Easy, Medium, Hard, Insane... what are the actual differences?

[Martin]

Ok there's the obvious answers.. one is harder than another..

But what actually makes it harder.. there's 2 options at the start your character has a "difficulty" applied to it.. a background class if you like.. and then the game is given a difficulty, one which can be edited during gameplay.. in case it is too hard..

Hard Abeyance for example is called a lv 0 card, but is actually a Lv 25 Realm. Antiquarian is lv 20 card but is actually lv 40. And so on. I like hard difficulty for combat.

I'm not sure if hard makes the game more grindy.. I don't know what the drop rates were like before.. I have noticed the drop rate of essence is 50% lower.. that's annoying, I don't like additional grind.

[Deadking9k (Ger)]

dont think that droprates are worse, but your killspeed is way worse on extreme, but the higher the realm difficulty, the more rare resources you can have. so you can play on normal or probably easy, and then if you want to farm t3-t5 stuff you can go on extreme, but beware the enemies have about 10-50x more hp on extreme (lvl 220 vs lvl 100)

[Faya AOP]

The gearscore and drops of enemys of the map.
The POIs.
The resources that spawn on a map, for example, anti swamp extreme does not have swamp fibre tier 1 which is essential for the swamp quest.
I play all my maps on extreme, i even migrated to a extreme abeyane desert and i like it. Way more challenging and diverse then most people will experience.

[Martin]

Yeh my findings are the same, Easy is actually Extreme.. in resource rewards. But Extreme in Combat and Hps. Medium or Hard is the best balance of both, with Extreme actually being for those who like dying alot. Or are agile enough to stay out of combat. I have a mate who only plays on extreme and he dies continually, it's as tho he is a masochist in games.. I like a balanced game. Guess I'll switch back to medium then hard on later fights. Where my gear score will balance the difficulty.

For Example Easy Lv 7 Gear 7-9 Essence in Rewards, Medium Lv 20 25-35 Essence (Some as high as 75) Hard lv 40 50-92 Essence.. Not tried Extreme, but expect lv 80-100 with 65-85 on drops. With either multiple bosses or vault/apex level bosses.

As far as completion times are concerned, single player starting game. Hard and Extreme is 10x the base completion rate. The most efficient game is medium difficulty.
Hard you're wasting alot of time healing and extreme.. well running back to your corpse essentially. With endgame gear it's different, because that makes even extreme easy.

[Martin]

Originally posted by Faya AOP:

The gearscore and drops of enemys of the map.
The POIs.
The resources that spawn on a map, for example, anti swamp extreme does not have swamp fibre tier 1 which is essential for the swamp quest.
I play all my maps on extreme, i even migrated to a extreme abeyane desert and i like it. Way more challenging and diverse then most people will experience.

Unless you show me you playing for hours on end in a video/stream.. I find this hard to believe. I'm on extreme right now and every enemy is almost impossible to kill, I'm spending hours making basic heal potions and foods just to stay in play. Gear Score 20 v lv 60+ enemies is almost impossible to beat. Even if they're just wolves.. or basic bound. On meeting the blade bound I was running for corpse 2-3 times per fight and the knights were one shotting me. So show me a video.. or I simply can't believe you. Actually you know I've seen videos of people who setup maps on extreme, cut the video in edit, going to gameplay on medium.. you can tell by the damage numbers what level someone is on or the levels numbers of the mobs themselves, if they don't edit those out.

Either way you do you.. I'll be playing on Medium, most efficient way.