Balancing Concern for the New Quests and the Final Bosses

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I know that the developers have pushed their game, its meta, and the players towards gearing and upgrading a variety of different characters to use in order to adapt to certain levels/battles/bosses which is by all means a welcomed and healthy way to improve the game moving forward, but currently I feel as if the biggest concern for the game is the tuning of any new content that is released. After a certain period of time after an update, the difficulty level of the game starts to normalize and you can begin to farm the new levels at a comfortable pace, but as of now the battles that are a part of the new quests are completely trivial until you get to the final boss, in which your entire team just gets one shot by some over tuned broken stats or abilities, despite what you bring in your team composition. I truly believe that despite the developer’s intents to breathe more life into this RPG by making it more strategy oriented, there is a severe lack of balance whenever it comes to new levels or final bosses.

For example, in any 6 battle adventure I would equip the Dead Match accessory on my Cube character to essentially double my damage in order to kill all the mobs faster. Specifically, for the 3 new quests however, I knew that clearing all the battles prior to the final boss is a trivial thing to do and as such knew that the Soul Seal accessory on my Cube would be more beneficial in the long run. This is an example of swapping out something traditional or what I'm used to in place of something out of the ordinary to give me an advantage by changing my strategy.

So I have my Soul Seal equipped and manage to get 5 stacks on each of my 5 characters throughout the clear, but on the 14th battle, the one right before the final boss, there's a bat faster than all of my other characters that instantly hits my entire team and dispels all 25 stacks of the Soul Blessing buff. With 15 battles as part of each of the new quests, you would think that the grinding out the first 14 battles over the duration of 10 minutes would give me some sort of advantage with an alternative accessory, but ultimately it all gets taken away in the blink of an eye right before the final boss. It's sort of ridiculous how something like this can happen, and I'll go more in depth on this later on but most of the time when you try to change up your strategy with your team composition and your equipped slots, there's typically some miniscule or large thing that occurs during a battle that completely nullifies and negates any effort to create a sound strategy.

Never minding this however because it can be chewed down to just poor luck (which is still really bad), if I wanted to use the Soul Seal accessory without having to worry about some random bat dispelling everything as I approach the final boss, I would have to use a Paladin to taunt all the mobs so that only my tank gets dispelled. You would think that choosing your characters wisely and strategically would benefit you in the sense that you can try to counter exactly what you're going to be expecting from a final boss, but this opens up a whole other can of issues. For the final bosses that heal, you clearly need the Night Blade to counter the healing but in truth, the Night blade is a terrible character with extremely low output from both its skill and tactic. It’s almost as if you're playing with 4 characters instead of 5 and at that point, the Night Blade just becomes a liability for your team and is completely dead weight until the very end and when you do finally get to the final boss you only have 4 characters to deal with it, and only brought along the Night Blade so that you can deal with a single one of the boss's mechanics out of their 4 or 5.

In the case of the Night Blade, I like the fact that several characters have something unique about their skill or tactic that would potentially encourage a new strategy, but as of now characters like these are simply just way too limiting and niche. When I tried to do the Evil Books quest, I brought along a Missionary, Tactician, Bun Sister, and Paladin all with 8k+ speed and 30k+ hp along with a really strong Cube (all of which being ancient quality) to prepare myself for the final boss, my tank just got one shot by the meteor ability at the very start of the fight for whatever reason (though this happens literally every attempt I try on the final boss of the Evil Books quest on one or two of my characters). With all the healing, dispels, shields, resistance, taunts, and immunities I brought along for this one particular battle on this one particular level, you would think that I would be able to kill the boss, but no. Even if by a stroke of luck, I was able to survive long enough to get a couple of my tactics off to set up some defense and proactively dispelling the debuffs, there comes a point in the battle where the boss just hits my entire team 2 or 3 times in a row before any of my 4 defensive tactics comes off cool down and ends up killing my entire team before I am able to use my tactics a second time. The reason why the Cube and Fire Player are so strong is because their rage dumps have no cool down, and is also the reason why almost every other utility, tank, or defensive tactic is so awfully bad. This is another concern in which if I am going to be strategizing and making the decision to bring say for an example a Missionary to dispel everything, there is no point in doing so if the enemies can apply 5-10 debuffs by the time I am able to dispel again. Same thing for the Tactician as in why bring the shield along if I can only shield one barrage of meteor attacks and let 2-3 more barrages hit my team while I wait for it to come off cool down.

In games like WoW or D3 where end game dungeons are more involved and engaged with multiple affixes that boost the creatures through some niche passive or ability that makes the whole thing far more challenging and fun, these game mechanics work because there is widespread balance from the beginning to the very end; for both the trash packs and the bosses. If the battles in Dragon Cliff were tuned up a bit and these sort of aura-esque affixes are present throughout the entire adventure so that the trash packs weren't so trivial and so that the final boss wasn't so broken or overpowered, I could definitely see players actively changing up their team compositions and equipped slots so that they can theorize and strategize how to approach a certain level/battle/boss. But in the game's current state, I truly believe that these unprecedented final bosses that are ridiculously overpowered are something that you can't really strategize for or adapt to.

I forget which level it was, but when I started my play through of Dragon Cliff there was one quest where every creature in the adventure had 2 or 3 lives, sort of like an aura present throughout the level that enabled a resurrection skill for all the trash packs. This is something that I want to see more of in the game; not only was it different from all the other levels, but it was in a sense ahead of the curve from your current progression that provoked a challenge.

In the current state of the game, you can pretty much face roll everything with whatever team composition you enjoy playing with, however this pretty much all goes to ♥♥♥♥ when you get to one of the new final bosses. Again, I know that the developers have been trying to push the difficulty level of the game so that players can experiment with what works best for them against a certain level. This is definitely a healthy thing to do for the game and I commend the work, changes, and adjustments that they have done so far but the final bosses do need some drastic changes because they are just simply way too overpowered to warrant a strategy to build around when they can still one shot your entire team without any regard to what you brought.

Say for example, you enter an adventure with an affix that gives every mob a huge healing passive, in which case you would feel good and awarded for bringing a Night Blade to add to your strategy. Or if there was an affix that gave every mob a cleave passive that lets them hit everybody on your team, in which case you would strategize about bringing a character with an aoe taunt to nullify this so that only one character gets hit. Currently in the game, you can bring a Duelist with Insolence equipped to Imperial Mausoleum so that you can cleave the strength output reduction onto all the bears, and you can also bring an Iron Soldier with Insolence equipped to Buried Temple so that you can cleave the intelligence output reduction onto all of the mages. These are just examples of how you can balance the game around team compositions and encouraging players to try out and test new strategies.

In short, it feels good and awarding to come up with a unique strategy to fit a certain situation. Whether it means having to spend practice points to level a new character up, spending gold to reroll their cards, farming new equipment and adding sockets to them, and changing up your gems, the whole process in theory sounds fun and awarding but currently in Dragon Cliff there is very little opportunity for you to completely overhaul your team composition and change your strategy. Whether because there is very little strategy involved in the game currently or there is very little incentive to do so, or the fact that the tuning of certain parts of the game are just completely broken and any amount of theory crafting or strategizing would still get immediately pummeled to the ground due to sheer difficulty, I truly believe that the suggestions I have made that make other games great will make a game like Dragon Cliff just as amazing.

[Shadow]

I agree that the mobs up until the boss(es) are fairly easy... but I thought the bosses were fair/challanging (maybe the final quest boss was a bit much being able to revive 5times) but with some levels, improved skills, and gem modifications was able to complete all the new quests

[Miqi]

The devs have stated several times that they are currently working on a better way to scale the game, wether it be through difficulty adjustment that rewards based on difficulty chosen or an overhaul of overall scaling, we'll have to see how that turns out, but the dev said that they aim to release it near the upcoming weekend.

[StarFishGuy]

Hi DJ Splash:

Thanks a lot for your detailed analysis of the end game content!

There are several changes we are working on at the moment to address these issues, and I will come back to you when they are released, to see if there are more rooms for improvements.

Thanks!