The thing is, they’re not everywhere. Even in the black trench there’s only a few.
Very common in the crucible though
And I imagine in the Crucible and narrow corridors is where that bloated abomination is most obnoxious, since you don’t have room to maneuver. Same for the spiral stairs in the black trench that same mob can be in.
A few changes like the slap flurry not stunlocking on the first hit or two and reducing the radius of the explosion would go a long way.
The most important change imo is for mobs to not be able to aggro and start queing attacks when you’re climbing up ledges because it’s honestly pretty bullshit that you’re in animation lock from climbing and the mobs are already queing a flurry of lethal hits you can’t possibly dodge out of due to the animation lock.
This can happen in both the Crucible and in the Marin woods where you’re climbing up the stairs to another level and these mobs are waiting there already wailing while you’re climbing up.
Imagine if they gave those bloated abomination the ability to decide for themselves when to Explode, also imagine if those leeches had the ability to explode, also add a debuff to all other enemies that get caught in the explosion, enemies affected by the debuff should explode on death!
Just Imagine How Fun It Would Be!
But making enemies bland is a step in this direction.
If anything, enemies should get even more special moves or quircks.
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If if that is the ONLY thing that separates this game from other diablo likes then this game would dead and no one would play it. OH WAIT 
there is alot more that makes it different and special.
mobs in games means ANY ENEMY that is not a mini boss or boss enemy.
Its too complex because ALL of it s move set.
its because it has 4 different things it can do.
its too frequently presented to the player to have the complexity it does.
There is a reason complexity of such design is limited to mini bosses and bosses. If there were MORE enemies with the same complexity, with the same frequency, the game would become a chore to play.
The reason Dark Souls feels so fair and fun to play, is because the complexity and mechanics are reserved for special encounters, not for every time you turn the corner.
I quite like the levels of complexity that is in the game at the moment. Not with every mob, but the hard mobs like the witch and the bloater, you do really need to think about how you engage them. This is exactly what I want from a game like this. I don’t want to be just mowing down every single mob with no thought.
I still feel that every death is still my fault and not the game just throwing random stuff at me. You will die a lot to the witch and the bloater, but that’s not really a bad thing. As you understand the fight better and get runes to deal with these types of enemies, you will die less.
With some mobs being harder than other it also means that you have to come up with real tactics to get you through the fight. It is a real choice who you try to kill first or last. Do you try to eliminate the easy guys first or get rid of the one enemy that is usually a challenge for you or do you just run past the fight.
The difficulty of a mob effects much more than just that mob. It affects the entire encounter, it affects how the player reacts to that mob being present in a group fight, it affects the players use of consumables. Simplifying a complex mob too much will have negative effects across the entire game.
The ratio they have of easy, medium and hard mobs is good at the moment. I think as long as they keep that in a good place, the game will continue to feel great to play and rewarding when you complete fights.
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I both like and hate that enemy. They’re really frustrating but the main frustration is from one simple element for me - well, actually two: they stagger you, and I can’t parry them.
This means I get stunlocked and there’s now no gameplay anymore. If they didn’t stagger you, you could dodge them as they keep attacking in the same direction, and it’s fine.
But because you can’t take a single hit, if your poise is too low, they’re just frustrating.
Otherwise, I think they’re good, I like complicated enemies so long as they can work together with others without feeling cheap. But yes, there’s some contrast compared to other mobs.
I think the TLDR we all agree on is the chain attack is too punishing.
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Let’s be honest, this isn’t about complexity. You just died many times to this mob and got pissed off. He has five different attacks in total, it’s not that complex.
The on death explosion only happens once, at the very end of the fight. It’s predictable and should be anticipated. You can avoid it by rolling away or timing a dodge so your iframes are active when it detonates.
The back swing only triggers when you stay directly behind him. It is condition based and predictable. Most players won’t even see it often unless they constantly hug his back - I personally have seen this move for the first time after like 300 hours.
So realistically you’re dealing with three attacks during most of the fight: two are used when player is in melee range, one when outside. Depending on the attack they can be avoided by rolling away or dodging to the sides.
The chained swings are the most dangerous. They could probably be telegraphed better to very clearly communicate “RUN THE FUCK OUT!”. But aside from that, the rest of his moves are properly telegraphed with visuals and sound, and they won’t kill you unless you’re already low on health.
Is learning three different attacks and one post fight explosion really that hard? I don’t think so. My final verdict: skill issue.
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Assuming other people skill lvl is in the same vein as the people claiming this topic is about turning the game into poe.
Its very silly to assume anything of anyone’s talent especially when no display of talent is shown.
Therefore it leads me to assume you’re only here to compensate for your own lack of talent.
Of course that would be silly of me to assume.
Gotta expect a “git gud” here and there with souls likes 
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Not really. You can to some extent predict someone’s skill in particular game based on opinions about the game expressed by said person. Assuming you yourself have enough skill and/or knowledge of mechanics of course.
You’ve got me 
To be frank there is nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has “skill issue“ moments here and there. As long as one tries to improve instead of blaming “too complex mobs“ or something like that, it’s all good.
Tradition has to be cultivated 
What OP is pointing out is just half of the problem: excessive mix-up. The other half is that mobs have inhuman response times. Paired together, the gameplay loop encounters big issues.
No, seriously. Take a Balak Taw archer for example. They can initiate their dodge-into-stagger arrow in under six frames. That’s less than 50 ms, far faster than a human can blink (~200 ms). They can do this in retaliation to any attempt at hitting them, even with weapons like Claws of the Crescent Moon which have an attack cycle that starts in about one-fifth of a second.
The Balak Taw dodge-attack in question gains distance and delivers a ranged attack – all with intangibility. This basically means that said enemy has a mechanically perfect interrupt that they can use to gain intangibility during any of the attacks available to the player in the game. And they have an aerial dodge which also generates complete intangibility which they can use frame-perfectly during a player’s attack animations. That’s two forms of generating intangibility without any telegraphing, both of which lead into a counter attack, both of which are activated practically the moment the player commits to any offensive action.
Response time is how long it takes for a human brain to run through an array of actions in accordance with an external stimulus, accounting for judgement, which is exactly what nearly every combat encounter in this game requires. Humans, aside from very well trained humans operating in specific environments (athletes, e-sports competitors), do not have a below-200 ms response time. RESPONSE time, not reaction time, which is the base response to external stimuli. The average RESPONSE time for a human being is approximately 450 ms, while the average REACTION time to a visual cue is 250 ms, with SD of about 35 ms. The enemies in this game seem to have a response time that is faster than the response time of 99.9% of the human population.
This is exacerbated by enemies which have a lot of mix-up, because it means the array of potential actions which the player should take to defend themselves is very large, and the enemies can choose to react inhumanly quickly, flow through their attack options inhumanly quickly, and can defend themselves from the player inhumanly quickly. This leads to obvious issues in any game that’s supposed to implement an animation-based combat system. To the enemies, it’s like you’re acting in slow motion.
This is an almost identical to a problem another popular game, “Ready or Not” had with its AI enemies, who were capable of landing accurate attacks on the player within 200 ms of “seeing” the player – far faster than 99.9% of the human population’s response times. They simply would outgun the player in almost any fair fight. FAIR fight – not any fight.
I know this seems like a tirade, but stay with me.
The combination of enemy response time being inhumanly fast, combined with their vast mix-up game, frequent methods of generating intangibility, gaining or losing distance from the player, ranged attacks, and parries, makes even common enemies way, way too difficult to fight fairly most of the time. This is supposed to be an animation-based combat game, but enemies can react as if reading your inputs and always have a response to what you’re doing. It’s incredibly easy for an enemy to shift the momentum of a combat encounter immediately, gaining the upper hand after you’ve outplayed them. Their frame data and reactions are just better than yours.
One of the best examples of this is how quickly enemies can respond to a player attempting to backstab them. Some enemies will initiate a radial attack followed by a kick within a quarter of a second of the backstab prompt being available to the player – and for some enemies, the radial attack cannot be parried. Dark Souls was never like this: enemies had wind-down frames after most of their attacks which lingered substantially longer than the vast majority of enemy attacks in NRftW, permitting reliable backstab openings to experienced players.
All of these problems compound when multiple enemies are attacking the player, which is frequent, especially later in the game – Balak Taw specifically call in reinforcements whenever the player takes more than about 10 seconds to dispatch them, and certain Balak Taw will immediately call for reinforcements when seeing the player. The Lowland Meadows is filled with fights against clusters of enemies. Group fights against a single player are a core component of this game, and when each enemy is responding to player actions in fractions of a second, generating distance, closing distance, generating intangibility, throwing out staggers with sustained attack frames (which usually can’t be parried, btw), and so on, it becomes almost impossible to engage in such encounters with any semblance of fairness. Too much mix-up, too many factors, too much risk, too many overlapping attack frames, all happening in nearly perfect split-second response to the player’s actions.
The solution? Don’t fight fair – which in NRftW’s case means playing the game like Diablo instead of Dark Souls. The player should create synergies within their build which allow them to one-shot enemies while resisting immense amounts of incoming damage. With a proper build, it’s very reasonable for a character to nullify almost all incoming damage by L20. Wand and staff rune-attack builds can use things like Fire Blast and Lightning Blast to hit enemies without triggering their intangibility from across the screen. Enemies don’t respond well to ranged attacks, and so ranged attacks bypass a lot of the issues plaguing melee-purists attempting to approach this game in good faith.
Last thing: concerning “telegraphed attacks” in NRftW giving the player ample time to retaliate – I disagree. We can actually hypothesize a “telegraphed attack” which is impossible to defend against without simply disengaging from a fight to give an example of what I mean.
Assume some enemy begins their attack animation in a sustained lead-in pose – the attack that will be delivered has infinite damage, and from the lead-in pose, will be delivered in a single frame, and at a random time between 10 frames and 300 frames. This hypothetical attack is technically telegraphed, but its delivery occurs in one-sixtieth of a second, so far, far faster than any human being could respond to the delivery. Against such an attack, the only options for a player are to either a) attempt to KO the enemy before the attack is delivered, which is very risky given the variable time before the enemy’s attack is delivered, or b) run away from the attack. Parrying such an attack would overwhelmingly be a matter of luck, and the chances of failure would be enormous.
What I’ve noticed in my 300+ hours of playing NRftW is that many enemies have a static lead-in pose which telegraphs an attack, but the attack is delivered extremely quickly, in about 100 ms or less. This means a player cannot use their reaction time to parry or counter attack most enemies without first developing an intuition for how each enemy delivers each of their attacks from each pose. This is a matter of trial-and-error, where a new player will often find the parry mechanic ineffective, only finding it valuable once they’ve memorized the attack patterns of most enemies. Reflexes cannot be relied upon. The player needs to study enemy attacks before they can reliably parry them. Most players won’t do this, because the benefit-to-time ratio just isn’t worth it. That time would be better spent building a god-wizard that bypasses frustrating encounters with a button click, or an invincible melee toon throwing out 4,000 damage/second.
There’s a lot more to comment on than this, but I think what I’ve listed above outlines the major issues. The solutions are to:
- ensure that enemy mix-up is tied to a preferred behavior of the general enemy type: “melee” type enemies avoid creating distance to swap to ranged attacks, and ranged enemies don’t have quickly accessible melee options when pressured,
- review the attack delivery animation curves of most enemy attacks, ensuring that they’re more linear and less exponential, giving players more opportunity to respond to attacks reflexively rather than from memory,
- add additional recovery frames to most enemy attacks, giving players additional time to punish enemies for whiffing,
- reduce intangibility frames from most enemy dodges, especially airborne enemies,
- Introduce specific behavior for group fights, where enemies alter their attack patterns to mitigate interference with other enemies, at the cost of pressuring the player,
- rework backstab response time, though recommendation no. 3 might help with this issue,
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everything you’ve said is totally on point, so this targeted reply is not to reduce your post, but to answer specific parts of it:
the balak-taw archer is an extremely weak enemy with no punishing mechanics, so giving him one god-tier move that he seldom executes is ok IMO
the points about telegraphing - yes you need to learn the game before you can sail through it, but it’s not impossible and is learnt quite easily - i know a little kid who sometimes plays this and has learned to parry most attacks after a few deaths without a problem
i know what you mean about reflexive interaction with the enemies rather than learnt by heart through error and it’s a fantastic concept - but there are so many super varied attacks. if you can see when they’ll all hit without ever seeing them before, won’t they all turn into a kind of gothic bloody metronome ? even aside from that, it would be a helluva challenge to write that combat system. do you know any game like that ?
Thanks for reading everything. It’s a lot, but this is a complicated problem with the game, and so I think it’s worth the lengthy write-up.
The Balak Taw archer is fairly weak on paper, but he can call reinforcements, and his ranged attacks make group fights much more complicated. You’ll notice that you only encounter a Balak Taw archer alone four times (IIRC) - once at the beginning of the woods, where he’s intended to introduce the player to a new enemy type, and the other times on a ledge above an area where a fall means death or serious damage. Moon knows that individually weak enemies which pose little threat to the player can be substantially more dangerous when put near a death-pit, and you’ll find that many times you encounter a lone weak enemy, they’re near a hazardous ledge.
And for “god-tier” moves – the archer has two: the backdash-into-stagger arrow, and the aerial dodge-into-ground-slam. Both grant intangibility throughout the entire action. Neither are telegraphed, neither can be parried. Both have knockback, and can kill a player if they’re near a ledge – which they probably are.
IMO, both of these moves are too powerful – they can be used in fractions of a second when they player gains the advantage over the archer, and essentially nullify the player’s attack and punish the player with a potential one-shot (if the player falls off of a ledge). Many other enemies have similar trump cards.
For telegraphing, I’m trying to draw a distinction between an enemy’s lead-in animation, which warns the player that an attack is coming, and delivery animation, where an actual hit box is created. For most enemies in this game, the lead-in pose is very lengthy, but the delivery animation is extremely fast – so fast that very few players are going to be able to reflexively parry it on an initial encounter with a new enemy.
I understand that you may know someone who has had better luck memorizing the attack patterns of the enemies and learning to parry them, but in my experience, most of the people I play this game with have chosen to never parry, because the process is unintuitive given the quirks of enemy attack animations. Those players don’t want to have to memorize dozens (or hundreds) of lead-in animations to figure out the right time to parry for each one.
In response to your last paragraph: this is certainly a tricky problem. Enemy attacks fall into two categories in NRftW, single-attack and multi-interval attacks. Enemies don’t technically combo attacks, because once a lead-in animation is selected, the enemy will always follow through with all subsequent attacks associated with the lead-in animation. So in a way, you can look at multi-hit attacks from an enemy as a single attack with multiple hitboxes generated over time, not an actual combo. These multi-interval attacks don’t have to be metronomic, but they could still have slightly slowed delivery, This would provide an example of an enemy attack which could potentially be parried by reflex, but doesn’t adhere to a predictable rhythm.
As far as games which have more forgiving delivery animations, I’d say Dark Souls, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, and Warhammer 40k: Darktide all contain enemies which have delivery animations that can be reacted to reflexively for the most part. For two of those games (DD:DA and Darktide), the challenge comes from overlapping enemy delivery animations hedging out opportunities for the player to respond to the attacks safely. One enemy overhead can be accounted for, but THREE overheads coming in at slightly different times cannot be accounted for.
It might be worth Moon’s time to develop a perfect block mechanic if they’re not going to invest into reworking enemy attack delivery animations. For many players, blocking feels safer than parrying, and if a player learns to reliably perfect block, then they’re not far from learning to parry most attacks (or dodge them, for that matter).
Last thing: I didn’t feel as strongly about these issues until a few days ago. Something has always felt “off” about this game to me, so I started a Hardcore run to stress test the game. After completing it, I had learned a LOT about enemy behavior and animations. When character death is trivial, it’s easier to view erratic attack animations over death pits as a quirky (albeit slightly annoying) design choice for the game. On Hardcore, where every fight matters, it becomes a much more glaring design problem – attacking an enemy only for them to immediately perform frame-perfect intangible dodges, and then send you inches from a fatal fall within fractions of a second gets old really fast. Trying to punish an enemy’s whiff with a backstab only for them to punish you literally frames after the prompt is revealed just seems unfair. You learn a lot when perma-death is on the line, which is why my posts outlining these issues are rather lengthy and emphatic.
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I encountered a few of the bloated “explosive” enemies today when clearing the Black Trench. IMO, I feel this mob type is fine as is and mixes up the approach to combat. I’m playing as a Dex-based rapier-wielding Cerim, most mobs i just rush in and pierce the heck out of them, rinse and repeat. With this bloated mob, i quickly learned that i cant do that, it requires more “respect”. So with this guy im forced to dash in, attack quickly and evade before he can tear me apart 
This made it more interesting. Also, so far it always seems to be on its own, so we’re facing 1 at a time and not a horde, which feels like it makes it more managable.