Why is max level what it is? Spoilers

[Millenia]

How come its so low? I've barely broken 1k hp with most characters, with monk passive and I'm already at max level?

Most endgame stuff does aoe dmg and you're lucky to survive with only 1000 hp.

[[DG]Holoman]

the dev's intended it to be more strategic with most fights, use debuffs / buffs / cant out level enemys etc, instead of just spamming attack. i presume your on hardmode like me for taking that kind of damage. i dont mind the level cap as theres nothing worth fighting after you reach it anyway. although it leaves plenty of room to raise it with some DLC / future updates like maybe new game plus? be really cool to gain unique items again, like the ultimate vendor stuff, make some fun builds with those. pretty easy for new maps / worlds to be implimented with how to teleport stones work i.e. finding the mars stone for the first time and the "new world" stone (not sure how far you are with the story)

[31n70pf]

I'm with OP on this one...
I'm at a point where i am extremly close to giving up on playing the game. I'm around level 57 and everything in every freaking new area almost oneshots my whole party. i am trying different strategies with the same results. i'm trying with buffing and debuffing, with only dmg builds or with tacticts other players have found, but most of the effective ones were patched... it would be fine, if i coudn't beat the super bosses but i'm talking about normal encounters... i'm just extremly frustrated right now

[[DG]Holoman]

i dont want to spoil too much but theres an area in the sea with squidmen NPC's who give you a really powerful item for answering some questions. it could help solve your problem with finding better / diffrent gear (helped me a tonne when i found it). although i do agree with late game enemys doings too much damage on hardmode. the crit rate is silly, its like 40% minimum on most mobs which does one shot your team very very often

[Codenhammerton]

Nothing worth fighting after you reach level cap? Have you fought the secret bosses? Unless you have a "Oneshot everything in the game" build that requires a very specific setup and some luck, those fights are going to be some tough challenges. I also hope for DLC or free updates in the future that add more content but I personally think that the level cap does still make things challenging

[Millenia]

Originally posted by Codenhammerton:

Nothing worth fighting after you reach level cap? Have you fought the secret bosses? Unless you have a "Oneshot everything in the game" build that requires a very specific setup and some luck, those fights are going to be some tough challenges. I also hope for DLC or free updates in the future that add more content but I personally think that the level cap does still make things challenging

Think my current issue is gear. The stuff I have isnt particularly good and I have a hard time finding the "next" area.

[pseudo]

it's to encourage parallel progression where your strength comes more from loot rather than just levelling up a few times to make up the difference

thematically it makes sense considering the pitch of this game is the thrill of adventuring and finding loot to power up with and get an advantage against monsters that normally would hand your butt to you

[River Running Games]

I don't think I've ever said it, but I was deciding between 60 and 80 for a bit. I settled on 60 because if I ever decided to add more content in a patch, upping the level to 80 felt a bit more clean than upping it to 100 (3 digits) or 99 (not round). I don't actually know if I'm going make that kind of content, though.

Originally posted by 31n70pf:

I'm with OP on this one...
I'm at a point where i am extremly close to giving up on playing the game. I'm around level 57 and everything in every freaking new area almost oneshots my whole party. i am trying different strategies with the same results. i'm trying with buffing and debuffing, with only dmg builds or with tacticts other players have found, but most of the effective ones were patched... it would be fine, if i coudn't beat the super bosses but i'm talking about normal encounters... i'm just extremly frustrated right now

Is it OK if I ask what difficulty you're playing on? If Easy, which enemies are giving you trouble? I tried to do a balance sweep awhile ago to address this sort of thing (only for Easy, though). If on Normal or Hard, I want to super encourage giving Easy a try! It was really, truly made to help with this kind of thing. I actually regret how I named the difficulties because it feels like some people would rather give up than lower it. It shouldn't be thought of so much as "Normal" vs "Easy", but more like, "needing to deal with that kind of stuff" and "not needing to deal with that kind of stuff".

[31n70pf]

I'm playing on normal and my false sense of pride as someone who plays (j)rpg's since the dawn of time forbids me to play on easy
I'm just bummed out, that the buffing/debuffing seems to not matter at all when everything oneshots you anyway... maybe i just need to stray away from playing whichever class i like to just use whats effective.

[Illuminia]

Originally posted by 31n70pf:

I'm with OP on this one...
I'm at a point where i am extremly close to giving up on playing the game. I'm around level 57 and everything in every freaking new area almost oneshots my whole party. i am trying different strategies with the same results. i'm trying with buffing and debuffing, with only dmg builds or with tacticts other players have found, but most of the effective ones were patched... it would be fine, if i coudn't beat the super bosses but i'm talking about normal encounters... i'm just extremly frustrated right now

I want to echo this concern.... (Normal Mode)

I accidentally found and beat two of the Depths superbosses with a generic balanced party. Really rough as I wasn't prepared/geared/mix-max'd for the fights - but I did them. Reaper/Valk, Ninja/Rogue, Dervish/Warlock, Shaman/Scholar.
Were both long fights, expected to die and come back with a diff party, but wanted to try. Managed to squeak out wins. Ok, cool; was pretty proud of it because I don't have much "end-game" gear (no Class-specific gear, etc).

I get to the Quintar area, and 3 times get effectively wiped out 1st turn by Tomb Guard, which is basically just a single trash mob. AoE Physical+Bleed + Fast so most of my team doesn't even get a turn before it strikes. Whoever didn't get CRIT and insta-killed by the AoE, died on their turn by the bleed. (except Reaper, but by then it's already over.)

I felt i had to horribly cheese and "cheat" that encounter to get by it at all. (+TT gear on Ninja/Rogue, so he could act first and Sleep Bomb; so my Shaman could get a turn to apply Power down + Reap/Valk AoE Armor up - which let the party (mostly) survive the AoE + bleed.

I cleared the dungeon, got the treasure, woo.
Put the game down for another week.

Beating a rough boss/super boss was a fun challenge - having trash tear me apart worse than the "super bosses" is not fun at all; and yet another reason it feels that Rogue is required. (other sleep classes are horribly slow).


Yeah, I could just put it on "Easy" mode - but that means I'm just saying "To HE** with it!" to burn through to "an ending" so I can shelve the game in the Archive to put it behind me and "just be done with it".
I don't really want to do that ..... yet at least. It was an amazing game for a good portion of it, and I honestly think if I started on "Easy" I would have regretted it being too easy for the first 50%-70% of the game.

[pseudo]

Originally posted by Illuminia:

I get to the Quintar area, and 3 times get effectively wiped out 1st turn by Tomb Guard, which is basically just a single trash mob. AoE Physical+Bleed + Fast so most of my team doesn't even get a turn before it strikes. Whoever didn't get CRIT and insta-killed by the AoE, died on their turn by the bleed. (except Reaper, but by then it's already over.)

True, and this is my experience as well. I just kinda thought the monsters in there were intentionally difficult to encourage you to use the water

If they weren't meant to be that strong then yeah they're probably unintentionally the hardest normal encounters in the game right now.

[Etienne]

Originally posted by River Running Games:

I don't think I've ever said it, but I was deciding between 60 and 80 for a bit. I settled on 60 because if I ever decided to add more content in a patch, upping the level to 80 felt a bit more clean than upping it to 100 (3 digits) or 99 (not round). I don't actually know if I'm going make that kind of content, though.

Since I cannot avoid giving an argument against level cap, I have to say that the possibility of increasing the level cap for future content goes counter to your previous argument for the level cap (end-game stuff being easier to balance with a constant level). If you ever bump up the level cap to accomodate extra content, then said end-game balance will have to be able to handle higher-than-60 level characters anyway.

(Having soft level caps where it is very hard to level much above the monsters would likely avoid both issues.)

[pseudo]

Originally posted by Etienne:

If you ever bump up the level cap to accomodate extra content, then said end-game balance will have to be able to handle higher-than-60 level characters anyway.

Well that's the conundrum isn't it? I think people are a bit too used to the idea from other JRPGs of levelling up any time they come to something they can't handle. Bumping up the level cap is only desirable because people want more power creep, which is definitely very available if people look around for it.

The problem is that this is an inherent flaw in the progression systems in JRPGs, you get rewarded with growth based on defeating enemies. Too much growth too fast makes the game feel too easy, too little growth makes the game feel too hard. Suddenly stopping growth around mid-endgame is a curveball to the player, telling them that equipment is the intended method of getting stronger, as well as optimizing your party composition. You're expected to poke your nose around and explore, finding stronger equipment and tools to mix into your build. Adventuring becomes your strength.

I think increasing the level cap is also able to be sidestepped by making the levelling 1-60 more meaningful by increasing the allocation totals on all classes. In this game, your total stats are entirely dependent on the growth curves of each independent class. This is where your level up bonuses are coming from. Across all classes there tends to be a regulated total number of points that get distributed into each of the attributes. If you increase this total, the balancing of the game changes dramatically.

It seems like it generally sits around 49 points or maybe 50 points for some classes. Each half a star is one point.
https://i.imgur.com/2hwGlPg.png (I didn't know Steam doesn't handle images oops)

Even increasing it to 60 points distributed into the attributes would make the game feel easier.

[welly321]

So your playing on normal and refuse to lower the difficulty yet your complaining about the difficulty. Do you see how insane that is?

[Leviathan]

In my case, yeah, I feel it's hard, but you need to get the hang of which strategies work for which enemies.

In particular, having skills that lower the enemy physical or magical attacks work well in combination to the Valkyrie Skills. You can both mass heal and give physical defense and lowering the enemy physical attack too is very notable. I think it's harder to protect yourself from magical damage but you can still heal it if you manage to reduce their damage to a point that everyone survives it.

You can also do the opposite with: Increase your magical damage (Wizard skill), then reduce his resistance (Aegis skill), and make him take extra magical damage (or fire damage with spotlight) and then nuke them with a flare.

Also, I didn't do this before beating the game but...
Get the summons!!!
All of them are useful. They are not very powerful attacks, but they have great effects, from silence, to paralyze, or even full HP recovery (Including raise and re-raise).

An enemy becomes way easier if you paralyze it when it's about to do something dangerous, then silence it when it's about to use a spell, then blind it when it's about to use a physical attack, then when you cannot silence it anymore you reflect its spell, then you put it to sleep with monster magic (or rogue or shaman skills). That wastes a lot of turns for the enemy so it does help A TON. In particular I wish I had some of that when I fought the final boss.

[River Running Games]

Originally posted by welly321:

So your playing on normal and refuse to lower the difficulty yet your complaining about the difficulty. Do you see how insane that is?

At first I didn't quite understand, but I think some people were playing through the game by levelling up to just to the right spot where things felt good for them to fight. Having a low level cap kind of got in the way of this at the end game, so I added the new assist option which should allow the same players to continue using this strategy. It might not be the original intended way to beat stuff, but I have to admit it's pretty fun.