Is adaptive difficulty better than region-based?

[Sobakaa]

I've started my game at medium difficulty and with region-locked levelling. Thought it would give me a sense of achievement of beating the area i'm in before moving to a new, harder one.

However, once i've finished everything in the first region - the elite guy, the dungeon, the hunt, crafted ghost armors and weapons i'm already at lvl 6 on all my 10 bros. Happened naturally, since i haven't found a way to reliably get wood and cloth for crafting i was just going around grinding enemies for armor drops and the merchants to randomly restock wood.
When i tried going to the neighboring regions - the swamp, the civil war place and the big town - i found that i kinda overlevelled potential threats already and now it feels like i'll have to go through at least 3 regions of boring auto-win fights before i'll get to the harder ones.

How does adaptive difficulty look like? Will i get lvl5+ bandits with better loot or will it be just harder battles for the same meager scraps?

[Ninth Hour]

"Better" depends on what you want. If you want to ability, as in the standard RPG progression, to outlevel enemies in a specific area, than region-locked would suit that preference.

If you want a more consistent level of difficulty throughout the game, no matter where you are, Adaptive is the way to go.

Either way, battles will eventually get easier as, even on Adaptive, your power level will be out of proportion to your level (because of abilities and legendary weapons).

On Adaptive, you are guaranteed a few things:

-Enemies will always be at the level of your highest level character or one level above.

-They will always outnumber you, by anywhere between 1 to 10 units.

-Because they are on your level or one above, enemies will always drop level-appropriate loot. So that level 8 Raider Bow you've been carrying around for a while will more easily receive a higher level replacement down the road, than if you were playing on Region locked.

[Torpex]

Just harder battles for the same meager scraps. One of the benefits, equipment drops are the same level as your party. In region locked mode drops are locked to the region level.

I played free mode in EA and hated it, as it was usually like +1 lvl parties. Nothing really hard, but it gets tedious with your large party as AI gets more.

You get wood from chopping blocks in lumber mills, iron from mining. Roughly 1st region is level 3-4, Arthes 4-5 and Vertruse is 6-7. Ludern is 7-9. Groenberg is 9-10. and the last one is 11-12.

[RainbowPig]

As the first post said, depends on what you want. I haven't played Region locked but I can speak pretty well for Adaptive.

On adaptive since enemies level up with you the importance of blacksmithing tanks as you'll very likely find better loot on your opponents anyway. Take my party at level 6/7, the best armour I can craft is the ghost armour but it isn't always better than the lootable equivalent armours i use, now crafted armours do have layer slots but you can find these by looting too... just takes a long while. I've crafted Rimesteel armour, shields, and daggers, but can't even use them yet anyway... though by level 8 the levels will come slowly enough that i'm not sure if these armours will be made redundant quite so quickly.

But every fight isn't a struggle once you have the ball rolling, enemies scale to your level and numbers but they don't scale to your equipment, skills, traits and oils. So with a few legendary weapons, some sharpening oil or whatever your fancy is, you'll be pulling out ahead well ez boi.

But it can be annoying when up against say refugees, who're so rubbish that my 7-8 guys have to cut down 10-13 of them. But worst of all is the sneaky mega damage a single warrior can unload on you because of some weapon/team ability/skill this unit has... I think I might just be thinking about a particular zealot.

[Lightning]

For Region mode it seems the leveling slows down alot once you hit around level 7 not sure how it is in adaptive not that far yet on my playthrough with adaptive

[mikejunt]

Ive tried both and while I like the idea of Region mode one thing I have found about it that kind of sucks is that it kind of gets repetitive in terms of gear. Because none of the gear available from merchants or combat drops in Arthes or Vertruse is high enough level to be competitive with Ghost crafted gear, and similarly the stuff in Ludern and Grinmeer is not high enough level to be better than crafted Rimesteel. This means that gear progression becomes incredibly static (craft new gear every 3 levels, and upgrade legendaries at the Brotherhood), and all loot is basically just fit for deconstruction

This is really unfortunate because a lot of other faction items have neat looking abilities that you would like to try out, but in region-locked mode it is almost impossible to get one with sufficient statistics to be worth using for any period. You might be lucky and get your hands on an Alazarian Heater shield for a level before you can get to Rimesteel, or something, but whenever I am playing in Region-locked I find myself constantly wishing that you could just upgrade any item because I'd like to spend a while using a Knight of the Eye sword or one of the more interesting shields (like the Legion one with Motivating Blow or the Alazarian one with automatic counterattacks), but when they're 4 levels behind your party they are worthless trash.

I dont think that adaptive fixes the EXP problems because exp doesn't scale with encounter level. I've taken my region-locked parties into Drombach when they were level 9 and significantly underleveled and they still get the same exp per encounter as you get in Tiltren. It's miserable. The fastest way to level is to play region-locked mode and kill things in Tiltren - enemy count barely matters, and you still get 50+ exp for killing 2 level 1 guys on a Tiltren bounty when you're level 9; you might get 59 for a random Bandit pack of 13 bandits on the streets of Grinmeer.

The leveling system beyond level 9 or so in this game is just really bad. In adaptive mode you're just forced to fight harder fights for the same crappy rewards, but in region-locked you can go seek out easier fights and get the same rewards for them as you do for challenging fights. It's not a good look.

[Ninth Hour]

Originally posted by mikejunt:

I dont think that adaptive fixes the EXP problems because exp doesn't scale with encounter level.

Can confirm. I'm on Adaptive mode and it's taking AGES to get my mostly level 9 party to level 10, even after hours and hours of combat. It's a big reason why I have 300+ hours of gameplay, yet have barely gone past half the available regions.

Talk about artificial inflation of gaming hours...and yet, I just can't put the game down.

[dr46onfusion]

By doing 1 mission on the region's bounty board you unlock that area as a starting area I think.
I started a new game in Arthes, which made tiltren and everywhere else scale up even higher sooner since arthes is is quite far from the other regions, making it so recruiting unique npc being lv5+ at the start of a new game.

Do be aware that even in region locked, guards are +1 lvl above you, and drop warbows and guard oriented gear in combat that is yellow rarity.

Murder merchants and guards for loot, then use travel posts to fast travel bacj and forth with 1 member in a party to basically lose all suspicion.

[mikejunt]

Originally posted by Kai:

By doing 1 mission on the region's bounty board you unlock that area as a starting area I think.
I started a new game in Arthes, which made tiltren and everywhere else scale up even higher sooner since arthes is is quite far from the other regions, making it so recruiting unique npc being lv5+ at the start of a new game.

This is interesting in terms of what it might do to some of the equipment scaling, but it doesn't fix the experience problem because *enemy level has no bearing on experience value in this game, level 1 fights and level 13 fights are basically identical exp regardless of what level you are*

And that exp is more than adequate to level quickly at lower levels, and impossibly grindy when it requires 100 battles per levelup.

[Tenshin51]

Region locked mode is poorly balance for capturing low level mobs. Somehow armor is connected to mob health. In the game description you can a capture mob if they have 50 % of their health not with armor mobs.

I strongly suggest don't use Region Locked mode if you are planning to go back to low level area to capture low level mobs.

[Hex]

Adaptive > Region locked

You can farm any gear you want at any time, because enemies always drop you upgrades. You can explore other regions anf when you come back to finish what you left, enemies are not 3 levels lower than you and you don't have have to waste your time with meaningless battles. Also when you actually get maxed out. You can go and fight max level enemies of all types to see how your team is doing really.

[Sobakaa]

Thanks everyone for the input. Since i pretty much got bored with region-locked i'll try adaptive and see if the things improve for me.

[Torpex]

depends on your tolerance of long battles. The smaller your company the better. There is also noticeable frame drops in large battles

[Prestige]

I never liked t he idea of adaptive difficulty. This can mean that i can end the game at level one because anywhere i go they will be a equal match to me

[mikejunt]

I think the adaptive difficulty would probably be the optimized game experience if they made some tweaks. As they have fairly directly emulated the Skyrim lockpicking system, they should also look at the differences in adaptive level scaling in Oblivion vs Skyrim.

Oblivion works like Wartales - *everything* levels, so at high levels, weak mobs are completely nonexistent, and every bandit is encased in glass armor and every marauder is wearing pure ebony and daedric. All monsters become the strongest monsters, and hunting alchemy ingredients that only spawn on weak monsters is impossible; you can only buy them in shops.

This sucked, and people didn't like it. It lacks verisimilitude, it makes fights weird and repetitive and tedius, and it creates a lot of issues with the economy because everything drops highly valuable stuff.

Now lets look at Skyrim. There are some basic factors that determine the 'starting point' of an area: in Skyrim, it's elevation, with higher locations having stronger enemies. The second determinant factor is when the player first visits that area. Take a high mountain draugr ruin and save it until you're level 40 and it will be extremely high level; try and force at at level 20 and the mobs will only be level 30 or so, because there's a cap on how low they can scale because of the elevation.

But most importantly, in Skyrim not everything scales. Encounters are a mixture of weaker and stronger enemies; as scaling increases, some stronger variants are included, but there are also still wimpy bandits in the mix as well. They're not that challenging, but they preclude some of the problems with universal scaling: you can still get the low level items, they don't turn battles into enormous slugfests against a dozen max-geared enemies, all that loot doesn't drop into the game economy, and it makes far more sense. The boss mobs are always max scaled, and there will always be a few others that are up there, but you get the whole gamut.

This kind of scaling would work much better for Wartales. Your starting area should scale with you somewhat, offering you the same level 1-2 encounters at the start of the game, but tapering off as you go - but still scaling up a bit. Higher level encounters can outnumber the player, but some of those mobs should be sub-optimal. Some individual encounters (especially random bounty targets) can be higher or lower than the typical area level. Instead of seeing a level 9 party of 12 and throwing 16 level 9-10 enemies at it, you should see a whole gamut, some encounters should be smaller or lower level, and others more dangerous.

This kind of scaling would work really well, create more organic variation in individual encounter difficulty, and allow for more variation within the same areas, instead of the constant litany of "3-4 more mobs than you have people, at or slightly above your level', every time, which gets very tedious just because of the quantity and time it takes to punch through them.

One of the brilliant things that Skyrim's scaling system does is make the player feel outnumbered while also making a portion of those mobs into pretty low-threat targets (though they can still cause you problems, especially archers who might knock you back off a narrow ledge or something). What Wartales has is Oblivion-style scaling; it has significant drawbacks.

It's ok if not every encounter is a punishing grind. More variation making some fights easier and, yes, some fights harder would go a long way to making a late game party not want to actively avoid every avoidable combat just because it's so much wasted time to fight so many mobs, even if its not particularly difficult.

[The Hat]

I've always hated scaling enemies. Unless they are set encounters for a boss or story event. I like to see the progression represented in the environment, and with scaling you are always level 1 sidegrading. You are never more powerful than a rat for example, or the starting area, so the sense of progression is lost for me.