Hi. While it doesn’t matter to much right now as we play offline anyway, i hope difficulty wont be so randomized at release. I mostly play HC and especially plan to play it at the release - to not lose much time with endless grinds at high-levels and instead rather take a weekly break when my character dies until i get desire to try something new. However since 0.7.8 i have noted that all the characters i created post 0.7.8 just cannot pass the new part of the game (at HC). The game difficulty jumps feel about right until the moment player gets to the Divine Era (chapter 8 i supose).
I usually get to that area at lv 43-46 and cannot progress any further now. So the solution prior to 0.7.8 would be to clear few early stages of monolith. But since the patch, player is literally taking a 50/50 chances there (even at stage 1) as some areas are doable, but in some hordes of overpowered creatures (Crabs, Elementals etc…) teleport out of nowhere and one-shots. I am neither a skillful player, nor i have OP gear, but i had bunch of lv 40-60 toons prior to 0.7.8 so my characters end up with ~400hp and 40-60 res, but so far 4 of my new characters couldn’t pass last part of the story at HC without getting whiped. Obviosly i probably could make some off-map kill build and clear each level slowly and safely, but I am not sure game is ment to be played like that.
I am not against hard content. But i dont think jumps from where stuff kills you in 2-4 sec to 0.5 sec and one-shot in case of monolith Crabs etc … is the optimal idea. In my humble opinion such content should be outside of the story. For example: in monolith, however in that case difficulty there has to be consistent. So player doesn’t clear it 2-3 times and then suddenly gets whiped in an instant at the same stage level.
I think its the way protections are currently fragmented. For Ruined/Imperial you’ll need necrotic/void. But then you won’t need them at all until you reach Monolith/Arena. Wish there was more time travel involved or at least more rifts with different enemies.
It’s not helped by the way that protections are done between the classes, i.e. a mage is likely to have far higher elemental protection than an acolyte without even trying, meaning the jump in difficulty with the divine era is more of a hop.
I’m normally not a HC player but i definitly understand your point and yes once you reach divine era again (before heorot dies, don’t know which chapter it is), the curve is just too much. Also for new players i can imagine how frustrating that first experience is. @XLVI_carpo had a good suggestion in his 0.7.8 review how to prepare players with quest specific item rewards for the new chapter. I’m also currently not happy with the difficulty curve and the insane amount of hp big creatures (even normal white monsters not rares) currently have. I normally skip those monsters because it’s not worth the effort and time to defeat them. But this is something EHG is probably aware of and will adjust in the future.
I appreciate the idea to prepare new players for different elemental threat, but i dont think it will change anything fundamentally. One of my recent characters was a primalist-druid with over 550hp and fire/cold res in 50-60’s, yet in chapter 8 fire-elementals still drowned his hp pool like butter and he ended up one-shotted from a rare self-exploding dog. That situation reminds me of the early days of POE when you could come across a damage-return mob and just suicide yourself instantly or a super-stacked rare mob from the maps for some reason decided to join campaign.
If i had an option to balance the game i would slightly increase difficulty in second half of the Imperial Era to prepare the player and either dramaticly decrease numbers or weaken the damage of spell casting monsters, like: rare-gryphons, fire elementals and self-exploding damage of the rare dogs. As for Monolith, i think it is fine for such monsters to exist there. But i would totally remove them from stage 1, add them in few numbers in stage 2-5 and only Ctrl+C/V them at higher stages. Also at early stages these over-powered creatures shouldn’t spawned behid the player. I dont know about everyone, but it doesn’t give me a good feeling when you retreat and suddenly find out that you have two-three fat mobs out of nowhere at your starting area.
