So after the hotfixes Nameless Pass and Black Trench during the story seemed fairly tuned.
My build at the time was a lv18 going into Black Trench, with cloth armor and staff and 23 HP, 22 STAM, and 21 INT. I finally started feeling like I was coming online.
And then after Darak, I come out of the Black Trench at lv20, and that’s where things went completely downhill.
Marin Woods and Lowlands are lv21, so I guess I will go grind out Nameless Pass to get some materials and do the daily bounty/challenges.
The upscaling was totally broken. It said danger lv17, 3 levels below my lv20, but mobs were absolutely destroying me, while being super tanky. My staff was capped at the upgrade tier that requires 2 bear claws (a lv21 map drop, which I couldn’t access until I nearly finished Marin Woods anyways because bear claws are that rare).
With full linen upgrades on my cloth armor and 5% decreased physical damage gems+ a ring raising armor by 23%, I was still getting trucked for 1/3 my health by mobs that were supposed to be 3 levels under me. Any multi mob pack with one ranged mob spamming ranged attacks that hit for 1/4 your health and a hypermobile lunging bruiser abomination is a nightmare.
So I grit my teeth and reached lv21 despite burning out food reserves, had started with 40 stacks of food, was down to 28.
I went to town and purchased the lv21 cloth armor, there was no cloth helm so I equipped the Cerim helm and had to sacrifice 2 equip load points to stay in light category. Every piece of armor was infused and upgraded all the way up to linen, and after going through Marin upgraded with wool.
Marin Woods was an absolute nightmare. The invisible birdmen still existed, but they weren’t the biggest issue. The biggest issue is how dodge spam heavy all mobs but the bruisers are, while pelting you with ranged attacks that take out 1/3 of your health while the melee mobs are doing 4-6hit combo chains that track all over the screen. And on top of their damage, they were immensely durable.
Almost every fight involved one of the birdmen calling an ally or two, with no way for me to prevent it because the damage is just not there and I am rolling for my life while the bruisers are bumrushing me or the ranged mobs throwing fiery arrows at me.
I went into Marin Woods with 38 of the mushroom brisque food, 12 fish salads, and 12 fish kebabs, 5 bass plates, 5 meatball plates. And all of those were pretty much gone by the time I reached Caretaker Alden. I was left with 2 of the bass plates and meatball plates, and 13 tomato soups.
Caretaker Alden itself was a nightmare, the damage is too high and I have to bumrush the boar with the icicle barrage spell and hope I don’t get pinballed by the boar into the plague waves that take out 2/3 your health and leave a nasty plague debuff.
And then the real fun starts with Caretaker once the boar goes down, because he’ll be teleporting 24/7 shooting even larger waves and you’re just standing there dodging because spending all your stamina sprinting to reach him means you have 0 stamina to dodge when he does his massive cudgel smash sequence into the ground where the smash unleashes an aoe that covers 1/3 of the arena, so you need to be sprinting and have 2 light rolls ready to maybe be out of the range of the smash to the floor.
If you somehow make it through the 3-4 floor teleport smashes, he becomes vulnerable for a bit, except that since you’re forced to run to Antartica to not get hit and tossed for 80-90% of your health, you now waste all that precious few time of vulnerability he has wasting half a stamina bar to sprint back near him, maybe hit him once and barely scratch him, until he gets back up and starts teleporting again.
In the end what I had to do was try to cheese with the Channel rune and hope to not be animation locked while reaching 100 focus to unleash an icicle barrage, praying he didn’t choose to launch a wolf or teleport behind me for a wave/smash while I am forever stuck in an animation lock.
I pretty much burned through all my elixirs and consumables I had been collecting since I started the game in terms of attempts, at lv23 despite it being danger lv21, and literally ran out of food on the last attempt, so if I had not wrestled a kill at 10% hp remaining, I would have been effectively stopped from attempting the boss and forced to go resource farming for hours to craft some more consumables.
Which brings me to the other problem of food by lv21 danger areas. The food that heals enough HP at that level are all fish based food, and fish are scare and time gated. All the other foods heal 130 hp, that is 1/3 of your HP pool. And even the 130 hp tomato soup uses the rarer herb, which is not even the majority present in Marin Woods, it’s still dracaena herbs.
I had thought that the food problems were gone with a little farming and overleveling black pass, but then the brutal overworld upscaling for Nameless Pass and the Beach put a cork in that. I started going through food like crazy again, 2-3 food items per multi-enemy fight encounter, of which there are many all over zones.
The NPC upgrades themselves feel useless. I had 65 silver by Marin Woods and nothing to spend it on because I had bought the food off the cook and ingredients off Grinnich the tradesman, and they are few and limited, with no reasonable restocking for me to restock on food.
Cloth upgrades are also incredibly rare compared to getting upgrades for mesh and plate. Linen and Wool are exceedingly rare, while ingots are plentiful and available through Filmore himself while the tailor sisters don’t sell any upgrade materials for cloth.
I beat Caretaker Aldin and for 3 hours of agony and wanting to put the game down and uninstall through Marin Woods, all I got out of that immensely difficult boss was a grey quality mace, blue pants, and a purple mesh hat. That’s it. I didn’t even gain an appreciable amount of HP, turning in the quest with Odessa and Irmgard didn’t even net me 1/3-1/2 of a level.
Bounty and Challenge XP and coin payoffs also need to scale, they are beyond negligible at higher levels, 200 xp at lv21 is nothing.