I know that difficulty is supposed scale to via corruption farming in the monoliths but this raises multiple problems:
It’s impossible to raise the difficulty before reaching the empowered monoliths,. This punishes players for getting better at the game as the more effective they get at making new characters work, the longer they have to wait before getting to test the limits of their build.
The corruption only affects one monolith at a time, which means that if you want to start farming another monolith you’re forced to steamroll through multiple cycles with suboptimal drop chance before reaching the same levels
Even within a monolith it takes too long to raise the corruption. 10 to 15 echos and 2 boss fights to get 30 corruption is too long
The rest of the game content doesn’t scale with corruption. Some prophecies ask you to go kill Majasa or Liath but the bosses are so easy it’s more of a chore than anything
So here are some solutions:
Make corruption global to every monolith
Add a way to raise corruption faster. I propose that just like you unlock empowered monoliths by clearing the last 3 steps, doing it again (through an alternative quest) raises the global corruption by 100. To limit people from going over what they can clear you could make the bosses have the power of the raised corruption applied to them.
Do something about the early game for alt characters. There’re already been a ton of suggestions about this like unlocking empowered monoliths account-wide, mine would be to add a way to make corruption apply in the whole map and have the possibility to raise it by completing the dungeons.
That’s it for me, I’ll conclude by saying that I love the game and have already played 200h since release but as things are I really don’t feel like making a new character because of how tedious and boring early game is.
Yes, they do not help.
I still 1 shot everything, but now everything also 1 shots me.
They also take up a core inventory slot.
Why couldn’t you add a 2nd difficulty like D4(a game marketed to everyone), and Grim Dawn?
Are you afraid of bad players who will be potential buyers clicking “masochist” mode on the character selection screen and then quitting instead of being someone who spends money on the game?
Or afraid of reviewers giving the game a bad review for reviewing it on masochist?
Hi Mike,
for some people, this is something they dont want to do ‘restrict themselves’ (even though we know its almost exactly the same as choosing a harder difficulty option).
for example, if someone is finding 500 corruption too easy and you tell them to ‘just use less powerful weapons’ or ‘dont spec passives’ or ‘dont spec your skills’, they dont like those answers.
if the option is added, they will want increased rewards because of the increased difficulty and time to kill enemies because of the challenge being higher, but if they have put the challenge on themselves, they feel that they can not ask for increased rewards, since its self restriction and nobody else to point to.
its easier for people to complain about difficulty and make it someone else’s problem, than just restricting themselves.
i would suggest putting those boots in a chest exactly where a new character spawns and maybe adding a equal reward to them (unlimited crafting potential or make them unique with only LP4), than them being just negative stats.
this is because a lot of players dont even know about them and some will just assume there is no way to make it harder, while others dont like the idea of pure negative stats for no reward.
with the boots being right there for everyone, i would suggest over explaining that they make you die faster and make you do less damage.
EDIT: just had an idea, make a nice set.
Boots like they are.
Gloves that disable passives.
Body Armour that disables all skill nodes.
Helmet that disables all resistances.
Amulet that disables weapon and offhand slots
I didn’t know that these boots existed, this is a nice easter egg but as the 2 persons above me have said they don’t really solve the issues.
I forgot to specify it in my OP but if I’m going to take on harder challenges I would expect to get better rewards, like more exp and rarer loots. These boots don’t give that, do they?
Also like Grizzly2612 said they’re very well hidden and you wouldn’t find them unless you know they exist, and as someone who picked up the game recently I had no idea. It’s not a bad thing in itself that they’re hard to find and I’m all for easter eggs in games, but something like that can’t replace a hard mode that would be easily accessible to all players.
To be honest, despite the title, it doesn’t read like you want the game more difficult.
You want to reach the difficulty faster.
This is absolutely fine as well and has been discussed quite a few times, but it is different from difficulty. Both might be needed.
I like some of your suggestions , like making corruption global and applying some of it to the whole map.
Some notes:
Well, it is true at this point, there is no denying it.
But this is mostly because of the giga-normous powercreep we are seeing.
I believe the best solution for the game would be to bring back the builds to reasonable levels of power, a complete re-balance difficulty/power, but I am not sure it is possible now the current standards have been established.
Sad…
That I completely disagree with.
I do wish the game would be a bit more difficult, especially early.
Not for rewards, just because I find a bit of challenge more fun than a sleepwalk.
Giving better loot, or even worse more xp, would make the game easier instead of harder after a few chapters (because our characters would be overlevelled and overequipped).
This is clearly shown in Grim Dawn, where Veteran mode is harder than normal for about two chapters, a lot easier afterwards.
I really like this idea.
At the moment the boots are not a bad concept, but like the old masochist mode, they probably make the campaign, especially early, a bit TOO hard. Jumping from an extreme to another. And with sacrificing an important gear slot, that’s tough.
Then if the game gets too easy you turn the difficulty up again, that’s very easy when you get an easily tunnable difficulty setting.
If you want the game to be harder but with no counterpart then you can already do it with the boots or self limitations (some people do no ward builds for example), you don’t need the game to change.
Not really. You could make an “adventure mode” similar to D3 or D4 where you skip the campaign, have already unlocked the main quest stuff (passive points and idols) but in LE that would limit the maps you play on to the monolith, the arena and the dungeons which isn’t something I find good. I really do think that being able to tune the difficulty of the whole game would be better.
the option to slightly reduce your own stats is always there, if you dont want the reduction taking up slots, then remove the passive points or skill nodes.
but people want to complain to developers and get them to make entire game modes/changes that takes time that could be spent in various other systems.
as i said, in other words, it literally creates another thing for people to complain about ‘rewards’.
people complain about difficulty and then once they are satisfied with the increased difficulty, then they will complain about not being rewarded adequately for that difficulty.
at the end of the day, if you can not manage the campaign or first monoliths when you have nothing equipped and no passives or skill nodes, then your difficulty slider is totally in your control.
but people want a significant reward for doing this, so, is it really about the challenge or the reward?
when you tell them to make it hard on their own, they dont know how much to reward themselves or they dont see it as rewarding themselves.
these are battles that will NEVER be won.
people expect someone else to make it hard for them, but nobody else knows exactly how hard people want it and then how much reward people expect for that hardness.
exactly.
once you get that difficulty out of your system, then you can resume and appreciate the relaxed time.
What are you on about? The mode was already there but EHG removed it for whatever reason. Some people just want stuff back that was a thing already.
On top of it adding a globald modifier that adds or removes bonuses isn’t a wild thing to do as far as I was told. I don’t know it first hand so this might or might not be true.
I wouldn’t say it’s harder, but at least there are capstone dungeons that you can try at anytime to unlock harder difficulties, which is something I like very much about that game.
This kind of mentality is good if you’re a superplayer or a speedrunner playing mario 64 or ocarina of time, where the game hasn’t been in development for more than 20 years now.
But this is a Feedback and Suggestions forum for a game currently in development, if your answer to people proposing changes to make the game better is “stop complaining and don’t make propositions” then I don’t know what you’re doing here. So please stay on topic and stop derailing my thread.
things dont just ‘work’, nor is it just a click of a button without code behind it.
even adding a single button is not a case of just put a box there with some text.
so, while they work on the text box code and testing it, what is happening with the bugs and skills not working properly?
something doesnt have to be wild to still cause issues even if you know exactly how to do it, it will still take time that could be better spent elsewhere.
people can adjust their own difficulty up to the point where even their best gear will not go past, but people can not fix bugs or make their skills work better.
so???
D4 has 4 and D3 has 16 for you to fine tune your difficulty and in both games the highest is capped and both still require you to get to a certain point to unlock them.
monoliths are endless, which means there is no limit on the increase in difficulty.
you got an answer from a dev, even though it was actually a joke.
google the meaning of ‘masochist’ and then read his comment again slowly.
Google the meaning of ‘pipeline’ and reconsider your point of view. Just because people are asking for a change doesn’t mean the devs need to stop whatever they’re doing to address it now, you’re just making up imaginary scenarios to justify your argument.
Again we had this game mode in the past and it was working. It was an unbalanced mess EHG never worked on outside of just adding it to the game with whatever modifiers.
So just hold your horses and read it again because EHG removed a working game mode as well as they removed a lot of other content.
When you try to argue how hard whatever is or just overlook that masochist mode was already live and kicking. For some reason you just ignore that fact and you come up with a lot of useless stuff ^^.
BTW I don’t think masochist mode was good at any point and I think it’s not worth to reenable it for the small fraction of players who want it.
