Insta-death foes overpowered

[ExAltair]

I found this "problem" in 2 different shapes, along the second and third maze.
1) Dwarves: Some dwarves (the ones with the shield) somehow managed to instakill my knights, while they were full health. I do not know if was a crit, or if there was a debuff on them, but I find a bit unbalanced that any foes could just kill someone with one attack when you are managing to keep their health as high possible (even more, this was in "easy" mode, so....)
2) Elves: as soon as I got in the third dungeon, I managed to bring with me a squad of 4 lv5 minion, all powered up to purple. I found these elves who marked my minions and the next turn instakilled them. I think is a bit absurd that one manages to play as much more safe possible, bringing everything up to maximum of equipment and level (for how much possible to that point of game) and there are plenty common foes that can just bring you down in one turn no matter how much builded up you are.

PS: I know perfectly that there are debuffers and that there are stance-stoppers, and I had them, but they were stunned, or were out of range, when I needed them. And since you have barely one turn to manage to save your minion from insta-death, I think is a bit to much. I know there are spells too to debuff, but as well, you have 1 turn to build up mana to use them, and is to few.

[amigopuro]

That happened to me with musketeers dwarfs, 1 round, 1 mark + 1 shoot = instakilled mi full heal Dark Knight. Turn 2, dwarf support marks my Bride, 2 shoots from musketters = kill my full heal Bride. Before I could do anything to stop them.

[Frenzy85]

Spells are your final option in such cases... Not much else to do. Stuff like Block abnd Ward get bypassed by crits, so you're at the mercy of RNG.

[Akira1530]

Yes, I just had two dwarves do 126 and 94 damage each in single hits, insta-killing two of my strongest minions! This is a huge balance problem and these same dwarves were normally doing less than ten damage in that battle. What kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attack increases your damage by over 1000%?!? Is it possible this is actually a math glitch in the game? In any case, devs please look at dwarves in stage two and how they can sometimes do insanely overpowered damage in a single hit.

Also, I want to say awesome game overall, love the graphics, theme and style of it!

[TheSheog]

The dwarves have mark that double damage taken or guarantee your minion get's crit every hit.
These are bad enough and depending on turn order and AI rng it can already kill anything with absolut no counterplay, but most of the time you can avoid it if you take the right minions and the wrong minion doesn't get stunned or pushed in a wrong position.

What's even worse it doesn't even need super combos to kill your run, the dwarven warriors seem to have a skill that debuffs their armor but must either ignore armor and deal over 350% damage on or deal 450%-500% damage and all that on a non crit. That's more or less the least dangerous enemy on floor 2...... able to oneshot 12 armor dark knight with at least more than 40 health with no buffs or debuffs involved, maybe even had and insanity damge debuff

Just hope what ever they target is at high health especially the dark knights and that the dwarven warrior isn't buffed/ your minion isn't debuffed. Also you might have to, on top of that remove debuffs , remove buffs or stances from enemies, BUT don't forget to maximize damage to kill quickly enough before you get screwed. The elite version of dwarven warrior I think deal around at least +80 damage or so with that move if they just want to.(but I don't remember and only had that 1 time) Most things that kill me don't even care about the bonus from higher quality ingredients and the 20 vigor buff you can get for those minions with artifact.

I understand having floors focus on having to deal with debuffs or powerfull buffs/stances or being stress ressistant or having to end battles quickly and so on.

But you can't add all of these at same time along with additionally giving enemies counters to most things you can do , making almost all enemies the extreme main thread that needs to be focused on , give them oneshot abilities that either can't be avoided by good play or could only be avoided by good play if the enemy doesn't decide to combine it with another move before it is your turn again, make them all the while drain you the longer the fight goes on at all times, have enemies that need to be stunned/knocked around constatly , enemies whose debuffs need to be dealt with before they lead to oneshots, enemies that get stronger over time, enemies immune to stress , have ward/armor and ways to deal with wards/armor and one even can remove dodge iirc. Now you can have ALL of that in a single fight, several time.

Either you need to make minions super replaceable or not give the AI the ability to win no matter what depending on their rng alone. It seems like the AI rng might be way more deciding than whatever you do or whatever you have done in a run.

I mean I got better in the game and some unlocks help, I found a lot more good combos etc., but if I think about it I don't think any of that really prevents the more or less onshots or even then a crit or another enemy attacking the target again still can do the job. The game is so great, but probably needs quite some balancing and slight changes to some mechanics. It doesn't really seem the difficulty in itself ,but that enemies could just win if they just want to or if the wrong enemy party spawns. It seems that they put too many things in the enemies of a single floor / battle, at least the way it is balanced right now.

[Paradox]

The problem is dark knights don't have any health, with a base of 55.

[ExAltair]

The point is: the game should allow the player to play whatever combo of minion one wants, and to rely on whatever battle plan one wants (even if is normal that in certain situations a minion works better than another). If some minions are unable to defend themselves against foes at a certain point, is like if the game is forcing on a pre-made road, out of which you cannot win. The same for the battle style, since there are:

ARTIFACTS: give bonuses depending on the situation. To much weak and situational, since you cannot buy a specific one and you have to rely on randomness, other to the fact you can use only 4 of them basically, and their effects untill now are not real gamechangers in any way.

ALCHEMY: allows you to upgrade minion parts (plain > green > blue > purple) (even if exchanging parts makes you lose the original ones, which is a great loss that they should change). If one relies on this, they still oneshot you. All of you know how much difficult is to upgrade a minion to purple parts, so is absurd that all that work is annihiled in one shot, even more if your playstyle relied on retriving parts to powerup your minions like that. This applies to equipment for minions too, who is lost due to a oneshot.

SPELLS: Extremely useful, but you need at least 1-2 turns to build up mana with your minions, and this obviously forces you to use minions who do so (so no vampires for example), and forces you to use the abilities to do so. Is a bit to slow, because even supposing you can use one "oneshot spell" on a foe, there is not always this possibility, and is not fair that one have forcefully to rely on that spell to go on with the game.

RAGE: this is the same as for spells. My first run was focused on rage building and in using final abilities of my minions, so you can imagine how usefull was to play on the rage path, with no spells, when I came to oneshotters.

FEATS: extremely useful, but they require a good expense of building points to maximize their income (*) and obviously are to much to take. So you will take only the ones you want (for example the oneshot ability for 75 mana that requires 12 points to be took). Which still does not allows you to play on the same ground of your opponent, since building up 75 mana takes a lot, while they oneshot as normal action.

* the path needed to boost your game is to build as fast as possible the buildings that provide architecture points and exp for Iratus. This way you get to build everything else much more faster and you get much more exp, which will give you more talents. even more, you should move on the map in a way to get as much exp for iratus possible, relying on the yellow sources too other than on the encounters. Obviously, even if this is the most efficient way, means that the game forces you on this path if you wanna play on the spell/rage/alchemy paths, since you will need the building points to build the structures who gives you mana/rage/parts, and to get the feats to boost them.

[Paradox]

Originally posted by ExAltair:

The point is: the game should allow the player to play whatever combo of minion one wants, and to rely on whatever battle plan one wants (even if is normal that in certain situations a minion works better than another).
...

No. The game should not just be super casual. You shouldn't be able to just use anything and make your way through. I would agree that no class should die in a single hit on turn one. I think there is a lot of room for improvement on class synergies, right now there are only a few parties that really work well together on the higher difficulties.

[ExAltair]

I did not meant that. The game should allow you to go on with any minion if you have a working strategy on them, but simply would need to make it more difficult to do so, since you are not relying on the optimal strategy (this at least should be true for the easy difficulty). For the normal and hard ones I agree with you. Because, just to say, the game can come to a break point, in which you do not have minions to fight nor pieces to build them, litterally making you stuck. So for those who at least wanna enjoy the game semi-casually should be possible. I love "souls-like difficult" games, but I can totally understand someone that after an hard day of work wanna go on with the game and gets frustrated only.

[Asuzu]

1) Get used to watch enemy for dangerous stances and interrupt them.
Any abiliity that shuffles enemy units around is good, or a straight-up "Interrupts stances" ability.
For example, look at Bride, Lost Souls, etc. Many minions have abilities than shuffle or interrupt. I consider Lost Soul best, because her shuffle spell can ignore wards and is guaranteed to go through.

2) Replace DK with Bone Golem and forget about 1shots on your frontline.
A "tank" with 70HP and only 10 health increase potential is a joke. Not to mention it hits like wet noodles. Only marginally good on 1st floor and on Cakewalk.

[ExAltair]

As I said, I know they exist (but I admit I did not knew the lost soul ability ignores ward). But the point is that if you make the DK useless, why putting it in ? all units should be equal and you should chose one over another following the battle strategy you wanna use. Otherwise none will use them (and since they have all the same cost of 4 components, there is really no reason in making the DK so weak, beacuse would be like "use the bone golem only").
PS: and the answer is not "because the bone golem has to be unlocked", because since all the games are connected, one can easily do (as I did) a playtrought based to unlock only a specific minion, and then start a new one in which you have that minion from the beginning.

[Paradox]

Originally posted by ExAltair:

As I said, I know they exist (but I admit I did not knew the lost soul ability ignores ward). But the point is that if you make the DK useless, why putting it in ? all units should be equal and you should chose one over another following the battle strategy you wanna use. Otherwise none will use them (and since they have all the same cost of 4 components, there is really no reason in making the DK so weak, beacuse would be like "use the bone golem only").
PS: and the answer is not "because the bone golem has to be unlocked", because since all the games are connected, one can easily do (as I did) a playtrought based to unlock only a specific minion, and then start a new one in which you have that minion from the beginning.

Well, that's why the game is in early access. However, even when it's done not all minions will be equal and not all strategies will be equal. And, that's okay, but I hope we get more viable options, which means stat bonuses for some and skill modifications for others (for better synergies and potential).

Right now the DKs are terrible for the front lines, but don't get me wrong so are a lot of others. Bone Golems are the best front-liners right now, imo. They have large health pools, over 200 after skills and items. They have CC, their ult stun. They have a self-heal of 25+ (scales with their vigor) that is also a stacking damage buff (on crit, which you can force with a talent). They have a movement ability to break stances and shuffle the enemy. They have a support option of applying 2Block to another party member (or 1block/ward). And, if all else fails, they can kamikaze for big damage (scales again with their vigor). I mean, almost every skill is useful (cept maybe that last one) and/or has more than one function.

What does the dark knight have? No hp, no cc, a bad self-heal, no enemy shuffle, etc. All the dark knights have going for them right now is their stance, which when paired with aoe buff/debuffs is impressive, but none of that matters because they die too fast. Even just buffing their vigor won't help in a drawn-out fight, that'll just mean they die on round 2 instead of round 1. And, it's going to be hard to make them all that much better, because while they are in their stance (doing the only useful thing they can do), they won't be doing anything else.

The lost soul heal part ignores ward (it's not an attack), the damage part doesn't (it is an attack). The lost souls are similar to the bone golems, in that most of their abilities are useful and they generally serve more than one function.

[ExAltair]

I agree on this. This post actually had born to point out a need of balancing of some mechanics (since is in alpha) for the game makers, was not my intention to "cry because is difficult". I appreciate the difficulty, would simply be appreciated the fact that actually the game could be more flexible around the strategies players could use to proceed. The main problem was the instakill who forces you in having specific minions who can actually deal with it, and so leaving all others out from the possible choices.

[iregame]

We are looking at this situation. Hope to find some solution and update soon.
Thanks for your suggestions guys.

[Asuzu]

Originally posted by iratusgame:

We are looking at this situation. Hope to find some solution and update soon.
Thanks for your suggestions guys.

Using the moment I want to say thank you so much for this game, it's been long overdue since Disciples and Overlord days, and I am having a blast playing. The atmosphere and quality level of the game is amazing.

Now, back to balancing...

You guys seem to have moved from 1-shot clownfiesta of Darkest Dungeon to more prolonged fights, increased HP pools and so on. Overall it makes the game more fun to me and feel more tactical, instead of zerging something asap like in DD, when fights are decided by turn 3-4 depending who had the most crits, me or AI.
The whole stress damaging mechanic also revolves around you being in the fight for some time to make it work. Maybe a bit too long, as many have stated, due to low chance to make a killing blow on 0 stress, which makes vigor-damage teams just so much better. After all, if it's dead, it doesn't fight back, which is not the case of stress.

Now, any sort of instakill mechanic just invalidates all of the above, increasing the amount of weird RNG, both for the player (Head Hunter and soulgem with 1% to instakill on stress damage), and for the AI (Headsman, elven scouts with 250% stances, etc)

Now, in Darkest Dungeon, when the AI is planning to use a NUKE ability, it clearly designates a target spot for said ability (e.g. Wulff deleting slot nr.3, please guard it NOW or suffer).
That is somewhat allright with Headsman - you can see who got marked and try to block it up/move it away/shuffle Headsman away etc.
In case of Scout, however, the shot is going into a random minion, most likely 1-shotting it if it lands into a backline dude/dudette, I guess that is why topic was created in the first place.

Overall I am completely fine with hard hits into specific locations, as long as I at least understand, where the shot is going, or at least I can see what enemy ability is doing. Right now it's a mystery what AI can do.
And I am completely not fine with 1-5% instakills - these abilities are so heavy RNG, in my opinion that has no place in strategical/tactical game. Would be fine if that was a shooter.
Headhunter needs something else for the flavor - for example, a mark to double the damage or make all hits crits, like AI does. Would fit very fine with his kit and feel. E.g. "we are going for THIS guy now" ability.

As for the frontline options - yeah, right now, as soon as you unlock Bone Golem, there is literally no reason to run anything else in first 2 slots. All other options are so mediocre it hurts. Either BG is so good, or everything else is so bad - bottom line, this needs to be looked into.

Take care and thank you for this nice game!

[ExAltair]

Originally posted by iratusgame:

We are looking at this situation. Hope to find some solution and update soon.
Thanks for your suggestions guys.

You have the full support from us, thanks for the hard work.