Feedback: Difficulty levels balance

[Kligan]

I've been playing this game for 30 hours now. Currently, I'm at the end of act 2 (presumably), inside the monolith. And while the gameplay itself is great, I really don't understand the difficulty in this game.
On normal it's piss-easy. My party has so much defense that I could basically go AFK facetank everything.
https://cdn.steamusercontent.com/ugc/14831842270970754059/55F3E4B024A60AFCDC931CEA41E9567F613E28C9/

On hard, on the other hand, the enemies straight up one-shot almost everyone in my party.

So the choise is between cakewalk and CBT.
I feel like there should be something in-between "expeditioner" and "expert". Because the jump in damage that the enemy do is insane.

[Drax]

In hard you're meant to mostly rely on dodging/parrying + shields and revives. You won't tank many shots so you can just go all in on damage output.

Normal does have some more difficult content in the late game with some of the optional bosses. The story content is quite easy but the other bosses will make you sweat a bit.

[Kligan]

Originally posted by Drax:

In hard you're meant to mostly rely on dodging/parrying + shields and revives. You won't tank many shots so you can just go all in on damage output.

Normal does have some more difficult content in the late game with some of the optional bosses. The story content is quite easy but the other bosses will make you sweat a bit.

I mean, "expert" is a slog because you'd have to replay a lot after missing couple of attacks.
I feel like there should be a middle ground where if you don't dodge/parry and take a hit - it hurts, but not one-shots straight up.

[Drax]

Originally posted by Kligan:

I mean, "expert" is a slog because you'd have to replay a lot after missing couple of attacks.
I feel like there should be a middle ground where if you don't dodge/parry and take a hit - it hurts, but not one-shots straight up.

That's why you have shields.

'Base Shield' - 1 shield per turn. So you just can't take more than one hit before their next turn which is fairly forgiving.
'In Medias Res' - 3 shields.
'Shielding Death' - 3 shields per death. Can also be combined with 'Auto Death' on a character. This alone is really strong because it's not once per game and so every revive is another 6 shields. Combined with 'Breaking Death' and you're set.
etc.

Normal is easy until the late game provided you can dodge/parry semi-reliably. I feel like Hard difficulty just requires solid picto/lumina usage. You can definitely also tank hits without shields but again you'll want to have defence providing pictos, + Confidence, Shell, etc.

But I'd recommend people playing Normal to keep playing on Normal tbh. The post-game stuff is quite a big difficulty spike.

[Kligan]

I don't have access to almost any shields at this stage of the game. So that argument is kinda invalid. Because on "expert" enemies one-shot you from the start of the game.