Some Feedback On The State Of The Game

[Svennihilator]

There are two parties of 6 right now that can do the highest level content on the highest difficulty. You have parties that go full glass cannon and kill everything on the screen in the first two turns with Heat/Lightning/Consumption/Mass Freeze or you have parties with an infinite supply of what other games often call "circuit breakers." A circuit breaker being something that triggers when you're low on health or going to die and prevents that from happening. Examples being Glory, Dark Ritual, Immortal Night, Ghost Armor, Redemption, Unyielding Contender or more utilitarian skills like Enduring Evasion, Shadow Walk, Soft Step, Fade or Smoke Bomb. Combine these with the 3 or 4 CC abilities each class gets and the goal is to avoid ever actually taking damage in the first place. Often times you'll combine these two types of play to make an ideal party.

Both these types of characters are important for games like these but the plethora of circuit breakers available combined with the insane damage output of enemies invalidates any kind of traditional defensive stat. And to illustrate, I did a little experiment. I decided to make an Ice Tank and make the character as "tanky" as I could with the gear I had without using said circuit breakers. It combined Int>Armor from the Ice tree, Might>Armor from the Warrior tree, and 50% damage taken from mana from the Lightning tree. I had ~8k armor, 43 to all resists, 35% damage reduction, Howl for 20% reduced enemy damage and both Frostbites for another 25% using Deep Freeze, Ice Spikes or Chain Frost. And the character still might as well be butter or the enemies just don't target them and run towards other targets. It's still not enough for a party of 6 at the highest level on the highest difficulty. You have to sacrifice quite a bit to get stats like that and you're still worse off than just using Dark Ritual or whatever on one character and throwing them into the fray.

I think there are three main issues that could be looked at:

1) The game is way, way, way, way, way easier solo. Something wonky is going on with the scaling. I leveled two characters with ease through the game solo but my party of 4 was a slog even though I would consider it a fairly ideal traditional party. When I put all 6 together I get slaughtered unless I build everyone in the ways mentioned above. I can easily solo at the highest level on the highest difficulty with a dual-wield dodger or a summoner but if I add another character or two I get one-hit by anything that breathes. That's... not good.

2) Too many circuit breakers. It's way too easy to make one character a ZDPS and take a bunch of circuit breakers and CC abilities and have the other 5 characters be glass cannons and steamroll the content. Which leads to...

3) Traditional defences need to matter more. You have all these cool pieces of gear that give armor and health regen and resistances and DR and none of it matters. I can see this being a frustration for newer players who are attempting to build traditional parties not realizing the game operates differently. They built their cool tank character with a big shield and a bunch of mitigation and Timmy the Archer, not giving a single ♥♥♥♥, targets your Mage and one-hits them. Then, your tank who deals no damage wails on Timmy with a wet noodle for three turns as he pecks your tank to death because that mitigation isn't good enough.

I have a feeling Shadow damage is playing into the larger damage spikes sometimes too. Not being able to resist it with resistances coupled with it being increased by the same rate on enemies as other damage types. I've had some runs end when facing Vampiric Black Dragons that full-heal every turn with their AOE and it's unpleasant.


Some parting ideas:

1) Shields suck at being shields. Give shields an aggro system of sorts. If an enemy is beside a character with a shield, that enemy can't move and must target the character with the shield. Hell, make it work the same way for enemies so they can mess with you. Too often when attempting to use a traditional tank I'll get next to a dragon or whatever and then on its turn it just flies off, casts a storm on my mage and then attacks my archer or whatever five times. Not fun.

2) Reflex as a stat really sucks. It's useful for exactly 1 build and there it's very good but it feels like such a waste when I see it on Shako or whatever. I'm not sure if this is a visual bug or a game property but the stats page says none of my characters have a chance to dodge unless I have one of the passives that gives a dodge chance, then reflex starts adding to that. The small change here I would make is make the max number of counter attacks scale on level instead(Start with whatever, bonus attack at 10, 20, 30) so the tooltip doesn't overflow, rename it Luck, and have it slightly factor in to loot drops for that character so the excess points you sometimes get in it actually do something.

3) I'd like to see the effects that stats have on summons clarified. How much damage is Might adding. Is 5 Might adding the same damage as 5% summon damage? How much health is Int giving them? Etc


Anyways, I love this game. I love the idea of mixing and matching different classes and I'd love to be able to use more of the cool skills and passives without having to lower the difficulty or use fewer characters to balance things out. I will continue to play the game regardless and I hope you keep making this game great! Thank you!

[danpaladin]

Full agreement. The game's balance seemed to be in a better place right before the patch that changed the talent of 100% counterattack on dodge. My friend and I sometimes come back to try the game, but the amount of boosting the AI are doing with a party of 4 to 5 characters is far too high.

The enemy counter-stacking of poison doesn't make sense for most setups, and can kill just about anyone with enough stacks. Archers and mages probably shouldn't get stacks, as those render their strategies unusable unless cleanse is ready every few turns. Why does 1 hit always equal 2 stacks anyway?

Not sure what's going on over there but it's feeling so difficult it's not worth the effort. The rewards are often worse than what we have after all that energy.

[Second Batch]

Some more monster variety would help too. If something says "resistant to fire" it should have more than 10 resistance. Give 50 resistance or more and immunity to the heat debuff or something like that.

Make us adapt

[Vigorous4play]

Well... you're doing it wrong. The stats in this game are generally designed to only work well when you are focusing heavily on it. The only situation I found 50% damage to mana useful is with Perfected Soul monk or a debuff/utility caster. With perfected soul you can use the 50% damage to mana talent as a buffer for when 75% dodge fails. You can put 10% resists on trinkets to save some of you and your mana because you don't have any other total damage reduction source. For the most part, you should only be picking 1 or 2 defensive stats to maximize as much as you can. You don't want to go both resists and % damage reduction because they are cutting into each others' effectiveness.

You can go full balls to the wall vitality build with logan's claws and be like wolverine. The way vitality works is that it gets even better the more you have because it exponentially scales with itself. The damage of Logan's claws also scales exponentially even though it's "added damage."

What I realized a short while ago is that builds heavily rely on the mechanics of the gear and vice versa. All stats monk only works if you have the gear to pump up a single stat, same with Logan's. The only piece a Logan's build is missing is a high vitality helmet... I guess the ring/amulet are global drops too and can be a pain but IF you get them, get the claws.

Adamant gear is good for a heavy damage ability semi-might focused 2h build that gets up to 7-10k armor. Honestly, I'm think about farming as much Adamant gear as I can because it's versatile to throw on pure output (damage/healing) or utility characters without having to go into Shadow at all.

If you are willing to spend skill points on resists, resist gear becomes more effective than damage reduction. You definitely do not want to be mixing the 2 much at all if you can avoid it. If you actually have the resists gear drop the adamant gear and get Challenger/Guardian/Crystalize/Storm Weathered/indestructible/Elemental Protection/Survivalist.

Ok WOW I just had a really good idea. Go 8 Lightning 5 Cold 13 Warrior 6 Ranger with a basic attack max crit Vitality/Intelligence/minDex build with high resist gear and energy shield. Blue dragon axes would probably be the best weapons with frostbite or if not get the other 2 passives. That would be a super duper tank who could still do damage.

If you have high resists/%reduction you want to be using that on a 2H or dual wield character.

Armor is not a good stat to rely on unless you are very heavily focusing on it with enough HP to live through large hits. I don't know what level you are attempting but 8k isn't much. It reduces damage by 10% of itself per hit. It's not designed to work well with reduced damage or resists. It's designed for lots of small hits. I think they doubled the effectiveness of the furious george talent (might to armor) recently. I don't know what builds the ice Diamond Skin would be useful for. The problem I see with it is that intelligence does not really scale with damage much and the gear that typically has high intelligence on it does not have high armor to be multiplied. Maybe for a control tank? Haven't thought about it yet.

Reflex is good either with Perfected soul, an all stats gear build, or dual wield added damage with high HP and some backup mitigation because counterattacks and opportunity strikes are the only thing that multiply added damage.

In the end, the best thing to protect against 1 shots is high HP. Like I said, vitality gets more effective the more you have and is the thing you have to have plenty of in a tank build outside of child of the abyss/immortal night/ dark ritual.

I've noticed shield tanks are only good when you have a lot of very far ranged casters and some cripples/slows/blinds. Maybe a backup tank or a summoner. Can be hard on smaller maps, but mass Rally is super OP for initial positioning.

I don't completely disagree with you. You do have some good points. I think there should be more damage shields in the game to buffer against heavy 1-shot hits so that people don't have to go Shadow or Glory as much, but that may just give people reasons to actually spec into Holy, which can be interesting. I'm starting to experiment with salvation as a buffer to heavy hits. It procs off of everything though I'm not sure about seal of protection/might yet.

My biggest beef right now is just gear drop rates but.... I'll see.

[killemall]

Thanks, this thread showed me that I don't want to play this. I have enough to do with work, I don't want to think this hard on a game.

[𒆜Nurse☩With☩Wound𒆜]

Why its a wait till finished for me I guess =) Sounds like an amazing fun game, but the balance is clearly not working correctly at this point.. an that just ruins it for me.. /sigh