What the he** happened to the difficulty curve in Mariners Keep??? In my first playthrough I was successfully killing multiple enemies and able to do parries, dodges, etc. I keep my characters at “Normal” for encumberance so I’m able to do roll dodges, etc.
Now every enemy seems to have lightning reflexes and extra chains to their attacks. This one guy does a four swing chain and then it seems to stop, so you go in for a swing, and suddenly with NO windup he instantly does a fifth swing and you get destroyed. There are NO openings to attack. And even when you get behind them they can literally whip around and hit you before you can even swing at them. While BEHIND them after dodging.
Mariners Keep is now a miserable, time-wasting place where I’m lucky if I get one hit in every two minutes.
What on earth happened? Because if this was intentional, you just made ordinary enemies way too hard. And this is not me whining, I GET how combat mechanics work, I KNOW how to play skill games.
I just did a farming run through the area, including the Shallows. My Realm is at the currently highest tier, my character is level 19 with plain white tier 2 chest and leg armour, wielding a “Pig Sticker” rapier that has been upgraded to max tier 2 and enchanted (18% extra cold damage, 14% chance to refill stamina, XP loss on death, infused with a topaz for Focus gain on hit).
I didn’t notice the enemies becoming tougher in these areas, but almost the opposite. It was really easy clearing my way through these places, it almost appeared as if I was doing more damage to them.
Maybe I’m just imaginaning things or maybe you just had bad luck on your attempt.
Yea, did you start a new char on a high tier Realm? Unless you plan to run straight to Sacrament via shortcuts than it’s always best to start on a new Realm. Top right corner will tell you the difficulty of the Realm compared to your gear and level.
So it seems that I was simply suffering from a case of forgetting my first playthrough and the difficulty curve.
I started a new character on a brand new realm.
I had gotten to level 23 on my first character, and I think that the first playthrough was so much fun because everything was so brand new that I was perceiving it to be “easier” even when I might have struggled with combat at first.
So when I went back and had to face the opening areas at level 1 again, I had a bit of amnesia at the earlier stages.
Once I got my second character to level 9 or 10, and I had a few upgrades done to my weapon’s damage, etc. and got some stat points suddenly there was a threshhold crossed and felt a power increase. Combat then became much more equalized and I wasn’t getting kicked around any more!
Could be the weapon you got, too. My first attempt all I could find was a staff, and was basically stuck trying to melee enemies with it. It was rough, lol. I completely ran out of food and durability before I even made it to the blacksmith.
Ended up just making a second character on a new realm, got dual daggers, and had a much easier time.
Very true! If you get stuck with the staff it can be very tough! Luckily I found a Claymore and some one-handed swords pretty early on. I also struggled to stay supplied with food up until a certain point. Then it seemed like I finally had accumulated enough surplus ingredients and I was able to fill multiple slots with meals. But for sure it takes a period of poverty and crisis to get there, lol.