Illusionary Dice MoI Area 11 Treasure Effect

When I first heard that the Maze of Illusion treasure was increase in attack speed, my first thought was, "oh really, again?" :P My second thought was that it was one of two possible effects:

1. DPS (damage per second) of the ranger would remain the same, but the hit rate increases. Exmaple: Without the treasure, if Ranger X's DPS is 10000 and he hits once every 5 seconds, then his damage per hit is 50000. Assume that with the treasure his hit rate doubles, then he would hit once every 2.5 seconds while his DPS remained the same, then each hit would cause only 25000 damage. This scenario causes no total damage gain, but has its perks as hitting more often can be advantageous. 
2. Damage-per-hit remains the same while the hit rate increases. Example: If without the treasure Ranger X's DPS was 10000, he hits once every 5 seconds, then his damage per hit is 50000. With the treasure, assume the treasure causes hit rate to double, then he is doing 50000 every 2.5 seconds. His new DPS would be 20000, effectively doubling it.

One way gives us just marginal benefits while the other gives us significant gains. So which way is it?

Our friends at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 has done the research for us! The text you find contained in the box below is an interpretation of their new article, Increased Attack Speed Treasure Comparison.

Article comes from: LINE Rangers 台灣社團
Author: 小為，黃郁弘
Research participants: 黃郁弘，小為，為執著，張家銘，黃名楊
Editor: 小為

Summary

LINE Rangers 台灣社團's testing has indicated that Maze of Illusion's treasure effect increases the rate of attack while preserving the amount of damage per hit. Each ranger's "attack" in the profile card represents its DPS (damage per second), and the damage per hit is derived from this number. The treasure preserves the ranger's damage per hit value according to its original DPS, but because the treasure causes an increase to the number of hits the ranger produces in a time period, it effectively is increasing its "true" DPS value. We can multiply the profile DPS value by the ranger's attack speed to find out how much the DPS has increased. For instance, Alice's profile lists her DPS as 53128. With 100% Illusionary Dice benefit, her DPS becomes 96693*.

* This value was obtained by using the attack speed value discovered via research method discussed below.

So how good is this treasure? Since this area is so tough, many players have had trouble getting it. Once you get to stage 129, you have a chance to unlock it 100%. Not to disappoint, the raid team has finally obtained 100% of the treasure and solved the mystery of its benefits.

The Method

The test method used recordings of the rangers attacking as researchers watched them in 10x slow motion to see the attack speed of each ranger. They recorded it many times and took averages of their observations so as to minimize error. Their original attack speed values were posted in their first article on the topic here, which I discussed on my blog here. Here is a sampling of their findings post-treasure (measured in time between hits):
  - Sol's speed is now 2.38 seconds, down from 4.33 s
  - Witch Cony's speed is now 1.47 seconds, down from 2.67 s
  - Alice's speed is now 2.55 seconds, down from 4.63 s
  - Opera James's speed is now 1.50 seconds, down from 2.73 s

Compare that to the original attack speed and you will see that obtaining 100% Illusionary Dice results in a 0.55 attack time reduction.

100% Illusionary Dice Attack Speed Coefficient

By battling a friend who does not have the Illusionary Dice treasure unlocked, the testers (who all obtained 100% of the treasure) saw that the Damage-Per-Hit value has not been changed, which is key to understanding how the treasure changes our ranger's damage.

Example: Level 70 Witch Cony

  - Without treasure, Witch Cony's damage-per-hit against the tower is 35648 

  - With 100% Illusionary Dice treasure, Witch Cony's damage-per-hit against tower is still 35648

From this, we can deduce that the treasure does not affect base damage values. Witch Cony's original no-treasure attack speed is one hit every 2.67 seconds while with 100% treasure, she hits once every 1.47 seconds. Since the treasure increases attack speed while preserving her damage-per-hit value, it means that her true DPS value has been increased. Based on damage-per-hit:

  2.67 sec/1.47 sec = approximately 1.82 times

...which means that if you take her profile DPS and multiply it by 1.82, you will get her new DPS. The treasure increases DPS by 1.82 times. 

Other rangers' attack speed changes also reflect the 1.82 coefficient:

  Sol 4.33/2.38 ~ 1.82

  Witch Cony 2.67/1.47 ~ 1.82

  Alice 4.63/2.55 ~ 1.82

  Opera James 2.73/1.50 ~ 1.82

This is how we arrived at the previous example with Alice: 

   53128 (original listed DPS) * 1.82 = 96693

Afterword

Line Ranger stages 109 - 120 of the Skyscraper area originally released with the treasure "increase attack speed" but because they reduced the damage at the same time, they finally changed the treasure altogether to something else, increase attack range. The present treasure for Maze of Illusion carries the same description as the old treasure, but it is vastly different and very beneficial to players. Once you obtain 100% of the Illusionary Dice, go back to Skyscraper and you will realize just how much easier the area becomes with the treasure effect. 

But the treasure effect is not just a DPS increase. It has substantially decreased the amount of time it takes for previously "slow/very slow" attack speed rangers to produce one hit. For instance, before the treasure, there was a very good chance that Sol would be knocked back or totally killed before landing even 1 hit of his red bomb. But now his hits are only 2.38 seconds apart (down from 4.33 seconds), so one quick burp and the enemy loses 250k! 

Conclusion

Long story short, the new treasure is the second scenario that I posed at the start, the effective DPS is increased by a factor of 1.82. 

Regarding Castle in the Sky

What about the 1.4545 multiplier from the Castle in the Sky treasure? Where does it fit in? 

Rest assured, the Castle in the Sky treasure is still in effect and it is still a factor in our rangers' damage-per-hit. The new attack speed is simply doing that amount of damage-per-hit more often.

The calculation of our rangers' damage is getting more and more convoluted as they add more treasure effects and multipliers. And it's getting all the more challenging to backtrack because they took away the enemy tower HP values that we used to measure against >:O It's all bit mind boggling, but we're getting more powerful all the same so I can't complain! 

Thanks again to the gurus at LINE Rangers 台灣社團. They work tirelessly to find out all this cool information.

Team Battle Balancing

This is a delicate subject. A lot of players have expressed that there are issues with Team Battle Mode (which I'll just call PvP, player vs. player, for shorthand). We know that the developers tweak the PvP parameters and the computer AI quite often because we see the game download "new resources." Each time they push new team battle files down, it throws us all for a loop because we don't know what they have changed. Teams you used to ride to victory one day may not serve you very well the next. But here is some breaking news from our friends at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 which may help explain what's going on. Their raid team published this just today, and this will change the way you think about your PvP strategy. Keep in mind that this is subject to change, and very likely will given Line Rangers' track record.

Team Battle Attack Power Reduction Ratio

Published and valid as of: July 14, 2014, 6:37pm. The text contained within this box is an English interpretation of the original article. 

• Article originates from: LINE Rangers 台灣社團
• Authors: 黃郁弘, 小為
• Testing Contributors: 黃郁弘, 陳安安, 小為
• Editor: 小為

The Line Rangers Raid Team is focusing on attack power specific to Team Battle this time. 

Rangers' attack power = DPS x Attack Speed x Attack Power Treasure modifier 

We discussed the details of this formula for finding actual attack damage in the attack speed post where the Raid Team hashed all that out.

The team experimented with rangers in Friend Battle Mode and discovered that rangers' attack power while in Team Battle Mode is weaker than in Single Player Stage Mode. The amount by which they are weakened is determined by the ranger's classification. 

Quick example:
Level 80 Alice's attack is reduced down to 33813. Level 70 Shu is weakened to 4049: Alice's attack power is approximately equivalent to 8 Shus on single target damage.

Test Method

The test team used Friend Battle Mode to do all their research. They allowed the opponent to attack their tower (since only the home tower has HP values now) in order to exact the damage inflicted by rangers. If you click on the article, you will see the pictures which illustrate Witch Cony inflicting exactly 24808 damage on the home tower, a farcry from the calculated 49616 damage per hit she should be making in single player mode. 

Sampling of rangers of various class types and their modified attack power in PvP Mode. The last column is the rangers' attack reduction modifier rate

Conclusion

The Line Rangers game has adjusted the damage rate practically once per week. Last week, splash rangers were reduced to 0.20, single-target rangers were 0.25. 

The week of July 14, highlights were attack class rangers 0.70, while other single target rangers were 0.50. 

This just continues to prove that Team Battle Mode is not ruled by splash rangers. If you have Dumpy, Prince James or Dancer King Boss, it's time to take them off the bench. You may find them surprisingly effective. 

For players who play with free rangers, Alice and Masked Moon are great choices. 

This week, attack rangers have the highest attack modifier as they're attacking at 70% power. All other single-target rangers are performing at 50% power and splash rangers are doing just 15% of their original power. Yikes.

Surely from the early days of Team Battle Mode, we have felt that something was not quite right. Our rangers do not perform the way we expect them to. Thanks to the team at LINE Rangers 台灣社團 we now know what was happening last week for a few days when it seemed as though our rangers were dying faster. Some modifiers must have been changed which created a difference in the actual damage rangers were inflicting and the way we expected our rangers to be performing. 

Some players may be outraged by this, but this info doesn't shock me, actually. A lot of games that have vs. player and vs. computer modes create a modifier for damage vs. other people because the pure damage in vs. computer environment would spell the end of player controlled units in no time at all. The amount of damage that is increasingly demanded to keep up with the challenge and difficulty of single player would not translate well in a PvP environment. This is an attempt to "balance" the rangers to make the PvP experience smoother and more worthwhile. Everyone will have their own opinions about whether this is helping. 

My biggest problem with Line Rangers with regard to these modifiers is the fact that players have gotten NO NOTICE about their existence nor the changing of these values on a near-weekly basis. This is something I criticized in my survey to the developers. They change stats without telling us. They change stage environment and enemy formation without so much as a warning. And they created and tweak these attack rate modifiers without any indication. We're left to wonder week after week why our fine team last week sucks this week. Or why our good tank yesterday is getting fried today. I understand that Team Battle is new and the game still needs tweaking. But the players should not get penalized for the mistakes and trials of the developer. At least give us the opportunity to properly adjust.

If anyone out there in LINE world is reading, my greatest plea would be to give us notices when significant changes like this are pushed out. Please?

And finally, I want to emphasize that the above stats are a snapshot of the PvP environment as of July 14 afternoon in Taiwan time. These numbers may not apply for tomorrow or the week after. And I wouldn't expect for the authors of the article to continually update the modifier numbers, either. It really changes too often to keep up-to-date 100%. But the point is, we know that our team composition needs to take into account for this kind of a parameter. This week, if you have the super good single target attack rangers on your team, you're probably kicking butt all over the place on the ladder ranking. Next week, it might not feel as great.

By the way, this does not mean that there is no place for splash rangers. You shouldn't just cross splash rangers off your team. Their potential damage is still huge when the enemy stacks up a bunch of rangers together. What this deters is having a whole 5-man team of splash rangers. That comp might not be a very effective team at the moment.

It's also possible that they tweak other stuff, like how much HP rangers have. We don't know if they've ever touched that stat in the past or if they will in the future. Sometimes you just have to go by feel of how your team is performing, and adjust accordingly.

Edit: This is more of an afterthought but... I just realized that I should feel kind of cheated by these modifiers. I spun the Gacha a lot over the last few months for splash rangers like SoCo, KSM and Ola Brown. Especially Ola Brown because he came around right as Team Battle was introduced, I wanted him badly! And I'm sure a lot of you were spinning for a chance at Susu recently. They're all splash rangers and they were promoted as the most powerful rangers in the game. And yet we just found out that splash rangers are performing at a mere 15% of their normal power in PvP. Anyone else feel like they've been played for a fool? HMMM...

Shu, Thou Art Cony

From now until June 30, select boss stages will let you bonus roll on a new ranger: Shu. Shu is long-range splash ranger whose power is close to Opera James and Songster Cony. But before we get into the nitty gritty details, has anyone noticed that his attack animation is exactly like Cony's? The legs together, legs apart, jumping up awkwardly to fire a projectile at the enemy, the speedy footies dashing forward... It's Cony. Maybe it's been him inside of a Cony costume all along.

Until June 30 18:00 Japan Standard Time

By the way, along with Shu one more ranger was downloaded into the game but he has not yet made his appearance. Maybe he is going to be released after June 30, when Ola Brown's limited obtainable period has ended.

Susu

LOL Susu is a very silly name. I think it means some funky things in some languages, too. But anyway, Susu looks like an ancient China dynastic warrior, and I would be disappointed if he is not melee. Either he's a fake-out to keep us wondering or he will make his appearance in the game very soon.

Update: A reader pointed out that the demon king (who, by the way, is throwing an exploding lunchbox at you, how cool is that?!), Susu and Shu are characters out of a Taiwanese live action puppetry show whose title is roughly like, super awesome fantasy martial arts heroes (it doesn't sound awesome at all in English. Some things are really lost in translation)... They popularly call Pili. If you want to know why a puppet show is such a big deal, read about the tradition of the show here. Since it's a joint promo, I think we can safely expect Susu will be coming soon.

Here is a look at Su's character on Pili. Su is a swordsman, so he should be a melee ranger. Here is Shu's character on Pili. I assume that something happens to him and becomes a monk over the course of the story. The puppets are stunningly gorgeous. I have to say, I like Shu and Susu about a hundred times more now that I have seen what they were modeled after. When I first saw the demon king, I was already blown away by how cool he looked for a villain. I mean... put him next to the onigiri boss and really, what comparison is there? Now I know he was modeled after this spectacular fellow.

Now on to the ranger!

Level 70 max master Shu

Level 50 Shu

Shu's range compared to Songster, Opera and Clara

Versus Songster Cony
Attack-wise, Shu out-performs SongCo by a big enough margin for it to matter.

• At level 50, Shu wins 11229 vs. 10322 DPS. 
• At level 70, Shu wins 26992 vs. 24813 DPS. 

He has a bit more health, too, and that's basically what I would say the added cost of deployment is compensating for. Cony costs 320 at lv 50, and 360 at lv 70, which is quite a bit less. So they're not exactly the same, but similar enough. By the way, they're also extremely close in attack range, with Shu winning by a narrow margin.

Versus Opera James
Comparing Shu with Opera James gets a bit more interesting. They're very close in attack:

• At level 50 Opera James wins just barely at 11453 vs. 11229 DPS
• At level 70, Opera James wins at 27528 vs. 26992 DPS.

The gain here is the health. Opera James only has 96k health while Shu has nearly double at level 70. Opera James costs the same as SongCo, 360 at lv 70. So if you don't have SongCo but you do have Opera James, the decision is a bit harder. 

If you are considering Shu vs. Opera for Team Battle Mode, I would definitely go with Shu for no reason other than the added range for survivability.

Versus Clara
A reader brought to my attention that Clara got a 9000 DPS buff sometime between last week and today. This makes her almost a perfect comparison with Shu, too.

• At level 70, Shu wins in attack of 26992 vs. Clara's 25303
• At level 70, Shu costs 460 while Clara costs 470
• At level 70, Shu has 184k HP while Clara only has 66k
• Shu's attack and move speed are faster than Clara's. His range is longer, too.

Well, looks like Shu is better than Clara in every way possible, no contest! Poor Clara.

Versus Abdula

• At level 70, Abdula does 69668 for 760 mineral and Shu does 26992 for 460 mineral
• At level 70, Abdula has 381790 health and Shu has 184312 health.

Abdula costs a lot of money and a lot of people diminish his value because of it. But think about it this way:

• Abdula does 91.7 damage per mineral cost while Shu does 58.7 damage per mineral cost
• Abdula is 501.4 health per mineral cost while Shu is only 400.7 health per mineral cost

If you look at it cost-to-cost, Abdula is still the better choice for your money. There are, of course, other considerations. Abdula's standard cooldown longer than Shu's. Abdula's range is shorter (it's right between Clara and Opera James'). Shu's move speed is faster than Abdula's. It really depends on what you want on your team. Purely on cost efficiency, Abdula wins. But if you want someone who moves faster, and can be deployed more often, then maybe Shu is a better choice.

While on the topic of cooldowns: Shu's standard cooldown is the same as Clara, Opera and SongCo: 8 seconds. Mastered, his CD will be 4 seconds. 

All in all, Shu performs exactly where I would expect for a 4 star ranger coming on the scene today. Get him while you can! Soon we won't know if we can get him again or if he'll be in Gacha or what!

P.S. Totally unrelated to Shu, there is a lot of buzz going around about certain ill-gotten ranks in the game. I'm not going to talk about it or refer to it or give it any sort of recognition/acknowledgement because I think the game should be played the way the developers intended. Please respect the rules of the game and my wishes for the blog - no comments about these people! Let's hope that this will blow over soon and be done with it.

New Battle Modes Available

After an extra hour of extended maintenance to prepare for the new battle modes, we are finally able to play the game. Unfortunately, the Versus Battle mode is currently plagued by network and ranking server connection errors. Practically every time you try to get to a new screen, or if you finish a game and try to get back to the battle screen with ranking info, the unable to connect error rears its ugly head at us.

Nevertheless, I persisted along with many, many other players to try to get a head start on the global ranking. Many of my questions were answered!

The Versus Modes

Ranking:

Everybody wins

• All players who participate in the ranked Team Battle mode will receive a ranking. Your points/score determines your global ranking. [Note: battling your friends will not help you in the global ladder.]
• Players begin at a score of 1000.
• If you win the battle, you will gain points and your rank will rise.
• If you lose the battle, you will lose points and your rank will fall. 
• The amount you gain/lose depends on the ranking of the opponent you battle (pretty sure), and in small part your winning streak.
• The global ranks are reset on a weekly basis (on Monday 6am JST) 
• The rewards are really worth it to play this battle mode. Top ranked first place, second place and third place receive a whopping 1000 rubies as a prize. Lower rankings aren't bad either. 
• You will also gain experience (for your rangers, not for the player) and coins when you win battles. 
• Note that battles against friends on your friend list will not affect your score and therefore has no impact on your global ranking.
• The bottom of the Team Battle screen will tell you how long until the global ranking will be reset and winners will be determined. 

Team Battle Mode 

• Your "real player" opponent's rangers appear to be AI (artificial intelligence) controlled. There is NOT an actual person playing and controlling the opponent deployments in real time at all. (Boo...)
• Team Battle requires "Special Feathers" which are the rainbow colored feathers. You regenerate 1 special feather every 30 minutes. You can purchase additional feathers with rubies. As with the regular feathers, you also get a new set of 5 each time you gain a player level.
• Somewhat fortunately or unfortunately depending on which point of view you take, you are free to take whichever rangers you please into combat. I'm pretty sure that your opponent's team is based on who that player has chosen in their team at that moment in time, too. 
• The length of the battle path is determined at random.
• Pretty sure that whatever treasure your opponent possesses will be applied to their rangers in battle.
• Whatever upgrades (mineral, max limit, tower health and missile strength) you have will apply in battle mode. 
• You may use items and friends/sidekicks in battle mode. 
• It is possible to hit Hurry Up mode which will just cause the lightning bolts to happen. I believe it also causes all units to become half health to speed up the fight. I don't think it makes the opponent deploy like crazy the way single player mode does, though. 
• So far, I don't believe you can trigger Thomas in this mode. I also don't think you can trigger Gold Brown.
• There is no clear bonus roll when you win a team battle. 
• When you win more than once in a row, the game will tell you what your winning streak is. A low streak gives you no bonus points, a high streak (10 or more) gives you a 2 point bonus. But most of the points depend on whether you were matched against a player who was close to your rank.
• You may only battle each Friend once per day. But you can farm up as many Friendship Points as you have Friends. 

Battle with Friends Mode

• You can access Battle with Friends mode by clicking on Friends in the main screen, then click on the Friend's picture, then click on the Battle with Friend button. 
• Your Friend also appears to be controlled by AI, so it's not your friend actually playing on the other end (Boo.)
• The length of the battle path is determined at random.
• Whatever upgrades (mineral, max limit, tower health and missile strength) you have will apply in battle mode. 
• You may use items and friends/sidekicks in battle mode. 
• You win 50 Friendship Points and personal bragging rights when you defeat a Friend in this battle mode. 
• There is no clear bonus roll when you win a team battle. Battle with Friends is considered a practice for Team Battle. 
• You don't need any feathers to battle your friends.
• If your friends choose to battle you and fail to be victorious, congratulations! You will receive 50 friendship points in the mail for doing nothing other than being absolutely boss mode. Too bad it doesn't tell you in the mail whose pride you hurt today :) 

My Current Impressions

First of all, from the ranking rewards, it would appear that everyone will get 20 rubies for the weekly global ranking system so it would be worth it to buy some rubies because you'll get 20 at the end of the week anyway. It doesn't hurt to participate! You mostly battle people close to your rank score, so you won't immediately be pitted against people who have insanely good rangers; but that said, ranking is no indication of how good that person is because "they" are not playing live on the other end, it's still AI. 

It would appear that in these new battle modes, long range units are incredibly powerful (Ola Brown, Dancer King Boss in particular). Once you get some meaty rangers to tank your front line, you need some nice long range units to stand at a distance and bomb away at the enemy. The opponent AI may decide to use items on you, so you should be prepared to respond. The one that is particularly dangerous in my opinion is enemy Ice Shot. Pretty much if they use Ice Shot, I respond with Invincibility almost immediately so that it negates whatever damage they will try to do while my units are doing nothing. You can deploy while frozen but your units will just sit at the foot of your tower until the Ice Shot wears out. 

Additionally, I would strongly suggest you go ahead and start upgrading your tower health if you have previously been neglecting this upgrade category. Since they took away Tower Repair, your tower is as healthy as it will ever be and there are no take-backs once you enter combat. 

While it's kind of disappointing that it's all AI controlled opponents, it's still kind of addictive because of what's at stake (glory, ranking & rubies). Mostly the fun of these battle modes is in checking out what you can do to respond to various team compositions and enemy formations. I haven't gotten bored with it yet. Try it out! It's pretty fun (when the server behaves). 

Endless Mode

• To get to Endless Mode, you hit the Start button the way you usually do on the main screen. Then instead of selecting a stage, click on the swirly portal on the map where it says "COMING SOON". 
• To play an Endless Mode stage, you must spend a "Special Feather" which is the new rainbow colored feather. It regenerates once every 30 minutes. You can also buy feathers with rubies. As with the regular feathers, you also get a new set of 5 each time you gain a player level.
• In Endless Mode only, it appears that non-speed type rangers incur a 50% longer cooldown "tax". Dancer King Boss who is normally (unmastered) on a 7-second cooldown is now just over 10 seconds in Endless. Ola Brown who is normally (unmastered) on a 8-second cooldown is on a 12 second cooldown in Endless. My Lia is mastered, and her mastered cooldown is 2 seconds, but in Endless Mode her cooldown is 3 seconds. My mastered Xan's cooldown is 4 seconds but in Endless Mode his cooldown is 6 seconds. I believe that the cooldown of speed rangers remains untaxed, but it's pretty hard to tell since the CD is so low for speed rangers anyway. It's noticeably longer for the others. In my recordings, my mastered Hip-Hop Brown is roughly on a 1-2 second cooldown which seems normal for master level. This is a very important consideration for Endless Mode team selection. 
• Unfortunately, I haven't played much yet. It has a similar ranking system, though not a global ladder, with rewards like experience and coins, based on how long you last in battle. It's not a bad way to level your rangers if you have no interest in using special feathers for Team Battle.

New Stuff

The update gave us a lot of nice enhancements that we've been asking for as well as other shiny new things. They've greatly improved on some "quality of life" type of features. 

• When you log in every day consecutively, you will stack up and gain rewards for your good attendance. This is a weekly event and replaces our old "daily login bonus." You will be rewarded once you get your "clear" stamp for that day.
• Experience Booster item will grant you 50% more experience for some time duration (3 hours or all day, d pending on which you buy.) I expect most people will be using 500 Friendship Points to buy the 3 hour one. I don't know yet whether it stacks with Double Experience Day, but I would expect so. Once you buy it, you'll see the timer ticking away in the main screen.
• Player max level has increased to 99 from 80.
• Little banners now tell you when something "new" has been added to your game or if there's an event happening to make sure you don't miss anything.
• The Friend home screen is accessed by hitting the Friends button on the main screen, then clicking on your Friend's picture. It'll show you what rangers they have and what level they are as well as their Collection progress and Treasure progress. 

• If you click on your Friend's portrait in the stage selection map, you can access a list of your friends currently stuck on that stage, send them help and click to go to their friend home page.
• They finally fixed the display of tower health to be the actual tower health rather than maximum of 999999. Unfortunately, they have also taken away the indication of exact health on the enemy tower (likely because we were exploiting it to find out info they didn't want us to know... lol. Boo). 
• When your ranger has reached its absolute max level, it'll say that the ranger is "Master". It's not just a vanity title: Master rangers' cooldown is half of an unmastered ranger. This is a newly added bonus of reaching max level, and naturally more incentive for players to want to play more Gacha. 
• Friendship Point capacity has been raised from 990 max to 2000 max. 

• Ranger storage capacity has been increased from 100 rangers to 150 rangers. 
• The new "Invincibility Item" gives your tower and all of your rangers temporary invincibility (approximately 8 seconds by my count). 
• Auto Mode should make your life a lot easier grinding levels. Once you enter battle in a stage, you can hit the Auto button (located under the Pause button) and the AI will take over your deployment. You can still take over if you wish, or turn off Auto if you want to play yourself again. You must switch Auto mode on for every stage you enter, though. I'm not sure what the AI does to determine which ranger to deploy, but I guess it'll take some time to try and figure that part out.
• Under Settings, there's a new "Coupon" button but not sure what it is for yet. Maybe some localized promotional things will be placed here in the future.
• When you click on a team member on the main screen you'll be presented with its profile and the option to go to the level up screen. 
• There's a Skip button on the Gacha now. Yes, my prayers have been answered! Now we don't have to waste so much time spinning that dumb ball!
• We no longer get 10 friendship points if someone selects you as a friend so people with symbols prefixing their names can more or less drop that style. The mailbox now allows you to kindly reciprocate sending "help" troops to up to 50 people. 

Anyway that's it for now, I'm going back to furiously try to climb the global ladder. Competition is fierce so far. Leave some comments if you have something cool/neat/interesting to add. I'm going to say this right now because I know some of you out there are burning up about it: If you are commenting only to complain about how unfair the Team Battle mode is without any sort of constructive criticism, I will delete it. 

That said, I do hope that the new updates to the game has offered everyone something to do while we wait for more new areas. 

Fists of Fury: Attack Speed and Damage

Following on the heels of the attack range article, LINE Rangers台灣社團 members have created more great reference tables on attack speed to aid us in ranger comparisons. We have had this discussion before when we explored the Attack Speed & DPS differences and the treasure effects of Castle in the Sky. If you followed me through those posts, the math below will look familiar. The text below is a translated interpretation of the article, Attack Speed Measured: 40 Team Members.

    
    The article comes from: LINE Rangers台灣社團
    Authors: 小為, 楊濟安
    Revision: 小為
    Testing Team: 黃郁弘，楊濟安，小為，鈺

Contained within the box below is their article interpreted in English. 

The team at LINE Rangers台灣社團 worked to get the exact damage numbers for each ranger and was able to calculate the precise attack speed. If numbers are not your thing, then check out the link to the article for a pictorial representation of the rangers' attack speed. (From left to right, the ranger attack speed goes from slower to faster.) For more detail, read on.

Note: All data below are based on max level rangers and stats as of June 11, 2014.

  Column 1 is the ranger profile listed DPS in game

  Column 2 is the actual DPS once you account for the treasure bonus (Column 1 * 1.454546)

  Column 3 is the actual damage dealt to enemy tower in battle in a single hit

  Column 4 is calculated attack speed, explained below

  Column 5 is the ranger profile listed attack speed

Attack Speed Calculation

To explain how these numbers came about, let's take the example of Masked Moon:

  - Take Masked Moon to an enemy tower and recorded that one hit against the enemy tower produced 162,305 damage. 

  - Masked Moon's listed base damage in his profile (which is his DPS, damage-per-second) is 51,500.

  - Take into account the 45% increase in damage benefit from Castle in the Sky's treasure, which multiples base DPS by 1.454546. His actual DPS is 74,909. 

  ⇨Since we know his one-hit damage is 162,305, then we simply divide: 162305/74909 = Every 2.16 seconds, Masked Moon hits one time. This is the number we achieve in Column 4.

The authors comes to the same conclusion as I did: faster attack speed rangers are a bit more advantageous. The reasoning is as follows: Suppose you had 2 rangers' whose DPS is 100,000. The first one attacks once per 1 second, the other attacks once every 4 seconds. If both were attacking an enemy with only 50,000 HP left, the first ranger would kill it after one second and only waste 50,000 damage. The second ranger would hit it after 4 seconds, cause 400,000 damage but waste 350,000 damage. 

Damage Per Minute

Taking our understanding of DPS a step further, the authors have created a table which displays the accumulation of damage by a ranger over the span of one minute. Bear with us, all will be explained.

  Column 1 is the ranger profile listed DPS in game

  Column 2 is the actual DPS once you account for the treasure bonus (Column 1 * 1.454546)

  Column 3 is the latest cooldown for each ranger, in seconds. Cooldown is the time that must pass before you may deploy another ranger.

  Column 4 is the total number of seconds of damage that can be inflicted per minute. To illustrate, let's take KSM as an example. You can deploy KSM once every 15 seconds. 

     First deployed KSM may attack for a full 60 seconds

     The second deployed KSM may attack for 45 seconds

     The third deployed KSM may attack for 30 seconds

     The fourth deployed KSM may attack for 15 seconds

     ⇨60s + 45s + 30s + 15s = 150 seconds

  Column 5 is total accumulated damage per minute: Column 2*Column 4. For KSM, that's 188,363*150=28,254,450 damage.

  Column 6 is the total cost to deploy possible units per minute. 4 KSMs amounts to 890*4 = 3560 mineral

The objective of these tables is to show us the rangers with the highest continuous damage accumulation. It is now quite obvious that Dumpy wins in this category, inflicting 228.9 million damage per minute. 

To give you an idea of what 228.9 million damage can do, consider this. Stage 108's enemy tower has 15 million HP. In 60 seconds, Dumpys can destroy about 15 of those towers -- assuming that there is no travel time from the point of deployment to the target. 

The reigning splash damage accumulation goes to KSM (28.2 million per minute), followed by Abdula (21.3 million), then Ola Brown (18.2 million). Sorcerer Cony is fourth on this list! 

What's the point of the last column? If mineral regeneration is about 200 mineral per second, then you can generate roughly 12,000 minerals -- take into account some extra, because you recover some minerals every time an enemy unit is killed -- and you can use the last column data to pick out the appropriate team for your needs. 

Deep Breath!

That's a lot of numbers! I found the information contained within the attack speed tables (particularly the actual DPS column) to be really nice. And the amount of time necessary to record the damage per actual hit must have been tremendous. 

The damage done per minute is a really interesting way to apply the DPS concept for a bigger picture. Take it with a grain of salt, because in reality there's no way for short-range rangers to spawn and immediately begin attacking, and most of us won't be able to deploy rangers as soon as they come off cooldown with 100% precision. But the damage per minute exercise gives us some insight into how DPS and cooldown can play into amount of total damage we can be dealing. This is the first and only place I've ever seen this abstracted.

P.S. Why is does attack speed article contain 40 rangers while attack range only 39 rangers? Red Brown was added as a consideration for the attack speed article.

Attack Range: A Picture Story

One of the finer details of the game which I quietly pointed out in my "Did You Know?" post months ago is that the attack range of different rangers vary. In my own gameplay, I mostly memorized their ranges in relation to each other, and that's how you'll find I described them throughout most of my posts. But our Taiwanese Line Rangers friends have now unmistakably shown us how ranges differ by putting 39 rangers on display! (Valid as of the time of this writing.) Contained within the box is their article interpreted in English.

    This article comes from: LINE Rangers台灣社團
    Authors: 黃郁弘，小為
    Photo Editor: 黃郁弘，小為
    Revision: 小為
    Testing Team: 鈺，楊濟安，Hsingju Wu，ShawTim Liu，黃名揚，標準兔，黃郁弘

In their article, "Attack Distance Measured: 39 Team Members," they took 39 4-star and 5-star rangers and with a ton of time, feathers, and screenshots later... lined them up in one incredible picture of ascending attack range. I'm not going to say anymore -- seriously, just click on the link! Scroll down and look at the picture. It tells a thousand words. Note: the testing group all have 100% treasure achieved in Skyscraper zone's Far-reaching Insight which increases attack range. 

Picture below is a translated table of the rangers quantified by range. Click to enlarge view.

Ok, cool, right? Of course. They also shared one really keen finding. Honey the speedy bee ranger has the same range as Sol. But she has an interesting attack animation: she arches back and then lurches forward to sting the enemy. They found that when Honey arches backward, it's not "just" animation; her position actually shrinks backward, taking her out of immediate enemy hit range. When she swings forward to sting, she is back in melee hit range again. So it is possible for Honey to avoid being the first target to be attacked when she swings back and forth! Weird. I wonder if the same sort of swinging motion applies to Dwight, whose attack animation is quite a lot of space. 

They also pointed out that Songster Cony is actually a pretty good ranger because her long range (quantified at 11) gives her a lot more survivability over other choices like Opera James. At max level, Ola Brown's DPS-to-cost ratio is almost identical to that of KSM (140 vs. 146). But Ola Brown's attack range is unprecedented for splash attackers and his attack speed is incredibly fast, making him a truly great asset to the team. 

The set of pictures at the bottom of their article show the difference in various rangers' standing distance between having the Skyscraper area treasure at 0% and 100%. They used Friends' rangers to illustrate the difference. (Edit: By the way, this means that when you use your Friends, no treasure benefits apply to their rangers.)

Range is really quite important to keep in mind as you progress through the more difficult stages. Sindy makes herself invaluable as a freely available ranger in so many stages because of her ability to out-range enemies. In the same way, Witch Cony is also a very good choice but with less DPS. Ola Brown can reportedly solo the first 80+ stages due to both his very far reaching ball and his high attack speed. Why is Dumpy such a high impact single target unit with such a low cost? Because he is relatively short range with relatively little HP, making him vulnerable to death. Clara and Opera James are two of the most closely related free rangers, but why does Clara cost so much more while doing less damage even though Opera James has longer range? Clara's value lies in the fact that she is obtainable 72 stages before Opera James and sometimes move speed is more highly valued than sheer DPS (Players who were around for the original version of stage 84 will know what I mean!).

In almost every ranger vs. ranger comparison, there is a reason for why one stat is low and another stat is high, justifying their various cost and cooldowns. Attack range is one very relevant stat to compare. Hope that this was illustrative and useful.

New Rangers Released: Game Field to Farm Field

The new rangers are here! This is the 3rd month in a row that new rangers have hit the game in the early days of the month, so it seems like we are following a steady release cycle. On to the new stuff!

Ola Brown and Dumpy range comparison with Thunder Brown (front line), KSM and Songster Cony

Ola Brown - 5 star long-ranged Splash Ranger. Limited time only! Get him while you can because Ola Brown will only be available June 1 through June 30 GMT +9. This is the first non-melee Brown unit we have seen and he is so cute with his creepy football/soccer ball. He is currently the longest range splash ranger which works out in his favor since Ola's health is relatively low. His health is comparable to Cony, so he's quite weak. Ola will not live in the presence of Richard (green dino mini boss in Skyscraper zone) but he will serve you well from behind the fray in most other instances. His attack is nothing to write home about, but it's certainly better than the 4-star splash rangers. Ola is also cheaper to deploy than other 5-star splash units, only 350 minerals at max. In certain situations due to his superior cooldown, cost and speed, spamming a lot of Ola Brown may be more effective than deploying Sorcerer Cony, Sol, or KSM. At level 80, he has 48,898 ATK (also known as DPS)/104,781 HP. 

Dumpy -  5 star Attack Ranger. Mid-range. Absolutely insanely high attack. Makes Dancer King Boss' max attack seem like child's play, but Dumpy has a much shorter range to hit. His range is the same as Dwight and Sol. Even at level 1, he does 45K DPS, making him immediately viable to use. He's on relatively short cooldown and he costs 380 minerals to deploy at max which is really cheap! The problem with Dumpy is his health is pretty low unless you are lucky enough to get 5 Dumpies to combine. His level 80 stats are 476,905 DPS/319,334 HP. More attack than health? That's a first for rangers! 

Abdula, Dwight and Lightning Jessica range comparison with Witch Cony & Warrior Jessica

Dwight -  5 star Balance Ranger. Melee range, sort of. Insanely high attack, high health. Pretty costly to deploy but makes up for it in battle. As far as range goes, Dwight doesn't stand up where health rangers are. He's a little bit further back, which is ideal for a ranger of his strengths because he will allow the health rangers to take the direct damage while having enough health to stand in the heat of incoming splash damage and hold the line a bit if the health rangers die. His range is the same as Sol. His level 80 stats are 245,279 DPS/2,678,054 HP. Yes, you read correctly -- That's 2.6 million HP. He's pretty much a Bernard with actual damage capabilities. Dwight will be a very valuable team member despite not being a splash ranger. 

Abdula -  4-star mid-range Splash Ranger. Medium splash damage, high health, but costs a great deal of minerals to deploy. He stands the same distance from the enemy as Clara. Abdula trumps all the other 4-star splash rangers in damage. At first I was skeptical about him because he does cost quite a bit more than other 4-star splash rangers (760 at max) and it didn't feel like he did that much more damage. However, after doing some math, I have found that with the cost of his damage, he does in fact come out ahead of all four of the other 4-star splash units. So he is actually a good choice to use if you can afford him. But what's important is he has the most hilarious attack animation. Maybe Abdula is the pet chicken's name, who knows? :) At level 70, Abdula sports 69,668 DPS/381,790 HP.

Lightning Jessica -  4 Star Speed Ranger. Only way to describe her is a mini Hip-Hop Brown. High speed, spammable, cheap. Doesn't quite have the attack or health for tanking the way Hip Hop does, so my initial thought is if you have a maxed Hip Hop Brown, you probably don't need to bother with Lightning Jessica. Another thing that's somewhat off about her is unlike her melee splash lookalikes, Lightning Jessica does not stand in actual tanking range (see picture above). Her distance is the same as Sol, Dwight and Dumpy. So if you're looking to use her as a tanking alternative, I'd be a little wary. She leaves a lot of room between her hit range and the enemy's hit range, which may result in allowable enemy forward marching space. Lightning Jessica's stats at level 70 is 21,975 DPS/305,089 HP.

Position comparison between new rangers and Sol. Dumpy, Dwight and Lightning Jessica stand at the same range as Sol

All 5 new rangers tearing up the place in 117

All in all, the new rangers are pretty impressive, with maybe the exception of Lightning Jessica. The game makers have really tried to give us a wide array of ranger attributes to choose from. I can definitely foresee situations where you cannot use some of our new overpowered friends, but many situations where they will excel and give you a huge advantage.

Does this mean that we don't need or want KSM, DKB, SongCo, Hip-Hop and Bernard? Absolutely not. They each have their own strengths and will fill different needs depending on the stage and the rangers you have available. Now, if you have Dwight and Bernard, you probably won't put both on your team, but certainly if have just Dumpy and Bernard, it's not a bad combo at all. Hip-Hop as a tanking hybrid will still be better than Lightning Jessica and hold speed advantage over Dwight. Dancer King is still the king of range though he does not have the DPS of Dumpy. But sometimes safety in far-range is more important than 500-600K hits. So, it all depends!

Good luck, everyone! If you are curious about GACHA probability, check out this post.

Missile, Ice Shot and Meteor Damage

Note : This information current as of May 2014 only. 

Missile Damage

Your missile levels up every time you invest some coins into it. In the earlier stages it seems like a great idea to upgrade your missiles because it seemed to do a lot of helpful damage. I have personally felt like the higher my player level became (which in turn meant more coins required for each missile level), the less it was worth to invest coin into a missile. My rangers feel more powerful these days and my missile feels like it's doing a lot less than my rangers. So why would I invest over 100,000 coins into this category at player level 75+? The question has been gnawing at me a while so I decided to try and figure out, how much damage does my missile do? My current missile level is 78.

I used a level 50 Hunt and stage 16's dragon boss to try to approximate some numbers. One hit from Hunt causes 19791 damage (tested it against an enemy tower). In Stage 16, it takes 5 hits to kill the dragon boss so my best guess is that the dragon has between 79164 to 98955 HP. We can then figure that half his health would be somewhere between 39582 to 49477 HP, the point which would be indicated by visually seeing the dragon get knocked back.

I tested by firing the missile and then allowing Hunt to hit him. The missile did some damage, then after Hunt hit him once, the dragon was knocked back (reaching half health). So this was evidence that the missile only did somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 damage, definitely less than 39582 damage since the missile alone didn't knock him back.

From just normal gameplay, I think we can all agree that the missile does a concrete number in damage, and not a set percentage. In later stages, the missile feels like it is hardly doing anything. The boss's health bars don't even move, whereas in lower stages, the missiles seem to be hitting for a large chunk of the boss's health.

It's tough to put an exact number on it, but I think it's safe to say that for a missile that hits approximately 30K (even splashed over a lot of targets), it's hardly worth putting any coin into once you get into the higher player levels. If you want to compare, level 80 Alice does over 220K in one hit. Level 70 Opera James does 109K in one hit, also as splash over all targets in range. 30K splash is peanuts! Upgrading missile becomes astronomically expensive in higher levels and, in my opinion, it isn't worth it. Missile upgrade is low priority along with tower health now. I'll upgrade them when I am sitting on a wealth of gold, but otherwise I'm not going to bother.

Ice Shot Damage

Ice Shot's description states that it "damages enemies by freezing." Does it really? I tested whether it really does by recording videos of myself versus bosses in various stages.

Stage 16 Ice Shot thawing

Stage 64 Ice Shot Thawing

Stage 84 Ice Shot thawing

If you click to enlarge the images, you'll see that indeed Ice Shot does damage them. The damage occurs when the enemies thaw, not when they become frozen. The screenshots also illustrate that Ice Shot does a set percentage of damage since it takes the same "chunk" of health off the bar from bosses that clearly have very different health pools. How many percent? Again, it's hard to say, but I would guess 3% to 5% looks about correct.

Meteor Damage

It always bothered me that the Meteor item cost more than the others. Sure, it does a bunch of damage, but so what? What exactly makes it more powerful than Ice Shot? [NOTE: Below discoveries about meteor are applicable to single player stage mode. Not confirmed for Friend or Team Battle Mode.]

To test, I took a lot of video captures of various stages and watched the playback in slow motion to try to figure it all out. Unfortunately, Meteor's damage is incremental with a damage-over-time element which makes it is difficult to show in still images, so you'll have to take my word for it and maybe test for yourself to see what I mean. 

Meteor does damage five separate times spread over a small area immediately behind the front-most enemy. Each time it tosses a meteor down to the ground, it does an initial amount of damage to anything in that area, then burns them for an additional amount. It does this 5 separate times to 5 different spots. 

This is the shot right before I hit Meteor. The first meteor will target the area where the green UFO enemy is standing. 

Meteor #1

Meteor #2

Meteor #3 - Dragon boss is finally within range and gets hit

Meteor #4

Meteor #5

Notice how the boss's health is lower than when #5 hits. This is the additional burn damage that happens after a meteor hits.

Positioning

I tried over and over and concluded that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to time it such that the boss gets hit by all 5 meteors. Usually they only get hit by about 3 of the 5 meteors. The area that it hits is relatively tight. The first meteor hits from the left and the rest sweeps towards the right while all bosses typically move from right to left. The only times I think it might be possible for the boss to get hit by all 5 meteors are: (1) you are insanely good at timing tornado such that the boss gets swept back at the same rate as the Meteors dropping, or (2) Boss health is close to half when meteors #1, 2 and 3 hit, then they are hit by meteor #4 and 5 because of the knock back to the right. I haven't ever successfully done the latter, but I guess theoretically it is possible (for bosses that get knocked back a great distance like the crawling worm in Altar of Flame).

Conversely, never time your item usage such that your Meteor will completely miss. I have done this by accident before. If while tornado is blowing everyone back (on a long pathway stage) then you hit meteor, the hot rocks will start to drop where there are no targets because the enemies are all swept back to their tower already. Positioning matters with this item, unlike Ice Shot which freezes absolutely everything on the path. 

Damage

I tested with a number of different stages and I've concluded that Meteor hits for a percentage of the total health of boss enemies. So if the boss is at 100% health, you release Meteor and 3 meteors hit it, then the boss will be left with approximately 70% of their health. Each meteor hits and burns for a total of approximately 10% the boss enemy's total health. It's a visual "guess-timate" so take it as you will! By the way, it is not 10% of the boss's current health. If it were dealing 10% of its current health in damage, then we would see that the meteors never actually kill any enemies but just bring it down in health and never actually reach 0 HP, which is untrue. [Side note: Percentage damage does not appear to apply to non-boss enemies. Meteor seems capable of one-shot killing low health little enemies outright, like the little UFO in my first picture above.]

So on average, you can expect that the Meteor item will deal 30% damage to bosses close to the front of the enemy line. Since it is a percentage, that can mean that it lopped off a lot of boss health, multiplied by however many bosses you are facing at the time. The potential damage is huge. Knowing this now, I think I feel that the 700 coins they charge me for the use of this item is justified. 30% can be crucial to timing, or help push through a Hurry Up phase where everything is already reduced to 50% health. 

I tested these items to the best of my knowledge. If anyone has other ideas or methods on how to figure out a more accurate damage meter, do share.