Welcome to HC
lvl 90+ mono? Are you serious? 200+ corrupt level 100 monos / t4 dungeons is where endgame just starts. What are you talking about?
HC isnât harder than SC, itâs just less forgiving of mistakes. Masochist is harder.
I could ask the same of you, I was under the impression that t4 dungeon bosses were supposed to be the hardest ones in the game.
This is the exact issue. I shouldnât have to grind zero difficulty content for 1000 hours just for the game to âstartâ.
You also have to do this on every single character, awful.
During the writing of the OP, Masochist mode was disabled. Has it been re-enabled?
It was disabled for 0.9, donât think itâs been re-enabled yet.
So if sc is too easy for you. Do HC and see if you are lying to yourself. Just Kill HC T4 Julra and post a video on youtube then you can move on to the next game.
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But hc has the same damage modifiers as sc, unlike masochist which is actually harder. HC is just more punishing.
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I have to agree. Everything goes until Empowered, then if you know what youâre doing you wonât find any difficulty until 250+ corruption and T4 dungeons.
The lack of difficulty is a bit concerning, maybe not too much but playing without any consideration of gear saving movement speed and a few health in pieces shouldnât be the norm.
Monsters are horribly balanced, trash in one-shoted even at 2k corruption because they donât have life, also some mini-bosses have less life than many elites. Enemy damage is fine, but corruption scaling makes it waird, and the only concern in endgame.
The game needs a serious balance pass. Shouldnât be PoE levels of punishing by any metric but you should feel gear progression.
This just means nerfs, so no one will agree.
The biggest problem currently is that Exp up to around 85 is too powerful. passives/skill masteries still provide an insane amount of damage for almost all builds. after you max out your skill trees/passives you hit a wall where you suddenly can only improve with gear, and that gear can take 500 hours to obtain.
So the way to fix it is to make normal monoliths actually matter, which means nerfing the power of skills across the board. Most âmetaâ skills/builds do 200 corruption with only health items on, they have no reason to engage with a gearing system because they are using a skill synergy that makes them strong enough out of the box.
To make gear matter, you have to nerf that. And everyone will cry at how weak and boring every build is. if you want the game to matter before empowered, it will mean your corruption farming numbers get nerfed too.
But if you put too much emphasis on gear needing to be really good before you can progress then you get a PoE like system where everyone just farms gear âgood enoughâ then is done because progressing past that requires even more then the 500 hours because the gear grind is exponential in LE.
Tbqh I think we are eating good, and the masses might say they are unhappy, but will be more pissed when they nerf everything to the ground and you have to actually stop to farm up items in normal monoliths because empowered is too hard without doing that. which would be gear progression.
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The game is indeed far too easy in general up to empowered Monoliths. Even then the empowered Monoliths (these are level 100 and start with 100 Corruption points that increase difficulty further) are still rather easy unless you push the Corruption to very high levels which is a long and tedious process. And even then only the Monolith bosses become challenging.
But hereâs my chance to plug the Arena againâŚ
You may have missed another end-game mode called Arena. THAT is where the real difficulty is to be found as far as I am concerned. Arena offers an endless wave-based mode (no bosses) that just gets increasingly harder until you quit or it kills you. Arena is generally unpopular as the material rewards you can get from running it are not good at all, itâs all about bragging rights and measuring the power of your build. However, if you want proper scalable and consistent end-game challenge that WILL destroy you, that is where you get it, imoâŚ
I admit I was shouting âJust go play Arena!!!â at all the posts in this thread that were saying end-game is too easy. If you think it is too easy, come back and tell me how many Arena waves you managed to push. (This takes a LOT less time than pushing Corruption in a mono).
Yeah but not in the campaign there isnât. That is the problem. Your first experience of the game is likely to be running through the entire campaign with a single char, and right now that is embarrassingly easy. It is almost impossible to die in the campaign. (And if you do, time to abandon that build lol).
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Yeah I donât necessarily disagree with that. But the campaign itself is kind of supposed to be a tutorial. Maybe some of the later bosses could be a little harder.
I still think the main solution would just be to add a greater difficulty mode, so that casual players donât feel like the game is trying to murder them all of the time.
We are so used to nerfs that we fall in the trap thinking nerfs is the only way to go. Nerfs are (not always) usually laziness, means the devs donât know whatâs going on so they just nerf to the ground the skills that have âunintendedâ performance.
You can balance things out the other way around: buffing underperformers.
In the situation we are talking about, is about buffing and tuning monsters a bit. Itâs a delicate issue but should be looked at at any point before release (IMO, if they want to have a ultra-casual game, so be it).
Itâs delicate because as of today, skills are tremendously unbalanced, and some skills are able to be useful because you donât need damage for so many encounters, the moment enemies have adequate health values and damage values, these skills will became instantly useless.
Problem is that new players will rarely pick the high difficulty for their first play through, and that is where the dis-satisfaction will set in. [Of course if you allow the difficulty to be dynamically altered at any time, weâre good.]
Personally I think the main issue is that the campaign (which I agree is nothing more than a glorified tutorial) lacks enemy density. Not only are the enemies extremely weak, but there are hardly any of them throughout most of the campaign. Adding double or even treble the number of enemies would not makes things any harder, but it would make the campaign a lot less tedious. It would be rather fun.
Letâs face it, right now the campaign is a tedious, soul-destroying exercise in boredom. Especially if you have been through it as often as I have.
[Itâs a damn shame that respeccing skills is so punishing during the campaign. If it wasnât, then players could at least experiment with their skills and skill points as they level, without feeling they are being punished and losing progression each time they do. That would make it far less tedious.]
New players shouldnât pick the high difficulty mode. Thatâs kinda obvious.
But I agree, I think the story and the campaign itself could be more interesting. At this point, Iâm not sure how youâd go about fixing that. I was discussing this with someone before and I think you could do something more like Megaman, where you can pick which bosses to do in what order and have them drop uniques and set items that are good for fighting certain other bosses in the lineup.
As far as the story goes, thereâs no simple change that would improve this one. Itâd have to have more going on in general, and it would have to revolve around the personality of each of the protagonists and them having fun and quip-y exchanges at certain points in the story. Thatâs something that takes a specific type of creativity and canât be done in an afternoon, so thatâs not likely to happen.
I just want add that there are another huge reason to justify arena lack of popularity. That would be its bad design right now. Too many similar waves that take forever to increase difficulty and a poor resume/replay system.
What takes 500, 600,700 waves to test your build could be done in 300, 400-500 waves if they tweak the system.
I could forgive the lack of material rewards. as the âchallengeâ appealing is fine to me. The competion, âfight for the gloryâ appeal would be fine if it were done in a more thrilling way and less time consuming.
The actual game is very easy, only bosses are difficult. Could have better balance between them. I have 170 hours in the game, several chars and two of them in empowered monoliths.
Even then only a handful of bosses are challenging. Most are brain-dead easy.
But if you think the above then⌠go play Arena! 