Starting Note

This dev log, all about the magical Magic Orb, also has a few new components that'll need to be discussed on their own. Since quite a lot has changed in comparison with how the original handled certain things, each of the individual towers were bound to have something happen to them just from the new systems alone. Magic Orb and Brewing Station got hit more than Crossbow and Oceanic Ship did with some of the system revamps, for reasons that I'll get into when I get to those individual bits.

Before I move onto Magic Orb, I just want to give a quick glimpse of the new settings menu that you'll be able to access in v0.1:

There are a ton of settings you can mess with here, with potentially more to come in the future. I won't explain any of them here, but you can probably gather what most of them mean just from looking at it alone. If not, you'll find out when the game releases.

Now, let's talk about the magical multi-purpose homing tower, Magic Orb:

Base, Up To Tier 2 Upgrades And The Ability

Magic Orb has been a fairly solid tower for every stage of the game. While not very good at starting on its own on harder maps, the homing helps it out with covering space towers normally wouldn't be able to reach at all once. Magic Orb's homing gimmick is something I wanted to keep around, however it was hard to test with just Plains, a single path long-ish map, as a really huge benefit from the homing was multi-path coverage.

Base changes:

• 0/0/0 - Base

  • Price increased from $500 to $550

  • Homing rotation degrees per second reduced from 360 to 180

• 1/x/x - Intensive Thought

  • Renamed to "Improved Spells"

  • Homing rotation degrees per second reduced from 540 to 180

  • Homing range reduced from 180 to 120

• 2/x/x - Stronger Magic

  • Renamed to "Intense Spells"

  • Homing rotation degrees per second reduced from 900 to 270

  • Homing range reduced from 240 to 180

  • Attack cooldown increased from 0.6s to 0.75s

• x/1/x - Explosive Magic

  • Renamed to "Fire Magic"

  • Price reduced from $500 to $400

  • Fireball explosion pierce is now capped at 20

    • Increased to 30 with 1/1/x

• x/2/x - Burnt Magic

  • Renamed to "Scorching Flames"

  • Price reduced from $750 to $600

  • Enemies with the fire debuff now have an animated fire debuff visual

• x/x/1 - Full Sense

  • Renamed to "Arcane Sight"

  • Price reduced from $500 to $400

  • Grants Hollow Priority Targeting

• x/x/2 - Filled Range

  • Renamed to "Nature's Sight"

  • Reveal aura pierce is now capped at 200

    • Only hollow enemies take up the pierce

A lot of things done here. First things first, the heavy nerfs towards homing. While homing is the primary gimmick behind the tower, I felt it was way too powerful in the original, so I decided to tune it down. Maybe it was hit far too hard, but we'll see in future versions and, if it was hit too heavily, then I'll bring homing back up a notch at that point.

Next, you'll notice the fireball explosion and reveal aura both have pierce caps. This is a rather significant change from the original, as anything that was considered an "explosive" would have infinite pierce as it was basically impossible for me to get those type of attacks to have pierce caps. Granted, pierce caps past 20 or so in the original took several updates in the first place since implementing them wasn't easy and even then it only somewhat works, if you played before Aura Booster's lane attack was removed, you'd know.

Anyways, this pierce cap is a rather major change to the game as a whole. The biggest point of concern is Time Trials, as those relied heavily on heavy piercing attacks to absolutely wipe everything out. While this heavily limits viability in that gamemode, it's not the main focus, and partially aims to bring down how heavily infinite pierce attacks were in various situations, such as the heavily dense rounds, for example rounds 63 or 78.

The reveal aura has an extremely high amount of pierce right now as I don't want reveal related attacks to be too handicapped outside of Time Trials. We'll see if I need to adjust this more when I start to add Aquatic Gem.

Next for this first section, the fire debuff visual in the x/2/x changes. A slight glimpse of this:

You can also see how this looks on Easy Crushers in the game's 7th screenshot.

Debuff visuals are the last super major thing I had planned for this release. There are a ton of visuals that'll be shown in this update, a solid chunk of which come from Brewing Station more than Magic Orb, however that doesn't stop Magic Orb itself from having a really large chunk of debuff visuals.

Debuff visuals are something that I've been wanting to add since debuffs were first implemented (past Brewing Station's launch in the original), as knowing when a debuff was and wasn't active could be super important. It wasn't as much of a problem with, say, Drill Sniper's stun as it was very clear when it was or wasn't active, since the target would be moving.

Now, the final thing to mention for the base tower, the ability, Thunderstorm... nothing's changed. Well, besides how the attack visually looks. The thunderstorm cloud is now always there as long as the ability is active, and there are now 4 separate lightning sprites that can appear whenever the attack hits. That's it, nothing more, but don't worry, Thunderstorm still has unlimited pierce.

Top Path - Striking The Runes

The top path remains focused towards heavily damaging low density groups of Crushers, while getting absolutely obliterated by non-boss enemies. Additionally, the homing improves with this path, same with the Thunderstorm ability strength.

• 3/x/x - Increases attack speed, pierce, and boss damage of the magical bolts.

• 4/x/x - Increases attack speed, pierce, damage, boss damage, and homing of the magical bolts.

This is a rather basic upgrade path, just increasing fire rate, pierce, and how much damage it dishes out. However, while basic, it's still a really solid tower for the price, and should cover spaced bosses really well.

The ability remains the same at 3/x/x, however at 4/x/x, it becomes Lightningstorm, which is identical to Lightningstorm from the original. While it deals very low single target damage, it's really solid at clearing out low health Crusher hordes, such as round 95. Just have something planned to clear out the Shelled enemies as it can and will get overwhelmed.

Middle Path - From The Ashes

The middle path ultimate in the original was just Volcanic Wizard, with its extremely powerful phoenix that wiped anything and everything out. The logical step when it came to the tier 3, I just decided to build into Volcanic Wizard directly.

• x/3/x - Replaces the magic bolt with a fast flame breath attack, inflicting a faster fire debuff on hit, as well as increasing fireball attack speed

• x/4/x - Fuses the flame breath and fireball attacks into one, with piercing explosive fire breath attacks that deal massively increased damage and inflicting heavy hitting debuffs

The point of this path is to go straight into fire and put all of the focus on fire. The attacks themselves are strong, and the lingering fire debuffs should clean up low health enemies that manage to escape its burning wrath.

One thing to note with Volcanic Wizard, the returning ultimate, is that a lot of its damage was shifted into the debuffs. Additionally, it's slower and projectiles now have a small delay before it can hit, and subsequently explodes, after damaging and exploding on an enemy. When combined with the explosion pierce cap, it'll limit just how hard it melts extremely heavy density groups of enemies.

The only really good thing about the shift towards debuffs is that it can handle Hollow Crushers slightly better. Still best to save your phoenix ability for them however.

Speaking of which, Volcanic Phoenix. The ability for both 2/3/2 and 2/4/2 is the phoenix, which is strong for both tiers. The phoenix, alongside the main attacks themselves, allow the Magic Orb to carry itself through midgame really well, easily getting close to Volcanic Wizard on its own now. However, the late midgame rounds, around the 70s, may prove challenging as 2/3/2 struggles against Medium Crushers, especially if spaced or Shielded.

The ultimate Phoenix is still extremely strong, just it doesn't evaporate everything as hard now, which could prove useful for the round 98 to 99 transition, but it'll prove detrimental for round 100.

Bottom Path - Dragged Back To Earth

Finally, the bottom path for Magic Orb. The tier 3 will seem relatively underwhelming at first glance, however it can provide rather useful if used correctly.

• x/x/3 - Gains a global range thorn ring attack

• x/x/4 - Improves the thorn ring attack, main bolt can slow enemies, fireball explosion inflicts knockback instead of fire, reveal aura is paired with a low pierce venom aura, and gains a chilly aura

Gaining access to the thorn ring with just the tier 3 is surprisingly useful. While it hits slower and lasts for a shorter period of time, the first-hit root is useful to quickly grab and stop leaking enemies. The main thing it can be used for is grabbing the Shelled children from the Easy Crusher once it breaks, as it will be able to clean them up relatively well.

The ultimate here, Nature Shifter, still contains a variety of attacks that all provide some form of crowd control. The pierce caps prove detrimental to how heavily Nature Shifter clears midgame, as it now pierce caps heavily against hyper dense rounds like round 63. The thorn ring can't root as much at once, the venom doesn't evaporate everything in range instantly, and enemies stop getting chilled really quickly once enemy numbers get large. Luckily, Earthquake still exists as the ability for this path.

Earthquake remains mostly unchanged, aside from the pierce cap. The close-range triple damage stunning area now has a low pierce cap that only matters more for lategame, as the global hit still wipes out basically everything in midgame and Crusher density isn't high enough to be a problem. There is a fancy new visual for this ability instead of the standard orange explosion that the original used, however.

Ending Note

Each one of the paths for Magic Orb is diverse enough that can be used for various different things if you need to. Unlike Crossbow and Oceanic Ship, you don't need to group all of the Magic Orbs together for maximum efficiency, instead they'll just cover each other's... backs?

Now with how much was changed with this tower, how heavily modified could Brewing Station be? A tower that was basically a requirement due to top path's buffing power, with the absolute crowd clear that was midpath, and then a versatile yet semi-unreliable bottom path due to the powerful knockback aura, insta-red potion, and stun explosion. Surely this tower would remain as a high performing support tower, right?

I guess you'll just have to find out tomorrow!