This update ain’t it chief

Dear u/Magyst,

I appreciate the QoL changes we got in v15.40 like the 999 items stacks, but what you did to the traps went completely south.

I mostly jailed 160 RtDs every week to get my supercharger, and between pre-v15.40 and post-v15.40 jailing didn't get any harder, it actually got cheaper as many already noticed by many players. I switched my double wall lights for 4x healing wall launchers and that was it.

I never wanted to depend on another person or jail solo, so I decide to repurpose an storage alt into a a constructor support. Since then I always jailed with the "BASE Kyle Power BASE Knox"-combo. It worked well, too well. I just had to build my stuff, started the defense and the husks sat helpless in my jail and still do. No "active playing", it was even reinforced by love lobbers.

You obviously focused on the wrong thing, instead of working on the husk you literally just nerfed traps further. Ever since the first rework traps have gotten progressively worse. You made traps almost obsolete now while not fixing jailing at all, ironically you didn't just ruin CC traps that were used for jailing. I built up the courage to finally give the Twine Endurance a try and the two gimmicks I wanted to focus on, Tire KB and Freeze KB. So I built the the defense only for the first wave for testing. I was aware of the freeze immunity but why are Tire traps affected by the crowd control immunity as well? A damage trap shouldn't lose it's utility when it's purpose is to kill husks and not endlessly stun them.

I remember something vaguely that you told us once IIRC "We want players to get more active". This is literally the worst slogan to go off when trying to handle a tower defense game. The purpose of defenses are to reduce work you have to "actively" put into the defense phase, and rather channeling that effort into building defenses. Even the saying "work smart, not hard" doesn't apply here anymore as traps were nerfed to the ground, making them almost useless in end-game. Even Stoneheart Farrah offers better CC nowadays, which is pretty sad.

I'm no expert in balancing a game but maybe forward the following ideas to the dev:

• remove crowd control immunity on traps again, therefor revert the husk dmg nerf to building as well
• implement a kill counter
• prevent 1-box AFK jails by making the husk despawn after staying in the same tile for maybe 1 minute
• maybe try implementing a counter to non-box jails by making husks in a 5-tile radius around the objective despawn if they aren't below 75% HP after a certain time, custom to every mission type as some only last 3 minutes while others last 8, also exclude mist monster from this

Not sure how well this idea might work, but it should certainly reduce the effectiveness of objective jails and prevent non-dmg builds. The "below" should also prevent the exploitation of healer husks. I'm not certain how well electrified floors could be exploited here, but I Thunder Thora shouldn't be that useful for exploitation. Overall these ideas should result in multiple waves of husks and with smashers and mini-bosses spawning in later waves reduce the effectiveness of a pure no-damage jail.

All in all u/Magyst this would be my ideas for giving traps their old strength back (especially for Endurance) while hopefully resolving jailing to some extent. The problem were never the traps, the husks were and fixing them should result in the traps not having to be nerfed in the first place.