Loot and balance pain. - time to give up.

[Nodor]

My issues:

Reflect mobs suck.

Feeling utterly locked into playing with my first three sigils because I can't easily level sigils if I switch.

Dying so often I can't get the purple and legendary loot I need to make the spells.. that will enable me to stop dying. I just spent 3 hours farming for new components.. and got nothing useful.

The demons with the slow are devastatingly hard compared to everything else.

Game has become unplayable due to difficulty spike.

[Nick]

1) Block right before the spell impacts - you galvanize the reflected damage.

2) Player problem more than game problem. You believe the minor bonuses from leveling are worth not unfocusing, so you choose to ignore the other sigils. Welcome to Lichdom? By the way, common misconception - you can in fact unequip your sigils. As long as you don't touch that checkmark box all of your progress is saved.

(If you still unequip sigils and lose focus, either you haven't updated the game or you pirated the beta version).

3a) Get better? Blink and block. Use terrain. Set traps. Change your tactics. If you keep doing the same thing over and over you'll never get any better.

3b) I've beaten this game using whites, greens, and blues. Purple items make things easier, but they don't make up for a lack of skill, which you'll only get through practice. Battlemage is very different from other FPS and action RPGs, and relying on left click spam and doing nothing else will probably get you killed often.

4) Block the missiles. Everything in the game can be blocked, even Banshee screams.


tl;dr learn to block

[jaqueline lorn]

or agile shield dodge everything

[Nodor]

1. I don't have the reflexes to block more than 50% ofl the time. So I switched to Agile shields.
2. 90% of my damage right now is from my charged Nova's from my Agile shield blinks. One control, one to add mastery, and one to blow them to bits. Yes this helps dodge, but it is disorientating. - Which means that inevitably, one of the demon slows lands and then I am instagibbed.

The game is beatable, playable etc. I can go back to the middle of zone 4, play through the end to get the bonus to random dropped loot, get to the sands on zone 5 then teleport back and repeat this process until a stubbron agile shield with 3 augments and the needed upgrades, like the 2-3 augments with the +30% shield health each drop so I can survive..

However, the grind gets old.

[Noodle Leg]

use necromancy and almost everything becomes a steamroll.

[adanedhels]

I agree Nodor I am sick of garbage nova crap dropping. I have more trap and nova drops then anything else and honestly they are the least useful items I can have for my play style, give me a lob or missle more often. When you have a randomized loot system thats fine as long as one type of item doesn't drop to the detrement of more useful items.. Also rays have WAY to short of range, they are completely useless as you have to let enemies close to much for them to be useful. I think Necro would be great Noodle Leg but getting to the point that that is a option to upgrade is annoying. I am a bit frustrated and the game becomes a huge grind when you don't understand the spell building system. I find using ice to freeze, fire to damage, and delirium to control is nice, BUT some regular enemies get random crits and there is no way to heal which means, back to zero upgraded item drop and back to my problem of no good loot for the types of spells I need.

Please Devs at least give those of us who aren't great at building spells OR have gotten a TON of unlucky drops to lower the difficulty or hell throw in some cheat codes. For those that will complain about that, shut up obviously you have no problems, some of us want to experience the story and see the end.

[[OTG] Idemus]

im not sure what you mean by getting to the point where you can upgrade necro, i wouldn't worry about leveling cause the bonuses are neglegable and if you mean slotting abilities, a white necro shape is better than any other imho...I kinda thought it wasn't all that useful when i first got it until i figured out how to use it...

How necro works: the not so obvious stuff.
when you cast a necro spell on something your minions attack it, you know this. when you crit and it dies, you get a minion, you know this as well. But what was not obvious to me at first, is when you are casting a "destruction" augmented spell, you have a good chance of getting a damage dealing minion. If you cast a "control" necro spell, you get a control minion. Lastly, there is mastery. The mastery guy is a badass. He teleports around and stacks up mastery, obsorbing a good amount of damage in the process from what i can see.

How i use my necro minions, is, i have everything speced for mastery. I have ice and fire as my other two sigils. If i don't have minions out yet, or if i do, doesn't really effect my play much. I walk into an area, hose everything down with an ice ray, pop a few enemies with necro crits, then blow them up with fire. Pretty soon i have an army of mastery slinging, teleporting nightmare tanks and I really don't have to worry as much about getting hit or taking damage after that. I usually just run around and find enemies that have a group of 3 or 4 skelies knocking em around, throw one fireball at them and move on to the next.

The game has gone from a very challenging grind to fairly trivial in difficulty. I went from dying constantly to making through two stages only losing my shield pips twice...once was a reflective mob, the other was a miniboss that one-shot me from 3 pips (i still don't know how that happened). I can't recommend necro enough if you are struggling.

[LupisVolk]

Dragonball Z Abridged taught me the best lesson here. "DODGE!!!!!/or block/blink"

[Omega]

*SPOILER ALERT*

Ever since I got a necro missle with 75% apocalyptic chance, this game has been a breeze. You crit with a necro missle, get the apocalyps, kill the guy, then get a 2k hp shield (about 2 pips on a tiwer 4~5 shield). Anyone struggling should try that. There are a bunch oof other useful combos too. I feel like this game is only hard for those that do not know how to get creative with crafting.

[Necro]

to me it sounds like your not spellcrafting properly, sure you may get a lot of novas..but u can use those novas to upgrade your shield ro your missile to a new rarity. Also - killiong the demon in the tutorial drops 2 legendaries - time to practice your dodging ;p

[IveGotNoIdea]

I have just beaten that green pilar thing that spawns mobs, the result?
1 Lob
3 Nova
0 Missiles
Guess which type of an attack I use the most? Yes, Missiles... For every missile in my inventory I get five or six Novas.

My guess is that the game drops all types of shapes equaly so for 100 drops it will be 33.3 targeted, 33.3 AOE and 33.3 ... Novas. The problem with this is quite visible - Targeted is split between Missile, Ray and Lob so the 33.3 drops will be split between those three causing on average one missile per three novas.

[adanedhels]

Thats the truth IveGotNoldea. The problem with having three types of main attack means you get a ton more limited use items (novas). And Necro I did not get 2 legendaries when I killed the demon. Also using novas to upgade rarity is fine and good. but it DOES NOTHING to add the ability to use 2 or more augments (which is where the best upgrades come into play). I keep getting level 3 (I'm in the ice caves) missles and lobs with only 1 stupid augment instead of the 7 novas I have with 2....

Thats just stupid and it makes it frustrating to look and see items that if they were something useful would make it possible for me to create some damn good spells. Instead I'm dealing with being a gimped mage due to crappy loot drops.

I think they should have made specific items drop from specific monsters to nullify the randomness of getting any good loot. I feel like I'm playing D3 before they fixed the loot drop rate and instead wanted to make you buy crap on the real money auction house.... except you don't even have that ability here....instead you can build yourself into a corner by not understanding the spell system (which I didnt when I started) or be forced there by crappy limited loot drops... I mean come on a legendary missle that only has one augment? My purple missle that has 2 augments gets me 183 hp of damage a cast base... nothing I change on that stupid legendary missle makes it above a 155 due to the inability to add more augments... I've got rays with more augments, but those things are useless due to limited range. I don't have a lob currently to switch to and I like having at least one tracking missle on hand for long range encounters with enemies while I do doge around a lot.

[Eden]

Originally posted by IveGotNoIdea:

My guess is that the game drops all types of shapes equaly so for 100 drops it will be 33.3 targeted, 33.3 AOE and 33.3 ... Novas. The problem with this is quite visible - Targeted is split between Missile, Ray and Lob so the 33.3 drops will be split between those three causing on average one missile per three novas.

Yeah, that's certainly how it felt to me. However, I didn't keep track and it may very well just be confirmation bias making me think that. With a strategic shield novas were not a huge priority to upgrade, whereas my targetted spells were key. So maybe I just tended to notice situations where I got no targetted shapes but plenty of novas. Still, my inventory really is full of novas...

[Necro]

i turned novas into a weapon, using charged blink casts the nova so i use that as my crowd control. also if u have many novas just use them to upgrade your missiles ;p

[Shrinkshooter]

Originally posted by Nodor:

Reflect mobs suck.

No denying that. It's by far the worst mutator.

Originally posted by Nodor:

Feeling utterly locked into playing with my first three sigils because I can't easily level sigils if I switch.

Yes, you CAN, for one thing, and for another, you don't need to.

Originally posted by Nodor:

I just spent 3 hours farming for new components.. and got nothing useful.

You don't need blues and purples only in order to craft uber spells. You can take your lower spells and synth them upwards to compensate. Also, I've received plenty of blues and purples with a rarity modifier of only 1, enough to get by, and I can just make more if not. Finally, if you're dying that often, you're either doing something wrong, OR you've hit one of those spike areas.

Originally posted by Nodor:

The demons with the slow are devastatingly hard compared to everything else.

They actually aren't. You need to either dodge or block; they have very big tells, and their attacks take at least a second to hit you, minimum. If you have proper timing, they're easy to manage; just wait until you need to fight three at once later on, or when you start encountering the freaking insta-hit lightning demons in Old Zasad.

Originally posted by Nodor:

Game has become unplayable due to difficulty spike.

Hyperbole. I agree about the difficulty spike -- the huge desert sequence where you're walking over giant sand dunes in a storm is ridiculously harder than anything before it, and you get all sort of horrendous mobs thrown at you -- but it isn't unplayable, for sure. I just hate that it seems the game is either too easy or too difficult depending on where you are.

[Djoser]

Well this is my strategy:

1. Agile shield ("cant touch me").
2. Kinesis mastery (anchor an enemy)
3. Fireball (overkill makes almost every enemy "oneshot target")

Use control + dmg, or mastery debuff + dmg... not only dmg.