Dungeon Defenders

[Soulflame]

Four dpsers are required, at least for the insane difficulty.  You might be able to get away with two for the other difficulties.

[Sophismata]

Four dpsers are required, at least for the insane difficulty.  You might be able to get away with two for the other difficulties.

Two Huntresses are enough.

[Xanthippe]

I've found a lot of the challenges impossible for me to do solo - although there is no shortage of guides showing how to solo stuff. Maybe these were made prior to patches that changed stuff?

I tried an Alch Lab Survival on hard (using a strategy for people without gear - basically new 70s) and wiped on level 14. Using enrage and snare auras at the 4 choke points, and then a dragon strike tower at the back, spike shields at the chokes, and I added a few towers back by the crystal.  The mobs don't kill each other fast AT ALL, and the auras go down way too fast.  Anyway, it was boring and took forever even with me killing them on my dps countess.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

I find Survival in general just takes for-ever, which is particularly frustrating when you get to wave 13 or 14 or whatever only to a) finally fall behind the endless tower-repair curve or b) get disconnected randomly from TrendyNet.

So far the only map I have soloed on Survival is Forges & Foundries (which took like two hours or something) -- the arrangement of the map makes it possible to realistically repair all your towers from the central point, whereas most other maps I get to a certain point and I'm like 'well if there was another person here this would be trivial, but since I have to run back and forth I lose.' I'm not really a fan of 'this is hard because eventually the 80,000 mobs will kill your towers slightly faster than you can tediously repair them' approach to Survival, tbh, but a general symptom of blocking-TDs vs. mazing-TDs I guess.

[kildorn]

Have you done survival since the most recent patches? One of the changes was lowering the number of mobs per wave, and increasing their difficulty sharply.

It sped up the mode a lot, which used to be "go afk for 45 minutes while this wave plays out", and now each one is over in a few minutes. But at the new difficulty waves it gets really freaking hard. "Half this wave is red wyverns" kind of bullshit.

[Soulflame]

The ridiculous part of survival as it currently stands is that layout design for wave 20 and forward is theorycrafted around Dark Elf Warriors.  Everything else can be handled with pretty much any layout you'd care to try, but DEWs can rip apart any physical structure too quickly, necessitating that if you do use a physical structure, you're automatically forced to put a str drain aura on top of it, which still won't save it wave 20 or on.  This has led directly to top end survival map layouts to include nothing but traps, auras, and as few barriers as necessary to stop poison immune orcs from dashing through your defenses to blow up a crystal.

Of course, traps are useless against wyverns, so you need something else to deal with poison and lightning immune wyverns, but that necessitates physical structures that DEWs can pretty much instantly annihilate, which leads a lot of people to play Alch Labs survival almost exclusively if they're searching for that sweet sweet super loot.

I fully expect the cost of prox mines (or some other nerf) to be coming soon, plus further nerfs to monk auras.  Yes I know DEWs will do 50% less damage to towers in 1.12.  I fully expect the overall effect of that around wave 20 to be exactly the same as it is now:  Jack Squat.  DEWs will annihilate towers slightly slower than they do now.  Hooray?

[Xanthippe]

Have you done survival since the most recent patches? One of the changes was lowering the number of mobs per wave, and increasing their difficulty sharply.

It sped up the mode a lot, which used to be "go afk for 45 minutes while this wave plays out", and now each one is over in a few minutes. But at the new difficulty waves it gets really freaking hard. "Half this wave is red wyverns" kind of bullshit.

Yes, I think I've only done them since recent patches.  I must be doing it wrong; I haven't gotten past wave 14 yet.

[Typhon]

Of course, traps are useless against wyverns,

ethereal spike kills wyverns.  not that this invalidates your points, i'm just trying to let you know that the spike will defend a path against wyverns

[Soulflame]

1. Ethereal spike is electric based.  Therefore it's useless against electric immune wyverns.
2. It hits only one target.
3. It has a slow recharge.
4. Wave 15 of a map that has wyverns sees 200+ wyverns.  They all come pretty much in a stream.  Far too fast for the ethereal spike trap to handle them.  You have to see it to believe it.  It's like a goddamn cloud of the things.  To the point where they easily overwhelm three magic missile towers.
5. I knew the ethereal spike could hit air, tried it out, theorycrafted/discovered the above.

So therefore:  for a traps huntress, app/squire towers are required to handle wyverns.

The "correct" way to handle wyverns on survival is ensnare and harpoons or ensnare and electric aura and fireball tower.  Which leads back to my other point:  people find it easier to simply not do maps with wyverns.

So... consider your point invalidated.

[Furiously]

Or just shoot the heck out of them.

[Soulflame]

That does work too, and on a map with ogres, you're pretty much required to run dps in order to kill ogres.  Or use barriers + strength drain aura.  The wyverns generally only bum rush from one direction at a time, at least that's the case on ramps.  However, that can be problematic as you have to shoot ogres, wyverns, and stray dark elf warriors that leap over all of your defenses in order to better jump onto your skull.  Stupid dark elf warriors.   

[Dren]

Ok, I made a mistake in putting off multiplayer with this game too long.  I can't get enough now.  So, fun.  Now I need to builld up a good friends list.  A good group in this game rocks like no other. 

Has anyone been doing any of the pvp yet?  How is it?

[apocrypha]

Picked this up for cheap couple of weeks ago, nice little game.

Any tips or guides around for how to gear up at 70? I've got a tower squire, aura monk and DPS huntress all at fresh 70 wearing whatever shit they picked up along the way and no real idea where to go next.

[Xanthippe]

I don't know, but the best gear that I can get solo seems to drop most in Glitterhelm.  (I have only run it on hard so far).

[Ice Cream Emperor]

Ugh that map is so intolerably constructed that I cannot bring myself to play it. Hard to imagine a map design less Tower-Defency.

[Typhon]

Picked this up for cheap couple of weeks ago, nice little game.

Any tips or guides around for how to gear up at 70? I've got a tower squire, aura monk and DPS huntress all at fresh 70 wearing whatever shit they picked up along the way and no real idea where to go next.

First stop - hard spooktacular.  There are tower placement guides in the forum to solo it.  Keep soloing it till you get 35+ reward weapon.  Then, with the upgrade costs all jacked up, lose the will to play and find another game.  OR find a way to game mana.  Forum is also saying that 8 man monster fest drops decent loot (I just play solo or friends, so I have no idea how broken the community is/isn't)

[apocrypha]

Heh yeah, Glitterhelm does my head in.

I'll give Spook & Monsterfest a go, thanks. Only very briefly tried random multi a couple of times, seemed fine, made my graphics card go bonkers though... I might have to turn the settings down to low to prevent some kind of meltdown!

[Ice Cream Emperor]

Okay this will probably come across the wrong way, but why would somebody read a tower placement guide? Like there is literally no game besides figuring out where to place towers. This is like several steps beyond some sort of raid guide in an MMO, where there is at least some significant amount of skill & excitement involved in executing the strategy/tactics -- something entirely lacking from Dungeon Defenders, unless there is some major variation in individuals' ability to repeatedly click the repair tower button or hold down the mouse while running around in circles.

Like, mind-boggling?

[Typhon]

He's asking for advice on how to get a better weapon.  I was trying to help with that.  I don't know how proficient he is with setting up defenses, so as an aside I suggested the placement guides some folks have posted on the forum.

Are you opposed to people playing a game for different reasons then yourself, or simply unable to grasp the concept?

[Xanthippe]

I had a lot of trouble on the last wave on spooktacular with only tower specced characters.  I haven't tried it since I leveled up my dps countess to help out.  I haven't gotten much equipment though, so my stats are like new 70s.

I could finish Glitterhelm hard, though.

[apocrypha]

I've looked at some layouts from other people after I've had a good go myself - it's interesting to see how others do it differently. I can also see how on some of the challenges I might find myself getting frustrated after repeatedly failing, but I'd prefer to try and work them out myself.

I've failed about 4 times on the Spooktacular today. Managed it on medium using almost nothing except Squire towers and then DPSing with my terribly-geared Huntress. I reckon I'm gonna need to lay down a metric fuckton of Monk auras to manage it on Hard though.

Had to turn the graphics down to "Low" too, which makes it look really gloomy, but it was just melting my vidcard.

[apocrypha]

Sussed it.

Was browsing the official forums, seeing what people thought about good Huntress weapons when I saw a response to someone asking how to upgrade their weapon, that said "export to Open, try stuff out, see what works".

Moment of epiphany! Spent about an hour doing exactly that. Went back to Ranked, spent about 5 million on my Huntress's existing weapon (a Godly Arquebus) and went from ~3k to ~60k DPS on a tavern dummy. 

That and a combination of about a zillion Monk auras and Spooktacular Hard is a cakewalk! Well, it gets a bit hairy on the last 2 waves and I keep losing a couple of spike blockades but that's all. Let's see if I can farm me some gear! :p

[Hawkbit]

FYI:  All DLC and the game is 75% off today on Steam.  Great time to grab the new characters and such. 

[Nightblade]

FYI:  All DLC and the game is 75% off today on Steam.  Great time to grab the new characters and such. 

the entire set including the game is like 5.24. Itll make a fun game to play on my ultra portable when I dont feel like working on the go.

[Hawkbit]

Of all the $5.00 games I've bought across Steam sales, this game alone is worth $5.00 more than any of them.  The amount of game you'll get for $5.24 or whatever is pretty astounding.

I only wish the consoles could get updates like the PC version, but I understand why they can't.

[Ruvaldt]

Played for an hour and a half.  Wow, there is a lot of game here for such a small price.

It's a fun game, but it sure feels clunky.

[Nightblade]

Played for an hour and a half.  Wow, there is a lot of game here for such a small price.

It's a fun game, but it sure feels clunky.

Yes, you can definitively feel it was made for tablets, not for pc.

[apocrypha]

Thought I'd join an Alchemical Labs Insane Survival game yesterday, you know, cos I'd not tried anything like that.

Didn't realise it was going to take 3.5 hours 

I got a green giraffe on a treadmill though (with 79 upgrades and no minuses). And a laser robot. Which was nice.

[Soulflame]

What was the trick to getting through wave 25?  Lots of dps?

One complaint I'd have about this game, particularly at the high end, is the game becomes much less about the towers (app and squire) and much more about traps and auras.  That, and player DPS reigns supreme over anything a defense set up by a player can do.

It's more of a shooter with static emplacement aids right now, which is fairly disappointing.  Especially the uber monster fest map.  There's simply no way to win that with tower characters, you must have player DPS.  Ogres on hard (I think... possibly insane) start with 3,000,000 hps, and you get four of them in the first wave.   

[Job601]

What was the trick to getting through wave 25?  Lots of dps?

One complaint I'd have about this game, particularly at the high end, is the game becomes much less about the towers (app and squire) and much more about traps and auras.  That, and player DPS reigns supreme over anything a defense set up by a player can do.

It's more of a shooter with static emplacement aids right now, which is fairly disappointing.  Especially the uber monster fest map.  There's simply no way to win that with tower characters, you must have player DPS.  Ogres on hard (I think... possibly insane) start with 3,000,000 hps, and you get four of them in the first wave.   

I just started my first character (an apprentice) after buying this on sale, and this is kind of disappointing news.  Does it have to do with limitations of the abilities of towers, or is the problem that towers are limited by the availability of mana and player dps is not?

[Furiously]

It's that the damage/tankyness of towers doesn't scale.

So they are great and you can just go afk and make a sandwich until level twenty when the amount of damage a monster does against a tower is too great. When they can single shot your crystal.... It's over.

[Soulflame]

Basically what furiously said.  Auras and traps deplete over time, vs towers that have around 6000 lightning tower (where I am with my meh geared apprentice) to roughly 30000 (spiked barricade for a well equipped squire.)  My countess has walls with 23k health, and one will die during insane mix mode because a mob, either an archer or mage, decides it is his duty to take that thing down.  Plus mobs with an elemental damage type do 2x the damage.  When mobs are nailing your stuff for 800x2, well, it doesn't take long for any physical structure to go down.

In theory, the squire guardians would help, but unfortunately guardians are capped at 5 towers.  Plus most players prefer to use apprentice guardians, since the damage increase is sizable.

[apocrypha]

What was the trick to getting through wave 25?  Lots of dps?

A fair amount of DPS and a really good Monk. I was at 60k single target DPS but just spamming piercing shot down the lanes and clearing 20+ mobs at a time and I was 2nd on number of kills behind the Monk. Most everyone else was concentrating on keeping the centre free of DEWs and keeping the auras & app towers up.

God a godly minigun from it that more than doubled my DPS once I upgraded it! Nasty long reload though but it's superb for picking off DEWs in bursts. Stupidly I hit the "Sell All" button before locking any armour pieces that I'd picked up so I gained nearly 10 million mana but sold all the super loot except the minigun :(  Game needs a buyback option!

[ezrast]

This game is surprisingly poopsocky if you let it be (I am letting it be). Less so if you play with randoms who can tow you through insane I guess, but my friends and I have been playing with just each other for the last week and a half and, wow, it's grindy but I keep playing it for some reason. They keep making fun of me for being farther along than they are because they are employed.

[apocrypha]

Oh man I am deep in that hole.

The group of friends I played with last week? Level 10. Me? 6 level 70s.