Normal too easy, brutal too hard. What do?

[rotkudnoK]

Basically the title. On brutal, bosses such as Errol, Goreswine, Grayson, Quincey feel too, well, brutal. I'm playing with a friend and we managed to kill all of these but Quincey.

The main issue for us was that there is simply too much going on: constant aoe and zone controlling, summoning the most tanky and annoying to deal with mobs such as archers and spear-guys, projectiles flying everywhere, and all we have is ONE single dodge. Every 8 seconds. Well, technically, we also have a counter, but it's useless against aoe and it feels like bosses use aoe for every 3 out of 4 attacks. Add to all this the fact that some attacks deal damage equal to half of our total hp, or even more, while we deal barely anything, and the combat becomes simply not fun.

After a dozen or so tries on Quincey we decided it isn't worth it and changed the difficulty to normal. And, you guessed it, the guy got utterly destroyed on our next try. Like, we weren't even trying to dodge all that hard, because he barely dealt any damage. Half of his aoe attacks are gone, instead of spear-guys he summons regular weak as hell goons... now it's just too easy.

Either way, the combat is, again, not fun. What do we do?

[Senki]

keep going on normal and you'll find harder bosses eventually or just keep trying with brutal I guess

personally I'm having fun on normal and I'm often close to death in the endgame boss fights but I'm also playing solo

[Tanyon]

My friends and I were literally face rolling the bosses.. which was crazy.. I remember this game being a lot harder.. finally we fought the dancer and 2 of us died.. third killed her with like 10% health..

The game does seem a lot easier. I remember wiping multiple times on like Nicholous, Ferocious Bear, Maja and Octavian.. we beat them all first try.. not even using special bloods or even really trying.

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I am also curious about this.

Apparently Brutal has not just number differences but new/better boss AI. So the ideal solution would be a way to use Brutal AI but tone down the numbers to somewhere in between, if that's possible.

[subwaybananas]

you could use the custom settings and adjust your own healt/power (sadly no enemy settings there)

[Zeon]

IMO brutal is just slightly overtuned & some bosses are just unfair. The 8 second cooldown on dash makes my blood boil at times & with how many adds are spawned during boss fights in group play the game is far easier played solo.

If you play brutal I'd change server settings to adjust things a bit. The changes to ai & movesets are very fun otherwise.

[opAw←G]

I agree brutal is too hard, it become more like a souls-like game. I'm a solo player most of the time and some of the bosses are just impossible to fight alone, the damage I deal is very cute even if I am the same level with the boss. That Vincent boss is just pure agony, with his slow aura + constant damage and charges at you like crazy.

[Tom]

I find Brutal both fun and not. Have to focus down and try to no hit bosses using everything i got which is nice. I've yet to finish act 1 and at times it already feels a bit harder than even darksouls and if it gets worse then it may be a bit much. 10 second cooldown on base dodge is rough and often forces me to use my weapon ability and spells as secondary dodges meaning you get at most 4ish dodges each with a 10ish second cooldown vs attack/AOE/minion spam. Its rough, manageable but rough.

Its stressful, brutal, at times frustrating. If there was a difficulty between normal and brutal I would 100% play that.

Edit to add. I think this game on brutal might be harder than the souls series, dodges on severe cooldowns, hits reduce your max hp coupled with very slow healing forcing you to stay still for extended times practically meaning you have to no hit bosses and thats just a double whammy with the dodges as they are. Idk something to think about.

[† Dead Anarchist †]

Quincey no problem - try the Bane on Brutal. Absolute unreal to kill on level. He simple summon army of 100500 high level undeads and do it again and again)

[weirdee]

Before the patch, the game had been balanced to somewhere near where Brutal is now but perhaps a bit less ridiculous. In response to player feedback, they set "Normal" to a gimped version of this, where they outright just don't put in some of the boss attacks that used to be in the fight, or slow the attacks down enough that you can largely avoid nearly everything with just strafing. The biggest early example of this is the bear boss: in rage mode, it used to just chain attack nonstop, which was super overwhelming (see your comment above about dodge cooldowns) and probably even kinda much if you tried to shield against it, but now in normal mode it just sorta slowly swipes at you two or three times and then stops. I'm willing to bet that it's now even more enraged than before in Brutal mode.

But now it just feels like Normal is easy mode, and Brutal is hard mode, and there's no actual Normal mode.

(Incidentally, the mob spawns in Normal mode are still at HP breakpoints where trying to kill them is still a massive waste of time, unless it's Polora's butterfly, which is now actually possible to kill in Normal mode, whereas it was sort of a DPS check where you just simply couldn't remove it fast enough after she was below 50% HP. I'm going to guess it's absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in Brutal mode now.)

Honestly? Even the bosses that are reliant on minions like the spider and the frog were already pretty oppressive before dumping the mobs in haphazardly, it feels like in most fights the add dumping either isn't really exciting enough to make it better or they end up throwing in so many adds that it actively detracts from the fun from counterplaying the boss attacks. So far the only fight I've seen it make sense in terms of boss design is the new fisherman boss.

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Originally posted by subwaybananas:

you could use the custom settings and adjust your own healt/power (sadly no enemy settings there)

Based on 1.0 patch notes:

Brutal

Face devastating challenges in a world with evolved adversaries.

Recommended for seasoned veterans.

• V Bloods have additional abilities and modified combat behaviors
  
• V Bloods have +3 Levels
  
• V Bloods deal 70% more damage
  
• V Bloods have 25% increased maximum health
  
• Units deal 40% more damage
  
• Loot drops are increased by 25%
  
• Durability loss is reduced by 50%

Maybe a starting point would be increasing player HP by 40%. it's not clear to me if V bosses 70% more damage includes the 40% or is added on top.

Also a lot of settings were removed from the UI and lacking documentation, I'm waiting for that to be fixed so I know what to change.

[Xix]

Originally posted by Tanyon:

My friends and I were literally face rolling the bosses.. which was crazy.. I remember this game being a lot harder.. finally we fought the dancer and 2 of us died.. third killed her with like 10% health..

The game does seem a lot easier. I remember wiping multiple times on like Nicholous, Ferocious Bear, Maja and Octavian.. we beat them all first try.. not even using special bloods or even really trying.

I think the problem lies in the fact that you've allready done them before. You know what to expect when you encounter the boss, allso your allready used to the skills & weapons you prefer, for you everything is just a repetition. On top of that your allso playing with a friend.
And you allready know the inns & outs about how to gear up properly.

For some one that plays this game for the actual first time the experience is very different. Let me take myself as an example.
First of all I play solo and local. Because I wanted to first "learn the game".
Anyway at first the game is easy to get in to. You only start with a few core abilities that are generic like dash and block. But as you progress you get acces to more skills and weapon types and have to pick abilities or weapons that you "think" are "good".
Some weapons or skills just don't work out the way you thought they would.
But worse is when your in a boss fight and your "hands" forgot that you changed a skill. Or forgot that the skill is now on a different key.
The other obvious aspect is that you don't know what to expect when fighting a boss. Do I keep my distance or do glue myself to them. This turned out to be a serious key factor in how easy or hard a boss fight can be, especially when you don't know the encounter.
Some bosses nearly one shotted me because of me not knowing they're powerhits.
And speaking of one-shotting. I ended up doing bosses that are on average 4-10 levels above my gear level.
This game does not really have "side quests" it's just track bosses and the main objective. Sure later on you learn about the camps selling books, or that villagers have books in they're closests. Or I suppose you could grind bandit camps for paper...
But before that I had the illiusion that my gear level had to come from killing bosses and only bosses.
It probably allso didn't help that I didn't bother to get the 24 yarn for the tailor thing, because I thought that would just unlock some cloth armor and I was planning to go for some iron armor instead. And my plan was to just spank those iron armor recipes out of those bosses that I could track.
Yeah joke was on me when I started unlocking armor recipes that needed that tailor thing.

Owh and the whole blood thing... Yeah I first thought it was something that would stack if you kept going for the same blood type... Like if your bite a rogue with 4% "rogue blood" and you allready have 8% rogue blood you get 12% "rogue blood" and you only lose it when you switch... Yeah bummer it does not work like that, and was allso the reason I ignored it for a long while because it felt like total RNG, and not worth the trouble. Well until the game forced me to bother with the prison cell thing, and a rogue with 78% "rogue blood" spawned in my castle.
Which reminds me. Why does that rogue keep spawning in my castle?... Though I guess if that rogue didn't kept spawning in my castle I probably would still be ignoring the blood thing.

Seriously the game on normal is pretty hard when you don't know ♥♥♥♥, but I guess it becomes super easy when you know everything the game has to offer. Because then you are that guy that does all side quests first and bosses second, making you allways overgeared when you fight them.

Anyway my guess is that Brutal difficulty is tuned for veteran groups of 4 players. And normal mode is tuned for newbie groups of 2 players. So veteran groups of 2 players on normal mode will find it to easy while brutal is to hard.
But the solution is simple, just do normal mode and do a boss only run. Ignore potions, blood type and recipes outside of boss drops, or main objective and you will probably have a good difficulty level. Also saves you some time. XD

Edit: The bear boss is probably too easy. I ended up one-shotting it while not knowing the encounter. But most bosses had me running out of combat and restart it. Or even killing me.

[battl3hamm3r]

I was about to write a similar post this morning because i'm breezing through act 1 on normal... but contrary to you, I'm playing solo

I keep reading that bosses get a lot harder later, we will see, I could switch to Brutal, but these days, I'm more in a laid back mindset when playing games, I dont feel like raging fighting bosses lol

[Tolfdir]

Originally posted by Tanyon:

My friends and I were literally face rolling the bosses.. which was crazy.. I remember this game being a lot harder.. finally we fought the dancer and 2 of us died.. third killed her with like 10% health..

The game does seem a lot easier. I remember wiping multiple times on like Nicholous, Ferocious Bear, Maja and Octavian.. we beat them all first try.. not even using special bloods or even really trying.

Are you sure that this is also not your experience as a veteran player?

[Toxi]

I'm giving brutal a few more spins at least for the end act bosses, but so far, I feel much the same way as you OP, normal is well, it's easy for the first acts, but it evens out later as well, normal, and brutal is just at times, Complete Bs.. Lidia for example is pretty easy overall and then she fires a freaking orbital nuke, an attack that even most normal act 3-4 bosses couldn't compare to and this is just an act 1 boss.

call me crazy, but shouldn't the bosses just be a hard mode, like, act 1 bosses are now about as hard as act 2 ones, or act 2 bosses are as hard as act 3, and so on? It genuinely feels like act 4 bosses on normal are less deadly than Lidia the Chaos Archer and that's probably because they actually are, because Lidia can even 2 shot you with enough dot damage.

Isn't that just a bit too much? Is the aim of brutal difficulty not to be for veterans, but for an even smaller amount of players that can beat these bosses without getting hit even once?

[Senki]

Originally posted by Toxi:

I'm giving brutal a few more spins at least for the end act bosses, but so far, I feel much the same way as you OP, normal is well, it's easy for the first acts, but it evens out later as well, normal, and brutal is just at times, Complete Bs.. Lidia for example is pretty easy overall and then she fires a freaking orbital nuke, an attack that even most normal act 3-4 bosses couldn't compare to and this is just an act 1 boss.

call me crazy, but shouldn't the bosses just be a hard mode, like, act 1 bosses are now about as hard as act 2 ones, or act 2 bosses are as hard as act 3, and so on? It genuinely feels like act 4 bosses on normal are less deadly than Lidia the Chaos Archer and that's probably because they actually are, because Lidia can even 2 shot you with enough dot damage.

Isn't that just a bit too much? Is the aim of brutal difficulty not to be for veterans, but for an even smaller amount of players that can beat these bosses without getting hit even once?

perfect difficulty would probably be to play on brutal and give yourself some stat buffs with the advanced settings