Heat felt better than Fear. Fear requirements jump too much too quickly.

[MeanFacedJohnny]

I love Hades. It's one of the only games where I got incrementally better and better over time just from playing, because I enjoyed playing. My review for Hades 1 says it all. I'm loving Hades 2 as well, but I have one main issue, and that is the Fear requirements for gaining nightmare. With Heat, you had to do one Heat better every time to get rewarded. This slow progression helped me to get much better at the game over time by increasing the difficulty slightly, but not exponentially. With Fear the jumps are crazy. 12 Fear to 20 Fear to unlock the next reward is just not fun.

I'm aware I could increase it one at a time on my own, but increasing Heat by 1 in Hades got me a titan blood, while increasing Fear by 1 gets me nothing. I feel pushed to go straight to 20 Fear which is a heck of a lot harder than the previous requirement of 12. In Hades that 1 Heat increase felt doable. Even if I failed a bunch of times I still psychologically believed that I can get this next Heat. If I did 21 heat, I know I can do 22, It's only one more, I just have to keep trying, and so on. With Hades 2 that feeling is gone. It felt good to beat a 8 Fear run. Then seeing 12 made me lose some will. Then I beat the 12 and see 20 Fear requirement and it just saps my care entirely.

I understand wanting to change everything up somewhat so it's not just the same game, and I also understand that it doesn't take as many nightmare to level weapons as titan's blood did, but it just doesn't "feel" good. In the case of Fear I really think Hades 1 Heat is the optimal way to go. I really don't like anything about how Fear works. I hate the switching bosses. That makes me feel like I have no incentive to try to beat the whole run. I hate the jumps in requirement. It just feels bad, and makes me give up on wanting to even attempt the higher Fear runs.

Idk, maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, which wouldn't surprise me because I was beginning to fall in love with the aspect of Eos on the torches and they got destroyed so maybe I'm weird. I'm just saying that with Heat, I was always ready to make that run with one more heat and get that win. With Fear, I just don't feel that incentive.

Otherwise love the game, have already put like 60 hours or something into it, and while I'll probably uninstall in the near future and wait for full release to see how everything unfurls, I can't wait for that full release day so I can buy this beast on console and hopefully a physical copy as well.

TLDR: Hades 1 rewarding Titan's Blood for increments of 1 Heat felt a hundred times better than how Fear requirements for Nightmare currently feels.

[The Sojourner]

I feel much the same as of now, and I suspect Supergiant will further refine this aspect as we progress through early access. Plus there's that Fear now has a max of 55 instead of 64, so 24 Fear can feel like 28 Heat, and 32 Fear can feel like 40 Heat. No thanks, especially considering that the Pact of Punishment never required more than 20 Heat for collecting its Bounties (which btw were more abundant than Nightmare is right now).

In other words, I think I'll hold off with the Oath (or maybe even playing more of the game) until the next major patch. It's not worth it right now.

[Rage]

I am on the same boat as the OP.
I am hoping that the fear system is going to be both reworked and added upon. Some fear options are good and some are just terrible but this is covered in another suggestion thread.
After beating the game on 36 fear just so i can get the statue (I think it was 36?) i only get options for too high fear requirements and while it should feel like the natural progression, the limited and un-fun options make me look away and just try to get nightmare by grinding no fear runs and collecting bones which is a little casual for me and burns me out since there is zero difficulty.
What i am saying is basically the fear system is not linear and instead of choosing which aspects of the game are going to be more difficult it ends up making for a 1 hour and 30 minute runs where i can't wait to finish and never try again.
My choices are:
1. Easy no fear runs with little reward.
2. Moderate fear runs with modifiers i enjoy but zero extra reward than no fear runs so i pass.
3. Way high fear runs with too many modifiers i strongly dislike that take up all the free time that i have for gaming for 1 nightmare that is not worth it so i pass.

I also completely agree with the statement that specific bosses shouldn't award nightmare, a whole run should award nightmare.

P.S. Off topic, but in the whole discussion of end-game which this basically is it, the resources felt good to be interchangeable in hades 1, but in hades 2 you are stuck with too many resources and limited-time consuming ways of turning some of them into something also obsolete. I'd like to either be able to pawn off all my extra stuff, not just the fish and the herbs or trade them at the broker a-la hades 1.