Enemies feel very overtuned

Wicked Feedback
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1

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t have an issue with difficult games or dying a lot. The issue here is that i don’t feel most deaths are due to bad play, but rather due to questionable enemy design/behavior.

Edit:
To clarify, my issue is not that combat is too hard or that enemies are always impossible to dodge, but rather that it feels slow and you sometimes get hit out of nowhere. Not always, no every enemy, but when it happens its annoying.

Combat
Enemies just feel really overtuned.
Regular enemies have very long combos (two follow up sweeping attacks after a jumping overhead swing seems excessive) and attack reach with little telegraphing, encouraging the player to just back up whenever an enemy attacks. Additionally they move forward quite a bit with every attack, covering a whole screen width or more in a single combo. Usually this behaviour would be easily exploited by dodging behind them to attacks, but enemy attacks seem to have some incredible tracking, turning on a dime (sometimes even 180 degrees in midair) to still hit you. Dodging every attack is also not viable unless you significantly invest in stamina from the very beginning. This leads to gameplay where the player just runs away from enemies for five seconds every time they attacks, has to run back because they have way lower reach for most attacks, gets a single hit in and repeat. I do not find this to be very engaging gameplay, as most of the time is spent waiting your turn while the enemy flails around wildly. Parrying is of course an option, but without an option to riposte, it might not be worth the risk.
The most egregious issue however is that every enemy can jump incredible distances. Ranged enemies (specifically the crossbow guys) use this to outrun a sprinting player, while firing arrows from point blank with no windup while reloading withing a third of a second. Melee enemies on the other hand will jump attack you from offscreen with no warning to stagger and then kill you with their follow up. Enemies themselves barely get staggered even by heavy weapons .In fact, they actually attack faster if you attack them. It seems that the stagger actually cancels their recovery animation, allowing them to counter immediatly.

Crafting/Gear
Up to Sacrament loot and gear is fine, but weapons become extremely weak immedietly after. You get sent after Darak directly after beating Warrick and entering the city, but the weapon you used to defeat warrick barely tickles darak. In order to deal any noticable amount of damage, you need to upgrade it multiple times, which is where the crafting system rears its head. Weapon upgrades need refined materials. Refined materials can be found in small quantities as loot, but you probably need to craft them. To craft them you need to collect resources to upgrade a vendors stall, to gain access to their corresponding crafting station. It takes a whole real life hour to upgrade the stall. It takes another 4 minutes of crafting time for the materials for a single weapon upgrade, increasing with subsequent upgrades and skyrocketing for higher tier materials. These wait times are completely unnecessary. There is no advantage gained from having this in your game. All it does is waste time and discourage player experimentation.

Suggestions

Combat

  • decrease range of enemy attacks, especially jumping attacks
  • decrease forward movement from enemy attacks
  • add a small delay between enemies noticing the player and attacking
  • increase enemy reload time, make reloading an opportunity to attack
  • prevent ranged enemies from firing in melee range
  • simplify enemy movesets to allow more dynamic combat
  • prevent enemies from turning on a dime, positioning yourself behind an enemy should make them miss you and force them to turn around after the attack
  • properly telegraph attacks and add a telegraph for headbutts, shield bashes etc.
  • make parries open enemies to ripostes
  • allow larger enemies to be backstabbed
  • tweak enemy spawn locations, large enemies spawning in small rooms sometimes makes it near impossible to see what is going on
  • greatly increase stagger to enemies, getting a greatsword to the face should stagger or even slightly push them back, currently you are lucky to interrupt their attacks, which they resume immedietly after
  • maybe be a bit more generous with starting focus and equip load

Crafting/Gear

  • scale back enemy health for content immedietly after reaching sacrament
  • remove construction and crafting times, waiting isn’t gameplay
1 Like
2

I would remove the “horribly” from the title, because it could definitively be much much worse. Otherwise I agree with all of those.
:wink:

This might be a bug. Are you sure about it? Can anyone verify?
It could be worth it to reproduce and report it.

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3

agree with the waiting times. at least reduce them to be bearable…

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5

  • Runes are an excellent system and something I greatly enjoy, but most of them wont be available to the player until much later in the game. If an issue is present before a player gets access to the solution, then it’s not a good solution

  • The issue I have with enemy attacks and combos isn’t that they are impossible to avoid, but rather that they slow down combat by taking quite long. I am not looking for a hack and slash power fantasy, but I would prefer if combat was a bit more fast paced, with more opportunities to attack. Enemies also already have the advantage in numbers and for some raw stats, they do not need as many tools as the player.

  • You are right, parrying is actually the solution here but it also raises the skill floor quite a bit, making it harder to get into, while also making blocking obsolete

  • Absolutely! Souls games definitely also have these types of attack pattern, but they are usually reserved for unique enemies and bosses, not regular grunts

  • The 1-2 second delay for attacks is only true for very few heavy attacks, most come out way faster in my experience.

  • I am not dodging the start up, but the actual attack. The problem is enemies sometimes rotate almost 180 degrees mid swing. They face away from you, swing away from you and then spin instantly backwards, so the swing still hits. This also makes flanking to avoid damage quite unviable, since standing behind an enemy doesn’t necessarily prevent then from hitting you.

  • I will look into getting some recording software.

  • The amount of resources required for upgrades is actually not the issue, but rather that they take so long to process. Collecting resources is fun, but delaying the payoff to your work not so much. I see no point in having them take any time at all, same with buildings.

  • Enchantsments are cool, but im not a fan of the RNG. Gambling an item where it might get useful stats or a debilitating debuff doesnt feel that good. Halved focus kills most items. I think having cursed items is fine, but even if you successfully enchant an item, it might still turn out bad. A system where you can choose enchantment and optionally choose a curse to get more slots/make them stronger would be more interesting. That way you can add more player freedom and reward taking a handicap.

6

the base enemies have quite literally 2 comboes, 5-7 different attacks each. No like objectively they have that many normal attacks, you cannot disagree on this. So enemies move forward with attacks unlike DS, so the fuck what, YOU also do use that knowledge to your advantage. It’s not that there’s no riposte, USE YOUR RUNES, notice how it charges your focus. I hate the “git gud” crowd but this entire post reads “git gud” like there is not a single thing you don’t think is unfair about the enemies in your initial post at least. Blocking DOES interrupt their attacks unless it’s a heavy enemy, you and the enemy are on equal terms here.

This one is a more subjective thing, you say you want combat to be faster, I personally don’t. I find that this game’s combat pacing hits the perfect middle-ground between the fast-pace DS3/BB/ER & the original DS1. If you’re only attacking after an enemy’s attack string ends, I find that odd. I find that I am capable of dodging the first or second attack, attacking, then dodging their 3rd, attacking again. Here’s the thing your post tells that you’re near the beginning of the game, how do you know you just haven’t adapted to the very intentional design choices of it yet? This isn’t a “git gud” thing but moreso how do you know whether or not you’re just too used to the standard soulslike tropes?

7

I stop reading at the “enemies have little telegraphing”, i backstab those suckers all the time, you can see those attacks coming a mile away too, thats why the devs put those long gorilla arms on the game.

I solved the materials problem by following an advice i saw on steam, i made another realm, which is good to get more ichor fast, and upgraded the merchant who sells crap, that one that knows a lot of cerins hehehe, i found bear claws on him, i just wish the plate face dude inside the crucible sold more materials.

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8

Gonna have to disagree with you bud. Once you know how to play the enemies aren’t that difficult unless you get ganged up on. Most of their moves do in fact have wind ups, and if you learn their behaviors you can get an idea of when they will do certain actions. Like if you knock an axe guy down, if you stay by him 100% of the time he will get up doing a shove attack followed by a side to side chop. So after a knock down, hit once and back off.

There are a couple things I agree with you on.

  1. Stamina is pretty useless to level up past 16, and definitely past 19. Which really hurts heavy load builds.

  2. Great swords, the one the first boss drops in particular, are so slow in their animations that you will usually be interrupted before you ever swing, even against stunned targets. Atm they feel like a weapon you swap to just to spam runes because they have a higher damage base and then you swap to a fast weapon or shield.

Overall though I don’t want the enemies made any easier. Especially with co-op being the next likely update. If anything I want there to be more of them with more teamwork between them when we have a buddy with us.

Good luck man and if you need any help I can hop in the discord to try and help you out.

9

I don’t know if I’d call the enemies overtuned exactly, but there are issues that feel like they could be improved in the combat and how enemies behave.

My biggest issues are:

  1. There’s a lot of what I’d call ‘gotcha’ attacks (for lack of a better name) in enemy combos where the enemy does a combo, stops after one of the attacks in a way that looks like a combo ending just long enough for the player to commit to an attack, then adds another swing onto the end of the combo that’s fast enough to hit the player before the player’s attack connects.
    The worst offender here are enemies with jumping attacks- I’ve reached a point where if an enemy does a leaping attack where they smash their weapon into the ground, I just assume they will follow up with a couple of wide sweeping attacks immediately after, because they pretty much all do, no mater how much the huge slam looks like it should have some recovery time afterwards.

  2. The enemies feel like they don’t have to worry about stamina at all. I’ve had enemies dash across 3/4 of the screen, launch a 4-hit combo, block a charged attack with their shield, then launch right into another multi-hit combo. The player can’t do half as much stuff without needing to back off and let their stamina recover.

  3. Enemies with shields seem to have obtained super-shields far better than yours somewhere. (pity they don’t drop as loot, lol)
    I’ve had characters in plate armor with a greatshield knocked flat on their arse from blocking one dashing hit with a one-handed axe, but I don’t think I’ve ever found any attack that’ll do the same to any enemy using a shield. The shield user enemies also don’t seem to take any chip damage or have any stamina restricting how many attacks they can block like the player does.

I don’t want the enemies made easier, to be clear. I think the combat difficulty is in a good place, actually.
I’m just saying it’d be nice if it felt like the human enemies were playing by the same rules I am.

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10

Yeah, i agree about the gotcha moments but those are a part of their moveset right? So if you learn the moveset you can avoid and know when to hit, not to mention that some of those attacks can be interrupted by a well placed rune attack to the face.

The stamina in these soulslike games has always been like that i guess, no enemy has a stamina bar, they have attack patterns that give you openings, they can dish out those and block, the shield enemies are easy to backstab though, since all of them have a rush shield attack that can be baited from afar, and they take a long time to recover from those, i have been hit by them and still manage to roll and backstab.

11

I think that is the point.
Memorizng attack pattern by heart.
Many people dislike this (me included, I am not in school).