Dungeon Defenders

[Jonathan]

It's been getting good reviews. I'll probably get it.

[Jonathan]

Saw Jason online in this.

I have a 22 TN Monk and a ~10 Apprentice on my phone. I like the 3D nature of the mazes. I question the whole multiplayer premise of this game, though. Combat characters will want tower characters to do a bad job so they have more mobs to fight. Tower characters want to design a layout that gives combat characters nothing to do.

[Jason]

Chuck, George and I have been playing this the last few weekends. It actually balances fairly well since they seem to double the hit points of the mobs for every additional player. So you have to balance mana between players if you want to pass the level.

[George]

But, we are competing to some extent. Oh, we share mana, because without a good mix of towers, we lose. Nonetheless, I kill as many mobs as I can to deny them to Jason's towers.

[Jonathan]

I don't get the balancing mana between players.

I will grant you that sometimes it pays to have defenses of different classes stacked. But you can achieve that with two players (or really solo, as long as it is build-phase-only).

[Vyrosama]

It really depends on what you want to get out of multiplayer.

If you just want to survive the map on a certain difficulty/challenge with your team then there's more than enough variety of things you can do that makes it fun. They scale the monsters fairly nicely and the boss fights are pretty epic. Loot/mana can be shared/need based. There really is no reason to bank chest/monster dropped mana since sold items give more than enough mana. Depending on the strategy used, one person will get a majority of the kills and will eventually be a level or two higher than others but that's minor since the goal is to survive. What usually happens in our games is that jason builds most of the towers (since apprentice towers are very versatile and powerful), george builds some blockade type towers to protect choke points or funnel mobs to other choke points, and I'm primarily support by building gas traps to maximize kills for the towers or inferno/explosive traps to weaken/thin out crowds. Typically Jason gets the most kills from his towers (especially when there are more choke points than we can handle personally). George sometimes gets the most kills since his squire mob killing abilities are comparable to towers. I usually get much less kills and probably only got the most kills once when we used a bomb centric strategy. I think I'm only down about 2-3 levels behind the others which I've made up via soloing.

If you want to get the best loot/mana/experience then multiplayer might be rough depending on what class you play and who you are playing with. There's no shared "loot bin", mana isn't shared but finite, and experience is based solely on personal performance (kills/awards (ie getting the first/last kill, last hit on bosses, etc). Hypothetically you could divy up everything based on monster spawn/choke points (I get all the mana/kills/loot in this section and defense units/num in team). Unfortunately the maps aren't designed like that (more spawn/choke points than players, weaker spawn points versus massive ones) and certain "towers" just are naturally support oriented (i.e. traps/auras). Also certain characters will have an easier time pitching a strategy to others that give them the most kills (no love for monks/huntress unless you can convince your team to do nothing but repair your auras/traps).

//end rant

[Vyrosama]

tangent:

Jon, do you play on the atrix or some tablet? How's the performance/limit screen real estate work out?

It sucks that you can't access the halloween dlc unless you create a TN character. Also can't get the costumes unless you beat the new map on insane difficulty (I think they said recommended lvl 60+ chars?)

[Jonathan]

The Atrix. Performance is a non-issue. I turned up the settings to max and it runs great.

Screen real estate is a bit trickier. The control scheme is essentially virtualized gameboy pad, where your controls share screen real estate with the display. The region left of center is used as a virtual thumbstick. There are attack/jump buttons on the right. I tend to play one handed except when forced to attack, as I really want the extra visibility. Doing abilities will be a real bitch, I think. So, it is adequate for tower building but not very good for combat.

[VLSmooth]

I just realized that this thread is currently on the first page of google search results for 'dungeon defenders'...

Edit: False alarm, the thread was there because Jonathan shared it and I was logged in to google.

[George]

I googled "dungeon defenders" to see if Vinny is right. To my amazement, this thread is indeed the last item on the first page. But, what in this thread would make Google rank us this highly? Then I noticed something under our listing at Google. "Jonathan Pearce shared this" They're using our Google+ circles to score results. I tried the same search from Firefox in private mode, and we aren't listed at all.

[Dave]

Supposedly $7.50 now on amazon.

[Jonathan]

You know, the scary thing is actually I never shared anything G+. It just knows who I am.

[Dave]

Dling from Amazon for $3 now... see what all the hoopla is about.

[VLSmooth]

Video for the new expansion(s):

Dungeon Defenders Quest for the Lost Eternia Shards Announcement Trailer
http://youtu.be/QAZcdH0rxXk

Actually looks pretty spiffy!