Ashlands Progression: A Slog from the Start

[Terminal Desolation]

So, my friend and I have finished our Ashlands adventure. We've gotten all the drops. We've beaten the boss. And after doing all of that...

The area is still ass. It's not fun. It's boring.

Initially, the 10 on 1s feel insanely unfair. It's ridiculous, how can you expect to win this! Turns out, after fully gearing up... They still are, and it's still absurd! Enemies spawning in such massive quantities that you spend literally 5+ minutes fighting as soon as you leave a portal is dumb as hell and not fun. I've heard some people saying that the massive group fights are easier if you play a mage or something, but forcing players into a specific playstyle that was only added super late in the game is an awful design choice - you spend the entire game developing your skills, knowledge, and understanding and now you are forced to abandon all of that and completely start over. Why? No other survival game (that is good) does that.

Combat in this game is ♥♥♥♥. Anyone arguing otherwise... I'm sorry that you have never played a game with an actually good combat system. That must really suck if you think Valheim's combat is actually good. I would highly recommend trying to fight on a sloped surface again if you have those opinions, especially with a spear. Remind yourself how "fun" and "good" the combat mechanics are, that now make up the majority of the Ashlands. Hit detection is wonky as ♥♥♥♥, the stagger system is questionable at best, stamina is clearly not designed for extended skirmishes and oriented for short-term combat, etc.

The biome itself is cool. I love the architecture, the hazards, the navigation aspects... All of that is enjoyable and fun. The only issue is that the game actively punishes you for daring to explore or try to gather resources. Other biomes might have a few enemies in the vicinity come to harass you after you start resource gathering. Here, if you try to chop a tree, you'll end up in a 4 on 1 that rolls over into a 3 on 1 that rolls over into another 4 on 1 into a 5 on 1 until you've killed 10-15 enemies and you STILL haven't knocked the tree over.

The enemies respawn absurdly fast. I've WATCHED them spawn in front of me, numerous times. So has the rest of my group. That's ridiculous. That should not be happening. Players existing in an area should suppress the spawns; it's a fundamental of basic game development that the player should NOT be able to just witness the enemies appear out of thin air. The fact that the developers either did not catch this or deliberately allowed this is ridiculous. Any combat encounter (or just world exploration if you're following a friend's path) can spontaneously become a bigger combat encounter because 3 guys respawned there.

In the amount of time we had previously been able to uncover a significant portion of a Mistlands biome, we were instead barely able to make ground in the area. Not because it was difficult - after establishing a proper foothold, it wasn't too bad. It was just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tedious. Every time an enemy sees you, it devolves into a multi-minute long fight, and the enemies are so numerous and cover is so nonexistent you're basically dragged into every fight, like it or not. You make a small amount of map progression and then get embroiled in an extended fight. Clear the fight. Walk 100 feet. Encounter another group. Rinse and repeat. After 2 hours, you've made it a small distance inland! Congrats! Now go back, repair your gear, and return only to find that most of the mobs have already respawned. Well...

Even if the fights start off as only a 3v1 (you'll rarely get "fairer" odds than that) more enemies will inevitably be drawn in by the "noise" of combat, and you'll end up adding a few more foes to the mix, making what SHOULD have been a quick, short, and enjoyable encounter a longer and more drawn out combat. The issue is that the combat isn't difficult - it's boring and tedious. "Oh, I have to fight 3 of the new lava dogs and 4 skeletons at the same time... again... just like 5 minutes ago... and 3 minutes before that..."

The omnipresence of combat as the MOST IMPORTANT MECHANIC in Ashlands really drives home how mediocre the combat system is here. It's not doing the game any favors.

You don't get to explore the map or enjoy the new environment because every moment you COULD be doing that, you're stuck in combat. Other biomes had enemies spaced out enough that yes, you could have fights and they could get intense, but you wouldn't end up in a massive melee unless you kited those enemies into another group. At the end of the day those biomes respected that the most fun in the game is the exploration, the discovery. They didn't feel the need to throw 10+ enemies at you every few minutes in the name of "difficulty."

The Ashlands mobs are easy. The quantity they spawn at doesn't make them LESS easy. It just makes them MORE annoying. It's not fun, the combat mechanics were not designed for fights of this scale, and the respawn rates are absurd. Reducing the quantity of enemies spawning will go a long way to making the Ashlands an actually interesting experience worth exploring to find new stuff & lore. As it stands, there is nobody in my group who has any desire to ever go back to the Ashlands because frankly, the biome sucks and is the most miserable experience in Valheim to date.

I would suggest toning down spawns significantly and either improving the enemy AI or adding some actually interesting & difficult enemies to the mix. Ashlands should be difficult, but this isn't difficult... It's a boring slog through an interesting land marred by awful, nearly perpetual combat, with "difficulty" created by dialing the spawn count up to 11 instead of developing actual mechanics.

[WizenedMan]

you nailed it 100%. everything about this update seems great except for the spawn rate. enemies seem the right kind of dangerous that you would expect entering a new biome.

besides the spawn rate, the other thing that turned me off right away is the way they introduced almost every new enemy at the same time. my first battle on land was with 5 or 6 different mobs at the same time, makes it very hard to learn the enemies. they definitely need to balance this out.

[Nerevar]

without the high spawnrate the biome would be WAY too easy. face it. the progression is super quick and grossly speed up by the new portal on top. dungeon delving doesnt even exist in this biome. putrid holes are fully irrelevant like troll caves.

the ashlands melee weapons have chain lighting. which can kill an entire pack of enemys. just for the record. dont use the others youre weakening yourself.

you dont have to fight everything you. what kind of mindset is this? you can just walk away. the only enemies can keep up are birds the valk and the morgen. the rest aint able to keep up. its safe to assume all players who complain about these 10 vs 1 (which actually arent much different from fighting a horde of greydwarfs with a brute in there at early black forest levels enemy count wise btw) are trying to stand thier ground. but why? the most parts of the biome dont contain anything that ask you to stick around. the shoreline has alot of places where you can slam a portal on a big rock and you have alot of peace there. unless you sit around at the portal site FOR NO GOOD REASON. you dont need to build a base. why would you build a house in a warzone? you wouldnt. move on.

biome is fine aside the gems. the devs need to add some more sources for these. down the road when we get the level 3 weapons people will struggle to find enough of these for all thier weapons due to lighting beeing the default best choice.

[Guard1an4]

I have a question for Terminal Desolation and Nerevar: Your opinions of the biome vary a good bit. I haven't personally experienced Ashlands yet so here is my question: If they adjusted the spawn rates some would it be good to lower them a little around the beaches and increase them a little further inland?

[Terminal Desolation]

Originally posted by Nerevar:

without the high spawnrate the biome would be WAY too easy. face it. the progression is super quick and grossly speed up by the new portal on top. dungeon delving doesnt even exist in this biome. putrid holes are fully irrelevant like troll caves.

the ashlands melee weapons have chain lighting. which can kill an entire pack of enemys. just for the record. dont use the others youre weakening yourself.

you dont have to fight everything you. what kind of mindset is this? you can just walk away. the only enemies can keep up are birds the valk and the morgen. the rest aint able to keep up. its safe to assume all players who complain about these 10 vs 1 (which actually arent much different from fighting a horde of greydwarfs with a brute in there at early black forest levels enemy count wise btw) are trying to stand thier ground. but why? the most parts of the biome dont contain anything that ask you to stick around. the shoreline has alot of places where you can slam a portal on a big rock and you have alot of peace there. unless you sit around at the portal site FOR NO GOOD REASON. you dont need to build a base. why would you build a house in a warzone? you wouldnt. move on.

biome is fine aside the gems. the devs need to add some more sources for these. down the road when we get the level 3 weapons people will struggle to find enough of these for all thier weapons due to lighting beeing the default best choice.

Hard disagree. The biome has plenty of danger - multiple enemies with significant knockback attacks which can and will launch you directly into lava, nearly no cover across most of the biome so enemies can track you down in the most efficient path possible and you can't maneuver around the environment nearly as much.

Haven't messed with the Lightning weapons because they add a whopping 10 Lightning damage that does not scale with upgrades, something like a 7.5% buff to the base damage. If they do have an AoE associated with them, very silly that it isn't mentioned or described at all - the wiki lists the "Lightning Effect" as purely visual. The Blood weapons provide significantly more damage, considering how many enemies there are you WILL be taking incidental damage, and you only need to be shy a bit more than 30 points out of your max health to match the +10 damage boost.

You absolutely do have to fight everything lmao. I have no idea how you think you don't. The Askvins also outspeed you, significantly. You don't have infinite stamina so you WILL have to slow down eventually, at which point everything outspeeds you. You WILL have to navigate across the lava, which does not hinder the enemies, so they will outspeed you there as well. You can avoid the skellies but other enemies will "hear" them being hostile and start tagging along too, so you just end up with a train of 10+ enemies that you'll have to fight eventually.

Not sure what Black Forest biomes you were in, because I don't recall fights getting worse than like 5 on 1 outside of multiple spawners. You also seem to have the wrong idea that all 10 enemies are simple skeletons. They are not. 3+ Askvins, at least one Morgen or Valk, sometimes both.

Your post also assumes I was TRYING to build there. I wasn't. Never was. That's just a random strawman you decided to build. I never even *talked* about building there because despite how cool the environment is. I only talked about exploring, getting to see the environment itself, and how miserable that was when every 10 feet you get drawn into more combat. You can't enjoy exploration or the atmosphere or ANYTHING about the land when you're drawn into more combat for the 8th time in the last 15 minutes.

Throwing more enemies at the players is not creating difficulty, it is creating frustration because the combat system was not designed for combat being THIS frequent and THIS dense. If they want to make the game more challenging, as I said in my OP, they could have done so with better AI or more unique enemies. They did not. Instead, they decided to increase the "difficulty" by increasing the spawn rates. In a tabletop, you don't challenge your party by increasing the amount of level 1 bandits to 50, you create appropriately scaled encounters. I would much rather face a few strong enemies than 20 weak ones.

Originally posted by Guard1an4:

I have a question for Terminal Desolation and Nerevar: Your opinions of the biome vary a good bit. I haven't personally experienced Ashlands yet so here is my question: If they adjusted the spawn rates some would it be good to lower them a little around the beaches and increase them a little further inland?

I don't think that would help. One big issue is the combat system's limitations really showing themselves in the massive fights. It makes the already clunky system feel even worse. Due to the frequency of enemy encounters, I found it exceptionally difficult to enjoy the exploration aspect of the game, which to me has been one of the major sources of enjoyment in Valheim.

[Subsonic]

Eh, don't agree, but opinions are like bungholes--everyone's got one. There are settings to make it easier for you if you don't like the default game. It's just a different challenge that's completely manageable. It's a harsh biome, any permanent presence there should be dangerous. It ain't the meadows. But, sure, if you don't like it then that's your opinion. I didn't mind it, was fun exploring around, overcoming the challenges, figuring out how things work, gearing up, taking on Fader, etc. Mistlands was harder than Ashlands, in my opinion--mainly because of the visibility hindrance. Everything else is manageable.

[Cakner]

My issue has been enemies respawning in certain areas. I specify Respawn over the initial spawn. Not talking about the monuments that spawn mobs either. There are certain spots when passing through it seems like the same group of enemies is always there if we went far enough way to unload the zone. Dog, 1 star Dog and 2 archers have been cleared to many times now. Morgen on the beach by were we landed, 2x warrior and 2x archer on the other side of the beach.

I liked the initial density and having to fight through but i really expected them to stay dead a little more, or creep back in from spawner/necromancers rather just popping up like weeds when i wasnt looking.

[Helios]

Case in point, me and my friend only fully explored a single (and not very large) island so far, and we've already accumlated more than a dozen stacks of charred bones. We demolish every enemy spawn point we can see, and yet they keep coming non-stop.

The intensity of combat on ashland is ABSURD.

[Tymon]

Originally posted by Cakner:

My issue has been enemies respawning in certain areas. I specify Respawn over the initial spawn. Not talking about the monuments that spawn mobs either. There are certain spots when passing through it seems like the same group of enemies is always there if we went far enough way to unload the zone. Dog, 1 star Dog and 2 archers have been cleared to many times now. Morgen on the beach by were we landed, 2x warrior and 2x archer on the other side of the beach.

I liked the initial density and having to fight through but i really expected them to stay dead a little more, or creep back in from spawner/necromancers rather just popping up like weeds when i wasnt looking.

This is exactly what I was saying in a different thread was happening to me. But no, apparently according to some people if you destroy the spawners, this doesn't happen... Yet, in my experience, I'd kill stuff in an area so I could mine or forage or etc, turn around, and then I'm being swarmed AGAIN. It didn't make the game 'harder', it didn't make it a struggle, so changing the difficulty isn't going to matter... It made it damned annoying is what it made it.

[Raeburn]

Completely agree with everything you wrote - we just finished it as well and felt the very same.

[Nerevar]

Originally posted by Guard1an4:

I have a question for Terminal Desolation and Nerevar: Your opinions of the biome vary a good bit. I haven't personally experienced Ashlands yet so here is my question: If they adjusted the spawn rates some would it be good to lower them a little around the beaches and increase them a little further inland?

the problem is very large sections of the inland are covered in lava lakes anyway. thus you cannot really travel them unless you ride an askvin or jump from rock to rock in some places.

the spawnrate isnt a problem at all. players just need to learn to spot the right place to land. and not just go the next best flat ground level beach. which is normally something a player learns way earlier in the game. this biome just punishes this way harder than other biomes. and then you have the players who never made landfall with a ship because they always build in a nearby safe biome and walked into the dangerous biome. but that method doesnt work anymore past mistlands. so now these players are forced to learn how to do it the hard way. and of course they struggle as they arent experienced with doing it.

so they gotta learn it now.

same for keeping fighting the same respawning enemies in the enviroment thinking they achieve something by doing so. thats a pointless task. its like trying to wipe out all greydwarfs in a black forest : theyll just keep comeing endlessly. you wont ever stop the spawning in. and i have seen enough streams now : people arent makeing use of the eviroment or the terrian at all to thier advantage. i lost count how many players i saw just standing there button mashing away at enemies barely moveing from the spot they are in. they see enemies and run right towards them. they never jump on rocks or ruins. they sprint everywhere. i dont know what to say anymore. they are playing like its thier first time in valheim. of course they die sooner or later due to that.

[thotpoizn]

For what it's worth, I've built a pitiful little base (tall dirt walls and a grausten hut to protect my portal) - and then set out to methodically populate the island I'm on with little grausten spawn-suppression huts. So far, I'd say it's working - I've gotten better at dashing ahead a few hundred feet, finding a suitable location (preferably on a rock or high spot), slapping together a workbench, cutter, and a couple of walls, kiting and killing the half dozen randos that invariably come running, slapping up a few more walls and roof, then slogging back to the base with another half dozen or so new friends trailing me. Sometimes I even get to the mud wall with enough stamina to climb over before something nasty gets me.
So far I've made about a dozen of them. They don't appear to have reduced spawn rates in the slightest; not one damned bit. But I'm getting SO GOOD AT IT THOUGH.

[Nerevar]

Originally posted by Terminal Desolation:

Originally posted by Nerevar:

without the high spawnrate the biome would be WAY too easy. face it. the progression is super quick and grossly speed up by the new portal on top. dungeon delving doesnt even exist in this biome. putrid holes are fully irrelevant like troll caves.

the ashlands melee weapons have chain lighting. which can kill an entire pack of enemys. just for the record. dont use the others youre weakening yourself.

you dont have to fight everything you. what kind of mindset is this? you can just walk away. the only enemies can keep up are birds the valk and the morgen. the rest aint able to keep up. its safe to assume all players who complain about these 10 vs 1 (which actually arent much different from fighting a horde of greydwarfs with a brute in there at early black forest levels enemy count wise btw) are trying to stand thier ground. but why? the most parts of the biome dont contain anything that ask you to stick around. the shoreline has alot of places where you can slam a portal on a big rock and you have alot of peace there. unless you sit around at the portal site FOR NO GOOD REASON. you dont need to build a base. why would you build a house in a warzone? you wouldnt. move on.

biome is fine aside the gems. the devs need to add some more sources for these. down the road when we get the level 3 weapons people will struggle to find enough of these for all thier weapons due to lighting beeing the default best choice.

Hard disagree. The biome has plenty of danger - multiple enemies with significant knockback attacks which can and will launch you directly into lava, nearly no cover across most of the biome so enemies can track you down in the most efficient path possible and you can't maneuver around the environment nearly as much.

Haven't messed with the Lightning weapons because they add a whopping 10 Lightning damage that does not scale with upgrades, something like a 7.5% buff to the base damage. If they do have an AoE associated with them, very silly that it isn't mentioned or described at all - the wiki lists the "Lightning Effect" as purely visual. The Blood weapons provide significantly more damage, considering how many enemies there are you WILL be taking incidental damage, and you only need to be shy a bit more than 30 points out of your max health to match the +10 damage boost.

You absolutely do have to fight everything lmao. I have no idea how you think you don't. The Askvins also outspeed you, significantly. You don't have infinite stamina so you WILL have to slow down eventually, at which point everything outspeeds you. You WILL have to navigate across the lava, which does not hinder the enemies, so they will outspeed you there as well. You can avoid the skellies but other enemies will "hear" them being hostile and start tagging along too, so you just end up with a train of 10+ enemies that you'll have to fight eventually.

Not sure what Black Forest biomes you were in, because I don't recall fights getting worse than like 5 on 1 outside of multiple spawners. You also seem to have the wrong idea that all 10 enemies are simple skeletons. They are not. 3+ Askvins, at least one Morgen or Valk, sometimes both.

Your post also assumes I was TRYING to build there. I wasn't. Never was. That's just a random strawman you decided to build. I never even *talked* about building there because despite how cool the environment is. I only talked about exploring, getting to see the environment itself, and how miserable that was when every 10 feet you get drawn into more combat. You can't enjoy exploration or the atmosphere or ANYTHING about the land when you're drawn into more combat for the 8th time in the last 15 minutes.

Throwing more enemies at the players is not creating difficulty, it is creating frustration because the combat system was not designed for combat being THIS frequent and THIS dense. If they want to make the game more challenging, as I said in my OP, they could have done so with better AI or more unique enemies. They did not. Instead, they decided to increase the "difficulty" by increasing the spawn rates. In a tabletop, you don't challenge your party by increasing the amount of level 1 bandits to 50, you create appropriately scaled encounters. I would much rather face a few strong enemies than 20 weak ones.

Originally posted by Guard1an4:

I have a question for Terminal Desolation and Nerevar: Your opinions of the biome vary a good bit. I haven't personally experienced Ashlands yet so here is my question: If they adjusted the spawn rates some would it be good to lower them a little around the beaches and increase them a little further inland?

I don't think that would help. One big issue is the combat system's limitations really showing themselves in the massive fights. It makes the already clunky system feel even worse. Due to the frequency of enemy encounters, I found it exceptionally difficult to enjoy the exploration aspect of the game, which to me has been one of the major sources of enjoyment in Valheim.

after this post of yours i will stop believeing anything you claim. sorry. the fact alone you claim that you MUST FIGHT EVERYTHING speaks for itself. that is literally completly made up nonsense entirely.

the same is the case for the "cannot escape enemies inland" are we playing the same game here? are you not makeing use of ruins rocks and what not and the feather cape? like you can parkour around like crazy even inland. you apparently dont do that at all.

the lighting weapons literally say in thier tooltip : 20% chance to cause CHAIN LIGHTING. that is visible before you even craft one by just haveing the gem found and the base flametal version crafted.
the fact you claim they dont tell you that again tells me you arent paying attention to your surroundings much at all.

or that you cannot outrun enemies. what are you doing? run in a straight line? never jump on a rock you pass by? enemies have a hard time following a player actually moveing around. askvins dont spawn at the shoreline to begin with. only inland. same for the valkyrie. and even they can be escaped rather easyly. plus askvins have TERRIBLE turn speed. unlike you. the only enemies you should always take out asap are the voltures. as outrunning these is impossible. but they got low health. like 1 fireball from the ember staff fired into the ground will kill the entire pack of birds at once. if your skill level is low it might take 2 fireballs. and thats it. plus thier attack range is stupid low. theyll miss aswell most the time if you just keep MOVEING.
you dont need stamina to just MOVE. why sprint nonstop? WALK. sprint only if something gets too close.

after this post of yours i am certain this is a personal skill issue on your end. if your claims where even REMOTELY true i wouldnt be able to do what i have been doing for DAYS now sucessfully.

[Terminal Desolation]

Originally posted by Nerevar:

*snip for space*

Fret not, this likewise tells me that we are simply not having the same experience and you have been blessed by the RNG gods. Not only that, but you have different tooltips as well! Are you playing in a language other than English, perchance? It could be a translation difference, but I just double checked and confirmed that no, the tooltip only says "Lightning," though that wouldn't account for every weapon except bow having 25% and not 20% chance... so if you play in English, I'm not sure why you felt the need to just lie like that to bolster your point. Does the opposite if someone takes the 2 minutes to boot up the game and load into a server and check themselves...

You get rocks? And ruins that aren't completely surrounded by lava? Entirely different locations, man. We had a couple of those, early on, and we use them to house portals. Once we got a little further inland though, started pushing towards the boss spawn? Just plains, with all the big rocks directly dumping you into a nice pool of magma, only fragments of ruins and those mostly surrounded by lava.But it sounds like your map is bountiful, with minimal lava fields, with loads of rocks and ruins to hide and climb, so kudos for getting a great seed. On my seed, the environment is exceptionally hostile once you get past coast and start getting to the magma fields. I was fortunate enough to find a pretty tame coast, though, I'll admit, and didn't experience that much difficulty establishing an initial outpost.

You said it yourself - sprint to dodge. Unfortunately, when you have to sprint to dodge 8 different attacks in quick succession, you don't really have a lot of time to properly regenerate stamina. We learned quickly that fighting is actually a lot easier than trying to run away from the encounters, despite your insistence to the contrary, so that's what we did. I've blown through more Tasty Mead and Stamina Mead in this biome than in every biome before combined. I would much rather be burning the same resources in fewer engagements that actually felt worthwhile, and like skill checks. Just "increase spawn count" does not increase difficulty. It increases the likelihood the player will eventually get overwhelmed or careless and die, but that's not a good way to scale difficulty.

Fighting a Morgen with a Valk or like 3 skellies is fun, and a good challenge. Much more than that, and the combat system falls apart as you start burning through too much stamina trying to dodge, reposition, block, parry, and fight back. Up the spawns of the tougher enemies in the area, reduce the trash spawns, and reduce the respawn rate. I shouldn't ever be seeing enemies respawn in front of me, and yet I have, multiple times, and so has everyone else I've played with. An area should stay cleared for a reasonable amount of time once you've cleared it. If I start chopping a tree to gather the new resources and clear out the enemies that come, I shouldn't immediately get into a fight with 5 more enemies when I get my axe out to resume chopping the tree down.

As I've said, I've "beaten" the Ashlands. Took out the boss, maxed out the gear, etc. This isn't me saying "I can't beat this." This is me saying, "Ok, I've beaten this. Here's my thoughts." And your response boils down to "Pfft, must be a skill issue." How is it a "skill issue" that I find the Ashlands miserable and unfun? It's a reasonable criticism and expectation of the game to have expected it to evolve beyond "throw more graydwarves at them" because that's literally what the throwers are, they're reskinned graydwarves with bigger numbers, down to the animations.

[Nerevar]

so for the very last time as i wont explain this endlessly :

your claims simply arent reality dude. and now you try to blame it on worldgen which is just an attempt at another excuse.

you cannot max out the gear to begin with currently.

i play in english. always have. the lighting weapons clearly show what they do on the forge. always did since an early ptb patch. and since everyone plays the same vanilla version the tooltips are the same for everyone.

everyone has large lava fields and ruins in lava myself included but there is still plenty of land and rocks to make use off and i take BETS your ashlands is no different as worldgen will never differ THAT much as you claim it does there.

and for the record : i KNOW you make these claims up. dont even try anymore. your claims that you must fight everything are the absolute proof that you are makeing your claims up in the first place.

you dont need stamina mead nor tasty mead if you know how to fight in valheim. you CLEARLY do not know that given your claims and posts here.

you dont need to sprint for every attack either. again. wrong claim. the majority of enemies arent capable of hitting a WALKING target. theyll miss 90% of thier shots. the fact you dont even seem to know this despite playing ashlands tells me i am not speaking to someone who has actually learned how combat works in this game. which is a skill issue no matter what.

there is never a reason to fight everything outside of a fortress. and a fortress has limited spawns that never come back once the spawners inside a dealth with. this is a fact. this wont change no matter how hard you pretend otherwise. this has nothing to do with worldgen or anything else. its just you believeing you must fight everything that you see or that comes your way. which is a mindset problem purely. the greydwarf example stands. its precisely the same thing.

[Sethis]

A straightforward fix, IMO, would be to implement something that WoW and other MMOs have been doing for decades now.

Enemy aggro distance scales inversely to your gear level.

In WoW (and many other similar games) once you get 8+ levels above an enemy, you basically need to clip through them in order for them to attack you, whereas if you're 8+ levels below the enemy, they'll run 50m to get in your face and slap you down.

Valheim could do exactly the same thing based on gear. Even at the crudest level, something like 3 tiers of enemy aggro would be great.

Tier 1 - you are wearing gear from before the current biome = current game experience
Tier 2 - you're fully kitted out with gear from the current biome = slightly lower aggro range
Tier 3 - you're fully kitted out with gear from the next biome or higher = significantly lower aggro range

So if you're walking around Black Forest in full silver/wolf fur, the Greydwarves mostly leave you alone. Due to Ashlands being the 'final' biome for now, you'd be limited to Tier 2, but at least that'd give you enough breathing space to maybe enjoy exploring a bit more.

It's something I've been hoping for since I first picked up Valheim years ago, I'm a bit disappointed there still isn't a similar feature.