The Mix

Balance

• Normal is much harder. You can no longer win by building only your race's most expensive tower. Winning games now mix three kinds of tower: cheap towers to build the maze, mid towers with a job (slow, stun, aura, anti-air, boss killing) where the path passes most, and a few big towers at the best spots
• New economy: gold earns no interest any more. Kills pay a fixed amount of gold per wave, shared over the wave's creeps, and Send Early pays 5 + 1 gold per wave. You earn about 26,000 gold over a full game instead of 150,000+, so every big tower is a real decision
• Maze towers are cheap: your race's first tower costs 20 gold (Glow and Glimpse 25), so you can build a real maze from wave 1. They hit softly; they are there to make the path long
• Creep HP follows the new economy: it rises steadily through all 60 waves instead of easing off after wave 45
• Every race's ultimate now has one job. Single target: Seraph (true damage, flyers first), Leviathan (bites and slows one target), Cosmos (long-range boss killer) and Ancient (its damage aura moved to Sanctum). Crowds: Volcano (bigger blast), Glacier (splash and a light slow), Tempest (chains to 5/6/8, flyers first) and Hurricane (splash)
• No single tower line can win a game on its own any more. Lightning, Laser, Focused Beam, Overcharge, Obelisk, Dart, Poison and Hailstorm were trimmed, and weaker lines were lifted, so every line has a job in a mix
• Every race has anti-air among its mid towers, for example Fire's Cluster Mortar, Frost's Ice Shot, Storm's Lightning, Nature's Poison line, Water's Riptide and Arcane's Monolith. Flak towers (Cluster Mortar, Monolith) deal reduced damage to ground creeps
• Bosses and flyers retuned for the new economy: Dragon Lord 900 → 750 HP, Void King 2,500 → 2,200 HP, Thornwarden regen 150 → 120/s, Siegebreaker armour 50% → 42%, and fewer bats and Dragon Lords in the big flyer waves

Improvements

• Poison and slow: a creep now suffers the strongest poison or slow on it, but a weaker tower hitting it no longer keeps a stronger effect alive. Before, one strong poison hit lasted for as long as any weak tower kept hitting
• Tooltips, tips and tower effects now match the new kits (no more splash on Seraph, Leviathan or Cosmos, no aura on Ancient), and the game no longer talks about interest