So infinite Focus and infinite Health on hit are gone. Brilliant, fantastic, important and necessary change. Now the devs need to look at the fallout from this, because all sorts of potential issues were being hidden behind the bigger issue of broken affixes. The two key things which come front and centre as a result of the affix changes are:
- The relative balance of normal weapon movesets against each other and against Runes/Parries/Backstab
- Healing/Sustain over time during challenging content
Removing infinite Focus means you can no longer play the game by mashing Rune attacks into every enemy. This is a good thing, but Rune attacks were hiding a bunch of problems with enemy poise and weapon movesets because Rune attacks were/are extremely strong and would reliably stagger/stunlock everything while doing massive damage and costing no stamina. Most of the early game combat complaints can be tied back to players now having to use other methods of approaching a fight and struggling because those other methods are much more difficult to use or in some cases are poorly tuned. Let’s think of your options for attacking regular overworld enemies like this:
Rune attacks - Reliably interrupt enemies on hit, can ignore shields, deal high damage, cost no stamina, may have invulnerability or hyperarmour
Parry - Reliably interrupts enemies on use, doesn’t care about shields, generates massive Focus for more rune attacks, gives a large window for free damage
Backstab - Reliably interrupts enemies on use, doesn’t care about shields, not stamina limited, high damage, makes you invulnerable, gives a window for more free damage
Regular attacks with your weapon - Can fail to interrupt even weak enemies, bounce off shields leaving you vulnerable, can be parried by enemies, cost a lot of stamina, deal low damage, generate very little focus, have long animation commitments which leave you vulnerable to fast enemies which don’t get staggered
So relative to other available options… regular weapon movesets are awful. Some of them are much more awful than others. This is a problem for new players because hitting things in the face with your sword is presumed to be the DEFAULT approach to combat in this kind of game, and is the option everybody is going to go for when sat in front of the game for the first time. We should acknowledge that trying to kill a lot of these regular overworld enemies with the basic attacking moveset of a lot of these weapons is a miserable experience.
Now obviously Runes/Parries/Backstabs are more situational or resource limited and they SHOULD be stronger than using basic and charged attacks, but it’s not natural to expect first time players to tackle basic cloth armoured bandit enemies at the start of the game by parrying them or in-combat backstabbing them to death just because their starting weapon doesn’t interrupt them on hit. You can’t balance combat around randomly rolled enchant affixes or one obscure Rune on a vendor or gameplay options which people will perceive to be niche approaches. Players want to swing their sword, weapon and moveset choice are part of the melee player fantasy, swinging that weapon needs to be a more viable way to approach the game.
Let me be clearer about what this means. If I am a player on the beach with a slowish one handed Mace as a weapon, and I come across a ranged enemy throwing firebombs, if I wait for the throw to roll past the bomb into melee range and smack that ranged enemy in the face with my slow mace, I do not expect to see that enemy ignore the hit and flurry me to death with a dagger. This isn’t what anybody coming into the game with any genre experience would expect to happen, there is an expectation that the kind of attack you are using would interrupt the kind of enemy you are attacking and No Rest subverts that expectation constantly. Now can you use charged attacks on the T1 mace to get an interrupt on this enemy? Yes and that is viable because the charged attacks on this mace in particular are as fast as the regular swings. Is that intuitive? Not at all. Does this apply to other weapons? No because some of the weapons in this poise damage range don’t have charged attacks, or their charged attacks are really bad, or their charged attacks still don’t interrupt this enemy despite them being extremely slow and short range such as the dagger charged attacks.
This is a problem in Breach specifically because if you can’t access infinite Focus then you do have to use the regular movesets on the weapons, and some of them are awful. There’s a reason you see so many content creators running Greatswords or similar giant weapons at the start of the game, it’s because they are the only weapons where the normal attack moveset interrupts enemies in the way a souls player would expect them to. Not being able to reliably interrupt enemies even when your hit lands first feels awful and so many weak enemies have fast attack animations which do not seem to be designed for them to be stagger-proof. You can of course beat all of these enemies comfortably with any weapon because every weapon can parry or backstab, but it is a bad idea to expect players to approach every weak enemy on the beach like this. The relative balance between regular attacks, Runes, backstabs and parrying needs to be adjusted so that a guy with a sword will most commonly approach combat by hitting things with his sword, because this is what new players expect, this is what the player fantasy is.
To that end I think the most important thing for combat right now is to have a balance pass of regular weapon attacks and enemy poise values so that enemies which feel like you should be able to safely hit them with your sword can be safely hit with your sword. I would look especially at ranged/caster/runaway enemies which are frustrating to chase down (They can be frustrating to chase down as long as you get to maul them when you get in) and also the amount of Focus generated from regular weapon swings vs parrying.
Cont.