Dungeon class balance issues and improvements

[Serulin]

Dungeons are pretty fun right now in building a team and seeing how far it goes, but it could use a few touch ups. A big one is using items mid fight. It sucks having 4 pheonix feathers and 8 healing pots yet having a party wipe because you encounter 1 super boss minster twice as tough as the previous fight. It is hard to guage how strong bosses are to fodder monsters. The ability to rotate mages or change spells to try something new would also be nice QOL.


On to balancing of classes.

Light is super strong, like required strong to go far. I usually use double light tanks. They don't even need assassination or dodge to already tank very far into the dungeon with 4+armor and 4+ shielding.

Druid is miles above all other damage dealers since late game fights let them scale into the 20s per hit to eventually kill anything assuming the tank lives.

Necromancer is useless due to max hp being 10. Late game enemies deal more damage than your hp and it is harder for them to get armor than light magic tanks. Having it overheal probably would still have it worse than aoe shielding.

Elemental damage has no point over the ramping power of druid. Late game enemies have massive hp pools and you want to target down 1 at a time anyway to reduce incoming damage.

Stun builds may work. I don't know if 1 stun and 1 druid is better than double druid. Never really had a mage get 4+ in the stun spell.

Dungeons are designed currently around turtling and survival. Speed has no use when hp scales so fast. Not saying it is a bad thing, just that I would prefer the other attack classes have som value or that I have more defense/utility options other than shield. I am debating between a 2 shield 2 druid, 3 shield 1 druid, or 2 shield 1 druid 1 stun for my next run. That is just how necessary shielding is when enemies can hit for your full base hp bar per attack, and how confident I am in ramping druid damage eventually killing everything is better than other spells.

[Leoron]

It depends on how far and when you are trying to do a dungeon run. Right now I split dungeon runs into two types, early and late. since so far i have only ever gotten two dungeon runs in one level it works out well.

For the early type of runs, I get as far as I can and sacrifice the students to jumpstart my school (typically around year 5-7). And in this run type, I agree with what you said. Mostly a mix of one druid and then stunners/shielders depending on levels and other passives. (stunners are fundamentally broken for boss battles btw). The objective of this run is to get as deep as I can while tanking battles.

For late game, done right before the dark lord shows up, my students should have a lot of passives and lvl 5 in key schools. The strategy I used is three stunners and one druid, all at lvl 5 in their attack stat, with a high level of blood pack and crit. The most important passive, however, is magic ink, the one that gives you a chance to get a scroll. the students at this point should have enough shields/random passives that they should not be threatened until threat lvl 40 ish. This gives you time to build up a scroll count.

The strategy I employed was to reduce the number of enemies to one using the finger of death scroll. If I was running low on the finger of death scrolls I would use the celerity scrolls and reduce the number of opponents to two. I would avoid most useless battles unless I had an excess of the above scrolls. At the very high level of threat, I was forced to used celerity scrolls even on single enemy fights since the chance of one of my stunners dying was relatively high.

Of special note is that you should only do the 2nd dungeon run if you have two dark lord banners with rep above 80. This is because of the event that will push the dark lord back by 5% each


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2522918266

[Serulin]

huh interesting, never really messed with alchemy chars, at least I think the scrolls are alchemy, will have to try it. My shield/druid build gets to around the point where enemies start dealing 20 a pop. The one I ran today was my best where I added assassin and demon to the mix to have some percent of doubles. got to the point where enemies were dealing 20 a pop before calling it. Ended up getting so many deep folk from the dungeon event that my game is now at 4 fps lol and my computer is a beast even if 4 years old by now.

[Sir Fisher of Slaithwaite]

Yea one thing I feel like they need to do is make students gain my XP based on their total Magic levels or some other reason. Everyone having 10HP really hurts balancing.

[Serulin]

Originally posted by Sir Fisher of Slaithwaite:

Yea one thing I feel like they need to do is make students gain my XP based on their total Magic levels or some other reason. Everyone having 10HP really hurts balancing.

Well it jist means hp is an arbitrary value and has no meaning because enemies scale too quickly. Students could have 1 hp and it won't matter as long as your shield scales fast enough or you stun them to death. It is an interesting disruption to the regular game, but needs polish such that breaking it is not the only option.

[CheTranqui]

They should have a chance to gain 1 hp each time they complete a new lesson in their studies. Maybe 50% chance each time?

That would make your average end-student have 0.5 × 20 = 10. If you stack that with the odd 5hp boost, a 25hp student seems far more useful than 10, while not being an insane boost. It'd get me 1, maybe 2 more battles?