More experienced opinion on combat and gameplay overall

Wicked Feedback
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Previously I had made an appraisal of the game suggesting certain magic combos were strong, and a way to improve dual weapons. Since, I’ve gotten further along, reached what I would consider the “end game”, swapped builds to a melee idea, and now I have additional opinions. Sorry ahead of time for the short story.

Combat

Overall I feel like it’s going in the right direction. Things feel responsive, generally I don’t feel like I’ve been cheated when fighting things, and the reductions to some of the forms of combat are good. There are still objectively better combat styles though, namely magic.

Magic is a problem

Talking with my previous friend who went mage with me back then, he’s still staunchly a believer in magic over everything else. And it’s hard to disagree, because even with the right setup with a melee and staff match up where damage is comparable, at the very least the spells have far superior reach and area of effect. There are a few spells which have exceptional damage multipliers though which push them beyond anything that a melee build has to offer, not to mention almost everything they do is safe.

This is ignoring elemental combos. Once again Overload (lightning + fire) seems to compound damage outputs immensely, causing a single weak enemy to chain destroy an entire mob when it explodes on death. This is something I can somewhat replicate with melee, but it’s far more difficult because I have to worry about taking hits, and I don’t get the benefit of higher elemental applications like spells seem to do. I can swing an enchanted spear four or five times and maybe apply plague/fire/electric before my target dies (ice seems to almost never work, only really bosses/giants), but one spell instantly lights something on fire, or infects it, etc.

And on top of that, magic is exceptionally unfriendly in a group. My friend and I are the vanguard, attracting the mob’s attention, and then one AoE nuke drops and we go from 3/4 health to our last HP simply because the elemental comboing is too strong. Sure, the mob’s dead and we’re “safe”, but having to spend food with every engagement that the mage joins us quickly wears out our resources.

Melee feels like a slugfest which we lose

Some would say this is a good thing. I’m seeing double to quadruple the kill times compared to my mage friend though, and it makes being able to contribute in any meaningful way impossible. I’m only good as a damage sponge when he’s around. When it’s me and my other melee friend, we are a suitable match, but it’s a struggle to deal with some enemies. Bosses in particular are painful and in a pestilence zone that means death looping sometimes to kill a boss through attrition as one of us stays alive long enough for the other to return to the arena.
I don’t believe this is a problem of “getting good”, as the fights just don’t have pauses to potentially recover unless you’re partied with someone. I need time to heal, however that happens, but when I’m locked into a block string from endless swings I’m just waiting to die. Rolling through the boss and the sprinting away just leaves me to die tired since they can somehow all turn on a dime and use their massive size to sweep/blast the area before I can do anything.

I still suggest my previous idea

See the link at the beginning of this post, but tl;dr: Dual weapons should have a clearer identity; dual daggers should auto-block while you’re aggressively attacking to help you survive a skirmish, and gauntlet damage should be reduced slightly but have improved focus gain per attack to become a rune spamming weapon.

It would be nice if weapons overall had clearer identities, because right now great axes seem like the clear winners when it comes to two handed weapons because their stats are superior to the others but are basically the same otherwise, and it feels like most of the one handed weapons do the same things. I’m assuming the upcoming rumoured class system will do that, but I’d like to put in my two cents since this is a game in development and I won’t leave an unspecified system to chance when I could influence it now.

I don’t particularly think that combat otherwise is in a terrible place, but if you’re nerfing things to make the game more dire for fighting in the later game, magic needs to be shrunk a bit. Smaller AoEs, smaller numbers, smaller friendly fire. I like that you’re trying with elemental combos, but it’s clear if you want to go far in this game, you need to lean on Overload. And likewise, martial combat needs a slight touch up; either its damage potential is too low without a complete build (see next section’s gripes), or its survivability makes it too questionable compared to using magic.

RNG is a bitch, and so crafting is too

I had to scrounge and patch together an equipment set over about 8-10 days, and I still don’t have an optimal setup now. Getting embers by itself is a huge pain. But finding equipment with parts of your build is time consuming, especially when you need a specific facet, and then extracting those enchants with the scant few embers you get from bounties/challenges is a long slough.

Embers need to be craftable.

Period in title for emphasis. I get maybe one ember to extract an enchantment per day as a reward for bounties. I seldom find one as a drop out there. Vendors almost never carry one. We. Need. To. Be. Able. To. Craft. Specific. Embers. I don’t care if it takes plague materials and gems of specific types and qualities. Give us something to do with all those materials.

Rerolling enchants should allow you to keep your previous result

If you’re rerolling an enchant for something different, sometimes you want the thing you’re rolling into even less than what you had. Other games which allow this kind of reroll (MMO examples: The First Descendant, Warframe) show you what you had and what you’re going to get, and you can pick which goes back on the item.

Reject “5% from max” enchantments

I have an armour pen enchantment. It shows 10 armour pen. That’s max. The radiant ember though says it’s at 95%. Even at 85% it was a 10. This is a two part problem:

  1. If it’s at its max value, then it should read 100% automatically. I don’t care what the damned ember says.
  2. It feels bad enough having to waste an ember to cover the 90%->100% gap when I’m already getting the maximum bonus for the enchant. 95% should be illegal. That’s robbery.

If Eleanor allowed us to bump up an enchant’s percentage through crafting, that would be one thing. But no, we have to use embers, and those embers improve things 15% at a time. So when you find an 80% enchantment, you’re wasting two embers…

Allow weighted crafting

If you’re making a bunch of the same item over and over, looking for a particular facet, it’s painful when all you get are dense and frostwoven “junk” when you’re specifically looking for rapid, durable, or agile. We have an abundant amount of resources at the end game. Let us throw in additional stuff to lean the crafting odds toward our desired facets. I have literal dozens of gems, chipped and mottled, which are going unused. Let me use those gems in an appropriate crafting bonus. Feathers for agile facet, shield emblems for dense, etc.

Modifiers for the Crucible to skew drops

The Crucible seems to be the intended end game. It scales to match your strength even in a brand new realm, it’s a semi-rogue-like (just ends too soon), and the gear is head and shoulders above whatever you could buy or find in the wild (until you get to end game and start burning stuff for pestilence zones). So allow us to sacrifice things to skew the Crucible rewards toward a particular thing. Sac mesh armour, more mesh armour drops if it would drop armour. Sac gems, more gems drop. This would help with the ember scarcity as well if you could sacrifice an ember to increase the drop chances of embers from enemies. You might not get back what you sacced, but you’ll get actual decent odds of getting some embers.

Builds need templates and free respecs

This one is short and sweet. We need to piece together everything necessary to create a build; from crafting/collecting armour pieces and weapons, to scrounging embers, to refining enchantments. We even need to reroll our stats at least once with embers. I think if we’ve done it once, it should be free to do it again. Let us save stat and equipment builds to templates which we can reapply for free in the future, re-equipping gear from our boxes in our houses and freely redistributing our stats to how they were when we recorded the template. We put in the effort once. Respec’ing to try out a new build that we don’t like shouldn’t lock us in until we can find enough embers to respec again, and rummaging through a dozen chests for the pieces from my old set is less than ideal.

Crucible adjustments and Cyvion chill required

There’s not a lot here that needs adjusting, but I feel there are a few things which could improve the experience.

  1. No pits: Simple, straight forward, there should be no bottomless pits. Deep water that we swim in, awkward “teleport to a random place” holes which disorient you by dropping you unceremoniously somewhere else on the map (prone and unstable), but being on a great run and dying because you got nudged through block knockback off a cliff is a terrible feeling.
  2. Let us revive each other: If my friends and I are 8 floors deep and someone dies for whatever reason, they should be revivable like they are elsewhere in the game. Maybe it takes half of their echo currency in addition to us spending health. Maybe they suffer from revive sickness, losing half their max health for two floors. Something.
  3. Endless mode: My mage friend was hyped for the Crucible until he got past Cyvion (who is a piece of cake for him, because he does Overload nonsense which obliterates him) and discovered that the Crucible isn’t endless. If you’re going to have a rogue-like mode, it would be great if you could make a mode which lets you keep fighting as far as you can, getting better drops, but fighting harder to deal with enemies.
  4. Cyvion needs the foam treatment: My current build is a tank. I have over 65% resists in every category. I’m wearing plate. I can block with a great shield. I’ve got over 300 health. Yet somehow, Cyvion deals 1/4 of my health every time he stabs me with his lance while mounted, or 1/3 of my health with every sword swing when dismounted. Somehow, this is marginally manageable, if absurd, with copious running around and stuffing my face with food. I would appreciate a bit of a damage reduction on his attacks. It’s worth noting I do not have the “damage resistance from durability” enchantment on my body armour, but I have seen build crafter videos where they take far less damage and do have that enchantment on top of 60%+ physical resist, so I have to wonder if this is letting you go above 70% damage reduction.
    But what hurts the most of everything is he seems to go into a rage mechanic if you don’t kill him in under 15 seconds when dismounted. He will continually teleport around the arena doing massive damage. Blocking lets me get away with surviving the first time, but when he does it a second time, I’m done. If I somehow survive that because I’m there with a friend and he’s teleporting between the two of us, he does it a third time back to back to back, and that’s just the end of the run. Rolling doesn’t help either, because fatty rolling doesn’t let you evade fast enough, and even if I’m capable of dash dodging, his timings change. He will sometimes teleport faster than normal, sometimes slower, and it seems to get worse as the fight drags on.
    a) The damage needs to come down, a lot. If he’s doing such a massive AoE, it shouldn’t also kill someone with 240 health and 50%+ resists (namely my melee friend trying a scythe build).
    b) He (and all enemies) shouldn’t repeat the same moveset continually. Whatever moveset his state machine tells him to transition to next, it should not be a repeat of the thing he just finished doing.
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To be clear, I don’t believe that Cyvion needs across the board nerfs. But I’ve yet to beat him solo without using magic. His first phase is fine. A bit painful, but he’s the boss, so he should strain our resources. But his second phase has several attacks which bypass blocking, and as I said his teleport is basically a death sentence if he does it repeatedly. I feel strongly that if you’re making yourself the thickest wall that’s immobile and resolute to take a hit, with near maxed out if not fully 70% capped resistances, you should be able survive more than a couple of stabs or swings.

In my most successful run up to him (where I didn’t get cheesed off a cliff by a badly angled charging grubhost. Their charging hitbox is wider than it looks) I had something like 10%+15% extra health, enemies deal 10%+15% less damage, enemies are 10% slower, and I was healing more, with periodic major fire AoEs, fire infusion, and fire on damage dealt. I died to his third round of teleport spamming (the first I’ve seen while solo). I have corroborating eye witnesses who can confirm he does it more than once in a row, and on occasion has done it three times. Just this evening with a friend he teleported twice (as a pestilence boss, the Sayer Echo, in Nameless Pass). I’m using a new build with normal rolls and was able to dodge roll through them expertly for once. Something I know I couldn’t do as a fatty tank. I don’t know if it’s proximity though. In some cases he teleports when we’re both within reach of his sword. In others he ignores us as ranged characters poking him from a safe distance and running.

As for the armour pen, if it is indeed rounding off and not showing the real value, then yes that is annoying and I really want that fixed as well. It’s hard to work with a game when you have wrong info, moreso than incomplete info. I do have an 11% rune ring though. >D

Finally, we’ll have to agree to disagree on the crucible pits, revives, and particularly the crafting suggestions. There are many resources I have 100+ of and there’s only one use for them ever. I have dozens of some gems. Make them useful for something else. >P

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the trick with the teleport attack is to listen to a particular sound - and when you hear it - roll. it’s a kind of vacuum blast noise. hard to explain. this always works for me unless i become impatient and roll sooner than i hear the noise.

i’m pretty sure out in the wilderness he follows a different script than in the crucible. to me he feels more “authored” in the crucible, whereas in the wilderness he chooses his attacks more randomly, resulting in more occasions where attacks just repeat. which is sometimes much easier to deal with, and sometimes much harder.

tons of people saying this boss is too hard tells me he’s in a good place. imagine if he was weaker - that would flatten the game somewhat, no ?

P.S. i sound like i never die to the EK. that’s not the case. i do die. but i see the pattern and like the difficulty

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I’ll have to listen for the audio cue then. As the pestilence boss he is a little more random, and I think that needs to be limited as I mentioned (don’t repeat yourself). But I can say it is an identical problem, just less so, in the Crucible. He has done a three-peat of the teleporting in the crucible before, but it’s far more common that he’s done it twice.

For the difficulty assessment, it depends. It can be a good thing when a boss is hard (like Malenia from Elden Ring). But it’s a fine line between “wow, that’s tough” and “wow, that’s cheap”. I like to consider myself proficient in the Dark Souls style games. It’s fine when an enemy has a devastating attack that needs skill to survive. But even if you don’t do it flawlessly there’s usually a moment to breathe afterward. Imagine if Malenia just spammed her foggy spirit clone attack endlessly without interruption, or Radahn (and Miquella) just spammed orbital bombardments. Sure, you might be able to poke a few times, but you’re going to be punished for it massively. Same deal here. Cyvion doing back to back teleporting is a problem, just as much as it would be if he was doing the cross arena charge multiple times in a row (less because that’s deadly, and more because it’s predictable and easily punished).