.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011Dayum.
I'm impressed. I'm excited to see how this actually affects gameplay. Not just from a looksie view, but in actual games, I feel it's going to change the whole aspect. I'm looking forward to all this.
Good job with the teaser, and it's going to give a lot of people the realization that it is actually coming, and it's not just a project left for dust. I think once 2.0 rolls out, IA 2 will be in the top 5 popular maps.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011Im super excited to know that items are coming very soon. The wait was definately worth it =) I love that you gave a sneak peek *drool* Combining items look great also. Thank you for making this game better and better.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011@Gachatar: Go
Legitimate concern to say the least. I've already run into this problem before instituting these various abilities dealing with summoning units. The problem lies within the coding. The way I have it setup now does not allow for me to make such alterations. However, If I discover a way I will surely integrate it into the process.
On that note, I countered this dilemma by increasing the damage, range, attack rate for these various units to begin with. Initially turrets had much lower damage, arc was close to 1/8th the damage of Psion, etc... So even though they may not benefit from blood abilities now they're damage scaling has been increased to supplement this problem.
Hopefully I can find a way to fix this as I would love to see all units scale with blood abilities.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011@Etravex: Go
Thanks for your hard work, really looking forward to this. I remember that you said a few posts ago that all you see on this forum are people complaining - please don't take it wrong, we're spending time and effort trying to help make this map a bit better since we love it so much. A truly bad map's forum wouldn't have a single comment on it, since no one played it.
Anyway, seeing the concept of this drone reminded me of something that I wanted to mention before. The issue is with summonable objects, like this Drone, Psion's Arc and Turrets. While on paper their damage scales perfectly well along with Specialist abilities, in reality they are really lackluster because they don't benefit from blood skills.
In a physical damage spec you get +50% attack speed, +50% damage, area damage proc from pyro tree and another flat +100% damage boost. And another 30% overall attack speed from frenzy. Since some of these stack multiplicatively this is roughly a x5 damage boost, ignoring the area attack component. Then there are also character-specific upgrades like Critical Strike, and so on.
In the end, abilities like these are quite weak. Turrets are an exception since you can spam so many of them but the Arc's damage is laughable, and I fear that the Drones and Dreadnoughts will also suffer from the same issue.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011@luckyo1: Go
I do understand what you are saying, however as more and more people start to purchase new items for varying specialists I believe the rage quitting will calm down. On that note as it stands there will only be 5 unique items (more will come with future updates) per class. The other slots are interchangeable with all specialists.
When Forging new items with your Carbon Steel you will have to first choose which specialist you choose to Forge Items for. The class specific Items say in the tooltip which specialist it's for. If someone misclicks and purchases something for the wrong hero then it wont be the end of the world. They can always play successive games and choose the specialist they bought the item for and equip it on them.
As per limiters, I will not be forcing people to buy items for each specialist 1 at a time. If someone wants to specialize in a particular hero and buy all his items then he can do so.
I will look into modifying all levels of difficulty as items are released as items will make killing infested easier.
The borrowing aspect will stay intact and allow for more group coordination etc before the match starts.
For instance you are only allowed to buy only 1 of each item, but if you bought 1 and someone lends you the same item and you equip both then you receive twice the benefit. These different group strategies will allow experienced groups to be able to tackle the new reformed "Savage" and "Lunatic" difficulties which will surely be a hurdle in 2.0
Not only will there be group strategies like this, but there will also be item combinations that can be formed that mutually benefit eachother. For instance, with [Wrathful Drone] equipped each drone will receive Wrathful Missiles to fire at opponents. Now, if you have [Wrathful Drone] and [Nano Dreadnoughts] (Nano Dreadnoughts summons 3 Nano Dreadnoughts which are controllable, health and damage based on seifer's weapon upgrades, and they last 60 seconds) combined together. If you use nanotechnology to summon your dreadnaughts and then place a drone of safeguard you will equip each Dreadnought with Wrathful Missiles as well which will auto launch even when the dreadnoughts are moving.
This may seem a little confusing now, but there will be many tricks and item combinations that will produce varying results.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011The borrowing aspect would indeed address the biggest source of tears about this part: specialist specific items. "Oh no, I didn't get specialist I have items for, RAGE QUIT" would be pretty damn annoying. You may also consider adding a limiter for items you can purchase per any one hero without purchasing item for others (i.e. buy one item for x, you can't buy another item for x until you've bought one item for any other hero).
Another issue that needs looking into on design level is scaling and difficulty. Current difficulties just don't differ enough to matter. Could you perhaps make health or mob damage scale with difficulty and waves more aggressively?
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Posted Jul 6, 2011Infested Arena 2.0 update
A little preview so that you all realize I'm working hard at implementing persistent Items into the game.
Item Preview
Look closely you will see that Seifer's Drone of Safeguard is firing missiles.
Item: Wrathful Drone
Range: 7
Firing Rate: .7
Wrathful Missile Damage can be upgraded by increasing Seifer's weapon Damage Tier 1: +3 Damage per missile Tier 2: +36 Damage per missile
Everything at this point is working perfectly. Items are carrying over from game to game and will appear in your inventory when you start up if you have previously purchased the item; even specialist specific items will appear in your backpack although you will only be able to equip them if you are the proper specialist.
As you can imagine, implementing specialist specific items as well as general items that everyone can equip is a daunting task. Before Infested Arena 2.0 is released there will be around 50 items for purchase. Later updates will implement even more items. As soon as I'm done creating and testing all items for balance purposes the patch will be implemented.
The current Item setup allows you to equip 2 ability components which will alter the way your abilities work [Wrathful Drone is an ability component], 1 Weapon Enhancement, 1 Armor Enhancement, and 2 Accessories. Weapon Enhancements will modify properties on your currently equipped weapon, Armor Enhancements will modify properties in regards to incoming damage, and Accessories will be various modifications. Right now the only "unique" (specialist specific) items are ability components; the rest will be interchangeable between all specialists.
You can choose to let other specialists borrow certain items for the game by dropping them on the ground and letting them pick them up and equipping them. If you let someone borrow your item and the game ends without getting your item back don't worry the next game you start you will still have your item. On the other hand if someone let you borrow their item and you leave the game or the game ends while still having possession of someone's item, the next game you start the item will be gone.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011Gachatar: interface bugging out is a fairly universal SC2 engine issue. Sometimes, randomly it seems to not load triggers.
I'm not sure if it's fixable on map level. I've had it on many custom maps.
On Revollt's question, I don't think so - exp seems static (correct me if I'm wrong). And frankly, difficulty doesn't seem to scale all that well at the moment. Yesterday me playing blaze and a random guy playing seifer two-manned waves 100-155 on hard difficulty with seifer spending most of the time afking. It seems that map raises difficulty through mob health and mob numbers, but former doesn't really stop blaze's air strike spam from dominating them, and latter gets cut off by maximum unit numbers on the map - we had a lot of eggs that spawned nothing with errors shown by SC2 engine in bottom left corner referencing max_threads.
You do get more carbon steel (future item system currency) on harder difficulties, so it's worth playing on them. And frankly, after a while it's just more fun :D.
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Posted Jul 6, 2011I have a question: if you are playing the game on hard, do you get more xp each lvl if you would play on easy?
Just ask because all want to play on easy, but thats a little bit boring... play up to lvl 100...