Shadow Plants are dumb, so I fixed them

Educate them

The crazy thing is for modern day they could have gone with nostalgia bait plants but they didn't, im glad about that but man half the shadow plants aren't really shadow plants in function only name

I feel like Grimrose could potentially be fixed for this system by being changed from an insta plant into a chomper substitute. It functions like it does normally, shooting a little shadow along the ground and swallowing the first zombie it sees into a void in the ground, or dealing large damage to and temporarily stunning large enemies. However, instead of disappearing after this, it instead just goes into a downtime state for a little while. When powered, the down-time between swallowing zombies is reduced drastically, something like half of its usual downtime. It would also naturally need to cost more sun to account for it being a permanent plant, as opposed to a temporary one.

Creeeps: I’m gonna fix shadow plants. Also Creeps: “It’s Nerf or Nothing.” (This is a joke)

Honestly, reworking ALL of the mints after Conceal-mint is a great idea. They are EXTREMELY powerful for ZERO downside, and need some sort of other effect other then a one-time board wipe/watered-down instant plant

Hey Creeps (and guys in general) , I was doing my own business, walking my dog and insulting in Spanish, and I asked myself, "Huh, I recognize what a good plant is , but what about Zombies?" And, knowing this, I have to ask, what is a good Zombie to you? Special wise talking.

my opinion on shadow plants is they're a cool concept executed badly. it's basically torchwood and pea synergy done poorly. torch & peas: - consistant 2x damage boost across all pea plants - torchwood only powers up 1 lane so you need 5 of them to power up every lane - has to be placed in front of your defence meaning its more likely to die and need more attention to keep it alive - literally does nothing else, a sitting duck that only powers up peas and nothing else meanwhile moon flower: - inconsistent strength boost, dusk and grimrose 3x their effectiveness, while nightshade trades less damage for range and ammo regen, and shadow shroom shadow boost does nothing, together with hardcode, this makes balancing them very tricky and headscratching - moon powers up 3 lanes, so only need 2 to power all 5 lanes - powers plants in front of her meaning she's less likely to die compared to torch wood - generates sun too so there's no risk replacing sun producers to moon flowers, they will produce even more sun than the sun producer they replaced

I have a great idea to reinvent shadow plants:the shadow states of plants should be alternate version of a plant , turning them not into a better version but a version more apropriated for it's position(being on the back)it's just like night shade works,he becomes a powerfull,Sacrificial , melee when he is not powered and a slightly less strong ,constantly active,ranged plant so for some examples I came up with:shadow pea should slwoly fire peas that do 15 damage with a stall effect when not powered and fire his laser when powered tough,it now does 10 damage(could have some good chemestry with his non powered ver.)toxic shroom(or whatever his name was)should act as his powered varient when non powered(tough that could be to op so maybe nerf him in another way)and when he is powered he will loose this abilty,BUT he will spawn randomly poison tiles every 5 seconds in a 3x2 (or 2x3 idk it's just a vertical rectangle)they stay for a good amount if time,do small damage and slow zombies ,grimrose could do less damage to zombies that don't wanna go to the shadow realm in his powered version and the rest could freak off(future me here:I decided to Change grimrose since my idea for him was preety boring and uncreative and I came up with a better idea the lines up with what I Said about the positions:in his non powered form he will attack the strongest in the field that is not flying and when powered he will attack 3 of the zombies close to your house in it's lane but will do weaker damage to those Fatso strong guys that don't fit in the hole than normal and flying zombies are still imune,*THANK YOU FOR WASTING YOUR TIME READING THIS*)

I do have a couple of problems with some of these changes. 1, Moonflowers inconsistency wont just make her worse, but annoying and irritating to use. Who likes your dusk lobbers having 3x less effectiveness on the last wave? 2. Whats stopping people from just using gloom vine and ditching moonflower? Its way more consistent and is honestly just a better torchwood in a sense since it can be placed in the backline. All the benefits with none of the risk. 3. This isnt really your fault but i hate the idea of shadow plants because it forces synergy onto specific plants and heavily restricts strategies. Like when are you ever going to use dusk lobber without moonflower or gloomvine and vice versa. Torchwood isnt that fun either, but at least there are a plethora of pea shooters to choose from. A plant could be better with a certain other plant, but not so much better that it becomes worthless incomparison alone.

You don't have a problem with shadow plants, you have a problem with the fact that half of them are trash and the other half are broken. The problem was never the concept, it's just the numbers. If they were balanced (just decrease the damage values of the broken ones and increase of the weak ones LOL) no one would bat an eye, it's not a concept problem, it's a stats one. They don't need to be changed, the idea works well, it's just that some are too stronger and for that you have no reason to bring other shadow plants. It's a number issue. (Comment for everyone, not just Creeps)

Nightshade doesn't have decreased damage when powered. Even when it's powered it will still deal 200 damage if zombie is close enough. So it actually only gets stronger when powered

i really like the shadow plants in vanilla, since it's a concept so simple that someone who's never played a tower defense game before could understand it, while still being effective, and in theory requires strategic placement to be effective. a huge problem i have with them though is that they're way too good in relation to the skill required to use them. moonflower, for example, is literally just "twinsun but it costs 50 instead of 125", and powered dusk lobber is just "half cost melon-pult that attacks 3 lanes", and that just makes it hard to justify not using them. on the other hand there's shadow shroom and nightshade, which are arguably better outside of the shadow aura, making the whole conceal-mint family feel like an unbalanced mess. i think making moonflower a limited uptime plant that you can't effectively use as your main sun producer is a great and creative workaround for these issues, and gives the shadow family the strategic synergy i'm sure it was always intended to have. as for how to fix shadow-shroom, one idea i had was to make it so that if a zombie eats the powered form, it walks backwards for about a second to spread the poison, making it both a decent staller and a crowd control option without needing support from other plants such as chard.

i've been thinking about how these could be improved for a while, but never actually managed to get anything down great stuff!

I think the perfect system would be like this, but you manually activate the moonflower area shadow powerup/synergy. So you have a bit more control over it and can activate it when need it (i think really long cooldowns on games like pvz should be more manageable by manually activation)

I wonder if it might be more interesting if moonflower did still always buff the plants in its radius, but the buff gets slightly weaker the more plants moonflower buffs. (They do slightly less damage or take longer to fire). But the upside is if there’s one boosted in moonflower’s range, the buff is better than vanilla.

"this thing is good while all its competition isn't. Clearly the only way to make the other things viable is to make the good thing just as bad as them... actually lets make it worse because I want to nerf everything else too" yeah, cuz that works so well... that's why everyone is in love with the helldivers balancing team right now

I feel like if you want to go for more of the inconsistency angle for shadow plants, itd be better to change how the powered state works. With the aforementioned changes, the shadow plants feel much worse, (except for nightshade, but they got a buff,) because the powered state itself is a straight upgrade for how the plant functions (again, ignoring nightshade), and not having it up feels like suboptimal play. I think a better idea would be to have the powered state work like a mini-plantfood. For example, instead of shadow pea becoming a plant unique from snow pea for 15 seconds, when pulsed by moonflower, it fires one, much stronger beam, and immediately goes back to not extinguishing explorers until it gets another order to fire. With this system it would be less their weak unless you babysit them and more unleashing their power when necessary. Moon flower can remain the same as your changes, maybe bring down the pulse time to account for the lack of a need for uptime. Dusk lobber can maybe throw stronger projectiles with larger splash, nightshade could rapidly fire all his remaining shots, then reload instantly. Murkadamia could start small, but everytime its pulsed, it gets a health state worth of jelly, keeping its identity of being a regenerating endurian. Concealmint could work on a column, or be map wide, since its effectively an insta now, leaving space for the other insta that i forget the name of tbh. The only plants that dont fit well are grimrose and gloomvine. Maybe grimrose could stay for a little bit without ammo, so it can be pulsed to get one more shot back? I dont have anything for the vine yet.

reccomendation -all shadow plants have the moonflower 3x3 thing -nightshade reloads automatically and guarantees a one shot on a normal zombie and faster reload when boosted -grimrose basically pulls + 1 zombies (2 at normal and 4 when boosted) the effect can splash too but close range like potato mine only -shadow shroom shoots fumes like scaredy shroom that can poison zombies (normal) and spores that kinda look like seaflora's projectiles that poison multiple zombies (boosted) -murkadamia nut acts like bean sprout or guard shroom when boosted instead of that goofy ass endurian knockoff -dragon bruit acts like guacodile but with three lanes when defeated -shadow peashooter drags multiple zombies like tangle kelp plant food effect -NOCTARINE DOES THAT FART STUN THING TOO -moonflower, gloom vine, and dusk lobber is fine for me

I liked the plants but the balancing really was gimicky especially when they get really thrown around to just be powerful gahhh

I can fix them...