Achievement for hard mode completion?

[Onoda]

Any achievements for beating bosses on hard mode or high custom difficulty modes?

Also, I'm interested in how other players have set their custom difficulty parameters, especially those aiming for maximum XP modifier.

Cheers

[Zunde]

No Difficulty based Achievements as far as I have seen.

Personally my difficulty is set at 2x For break and recovery 1.5 for enemy health and damage/attack rate at default for 2.5x fragment drops.

[VonFirflirch]

None. It's very much part of the "Play on Hard or above if you want to spend 10 hours more than anyone else. And unlock concept art faster."
I kind of miss the era of proper rewards for beating a game's Hard Mode and whatnot.

Aside from enemy HP, I increased most parameters until I could get the 2.5 bonus.
Attack Strength: 1.5 (the rats were terrifying)
Break/status effects: 1.9 (I could still break bosses once, usually, I really wonder what it's like on Normal, or even Easy settings.)
Recovery speed: 2
Attack frequency: 1.5

Even only at 1.5 damage, some boss moves just... erase you. I could have turned the "insta-kill" setting on without much difference, at times x)

[Belforks]

i left hp at its normal 1x cause i did not want to spend twice as long attacking a boss, enemy damage was 1.3x and the others were maxed out to get the 2.5 max bonus.

[Mr. September]

I skimmed through the achievements earlier, and none are tied to difficulty as far as I'm aware.

The fragments you get are for Extra content, and nothing else. Experience is another parameter that isn't affected by difficulty as far as I can tell.

My difficulty settings for reference:

Maximum HP: 1.0
Attack Strength: 1.6
Break and Status Effect Resistance: 1.7
Break and Status Effect Recovery Speed: 2
Enemy Attack Frequency: 2

Disable Enemy Attack Tells: On

Fragment Bonus: 2.5 (max)

TL;DR: There are no achievements related to difficulty settings (yet?), and increasing the difficulty only makes Extra content easier to get.

[Zunde]

Originally posted by VonFirflirch:

None. It's very much part of the "Play on Hard or above if you want to spend 10 hours more than anyone else. And unlock concept art faster."
I kind of miss the era of proper rewards for beating a game's Hard Mode and whatnot.

Aside from enemy HP, I increased most parameters until I could get the 2.5 bonus.
Attack Strength: 1.5 (the rats were terrifying)
Break/status effects: 1.9 (I could still break bosses once, usually, I really wonder what it's like on Normal, or even Easy settings.)
Recovery speed: 2
Attack frequency: 1.5

Even only at 1.5 damage, some boss moves just... erase you. I could have turned the "insta-kill" setting on without much difference, at times x)

Even with enemy damage set to default one specific boss in the game would straight up kill me in a single hit if I did not correctly dodge the "Nothing personal kid" sword draw.

Damage in this game is weirdly mean honestly.

[Raccoon Citizen]

None. The difficulty sliders are strictly for "Extras" shop and challenge. Choose whatever you want. I played on Hard preset (even though I usually view difficulties that just bump numbers to be boring). Honestly, I felt like by the end of it I should've just picked Normal since that's the intended settings, especially with certain bits of the game having weirdly high damage. But it was fine for the most part.

Pick whatever you want.

[Raccoon Citizen]

Originally posted by VonFirflirch:

None. It's very much part of the "Play on Hard or above if you want to spend 10 hours more than anyone else. And unlock concept art faster."

That's actually very accurate since I read that some finished it in 15 or a little more. Ender Lilies can be finished in 15-20h too. And I 100% it in 27h lol (probably less since I left it sitting for a bit to do something)

Originally posted by Zunde:

Even with enemy damage set to default one specific boss in the game would straight up kill me in a single hit if I did not correctly dodge the "Nothing personal kid" sword draw.

Damage in this game is weirdly mean honestly.

It is, isn't it? lol, I swear sometimes it gave me the feeling "Is this balanced? Should I change to normal?"

[Onoda]

Decided to just max all the sliders. Always a little sad when I finish a game like this and prefer to struggle through it and enjoy the learning process. Honestly, when a game has such nice art as this, it's a terrible shame the whole thing is over with too soon.

Same story with Blasphemous when that came out, I found this item about 10 minutes in that prevented the use of healing flasks and just kept it on the entire way through. It's become a tradition of mine to make a metroidvania game better by doing things like that, just wanted to know if there was an achievement here.

[Zunde]

To be fair though. There is no enemy contact damage and your dodge has insane I-frames outside of your dodge so one could say that the damage is scaled around that factor.

Still does not feel good to lose 60-80% of your health bar in a single attack. Especially when your heal is only healing about 30% of your health bar.

I need to look through my Relics and such to see if i have anything to boost healing as it's getting quite difficult and heals just are not going far enough.

[Onoda]

Originally posted by Mr. September:

I skimmed through the achievements earlier, and none are tied to difficulty as far as I'm aware.

The fragments you get are for Extra content, and nothing else. Experience is another parameter that isn't affected by difficulty as far as I can tell.

My difficulty settings for reference:

Maximum HP: 1.0
Attack Strength: 1.6
Break and Status Effect Resistance: 1.7
Break and Status Effect Recovery Speed: 2
Enemy Attack Frequency: 2

Disable Enemy Attack Tells: On

Fragment Bonus: 2.5 (max)

TL;DR: There are no achievements related to difficulty settings (yet?), and increasing the difficulty only makes Extra content easier to get.

I'll admit I've been too cowardly to disable the attack tells, yet. Going to experiment.

[Mr. September]

Originally posted by Onoda:

I'll admit I've been too cowardly to disable the attack tells, yet. Going to experiment.

Doesn't change anything apart from removing the red flash before enemies attack. You can already tell what move they are going to pull depending on the animation, though I admit some attacks are pretty fast and you can't react before you see them a few times. Good thing is that many attacks are shared across enemies, so once you learn one, you know how to deal with it when another enemy uses it.

[Onoda]

Originally posted by Mr. September:

Originally posted by Onoda:

I'll admit I've been too cowardly to disable the attack tells, yet. Going to experiment.

Doesn't change anything apart from removing the red flash before enemies attack. You can already tell what move they are going to pull depending on the animation, though I admit some attacks are pretty fast and you can't react before you see them a few times. Good thing is that many attacks are shared across enemies, so once you learn one, you know how to deal with it when another enemy uses it.

You're right. Had the first boss down to a hair and just disabled healing as well. Only thing I'm not confident with is the insta-death option. Not going to be ready for that even after I finish this playthrough. Determination might be one of my strong points, but concentration isn't.

Hoping the dev sees the thread and decides to chime in and perhaps add achievement(s) for all the players who seem to really enjoy the extra challenge stuff.

[VonFirflirch]

Originally posted by Zunde:

Even with enemy damage set to default one specific boss in the game would straight up kill me in a single hit if I did not correctly dodge the "Nothing personal kid" sword draw.

N°7, right? That's funny to me, maybe I didn't look thoroughly enough, but I've seen a bunch of threads on the Rats and the Iron Witch (which gave me trouble too, but really aren't nerf-worthy, IMO), yet, hardly anyone talks about the effective instant-kill on the FOURTH boss of a GAUNTLET. x)

Originally posted by Raccoon Citizen:

And I 100% it in 27h lol (probably less since I left it sitting for a bit to do something)

Yeah, I'm at like 28, myself. 3 of these were from Tower, alone. x)

Originally posted by Zunde:

There is no enemy contact damage

I wonder if I'm alone in wishing it were still there? Some enemies feel rather ill-equipped without it.

[Mr. September]

Originally posted by VonFirflirch:

I wonder if I'm alone in wishing it were still there? Some enemies feel rather ill-equipped without it.

I think it only makes sense for some enemies. Like the electrified Homunculi in Declan's Estate. I'm fine with it being gone. One less hassle to deal with while I focus on surviving, because I don't think area denial is fun. Also, I don't think contact damage would have worked well when we can crank enemy damage up while also having Relics and status effects that can further increase the damage you take.

I'd very much have enemies hurl projectiles that have lingering effects than have to deal with having to avoid touching them. If anything, area denial due to contact damage is a big issue in a lot of metroidvanias. Even more so when the enemy designs seemingly don't match the fact that they damage you on contact.

[VonFirflirch]

Originally posted by Mr. September:

Even more so when the enemy designs seemingly don't match the fact that they damage you on contact.

Obviously, good design is required for it to work. But like, to me, enemies are supposed to be obstacles. What good is an obstacle that you can just run past, you know?
Area denial makes sense to me, I really do not see the problem, if the enemies block you, that's an extra reason to engage with them: so you can proceed further.
And when you're finally strong enough to blast through them with hardly any time wasted (like Shinesparks and whatnot), that's all the more satisfying.

Agree to disagree? I figure I'm not going to change your mind on this x)