New patch made game worse.

[jarvoren]

I will split this down to technical and gameplay:

Technical:
- numerous times game crashed for us in different scenarios - boss fights , stage transitions, everything on different pcs (we played 4 player coop) - that comes on top of connection issues that last patch introduced. This needs fixing.
- Double keys did not count when we picked them up.
- Refuge choice cannot be escaped from.

Gameplay
In already hard game You diluted power sources. Multiple times instead of passable power all four of us in coop ended up on first boss with one item. Because there was ♥♥♥♥ for power on the map.
Right now instead of green book i tend to see refuges and double chest. and for double chest you need to do double key which again takes place of a good power source . The math seems the same two camps two items. However rolling and time taken is doubled.
Rolling double chest with double star is a bad idea needs too many resources. And two keys needing You not to die is very hard in 4 player coop even on easy due to the visual clutter.....
The new astral chest again does not give enough power vs normal chest or book.
Reseting tallents in coop is very time consuming it may be ok reward for solo but in coop this chest is very low value.
Refugees seem worthless. I have not seen good enouch trade to bother even going to their camp.

Overal we think that game became harder in coop and much more rng dependant.

Right now our team basically said either you ballance it or we drop...

[SmolAnubis]

I was going on the forum cause I just had the exact opposite experience, just had carmilla run end with 216 vit, 235 damage, 40 crit and 60 extra crit damage, fully stack vajra and dash charge trinket. A lot of that came from the double chests which allowed me to get the vajra and dash stack passive, and the new bosses gave 4+ cursed items along with oni mask.

There's SO MUCH more power to be gotten from just the extra boss spawns alone, the refugee camps can offer a ton of value and the double chests make making a build with just items so much more viable.

The planetarium thing does seem kinda bad, but I'm happy to have a node that upgrades your skills again.

[Shard of time]

I agree only with the blood ritual complain, because it is poorly designed in general

[jarvoren]

And did You feel that it was due to your decision making or just luck of the draw ? Because right now i do not feel my decisions on where to go have any value at all.

[jarvoren]

Also solo is different beast at all - my post mostly reflects my teams 4 player coop experiences.

[SmolAnubis]

Originally posted by jarvoren:

And did You feel that it was due to your decision making or just luck of the draw ? Because right now i do not feel my decisions on where to go have any value at all.

Bit of both, it's a roguelike after all. But I do generally feel after this update that there are more choices to be made overall, more opportuinities to get good stuff.

Originally posted by jarvoren:

Also solo is different beast at all - my post mostly reflects my teams 4 player coop experiences.

That's fair, I have no idea what 4p is like, but unless they changed the scaling of 4 players to be made harder, the update should have the same impact for solo and mutiplayer right?

[Plumber]

Originally posted by SmolAnubis:

the update should have the same impact for solo and mutiplayer right?

4p is significantly more difficult than 1p due to the sheer quantity of enemies and stagger being scaled too harshly. 4p blood rituals practically require you to kite the edge of the arena because of the density of enemy attacks, and any bravery causing instant death without Golden Chainmail means it’s much less forgiving than in 1p.

I feel like 2p is the sweetspot and 3p is tenuously okay.

[SmolAnubis]

Originally posted by Plumber:

Originally posted by SmolAnubis:

the update should have the same impact for solo and mutiplayer right?

4p is significantly more difficult than 1p due to the sheer quantity of enemies and stagger being scaled too harshly. 4p blood rituals practically require you to kite the edge of the arena because of the density of enemy attacks, and any bravery causing instant death without Golden Chainmail means it’s much less forgiving than in 1p.

I feel like 2p is the sweetspot and 3p is tenuously okay.

I see. Then yeah, toning those down for 4 players might be required lol, it's definitely where the biggest powerspike lies in this update.

[DeMasked]

Whoever decided to have the Altar of Fates give the full reset choice of talents is quite a special person indeed. Like... multiplayer sitting there thinking about your choices while the timer continues to tick down?

Multiplayer in general isn't scaled well because higher density of mobs means more likelihood of drawing said mobs into whatever you are dealing with.

I still think that scout towers should give additional time and have that scaled with multiplayer as a way to deal with the topsyturvy balance.

[Cuestrupaster]

Yeah I mostly agree...
- This post made me realize how bad the double chest can be, if you need to make a blood ritual in order to get the key(sometimes there's no boss but a locked chest, so you can just take the key) then it's a waste of time and it took 2 spots in the map... because the ritual is very hard, it's doable, but all you get is a key to open a chest that give you 2x of one item, and if you need to roll because you get useless items then you're sunking 2 stars into it, that's super bad, plus if you don't do the boss after, which still need to be a time sink, it's even worse because you can say half of your time in the ritual was wasted.
- The new Astral Shrine are bad, when they were described I thought they would have one of the old book rewards that was: Green 2 free random upgrades, Yellow 3, and Red 4, this was the meta back in the day, do all books and upgrade everything. But now Green is just 1, seen Yellows also have just 1, and then Red I don't remember if I did any, but it's ridiculous that you can't get more than 2 free upgrades, the stars are nice but most of time not worth the time... like sure sometimes you want the stars, but if you're really desperate for them then the run is probably cooked already.
- And all the reroll is nice, but without pause? No.
- And Refugees really would benefit from being able to cancel the interaction and comeback later.

[Astral Projection]

Originally posted by Plumber:

Originally posted by SmolAnubis:

the update should have the same impact for solo and mutiplayer right?

4p is significantly more difficult than 1p due to the sheer quantity of enemies and stagger being scaled too harshly. 4p blood rituals practically require you to kite the edge of the arena because of the density of enemy attacks, and any bravery causing instant death without Golden Chainmail means it’s much less forgiving than in 1p.

I feel like 2p is the sweetspot and 3p is tenuously okay.

4 player needs some major scaling fixes.

[Iris Heart]

Multiplayer is just poorly designed. It feels like they didn't know what to do, so they cranked up both enemy numbers and enemy stats, and it feels like a freaking chore.

As of the point of this thread, I came to this forum to see if I was the only one feeling this way. These new activities dillute the activity pool so much, reducing the number of available items for which them devs didn't seem to put a protection from (as in, the location must feature this bare minimum of regular chests).

[Tenebris]

Originally posted by SmolAnubis:

I was going on the forum cause I just had the exact opposite experience, just had carmilla run end with 216 vit, 235 damage, 40 crit and 60 extra crit damage, fully stack vajra and dash charge trinket. A lot of that came from the double chests which allowed me to get the vajra and dash stack passive, and the new bosses gave 4+ cursed items along with oni mask.

There's SO MUCH more power to be gotten from just the extra boss spawns alone, the refugee camps can offer a ton of value and the double chests make making a build with just items so much more viable.

The planetarium thing does seem kinda bad, but I'm happy to have a node that upgrades your skills again.

my first point was already answerd, that solo is 3 times easier than 4p coop
my second point tho is that game surelly can still be "broken" by overbuffing yourself, but that requires a really good start to tempo on, and while in solo it may be one or two good tallents, in coop for that to happen you need quite more than that. So while yes more bosses and locked chest means more power spikes, those are really tough PoI-s, and in coop to be able to kill boss without wasting a lot of time you need other half of map to generate well, to have chests, wishing wells, grimors. If that isn't the case you are forced into doing those harder PoI-s without sufficient power, and for that loosing a lot of time

[DeMasked]

Originally posted by Iris Heart:

Multiplayer is just poorly designed. It feels like they didn't know what to do, so they cranked up both enemy numbers and enemy stats, and it feels like a freaking chore.

As of the point of this thread, I came to this forum to see if I was the only one feeling this way. These new activities dillute the activity pool so much, reducing the number of available items for which them devs didn't seem to put a protection from (as in, the location must feature this bare minimum of regular chests).

Main issue to me is the enemy numbers because that means more screen clutter and chance of enemy groups aggroing more enemy groups. It's harder to sneak things or bypass enemy groups.

Increased enemy stats is fine as you can combine your damage / stagger on enemies to quickly stun or kill them.

An increase to enemy numbers would require a larger map by like 15% or so.

[TheDream]

I definitely feel as thought the game got harder, even for solo. I'm sure if you get good luck during your run, with layout, what events you get, and what items and talents you get, with minor need for rolls. The chance to be more powerful than ever is there.. But now its even hard to figure out which way to even path at the start of maps 1 and 2, because they have mixed up the green, orange and red events or something.. like it used to be intuitive, and flow across or around the map. now feels like you get a green chest, and then right next to it is a red chest. woops, times wasted running wrong way. then you give up half of your resources for +5DMG at the refugees lol.. i love this game, but before i was pushing for max difficulty clear. now i am dying on the second difficulty on the second stage..

[MXiaa]

Thank you all for the feedback; that's deeply appreciated, especially when we change this much in a run!

Adjuments need to be made for the new content, but the whole point of this update is to change things up and avoid redundancy.

There's definitely a new learning phase: what is the most valuable at this time of a run, how to optimize the new content... But I think it's exciting! haha

Changes to magical objects and talents are planned for our next update. We cannot balance everything at once; otherwise, we wouldn't be able to keep track of what's good and what's not in the changes.

Keep the feedback coming, we're taking good notes of everything.

Cheers,