Book One Numbers?

[The RDM]

Took a break and came back after a few weeks. Book one is just seemly impossible on some runs now (Rank 15)? I used to enjoy Clairvoyant despite its slow starts and now it just feels like I need to sandbag the right potions and not get unlucky with bindings/augments to get out of book one. I can't take Misplaced Nobility anymore clearly, but that was already starting to get sketchy before the update...

My first run of the day was with a friend and we literally could not beat the first boss encounter (the Box). I don't think I've ever seen triple digit damage output, let alone on the first boss encounter. We just did not have enough damage to clear enough of the mobs to survive.

Played another run with Star Captain right after and it felt more in line with what I was used to from before and we beat the run no problem. Did another run as Clairvoyant right after and the run was better, no triple digit damage, but the boss spammed unavoidable damage and eventually killed us both with about 200~ HP left. Not super upset about the last one, but losing runs early is something that I haven't experienced frequently in this game, and especially not at the first boss.

A lot of the normal/hard combats feel too easy/fast now. I feel like the game was definitely too easy before, but this most recent balance update has left me almost regretting picking up the game. I don't want to feel like options I had are taken away and replaced with DPS checks reliant on good RNG.

[Anarchist]

It depends on guardian, at R20 some fights are ok, but most of them are impossible. Bosses now spawn too many minions and moreover, for some books killing minion spawns another who is attacking you on the same turn. Whoever thought its funny is idiot. Nims unavoidable damage is about 20 at first book which is impossible to deal with, 2 hits and you are done. They killed hp management now hp pools are too expensive and wont help you anyway. Before they said that reduced unavoidable damage but in fact it is increased so much you just want to spit into gamedevs face. Last update seems to be not tested at all.

[The RDM]

Originally posted by Anarchist:

It depends on guardian, at R20 some fights are ok, but most of them are impossible. Bosses now spawn too many minions and moreover, for some books killing minion spawns another who is attacking you on the same turn. Whoever thought its funny is idiot. Nims unavoidable damage is about 20 at first book which is impossible to deal with, 2 hits and you are done. They killed hp management now hp pools are too expensive and wont help you anyway. Before they said that reduced unavoidable damage but in fact it is increased so much you just want to spit into gamedevs face. Last update seems to be not tested at all.

You bring up a lot of good points. The minions spawning and attacking the same turn feels like you can't reduce incoming damage. I thought the HP pools where already too expensive for the amount they healed, but this change just made me want avoid them even more. Nims two turning us felt pretty bad. What can you even have at that point? Two armor potions? The HP of guardians is so high it's difficult to kill them fast enough in the first book.

If it was just one or two things maybe it wouldn't be so bad, but everything together has made the game less fun for me.

[Shifter]

nim is a dps checker, and in the group run of Book 1, it completely goes wrong. In most cases, players won't have enough dps to deal with it. I believe they should modify the BOSS's scaling aoe mechanism to prevent players from falling into RNG hell.


Here's an r20 solo clairvoyant beating nim on book 1, hope it helps.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Vu4y147YR

[Anarchist]

Yes clairvoyant and star captain (and maybe weaver) are more or less ok atm because of AOE if you avoid some books, but I cant do anything with poison for example, mosscloak is just overwhelmed with countless enemies. Poisoning kinda works but usually too late. And I did R20 on all of classes before and have whole victory board completed. So may be devs can explain how is that supposed to work?

[Limdood]

Originally posted by Anarchist:

Yes clairvoyant and star captain (and maybe weaver) are more or less ok atm because of AOE if you avoid some books, but I cant do anything with poison for example, mosscloak is just overwhelmed with countless enemies. Poisoning kinda works but usually too late. And I did R20 on all of classes before and have whole victory board completed. So may be devs can explain how is that supposed to work?

Funnily enough, I'm at tier 20 and I can USUALLY win a full deep dive with mosscloak or obelisk no problem, but I can't seem to get any other class out of book 1.

The damage - notably with instant attacking frogs and instant exploding lava minis, the sheer number of direct attacking or unavoidably area attacking enemies, the high individual damage numbers, and the absolute uselessness of carver healing pools now (especially because reduced healing tends to be a "safer" pick) - makes poison (and burn) a LOT less viable now. You just can't reliably survive until turn end without removing attackers....you're just not going to get the 6 evasion stacks or 20 shield you need to tolerate the incoming damage. Mosscloak at high tier seems to be best used as full nuke, full out, all the time - boost crit damage and use bindings and vestiges that generate crit charges.

Obelisk is a bit different, but I use blessing of Kwills and focus on getting good survival and physical power FIRST (often supported early game with bleed if I can find it) and then go into spikes or ramping-damage basic bindings depending on what the run offers. I think a lot of people grab blessing of quillion for obelisk, and I think that's a bit of a trap at tier 20.

Magma miner plays like Mosscloak, but just can't put out the early turn nuke hits with his nuke hit costing 2 will and not having access to mark and being single target, it just doesn't get the job done until it's heavily modified. Burn might be stronger than poison, but it has the same problems at tier 20 of just not being able to survive until turn end.

Weaver and star captain both feel like they have massive trouble early on getting through the first 3 or so combats without dropping 20-35 hp. Maybe with perfect binding augment RNG early on and good wisdom/vestige rerolls they'd have a shot, but I haven't found it yet.

Clairvoyant feels like it's most likely to be "next" for me in winning a tier 20 run....it has the ingredients in it's toolkit to do what tier 20 demands. namely, take advantage of generated critical charges and nuke enemies hard enough to kill them in one turn, but also the ability to generate shield for unavoidable damage.

[Shifter]

Originally posted by Limdood:

Originally posted by Anarchist:

Yes clairvoyant and star captain (and maybe weaver) are more or less ok atm because of AOE if you avoid some books, but I cant do anything with poison for example, mosscloak is just overwhelmed with countless enemies. Poisoning kinda works but usually too late. And I did R20 on all of classes before and have whole victory board completed. So may be devs can explain how is that supposed to work?

Funnily enough, I'm at tier 20 and I can USUALLY win a full deep dive with mosscloak or obelisk no problem, but I can't seem to get any other class out of book 1.

The damage - notably with instant attacking frogs and instant exploding lava minis, the sheer number of direct attacking or unavoidably area attacking enemies, the high individual damage numbers, and the absolute uselessness of carver healing pools now (especially because reduced healing tends to be a "safer" pick) - makes poison (and burn) a LOT less viable now. You just can't reliably survive until turn end without removing attackers....you're just not going to get the 6 evasion stacks or 20 shield you need to tolerate the incoming damage. Mosscloak at high tier seems to be best used as full nuke, full out, all the time - boost crit damage and use bindings and vestiges that generate crit charges.

Obelisk is a bit different, but I use blessing of Kwills and focus on getting good survival and physical power FIRST (often supported early game with bleed if I can find it) and then go into spikes or ramping-damage basic bindings depending on what the run offers. I think a lot of people grab blessing of quillion for obelisk, and I think that's a bit of a trap at tier 20.

Magma miner plays like Mosscloak, but just can't put out the early turn nuke hits with his nuke hit costing 2 will and not having access to mark and being single target, it just doesn't get the job done until it's heavily modified. Burn might be stronger than poison, but it has the same problems at tier 20 of just not being able to survive until turn end.

Weaver and star captain both feel like they have massive trouble early on getting through the first 3 or so combats without dropping 20-35 hp. Maybe with perfect binding augment RNG early on and good wisdom/vestige rerolls they'd have a shot, but I haven't found it yet.

Clairvoyant feels like it's most likely to be "next" for me in winning a tier 20 run....it has the ingredients in it's toolkit to do what tier 20 demands. namely, take advantage of generated critical charges and nuke enemies hard enough to kill them in one turn, but also the ability to generate shield for unavoidable damage.

Very insightful.
R20 solo feels more like "nuke or die". Elemental damage is merely icing on the cake of direct damage, and to finish the run, you must have enough damage output to one shot minions.

[Limdood]

apparently I was incorrect as to my next win....

Weaver is now my 3rd class to win tier 20.

Thanks to defensive Constrict, harmonizing whistle, and Inkritto, I could smash a constrict at least 4 times per turn, which meant 1 shield per enemy (2 with Contrition of Allyra) 4 times in a row by the end.

Act 1 was a bit dicey, but it was proving grounds and I had Afterimage, plus a CD potion for an emergency. Took a gamble on the inkshield challenge (enemies start with 2 stacks of 15 damage resist and lose 1 per hit) since weaver tends to smack enemies a few times really weakly to get threads.

Got jinx with permanent dread stacks up and running in book 2, and with selectively using afterimage to give me jinx crits, plus solid ability/magic/crit damage scaling from wisdom fountains and a lucky Predator's quintessence right before the boss my damage was able to keep up and wiped out the mimic (even if he did start as magma miner mimic, which hits like a truck).

Was worried how I'd hold up going into Argolath because tier 20 spawns a mimic boss every phase and it can be tough to nuke down the tentacles early, but I completed my run goal and got offered Contrition of Allyra, which meant double shields, and if you're spreading damage around on argolath, there is no shortage of targets. I was ending most turns with more than 50 shield.


To the point of the thread though:
Once again, I focused on nukes + defense. getting a binding augment that gives shield per enemy hit feels CRUCIAL most of the time, and having SOME way to gain an evasion stack in a pinch (cultivate augment, afterimage, crit = evasion once per turn vestige, etc.) will save your butt big time in high tier deep dives.

This last run feels like I could have survived if I was running burn or poison, but whoops! nevermind! because if I was running burn or poison, I'd have taken wisdom upgrades, vestiges, and augments that boost those (because while they scale well, they do require DEEP investment to make work) and wouldn't have had the mix of defensive augments and vestiges and CD reductions that let me continually use those defensive options.

Book 1 early fights were quite damaging again, and without pulling constrict and Jinx, I'd have struggled to get kills in time to stay healthy. Proving grounds with any source of evasion feels almost required as book 1 just because all the other bosses have utterly unavoidable damage (evasion not working on the full-field AoE pulse attacks from enemies feels really BS....I get why they do it, and it makes sense, but those type of attacks are HEAVILY overused on all book bosses except Janus and Mimic (who has some, but much less than the others....though a 10 heat magma miner mimic using an unavoidable AoE is often just instant death))


Having run some T16+ runs with a friend, the "nuke" approach struggles even more due to the immense hp buff on enemies. And you really need to match what you run with your partner. Running, say, a survival Obelisk and any Nuke/Poison Mosscloak is incredibly rough. The mosscloak can't do enough damage to health boosted enemies to remove them before they attack, and the Obelisk can't possibly gain ENOUGH shield/health to deal with the fact that nothing dies in time anymore (a solo obelisk can kill the small stuff before they attack quite often....while a nuker can still often do that in a team run, they're often too spread for a nuker to kill them all, since it takes their whole will reserve, and it leads to the bulky stuff lasting longer).....instead, you need to run double survival (and split incoming damage, and you STILL need a nuke for enemies like inkpots that do unavoidable AoE and ramp up damage) or double nuke (and carefully coordinate each attack to kill as much as possible as fast as possible....and once again, you STILL need shield/heal to deal with the unavoidable AoE from bosses or beefy enemies)

[Anarchist]

Weaver can be faceroll even now if you get enough defense early, hes got shields from all skills (shielding from first) and with evasion from blink or vestige you just need damage like Poison Vapor - Toxify. Still star captain seems to be better for me.