Best difficulty to play it on?

[Galidar]

Started the game on hard and just recently bumped it up to expert. Not sure which difficulty I want to keep it on. What are you all playing on?

[さまよう侍]

Originally posted by Galidar:

Started the game on hard and just recently bumped it up to expert. Not sure which difficulty I want to keep it on. What are you all playing on?

Started with Expert and staying with Expert. If you're looking for challenge, try to kill those Tainted mobs around your level, too. If you find Expert is too difficult, look at your gears, magic level and higgledy(the elemental guys).

[Spooky]

Expert is just right. Although, certain bosses have one-shots which the AI will be prone to run directly into, causing some frustration. Ultimately, you can git gud or do some minor grinding to alleviate this problem. Being under-leveled tends to be fine unless it's a big enemy or boss, so long as your within a few levels of them it shouldn't be too great of a problem.

Also, exploit weaknesses and invest in iframes for dodging.

[Gecko]

Expert is fun. You need to grind a little bit and think about gear and the tactics tweaker more, which I like. The 1 shot kills are annoying with your AI though.

[BeefoTheBold]

I started the game at expert, and then lowered it to hard.

I got tired of needing to hit every enemy I came across 15 times before it died and being one shotted by any tained monster anywhere close to my level.

[Gecko]

Originally posted by BeefoTheBold:

I started the game at expert, and then lowered it to hard.

I got tired of needing to hit every enemy I came across 15 times before it died and being one shotted by any tained monster anywhere close to my level.

To be fair, the tainted monsters are meant to be hard. Even on normal people were recommending you be 5-10 levels higher to fight them.

[Honorable_D]

Just plain not a fan of being 1-shot. Totally makes HP and defense/gear pointless and it seems on Expert you'll basically be 1-shot by any enemy worth a damn.

Been playing on Hard and enjoying it.

[bossmanham]

Hard seems to be a good balance. I started on the normal level right before the difficulty patch came out and it was too easy, so I bumped it up to hard as soon as I could. Expert seems like too much 1-shot deaths.

[Dex]

The expert mode makes a lot of the systems in the game pointless. If you're going to get one shot no matter what armor/resistances you have that's just silly.

I'll be sticking with hard. The combat isn't smooth enough for me to want a Dark Souls experience out of it. Also, some of the monster moves come out of nowhere, which is just silly.

[Fel]

I didn't find much difference between hard and expert outside of bosses and tainted monsters.

My main problems are that more often than not you will be hit from behind or the sides unless you only fight on the edge of the battles to keep everything in view, and that a few monsters have very little windup on some moves (I still can't fully figure out the slime's whip/bash signs at all).

The dodge not cancelling the current animation, coupled with the command queue and the fact that some moves just break your guard (the whirl that most big monsters have for example) mean that the defensive options are limited and somewhat unreliable unless you go for a counter-based style where you wait for enemy attacks before landing a couple blows and repeating (which works but is really boring).


Playing on expert is the best way to get better gear drops, so what you might want to do is to play on expert most of the time and switch to hard (or normal) for tainted monsters (and/or bosses).

[Wolfier]

well difficulty is quite based on how you play i feel. I play on hard and go offcourse for a short periods to grab more peps which caused me to be about 10-15 lvls behind the curb making most fights quite hard. All bosses can either 1 or 2 shot me at this point while taking up to 30 minutes to kill.

[a gigglepuss!]

Started and stayed on Expert, which was perfect for me. If it was any easier, I wouldn't even bother using features like the tactics tweaker TBH.

[undertherox]

Originally posted by Dex:

The expert mode makes a lot of the systems in the game pointless. If you're going to get one shot no matter what armor/resistances you have that's just silly.

I'll be sticking with hard. The combat isn't smooth enough for me to want a Dark Souls experience out of it. Also, some of the monster moves come out of nowhere, which is just silly.

i would say the opposite, tactics of war or whatever in the tweaker can make or break a whole battle and resistance setting can prevent one shots if you are on the edge. One shots on ai will happen because theyre dumb and take full power shots, but with some item manipulation they can still be useful. Expert makes everything count and therefore not pointless, 1hits usually come from too high level monster so all attacks are too high/or the monster has ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ glowing sprites sucking into it meaning get the ♥♥♥♥ away. Similarly, monster moves are some of the most regular and periodic/predictable things there are. I can understand not wanting a souls experience but the strategy for reading an enemy is pretty similar. 1 shot deaths dont mean youre ♥♥♥♥ was pointless means you were probably too low lvl/ not optimized/ you know its coming... git gud. Combat takes some getting used to but ♥♥♥♥ can get on a roll and the combat sequence makes more sense the more you do it and has a rhythym/tempo. Solid ♥♥♥♥

[さまよう侍]

To go through Expert mode, I have utilized the Tactics feature, higgledy, damage reduction(more important than raw DEF), Crowd Control(stun,confuse and freeze). I enjoy combat in this game than FFXV. I bought both games about 1 week ago when they were both on sales.

[Galidar]

My only issue with expert so far is your AI companions that often just stand there and eat a boss 1 shot. Other than that it feels pretty solid and makes the fights fun.

[Fel]

The AI getting shot seems to depend on your own actions, they rarely get targetted in my case, probably because it seems to put a big emphasis in hunting down the most "dangerous" member of your team, so if you keep on pressuring the enemies (bosses or not) you will remain as a magnet for attacks, especially for those having some ranged attacks.

Even on bosses that are dangerous when you get close (slime tainted monsters for example) you can pile on ranged damage.
If you play with either of the two basic characters then just using the charged ranged attack is usually plenty, but you can also rapid-fire the basic ranged attack to pile on the damage fairly fast and get the agro (at the cost of your special attack crystals depleting at an equally rapid pace, just stand without moving and spam the ranged attack button/key).

As long as you continue to keep the agro, your allies are mostly safe outside of AoE targetted towards you (charges, ranged explosions, whirling attacks, slime's swipes...).

It does make your own time harder because you have to focus a lot more on defensive actions, but it lets you keep your items to use on the character you are controlling instead and it's easier to predict what the enemies are going to do (and to try to take advantage of it when you can).