After a few runs, I find that I basically only want to build Fire Turrets (and of course Forge when ready). Everything else is just tissue paper, or occasionally an annoying side quest requirement. I would prefer it if they differentiated more between perks and just battle zone stuff. Maybe let you keep character bonuses without having to defend the tower, but nerf those a bit. And remove the +10% power entirely from Fire Turret, because it defends and grinds XP so well without that. The summons are weird, because they're battle aids, but they don't defend the building the same way, so aren't a great candidate for needing to stay alive. At the very least, I feel like it should be faster/easier/cheaper to rebuild demolished buildings. With so many side quests all over the place, I never really want to build a Trojan Horse because it'll be gone as soon as I go to pick up a chest, or maybe even sooner if the wave is big. I'm just not seeing why you would build anything other than Fire Turret and Forge in the current state.
I've also found that Duration is in a bad place. Due to the cooldown only starting after the full duration, it's usually better to have a short duration and an even shorter cooldown. A shield toss can only hit each enemy once, so losing duration to gain power is a great upgrade, and the opposite is bad. Talos with a lot of duration will march in a single direction for a long time and you're stuck with it, possibly a full screen away from where you need it to be. Spinning sword likes duration just fine, but global duration buffs will hit skills that don't want it. Compared to Deep Rock GS, the analogy is Clip Size or Lifetime. You never had self-defeating patterns with those, and you could keep spamming new stuff while the last one was still out in most cases. Obviously making this change in isolation would be a huge buff, so everything would need a full rework now. Weird unbalanced stuff can happen if we rework to allow compound scaling, but Duration is somewhere between suboptimal and actively harmful, as far as I can tell. Maybe if they didn't let you level to 30+, they could have more control over where the DPS scaling ceiling is.
After a few runs, I find that I basically only want to build Fire Turrets (and of course Forge when ready). Everything else is just tissue paper, or occasionally an annoying side quest requirement.
I would prefer it if they differentiated more between perks and just battle zone stuff. Maybe let you keep character bonuses without having to defend the tower, but nerf those a bit. And remove the +10% power entirely from Fire Turret, because it defends and grinds XP so well without that. The summons are weird, because they're battle aids, but they don't defend the building the same way, so aren't a great candidate for needing to stay alive.
At the very least, I feel like it should be faster/easier/cheaper to rebuild demolished buildings. With so many side quests all over the place, I never really want to build a Trojan Horse because it'll be gone as soon as I go to pick up a chest, or maybe even sooner if the wave is big. I'm just not seeing why you would build anything other than Fire Turret and Forge in the current state.
I've also found that Duration is in a bad place. Due to the cooldown only starting after the full duration, it's usually better to have a short duration and an even shorter cooldown. A shield toss can only hit each enemy once, so losing duration to gain power is a great upgrade, and the opposite is bad. Talos with a lot of duration will march in a single direction for a long time and you're stuck with it, possibly a full screen away from where you need it to be. Spinning sword likes duration just fine, but global duration buffs will hit skills that don't want it.
Compared to Deep Rock GS, the analogy is Clip Size or Lifetime. You never had self-defeating patterns with those, and you could keep spamming new stuff while the last one was still out in most cases. Obviously making this change in isolation would be a huge buff, so everything would need a full rework now.
Weird unbalanced stuff can happen if we rework to allow compound scaling, but Duration is somewhere between suboptimal and actively harmful, as far as I can tell. Maybe if they didn't let you level to 30+, they could have more control over where the DPS scaling ceiling is.