Is solo Ascension more do-able now?

[lopedo]

I played the heck out of this game when it first came out, finished the ascensions with a buddy and stopped playing. I remember it was almost impossible to do ascensions solo back then (for me at least, I kept getting one shot and had to get reeeaaaaaally lucky with RNG).

Did they ever balance this out? I still like using the cat. :D Anyway, aside from that, worth coming back to? I'm mainly interested in the cat character so the DLC's are whatever to me but I think it's a fun game to play if I can not get 1 shot.

[931numbers]

If by "balance this out" you mean "make various random things hilariously overpowered so picking them makes things ridiculously easy", then yes, they balanced this out.

I'll give you the first one. Pick the spiritual blessing Painkiller when you play Cat and throw smoke grenades. Enjoy finding the rest.

[Koumori]

Originally posted by 931numbers:

If by "balance this out" you mean "make various random things hilariously overpowered so picking them makes things ridiculously easy", then yes, they balanced this out.

I'll give you the first one. Pick the spiritual blessing Painkiller when you play Cat and throw smoke grenades. Enjoy finding the rest.

I do wonder why they decided to buff Painkiller; it was already a decent enough spiritual blessing when all it did was invert elemental status effects applied to you.

[931numbers]

Originally posted by Koumori:

I do wonder why they decided to buff Painkiller; it was already a decent enough spiritual blessing when all it did was invert elemental status effects applied to you.

People non-stop crying that the game is too hard despite already getting a flood of buffs earlier on is the most likely answer.

People too often reinforce the possibility, and I've yet to see evidence suggesting otherwise.

[Paw]

they made it so much easier by giving you 3 bots that are immortal and can revive you anytime.

[Ragnarök]

Depends how far back you mean but yes, the difficulty curve was definitely smoothed out and stretched out if that makes sense. I remember when the difficulty only went up to Nightmare and that was actually pretty difficult back then, even beating Normal first few times was hard. Now Nightmare feels almost easier than Normal back then. Getting the achievement for beating Nightmare under 30 min I genuinely got by accident. R5 is probably closer to what Nightmare used to feel like.

All in all I don't mind that, more options is good. You can always tune the game to your preferences. But yes, the game got easier. I remember struggling with beating all reincarnations back then (mostly due to the stupid cube floors) on coop. Now it's a lot easier especially if you try to make it easier with bots or the new season mechanic. I feel like the main difference nowadays is that RNG can't really screw you over besides giving you weapons that you don't like because you can compensate for everything else rather easily.

The main difficulty is reading descriptions and trying to comprehend it all especially on characters you don't play haha. That's the main detriment of this game. Things need to be simplified a lot to make runs nice and smooth. If you play on coop with people that are trying out a new character sometimes each goblet can take like 5+ minutes. Some scrolls I still don't understand and just wing it. There's this one that has absurdly long description about enchanting scrolls or something. For some reason in some things there is too much info given that does not benefit the player and in other cases too little.

[lopedo]

I gave it a try and it went from being broken in the game's favor to being broken in my favor. I don't think that's balance. lol.

My hope was that I could take a few shots and have some kind of defensive mechanic, but I found the best answer to be to again stack RNG things that break the enemies. It's less RNG now, so more possible, but not very rewarding to me. Other games in the genre it becomes crazy chaotic fun, this game... eh. I guess I just don't feel it anymore but that's quite alright, I got many hours of joy from this game.