Armour needs to be changed, or the difficulty needs to be tweaked

Wicked Feedback
1

I’m a bad souls player; and I started on the hardest difficulty, so I should find this game challenging. First 10 levels, while figuring stuff out, felt great. Challenging but manageable.

After level 15, everything was a wash. Bossing was ok, most bosses still took me 2-3 tries. However, all the normal enemies felt extremely undertuned. None of them pose any threat to me, at all.

Considering this game is 90% exploration and killing regular monsters, this is not good.

I intentionally gimped myself by not using any runes; didn’t slot any gems; didn’t use any consumables whatsoever, except food, and didn’t use any ranged attacks.

I think it’s partly because of how powerful armour is. Use 700 armour and it feels like you can take 10x more hits. Heavy roll is perfectly usable in this game, but using medium roll with very high armour is still easily manageable with a little investment.

Any build sub 400-500 armour feels silly to do, because of how powerful armour is, for almost no investment. I like building defence, so that’s not a problem in itself, but if you keep it like that, you have to balance the monsters around it.

I understand I could run naked if I want a challenge, but intentionally building sub-optimally so I can have fun never felt good to me; especially in a game with difficulty settings. It feels like bad design if I have to do it that way.

Even now, it feels bad not using runes/gems/consumables/ranged attacks. But I know if I use them the game will become way less fun cause it will be even easier

At least make it so, instead of 20% inc xp for hardest difficulty, it’s -20% armor effectiveness

2

There is a balancing issue for the high difficulty right now, the bonus XP you get is so high that even though the difficulty is higher you are essentially outleveled compared to the area, and the difficulty basically goes back to normal or even simple.

For a second playthrough where the player knows the game and plays the story as quickly as possible, the difficulty is correct but for a first playthrough, if you stay too long in one area you might get too many levels.

If you notice the Post Pame (spoiler if you haven't finished the story yet)

The last floors of the crucible and the plague zones lv4 if you check they are lv 30 they have the correct difficulty (if you are level 30)

3

I played pre-breach, so I almost never went back to the same area this time around; and I didn’t focus on bounties, only did the ones that were on the way. But even then I was a bit overleved. Was doing lvl 16 areas at 17-18 ; lvl 21 areas at 22-23

So yeah, fully agree, that’s part of the problem too.

I don’t think the difficulty is correct even if you’re the right level, though