Corpses make no sense and aren't fun.

[bats]

The new corpse mechanic leaves something to be desired. Namely, a purpose that makes sense.

According to the patch notes, they were added as a way to "enhance positional strategy", but all they've done is added an unnecessary step to combat that wasn't there before and never needed to be.

Front-line fighters like Leper and Crusader now have to waste turns clearing junk from the front rows just so they can continue to contribute to the battle, whereas dynamic fighters with longer reach (like Grave Robber and Jester) are pretty much unaffected. They were already preferable choices to the heavy fighter classes before this patch, and now it seems that this is even more apparent.

In this respect, corpses are not likely to "enhance" positional strategy at all; they will simply encourage the player to use teams that bypass the problem of corpses altogether. After all, who wants to waste time beating on dead bodies?

And who wants the added dilemma of whether or not to waste a slot on a corpse-clearing skill? Purge or Disorienting Blast are basically useless, aside from their corpse-clearing functionality. I would rather take any other skill than these, as they only exist to clear a hurdle that impedes gameplay. (Yes, I know disorienting blast shuffles enemies, but with the right team, I've found that I don't need to pull or shuffle enemies at all, ever, so why would I bother?).

Corpses also don't make sense from a purely aesthetic (and logical) perspective. After all, if you were in a real battle, you wouldn't need to waste time chopping up the corpses of your enemies. You'd simply step over them and continue to fight. That just makes sense, right?

It also makes no sense why death by bleeding or blight would not leave a corpse. The devs' explanation that "After all, there was too much of the body withered or bled away!" is not adequate. I understand that they want to give bleed and blight more power, but adding an arbitrary benefit like this simply makes no sense.

In summary, corpses have made battles longer and more awkward, but haven't added any more fun. So why is this touted as a good thing?

I hope that this is something that goes away in the next patch.

[geepope]

Front-line fighters like Leper and Crusader now have to waste turns clearing junk from the front rows just so they can continue to contribute to the battle, whereas dynamic fighters with longer reach (like Grave Robber and Jester) are pretty much unaffected. They were already preferable choices to the heavy fighter classes before this patch, and now it seems that this is even more apparent.

The general consensus among experienced players was that the GR and Jester were badly underpowered, which was pretty evident before. Against weak-to-average enemies pair of well-equipped Lepers could pretty easily take out half of an enemy formation in one attack, then clear the other half in the next.

[Fifty Three]

Corpses do make sense. They now make the game more about strategy and the skills that you pick for your characters.

Leper and Crusader have skills that can clear or traverse the corpses. Leper's Purge clears corpses, while the Crusader's Holy Lance traverses the front corpses to hit the nugget center which is the back row.

The Grave Robber's Poison Dart now actually matters, because it causes Blight. When enemies are killed by Blight they do not leave a corpse. Plus the Grave Robber's ranged attacks can now shine just a little bit more.

It seems like a lot of the Corpse complaints come from not having a character have certain skills.

Corpses make the game more interesting.

[LukeBu]

It makes sense that a living combatant can get in your way and protect people behind them, but obviously the corpse idea needs to be refined a bit to make more sense and not just be a pain in the ass for no reason. It is a bit silly to have to attack a corpse for several turns to get at someone. If the intention was to give plaguebearer a purpose and better balance, sorry they still suck(until they can heal more or do more damage). maybe the corpse can have 1 hp, or less than current at least, or build up from multiple enemies or just big enemies make corpses. This mechanic at the moment doesnt add too much difficulty, but just seems silly.

That being said I really enjoy this game. I am reading H.P. Lovecraft and this game fits so many great themes from his short stories but still has very innovative fun gameplay, some balancing needs to be done of course but for early access its great.

ps. also does anyone find it silly you can confuse and bleed a corpse?

[bats]

Originally posted by Fifty Three:

Corpses make the game more interesting.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't find them interesting, I just find them annoying. They haven't really affected my strategies or party choices at all (I already had a liking for Plague Doctor, for instance).

But it's not just the corpses that are irking me in this patch. Rendering blight and bleed essential rather than optional is kind of troublesome, whether it's for the purposes of corpse-clearing or not. Team selection is likely going to be more restrictive now, because you HAVE to have a certain amount of bleed, blight, and corpse mitigation in order to be effective as a team (especially with all the prot added to the enemies).

This patch isn't all bad, however. The new sanitarium is a welcome fix, for instance. And the balances to crit to 1.5x instead of 2.0x seemed like something that needed to happen.

And if the heavy fighter classes legitimately needed balancing, I'm all for that, I just hope they find a way to do it without keeping this awkward and nonsensical addition of corpses.

For the record, I'd like to say that I love this game, it has outright addicted me since I first bought it. I've dumped 80 hours into it over the past few weeks, which is unheard of for me (usually I play a new game for a few hours and get bored).

After playing this patch, however, I found myself not having fun playing this game for the very first time and that makes me sad.

The game is still in early access after all, and I guess this sort of thing is kind of expected. I just hope they work it out

Originally posted by LukeBu:

ps. also does anyone find it silly you can confuse and bleed a corpse?

I sure do, LukeBu. I suuuuure do.

[Fifty Three]

To each their own then. I'm having tons of fun with this update.

[algothi]

Originally posted by Thorn:

But it's not just the corpses that are irking me in this patch. Rendering blight and bleed essential rather than optional is kind of troublesome, whether it's for the purposes of corpse-clearing or not. Team selection is likely going to be more restrictive now, because you HAVE to have a certain amount of bleed, blight, and corpse mitigation in order to be effective as a team (especially with all the prot added to the enemies).

You dont need to have Bleed/Blights. They do have an advantage against Prot and negating Corpse generation, but I have run a mission without any of these and did just fine (fights took an extra turn, two at most).

[Hans]

I am firmly entranched in the "wtf is the point of this corpse mechanic" side of the debate. It's an arbitrary mechanic that doesn't make sense... you could have accomplished the same thing by simply buffing the amount of hit points monsters have.

Also... undead leaving their corpse behind to be killed... three times?

**EDIT** Why do my characters not leave corpses behind? One way enemy gimmick?

[Celerity, Executor of Impunity]

"Hey guys, we couldn't make movement effects actually useful so instead we randomly gave them corpse removal abilities, except leaving the corpses there is actually helpful so your good classes (read: not GR/Jester) can just keep hitting them repeatedly without them moving forward. Also, we slightly nerfed movement abilities, but buffed AoE spam."

[Hans]

I also question why a maggot with 5 hp and 60% protection (why a giant squishy maggot has 60% protection...) leaves behind a corpse with 8 hp.

[bats]

Originally posted by algothi:

You dont need to have Bleed/Blights. They do have an advantage against Prot and negating Corpse generation, but I have run a mission without any of these and did just fine (fights took an extra turn, two at most).

Fair enough. I still don't see why longer battles are necessarily better, though.

[Celerity, Executor of Impunity]

Longer would be fine if it were harder. See, trash mobs that die in 2 hits is fine if they can still fight back after the first hit. Does hitting an inanimate object a second time add anything of value? No, and corpses actually make a lot of things easier because enemies don't move out of the targeting area anymore. I'm also pretty sure the power creep has reached the point where Bellow is a reliable OHKO on trash, and it's a full screen AoE.

[stevo]

Corpses have literally just made this game dull as dishwater. I'm trying to get what the devs wanted to do, and I understand it partially, but it just fails miserably.

The funny thing is, they don't even add any strategy or difficulty, other than to now load out a team that can hit hard on all rows. You no longer have to worry so much about moves like If it Bleeds no longer having use with one high prot/HP enemy left. Before you would have used a bit of guile, stunned a weak row 1 enemy while you stacked bleeds on the guy in row 2. Now? No problem, just wail away. So I question the general mentality of "Corpses were made to negate just hack and slashing through battles".

The quicker this either gets axed or altered, the better, because at the moment, a pretty robust and flexible combat system has turned to sludge.

[Angoril]

4 hours in the new update and I can say that I am no fan of the corpses either. I tried various groups on both a new save file and on my main one. They don't really seem to add anything beneficial to the game or add to the difficulty. They make the fights a couple rounds longer and that's about it.

Making the weak heroes more useful is always something welcome, but this just made the game annoying to play. Think this will be my first time that I will be entirely skipping such a big update. I see no point playing around corpses only to level the Houndmaster (which I didn't like either), so I'll wait for the Cove and see where I'm going from there.

[WTG_Nightbringer]

More than the corpse removal, I find the maggot removal to be the real problem.

Seriously, when did we give maggots the protection of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Abrams. Quite possibly more protection than an Abrams >.>

[Celerity, Executor of Impunity]

This is perhaps the dumbest change. I could see a cannon not taking much damage from attacks because it's a cannon. I could see a heavily armored foe not taking much damage because that's kind of the point. It's just arbitrary. This is the sort of thing you'd see in a very amateurish mod. There's mechanically no difference between 10 life, 50% damage reduction and 20 life but based on the enemy type one makes sense and one doesn't.