Both Iggy and HK have brought up the suggestion of expanding the map, or at least portions of it. I agree with their opinions and would suggest expanding the paths. I understand that your intention is for players to eventually go into the water, but the narrow paths cause two problems. One, it is hard for players to fight and get gold in the beginning before they get Depth Strider boots. They can be easily pushed off while fighting mobs. Two, once the waves increase, it'll be incredibly difficult for players to buy items from shops.
Believe me: I would have made it much bigger to begin with if I had that much space to work with in my little corner on Flat One.
On the matter of roads, people getting knocked off early on isn't really a bad thing, assuming it even happens with how few mobs we will start with.
Just remember that zombies can't dive or swim fast, and you're golden.
I could very well do to try and protect shoppers from guardians somewhat, but too much protection would make a shelter, and zombies aren't smart enough to breech most shelters (oh no, a door! I'm not allowed to break doors!).
There is also the fact that 50% of the stair cases are
right next to literally leading up to the shops, so if you get knocked into the water, just waltz right back up.
Also
Two, once the waves increase, it'll be incredibly difficult for players to buy items from shops.
What mob map
doesn't have this problem?
It'll only help people learning how to deal with harder mob maps in the long run if they're used to having to wait 5 rounds for < 20 seconds of safe shop time.
To be honest, this was one of the changes I wanted to see the most. I had PM'd you in-game, asking you about your opinion on this. Your response was that it would limit the Guardians' movement, which is totally valid and understandable. Perhaps make half the map 1 block deep, but the other half 2 blocks? Once the waves go on, players will be forced into deeper water anyway.
Making the water shallow would also inhibit player mobility in the water, forcing them to climb onto the wooden paths at certain parts (when changing quadrants and/or moving to/from mid, to be precise) instead of being able to sink down and quickly dash under them.
There is also little trouble with getting back out of the water thanks to staircases and Minecraft step-physics (and there are plenty of stairs), and even then, swimming up 4 blocks doesn't take too terribly long.
People could also utilize a strategy of sinking to the bottom as it is now and swiping at zombies from below until the guardians start to spawn because zombies are too stupid to dive.
For comparison with the only map really similar to this (I believe it's called Grow), this is less op than literally standing on a car and camping with a sword until blazes shot you off. since the water tactic still forces you to come up for air.
Many of the items and their pricing are still awkward/unbalanced in my opinion. Right now you have the most powerful items as 64 gold. I think I agree with HK here where they should be at least 100 gold. I would also recommend raising the prices of the chain Prot II armor (or just remove Prot II).
Notch Apples:
Either remove them, make them only accessible after a certain round (say about 15), or keep them as they are.
Equipment:
I'm just going to start and say that a number of the price compromises I made were a mistake.
I will not pretend to know whether or not you understand:
*how strong guardians really are.
*the logic behind my choices of cheap and affordable armor.
Allow me to remedy regardless.
I firmly believe that the Diamond Sword and Stronger bow should be no more than 40g each, the sword be so because the only difference between it and the 20g gold sword is a massive durability advantage.
The idea behind the diamond sword is that it is vastly less of a money dump than the gold swords, but you might want to get the gold swords when starting out because you can sort of afford to get them early on.
The pow 5 bow is meant to deal with guardians from a safe distance and to deal with the wither at all.
Besides, won't people be spending quite enough money trying to get more of the harming and healing arrows specifically for dealing with guardians and the wither (about 5g for every 2 strong arrows)?
And most importantly, I had the armor very particularly low-priced because of a little something I found here
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Guardian about guardians:
The guardian's laser is able to penetrate armor to some extent, making strong tiers of armor with enchantments even more essential. While a guardian does 9 (
) of damage (hard difficulty) to an unarmored player, it deals 5 () to a player in diamond armor - one would expect that the attack would get reduced to 2 () of damage. That means that while guardian attack stats do not look very impressive, it still deals more damage to players wearing armor than other mobs with higher stats, although using enchanted armor can still reduce damage further.
Guardians deal 2 () damage each time it is hit when its pufferfish-type spikes are extended. If cornered, the guardian will usually extend its spikes and fire at the player, even at point blank range.
compared to zombies, guardians are scary. And so are the zombie pigmen (I've seen them do a whopping 5 damage through full diamond on mob) who will eventually accompany the guardians, and also mind that there will be elder guardians.
This map will not be playable with prices of 100g (or even 50g) on anything that isn't a super strong consumable (i.e. notch apple) because the gold gained from zombies alone will not be enough to meet such lofty prices in time for dealing with guardians.
I will also mention that I ultimately intended for this map to be quite a bit easier over all than all the other mob maps out there.
Unless you have really strong evidence proving that I need not ready the players for a sudden difficulty spike going from early game to end-game, I will proceed to revert/lower armor and weapon prices tomorrow after school.
