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I estimate in about 8-10 years - if ever - before a Darkest Dungeon 3 is announced.
Hey Nerd Commando, a lot of people claim properly balancing DD2 is very difficult. How long do you think it would take an experienced dev (or a team) to balance all skills and paths without introducing any new animations, models and so on, basically just number changes?
2-3 months max. And that's assuming a "do a patch > release it > collect feedback > do a patch" cycle, just to keep check that your decisions are popular.
It's just that Redhook are doing, well, I dunno what (it's disrespectful to say so but I'm not a moral example). They do extra rare patches (is it because of multiple platforms? are they already on consoles bc it's difficult to patch there?) and those are massive. And that's just wrong.
The problem with MaA nerf, for example, is that sure, mb he's a bit too good, but giving several simultaneous nerfs in a row is just too much. They should've given, I dunno, two nerfs, then, if it's not enough, another one, and so on. Calibrate him slowly. Instead they just made him into Monthy Python's Black Knight.
You could blame Epic, ofc - Early Access was sorta wasted because of them but now EA is still required to weed out all the kinks. But even there design decisions were just weird - instead of carefully balancing stuff, mostly it was "let's just redo it from scratch" and, as the result, you're having new stuff that's as imbalanced as the old one (but differently, though).
Give this man an investor.
look up project iron crown
It's very Red Hook.
In DD1, opening with finale was clearly a problem. The skill is called finale...
They tried making it debuff the jester harder, but it was still a small debuff, especially if you opened with three finales.
So they made it charge up. Cool and fun idea (boss-only, but nvm...) that I wouldn't have thought of.
And quadrupled the debuff. And made it permanent.
And gave finale the harshest use limit.
Any one of those nerfs would have been sufficient or nearly so. They did all three, piledriving finale into the bedrock, and called it good. It's true: finale wasn't a problem anymore...
DD1 finale is nearly as random as wyrd reconstruction. Imagine wyrd.r could charged up to say 0-80, but you could only cast it once per battle. Oof. Functionally you have to plan on finale critting, for a couple reasons. However, it has like a 40% chance not to crit, and that non-crit can low-roll, meaning sometimes it does -65% expected damage, basically zero.
And it's supposed to be solo-finale, so doing finale correctly is about guessing how charged your finale is (or doing a ton of math) then predicting how much HP your boss will have two turns from now. Or you can just take it off the bar and not worry about it...
RH loves to slowly accumulate knowledge, finally bringing themselves to understanding, then throwing it all out and going back to square 1 where they were oblivious. E.g. they learned a lot about stress during DD1, so they introduced relationships to ensure all that knowledge was irrelevant.
I would like to highlight the DD1 flagellant nerf. He was clearly nerfed in response to the video of killing the swine prince solo...except that video is basically fraudulent. The victory was possible 1 out of 700 times. If you had a massively modded roster of only flagellants, you can safely expect to kill all of them several times over before accomplishing what the video showed. Red Hook never understood enough about the game to notice. They were successfully defrauded. This continues: videos of [can do it] are treated as [can reliably do it].
That said FLG is still a top-tier character. They addressed the funlol part, not the sweaty gamerchad parts.
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Thinking about the sun ring, I understand something else. They think hero damage is very very important. They think +%damage is not very powerful.
Every DD2 hero is carefully balanced to hit the 4-8 damage standard on average. Anyone who can do more damage* does so at high costs. Anyone who can do the 4-8 more easily is considered godly, stripped of the abililty to do anything else.
...and then they have bloodthirsty in the game. Plus warlock, ravager, memories... 4-9 damage? Oof, careful with that. +65% base damage? Eh, I'm sure it will be fine.
*(There's a +30% damage bonus standard, average 6=>8. In particular revenge+ gives chop+ 32% extra expected damage at full efficiency.)
Variance is not factored in. Some heroes have high crit. The leper has high miss. Doesn't matter: everyone has to be exactly 4-8 on average, lest they be [[unbalanced]]. Time spent isn't factored in. Capable of doing the math. Not capable of doing the right math.
I guess they nerfed the sun ring twithout understanding why they were doing it, and they forgot why the leper got buffed to 13-26 in DD1 (which is still too low).
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I want to mention I really like the iratus six-skill no-choice system. DD1 BH feels good because he always has four correct skills, and you just use those. Having a bunch of skill choices adds a lot of complexity for little gain. Neither developer nor most players can handle the complexity. I find it's always like, "Damn that skill would be fun to use, except it's far too bad to give up any of these plain skills." "Man it would be cool if having [skill] on my bar wasn't a terrible idea right now."
Holy lance looks awesome, feels awesome, and has an awesome +crit. And if you make any party where you lance more than once, it's way too slow.
TBH, now that the practically don't exist anymore (thinking that the franchise won't be bled to death is high-degree copium), this all doesn't matter anymore.
It's less about complexity and more about those choices being mostly faux ones. It's especially egregious in sequel where you have 11 skills (and now 14-15 with path reworks) yet those skills aren't really from the same character - instead you have 2-3 different chars human centipeded into one, with subsets of skills that painfully don't work together.
Even in the first part, most chars would have 1-2 practical skill presets and everything outside them was trying too hard. So it's pointless to pretend.