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. 

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.