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.

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  • 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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  • 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.

2 Likes
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.

2 Likes
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.

2 Likes
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.
1 Like
11

Poise:

  • OK for most enemies, with a few outliers.
  • The worms from the bloated abominations have too high poise for no reason. Their poise is such that they will usually always get a bite off through any attempt to clean them up once the bloated abomination has exploded.
  • False Ones are the most egregious. You can pull off a charged attack followed by a martial kick rune attack and they will still not be staggered. Their poise needs to be toned down.
  • Some runes like Skyfall Punch need their poise damage buffed. As a rule, if you’re blowing 100+ focus on a rune attack that also has a windup animation, this thing should stagger most things short of bosses if you land the rune.
  • Enemy poise stagger is pretty short outside the Goliaths who are staggered enough for a charged punish. Conversely, when the player’s poise is broken, the player sits there staggered for an eternity.
  • The poise system further aggravates the issue of the game heavily incentivizing mesh/plate armor over everything else. Cloth/leather has such bad baseline poise that sometimes a single boss or 2H enemy attack will immediately break your poise/stagger. The upsides of cloth and leather simply do not compensate for the sheer gap in survival that mesh offers while still being able to preserve a normal roll.
  • Look at all your content creator videos, they’re all running some type of mesh or plate on at least over half the armor slots if not all slots on mesh, and what is not mesh is usually leather.

Ranged Enemy Attack Spam:

  • Enemies like the prisoner witches, the abomination darters, and mosquitos have way too much ranged attack spam, dashbacks, and the poise damage and stagger on their projectiles is excessive, made worse by your poise buff to them.

Before, they used to be priority kills but your efforts in reaching them paid off by easily being able to stagger them out of their barrage of ranged attacks. Now, they got increased poise and that means far more frequent dashbacks and teleports and knockbacks after all the investment spent closing distance. By themselves, this is not an issue, but these mobs often accompany bruisers and more threatening melee enemies.

They are not a problem on their own, but their cadence of attacks given their significantly increased survival is now excessive in group fights, and all you’re doing is making people consider sitting on a bow and trade cheese with cheese to not deal with the BS of chasing ranged enemies that feel like Usain Bolt while you’re the asthmatic fat kid that runs out of stamina in 5 seconds.

Targeting:

  • It still sucks. My character has a threat in front of him that I intentionally am using a rune attack to handle, and instead my Tempest Kick on controller will go careening the opposite side of the screen or toward some distant mob to the side, hitting thin air instead of the mob in front of me I wanted to use the rune on.
  • Also bad with bows, the magnetism is really bad in terms of switching around enemies while you’re charging up shots, or doing a hard 180 toward thin air for no reason.

Shallows Brine Vault:

  • Fighting bosses and enemies here sucks. Even with Illuminate rune, the illumination range is far too small and very often the bounties or enemies will be obscured when they’re throwing ranged attacks you can’t dodge because you can’t see.

Environmental effects:

  • The flames and plague areas created by enemies need to really be toned down in duration, they just last forever and do a ton of damage, and worse of it all is that dodging through them does not avoid the damage, it still incurs it.
2 Likes
12

Agree. It’s even oddly immersion breaking because it feels like a deliberate number crunching on development side to make things difficult rather than an in-game natural occurrence. Your brain is conditioned to expect these types of effects lasting maybe 10seconds max. But in my experience they last like 4 times longer than the duration of the combat encounter itself which makes no sense. Maybe at the minimum they should dissipate a few seconds after combat ends.

1 Like
13

Input Reading and dodge spam from mobs:

  • Recently swapped from gauntlets to a Cinder and Stone 2H mace build to test runes.

  • Many of the 2H runes are completely useless against Cyvion, the Echo Knight due to his dodge spam to half a screen away the moment you activate the windup for a flurry attack rune.

  • Even when you stagger his charge stab via parry, the windup on the flame cyclone rune attack is such that you only have 1 of 3 hits land because stagger wears off by the time the second and third will hit and he just dodges away.

  • That’s a 100 focus cost punish you would deserve to get for dodging and parrying his combos, but every single time he input reads and dodges, making you waste all your focus. He ended up dying from chip burn damage, incredibly unsatisfying.

  • I cannot emphasize how obnoxious these input reading dodges are, and how many prospective players that will alienate.

  • Not only that, it is actively damaging to the gameplay experience because now you will only spam 2 quick attacks to chip him down and only use the flame slam skill when he’s staggered. You’ve effectively removed 2 of the 3 usable runes on this unique weapon (the other is a useless Channel utility rune for some reason taking up a slot), removing approaches to gameplay.

  • If a boss is programmed to constantly troll your focus expenditures after you working to not only find an opening to not get mauled and staggered, but to build that focus up, people are just going to quit that build out of frustration if not the game altogether.

  • A gameplay loop that mainly consists of 1-2 attacks for 80%+ of a fight and dodging for 7+ seconds in between is going to turn off a lot of people.

    The damage already cannot be facetanked, and stamina limits attack spam, but it’s a really boring experience when you barely get to see Arthur’s beautiful attack sequence animations go to waste because the game is such that the incentive is to play guerrilla style with incredibly short engagements and chip damage.

1 Like
14

I agree about the runes, they should be removable and insertable but in my opinion for the rest is just a balancing issue, the unique items are a nice concept, and for me it’s okay that they are difficult to obtain but it’s not okay that I can only get them via RNG.

I would like it if there were some (difficult) quests/missions to get them all.

Honestly, I find leveling up stamina + stamina gems too strong, I can’t seem to find a balance between having too much stamina (endless, pointless spam) or having too little. I hope that with the combat update, since we’ll be abandoning the attribute system, the stamina situation will be more balanced, and that we’ll reach a balance similar to that in Elder Ring (maybe even a little less stamina than Elder Ring would be good).

15

I am sitting at 20 stamina points in plate with two 20% stamina regen gems.

My character is running out of stamina in 3 regular attacks with the Cinder and Stone 2H unique and it takes like 5 seconds to recover a full stamina wheel not including the delay for the regeneration to start.

It’s frankly absurd that this much investment sees so little return.

I’ll say the same of the lifesteal gem on a 2H weapon. The regular attacks are healing for nothing despite taking off 60-70% of a mob’s health. Something feels off. 12% lifesteal+ 20% increased healing from affixes.

Maybe Cinder and Stone’s innate fire infusion is messing with something in calculations.

Either way, feels awful.

The best weapons in this game are by far the 1H swords and clubs and greatswords with charged attacks(cinder and stone does not have any charged attack).

16

Sounds like you should go for gems and a build that lowers your overall stamina cost, rather than stamina regen build which forces you into a position where you at some point need to find a place to “breathe”.

Make sure it says “healing increased” and not confuse it with “regainable health” but i think regainable health would benefit you more.

On my weapon i dont have any lifesteal i have a fire infusion gem but i also have crush which is a plague rune and whenever i hit an enemy affected by plauge it heals me.

My health regen gem didn’t start working until i rolled “healing increased” on one of my armor pieces, which i found to be a bit weird?

17

It’s a very big flaw for a heavy weapon to not have charged attacks, super sad.

If you want to use a hammer you’ll probably want to use one that has charged attacks like

image
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or
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. In a way, charged attacks are also useful for saving stamina since they do more damage but cost the same amount of stamina.

Same but i also have, 2 stamina cost reduction gem and ring, and it feels like I have infinite stamina, but the moment I remove the ring I have stamina problems and it seems like there is no middle ground.

I am using the ring of regainable health and a lifesteal gem, the health regeneration is good, and apparently now even hitting an enemy with the plague cures you.

image

1 Like
18

Yeah, probably lifesteal is much better on corpse smeared blade.

But you can’t infect with Cinder and Stone without overwriting its native fire infusion.

I could probably fit some stamina cost reduction gems at the expense of 10% physical DR, but fat roll and the long animation locks of 2H hammers make that highly punitive since you eat a ton more damage than just running quick 1H weapons which do more DPS and have less animation lock risks.

The one thing this 2H deals well with is the False Ones as it deals enough poise to stagger them, but that’s not enough an upside for all its downsides.

The jade ring is absolutely necessary to not feel stamina starved alongside the agility ring.

2 Likes
19

Closing Thoughts on Experimental Branch:

The Great:

  • Being able to discover armor and weapons via scribe table. Paper economy is still too stingy for research costs, but deterministic pathways as pity systems are always good to mitigate excessively bad RNG.

  • Good tweaks to gathering, the fishing minigame feels highly rewarding in particular.

  • Server stability for coop is surprisingly smooth for a first pass on EST timezone NA servers.

  • Awesome optimization work, I don’t have any stuttering when entering and exiting zones anymore on a high end rig. Running around feels pretty seamless.

  • Love the new buildings for NPC’s like Illaria and Danos. Hopefully Grinnich and Markos get a glowup.

The Good:

  • More cool armors to discover, they were all well done. More of this, more unique looks that are not just recycling enemy/NPC attires to allow for Cerim players to feel distinct and separate from Sacrament inhabitants, considering you are an outsider.

  • Compendium for cutscene replay and story recaps are much appreciated.

  • Good tutorial sections.

    • Parry improvement is good. Consider giving it an aoe knockback/stagger radius so parrying an enemy doesn’t have you eating a ton of damage from nearby enemies while you’re locked in a successful parry animation. Or at least some short immunity phase when successfully parrying. Parry stagger needs to be improved, enemies are recovering quicker than a punish attack animation finishing.

The Bad:

  • Balance changes to Path of the Chosen. You’ve grabbed Breach balance and pushed it back closer to what got you review bombed to begin with.

  • You’ve overbuffed enemy poise, especially on bosses (Cyvion can eat a 150 focus eruption and a 3 hit 2H hammer swings and still not even be staggered), and buffed the damage of every enemy significantly on top. The game is back to spike damage experience and dying in a stunlock, as opposed to triage combat.

  • This coupled with the new really bad enchantments that encourage low HP glass cannon builds and % scalar affixes have incentivized heavy meta-gaming instead of having generally good baseline function with gear mostly customizing the good baseline experience.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvE9g3BssMs

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6pmCB69HD8

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is555BYniQc&t=64s

    Replacing all the gems with these % hp/focus conditional affixes was a bad decision. It’s highly warped the balance, because in order to make them worthwhile, you have to make them large boosts, and because they’re large boosts, you just stack a bunch of large % scalars and the game becomes basically a glass cannon zoom zoom burst enemies out or they one shot you instead.

    • Attack speed scalars are even more broken. They warp focus economy, build up application, and poise damage application. These should not exist. A 22% attack speed on build up boosted by a gem to 44% is ridiculous.

    • Plague needs probably its defense/heal/poise debuff effect back on top of the lifesteal to compete with burn/shock/freeze.

  • Freeze is in a binary state where if you play a normal build its buildup is significantly reduced and noticeably mediocre due to falloff speed, but with the certain combination of gear affixes (which are purely RNG drops and further worsened by the awful enchantment limit system) frozen is trivial to apply with 2H weapons and runes, and incredibly overpowered with shatter crit damage stacking.

  • Player poise is terrible, even with full plate. I can sit in full plate and take the Crucible 15+25 poise buffs and still get knocked off by a bloated abomination slap or a goliath club stomp with a single hit.

  • Stamina system is horrendously limited compared to other soulslikes for no reason. It shouldn’t take 20 points of stamina, a 20% stamina regen and 15% max stamina gem, and jade ring+ring of agility for the player to not run out of stamina in a single 3 hit 2H mace attack sequence. It’s totally absurd given how often the player has to dodge or parry given enemy aggressiveness and poise, or how often we have to chase with the input reading dodge spam of many mobs and some bosses.

    • Camera on some jump sections feels bad still. In the Nameless Pass with the prisoner area where you can climb up a vine wall and jump through a crane platform to another climbable wall with a wooden platform at the top, often getting back down with the crane platform has horrid camera angles.

    • Damage mitigation calculations are way off. It can’t be right that on 65-67% mitigation plate with 60%+ all elemental resistances and a 20% damage reduction flask on 350+ HP, Cyvion is still deleting a third of your health with one strike or projectile. Damage feels absurdly excessive on normal difficulty at max rank and early levels, the better balance happens around lv11-16, then it quickly ramps up again. Balak Taw and the Lumbermill Giants are other big offenders for excessive damage.

    • Consider playtesting the fights on high animation lock weapons. 2H maces feel horrendous without built in damage mitigation and low baseline player poise. I have a 30 poise damage mace and a hit is still not staggering a prisoner witch after your poise buffs.

    • Caretaker’s teleport spam feels similarly terrible, as do the Winged Brood on slow 2H weapons.

    • Where you mostly see 2H weapon use is either frozen build abuse or glass cannon builds that stack % damage affixes to do gamebreaking amounts of damage in 1-2 hits.

    • The Heal rune has been completely obliterated. It is nowhere near justified in a 50 focus costs when it heals less than a mushroom soup, the very first baseline recipe of the game. It has no scaling.

      Please revert the ridiculous nerf to this rune, and instead keep its initial healing on Experimental branch but the rest of the value to apply as a heal over time effect, so you are discouraged from spamming it instead of food, but it still has value and use for the 50 focus and utility rune slot it costs.

      In its current iteration, Heal rune becomes absolutely obsolete quickly, and obsolete systems is not good design.

Proposed Changes:

  • Turn back balancing closer to Breach levels for Path of the Chosen and below. Make combat more triage base with moderate damage outputs on both sides instead of 2-3 shots and incentivizing glass cannon builds.

  • Revert the terrible enchant limit system and fix bricking gear with RNG enchantment and facets.

  • Remove % damage affixes and effects that give scalars on damage, they always break the game balance. Replace these with fixed damage number procs that are much easier to tune and keep in control so damage can’t exponentially shoot up.

  • Gear should complement builds and playstyles and not be an entry requirement to make builds and playstyles viable. It shouldn’t take an RNG good roll on an RNG ring drop to make a night and day difference with enabling certain builds and weapons.

    • Punitive affix and other systems like Pestilence debuffs are absurdly weighted to the curse side of the kiss/curse ratio. Seriously, do you think players are gonna put up with 30%+ increased incoming damage when enemies can still 3 shot you, or make enemies take 50% less damage at high health (literally half damage for half the fight?). Losing 10 focus or stamina on being hit is a humongous penalty. There’s a reason most people are rerolling to lose health/focus on combat or stamina costs as these are way less steep punishments.

    • Better research paper drop rates, chests and diggable areas should have one by default, bounties should give 3 papers as a reward. Recipes that you discover without rolling for them should cost 1 paper, not 3.

    • Excess papers after all is unlocked could be turned into vouchers that can be used for rare materials from a vendor, maybe from Alistair.

    • Material drop rates, particularly cloth and animal/human parts need serious buffs in drop rates, and leather closely behind them.

    • Pestilence mats feel incredibly scarce on tier 1 pestilence, you can complete an entire pestilence and not gain a single mass and maybe come out with 2-3 sinews by the end.

    The idea here is to encourage you to burn to increase pestilence tiers, but with your balancing changes and removal of a lot of damage reduction affixes and sources alongside nerfs to lifesteal, very few average people will want to participate in higher pestilence levels with the massive combat handicaps. Bosses will feel like brick walls if you’re not exploiting busted % damage scaling builds.

    • Both cloth and plate feel pretty terrible, their downsides don’t make up for the upsides of a leather+mesh mix which seems to have close to plate mitigation without the slowness and leather+mesh preserves a normal roll.

    • Balance weapons according to their animation locks. These problems are less marked when you don’t make enemies do tons of damage and easy to stunlock the player, but even then I can’t say playing 2H hammers or staff felt like a good experience compared to using my 1H swords/wakizashis, gauntlets, bow, and wands+shield.

    • Wands and staves need a bow level rework. This game heavily fails to fulfill a caster fantasy. You’re all spellblades.

20

I actually liked the balance for the unchosen or hardest difficulty. but i was running around with the basic rusted sword as it just gave me enough agility and attack speed, i tried a couple of other weapons but yeah the differen stat requirements made them impossible to use so i just stuck with that one. and given a whole new system is coming i didnt bother much.

for me food wasnt an issue very much because i have collected enough research papers to just unlock all the recipes, but that was also at a later stage after i finally figured that the food recipes dont drop anymore at all, which not knowing and having to ration the papers for that, might be an issue for some, but i never felt like a had too few of them, i even sold a couple wheni was short on money. but im a nook and cranny guy, others probably rush through the game and i think getting a basic recipe tier for every new region tier unlcoked at the start of a region might not be a bad idea.

the most annyoing part for me was still caretaker. as its just a kite, run aroun, one-two-hit, repeat fight. nice if you have a ranged character that doesnt have to do that, bad for melee. i eventualyl got good enough to not want to throw the controller at someone but its still a horrendous fight. the bear boss is far better as it actually rewards precision evasion and position way more than kiting the bs tusk and its ground effects. or the usual aoe combo that just stunlock kils you when you didnt dodge and dont have stamina to dodge the next hits in the combo. cyvion does the same. i think the should stop after the first hit when the next could kill you. it would still be punishing and bring you to low health just not a super annoying overkill with weird timings that just feels unfair.

I also want to mention that there are no corrupted boars, so you first have to clear a pestilence before you can farm them which is kinda annoying when you only play 1-2 hours a day. especially when you clear the pestilence in one region and realize that it just doesnt spawn boars. sure, that could be solved with the seneschal, but that would remove all pestilence encounters for the day.

apart from that i think that how the economy is designed feels well balanced. sure i discarded all the boar hooves because i never needed them just to need them half an hour later and not being able to find one in 3 hours, but apart from that the whole smithing, facet, max embering and exalting doesnt feel that bad. it prevents perfecting your gear too early and forces you to go out into the world to actualyl gather resources for a farm, build, enchant, ember, exalt cycle, whwere every step could fail to create the perfect item but still gives you plenty chances to create a reasonibly good enough one.

perfect facet, enchantments and exalts, should not take for granted as every drop can now make you curious as to what you might be able to use it for. has it good rolls? what does it enchants inspire? is the facet special enough that would make it worth putting some embers into it.

that being said i think the biggest issue to it is weight. at least for me once you chose your combination of mesh plate cloth leather gear you’re kinda locked in, as you cant just change one without having to compensate somewhere else.

and that limits your deisrables pool and i just started to ignore all other ewuipment wight classes other than the ones im wearing.

on top of that now that we can craft our own gear and kinda want to look good, all the ugly gear is ignored as well. and theres too much ugly equipment. especially helmets. but that is a choice. but i obviously dont want to run around in kindler baskets or turkey costume etc. kinda weird that a game that looks so good has such ugly equipment options^^