Master Difficulty needs to be tuned down

[Fat Leader]

So I have over 100+ hours into this game, and don't want people to think I'm just some casual player griping about how "The game is too hard, wahhhhhh." That being said, the monsters in Master Difficulty are tuned WAY to high, especially as you get towards the later parts of the map. Monster teams that could habitually dominate fights in the arena where the enemy was 10+ levels higher are getting absolutely destroyed by every random encounter. Beyond monsters having HP totals they could NEVER have, there is just just how MUCH extra damage the enemy does, even to extremely defensive teams. This is not just "Increasing the bonus on the monsters equipment by +1", this is massively increasing every stat on the monster far beyond what is fightable by almost any strategy beyond the most gimmicky.

For example, one of my teams is Glitter team, with Gold Sense x10. That means they are doing +50% damage and taking 50% less damage from the enemy. This is on top of having 45% damage reduction on the entire stable. I go to the underworld, and fight one of the mobs where EVERY monster I have is resistant to all the damage they are taking, on top of all my other resists, and is doing super effective damage to the enemy every attack. On Normal difficulty, I crush the enemy monster team with little effort. On Master, it's the exact reverse. Despite all my resists reducing the damage down, they still are chunking me for enormous amounts of damage, easily doing 700-1k damage each to my entire team. Meanwhile, I can't kill them fast enough because I go from doing around 500-600 per crit over 5-8 hits to 300 per crit, which means their damage reduction is doubling going from Normal to Master.

That's too much of a jump. There is increasing the difficulty to challenge the player, and then there is just doubling every stat except for HP and Mana, where HP jumps anywhere from 20-50%, on top of them taking 1/2 the damage. It removes the purpose of using NG+ to bring all your monsters over, when you legitimately can not use over 80% of your monsters because they don't work for the few strategies that actually allow you to earn any xp. I loved this game for how balanced encounters felt overall, allowing for the player to try out a lot of strategies, seeing what works and what didn't. New areas having you need to switch teams around because certain strategies didn't work against particular monsters. Master Difficulty just throws all that balance out. Having the end game and post game monsters does NOT balance this out at all.

Has anyone else who has been playing Master difficulty felt the same about it? Please, no responses along the lines of "Just use this one monster combo and you get through every fight", because if you can only get through all of it with one 3-monster team, then that kind of illustrates my point about how the balance is gone.

[gran2996]

It's hard for me to say the exact diiference, because I have not tested precisely the difference between the difficulties. But I had no big problems for the monster fights, except some low scores and occasional one-shots of my monsters.

I agree, that the wild monsters are tuned up a bit too high, as for their health, and the battles are usually too long, but there were no places, where I really got stuck. And I build my teams around using the spectral familiars.

Could you tell what is your team exactly? I have not tried glitter team, but I might help.

Generally speaking, as I see, If you have a team, which 5-stared all the Champions, you shouldn't have big problems.
The only advice I can give at this stage is browse your team and all the monsters with gold sense. And you might use (I do not know if you do) 2 different teams, as you have 6 slots, like a glitter team and chill team, or buff team and so on.

[Fat Leader]

At first, I was using a team that I used to 5/6 star all the champion monsters, and they were doing great up until getting to the underworld where they just fell apart. Strong congeal team of Dark Shock Hopper + Arachlich + Dark Sutsune. Congeal with 5 stack chill, plus almost all the damage dealt creating bleed stacks that stack up, with bleed healing the team. Very high damage, really strong healing. But then they started getting completely stomped, so I switched to the glitter team. Dark Aurumtail x2, and a Dark Goblin Archer for extremely high pinpoint damage. All of them had the defenses as I described above, and the two aurumtails had blacksmithing to bring all my stats up higher to make even the goblin archer tanky. Strong shielding team with high damage. They would dominate almost any champion monster 4-5 star no issue, underworld they get stomped again, because everything is simply too tanky and too healthy, even the "glass-cannon" style monsters.

I tested several groups of monsters, going from normal to master and back to normal using monster bells to test out the differences in HP, Damage, durability...Their numbers are getting almost a flat x2 across the board, and I'm not sure it's their magic/attack, but the actual damage numbers getting a flat x2, as well as their damage reduction number. Defense gives reduced returns the higher it goes, so damage should not just be halved going up a difficulty setting, especially not on mobs like Mega Rock, which are already extremely high on defense to start with. I truly believe this is matter of the devs just having overtunned their new difficulty level, and I'm hoping that it will be adjusted in future patches.

[Feyda]

Yeah not sure what you're talking about... Experimented with multiple teams and didn't find any encounters in Master mode to be overwhelming. Sometimes when hitting new areas and your level is under the level of the rando mobs you might struggle, but overall if you have a solid team comp, it wasnt too hard. Already beat NG+ twice in master mode in quest to get all 4 familiars.

[gran2996]

Not sure about the glitter team, never used, so have no appropriate advice. But the chill-bleed team seems to be too offensive, and lacks proper multitarget shielding. Sutsune and Shockhopper - nice, but they are rather squishy. Feast is excellent, but it takes some time to start rolling, so you need proper shielding on top of healing. Your team is designed more towards HEADSHOT the opponent, rather then survive.
If I were you I would do like Ice Blob/Sutsune/Arachlich or Diavola(D)/Shockhopper/Arahlich.
Or stay Diavola|/Arachlich plus King Blob, the King is a good healer on New Game+, good survivability.

[Fusei]

Originally posted by gran2996:

I agree, that the wild monsters are tuned up a bit too high, as for their health, and the battles are usually too long, but there were no places, where I really got stuck. And I build my teams around using the spectral familiars.

Agreed, my ng+ has been quite a slog so far ... The beginnings were especially boring because I picked a team with a lot of 30+ synergies (which wasn't smart).
After that it became alright I guess, but yeah a reduction of the health bonus would be greatly appreciated.

Funny thing is battles against alchemists/monster trainer were often easier than "random encounters".

[Woody]

I found that master mode NG+ became a lot more fun once I threw away any notions of getting 5 stars every fight like I did in the initial play-through. The difficulty feels pretty good now that I'm fighting to just survive and win rather than instawipe enemies every fight.