Recharging health packs at warp pads

[Shifty]

This shouldn't have been removed. Reducing the amount of time wasted farming health kits in the first couple of areas in the north zone was the #1 quality of life feature introduced in the invincibility patch.

On top of that, it made the healing upgrades a genuinely viable thing to spend gearbits on. Pre-patch, healing was sparse enough that upgrading your healing capacity was more or less pointless. That changes entirely when you have an easy way to obtain health kits without going through a laborious grinding process.

[PandaXs1]

Originally posted by ZeroFA:

Originally posted by 糟糕! Panda-s1:

I play hyper light drifter 'cause it has challenging combat, and secrets that reward careful exploration. I don't play it because I enjoy farming for health packs repetitively :/

Have you tried carefully exploring that crystal trap room just south of the teleport in the West Area? That place relies a bit too much on luck and reflex. And when you get to the end of the it, you're trapped in a room with a cliff on one end and about two dozen dirks with those crystal trap spiders with literally zero warning.

By the time you've processed what was happening, you're either careening off the cliff side taking unnecessary damage (because dashing), or you get caught in one of those crystal spiders and take multiple hits from all the dirks around you. This is especially worse in NG+ when you only have two HP bars and can't switch to a different tunic.

But that's me just ranting about that particular area.

As for the topic at hand; in just the regular game, the absence of HP kit refills didn't bother me because you at least had 5HP to start with. On an NG+, its inclusion helped with the pacing and alleviated some of the frustration I had with the level design and its implementation of the chain-dash.

I actually got through that area on my first try, lol.

But in order to get to it I still had to discover the invisible platforms, and then had to hack a crystal to find a hidden path.

Originally posted by OneBlowingInTheWInd:

Look, just make healkits recharge ONLY at the warp point in TOWN.

this is probably the best compromise. I understand there's health kits everywhere, but it's common sense to stock up before setting out on actual exploration.

has anyone proposed the warp pads only giving 3 health kits?

[jep]

Originally posted by iamdopeasfcuk:

Am I the only one that never seemed to run out of health kits? There were so many in the game itself and some rooms had 2 or more steps away from eachother lol. Also the health kit upgrade let you store more kits, so you wouldn't have to scrounge around and look for them, since you had more places to store them.

Yeah, this left me scratching my head as well. All I can chalk it up to is people using a playstyle that the game discourages. I'm guessing they're going in and getting in monsters faces and not backing down, therefore taking more damage. The game definitely encourages stealth, attack/dash back/attack/dash back, pulling individual enemies to you from range rather than fighting groups, etc. I play it like that, and even with my limited skills filling up health packs generally only means going a couple screens out of my way if I've been in a really tough fight (a boss or a big pack of enemies that either you just can't lure away or that I screwed up on.)

[Shifty]

Originally posted by 糟糕! Panda-s1:

Originally posted by OneBlowingInTheWInd:

Look, just make healkits recharge ONLY at the warp point in TOWN.

this is probably the best compromise. I understand there's health kits everywhere, but it's common sense to stock up before setting out on actual exploration.

has anyone proposed the warp pads only giving 3 health kits?

Limiting the recharge to the pad in town isn't really a solution, because you're still wasting time watching two lengthy warp animations before you can actually get back to where you were.
Yes, you're wasting less time than you would doing the farming run, but the fact that you're wasting any time at all makes it an essentially pointless change.

I think someone suggested limiting the amount of packs refilled earlier in the thread, and I'd absolutely take that. It retains the viability of the health upgrades, lessens the likehood of the "i have one block of life and the next room is a nightmare" situations that stop you dead (cough east zone ambush cough), and also doesn't outmode the health kits that you find in the wild.
It's a good solution.

[jep]

Originally posted by ZeroFA:

Have you tried carefully exploring that crystal trap room just south of the teleport in the West Area? That place relies a bit too much on luck and reflex. And when you get to the end of the it, you're trapped in a room with a cliff on one end and about two dozen dirks with those crystal trap spiders with literally zero warning.

By the time you've processed what was happening, you're either careening off the cliff side taking unnecessary damage (because dashing), or you get caught in one of those crystal spiders and take multiple hits from all the dirks around you. This is especially worse in NG+ when you only have two HP bars and can't switch to a different tunic.

I feel like this is an example where if you take the brute force route rather than the finesse route, the game intentionally punishes you.

I won't boast on getting through it on my first try like another poster, as it did take me several to get the dash timing down. But what I did do was stop and look at what the developers might have put in to make my life easier. I found that the bottom walls were actually no-trap zones. You dash through the first tiny section (mostly easy, though sometimes I'd screw up and have to heal). Then you dash to the bottom wall in the second section and hug it as you go east. That only takes two dash presses in a straight line down so it's pretty hard to screw up.

The tricky part is the third section. You have to dash northeast, then west and then south. But not all the way around the bend. You just need to dash down to the bottom of the wall that's at the northmost point. There you can rest and heal. Then hug the wall and walk the west. Another fairly easy section where you only need to dash straight down a few presses. Then you're in a no-trap zone where you can heal again if you need to. You're even given a little bit of leeway in that if you get smacked at the end you'll likely roll into the safe zone. After healing at the north bit, you should be fine.

Then you dash to the bottom again (a single dash button press), where there is a safe zone along the wall. It's a little tricky in that you have to pay attention and notice the very last section of the corridor is NOT safe at the bottom of the wall and has a spike trap. But this is GOOD! You're going to use that to do your dirty work. Go to the end of the safe zone and a bunch of monsters will follow you. Just walk east along the safe wall and they'll get creamed by all the spikes (they're not smart enough to hug the wall). Go back and lure some more. When you get to the point where they're not coming, throw some bombs or take potshots at them with the pistol. Once you have their numbers down, you can just press the dash button once to go into the room.

I only wound up having to fight two or three of them, which was a piece of cake. And then just go get your stuff and press the secret switch and take the platforms back to the entrance.

I found it challenging, because I'm not great at the dash. But once I sat down and really studied it, I found a way and just had to take maybe 10-12 more tries to make my fingers do what my mind wanted them to. This is what I love about this game. Many times there are seemingly impossible challenges that you think are impossible. But once you puzzle them out, they become a lot more doable.

The football midget, on the other hand, is a bastard and I hate him.

[...]

I feel like the ability to recharge healthpacks isn't needed at all. Though I have yet to try it, I like the new patch fixes. Only a couple times I recall wandering to stock up. Seriously, they are everywhere and you only can hold up to 3 at first. That ain't grinding.

For those who are saying that the town should only restock health kits - that's silly. You could just warp right back to the other warp point if you've unlocked it. You might as well have them all restore health kits.

What if each time you encountered the dog man or the story character in each area (for the first time), or even monoliths, your kits are restored? It's a one time recharge that happens in each area when you discover these things. Continuously being able to recharge your kits from a waypoint just seems too easy.

[Pnume]

Yep this one was a good idea. No impact on difficulty.

Lowering the healing time and invicibilty frame...not so much.

[nessed]

This probably isn't all related totally to the topic, but It starts to feel like this is somekind of online competitive game that needs very carefully thought-through balancing afterwards even tho none of the things that people are whining about being too hard or frustrating in the game (like this farming health), are not big issues.
Hello 2016, how did we come to this?

For example in many games especially in the past there actually is some ridicilous grinding that is very understandably frustrating and takes a lot of time by just repeating something. But it's also a developement choice to do it like that, and sometimes it's even quite fun. For example in some jrpg's, if the mood is right fo that kind of play.

Since the grinding is so minimal in this game, it just makes it better. For example if comparing to old Zelda games, it was fine and fun when you prepared to go to a next dungeon by searching upgrades or farming things a bit to get full everything.
In HLD there is very little of that content where you feel like you are preparing to go next dungeon, it just adds a bit more of that adventure feel. Unlike warping systematicly to home to get full health and then warp back to the start of a dungeon.

The stuff that has been happening in patches by requests of more casual side of players is slowly stripping the game a bit worse state from the original that at least I felt had great balance, and wans't really hard but gave just a little bites of oldschool videogame elements, but mostly felt modern intended. Never ended up frustrating. (maybe only in few fights when concentration gave up, but that's also great when noticing that every frustration comes from my own lack of concentration.

This all also gives a feel that the developer(s) aren't yet sure of the final direction. -_-
Fix the bugs and issues that makes a player getting frustrated cause of it's out of their control. (I can't think of anything major myself. Only that I wished the game to be longer)
Don't fix something that isn't broken.

This "issue" that many has been talking about as a serious downer to them, is part of the damn adventure. If it's farming, these guys probably doesn't even know what farming is or can be, and if it feels like waste of time in this game, I don't know what they have been playing as "videogames" before. And I don't know why they are even playing this kind of game in the first place? What were you expecting ppl? The farming is so freaking minimal compared to other games, and these kind of elements also make HLD to feel like a videogame it clearly tries to represent.

Here's my previous post, that explains more about the importance of these little features some of the ppl want's to be changed:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/257850/discussions/0/361787186436555075/#c361787186439749468

brb puking.