So is malaise rework basically killing the slow playstyles?

[MaxBedlam]

Apparently coming next update the malaise bar will no longer fill from getting hit, but will continuously fill up as you play. So instead of punishing you for getting hit the game is going to punish you just for daring to play it, which is quite a bs way to go about this.

Furthermore higher malaise will increase enemy damage, movement and detection speed.

All of that together seems like developers want to kill slow playstyles and force everyone to play fast which will probably make me not want to bother with this game anymore.

[MaxBedlam]

Local Jerk の投稿を引用：

GLUE の投稿を引用：

I mean, this won't stop me from buying the DLC and enjoying the game more.

And that is why you'll keep being screwed over by bad devs your whole life.

Honestly, this. We gamers and therefore customers should not only complain about things we don't like or want in a game but also show we mean it by not throwing more money at developers until they get things right.

[d.a.elliott]

Gatebase の投稿を引用：

You can always roll back. So far for me the game peaked around 1.8. Since then the weapon rework changed most of my preferred loadouts, the scroll rebalance made the game less fun in my opinion and now it seems my preferred playstyle (slow and methodical) is also on the chopping block. Really strange why they keep narrowing the viable strategies. I also played around 1.0 release and compared to 1.7/1.8 (when I returned) it seemed like the game had been hugely improved, making it more accessible and fun. Now they're going back in the other direction. A bit of a shame, but it's hard to be up in arms about the changes as long as they keep offering the old versions via the beta branches. If you don't like the changes, just don't play them.

I guess I mostly don't understand their motivation. What they're doing here reminds me a lot of what happens in competitive multiplayer games - devs endlessly tinkering with balance because the community always discovers some cheese or exploit or a certain meta takes over everything. And for a competitive multiplayer game those are really bad things. But Dead Cells is a singleplayer game. There's nothing wrong with some combos being overpowered or some playstyles being safer than others. Yes, one-handed crossbows combined with shields were overpowered. And you know what? That combo was awesome and really fun to play!

Agree wholeheartedly.

I tell everyone that peak Dead Cells was 1.8. Sure there were some exploits, but it was challenging without them. Little was more satisfying than freezing and crossbow bolting an enemy; and I loved the tension when money was tight and you were forced to choose your weapons carefully. The game always managed to entice me with a superficially better-looking weapon only to end up destroying me a biome or two later for my decision.

I guess I'm one of the few people who don't understand the drive for a "balanced" game -- I much prefer fun mixed with the blessings and curses of good and bad luck. I loved the diversity of playstyles and lack of balance across weapons in the older versions. When I wanted a challenge or something different, I'd go for it; and even when I thought I was OP, I was *still* taken down due to foolish decisions. I can't imagine Ghosts n' Goblins, for example, if Capcom felt the need to equalize the strengths and weaknesses of every weapon. Even the torch has its occasional uses and makes for a radically different game when players commit to it.

With this alpha, it feels like the same from the past couple of patches. With the balancing done and community feedback taken into account, MT get concerned because more people are succeeding, and so they artificially raise the difficulty (hello auto-malaise; hello mutation-nerfing). The old 2BC wall was a good thing -- I felt accomplished *finally* getting past it; now I get annoyed just playing the prison, which shouldn't be happening. I'm also glad I beat 5BC on 1.8, because it was a helluva lot easier 1.9 onwards. The tension regarding weapon selection is completely gone, and this increased specialization in alpha just totally turns me off.

If they really wanted to increase the challenge, then just patch what's broken (e.g. when people used to lightspeed past bosses), fix the copy save file exploits, sprinkle in some new enemies, and prevent button binding. Done.

Indeed, rollback via Legacy is the only thing to do at this point. It feels like a completely different game.

[Leviathan]

The update does kill a lot of variety. But now I'm interested in seeing what happens if I combine blood sword+Sadist Stiletto in backpack with porcupine (or viceversa).

I'm having a lot of fun in the update, but I do think it's unfair if you like being careful, in particular when you get cursed.

Even if you like going fast (like me) the randomly appearing enemies can randomly ruin anything you're doing at the moment they appear and that's a really cheap way of increasing difficulty.

[kermat_]

d.a.elliott の投稿を引用：

I guess I'm one of the few people who don't understand the drive for a "balanced" game -- I much prefer fun mixed with the blessings and curses of good and bad luck.

With this alpha, it feels like the same from the past couple of patches. With the balancing done and community feedback taken into account, MT get concerned because more people are succeeding, and so they artificially raise the difficulty (hello auto-malaise; hello mutation-nerfing).

I don't understand their motivation either but recently I've come up with the theory that they are working on adding a sort of multiplayer into the game and that's why they focus on balancing and ignore all the bugs. People have been asking Motion Twin for multiplayer (pvp, co-op) for years and the answer has always been something along the lines of "We'd like to add it some day, but it's not our current priority". Now we're seeing them focus overly on balancing and let the bugs accumulate.
My alternative explanation is that they're still stuck in the early access mentality where items were outright broken overpowered and they keep "balancing" stuff to the point that every item in the game feels like a blunt knife. And the fact that they have a whole community that constantly provides them with feedback about the state of balance/items is only sustaining that mentality. We do this either through direct feedback ("Hey MT/EE, this item is overpowered and needs nerfing") or through indirect feedback (youtube video named "This build MELTS every enemy and boss in dead cells").

d.a.elliott の投稿を引用：

If they really wanted to increase the challenge, then just patch what's broken (e.g. when people used to lightspeed past bosses)

Was anyone outside of speedrunners using this exploit? I've been told that it's a near frame-perfect input.

[d.a.elliott]

kermat_ の投稿を引用：

I don't understand their motivation either but recently...

I immediately considered the EA mentality as the driving factor, and it's disappointing to turn to a game that's out of EA after taking short 1-3 mo breaks to see what feels like an almost totally different game. Almost feels like a bait-and-switch, more analogically than anything else.

I hadn't thought of the pvp angle though. That's a really interesting theory, and if that's the case, I feel a little ho-hum about it. I didn't get into Dead Cells in the first place for pvp (or even the idea of it), and I wish they would've just built out a separate game for it even if it was 92% the same as Dead Cells.

kermat_ の投稿を引用：

Was anyone outside of speedrunners using this exploit? I've been told that it's a near frame-perfect input.

Probably not. I never tried it, but I do confess to having occasionally used the 'roll' past Conjunctivius tactic... Always wanted a good legendary and would end up getting something silly that conflicted with my intended run. I couldn't complain though -- it felt like justice was being served forcing me to pass on a legendary since I skipped the boss.

On a separate note but on the topic of post 1.8 grievances, before the economy rework, I was in the ice cave having a beautiful run with a split scroll lvl 9 giant killer. I killed an elite only for the game to taunt me... Lvl 11 Legendary Spartan Sandals, toxic cloud with each hit + 80% damage to poison + shoot arrow in front and up + burn when die + 40% burn. I have never been more tempted to take Spartan Sandals in my life, and sadly, the new rework completely negates that tension.

[kermat_]

d.a.elliott の投稿を引用：

I immediately considered the EA mentality as the driving factor, and it's disappointing to turn to a game that's out of EA after taking short 1-3 mo breaks to see what feels like an almost totally different game. Almost feels like a bait-and-switch, more analogically than anything else.

Probably not. I never tried it, but I do confess to having occasionally used the 'roll' past Conjunctivius tactic... Always wanted a good legendary and would end up getting something silly that conflicted with my intended run. I couldn't complain though -- it felt like justice was being served forcing me to pass on a legendary since I skipped the boss.

Yeah the EA mentality would explain the endless balance changes, but it does not explain to me why they'd be ignoring bugfixes. That's why I think they're hammering on the MP component.

Skipping Conjunctivius also doesn't give you scroll fragments. That's a pretty rough trade-off for me personally 😂
With Conjunctivius I usually receive enough fragments to give me 2 extra scrolls with the fragments that I had going into the fight.

[tomw]

Ironically they said "slow and steady wins the run" in the game while tweaking the game to punish slow playstyle. Guess they should remove it after the next update.

[sirslash47]

travistotle の投稿を引用：

Apparently the previous malaise system wasn't popular (?) but I never had a problem with it. At least previously malaise was a punishment for making a mistake and getting hit; now I can be playing perfectly and the malaise will still rise.

...

I understand that there were rewards for playing fast already with the timed doors, but at least previously playing fast was OPTIONAL, now it feels mandatory and I'm not a fan of that at all.

^This so much. I essentially picked a tube and got some gear after the PQ I would make up my mind to see which stat I would pick and how fast I was willing to go. They need to put the current one as a custom option and call it something like "Malaise corruption". I feel like getting punished for no reason.

Now I am going for 100% again and then play either 1.4 (cursed runs) or 1.8
I'll even throw some arbiter shenanigans of 1.2 in there.

[d.a.elliott]

Gnodab の投稿を引用：

1. You can't cheese enemies to death with Homunculus anymore, a tactic that should have never been possible on one of the highest difficulties in the game.

I have never bought this line of argument against the old malaise.

One, less than 2% of all players were finishing the game. If this was such an easy cheese tactic, why wasn't that number higher?

Two, save scrumming is a far bigger issue than using the Homunculus, for which the simplest solution would've been to simply disallow it from damaging enemies altogether, no? Once again, the devs take the sledgehammer approach to the nail.

Three, and most important for me, why does it matter? This isn't a multiplayer game. If I want to spend 5 minutes on a biome or 5 hours on a biome, who cares?

If the devs really believe that the Homunculus was a good reason to change malaise, then they're tone deaf and burying their heads in the sand. This pursuit of the perfectly balanced game is destroying it -- they should have prioritized what's fun for the player instead, something they used to do.

[Tactical Drongo]

wow...I thought motion twin already killed dead cells but it seems like they just won't stop beating the dead horse

[Leviathan]

Right now I don't think it kills slow playstyles. You can actually be extra slow and careful, if you resign to max out malaise somewhere. Then you can eat all the infected food and farm spawning enemies until you get the 60 in every biome, at least for the first half of the game, since second half is easier.

[SaiColors]

I don't think you need to play real fast or hurry, it is still manageable.

I do think it's more challenge now cause the speed up on enemies actually does something, I feel I getting hurt more often than before, this makes some slow weapon into awkward position too.

The only real bad thing for me is they nerf and change mutations too much.

[chipperguy]

sidecolors の投稿を引用：

I don't think you need to play real fast or hurry, it is still manageable.

I do think it's more challenge now cause the speed up on enemies actually does something, I feel I getting hurt more often than before, this makes some slow weapon into awkward position too.

The only real bad thing for me is they nerf and change mutations too much.

They’ve barely done anything to mutations in this update. The only ones they changed in a major way were ones that affected malaise, but that’s reasonable since this is a new system and keeping those bonus side effects around, would either a) not work because malaise isn’t on hit anymore or b) wouldn’t be balanced with the new system. The mutation changes for brutality specifically has actually made its playstyle a lot more interesting because they’ve essentially merged the tactics assassin melee playstyle into brutality and got rid of the weird pseudo-tank playstyle it had before and it works really well in my opinion. The only issue is that it leaves tactics a bit barehanded in the way of mutations, but the devs said that Tactics would be getting more mutations as the playstyles main focus for new content going forward, so that will be rectified eventually.

[SaiColors]

chipperguy の投稿を引用：

They’ve barely done anything to mutations in this update. The only ones they changed in a major way were ones that affected malaise, but that’s reasonable since this is a new system and keeping those bonus side effects around, would either a) not work because malaise isn’t on hit anymore or b) wouldn’t be balanced with the new system. The mutation changes for brutality specifically has actually made its playstyle a lot more interesting because they’ve essentially merged the tactics assassin melee playstyle into brutality and got rid of the weird pseudo-tank playstyle it had before and it works really well in my opinion. The only issue is that it leaves tactics a bit barehanded in the way of mutations, but the devs said that Tactics would be getting more mutations as the playstyles main focus for new content going forward, so that will be rectified eventually.

yeah I played tank brutality a lot before, like split sword, frantic sword, and I bring double traps a lot. now these weapon are actually harder to use for me, or at least I have to bring other skills to make up them, like the tonic.

But it's strong for skills like phaser or Infantry Grenade now, works well on all fast weapons.

[BassChamber]

Malaise mechanic needs adjustments.

I undertand the idea is to force you to play fast, but still it feels annoying because of the elite spamming combined with increased damage and speed.

Either make malaise bar increase slightly slower, or make enemies less powerful.

Also, some elites specials are very annoying also, please get rid of it.