More on Dungeon Defenders

Over the past couple days I've gotten in some multiplayer games of Dungeon Defenders. There are four classes in the game and there were four of us so we each took a different class. It turns out the game is much more tower defense than first person shooter and the 'best' class is the one with the best towers: the wizard. Snuggles is our wizard and he always gets the 'most valuable player' award at the end of a level because his turrets kill practically everything. Certainly all of the cannon fodder that exists solely to make single target damage dealers worthless all gets to die to his fireball towers.

That said, the game is pretty fun and the other classes do have things they can do to help win the fights. They just don't do the things that score points most efficiently so they never get to top the meters.

I'm playing a knight that most deals with being tough and building walls. One of the things that I noticed while playing a solo wizard is my towers kept dying so I had to put some of my stat points into tower health. In our little team Snuggles can pretty much ignore tower health and focus on the three tower damage stats. I ignore the three tower damage stats and just make my things tougher. So my stuff gets beat up and Snuggles' stuff kills things. It seems like a pretty good combo thus far.

Lino is an archer which doesn't seem to have turrets that can compete with wizard or knight turrets. What he does do is a high amount of single target damage. Most of the time this is pretty irrelevant (everything will just die to turrets anyway) but every now and then flying monsters or huge monsters or bosses will spawn and it's really useful to have a mobile ranged attacker who can take them out.

Robb is a monk that doesn't actually seem terribly useful. It's listed as being the most challenging class but I'm pretty sure that just means it isn't very good. Monks seem to mostly have buffs and debuffs that might actually multiply very well on hard difficulty levels to allow the specialists to do their things even better. But then I don't know what else he could do. Because the game is set up so anyone can upgrade/repair other people's stuff there's really no need to have more than one person building attacker towers. There's no need to have more than one person with a lot of points in tower health. I guess a second generic damage dealer is fine, and that's probably what monks actually do. (One of the constraints in the game is a limit on how many things you can build, and I don't know if building random auras is worth skipping out on more damage turrets.)

I am definitely enjoying the game. It has lots of little tricks to make you want to keep playing with levels and gear and scoreboards and such. Definitely a good inclusion in the bundle thing I bought.

Dungeon Defenders

Over the weekend I was browsing the Steam featured sales and saw a game (Deponia) that looked interesting. It was on sale, or you could buy it in a big bundle that was even more on sale. It's like making money! (Only not even close...) I looked through the rest of the bundle, saw a few things that I'd heard good things about (Cave Story, Orcs Must Die! 2, Super Meat Boy, Thirty Flights of Loving) and decided to throw some money away.

I then picked a game pretty much at random to try out. It was Dungeon Defenders which it turns out is a tower defense game built out of a first person shooter engine. I've been a big fan of tower defense style games ever since spending a lot of time playing them with my brother in WarCraft 3. I'm always interesting in seeing what kind of twist people are going to put on the genre and Dungeon Defenders has a pretty good one. There are a bunch of different character classes in the game that can build different types of towers which is to be expected, but you can also play the game as more of a FPSer instead. The game has all the standard RPG things going on with levels, classes, talent trees, equipment, and an upgrade system. You can choose to spend your levels making your towers better or you can choose to level up your personal killing power instead. Add in the fact you can play in a group of 4 people and there's lots of reasons to specialize one way or another. One person can play a tower defense game and some else could play a hack and slash, loot acquisition game.

I started playing in offline mode just to see what was going on and ended up playing 7 hours over the weekend which does bode well for the game. It turns out you can't earn achievements in offline mode (I think it's open for modding) which is a little disappointing and means I should probably restart in online mode. On the plus side then I can play with other people. On the down side most other people are jerks. Eh, you win some, you lose some.

I browsed around a bit today to see if I could figure out how scoring works. There's a leaderboard after each mission and I found my score was a lot lower than other people's scores at the same level. It turns out I spend a lot of time just wandering around picking up terrible loot to vendor and you don't actually need to do that. Any loot you leave on the ground gets automatically vendored for you at the start of the next wave. The map also highlights loot which is 'better' than your current loot in green so you know where to go to pick up potential upgrades. There's also big multiplier score bonuses for not taking any damage to your base crystals and for not taking any damage on your hero which coupled with higher time bonuses would probably help a lot.

So I figure I'm going to restart in online mode. The question is do I play the class I've leveled to 29 already and know how to play or do I go with something new?