Regarding the difficulty

[The nameless Gamer]

After 4 runs, I've noticed a pretty steep drop in difficulty after the Mantis boss. Mysterious Cave and Underground City monsters and bosses don't pose a threat to the player whatsoever. Erza in particular outright deletes every monster in her path, since some of her techniques can be linked into simple combos (for example: Sky piercing attack with the rapier followed by Meteor Strike with the spear) which do 1000-1500 damage. The bosses don't do much better. The damage done by player characters is high, the boss damage is very low. Ylanna (the Mermaid) does less than 200 damage against characters with 900+ HP (without food buffs). The Abyss Spider is a complete pushover. And that's with only partially optimized character builds.

Please consider upping the challenge a bit in the future updates.

[Zeal]

All bosses are a "pushover" to some degree, since they are susceptible to certain status ailments. This game has not struck me as wanting to impose a high level of difficulty onto the player, though.
I also argue that traversing from A to B should not necessarily be a chore filled with dangerous enemies that pose a proper challenge (or worse: are just damage sponges) in a metroidvania, whose gameplay consists primarily of exploration.

The biggest argument in favour of the current average level of difficulty in the game that I can see is of course that you do not require highly optimised builds in order to run through areas, and instead can just try out different, unoptimised builds at your leisure.
I can see how difficulty options might be nice to have in the finished product, though.

While optimisation is relevant to the topic, by the way:
Anyone agree with me that the costs of unlocking further upgrade slots on equipment is significantly too high? Having to gather a lot of rare materials (on top of some currency) in order to unlock a few further slots seems to make unlocking just not worthwhile, since your gear would be outdated really quickly all the time, thus heavily hindering mid-game optimisation. This lack of optimisation incentive paired with higher difficulty might quickly lead to frustration and forcing some players to grind/farm up every piece of gear they get just to stay ahead of the enemies.
A suggestion to make unlocking upgrade slots more easily accessible: Make them only cost currency (increasing in price per slot with gear levels). Money is more or less easily to come by, thus allowing people to more easily upgrade their gear as they go, instead of e.g. saving up everything for the endgame gear upgrades.

Well, I am straying further from the original topic now, so I will just shut up already..

[The nameless Gamer]

Originally posted by Zeal:

All bosses are a "pushover" to some degree, since they are susceptible to certain status ailments. This game has not struck me as wanting to impose a high level of difficulty onto the player, though.
I also argue that traversing from A to B should not necessarily be a chore filled with dangerous enemies that pose a proper challenge (or worse: are just damage sponges) in a metroidvania, whose gameplay consists primarily of exploration.

The biggest argument in favour of the current average level of difficulty in the game that I can see is of course that you do not require highly optimised builds in order to run through areas, and instead can just try out different, unoptimised builds at your leisure.
I can see how difficulty options might be nice to have in the finished product, though.

While optimisation is relevant to the topic, by the way:
Anyone agree with me that the costs of unlocking further upgrade slots on equipment is significantly too high? Having to gather a lot of rare materials (on top of some currency) in order to unlock a few further slots seems to make unlocking just not worthwhile, since your gear would be outdated really quickly all the time, thus heavily hindering mid-game optimisation. This lack of optimisation incentive paired with higher difficulty might quickly lead to frustration and forcing some players to grind/farm up every piece of gear they get just to stay ahead of the enemies.
A suggestion to make unlocking upgrade slots more easily accessible: Make them only cost currency (increasing in price per slot with gear levels). Money is more or less easily to come by, thus allowing people to more easily upgrade their gear as they go, instead of e.g. saving up everything for the endgame gear upgrades.

Well, I am straying further from the original topic now, so I will just shut up already.. :leaCheese:

The biggest offender is the Sleep debuff. It literally stun-locks bosses if coupled with multi-hit attacks like Nia's Lightninig punch or simple minigun full auto-fire from Ciara. I agree that Frontier Hunter doesn't have to be like "Momodora - Reverie under the moonlight" or "Minoria", where the player character dies in 2 hits, but some sort of challenge should be present. The bosses until the Mermaid are done right IMO, but from there, they feel simply too weak. I actually lose to the Winged Kobold and the Mantis if I'm not on top of my dodges and parries. The other bosses keel over before I even need a potion because of how powerful the player characters become. Then again, perhaps if boss attacks weren't as slow as they are, they would be harder to defeat without changing their health and damage. I would nominate the Winged Kobold for some sort of gold standard for this game's bosses. It attacks frequently and has a fair amount of HP/damage.

[Zeal]

Originally posted by The nameless Commander:

The biggest offender is the Sleep debuff. It literally stun-locks bosses if coupled with multi-hit attacks like Nia's Lightninig punch or simple minigun full auto-fire from Ciara.

I have read about that somewhere and tried to abuse that with the minigun, but did not actually find it to be very reliable for stunlocking. I have had much greater success with Erza's ice dragon kick that freezes bosses for a very long time, and still requires some amount of skill/timing to execute (unlike the minigun might/would).
Having the sleep debuff on top of that felt merely like a relatively balanced "nice to have". I have not played as Nia much, though, as I prefer Erza's gameplay (although Ciara's guns were fun for a while).

[The nameless Gamer]

Originally posted by Zeal:

Originally posted by The nameless Commander:

The biggest offender is the Sleep debuff. It literally stun-locks bosses if coupled with multi-hit attacks like Nia's Lightninig punch or simple minigun full auto-fire from Ciara.

I have read about that somewhere and tried to abuse that with the minigun, but did not actually find it to be very reliable for stunlocking. I have had much greater success with Erza's ice dragon kick that freezes bosses for a very long time, and still requires some amount of skill/timing to execute (unlike the minigun might/would).
Having the sleep debuff on top of that felt merely like a relatively balanced "nice to have". I have not played as Nia much, though, as I prefer Erza's gameplay (although Ciara's guns were fun for a while).

With the Sleep Debuff equipped I completely cheesed the Scorpion, the Mantis and Mermaid Boss. Lightning Punch is 10-12 hits and coupled with a 30% Sleep debuff chance, Nia just keeps interrupting boss attacks which are supposed to have super-armor. It works the same way with Ciara's minigun. Whenever you see the boss begin to glow, just hit it with a stream of bullets or Nia's Lightning Punch. The boss' attack gets canceled on spot by the Sleep debuff.

[Schattensang]

I think the difficulty of the game is good enough for what it is right now. Later on it might be a good idea to add different difficulty levels, but as a sort of payed demo that it is right now it's okay.

For a bigger challenge we now also got the "boss rush" (not really the right term in my opinion, but oh well), and those bosses certainly aren't a push over when you can't cheese them and they have abilities that deal 500+ damage when they hit you unprepared.

The normal game doesn't need to be too challenging with the lack of difficulty sliders, the challenge can be kept to optional content.

[Geodude07]

They do make it too easy to break the fights. I understand things like poison and time bomb being easy to proc as they take time to really add up to much. Sleep is just absurdly too good especially since some cores give you buffs to sleeping enemies. It's fun, but broken on bosses. It hurts your engagement with the mechanics they do have. They may want to weaken the effect on bosses, have diminishing returns on bosses, or something.

What I would recommend is doing the boss rush if you want to feel how this game would be with higher difficulty. It forces you to engage with the difficulty. Although I have issues with that too.

It punches a hole into most builds which utilize the various debuffs because the bosses are already immune to everything by their second level of difficulty (they have 5-6 I think). Which means only certain cores are worth it. Those being the self-buff or survival cores. Though I have not seen what the highest challenge level bosses do. They might turn off our cores or some nonsense. I know the third level has them immune to status effects, do more damage, and force you to exclude a party member. They might even become immune to juggle by the end.

What gets aggravating is how some boss attacks feel a bit janky with how they hit or when they hit. Hitboxes behind their attacks stand out. It makes me wish parry had a dedicated button and would interrupt any action. Should be usable midair as well.

All of this is compounded by the issue of most of the good cores being locked behind absurd grinds for adequate use. This is only a problem for the boss rush though as you don't need to optimize significantly for anything but those fights. But even outside of the boss rush it feels sort of silly to have all these theoretically awesome cores go to waste because you can not reasonably unlock the slots required. So it's far better to go for 'cheese' builds when putting an enemy to sleep is only 3 slots across.

By the time you could unlock the slots for other types of builds, you've replaced it with something so much better that you can not justify keeping it even if it has a very nice effect. Then you go right back to basic cheese. They need a bit of work on that.

Drop rates should go way up or requirements for unlock should drop significantly.

[The nameless Gamer]

Originally posted by Geodude07:

What I would recommend is doing the boss rush if you want to feel how this game would be with higher difficulty. It forces you to engage with the difficulty. Although I have issues with that too.

I've beaten stage 3 of each boss fight without using potions, but stage 4 is a roadblock for now. The Silvermoon Wolf kills my chosen character in 3 hits (since their HP is between 1200 and 1400 and he hits for 500+ damage with his dive attack). The difficulty for stage four is quite a spike. The player can only use one character, while the boss has a massive stat increase. This is where I would like to compare the bosses to the ones from "Momodora" and "Minoria". In those games, bosses kill you in 1-3 attacks, but they can be beaten in 3-5 minutes once you either learn the pattern or adjust your reaction time. Stage 4 bosses in the "Frontier Hunter" boss challenge are notably more durable. By the 5th minute, I've chewed through two of their four HP bars (with a major focus on upping my characters' damage potential). I'm not saying it can't be beaten but it does feel a bit like a slog. By the time the game is a 100% complete, we will most likely have the option to just power-level enough to not die in 2-3 hits while dishing out considerably higher damage, but right now, Stage 4 already feels like quite the uphill battle.

Update: beat the first boss on stage 4, albeit barely. Mostly using the Tyrant Dragon Slash. And I had to use potions. The fight also took under 5 minutes (around 3), although I've been using her most powerful technique which does 1500-2000 damage reliably. The basic attack and most other techniques would definitely not perform as well.

[The nameless Gamer]

Not to open a new discussion, I would like to suggest something regarding future difficulty options. Rather than the usual "easy/normal/hard" selection, the game could feature a variety of specific difficulty settings. A few examples:
Monster/Boss attack speed: allow the player to switch between "normal" and "fast"
Boss status effect immunity: on/off
Boss damage: Normal/high/brutal.
Those are a few off the top of my head. There don't have to be many, but it'd be a welcome change to be able to fine-tune the difficulty a bit rather than just increase enemy/boss stats. I could think of a few more suggestions if needed.

[The nameless Gamer]

Originally posted by Roguecel:

What level are your players?

Do you perhaps mean characters?

[The nameless Gamer]

Originally posted by Roguecel:

Yes. Sometimes I miss correct words. Did you level up to a high stat, 50+?

No, to beat all bosses in the boss challenge on their hardest difficulty I started a new save and solely powered up Erza with mysterious fruit. She is level 43 yet has stats high enough not to die from two hits from a stage 5 boss from the challenge.

I'm no longer suggesting a difficulty increase by default but some difficulty options which can be turned off or on.

[hewittlemming]

I agree about the freedom of choosing whether you want bosses to be immune to status effects or not. I LOVE the status effects stacking in this game, it's pretty much one of the few games that got it right and making harder difficulties just straight up make them immune to it would just cripple the gameplay element I feel like more games should include for their boss battles.