Thoughts on difficulty 4+ scaleing

[Demon Swords]

I started playing sometime between Dec 4 and Dec 10, and I found several balance issues and weird design choices and thought of some solutions. (I just haven't unlocked all the items / craft-able upgrades so was pushing off a post.) A partial solution to one of the problems was having more difficulty options... So how does the new difficulty options fare?

Why was more difficulty options needed in the first place?:
- 1) The game's highest difficulty was way to easy to beat considering how much more meta progression I had left to unlock after my first difficulty 3 win (and still do.)
- 2) Because of point one the only thing challenging left would be to get as far as possible in endless of Difficulty 3, try to beat difficulty 3 on every Gacha fighter, or just mindlessly grind until everything was unlocked.
- 3) Many Gacha fighters have small flat stat boosts that aren't very meaningful when considering how much starting stats you can buy and how easy it is to max some of these stats in a run, especially a Wave 21+ run. So this point removed the beat dif 3 with every gacha fighter. (Worse 2 offenders is Charlotte and disco cat that both have tiny stat boosts and massive negative stats, and nothing unique about them game-play wise besides being extremely squishy for no reason.) A partial fix for this would be to incentives more shorter hard runs (since shorter run = less scaling. Less scaling = more difference bonus / reduced starting stats are.)

Does difficulty 4+ solve the above:
- Since I wanted more difficulties and an infinite difficulty was added, on paper, it fits perfectly. Unfortunately a bunch of weird design choices was added in as well. (as a side note, the lowered stats from meta upgrades in the patch noted, does help a little with making Gacha fighter stat changes be slightly more meaningful,)

Difficulty 4+ issues:
- Random Gacha Fighter: The awkward thing about this is that many players aren't going to have everything unlocked before trying to do difficulty 4+, so your going to have a chance to get a character who incentives the weakest build for your current unlocks. (like me who haven't unlocked any good magic item / upgrade yet, and was forced to play the demon mage lady you start with by default for my difficulty 4 run.) Its also awkward that Poison and invocation builds each have only 2 Gacha fighters that incentives these builds so you have much lower odds of those builds over physical or magical ones. (though with how little stats gacha fighters tend to give and with only a few having -invocation, you could run a poison or invocation build on just about any gacha fighter.) The only good thing about random fighter selection is that it fits thematically with the random pulls that Gacha games have.

- It costs money and blue coins to try: I think to some extent having a cost to try a difficulty 4+ run is necessary so players won't just restart runs if they get a Gacha fighter they hate, but the cost is too much. When I beat difficulty 4 (and stopped without endless, because I didn't feel like doing it this time) i got slightly over 6000$ (including from leveling up) and some blue coins. Which was barley left me with enough to play difficulty 5's cost of 5000$ and 3 blue coins. The main use of spending $ for increased starting stats is to be able to complete harder difficulties, but If I'm spending almost everything i gained from difficulty 4 to face difficulty 5 (and presumably keeps happening for future difficulties), then when are you supposed to scale more to be able to face the harder difficulties? Eventually you'll either lose / the scaling money cost of difficulty 4+ will be to high, forcing you to play Difficulty 3 to get enough to try difficulty 4+ again. The really awkward thing is that If I can beat difficulty 4+ with a random fighter then obviously I can beat difficulty 3 with a fighter of my choosing (so Why should I need to grind the easy difficulty 3 to be able to face difficulty 4+ again or gain enough money to buy meta upgrades before trying again.)

How I would change things:
- 1) Reduce the cost to try difficulty 4+. (so players that can beat difficulty 4+ don't have to play difficulty 3 to be able to play more difficulty 4+.)

- 2, Ver A): If you want to keep random Gacha fighter, then rebalance them so there aren't any extremely bad ones. Might also be a good idea to give some fighters incentive to run multiple builds / hybrid in case you haven't unlocked enough to run their primary build and randomly get them. (so for fighters that already have + to physical, magic, or Invocation could also get an equal or slightly lower bonus to 1+ of the other 2. When I finally unlock all the items, I'll make a new post going in-depth about rebalancing the Gacha Fighters.)

- 2, Ver B) Just remove the random Gacha fighter part.

- Optional 3, Partial Rework: A faster difficulty gain rate and you can no longer do wave 21+ on difficulty 4+. This Way Difficulty 4+ is more of a Challenge for how intense a 20 wave challenge you can beat, and difficulty 3 wave 21+ is more of a challenge for how long of a run you can last.

[MrDB]

Totally agreed about the cost.
Current one make no sense for me.
We already got new achievement for having all meta upgrades that will require dozens hours of grinding.
Would be nice if new difficulties could help to EARN more gold/coins, not the opposite.

I tried dif5, got Madline aka the weakest fighter and lose without chances.
Imho something like 500 gold would be ok price for participation in this lottery. Maybe even 1000. Not thousands + rare coins.