Please create a difficulty mode between Normal and Brutal or at least allow us to edit boss damage/level.

[MrRogersBestNeighbor]

I'm all for having an incredibly intensely difficult game mode. I love brutal, especially the new attacks from bosses.
However my friends have a pretty rough time with brutal. I've been managing our dedicated server and quickly found out I can't change the level of bosses to the normal settings, I can't reduce boss damage, level, etc... I can boost vampire stats, but it's not nearly enough (I can roughly double a player's health and boost damage a little).
It only appears like I can edit the files to change boss specifics, but it doesn't update in game. Bosses still do 170% damage, when the file says they do 100%. Bosses are still 3 levels higher, even though the settings file says "0" under Level Increase, etc...
It seems these settings are locked in and can't be changed no matter what changes you make in the serversettings file.
I would absolutely love having the option of a gamemode with bosses that have the new movesets, but their health, damage and level scaled to "Normal" difficulty.

As a result of not being able to change boss stats, I ended up reverting the server difficulty to "Normal", which just leaves me facerolling bosses with ease. I feel "Normal" is far too easy for me, but brutal is... well very brutal, especially for casuals like my friends.

Please include a difficulty between Normal and Brutal.

[Sergalius]

basically they created a lot of content for Brutal only mode, saying that anyone who are playing not on brulal - loosers which do not get a FULL game experience.
Well done lads. well done. Learning from Hd 2 devs as F*ck the player

[Legendary Girl A]

Host your own private server and tweak the % multiplier yourself?

[Dr. Rockso]

Originally posted by Sergalius:

basically they created a lot of content for Brutal only mode, saying that anyone who are playing not on brulal - loosers which do not get a FULL game experience.
Well done lads. well done. Learning from Hd 2 devs as F*ck the player

Care to elaborate more on this nonsense?

Tell me which content exactly is only for brutal mode?

[Terotrous]

While you can no longer directly edit the power of the bosses (you can in the server settings file, but I'm not sure that value is still used), you can edit the power of the players instead, which will have the same effect. Just give the vampires slightly more hp or damage and it will make the game a little easier.

[GR4V3 MIST4K3]

Originally posted by Dr. Rockso:

Originally posted by Sergalius:

basically they created a lot of content for Brutal only mode, saying that anyone who are playing not on brulal - loosers which do not get a FULL game experience.
Well done lads. well done. Learning from Hd 2 devs as F*ck the player

Care to elaborate more on this nonsense?

Tell me which content exactly is only for brutal mode?

One extra phase per boss. That's about it. No cosmetics, armor sets or weapons are brutal-exclusive.

[Kashra Fall]

Originally posted by Dr. Rockso:

Originally posted by Sergalius:

basically they created a lot of content for Brutal only mode, saying that anyone who are playing not on brulal - loosers which do not get a FULL game experience.
Well done lads. well done. Learning from Hd 2 devs as F*ck the player

Care to elaborate more on this nonsense?

Tell me which content exactly is only for brutal mode?

The bosses specifically have new mechanics on brutal mode. The extra damage etc can be tweaked in the ini folder apparently, but brutal is inherently +75% more to the player.

[Storm's End]

You can modify the settings like you're asking

I play with my dad on our own server and we play on """brutal""" so that all the enemy bosses do all their cool stuff, but I reduced enemy damage a bit and upped our health a bit so that we aren't bashing our heads against a wall. Basically cool boss fights but hesitation isn't necessarily defeat.

[MrRogersBestNeighbor]

Originally posted by Terotrous:

While you can no longer directly edit the power of the bosses (you can in the server settings file, but I'm not sure that value is still used), you can edit the power of the players instead, which will have the same effect. Just give the vampires slightly more hp or damage and it will make the game a little easier.

Yeah I maxed out all those values, still too difficult for my friends. If you max out health given by gear and vampire stats directly, it gives you slightly over 2x health. If you max out physical and spellpower, I haven't done the calculations on it, but the damage isn't significantly more. All those values max out at 3, can't go any higher.

And no, you can't tweak boss damage (afaik). You can alter the damage, level, etc.. of bosses in the file, but it doesn't do anything (at least for dedicated servers, haven't tried on a solo server). Even if I nerf the boss damage and level in the serversettings file, the changes aren't reflected in the game even though they are saved in the file. It seems like boss damage and level is hardlocked if you use the brutal movesets.
I've checked all over, different forums, the wiki, etc... There doesn't seem to be a solution for this on dedicated servers (and probably private server hosts as well?).

Originally posted by GR4V3 MIST4K3:

Originally posted by Dr. Rockso:

Care to elaborate more on this nonsense?

Tell me which content exactly is only for brutal mode?

One extra phase per boss. That's about it. No cosmetics, armor sets or weapons are brutal-exclusive.

Most bosses have an extra mechanic (or two) or phase that dramatically changes the gameplay of the fights. The fights are MUCH MUCH funner. Often moves you need to save your dash or shield/counter, which requires you to have more foresight on what's going on in the fight. Some fights it almost feels necessary to have two defensive spells. Whereas I can easily no-hit every boss on normal (at least for the first half of the game, maybe later in the game, haven't played the later half pre-1.0 in a long while) that's extremely difficult to do on brutal. The bosses on normal are just so incredibly easy to faceroll on normal, I have no idea what the devs were thinking in not including a difficulty between normal in brutal that incorporates those mechanics, without the dramatic increase in damage and level of the bosses.

Take a game like Killing Floor 2, they have 4 difficulties. Easy and Normal for ubercasuals, Suicidal (which grants all enemies extra movesets, many of which are completely devastating if you aren't careful) and Hell on Earth for people who have dumped loads of hours in the game and know exactly what they're doing. I was good enough to play on Hell on Earth, but my friends never were, which was fine because I could just play with them on Suicidal. In most games, we're able to find a happy medium of challenging, but not so challenging they're getting triggered from dying over and over again.

I love having a super difficult gamemode that really challenges me (I tend to play on the highest difficulty on every game, often with modifiers to make it more challenging, the highest difficulty on most games is often disappointing). I'm thankful V Rising is doing what most games are unwilling to do in that regard. But when it comes to playing with my friends, it seems our choices are either mind-numbingly easy or uber-challenging.

[MrRogersBestNeighbor]

Originally posted by Storm's End:

You can modify the settings like you're asking

I play with my dad on our own server and we play on """brutal""" so that all the enemy bosses do all their cool stuff, but I reduced enemy damage a bit and upped our health a bit so that we aren't bashing our heads against a wall. Basically cool boss fights but hesitation isn't necessarily defeat.

How?
As far as I'm aware in the Servergamesettings.json the line: '"PowerModifier": 1.7,' doesn't change anything if you set it 1.0 or whatever other value you set it as. You still take the same damage. Likewise, changing the '"LevelIncrease": 3' value doesn't change anything either if you set it to 0, 1, 2, the bosses are always 3 gear levels up.

I haven't messed with '"UnitStatModifiers_Global":' because my understanding is that only applies to mobs, not bosses. Which mobs aren't the slightest bit of a problem, my friends have no problems against mobs.

Also how far are you? My friends didn't have many problems with the first half of Act I bosses. It's the 2nd half we started running into major problems with their health bar getting deleted in seconds by bosses.

[MrRogersBestNeighbor]

Edit: I'm retarded. I found out why nothing was changing, it's because I had the line ' "GameDifficultyPreset": "Difficulty_Brutal",' in the ServerHostSettings.json which had overridden any changes I made in the ServerGameSettings.Json.

Still silly that people need to tinker with their game files to get a "Hard" difficulty. Why would you spend so much time and effort creating a new moveset or two or a phase on every boss to only leave them for the most diehard players? They aren't even in the default settings either. I know I'm not the only one to complain about this. I've seen dozens of threads of people complaining about how obnoxiously easy Normal is compared to how obnoxiously difficult Brutal is.

[GR4V3 MIST4K3]

Originally posted by MrRogersBestNeighbor:

Edit: I'm retarded. I found out why nothing was changing, it's because I had the line ' "GameDifficultyPreset": "Difficulty_Brutal",' in the ServerHostSettings.json which had overridden any changes I made in the ServerGameSettings.Json.

Still silly that people need to tinker with their game files to get a "Hard" difficulty. Why would you spend so much time and effort creating a new moveset or two or a phase on every boss to only leave them for the most diehard players? They aren't even in the default settings either. I know I'm not the only one to complain about this. I've seen dozens of threads of people complaining about how obnoxiously easy Normal is compared to how obnoxiously difficult Brutal is.

By people you mean the ~2% of the players that bought the game and actually played through all the bosses ("Master of All" achievement)? That's not a high percentage, and yet you see a lot of people bragging in the forums. Questionable.
Silent majority of players did not return for 1.0 (~75% of the players did not enter Farbane Woods based on "A Whole New World" achievement).
The question is: would you rather have a vibrant following that constantly pulls new people in and encourages newbies to enjoy the journey to kill Dracula or a bunch of toxic "git gud"-ers that scare people away from playing?

I do agree with you that all mechanics for bosses should have been enabled on Normal. People playing on normal feel they miss out so they go into Brutal, it gets too hard for a lot and they leave the game frustrated to vent on a forum or to a friend. Snowball effect causes more and more players to leave.