Combat Balancing

Wicked Feedback
1

I played this game for like 1-2 weeks and already saw many incredible problems, which i cant understand how they made it even into the game.

Bosses shouldnt be staggerable, i litterally farm the crucible boss with dual wield daggers from blacksmith lvl 2, and he cant even stand up and fight back. Its ridiculous and ive never seen this in a game.
Nerf the damage and health of the bosses and give them more phases with aoe areas to avoid and stuff like that, so it becomes alil bit challanging.
Nerf the damage of some builds and echoes in general.

Remove the stats “focus gain on dmg” its destroying the whole game.
I remember 2 things from ur first trailer, you advertised with the combat and focus system and the clearity of the bossfights. But in reality you did the exact opposite, showing me you have no clue what ur talking about. You said you dont want people to spam certain attacks from close or distance, thats why u introduced focus for all classes. So all classes have to engage in close combat with regular attacks to gain focus and then use those powerful rune attacks. But in reality you can not only gain focus from any distance, but also spam rune attacks 24/7.
Its ridiculous. Make the rune attacks stronger but make focus gain much slower and only gainable through auto attacks and without any stats which increase focus gain. Mayble only “focus gain %” but not “focus gain on damage”.

And make the boss fights clearer, because in many situations i cant see what happening, because all animations in this game are so wild which make them hard to read and on top of it, your character and enemies are being pushed arround and on top of that the fights are floated with effects. The exact opposite of ur advertisment.

Remove the stat “item weight decrease” and “carry weight increase”.
They remove the entire gear balance. They are way to strong with heavy gear and way to weak with light gear. You said you dont want transmogs, because you want players to identify builds through appearances, but again you did the exact opposite. Now most players run heavy armor, but still are in the light or medium weight class. Which makes the light armor too weak and destroys the point of armor classes and decision making.

Remove the stat “armor increase” because its simply too strong with plate armor and too weak with light armor. Which makes balancing almost impossible.

Give dual wield and two handed weapons double the stat buffs for fair balance.

Remove the pushing of enemies when hitting them. Half of my attacks miss, because the enemy is being pushed back after the first hit. And then they fall down edges and my character falls down with them in the attack animation. Which leads to the other problem, disable falling from edges while attacking. Like elden ring did. I simply cant attack enemies near edges.

Increase the backstab range, because ur animations are so bad that i cant tell where the back is and its changing during their animations.
So either fix the animations which is alot of work, or simply increase the range by alot. like up to 150 degrees behind the enemy.

I probably forgot some things and add them later on. I hope you change these things and dont waste all ur efforts into the game. Because i dont think that most players would like the state of the combat in this game. Only the mindless ones.

4 Likes
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“Bosses shouldnt be staggerable, i litterally farm the crucible boss with dual wield daggers from blacksmith lvl 2, and he cant even stand up and fight back. Its ridiculous and ive never seen this in a game.”

I mean posture breaking is already an accepted and balanced thing in souls likes. Just because currently its easily overwhelmed with certain setups doesn’t make it bad by design, but rather untuned. There really hasn’t been much of a balance pass yet so i would expect this to be fixed in the next few major content patches.

“Remove the stats “focus gain on dmg” its destroying the whole game.”

I kind of agree here, it definitely feels like the crucible should allow this kind of focus spam gameplay through boons, but currently you can achieve it outside the crucible quite easily with the right enchants and infusions. Especially when pvp comes along, this will show itself to be a little bit game design breaking.

“And make the boss fights clearer, because in many situations i cant see what happening, because all animations in this game are so wild which make them hard to read and on top of it, your character and enemies are being pushed arround and on top of that the fights are floated with effects. The exact opposite of ur advertisment.”

I also agree here, it becomes noticeable with a lot of specific boons (thunder strikes boon is such a massive offender here)
Another way the clarity is lacking is vs certain camera angles. When a Nith Giant goes for a kick when hes facing away from the camera, you cant see his only tell (raised leg) because its obscured by the camera. They could modifiy some animations to fix this.

They will definitely need to do a animation pass to increase some visual clarity in certain situations.

“Remove the stat “armor increase” because its simply too strong with plate armor and too weak with light armor. Which makes balancing almost impossible.”

Yes Armor Damage Reduction and equip loads need to have a balance pass also. With the right enchants you can basically wear full plate and barely need any points in equip load, allowing you to dump more points in damage and health. You don’t sacrifice much to do this at all. With 40% reduced weight and 20% increased equip load on full plate, you can basically be running around at the same equip as someone with unenchanted cloth. Sure it isn’t easy to roll that on all 4 plate items, but its a bit game breaking if you do. (although 4x infusions on a high roll plate Armor chest is a better option)

“Remove the pushing of enemies when hitting them. Half of my attacks miss, because the enemy is being pushed back after the first hit. And then they fall down edges and my character falls down with them in the attack animation. Which leads to the other problem, disable falling from edges while attacking. Like elden ring did. I simply cant attack enemies near edges.”

I’m a bit torn on this one. I was killing myself all the time before too, but with some restraint I’ve learned to chant the types of attacks i do vs enemies on edges, most weapons have a move set that will give you a good attack vs an opponent on the edge. Personally like the challenge of making a character chose moves carefully on precipices’, but i can understand the frustration others might have with it so its an either way thing for me.

“Increase the backstab range, because ur animations are so bad that i cant tell where the back is and its changing during their animations.
So either fix the animations which is alot of work, or simply increase the range by alot. like up to 150 degrees behind the enemy.”

Eh, its a skill you get used to. I land backstabs all the time now. It probably could be slightly buff radius but 180 would be too much, backstabs are broken as is.

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please no! that is not making it more challenging, that is artificial difficulty. it does not make the boss more challenging because it has challenging moves or player input reading or great combat choreography, it just adds more nuisances.

i never will understand who those people are who enjoy boss arenas full of poison, bullet hell bosses that spam a quintillion of projectiles or bosses that are just sponges, take 0.1 dmg and perma stagger you with elemental bullshit.

more phases, more aoe and more bullshit in the arena does not make a boss better or challenging. what really makes busses fun and challenging are nice choreographed attack patterns. thigs u can learn and work with. you can not learn a poison pool and work with it, u can just wait it out and run to the farthest corner in the arena. thats just lame. you need attacks that are hard do deal with, but when u manage to dodge i get a punish window. thats what makes fromsoft bosses like lady maria, rellana, friede, artorias etc. so great.

4 Likes
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Blockquote
more phases, more aoe and more bullshit in the arena does not make a boss better or challenging. what really makes busses fun and challenging are nice choreographed attack patterns. thigs u can learn and work with. you can not learn a poison pool and work with it, u can just wait it out and run to the farthest corner in the arena. thats just lame. you need attacks that are hard do deal with, but when u manage to dodge i get a punish window. thats what makes fromsoft bosses like lady maria, rellana, friede, artorias etc. so great.

Yeah i think really the bosses just need the right tuning. All those bosses you meantioned wouldnt be nearly as great if every second hit staggered them. Theres a reason Melania takes 3 parries to stagger, fromsoft wanted you to have to deal with her full moveset, multiple times.

The echo knight as fine as is, as long as it takes you about 3-5 mins to kill him. The nature of stacking a build with a crazy lucky boon streak, is that sometimes it takes 10 seconds. That’s all fixed with tuning, not a boss redesign.

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I agree with most points mentioned here.

You can bully Echo Knight easely atm. The reason however is not his weak poise defence, but the ability to spam rune attacks back to back. The main culprit is the “Gain Focus % on damage dealt” enchantment, as it allows for multi-hit rune attacks to gain all the spent focus back and creates a loop. “Increased Focus gain” enchantment could also be cut in half or only be limmited to certain gear slots, like weapons, rings and gloves.
The same goes for all gain % on damage dealt effects, stamina as well as health. Those enchantments allow to bypass game resource management, so that the combat goes from souls like to action.
The next big thing is the “overall speed” enchantment. It should not come back for purple gear and only be limmited to certain gear like the Willow Ring. It is just too powerfull.

I also agree with the light vs. heavy armor depiction. Not only is it extremely easy to equip heavy gear, but cloth armor is just at natural disadvantage. Any +armor or weight related enchantments are not effective on lighter armor, thus act as a filler. Additionally there are no benefits to go light weight in the first place.

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light armor in elden ring was mainly for some of the armor bonuses. Without meaningful bonuses there is little reason to go light. The light dodge just isnt impactful enough in the current game. Pvp may be different. What would be interesting to see is some of the more sought after effects that would allow people to increased ranged damage to a competant level, being moved to a “light armor only effect” For example, many of trhe stamina return and rune generation effects would not exist or be infusable on plate armor.

1 Like
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@Kenna I would also say that light weight offers no advantages worth investing and needs a revisit. As for heavy vs light armor; armor class unique enchantments could be a possible solution. Or another idea is to scale enchatntment values based on the armor type: cloth > … > heavy.

@BowUser There must be a middle ground between no rune uses and currently possible rune spam. NRFTW cought my attention because the game marketet itself not as a run-of-the-mill ARPG. I argue from the standpoint that combat mechanics and resource management should matter, especially during a boss fight,
Even after all the nerfs to said enchantment it still generates way to much Focus. The idea to reduce the hit count on certain runes is akin to treating the symptoms, not the problem. Rune attacks do not generate Focus btw. it was removed a few patches ago; only the enchantment allows Focus generation on rune use. The main issue is that you don’t require anything elso besides this enchantment (found on a gem) and like 200 Focus pool to spam runes. This is not a heavy investment into a build to provide such results.
The suggested solution to poise is also overcomplicated for a simple problem.

Personally, I think PVP is a waste of resources here. That said, balance should matter, even for a single player game. Fun is a subjective thing and it is hard to evaluate who’s version of fun is more important. In the end it will be a bow down to majority for profit reasons.

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The innate Focus gain on weapons.

On the weapon you get 2% from gem and additional 3% from enchantment, can be a blue one. Then you get additonal 5% from a torch for a total of 10% of max Focus on damage dealt. That’s 20 Focus per damage instance with a max pool of 200. Piercing Flurry or Twirl Dash hit 7 times per rune use. 7x20=140. You can easely adjust Focus pool if you intend to use less sources of “Focus on damage dealt” or the rune does less hits.
In this thread the very first entry showcases exactly what I mean:

With your bow build you should be able to spam Cone Shot, as you get all the focus back, even with the 30% extra cost from echoes.
The endresult could be something like this:

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Okey. Let’s brainstorm and fix multi hit runes without nerfing “Focus on damage dealt” enchantment. I will include suggestions you provided so far. (I will refer to Piercing Flurry in all examples).

  • Rune cost increased from 100 to 150. With the setup I mentined earlier you just have to increase max Focus to 250 to chain spam.
    Rune cost increased from 100 to 200. With the setup I mentined earlier you just have to increase max Focus to 300.
    Going any higher is silly as the rune becomes unatractive outside this setup.
  • Number of hits reduced. With the setup I mentined earlier you would have to go from 7 hits to 4 hits to not break even. In case of only 4 hits - increase max Focus to 250 to chain spam.
    Reduce the number of hits even further and you lump all multi hit runes together and make them indistinguishable. Not to mention…increase max Focus to be able to chain spam.
  • Reduced the amount of Focus generated per hit with multi hit runes. Done already. Runes do not generate Focus innate to weapon stats. Only enchantments allow Focus generation, like “Gain Focus on damage dealt” but I am not allowed to touch it.
  • Focus on damage dealt scales from the damage and not max Focus pool. This turns Focus pool into a dump stat. Furthermoire, the ammount of damage we can deal would result in an overall buff to Focus gains.
  • The whole attack chain is considdered as one damage instance and triggers the enchantment only once.
    Now there is a special rule, an exception, for certain runes that has to be communicated somehow with the player base. Such special rules are not transparant to the player. Special rules overcomplicate general game mechanics. Special rules create weakpoints in design and are the main cause of outliers. Still, this would be my highest common denominator.
  • You can add more ideas.

And I explain that “Focus on damage dealt” enchantment is the issue, not the runes.

It was with regards to your poise solution.
Multi hit runes do not deal massive poise damage on their own. However, if you chain them it adds up and you can easely poise break EK. Thus, the issue is not that multi hit runes deal massive poise damage, but their spam. Said spam is a result of brocken Focus economy.

The first part with the timer punishes legit stun builds. It also introduces another unclear/non-transparent rule. The second part is acceptable, however it misses the point that poise break comes from rune spam. This makes your suggestion overcomplicated, because you either need special rules/mechanics or you treat the symptoms and not the problem.

All that said, all the time I was talking about overachievers, yet there are some things that require a buff. That would be innate Focus gain on most 2H weapons. The innate Focus gain value can go as low as 5, which is not acceptable given the slow attack speed 2H weapons have. It needs to be at least double digits.

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@BowUser thanks for the novel :slightly_smiling_face:, it was a great read. I agree with 90% of it. The part I disagree most is this:

As I see it, top end builds push the design to its breacking point and sometimes even further beyound. Thus they have to be adressed first, ideally without causing damage to less optimised strategies players use.
My understand of balance is that you hammer down all outliers first, at the top as well as at the bottom. You work at the bottom to ensure great variety in available strategies; you work at the top to ensure said variety actually matters.

Just a small insert to cross-check our findings on elemental effects.
From my observations elemental effects trigger when an enemey takes ~45% of its total HP as elemental damage. I could never freeze EK more than twice. This means outside of pure elemental weapons or elemental runes status effects are unattractive.
I did not test the effect of mixing several elements on an enemy and how it influences the individual status threshold. I also did not test the new “Elemental potency” enchantment.

Well said.
Neither do I want to see a pure auto attack (AA) playstyle. Yet I also think being able to use a rune after only 2 AAs is too much. While being able to chain spam runes is borderline ARPG teritorry. I see runes as tactical maneuvers, as special moves. There is just nothing tactical or special if players can use them frequently.
This does not mean cheap & spamable runes should not exist; runes that build the baseline and anchor the mechanic should not be spamable though. My baseline is 100 Focus cost.

As far as I know:

  • “Focus Regeneration” grants ~1,5 Focus per second per regen source
  • “Increased Focus gain” improves the innate Focus generation on AA based on the stats listet in weapon UI. It used to influence other Focus sources but it was patched out.
  • “Focus % gain on damage dealt” scales only from the number of damage instances as well as max Focus pool. It used to work differently but it was changed at that time
    Patch Notes - Early Access Patch 1
    Patch notes only mention “nerfed”, but with this patch the % was lowered and scaling from “Focus gain increased” was removed.
    I even tested it again to varify: I died to 0 my Focus. Equiped gear with as much “Focus gain inceased” as I could ( 170%) and weapon +torch with “Focus on damage dealt” (7%). Drunk a potion to execute a rune. Killed a crab. Marked Focus gained from the enchantment. Died to 0 Focus again. Removed armor except the ring to maintain the same Focus pool and killed a crab again. Focus gained from the hit was the same.

This part is not correct. We have a different footing for this discussion and talk past each other.

The absolut brain dead thing in the game is, that innate Focus gain on weapons can vary between 5 and 10. For all weapon types except Dual Daggers, those vary beween 3 and 5 but just hit twice. That’s why Dual Daggers and some faster 1H weapons can generate Focus like crazy, while most 2H weapons feel so slow in this regard.
This is one of the complaints OP had and I support this view.

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THANK THE LORD, it’s someone smart and not just another estus post, we welcome you gladly. Yes to so much of this post

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i dont like those aoe phases of bosses either, but its better than the current boss fights. we saw that the game is too easy, no matter what kind of attacks the enemies have. So i doubt that they will make the fights better through better attack patterns and the attack animations are so wild, that they are hard to read anyway. which makes it less skill based. unlike in soulsgames. the aoe phases were just one example, but i actually dont care what they do as long as it gets better. but somehow i think aoe attacks would actually make this game better, if its not too much that u just have to go into a corner. but if they change all the other points ive mentioned, than the boss fights would automaticly be better. right now u can just skipp all the attacks and damage of the boss, by simply stagger and rune spam him.

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I have boomer reflexes, and I have only killed EK with pure luck. I have 2x30lv characters, one with slow 2-h sword, and other with falling sky mage staff.

I guess staggering is easy with very fast weapons, but at least for other specs the bosses offer still some challenge.

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yes, thats why i said they should remove stagger and focus, stamina, health gain on damage dealt and then nerf bosses, so it becomes balanced and skillbased. but also remove decrease item weight, increase weight capacity and increase armor, to balance also the weight classes. game has alot of potential, but its at a very poor state right now. these things are no brainers…

22

I was talking about those coneshot builds and runes like that.

When u use dual wield daggers, then the first hit pushes the enemies back and the rest of the combo misses. Sometimes the last hit of the combo hits again. Thats pure nonsense, and thats not the only problem like i said. It also creates the senseless pushing enemies down the cliffs and with dual wield daggers your combo just follows them down the cliff. And it feels very unnatural to just push them around making them floating around. Thats not a tool of increasing impact of the weapon. Its just extremely stupid. Model stagger and sound and blood is enough to show visual impact.

The problem is not the backstab range like i said, its the extremely bad animations. You cant tell where the back of the enemy is, when they are attacking. I try to orientate by their weapon hand, but its still miserable. There fore my solution to this was to increase the backstab radius, because its less work than reworking the animations. Atleast double the radius.

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Its not about spamming attacks, when i click 2 times, then the combo throws me down the cliff. i can only click one time and move back and wait him to come and click one time again. thats by far the dumbest gameplay ive ever witnessed. thats not a matter of opinion. but i understand that other weapons might have not that problem. but even with them you have to wait for the enemy to walk away from the cliffs.

Im always playing in light weight, even in souls games.

I will try to orientate on the feet, the next time i play it when some good balance patches and content releases. thx for the advice. but it still needs a change, however they want to change it.

26

Btw, i remembered that i first oriented myself at the feet of the enemies for a backstab, because its natural. But it didnt work, because their upper body just twists around unnaturally. Thats why i said the animations are the worst ive ever seen and need to be reworked, but that means alot of work. Thats why i said increasing the backstab range by a lot would be the easier solution for their fail. Then i figured out that the weapon hand is the most accurate orientation for a backstab, but still not good enough.

28

I still think the enchantment is the main culprit. The whole issue stems from the combunation of runes and enchantments. To present my argument I would like to break this equation apart and analyze each part individually.

Runes. If we look at runes in a vakuum, multi-hit runes do not stand out in terms of damage or utility. All runes operate on a similar power level.

Enchantments. Among Focus related enchantments most potent are “increased Focus gain” and “Focus on damage dealt”. Both enchantments have fundamentally the same trigger condition - hit something and gain Focus in return. However, in a direct comparison “Focus on damage dealt” is stronger:

  • it requires less investment, as player can gain this effect simply by using a gem. “Increased Focus gain” on the other hand is dependent on right weapon & armor enchantments in order to reach high % and be effective. Moreover the weapon itself should have high innate Focus gain stat.
  • it scales better and easier, because it is tied to max Focus.
  • it triggers even on rune attacks, while “increased Focus gain” does not.

To sum it all up; all runes operate on a similar power level, while the next best enchantment requires more investment, has worse scaling and stricter trigger conditions. Those are the reasons why I think the “Focus gained on damage dealt” is the main couse for rune chain spam atm.

Absolutely.

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I probably forgot some things and add them later on. I hope you change these things and dont waste all ur efforts into the game. Because i dont think that most players would like the state of the combat in this game. Only the mindless ones.

Man, you’re talking like this game is about to come out without anyone playtesting it or caring about balance.

Man.

WE are the playtesters.

It’s the fucking first update of Early Access.

Chill.