100% achievement

[Chatpelier]

Hi there. I just finished all characters in both Crash Site and Abyss in danger 5 without retries.
Here's my (quick) honest thoughts on what doesn't work :
-Abyss feels like a danger 5.5 to me, mainly due to some elites being far harder than those of Crash Site. That being said, I never died on the wave 20 bosses except the first 2 times I encountered them. Some mobs are also far more annoying to me in Abyss, mainly the Narwhals+Octopuses zoning you hard and the Big mouth mobs that create machines. Sometimes they can end runs on their own.
-Some characters are poorly designed imho and need some really good rolls to be doable. I mainly think of Baby, Diver (the mid game is horrible, but the endgame is really easy), Ranger and Hunter (no health and mainly using ranged weapons). A few others were also quite hard to clear, and I think it's mainly due to either them being really frail without a really good upside or they don't really have access to good ways to handle a lot of mobs at once.
-Ranged weapons are far weaker than melee. Piercing isn't good enough and needs too many items to function properly. We'd need less damage reduction per piercing and/or more piercing on weapons from the get go. Some weapons just can't be chosen as a first weapon, because they can't clear waves.
-Turrets (engineering) is "okay". It's decent early to mid and can't kill bosses or elites later on. Random spawning location is also annoying sometimes. I think we'd either need them to always be grouped or better ways to make them deal damage. I always have to run around for the whole wave 20, even with a lot of Engineering, and good item damage for turrets.
-Elites in wave 11 are often a death sentence for a lot of characters. That's a poor game design choice. Just manually change that so that some very frail characters can't encounter Elites before wave 14. Hunter and Ranger just get roflstomped every time.

That being said, I think the game is still pretty good and it's not impossible to complete. Yes, it is hard, and I'm fine with it, but I would like for some characters and build to work most of the time when you play well.
I've had quite a few run end because either ;
-The shop only had trash items even with quite a lot of Luck
-Some characters are just too weak early and mid game to function properly without god tier rolls on stats and/or items
-The game sometimes just doesn't want you to win a procs a Big mouth beast that shoots waves of bullets during an elite fight in the first 5 seconds (yes that can happen, sadly, I've encountered that twice - you can't even stop it).

Happy to give a few tips if someone is stuck with a specific character.

[GaviJa]

Kinda the opposite for me. I think the abyss is easier than crash site due to cursed items being immensely powerful.

I agree on some elites being absolute powerhouses, once you learn the patterns it obviously gets better but you are never far from a bad streak of movement and being nuked. Elites wave 11 has been so punishing, I'm surprised it's still in the game in that state. Having hordes is ALWAYS better; better material farm and less dangerous.

The shop has been diluted with some items so it's harder to find what you need.

For me baby, diver, ranger and hunter were 1st tries in D5. Diver is so powerful with crit dagger that give materials. It snowballs like crazy.

[Chatpelier]

Learning the patterns is obviously needed, but I usually die to mobs and not elites.
The jellyfish is a good example, you can avoid it 99% of the time, but if a lot of bullet shooters or Sharks spawn with it, you can get 1HKO out of nowhere with frail character (even after investing in HP, Dodge and Armor - which you should always do).

Some elites are game ending against certain builds as well imho. I'm always playing in autoaim, because I don't think this type game should be played otherwise and the Gladiator just destroys ranged builds. Tbf, you avoid its patterns, but you die to sharks rushing you, because your weapons will never target the shark in that instance.

I also think that a couple elites have random patterns (the spider I think and the Butcher type elite that drops 3 spears in random directions on you), which can't be dodged properly without enough speed. And sometimes, you just don't find speed items at all.

So my issue, is mostly with some of the mobs that deal insane damage early on and are harder to dodge than their Crash Site counterpart. The shark's rush angle is sharper than the big boy from Crash Site. The Narwhals are also a pain to handle without enough defense and speed.

For the Diver, I always encounter the Narwhal elite wave 11 or 12. I have no luck. xD
And I almost never find a second Harpoon, which makes the builds way easier. So my complaint would be that Harpoon drop should be higher.

I first tried 60-80% of characters, including some people have a hard time with, so I think luck is part of it. I think Baby needs to luck out at least 1 or 2 snowball items and have good weapon and exp drops. If you don't have that, you run will be tough.

Ranger and Hunter, I dunno, I think they aren't for me. Hunter especially just sucks imho. Spears don't work well due to too much Range, Crossbows sucks, despite them being THE weapon for Hunter, but they aren't strong/fast enough on their own (piercing sucks as I mentionned), and most of the other starting weapons aren't good. I think I ended up winning with knives ? I'm not sure, but it didn't feel great.

[Rushin]

Elites on wave 11-12 are run killers. Consistently a lot harder to get through than the wave 20 boss duo every single time, even with retries for practicing.

With most characters what I find every time is that glass cannon builds just don't work, those early elites have far, far too much health anyway. It's best to invest considerable resources into defense and take them down in 55 seconds rather than like 30 because you're guaranteed to take damage regardless and you're just gonna die if you can't tank it. I'm so tired of building characters that wipe out regular mobs easily, still can't take out the elite nearly fast enough, and die instantly to a single hit (which is close to impossible to dodge if this drags out for 30+ seconds).

So to counter this you invest more into defense rather than damage which is usually bad long-term, you can't kill a ton of the regular mobs on the elite wave (or even the elite itself), and the payout crate is consistently not worth it.

It is so much better to just restart repeatedly until you roll a horde or two as your first challenges. You can keep pumping up the damage with little to no defense, fighting hordes is a lot more fun and less frustrating, AND the payout is a lot better.

I hate early elites. Imo either scale them down a bit or set the fixed order of horde-elite-horde. Why bother dying to elite on wave 11 if you can roll a horde on wave 12 which is far easier, more fun, and more rewarding? Strange design choice.

[Chatpelier]

I think the game would be near perfect if those 3-4 things were updated:
-No Elites in wave 11 or 12, or nerf their health enough so that you can burst them (I don't think you need to nerf their damage output though)
-Fix the ranged weapons so that they can deal with hordes better (whether it's better piercing or more explosions, I don't care) and fix turrets so that it can actually kill elites and bosses without needing to high roll everything in the shop
-Update the shop a bit more so that you don't have to reroll 4 times to find 1 "ok" item for your build
-A few characters might need to be tweaked a bit because they aren't fun to play/build and aren't unique. This would depend on the other 3 changes. I'd argue that turrets should be packed, which would render Engineer (?) useless. If Piercing isn't tweaked, crossbow sucks, which means Hunter is a useless class (it should be the class that uses crossbow, but it sucks), etc.

[B the Self]

I will not elaborate excessively but I'm with you, I did a run (this is an example) on Crash zone with Hiker+ Lances it was pretty easyyy and pretty fun, then I went to Abyss and got wrecked to the point that I could not kill a single elite or boss then I did a run again and could kill elites on abyss but not the bosses but I really think of you are not building curse (me, I'm not a fan of curse) then Abyss is much worse because you get cursed even if you don't want to and I never like to pick cursed items so yeah.
What you said matches my experience so far with pre-dlc characters in the abyss like Danger 5.5 or 6.

Also keep in mind people that find the Abyss easier are either playing dlc characters that mostly scale with curse or/and are playing with curse altogether and Abyss gives you a lot of curse for free so there is that, now if you force yourself to play without curse (avoiding the cursed enemies) then you will how tanky is everything in the abyss but I must say I do like the direction it is pretty much now and I also really miss wave 9 on crash course but on the abyss, it is pure bliss

[HeraldOfOpera]

Originally posted by Waves of the Self:

I will not elaborate excessively but I'm with you, I did a run (this is an example) on Crash zone with Hiker+ Lances it was pretty easyyy and pretty fun, then I went to Abyss and got wrecked to the point that I could not kill a single elite or boss then I did a run again and could kill elites on abyss but not the bosses but I really think of you are not building curse (me, I'm not a fan of curse) then Abyss is much worse because you get cursed even if you don't want to and I never like to pick cursed items so yeah.
What you said matches my experience so far with pre-dlc characters in the abyss like Danger 5.5 or 6.

Also keep in mind people that find the Abyss easier are either playing dlc characters that mostly scale with curse or/and are playing with curse altogether and Abyss gives you a lot of curse for free so there is that, now if you force yourself to play without curse (avoiding the cursed enemies) then you will how tanky is everything in the abyss but I must say I do like the direction it is pretty much now and I also really miss wave 9 on crash course but on the abyss, it is pure bliss

So what you're saying is that the different levels require different strategies, and if you try to do what worked on one level you will suffer tremendously on the other? That sounds like it's working as intended and should be made even more true.

[B the Self]

Originally posted by HeraldOfOpera:

Originally posted by Waves of the Self:

I will not elaborate excessively but I'm with you, I did a run (this is an example) on Crash zone with Hiker+ Lances it was pretty easyyy and pretty fun, then I went to Abyss and got wrecked to the point that I could not kill a single elite or boss then I did a run again and could kill elites on abyss but not the bosses but I really think of you are not building curse (me, I'm not a fan of curse) then Abyss is much worse because you get cursed even if you don't want to and I never like to pick cursed items so yeah.
What you said matches my experience so far with pre-dlc characters in the abyss like Danger 5.5 or 6.

Also keep in mind people that find the Abyss easier are either playing dlc characters that mostly scale with curse or/and are playing with curse altogether and Abyss gives you a lot of curse for free so there is that, now if you force yourself to play without curse (avoiding the cursed enemies) then you will how tanky is everything in the abyss but I must say I do like the direction it is pretty much now and I also really miss wave 9 on crash course but on the abyss, it is pure bliss

So what you're saying is that the different levels require different strategies, and if you try to do what worked on one level you will suffer tremendously on the other? That sounds like it's working as intended and should be made even more true.

*yawn* ignore all of my message and just reply to whatever random line you want to? *yawns*

[Spawnling]

I think a lot comes down to playstyle and weapons used.

I tried Stick Baby today and it still destroyed everything in the Abyss.
Ranger went well with Slinghsots.

I aggree that early elites are annoying and hard to deal with.
Against them it feels like you need ~10-20% speed by then. Not going for speed in the Abyss is a auto loss for me.

[Adeptus Stark]

I was working on 100% achievements again but I got back into Valheim and my gaming time is limited. Will get a few bro's done this weekend for sure though.

[BAKA]

I just finished crash site 100% and will now start on the abyss.