Too much damage?

[Anon]

Feels like the game's always had a damage problem, everything hits you too hard and the dev's bandaid fix for that back before Steam was just to add that parry system.
I think it's got that one problem a lot of simpler RPGs have where defensive stats are additive so you're either invincible or getting one-shot, no in-between. (Early Access Starbound had this same exact problem, IIRC.)

Even if you're some tankity tank tank, you still take a lot more damage than your build would suggest, which unfairly buffs the ranged classes, so you're just expected to parry everything or die, which doesn't work that well in a spammy combat system like this.
I mean right now, I'm playing a semi-tanky melee character and she gets two-shot by enemies her level, full equipment and everything.

I've seen this issue in a few other games too, I'd rather not start listing them off, but really the fix is either to move away from defense stats that just lop off a certain number of points of damage and switch to percentages, or do a combo of both.
My favorite is when RPGs have both a, say, defense stat and a resistance stat, or defense and tolerance.
Basically, light armor would just have the percent resist, but heavier armor would resist both a percent AND a certain number of straight points, so if you're all-in on tanking, you could walk into a lv1 area and watch as the enemies literally can't hurt you.
Come to think of it, Fallout New Vegas did this, huh. I forgot about that.

[Anon]

Actually, well, the more I think about it, the more I feel it's less that everything does too much damage, it's more that the defense mechanics being so simple causes that whole "everything kills you in one hit OR does basically no damage to you" thing.
Go to a dungeon, get wiped ten times in a row making almost no headway, go to the shop, buy new equipment, come back and now the dungeon is babymode.
It really does remind me a lot of Early Access Starbound.

[CodeRedAlert]

Are you playing by yourself? I think enemy health and possibly damage scale with the amount of players in your party.

I play a tank too, but I haven't had the issue of being wiped over and over. I also bring consumables to keep my health up while I soak damage and keep up taunt for my friends.

[Anon]

Originally posted by CodeRedAlert:

Are you playing by yourself? I think enemy health and possibly damage scale with the amount of players in your party.

I play a tank too, but I haven't had the issue of being wiped over and over. I also bring consumables to keep my health up while I soak damage and keep up taunt for my friends.

Alone, yeah.
I know it scales up in MP, but maybe the starting point for the scaling is too high while also not scaling enough for parties?
Heh, this character, I started the diva quest, ran over there, fought the Slimeks and about half a second after the Diva's little text box showed up, I took 50-something damage while at like 45/60 and died in one hit. (Do enemies crit? I guess I should check that. After leveling up elsewhere and buying out the shop I was able to fight her no problem though.)
I guess another balancing option might be to *very slightly* increase how much def you get from strength and how much mag def you get from int, since neither stat really buffs defense much.

Still, Gunfire Reborn has the same party scaling issue.
In GR, if you play alone, you die, your only options are to sacrifice a ton of your special currency or die, keep it all, and end the run; if you play with even just one (1) other player, you can both revive each other (with a little debuff) all you want and can cover each other's weaknesses or redistribute buffs for extra strong builds, etc., so even though the scaling is there, 2-player is still vastly easier than 1-player. I imagine it's probably a bit like that in Atlyss too, probably not as extreme though.

[TakeMyLunch]

Originally posted by Anon:

Originally posted by CodeRedAlert:

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Enemies do indeed crit.
I still have a hit about an hour ago burned into my eyes where a Rageboar crit me for exactly 72 damage...
My MaxHp (which I was at the time) was.... 72!!

[sndream]

I used Fighter for melee combat in the demo and it was overall ok. After purchasing the game and playing it all afternoon, I realized that Crescent Grove's difficulty was too high for Fighter.
With multiple enemies, it's difficult to achieve a lot of blocking, and with enemies that release debuffs into the field, the benefits of blocking are low and the consequences of failing to block are severe. the amount of HP is on the low side, basically draining after a couple of attacks, and there aren't a lot of ways to recover it.
I was frustrated to find out that the best way to do this was to use a ranged weapon, so that I should have chosen Bandit or Mystic in the first place (also, I feel like there aren't a lot of Fighter-exclusive items, and I found Mystic-exclusive shields in Crescent Grove, whereas the Fighter is limited to generic shields sold in the store)

[Trouser Snivy]

Originally posted by TakeMyLunch:

Originally posted by Anon:

text

Enemies do indeed crit.
I still have a hit about an hour ago burned into my eyes where a Rageboar crit me for exactly 72 damage...
My MaxHp (which I was at the time) was.... 72!!

enemy DoT also crits, I ate a crit poison tick of 50 and was flabbergasted

[Venc Ganence]

There's a few questions:
How heavily have you specced into Vitality?
Are you keeping your gear up to level?
Are you pursuing enchantments?
Are you using all your skills?
Are you using consumables?
Are you properly managing the crowd or are you just standing in place? ATLYSS just about demands constant movement to stay alive. While this does incentivize ranged playstyles, it doesn't preclude melee, as they also have access to mobile offense.

[Killial]

My personal experience - leveling up to 25 melee rogue.
I didn't encounter too much damage gradation. All I saw was that you really need a lot of VIT, and that's it.
I ended up with a 1:1 build, ending with 40 DEX and 40 VIT, and about 230 HP (taking into account the gear HP bonus). And that's more than enough. I have over 99 healing potions gathering dust in my warehouse, because I hardly use them.
I also didn't notice that you need to constantly parry. The only monsters I actively parried were boars.
All other gameplay you just byte the crowd into a bunch, jump attack on them a few times - stun the crowd - do a couple of heavy attacks - retreat - heal through Recovery or Mist Veil (if you need a little Benny Hill while you heal) - repeat.
That's it. If you don't stand in a crowd of monsters, purposely face tanking and trying to waste your stamina by parrying in the crowd, then you almost never die even in close combat.
For enemies of your level +/- with a weapon of the appropriate level, 1 - 3 cycles per wave are enough for you to destroy everything except "mini bosses".

And yes, if you don't run into enemies that are several times higher than your level, you're fine.
If you just can't stop trying to overcome and tryhard, fighting high level enemies... well, I wish you good luck.

[Sly-Scale]

Originally posted by Anon:

(Do enemies crit? I guess I should check that.

Killers can crit; they're aptly named. There was something in the patch notes about fixing ordinary enemies critting you, so just watch out for them and... I think Precise and Magical ones can also crit you.

[Venc Ganence]

Originally posted by Sly-Scale:

Originally posted by Anon:

(Do enemies crit? I guess I should check that.

Killers can crit; they're aptly named. There was something in the patch notes about fixing ordinary enemies critting you, so just watch out for them and... I think Precise and Magical ones can also crit you.

If the enemy has a modifier in their name, they can crit. They also tend to glow a bit and be bigger than others of the same type. Not always immediately noticeable in the chaos, but easy to spot once you're looking.

[Anon]

Originally posted by Venc Ganence:

Originally posted by Sly-Scale:

Killers can crit; they're aptly named. There was something in the patch notes about fixing ordinary enemies critting you, so just watch out for them and... I think Precise and Magical ones can also crit you.

If the enemy has a modifier in their name, they can crit. They also tend to glow a bit and be bigger than others of the same type. Not always immediately noticeable in the chaos, but easy to spot once you're looking.

That's a new change as of a patch posted between when I first posted about it and when Sly-Scale replied to me. And no, it's not all modifiers, just a handful.
Good thing too, I don't think anything under level 10 should crit for 70 damage like some of the things I've been hit by.

[riesenwildschwein]

ARPG
lrn 2 dodge
Just dont get hit
Slot Bunjars to heal after making a mistake. Also get Divine and the default heal skill for free healing. You can get away with being hit a lot if you are good at healing.

[Anon]

Originally posted by riesenwildschwein:

ARPG
lrn 2 dodge
Just dont get hit
Slot Bunjars to heal after making a mistake. Also get Divine and the default heal skill for free healing. You can get away with being hit a lot if you are good at healing.

I just feel that you shouldn't have to dash around like a ninja or perfect parry every attack if you're building entirely to be a tank, but really the only tanking in this game is pretty much just HP tanking, which ends up being kinda dull in a game that only has one (?) source of % healing, which funnily enough is one of your starting spells.
I've been developing too many hand/wrist issues the last couple years to really want to play super fast paced games these days, it's starting to really bring out my love of tanking in games.

Dodging works for everyone, but it's a bit too much of a "panic button" IMO, everyone dashes everywhere, there's really no penalty for spamming it, and it gets you out of the way of basically everything.
I would've balanced it so heavier armor nerfs dashing but you get damage res % (and knockback resist) while light armor buffs your dash but doesn't help much for defense.
Plus it's just weird to try to build a wall of meat tank and just have them zooming around the map like that.

Blocking, I don't know, it really just feels like it was tacked-on and never finished. Regular blocking usually just breaks in 2-3 hits, and the block threshold isn't nearly high enough to really be relevant at all, and the only viable way to make good use of them is to spec into shields specifically as a warrior, anyone else it's just a waste since you don't need a shield to parry.
Heck, blocking is so much of a cobbled job that parrying WAS the "fix" for it to try to make it viable, but that just made blocking into a "whoops, you failed to parry, here's your safety net, try not to break it!" thing.

Parrying works great in small fights. One-on-one is boring because it's super easy to tell when they're about to attack and it's easy to just parry everything, and small groups of like 2-4 are fine, but bigger groups make it unviable because the purple glow tends to get buried or disappear and you're better off just dodging, especially with how big some enemies get, turning the whole screen into a mess of vertices and colors.

[riesenwildschwein]

Originally posted by Anon:

I've been developing too many hand/wrist issues the last couple years to really want to play super fast paced games these days, it's starting to really bring out my love of tanking in games.

I am sorry to hear that.
Try to look for the skilll scroll Divine. It's in the grove and a vendor on the wall of stars carries it. This is a second classless healing spell that is better than the starting heal. Mystic has another exclusive heal skill but less defensive gear than warriors.
Otherwise, this game might not be for you then.

[Higuera]

Originally posted by Anon:

everything hits you too hard and the dev's bandaid fix for that back before Steam was just to add that parry system.

I will note, i believe this was more a fix for "Block is mostly useless", actually :V

Before the update, Blocking would be good for maybe an attack or three, before you'd run out of Stamina and (unsurprisingly) get destroyed as you can no longer block or dash.

Pretty rarely used it pre-update, made the Catacombs FAR more doable with far fewer deaths/runbacks once it was added however.

Originally posted by Anon:

Do enemies crit? I guess I should check that.

YES. Yes they did (at least until recently)

I know for a fact this lead to some wacky shenanigans like 100+ damage critical hits, which would be a 1-2 shot for anyone who didnt invest heavily into Vitality.


Also notably, you bring up equipment:
I believe it's in general how STRONG the Equipment's stat bonuses are, relative to your own base stats.

Using my Lv25 Fighter for example (All Killer Equipment, Jadetrout, Coldgeist Blade and Rustweary Shield, Stats allocated to 60 Str 20 Vit):
(Base/Equipped)
Health - 134/179
Mana - 33/46
Stamina - 41/57

Attack Power - 61/169
Dex Power - 2/14
Phys Crit% - 0.03%/11.09%

Mgk Power - 1/14
Mgk Crit% - 0.02%/0.22%

Defense - 0/75
Mgk Defense - 0/32


About 50% more Health, 50%~ more Stamina, almost 3x the Base Damage, ALL the Crit Power, and a pretty hefty amount of Defense.

Originally posted by riesenwildschwein:

Originally posted by Anon:

I've been developing too many hand/wrist issues the last couple years to really want to play super fast paced games these days, it's starting to really bring out my love of tanking in games.

I am sorry to hear that.
Try to look for the skilll scroll Divine. It's in the grove and a vendor on the wall of stars carries it. This is a second classless healing spell that is better than the starting heal. Mystic has another exclusive heal skill but less defensive gear than warriors.
Otherwise, this game might not be for you then.

There's also Siphon Leech, which is pretty strong as well. You can pick that up in the Catacombs Chests.