Beta Tuning and Progression Systems Feedback

Wicked Experimental Branch
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1
  • Pickaxe prisoners need the input reading dodge spam adjusted down. It is really obnoxious fighting a group of 2 of those and maybe a prisoner witch while the pickaxe guy is spamming dash backs whenever it isn’t trying to shave half your head off with its multi-spin attack.

By the time you dodge an attack and want to punish you’re already having to dodge another spin or lunge, and with the tiny window and little stamina you have left they just immediately dodge out over and over.

  • Heal rune feels absolutely worthless with the overnerf, it scales like garbage, it costs too much focus for what it does. With how plentiful food mats are, I will never use a Heal Rune that costs me a focus attack that could clear a group of mobs on top of healing less than even a Mushroom Soup and not even have side buffs or provide focus like fish food.

    Systems becoming obsolete is NOT good. Please keep this tuning approach to Unspoken and leave viable options to the rest.

    These people complaining had the option to self-handicap and not use the heal rune. Now you’ve removed the Heal rune from viability for EVERYONE by listening to the select few who want to force their perspective on perceived difficulty on everyone else when they always had a solution.

    It is actually trap rune taking up your utility slots and ceases being useful past lv4. It has no scaling, and it costs too much focus for how little it heals.

    A better change would have been to halve the original healing and have the other half of the heal happen over 5-10 seconds, so food is still best for burst healing, but Heal would still be a rune worth the 50 focus cost.

  • Food recipes appear to have been moved off Gordon into the scribe table. Why? It makes upgrading him pretty worthless as his food offerings are way too costly (as are most vendors early game with the current cost of upgrades and infusions) to even be worthwhile.

  • Certain gauntlet weapons have too short reach, the handwraps when you use a charge attack or even manage to stagger a mob or parry them will often place you at a distance where you won’t be able to even have the full window to punish as your reach is ridiculously low.

  • I don’t see in current balancing how gauntlets or kick runes are worth it over 2H weapons, 1h swords/wakizashi/rapiers, bows, or even wands.

You have less reach than all those categories, you don’t attack noticeably faster than 1H swords/sabers, and on top you neither do the damage or poise damage. Rune kicks and martial attacks have poor tracking, poor reach, and inferior damage to other runes.

It seems that if you want to use gauntlets, you use Reinbach claws with lightning infusion/lifesteal, and that’s it as far as your options.

  • Cloth still sucks, really badly. Even worse is upgrading it.

  • In general, reaching Black Trench, I feel like my upgrade path has significantly stalled by the total scarcity of animal parts and cloth/leather. I still have some items at rank 4-6 despite having cleared all the way up to Nameless Pass, and by clear I mean doing every nook and cranny of the map before the boss for each respective map.

2

  • Made it to Lowland Meadows, and now the food recipe situation having been moved to the scribe table lottery becomes even more evident of an issue.

    I only had Danos tier 2.

    Even then, this unlocks several higher tier recipes. What that means is I went the entirety of Nameless Pass with RNG research unlocking only recipes that use Marin/Lowland mats, and I didn’t have access to any food that uses Nameless Pass/Black Trench mats for the entirety of those maps, only unlocking 2 tier 2 recipes by the end of Black Trench.

  • I am entering Lowland Meadows and still don’t have a recipe to use T2 fish. Removing recipes for sale from Gordon/Grinnich is not good. Scribe table is supposed to be a pity system to eventually work your way to a recipe if RNG is unfavorable.

    By removing the recipes from the vendors, you’ve made it mandatory to participate in the research lottery as our first and only choice. Worse, because the cost of gambling for the recipes is steep at 3 papers per research, this also means in order to obtain food recipe upgrades you are also giving up access to more weapon class variety.

    If I play a gauntlet using monk, my drops have been largely 85% maces/axe/swords and the other 15% staves and wands. Doesn’t feel great when scribe table research is so expensive and most of it needs to be used to get food recipes.

    There is also quite an abyss in performance between the weapon classes. Crystal Fists and Handwoven Wraps are pretty bad compared to Reinbach claws. Both in damage, reach, and synergy with gear.

    There is for example Jade Ring, which prizes fast attacking weapons to trigger the stamina returns. Slower weapons are penalized by these types of items, and there appear to be no equivalent rings that give favorable conditions to slower weapons simply because slower weapons suck in a game where enemies have poise, are far more mobile than the player, seem to have longer aggression periods than the player as if their stamina was higher, and do input reading dodges frequently as well as interrupt the player rather trivially since player poise outside plate is really low.

  • With that said, since the class system is bound to shake system balance quite a bit, we’ll see if different classes can give traits that catch up slower weapons up to speed with faster ones that have less animation locks in a game where animation locks are lethal due to how hard mobs/bosses can hit.

    Even then, I doubt there will be a class that can compensate intra-weapon type balance. Gauntlets and higher risk weapons either need to bring in more damage, or they should have built in increased damage mitigation for the player to compensate for the reality that these weapons make you more stationary.

    An example of this is Khazan, the Last Berserker. The greatsword weapon gives baseline damage mitigation while swinging to compensate against the faster DW/spear weapons.

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3

  • Testing some more on Path of the Chosen, and I don’t know if bounties are scaling with character level because I did Savage Pair and the antler helm marauder weekly bounty and they felt like massive health sponges at Lv20 with my max possible upgrades as I’m being starved out of upgrades by the abysmal animal material drop rates.

  • I haven’t found a single wolf skull in a double Nameless Pass clear including the crane area and the dark cave which has the majority of those wolf packs. Animal parts, cloth, and leather need significant drop rate buffs and more of them to be on the vendors, especially animal parts on Grinnich and cloth on T2-T3 tailor shop.

  • Enemies with fire enchant feel lke they’re applying way too much build up with a single hit, a Savage Pair single axe swing was applying a burn DoT that was entirely outdamaging a whole Mushroom Soup heal on its own, just counting the DoT.

  • Illuminate Rune needs to be one of the baseline runes always offered at T1-T2 Eleanor. I have her at T3 for 2 days and have yet to see the rune.

  • In fact, vendor stock needs to rotate much more frequently. It being bound to a real life daily lockout feels dreadful.

  • Please reduce material processing times. The initial tiers of material processing are reasonable at 30 seconds, but 3 minutes per material process when recipes need 10+ of a material is just really silly timegating for no reason. It really does not feel good to have gear upgrades timegated by the processing time on top of the RNG material drop rate wall.

4

  • Adding to those whose feedback is a request for a quick item radial menu.

  • Right now, during combat, with how aggressive enemies are, the quick menu for controller users is dreadful because the controls to pull out the quick menu and select between items keeps your character stationary.

  • There is no way in combat that I will be cycling through the items as just 2-3 seconds being forced to stay static due to the button placements.

  • Having to hold down the down D-pad means I can’t use the left stick for movement simultaneously, and because item selection happens with X I cannot dodge mid-item selection either.

  • The best solution would be for the shoulder L2 to pull out an item quick access menu that you only need to click once and item selection works by just the right stick moving over the selected item.

  • Alternatively, since the circle button is mostly sitting there collecting dust, consider that as another possible shortcut button.

  • Consumable buff durations seem tediously short at 2-3 minutes. It makes their steep crafting material costs, especially flasks and oils, not feel particularly great.

  • There will be a ritual of slapping your 3 different stamina/poise/focus flask first, then 1-2 food buffs, then the rune buffs, then channel, then eat food to recover health again. Very tedious and frequent prebuffing process. Perhaps consider consolidating buff categories and effects, or just remove the silly damage amp/defense buffs and just keep the oil effects and the flasks.

  • Food/flask buffs should last longer than 2 minutes.

  • Similar for the bed and animal petting buffs, these buffs are so short that by the time you reach any place where they might become useful the buffs are about to fall off.

5

…Have to test

But it’s better than before with the addition of focus gain and the fact that it’s the only armor that doesn’t reduce stamina regen, now it’s not completely bad even if it’s still weaker than the other options, and anyway light armor is meant to be risky, the anointed ones that you don’t equip load go into other useful stats and light dodge is very good.

I did it too, in my opinion it’s a consequence of limited rerolls, It’s not worth putting embers into an item if all you to end up with shitty enchantments, so fixing an item with bad enchantments is not even something you take it into consideration even if the item is of a higher level.

And this combines with the problem that upgrading items has always been something that NRFTW has never done well, and it’s always best to wait until you find the same or similar item but at a higher level without wasting money and materials.

I almost never used food so I didn’t realize how serious the problem was.

But It seems to me that you can buy new food from the chef and then search for the food you bought without wasting research papers with the random search.

But it must be said that the system is a bit too convoluted, buying the recipe from the chef was more intuitive.

This is a very serious problem, what’s the point of having a lot of different weapons if many are useless either because of the moveset or because of the damage.

This ring is my favorite ring but it’s always one step away from breaking the game or being useless.

I hope that when they add classes the balance improves everything but I doubt that will happen, I’m very afraid that the class system will fuck up the balance even more, the devs don’t seem to have made any progress in balancing the game.

This type of RNG is terrible, in my opinion there should be ways to get what you are looking for in a guaranteed way, like a self-imposed hunting mission, which allows you to find what you are looking for, for example choose from a list the objects I want and the game gives me a mission or more missions to get them.

They definitely increased the damage but it seems ok to me.

Yes I think it would make more sense to have them updated every day in game instead of every day in real life, and there should also be a mechanic where you block an item from the merchants’ window, for example if I want to buy a weapon (and I don’t have any money) but I’m done playing for the day, then I can’t buy it anymore because the next day it isn’t there, but if I block it the item will also be there for me the next day.

I agree

Yes, both for the food and for the consumable items, it seems like Zelda BOTW & TOTK but you don’t stop time.

5 min would probably be right.

in my opinion it should be possible to mix the effects in a single potion that is crafted with the current single components so you drink that and be fine (but obviously you have to have crafted it first so there is an extra element of planning).

5 min would probably be right.

It would be nice if the pet gave you full health and full focus. The beds in my opinion should give you the buff until you die.

6

Managed to finish the campaign and one Pestilence Lv1 clear and I think I’ll stop there to not burn out on the content.

Post-clear Feedback: Bugs:

  • Invisible Balak Taw are back, particularly when they get called via an enemy screech. They are invisible and will attack and damage the player with only a target lock circle able to reveal where they are.

  • Enemies will often get stuck without animation and yet carry out the attack anyway and shave off 75% of your health and pinball you around despite looking stationary.

  • The Gate opening cutscene with Seline is failing to trigger, you have to skip out of being stuck.

Balance (Path - Chosen, 30 HP, 53 Dex):

  • Regular enemy damage starts getting too high on Nameless Pass and onwards. Marin and Lowlands being the most notable. A single 1-2 hit attack sequence from a regular enemy on 40% physical DR can still wipe out 1/2-2/3 your health, and you will be fighting 2-3 of these enemies at a time.

  • The sawmill goliath in a single attack sequence will immediately stagger and 100-0 a cloth/leather wearer, and it alongside the cage abomination have larger hitbox on their stab and swings than the actual sword.

  • Enemy poise outside goliaths is excessive for weapon types like gauntlets. I can use a 50 focus drive break or spirit burst and that will not stagger several if not most regular enemies, and sometimes not even a full melee sequence will. Landing a spirit burst on a goliath and carrying out a full melee sequence with gauntlets will not fill their stagger bar.

  • This makes controlling groups of enemies incredibly bad outside using high stagger 2H weapons with charged attacks and high reach, or bows.

  • This lead in effect to most of my lethal and most resource intensive encounters being with groups of mobs and not bosses.

  • Something is wrong when a regular enemy is hitting as hard as a boss for 1/3 your health at 40% DR. I’ll die on this hill, regular enemies should never be as dangerous as a boss.

  • Boss loot feels pretty terrible overall, even solo.

  • Cyvion has way too much HP, even abusing something like Siren’s Call charged attacks from range with modifiers it was barely tickling him at 53 dexterity scaling.

  • Kiss/Curse system leans heavily towards highly punitive relative to the benefits. Plague gear has outrageous rolls like 30% increased damage taken when not at full focus, in a game where enemies can 2-3 tap you.

  • Another example is Crucible. One power grants 15% attack speed and damage, but entirely removes focus. This is a massive outgoing damage nerf that can roll randomly, and on top of being terribly tuned it degrades gameplay by reducing the player to regular/charged attack spam.

  • Bows are not necessarily higher DPS than some melee, but definitely with gauntlets, I had little reason to risk getting 2-3 tapped by enemies in melee when my gauntlet hits are tickling them for 50% of their HP at best on a full 3-4 second animation lock attack sequence. There is just no payoff whatsoever for how much damage the player takes while trying to melee.

  • Rather than significantly make melee damage higher than range, melee playstyles need more baked in resilience/survival. It really is not fun to dodge roll for 10 seconds and hit 2 times and go back to rolling for another 10 seconds on repeat, or replacing the 2-hit sequence for just charged attack spam in between dodge rolls to minimize exposure to punishment. Arthur made all these beautiful animation sequences and you barely get to use them because doing more than 2-3 hits is suicidal at current tuning and enemy aggression/recovery rates.

  • Parry was feeling good until Marin. Then you land a parry and the enemy is recovering and landing an attack before you’ve even finished the punish rune animation.

  • The changes to gems are not good. Some like increasing enchant % at full health/focus just encourage degenerate gameplay like camping range or just spamming regular/charged attacks. A 40% conditional boost to a 10-15% increase enchant isn’t that significant either compared to a permanently available gem benefit.

  • I repeat, cloth is terrible. I want to play with Illaria’s monk uniform with my monk character, and you’ve made the set garbage cloth instead of leather. This means that compared to leather+mesh mix using just the monk head and chest for appearance I am leaving 15-20% DR on the table just to look how my character makes sense from the sense of class fantasy, and on top a lot less poise. In general, this game is tuned to heavily incentivize a mesh/plate knight or leather/mesh archer playstyle at the expense of all other archetypes due to the massive survival difference.

  • Before, I could circumvent the heavy weakness of cloth by stacking physical DR gems and plagued damage reduction % rolls, but you’ve significantly trimmed these. Now playing with how I want my character to look comes at a massive performance cost.

7

Jewelry and the removal of exalting their stats:

  • Please revert this decision. This completely removes the player ability to mitigate bad drops with bad rolls, since you can no longer maximize the roll of jewelry with exalting to compensate for bad rolls when the ring drops.

  • This is even worse than changes to armor and enchantments, because unlike armor or weapons, YOU CANNOT RECRAFT RINGS. You are at the complete mercy of RNG drops. To get another ring of the same type to drop and hopefully with better rolls. Not good.

Runes, enchanting, and upgrades:

  • Vendor prices to upgrade items and enchant items with runes, infusion, or to extract runes is way too high during a normal playthrough. I could barely scrape by enough silver to upgrade items, because the value of selling items to vendors is so low and silver acquisition does not keep up with the absurdly high costs of materials and services from vendors.

  • This is another reason most players won’t bother buying from vendors and will opt to just farm and craft, even though vendor stock is limited and refreshes on a ridiculously long IRL day long cooldown. Why would I spend 1 silver 20 copper on a single plate of food when the limiting reagent for that food plate is a 20 copper material? Makes zero sense to buy dishes or most flasks and potions.

  • It’s even worse with armor that costs a whopping 3-7 silver a piece, without knowing if said armor will be bricked when Eleanor makes it blue instead of plagued.

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8

Rune Extraction and Build Changing:

  • Rune extraction needs to extract all runes if it’s going to destroy the weapon, not just a single rune.

  • It is incredibly tedious, grindy, and costly to change builds.

  • Say, I want to transition from a set of magic gauntlets to a plagued gauntlet set. Not only do I need to grind the materials to craft, which are already scarce, but I need to grind out the RNG of rune drops since you can’t craft runes, so all the runes I had on my previous gauntlets, 75% of them are gone when I want to carry over to a new weapon.

  • Items starting at rank 9 was a bad change from the previous max rank drop at max level. Now you have to regrind a bunch of rare animal materials on top of pestilence mats just to get a weapon that’s up to speed with your current one. Again, making experimenting with builds really costly, grindy, and tedious because of how much RNG drops you are reliant on to even pull the trigger.

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9

Exalting:

  • Exalting can trigger on affixes that are already maxed, like 15 focus on fatality. What this means is 1 or more of the 4 exalting RNG rolls is wasted and then you hit the 4/4 cap. This feels awful.

Enchanting:

  • Somehow it just got way worse and with more RNG. It’s not only the reroll caps, which are bad in themselves.

  • It’s the facets now. Without the ability to reroll facets, items can get outright bricked even more than you already brick them when eleanor doesn’t enchant them with plagued or magic status with the exact outcome you wanted.

  • People want to get their builds online without the RNG slot machines, the fun part of the game is not the itemization RNG, it’s the combat and how you can modify the combat experience with different gear loadouts. The way enemies are tuned, you can’t afford to be playing suboptimal builds or builds that lack synergy.

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10

Uniques/”Legendaries”:

  • Don’t feel great because they’re rarer and harder to acquire, but not particularly tuned to be capstone items. I understand why you’re trying to not make the rest of your weapons obsolete next to uniques, but then as an item class they really make little sense.

  • All of them still have utility runes in their rune slots, which is wrong.

  • Lack of ability to customize runes is pretty awful and will trash most of these items.

  • Cannot be exalted.

  • Target farming nonexistent. This entire beta I am sitting on 3 legendary staves from crucible and 3 falstad greatshields and a light shield, but not a single gauntlet despite playing a gauntlet build. This circles back on how miserable the game makes it for you to quickly pick up, play, and refine your character with the playstyle archetype YOU want, instead of being forced to play to what drops.

Stamina:

  • The impact of investing on the stat feels minuscule, and it seems ridiculous that a complete attack sequence depletes about 80-90% of your stamina, even with stamina investments.
  • Enemies have prolonged attack sequences that require often 3-4+ dodges, then a ton of dashes that require sprinting to close distance, that by the time you’re on target to punish, you barely have any stamina to do so because of all the dodging and sprinting that competed with the significantly large attack stamina costs.
  • As a result, Jade Ring with a 5%+ roll feels mandatory to make melee stamina centric builds work.