The G-Meister
Giga Slime
One of these things just doesn't belong. Can you guess which thing is not like the other things, before I finish my song?
Well, for a start, it's a skill. The one people bypass because it looks like a bit of fun and not a particularly good skill to actually use. The one that got added a short while back in replacement for another skill, yet everyone went wild about the other new one and let this one gather the dust. The one that is now a major component of my mage build, making grinding over twice as fast by itself. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:
Summon Plant
I love the fact that you can run around an area, growing small plants that smack the crap out of everything… but that’s the issue – they smack the crap out of everything incredibly well, in fact, too well. The season temple room northeast of the central room has become a breeze to grind in (as you might have seen from one of my statuses, I managed to get all the 6 OP hats within an hour. It took over 10 hours in that room with another character and I only ever got 5 of the things.) In the present room that farts out gifts at a rate of 1 a second it’s possible to keep the presents down at a steady number. I can stand still and put plants down in the Pillar Mountains and hardly take a wince of damage. What’s more is, I can do all of this on hard mode.
I'd been grinding in this room for about 15 minutes, and I think I beat the record from the number of presents in one room after I'd died. It's not hard to top it though.
Something’s broken, and as sad as I don’t want to see it change, it needs to. It’s a balanced arcade build as it takes a short while to set up, and it’s also not amazing against most bosses. The place it isn’t balanced is when grinding in story mode, in moderately small areas. The easiest area is by far the Mountains, then the Toy Factory, then Séasònnë, then the Temple of Seasons, then the Flying Fortress, then the Pumpkin woods (so much so that it’s literally useless there).
My aim with these suggestions is to balance out these areas, hopefully making it better against bosses, but at the same time make it almost equivalent with my original mage build. This way we are hopefully left with a moderately balanced skill that’s fun to use, and fair to play with.
Firstly let me go over what’s good, and what should be changed. I like the high damage, it makes the plants seem stronger, fierce and more appealing to use. I like the duration they stay around, reinforcing the point before. I also like that it’s automated, which in some ways is rather OP, but we’ll get onto that later. I also like that the plants are placed in front of you. This is what makes it a dangerous skill to use – I had to pump my movement speed while charging a skill to make sure I didn’t die from melee attacks while trying to place them.
I like the EP cost and charge time, seems good to me. Finally, I like that they don’t block EP. Going for a more manual system means they’re easy to relocate, and is very anti-AFK. However, this then brings up the issue with every magic build – the amount of plants you have is governed by your EP regen, which much outweighs any MATK you could give to your character instead.
What I don’t like is how quickly they attack (just look at the picture above), which in my opinion will have much less of an effect on players’ minds if nerfed (as in, I would think “oh it’s a bit slow but it does loads of damage,” rather than “oh it’s really weak no point in using that.”) I also don’t like Boss Plant. Yes, he (She? It? Do plants even have genders? (Technically they’re both male and female, so I’ll go with he)) is a boss, yes he looks badass, but he sits there with two bouncers that do quite a bit of damage with his attack speed buff, and they don’t cost any EP to keep around! Even then putting plants around him just makes it more OP.
There’s a few other miscellaneous things I don’t like, but we’ll get on to those in time. Anyway, here are my improvements:
Nerf everything
At base charge, with pumped MATK, one little plant will do more damage over the course of its lifetime than a silver charge Earth Spike or Meteor. That’s too far. What would be a reasonable proposition (well, to me) would be to cut the damage by about 10%, but cut their base attack speed by about 30%, for all three types. This brings them down to a reasonable DPS, while not being too terrible.
Change the abilities of each plant level
The base charge at this moment is much more powerful and useful than the bronze. It’s definitely not worth the extra time charging the spell to put down a slightly bigger one that slows enemies and lasts longer – you’ll take twice the damage in that time. What might be better is having the base charge do half the damage, but have 25% extra attack speed, and deal some knockback, without interrupting attack animations. The Bronze charge plants are the ones which do the actual damage yet do not have their slow-down ability, and means you can’t just spam the small ones everywhere and win (like it works in the Toy Factory).
This turns it into more of a tower-defence like system, whereby you can put down a few of the smaller ones to protect you from incoming melee attacks, allowing ranged builds to get some nice clean attacks off, yet if you want them to do any damage, you have to protect yourself with the smaller ones in order to not take any damage while placing the larger ones, giving use to both the base and Bronze charge.
Projectiles will ignore this system completely, until you get to the Silver charge. I like that there’s a ranged option, but they’re also too OP, seen as they track enemies like a sniper. After the attack speed nerf, they’ll still be very good at killing other ranged enemies – they already decimate Wisps, Lantern Jacks and Season Mages. My proposition to combat this is to reduce their aim a little, making them less likely to hit these three, seen as they’re fast moving. Furthermore, make it so if one of their shots happens to hit a projectile from any monster, they both get destroyed. This makes them less effective if their shots hit the other shots, while keeping you safe. However this could be an issue against FaZeman and GUN-D4M. Perhaps their projectiles are too resilient and can’t be cancelled out.
A different idea for these could be that they hide when enemies get near, like the scaredy-shrooms in Plants vs Zombies. This means that you will HAVE to protect them with the smaller knockback plants if you’re to sit around them.
Nerf Boss Plant
The easiest way to do this would be to make him block EP, but seen as we already have the other nerfs, it then becomes pretty reasonable. Or we replace him with a…
Manual Plant Turret
This would work by using the Gold Charge, and it grows a stationary turret possibly for 0 EP and it disappears when you get off of it, or have a set EP block and it will stay there, doing the move-thing like boss plant does when you re-cast gold charge. When placing it the first time you will hop straight onto it. Holding the attack button makes it fire roughly three projectiles a second, each at the cost of like 2 EP. The projectiles are as strong as the ones fires from the Silver charge pepper-like things if not 10-20% stronger, yet they do a meh amount of knockback and cancel attack animations.
You can use the move left and right keys to rotate it anticlockwise and clockwise respectively, and it turns pretty quickly. While on the turret, you can charge plant summon and place down plants a little further away than normal to keep any melee enemies at bay. If you shield while on the turret, it disappears or stays there, as explained above. Holding the plant summon button and attack cancelling near the turret will put you back on it, if it does the EP- blocking option.
Well, sorry for the long read, I tried to put some pictures in to break it up. Having wrote this out in Word beforehand, the word count totals about 1400 words. Thanks for listening to my opinions ^-^
Regards,
G <3
P.S. @GoodStuff, in case you ever wanted repayment for discovering your secret, I guess you could say this one is mine
Well, for a start, it's a skill. The one people bypass because it looks like a bit of fun and not a particularly good skill to actually use. The one that got added a short while back in replacement for another skill, yet everyone went wild about the other new one and let this one gather the dust. The one that is now a major component of my mage build, making grinding over twice as fast by itself. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:
Summon Plant
I love the fact that you can run around an area, growing small plants that smack the crap out of everything… but that’s the issue – they smack the crap out of everything incredibly well, in fact, too well. The season temple room northeast of the central room has become a breeze to grind in (as you might have seen from one of my statuses, I managed to get all the 6 OP hats within an hour. It took over 10 hours in that room with another character and I only ever got 5 of the things.) In the present room that farts out gifts at a rate of 1 a second it’s possible to keep the presents down at a steady number. I can stand still and put plants down in the Pillar Mountains and hardly take a wince of damage. What’s more is, I can do all of this on hard mode.
I'd been grinding in this room for about 15 minutes, and I think I beat the record from the number of presents in one room after I'd died. It's not hard to top it though.
Something’s broken, and as sad as I don’t want to see it change, it needs to. It’s a balanced arcade build as it takes a short while to set up, and it’s also not amazing against most bosses. The place it isn’t balanced is when grinding in story mode, in moderately small areas. The easiest area is by far the Mountains, then the Toy Factory, then Séasònnë, then the Temple of Seasons, then the Flying Fortress, then the Pumpkin woods (so much so that it’s literally useless there).
My aim with these suggestions is to balance out these areas, hopefully making it better against bosses, but at the same time make it almost equivalent with my original mage build. This way we are hopefully left with a moderately balanced skill that’s fun to use, and fair to play with.
Firstly let me go over what’s good, and what should be changed. I like the high damage, it makes the plants seem stronger, fierce and more appealing to use. I like the duration they stay around, reinforcing the point before. I also like that it’s automated, which in some ways is rather OP, but we’ll get onto that later. I also like that the plants are placed in front of you. This is what makes it a dangerous skill to use – I had to pump my movement speed while charging a skill to make sure I didn’t die from melee attacks while trying to place them.
I like the EP cost and charge time, seems good to me. Finally, I like that they don’t block EP. Going for a more manual system means they’re easy to relocate, and is very anti-AFK. However, this then brings up the issue with every magic build – the amount of plants you have is governed by your EP regen, which much outweighs any MATK you could give to your character instead.
What I don’t like is how quickly they attack (just look at the picture above), which in my opinion will have much less of an effect on players’ minds if nerfed (as in, I would think “oh it’s a bit slow but it does loads of damage,” rather than “oh it’s really weak no point in using that.”) I also don’t like Boss Plant. Yes, he (She? It? Do plants even have genders? (Technically they’re both male and female, so I’ll go with he)) is a boss, yes he looks badass, but he sits there with two bouncers that do quite a bit of damage with his attack speed buff, and they don’t cost any EP to keep around! Even then putting plants around him just makes it more OP.
There’s a few other miscellaneous things I don’t like, but we’ll get on to those in time. Anyway, here are my improvements:
Nerf everything
At base charge, with pumped MATK, one little plant will do more damage over the course of its lifetime than a silver charge Earth Spike or Meteor. That’s too far. What would be a reasonable proposition (well, to me) would be to cut the damage by about 10%, but cut their base attack speed by about 30%, for all three types. This brings them down to a reasonable DPS, while not being too terrible.
Change the abilities of each plant level
The base charge at this moment is much more powerful and useful than the bronze. It’s definitely not worth the extra time charging the spell to put down a slightly bigger one that slows enemies and lasts longer – you’ll take twice the damage in that time. What might be better is having the base charge do half the damage, but have 25% extra attack speed, and deal some knockback, without interrupting attack animations. The Bronze charge plants are the ones which do the actual damage yet do not have their slow-down ability, and means you can’t just spam the small ones everywhere and win (like it works in the Toy Factory).
This turns it into more of a tower-defence like system, whereby you can put down a few of the smaller ones to protect you from incoming melee attacks, allowing ranged builds to get some nice clean attacks off, yet if you want them to do any damage, you have to protect yourself with the smaller ones in order to not take any damage while placing the larger ones, giving use to both the base and Bronze charge.
Projectiles will ignore this system completely, until you get to the Silver charge. I like that there’s a ranged option, but they’re also too OP, seen as they track enemies like a sniper. After the attack speed nerf, they’ll still be very good at killing other ranged enemies – they already decimate Wisps, Lantern Jacks and Season Mages. My proposition to combat this is to reduce their aim a little, making them less likely to hit these three, seen as they’re fast moving. Furthermore, make it so if one of their shots happens to hit a projectile from any monster, they both get destroyed. This makes them less effective if their shots hit the other shots, while keeping you safe. However this could be an issue against FaZeman and GUN-D4M. Perhaps their projectiles are too resilient and can’t be cancelled out.
A different idea for these could be that they hide when enemies get near, like the scaredy-shrooms in Plants vs Zombies. This means that you will HAVE to protect them with the smaller knockback plants if you’re to sit around them.
Nerf Boss Plant
The easiest way to do this would be to make him block EP, but seen as we already have the other nerfs, it then becomes pretty reasonable. Or we replace him with a…
Manual Plant Turret
This would work by using the Gold Charge, and it grows a stationary turret possibly for 0 EP and it disappears when you get off of it, or have a set EP block and it will stay there, doing the move-thing like boss plant does when you re-cast gold charge. When placing it the first time you will hop straight onto it. Holding the attack button makes it fire roughly three projectiles a second, each at the cost of like 2 EP. The projectiles are as strong as the ones fires from the Silver charge pepper-like things if not 10-20% stronger, yet they do a meh amount of knockback and cancel attack animations.
You can use the move left and right keys to rotate it anticlockwise and clockwise respectively, and it turns pretty quickly. While on the turret, you can charge plant summon and place down plants a little further away than normal to keep any melee enemies at bay. If you shield while on the turret, it disappears or stays there, as explained above. Holding the plant summon button and attack cancelling near the turret will put you back on it, if it does the EP- blocking option.
Well, sorry for the long read, I tried to put some pictures in to break it up. Having wrote this out in Word beforehand, the word count totals about 1400 words. Thanks for listening to my opinions ^-^
Regards,
G <3
P.S. @GoodStuff, in case you ever wanted repayment for discovering your secret, I guess you could say this one is mine
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