I am about 27h in and the game’s difficulty is starting to feel more frustrating than challenging.
Up until I unlocked the Crucible around level fifteen everything felt pretty good difficulty-wise, but ever since then I feel like the enemy damage has ramped up to such a degree that I’m really struggling to keep up. My stats are a bit spread out, sure, but getting killed after 2-3 hits by every enemy I come across is starting to feel ridiculous. On top of that, pretty much every piece of gear I am getting is either req. lvl21 (18 currently), or requires twenty or more stat points invested than I currently have, ex: 44 dex/str/int (current highest are dex and int at 23). I have plenty of points invested in health, stamina, and equipment load; my weapons are as upgraded as I can get, and I am still getting flattened. Been playing souls games for years and I enjoy the challenge involved, but this is just feeling unfair for the sake of slowing progression down.
People seem to be finishing the game around 17 from what I’ve seen and the devs did adjust the loot based on feedback similar to yours. The short of it though is we only have Act I and you should be able to go into Act II around then but it doesn’t exist yet. The Crucible in that scenario would give you a taste of something to work towards and you would come back to it after playing some of Act II. It’s just a weird spot atm until more content gets added in.
That being said, spread out stats make things rough. I have several characters now and the two that struggled the most were the ones with spreadout stats. One of my guys had 28 strength so he could use a certain shield, 16 faith, and 16 dex so he could use a certain rapier, and although he could get through the crucible’s mobs he just couldn’t get paste the defense of the boss until about 21 after I maxed out his weapon in order to make up for the lack of a faith/dex bonus to damage.
I could be wrong, but I think if your stats are spread out you’re going to have a hard time doing damage to high armored enemies.
I started to feel it about level 17-18, up to the point I need to deliver 4-10 hits to kill the enemy but I get killed with 2-3 hits. I don’t think game difficulty is evolving fair with the level gain, plus the redistribution of enemies in the map is unbalanced (which might be adjusted when we get more ACTS).
Another point is helping to get me frustrated to the game is the item drop, it does not match the game difficulty evolution. If I have to face mobs that are killing me with 2 hits but they require 10 hits at least to be killed, I would expect some decent amount of coins dropping, or resources, but the drop doesn’t seem to be evolving with game damage.
You’re just in the crucible too early. Armor makes a pretty big difference, and I’m not sure the crucible is really designed for gear under T3.
It isn’t really. It can be done, I find it fun to do, but the average player probably isn’t trying to experiment and make 10 characters like I’m doing.
All in all the balancing can be tweaked some, and they have been doing it. But it’s hard to judge until there’s more content. Maybe 17-21 in the full game is Act II and 21+ is Act III and The Crucible. We don’t have that experience yet.
nope found it easyier and easyier as game went on played a mage though
I recently found out a very important variable in the game, that is resistence!
it grants you way more tankiness than you can imagine, maybe even more important than your health and armor. enchant some blank gear and try to find resistence bonus and health increase for damage taken lines. once you have around 600+ armor and enough resistence, you will find echo knight not doing any damage to you at all.
So far Mage and Archer have been my most broken builds. They just don’t get hit because they can cast infinite runes. I hope they don’t nerf that too hard, but those are fun. No idea how they intend that to work in pvp.
A lot of other builds can beat crucible for sure, but those two just don’t get hit.
i think the best thing to do after level 15 is to make sure your weapon is decnetly upgraded. If you cna kill things before they can kill you it makes everything up until the crucible a breeze
Throw ice on a weapon and the crucible will be a breeze too. With only hitting the required 16/16 stats on a spear earlier, I was able to clear the crucible with a level 13 character without a helmet or gloves. I just one tapped every enemy and they froze instantly, then poked them a few times while they were stuck. Only downside to ice is that the shield guys will sometimes block your attacks even though they’re frozen and facing away from you. They just instant turn around and block, and then remain frozen. Upgrading a weapon to max makes a massive difference in element build up it seems.
Assuming you have a weapon that scales with dex and int and its upgraded all the way. You should be doing solid damage. It sounds like your struggling with defense and not offense but figured id mention it.
Make sure you dont have purples with terrible negatives. -20% health or +20 percent damage taken. They will be at the bottom of purples in red text. Upgrade your armor/enchant/add gems. Upgrading some lvl 11 mesh gear will still be good enough especially if it rolled well on enchant.+ health,armor,healing effects. Besides that, I don’t want to say get good, but a lot of this game is learning attack patters and avoiding getting hit entirely. Backstabs can nearly 1 shot certain enemies. You said you have equipment load but make sure your load is under heavy. Getting some sort of health % on damage with as much healing effects increased will let you nearly facetake most enemies.
Fully agree with you here - the stat requirements are ludicrous. The only way you would have those stat reqs is if you expected a regular hammer to require 32 faith, or a sword to require 42 int. Neither with any magical qualities.
I put in about 25 hours but I’m not making multiple characters - I absolutely love the game but I’m putting it down for now until that gets sorted out.
I’m surprised we don’t see more from people who have finished the game about stat reqs specifically. I made some posts- even if you were level 21, you would have to know and specifically spec into whatever weapon you’re aiming for - to the exclusion of almost every other type of weapon
I have a whole stash full of weapons that require 42 str that I am saving.
I really don’t enjoy the crucible but if the items I looted there would be at least usable it wouldn’t be so bad. And I did the crucible only like 3 times! The amount of useless items you get is kinda wild.
Now I have to grind 3 more levels to get to str 42, and I can’t put points into any other stat I might wanna use.