FYI: Difficulty influences the economy and it's BAD

[Drax]

Playing Veteran, doing all the missions, looting + selling guns, and collecting and selling artifacts, I simply don't have the expendable cash to upgrade or buy anything. It ALL goes on repairs and I can just about keep my gear in working order. I did a 2hr long excursion where I did a story mission, two side quests, and found 2 artifacts along the way. I tried to use my pistol as much as possible to reduce the wear on my more expensive rifle and went back maxing out my weight with two weight reducing artifacts. Sold everything I had spare, repaired everything I had, and ended up with 70 coupons to my name. I lost coupons on that whole trip.

This is with mid-tier weapons and armour. The weapons and armour in the lesser zone is dirt cheap. Once you start getting better stuff, repair costs skyrocket. And again, only in higher difficulties... I know there's going to be someone playing on STALKER difficulty saying they had no issue repairing their TOZ and leather jacket.

Most repeatable and side quests have coupon rewards UNDER a 1000 which essentially makes them not worth doing. Emptying one magazine with a rifle will immediately put you in the red for doing that quest and I had one where I had to save a Loner from a Bloodsucker and he gave me 300 credits if I remember correctly... The only way to reliable make coupons is through selling guns and artifacts. Artifacts are the most efficient considering they weigh nothing and will result in the least wear to your weapons and armour. The rarest artifact I found seems to go for around 10k coupons. Maybe there's someone later in the game who pays more for them, and I know there are artifact fulfilment missions. More realistically though, farming military with the poor spawns and is the fastest way but it's a grind.

I dislike how much Veteran difficulty effects the economy. Controversially, I haven't had much problem with mutants. I went to Cordon early, found a SPAZ and have been popping bloodsuckers pretty easily, and use grenades on Poltergeists. One shot headshots make humans pretty easy targets and the player character is ridiculously tanky for Veteran. IMO artifact rewards should be significantly better with weapon value reduced (The average bandit has a mass produced AK that sells for the same cost as an uncommon artifact), repair costs should be lowered or wear rate reduced and mission rewards especially should be tweaked.

You literally get paid just enough to buy stale bread for saving the life of someone from a horrific monster notorious within the zone. This is like thanking someone for killing a bear for you with nothing but a swiss knife with an old cereal bar you forgot about in your back pocket.

[qlemczaq]

I think the biggest issue is with weapon/gear repair costs. Im also playing on veteran and I spent all of the coupons on gear repair. At this point your only solution is to apply a mod which lowers durability loss of your gear. It's available on Nexus.

[JetLi47]

just use a mod at this point. imo they didnt rly put any thought in the difficulty as it stands now. you find an absurd amount of supplies but on the contrary repairs are so damn expensive.

[Drax]

Originally posted by JetLi47:

just use a mod at this point. imo they didnt rly put any thought in the difficulty as it stands now. you find an absurd amount of supplies but on the contrary repairs are so damn expensive.

I probably will but I typically don't like difficulty balance mods because they can make things far too easy. I was also half expecting/hoping there to be some sort of solution later on in the game? Like finding scientists who would pay more for artifacts, and I still haven't found new scanners yet to make artifact hunting more profitable. But it's pretty clear at this stage there's some serious economy balance problems that won't have later fixes like mission rewards and item wear rate.

[Hex: Onii-Chan]

It's ridiculous, yeah. I love playing on the highest difficulty for the challenge of it, but there is no challenge here. I CAN take down a bloodsucker, but it isn't rewarding me with anything for doing so. So if I fight one, it's basically just "oh, great, I will have to find 100 more ammo somewhere, my gun will need to be repaired for like 3k and the quest gave me a pat on the shoulder and a crisp 300 coupons".

[SkyLiteZz]

Git gud

[Serpiko82]

Originally posted by Knight Light:

Git gud

Git out

[ᴛᴀʟᴜ 🐦]

I agree, the bar missions should increase their rewards by a zero. 1000 coupons should be 10.000 coupons to make up for repair, ammo costs etc doing the task.

[LedveLedve]

I think the idea was to force player to loot as much as possible, so the player would spend more time in the game and discover more places. Works with me.

[Hex: Onii-Chan]

Originally posted by LedveLedve:

I think the idea was to force player to loot as much as possible, so the player would spend more time in the game and discover more places. Works with me.

...and then give the player just enough carry capacity to be constantly overloaded if he did just that.

[lockwoodx]

I addressed how the kill counter and veteran mode are basically devs trolling players after the game was released the way it was.

[strangerism]

I think Veteran affecting economy is part of the difficulty. In the sense that you are supposed to mitigate anyl the losses through skilled game play, e.g. take less damage as possible as to not incur in the repair cycle of all your gear
I am not really a fan of this but I guess it's part of that level of difficulty
I started straight on Veteran to make fights more challenging, I though. However considering the state of the ai atm, I guess it is better to use the stalker difficulty
lets see what this patch brings in and I'll decide. either I'll drop the diff or use some mod to balance the economy for a more enjoyable veteran

[Meddle92]

Originally posted by strangerism:

I think Veteran affecting economy is part of the difficulty. In the sense that you are supposed to mitigate anyl the losses through skilled game play, e.g. take less damage as possible as to not incur in the repair cycle of all your gear
I am not really a fan of this but I guess it's part of that level of difficulty
I started straight on Veteran to make fights more challenging, I though. However considering the state of the ai atm, I guess it is better to use the stalker difficulty
lets see what this patch brings in and I'll decide. either I'll drop the diff or use some mod to balance the economy for a more enjoyable veteran

it's literally just run and hide mode. Never fight mutants because they are bullet sponges. Then when you are on a missions where the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemies seemingly keep respawning well have fun with that just get lucky running, hiding, ducking behind cover, and breaking their line of sight. This is just lame.

[Ammikaameri]

Yeah the repair costs should be adjusted a little. The next patch should help with the upgrade/attachment costs.

But it is still doable. At the mid game you get armor and weapons so often you can just ditch the ones that are broken and use another one. I have one main weapon that I repair and then the other slot is being used by whatever I happen to find.

Constantly changing armors does make some of the upgrades to them pretty irrelevant.

[Serpiko82]

Veteran mode's greatest difficulty spike is actually that it tries to keep you poorer, rather than making things harder.

Proof being, after getting geared up (through variably legit methods), even just with mid level suits I feel like I'm tanky as well. In combat terms, the hardest fights are now those involving mutants, and NOT because they hit particularly hard, but because my ammo supply could simply run dry before all the things die.

[Pessu]

I don't know what the intention was with the economy but it's completely broken as it is.
You can get the full value of items by using a trick at the trader https://screenrant.com/stalker-2-full-value-money-glitch/

I've been doing that my whole run and it balances the economy so that you actually have enough cash to fix your gear and buy things. I suggest just doing that until a proper fix is made. It still doesn't do anything to make quests worth while coupons wise but at least you get money by selling guns and other gear.