Why does everyone at hopoo think risk of rain 2 must be harder?

[Chubbz]

I've played this game diligently through the early access phase only to have big issues with the launch patch which in my opinion still had balancing issues as well as adding detrimental gimmicks such as utility scaling infinitely with movement speed item(Not opposed to some boost but infinitely? on top of acrid's leap STILL having no option to aim at specific enemies or spot on the ground...) and I have to say this DLC has me scratching my head in confusion as what the devs at hopoo are doing.

Void seeds- Nice addition however the void elites are annoying as piss as well as the void parasites being very erratic with a hit box that is tiny. The new voidtouched enemies collapse is still stupid ridiculous. There's just far too many cheap set ups with enemies being able to freeze you in place then one shot you, or pull you in and blast you with missiles having me ask why is there even a health bar?

New levels- The new levels are well done and the music is awesome however their order is a bit dumb. Level 1 and 2 have way too big of levels now in the mix and there's still no alternate level 5. Another thing I find disappointing is the New end boss and "way to beat the game" doesn't include a cutscene or a proper ending. It's just a environmental level leading to an overwhelmingly difficult boss for a death screen that says "died by: ???". Even the Lunar Beads imp boss after monolith offers you coins and the whole gimmick of beating the moon boss is to see a neat little cutscene.

New characters- Both are very fun and powerful in their own right but a few gripes with. Voidfiend has no alternate abilities at all. Railgunner has alternate abilities however her short ranged auto-sniper skill makes zero sense to me, having to zoom in and limit your sight as well as being slow while forcing you to get repeated crit shots with an auto sniper. It's moments like these where I wish someone at hopoo in the meeting about this decision said "How about it's a third person zoom in, you still get more accuracy but you can see more of the enemies around you" you know like real tactical gameplay.

Old characters- Literally none of the old characters have been touched, a huge downside in my opinion. Some characters have desperately been lacking in power(Artificer and huntress, to name the top on my list) as well as having zero sense with the artificer's alternate special. Flamethrower or jump in the sky, well one makes me harder to hit but one makes me do more damage. Where in reality the alternate jump in the sky should be an alternate utility skill or at the very least she desperately needs an alternate utility. Huntress is still squishy as hell as well as being a poor translation from RoR1, one thing I think would make the translation better is allowing her to spring in all directions while also shooting, then make her as squishy as you want.

Then theres the arbitrary gimmicks being added just for the sake of "This game needs to be harder". The grandparent boss was a fine fight, difficult as is with the gravitational sphere and the aoe sun buff of doom. It was extremely difficult if you were dealing with poor rng and had the teleporter spawn in an open area with no cover from it. Now it also adds a burning fire tick buff, that stacks the whole time, on top of the original radiance of doom. There's just so many moments where I feel like Hopoo should work on fine tuning their stuff before adding a dlc which is going to break the game only to ham fist in a patch to fix stuff and continue to do so. Everyone on pc is a game tester and Hopoo has no clue what they are doing.

[FAMILY_MAN]

The original grandparent spirit bomb was super trash. I remember several times running away from it while clearly inside the radius and wondering if the attack was even working or what the heck it was even doing.

[[T]aKer]

A couple of things.

It never bothered me in the slightest to have Movement Skills scale off movement multipliers (Movement Skill, because Engi, REX, Captain and indirectly Railgunner's Utilities aren't affected, and Artificer's Movement Skill is on her Special Slot).
It only becomes a problem if you have too much movement speed (yes, there's such a thing as "too much movement" sometimes)
The only character on which that scaling gets problematic is the new Void Fiend, where in controlled form, unlike Artificer, you can't reliably avoid fall damage without a Hoppo's Feather ready.

Problematic Voidtouched allies were adressed in the recent patch so I won't go into those, but the new big Void Enemies didn't oppose any threat to me personally, even on the first encounter (that first encounter being right in the Void Locus completely underleveled). The Void Barnacle (the turret) did kill me the first time, but isn't a bit deal to dispatch either.
One thing I agree is the Nullified effect the Void Jailer inflitcts to the player. It's ok when only facing one Jailer but can be a totally unfair instant-death when there's a bunch of other monsters around. Overall could be a bit shorter in duration.

Map size: I went on all Stage 1 & 2 maps without killing anyone, skipping all loot. Simply sprinting along the outer part of the map in a relative circle (I voluntarily avoided all jumper-thingies and took the walking route on all maps, basically "traced" the playable outline of each map) and here's the average time I got:
. Stage 1: Distant Roost: 1:50 - Titanic Plains: 2:30 - Siphoned Forest: 2:35
. Stage 2: Abandoned Aqueduct: 2:40 - Wetland Aspect: 2:45 - Aphelian Sanctuary: 2:45
As you can see, the map size fits the level it's in. If anything, Distant Roost is smaller (but it's also more on the vertical side compared to the other two).
I also have no problem with the lack of Stage 5 alternative, since it's home of the Primordial Teleporter. Having more stage variants would be a better alternative for Stage 5 instead of having completely different ones.

I have nothing to say about the new characters. I personally do prefer the quickness of the short-range scope coupled with the Supercharge and it works perfectly even on loops.

About old characters, seriously? Artificer needs more damage? She always has been one of the best to do Burst damage and she has *two* innate skills with AoE burn, making her both a DoT and a burst damage character. And that's not even considering the 2 big buffs she recieved recently with the Green Ignition Tank and the Flamethrower scaling with Attack Speed, making Attack Speed useful on her now.
For Huntress, her skills are decent enough. The only thing that doesn't feel right to use for me is Phase Blink. It's restriction to horizontal movement feel forced compared to all the other "locked" Movement Skills.

[Von]

i can't believe you left your statement about huntress at the end so i didn't know your statements were entirely invalid until almost the end

huntress is one of the strongest characters in the game, if you think she needs any sorta love you don't understand how powerful her kit is (or this game, tbh)

[Cyber Kitten]

I would rather play a game with devs that are confident in making their games hard like Dark Souls, SIFU, DOOM, and other roguelite games.

It is much better than games that spoil their community like Warframe. But you are lucky that Hopoo keeps on nerfing enemies and scary mechanics all the time due to the first angry reactions on players with new content.

It's like they try making it harder, but then aren't confident and crumble due to the force of how many people complain. This is one of my favorite games but that is the one thing I'll say gets me a little upset.

They already have the ultimate accessibility difficulty which is drizzle, command. And also mods. So why does it need to be easier?

[Julius Seizure]

This kind of game is effectively impossible to balance simply because of certain core design decisions, which is why 'gotcha' stuff like Mithrix's 'thief' phase, Void Implosions, and Infestors have to be introduced. Otherwise, there's absolutely nothing that can threaten even a semi-competent player once their run reaches a point where they can freely AFK and passively outheal any damage they take while their passive auto-attacks kill enemies for them and all their passive on-kill effects mop up anything that doesn't die in the barrage.

That's not difficulty-dependent either, even if you're running with no artifacts on Monsoon that soft-winstate isn't too hard to reach with any given character. For Risk of Rain to be a truly balanced and 'tuned' experience, they'd have to rip the heart out of it and redesign the gameplay loop from the ground up, which isn't going to happen in the span of a DLC pack. The 'duct-tape solutions' in the first paragraph are all they can do to keep the experience engaging when your character has become a whirlwind of death that only ever gets stronger.

[Hiroko]

Why does everyone think you have to play the game on the hardest difficulty and then complain that its too hard?

[Slayer Slayerson]

Alternate primary should be noscope, you lose way too much awareness if you stand still and shoot.

[Frostea]

Originally posted by Cyber Kitten:

I would rather play a game with devs that are confident in making their games hard like Dark Souls, SIFU, DOOM, and other roguelite games.

It is much better than games that spoil their community like Warframe. But you are lucky that Hopoo keeps on nerfing enemies and scary mechanics all the time due to the first angry reactions on players with new content.

It's like they try making it harder, but then aren't confident and crumble due to the force of how many people complain. This is one of my favorite games but that is the one thing I'll say gets me a little upset.

They already have the ultimate accessibility difficulty which is drizzle, command. And also mods. So why does it need to be easier?

Quite frankly there's a difference between something that's hard but fair. And something that's hard just for the sake of being hard. Risk of Rain 2 definitely falls into the latter, if you want the former go play something like Isaac.

[Jabberwock]

I honestly believe it's because the game just crashes inevitably when you are on a good run. It looks bad when the end state of your game is it collapsing on itself. They have added multiple ways to end the game early and increased the difficulty to mitigate longer runs and avoid dealing with this problem.

The problem is very clear on similacrum where survival is even easier if you play multiplayer (Dying =/= falling behind, only 1 player needs to survive a wave) The last few runs me and friends have done have ended in stutter deaths or crashes around wave ~95.

[im locked out]

tbh the game is easier now lol. new items and survivers are broken af

[Talithmara]

Originally posted by Hiroko:

Why does everyone think you have to play the game on the hardest difficulty and then complain that its too hard?

Probably elitism in gaming in general. Spend enough time online, and elitists can slowly begin to leave a mark on you.

I know that I rarely find hardest difficulties fun, since I game to unwind and de-stress, and artifically inflated enemy stats/ enemies getting special advantages you don't in a game where you're using the same unit types against each other/ etc, always just annoy me more than anything else. But I always inevitably TRY them, because of arrogant jerks insisting my opinion isn't worth considering if I'm discussing lower difficulties.

It's definitely some small part of why I play Monsoon in RoR2. The usual me would have just stuck to Rainstorm and just played enough Monsoon to get the unlocks. But every time I think about playing Rainstorm, I think of the scorn I'll recieve if I have a good run and try to share my victory screen. This also applies to artifacts; I actually vastly prefer Sacrifice to Non-Sacrifice, but I force myself to play Non-Sacrifice since I know many people will accuse me of cheating because I didn't scour the map for every half-buried chest.

That said, I'm not trying to hate on elitists; it's easy to accidentally be elitist when not meaning to! There have been games where I was in the top 1% of players, but thought I was bad since I was comparing myself to the top 0.1%. So I'd get angry the 99% couldn't keep up with me. It sounds idiotic when you spell it out like that, but sometimes it can just be hard to accept that you're better than you think you are, you know?

[HoneyDrake]

Originally posted by TaKer:

[...] and the Flamethrower scaling with Attack Speed, making Attack Speed useful on her now.

Are you serious? damn, nice, thanks for mentioning it, I missed out on that change.

But most of what you said is something I can support.

The only change I want to see is the void zone damage being nerfed on normal gameplay (Simulacrum can stay the way it is right now). Right now you need to fullfill 1 out of 2 criteries: having high mobility and/or sufficient healing while moving around (sth like 2 corrupted fungi are enough, if I am not mistaken)

[HoneyDrake]

Originally posted by Frostea:

Quite frankly there's a difference between something that's hard but fair. And something that's hard just for the sake of being hard. Risk of Rain 2 definitely falls into the latter, if you want the former go play something like Isaac.

You are mixing something up.

To win in RoR2 you require knowledge, a certain amount of skills to pull basic stuff off, and nothing more. Luck doesn't become as big as in other titles as being "faster" is more important than opening every chest on the stage, in fact: if you take more than 5 minutes on the first stage you are doing something wrong, really badly even if you want to aim for higher eclipse difficulties.

Binding of Isaac requires you to reset the game till you get a decent starting item. You don't? Expect to spend excessive time on each room, which is unreasonable and freaking horrible. BoI has changed a lot, and every DLC update has made it worse and worse, item pools becoming worse and worse. It's so freaking bad that most speedrunning communities use mods which changes the item pool to usable items, aka banning like 98% of the item pool for the first floor (no clues what the current season rules are, but should be still pretty similar when it concerns multiply character runs).

Spending time on a stage/room is not equal to being good at the game, spending the lowest amount of time possible is, optimizing your pathing, and trying to get the perfect power curve is.

[Talithmara]

Actually very true.

In any game, knowledge is power. And nowhere is this more true than Roguelikes, where you need to know everything to make the correct choices on a moment-by-moment basis. And considering RoR2 ramps the difficulty up the longer you take, it's actually preferable to only get a few items instead of scouring the entire map for every scrap of loot. So knowing the maps, places where loot/altars typically appear, etc, is probably more important than pure gaming skill.

Signed: Someone who has a friend who can't accept this and tries to spend 20 minutes fine-combing Stage 1. I can't play with them without Sacrifice anymore.

[Frostea]

Originally posted by Honey Drake:

Originally posted by Frostea:

Quite frankly there's a difference between something that's hard but fair. And something that's hard just for the sake of being hard. Risk of Rain 2 definitely falls into the latter, if you want the former go play something like Isaac.

You are mixing something up.

To win in RoR2 you require knowledge, a certain amount of skills to pull basic stuff off, and nothing more. Luck doesn't become as big as in other titles as being "faster" is more important than opening every chest on the stage, in fact: if you take more than 5 minutes on the first stage you are doing something wrong, really badly even if you want to aim for higher eclipse difficulties.

Binding of Isaac requires you to reset the game till you get a decent starting item. You don't? Expect to spend excessive time on each room, which is unreasonable and freaking horrible. BoI has changed a lot, and every DLC update has made it worse and worse, item pools becoming worse and worse. It's so freaking bad that most speedrunning communities use mods which changes the item pool to usable items, aka banning like 98% of the item pool for the first floor (no clues what the current season rules are, but should be still pretty similar when it concerns multiply character runs).

Spending time on a stage/room is not equal to being good at the game, spending the lowest amount of time possible is, optimizing your pathing, and trying to get the perfect power curve is.

The rushing thing doesn't work so well when the first couple of bosses keep dropping useless items like squid polyps. The point at the end of the day was that it's entirely possible to beat an Isaac run even if the RNG absolutely hates you, It's not possible with RoR2.