Dungeon Defenders

Bought... Worth it for DD + All DLC alone and I already owned DD.

I played it a bunch after the commercial release and stopped when it felt like I was just grinding. I tried going back to it later but the game actively prevented me from playing it. I thought the Jester sounded cool so I bought him. I was kicked from the first, second, and third games I auto-joined. I tried playing solo and when I clicked start my packages had Ogres in them. So there I am, a level 1, and I lose automatically. The class doesn't work at all like I thought it would. I thought the gimmick was I would get random traps combined with the ability to move them around to create this hodgepodge of making the best of whatever I was given. Most of the packages had nothing, very few had any traps at all, and then if I got an Ogre that was it. So I try joining some other games. I'm just using auto-join and after being punted from those earlier games all that is left is some super high level thing. These people do not give a fuck and let me derp about. After the first round I go from level 1 to level 45 or something ridiculous.

The game just wouldn't let me play it.

I still play, it's a fun game and it's cheap so hard to say it's not worth it.

Overall they have improved it a bunch, but they never smoothed out the transition. Nightmare feels like the difficulty it should have been all along. Instead of hordes containing thousands of little kobold you can facerape there are spiders jumping down all over, djinn desummoning traps and buffing troops, and sharken who charge towers knocking them off position. You have to actually plan your defenses better now instead of just pure dmg(at least until you have stats that are obscene).

Survival mode is also significantly shortened and reduced so you can do 1-25/30 in 2 hours, not 15.

The last time I looked into this the general word was that Trendy had gone full retard and if you weren't already high level with the top gear or friended with people who would let you leech level up etc you were pretty much fucked. There's a massive difficulty spike between some of the later difficulties and it seems Trendy have focussed development on the player base they already have in how they scale newer content with nothing put in to enable you to reasonably progress.

I say reasonably as quotes I saw said you might get an upgrade every 2-3 hours or so of grinding difficulties/content to be able to survive later content.

Now that was a couple of months or so ago so perhaps things have improved*

Actually I dug out this quote from another forum from 2 weeks ago

Yeah, ignore Nightmare. The game really is (was?) a lot of fun but at some point instead of trying to balance the game for normal players they started catering to the highest tier players and give them even more ridiculous challenges instead of letting everyone enjoy the new content.


True this. I remember when you could just about get a foothold in Nightmare after doing Insane Hardcore, and even then it was about surviving the first wave of Endless Spires and praying for Mythic gear from the chests. But still, you COULD just about work your way up from there, given a lot of patience. Now it seems totally impossible without help from a fully geared person.

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I definitely got my moneys worth from this game when buying it at launch, it's just a shame the devs were completely blind on how to balance the game pretty much from day 1. The first few weeks with the rollercoaster patches should be required reading on how not to support your game out of the box.



*[spoilerz]It won't[/spoilerz]

Arbitrary_sl said:

I thought the Jester sounded cool so I bought him. I was kicked from the first, second, and third games I auto-joined. I tried playing solo and when I clicked start my packages had Ogres in them. So there I am, a level 1, and I lose automatically. The class doesn't work at all like I thought it would. I thought the gimmick was I would get random traps combined with the ability to move them around to create this hodgepodge of making the best of whatever I was given. Most of the packages had nothing, very few had any traps at all, and then if I got an Ogre that was it. So I try joining some other games. I'm just using auto-join and after being punted from those earlier games all that is left is some super high level thing. These people do not give a fuck and let me derp about. After the first round I go from level 1 to level 45 or something ridiculous.

Click to expand...

In fairness that will probably only happen with the Jester - their character portrait should be the trollface.

IMO the game has it's problems, but if you haven't played it, I'd be amazed if you didn't get $6.50 value out of it - there's a metric shitton of content, much of which is quite radically different ( this is usually good, sometimes bad, for instance it has the worst pvp ruleset map of any game ever designed as one of it's maps ), has very few significant bugs, a smooth online experience, good local co-op and pretty good production values for a $50 game, let alone a $5 one.

Yea, again...for the price it is worth it. No doubt the game has issues, but we are not talking a 60$ MMO with monthly subscription.

Here are the major issues as I see:
-The gap from insane to nightmare(or new maps) is HUGE. Essentially you cannot do nightmare without nightmare gear or at least 2-3 people working in a coordinated fashion. There are ways to get nightmare gear without buying them, and it's not exactly hard, just annoying. In theory you should go from Glitter insane(last map from original campaign) to deeper well nightmare no problem.
-You have to ditch the idea of solo play or be willing to swap characters alot and have more frustrations. They game is designed for multiple people big time. This brings up problem #2. DU units are so important and public games are so trash, people just boot you upon entry or don't let you build, etc. You really need to play with friends.
-I seriously believe that nightmare difficulty is what it should have been. Once you get over the hurdle from problem 1, it's a way more fair and challenging game. I can beat almost every level, but when I lose it's not because my towers just are not strong enough, it's because I didn't build correctly and a sharken or flying ogre got through. Where you put defenses and WHAT ones you use finally matter.
-Certain classes just can't solo and certain towers are just ass. See above comments about teamplay. Another balancing round wouldn't hurt them or at least getting some fixes in for the shitty towers.
-I left for about 1 year and decided to come back just because I was bored....I was completely and utterly fucking shocked they still did not have a loot filter in place. I mean, holy shit. This cannot be that hard to implement and it's a royal fucking pain in the balls to go around searching all the loot.


Seriously though, if you can get this game for under 15$ it's worth every penny. It has a ton of content and it really is fun. Just don't go into it with the EQ/MMO attitude of wanting to beat every map on the hardest setting solo or in a pub and have the best gear in game.

Rangoth_sl said:

-The gap from insane to nightmare(or new maps) is HUGE. Essentially you cannot do nightmare without nightmare gear or at least 2-3 people working in a coordinated fashion. There are ways to get nightmare gear without buying them, and it's not exactly hard, just annoying. In theory you should go from Glitter insane(last map from original campaign) to deeper well nightmare no problem.

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With the Summoner and Series EV, the gap isn't as big as it was initially. EV basically doubles the effectiveness of any tower, while the Summoner basically doubles the amount of DU you have, not to mention his minions have 360 degree aim, which only a couple of buildings have. I know the King's Game and Palantir smoothed out the loot progression somewhat as well, particularly in the completion rewards.

Rangoth_sl said:

-I seriously believe that nightmare difficulty is what it should have been. Once you get over the hurdle from problem 1, it's a way more fair and challenging game. I can beat almost every level, but when I lose it's not because my towers just are not strong enough, it's because I didn't build correctly and a sharken or flying ogre got through. Where you put defenses and WHAT ones you use finally matter.

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The thing is, if you played the game in the first few weeks, Nightmare was never necessary. Insanewasquite challenging. It's just that they went crazy with the loot progression and added loot that literally had 5-10x the amount of stats within a couple weeks after release and kept ratcheting it upwards until they trivialized every difficulty. In all honesty, even Nightmare was even getting extremely easy to me when I stopped playing due to how high my stats were getting.

If/when DD2 comes out, they really need to slow down the loot progression, because all of us that were complaining when "superloot" was added to the game were exactly right on what would happen with increasing stats that much that fast.

I agree with point 1, once I created a summoner things got alot easier. Amazing how unbalanced some classes are. For those who don't know a summoner summons minions instead of towers and uses a completely different DU system(MU instead). Archers, pretty much the only minion worth building outside of special situations, shoot 360 as stated above. This makes them perfect for guarding against dropping spiders or sneaking mobs, etc. With good stats they also rape face as well. They can never shoot quite as a fast as other towers, so super high stats they do not scale quite as well, but they are extremely powerful mid game and are pretty much the only reason I was able to solo my way into nightmare without any shitty gimmicks.
Also as stated above, the EV dude and put "beams" down from point to point. Like a wall, but each some something different. One is a wall, one reflect projectiles(very useful actually), one does dmg and then there is the master beam, a buff. Pretty much amplifies(doubles or more) the range, dmg resistance, and speed of any tower it's on with decent stats. Aka 2 towers and a beam > 3 towers. I never use a tower set that doesn't have a beam on it at this point. Bad news is that if any tower goes down, so does beam and you can get fucked.

I do disagree that insane was ever a challenge though. When I played after it first came out, I was with a few members of this board and we never really had issues except with the damn timer and bosses sometimes. Once you knew where to build to block, you could own everything since it was just hordes of mobs that run straight at you. You had to repair, assist with hero, etc but you never had the unknown happen. The new maps and nightmare added a bit of that unknown which made the game more entertaining because you actually had to "care" again about what you did and where you placed.

You are right about superloot though, even know when I play nightmare it's mostly a joke because my stats are getting insane(2k in tower stats for example, when I left long ago before coming back I had maybe 300-600). At the end of the day I can't quite put my finger on it but I really like this game. I LOVE TD games and this was a really cool play on it to me. Is there a DD2 in the works?

Thread necro!! Friend picked up a 4 pack on the Steam Summer Sale, and have been having a blast! Tons of content, and easily will get my monies worth from it. Started out as a Monk, and was up to level 22, and then similar to the poster above with his Jester, I got into a high level game, and within an hour was level 76.

So not sure how I'll progress now, but I'm anxious to get back in game and figure it out.

Steam profile below, friend me if you want to get back into it. Always running with 1-3 other people!

Still having a blast! I keep finding more and more stuff to do. Easily can power level anyone up if they want to start, or get back into it.

No wonder people have like 500+ hours into this game.It feels like starting fresh in Everquest. Just so much to do, but the cool part is, that catching up is actually fun!

2 months to finally get a resolution? That seems stupid long even for Steam. At least they offered to restore you? But at that point, I probably would have been so mad, I wouldn't have even cared.

Did you have them restore your characters?

This game was a ton of fun at release. I quit once they started getting ridiculous with the dlc like every 2 weeks, things were changing constantly and were not balanced or tested properly. How is the state of the game now? I would love to play again but I feel like my friends would be hesitant to start back up a this point. Another game created similar to this one with better balance would really be amazing.

I bought the $25 DLC pack off of the Steam sale, but if all that DLC was releasing on a regular basis, that would get annoying. At the same time, that keeps it fresh.

I'm having a lot of fun leveling up new characters, and gearing them out. I get the sense that it is for sure on it's last leg, as Dungeon Defenders 2 is in alpha/beta right now. There are some really challenging maps, and recently did Winter Wonderland, and that was really cool having the Christmas theme all around. haha

But, for min/maxing the game, only 2 maps that matter. Tavern Defense for experience, and Lab Assault for gear.

holy shit a sequel, i'm pumped for that

I was too a few years ago when it was announced. This was a fun little game well worth the original 15$ or whatever.

First they gayed it up by turning the SQL into a MOBA...total ass. Now this DD2 style sequel has been in the works for like 2+ years, so I'll probably still get it when it comes out if it's priced cheap like the original but I've long lost the urge to play.

I really liked the first one actually. Some major issues with end game and the balance is lame as hell, but it's certainly fun for a go-through.