I played through the game without rushing, did Warrick twice to get his legendary weapon and overall had a great time working through what I imagine is considered “act 1”.
I killed Darak on lvl8 and from there on out saved all my stat points in case I found a weapon I wanted to spec into.
I killed the twins on lvl13 (still saving all my stat points) and so far all went pretty smoothly.
By this time I have 20 vigor, 15 endurance and 11 in most other stats (which let me try a variety of weapons).
Then the crucible is opened up. I’m like: cool, let’s do it.
However, I get absolutely destroyed and do near zero damage.
From discord I understand it’s a lvl21 area and I should go farm a bunch to level up. This difficulty spike just seems ridiculously- and unnecessarily steep.
Also, farming areas I just completed for the story seems like a pretty boring exercise, especially when I need to do it for an equal amount to ~50% of my entire playtime so far (if leveling is roughly linear in time).
Imagine if in Diablo 2 you can easily make your way through the barracks, but then need to farm for 2-3 hours just to start doing decent in the catacombs
Ps. I’m enjoying the game, keep pumping out those fantastic fixes and improvements
Similar situation. Done the first act, but nowhere near lvl 21, and now everywhere I go I do 1 dmg to enemies with my basic attack. All enemies can kill me in 2 hits. Even the snakes are like boss fight bullet sponges. This needs tuning as it’s just not fun now. I’m going to step away from the game for now and hope this gets fixed at some point.
I agree with the original post–regardless of the current roadmap for the game, there needs to be a smoother transition into crucible. Currently the difficulty bump from twins to crucible feels high enough that a lot of people will just quit once they’re done with the campaign.
My recommendation: just start players in a lower-level version of the crucible.
It’s meant to be end game, and this is just me guessing but it’s likely the intention for you to try it, have a hard time and then go into Act II. There just isn’t an act II yet.
That being said I’ve had several characters survive to some degree at level 10-13 if I get them setup right. I wasn’t completing the crucible at that level, but I was clearing a couple of rooms.
Gear has a major impact on how you do. Also, there’s other tools at your disposal. Like you can wear heavy armor and shove enemies off a cliff or stun lock the giant enemies. With the cliff kills make sure you just do some damage first because in my experience if you don’t hurt them first they don’t give exp.
That’s literally me. I’m still active here and on discord, but I have no interest to simply start a new realm to level my character so I can progress after 4 hours of grinding.
I don’t mind grinding, but there needs to be a good reason for it. The reason shouldn’t be “imbalanced difficulty spike”
Anyhow, still very positive on the game and looking forward to either a rebalance or new content
