A single death costing 9-11 copper at lv3 feels excessive. The game early is incredibly stingy with currency. I can’t even buy more than one weapon to try out what feels better for my ideal character without bankrupting myself.
I’m really not a fan of a durability system for battle armor and weapons in a game that is by design intended to be challenging and unforgiving.
If the game is going to be balanced and tuned around the expectation you will be dying often and have a steep learning curve from the very beginning, it really needs its systems to allow for trial and error and gradual improvement.
The durability system just exists to stop the game flow from practicing the fights to forcing you to go farm and sell for a while to even recoup the costs of dying in order to keep trying to take attempts at the combat content.
And in turn this progressive setting back of the player financially heavily delays the ability to try out items, swap around different armors to feel out what’s best, and buy upgrades and enchantments because death financially ruins the player.
Please reconsider durability to apply only to gathering tools as a rate limiter for gathering resources if you want to put a bottleneck there.
But if this is going to be an unforgiving soulslike with a lot of dying from the very beginning because the game makes no effort to warn you of some certain mobs in an intro area that can 2-3 shot you and encounters with any kind of enemy can end in 3-4 hits, then it needs to remove the durability and healing item ingredient scarcity/timegating via herbs as the limiting reagent.
Because right now it feels too metagamey where you get the unpleasant surprise of getting splatted off every detour bumping into mobs you clearly are not meant to tackle at lv3-lv4 in an area where the supposed danger level is appropriate to you.
I don’t want to just park my character and go watch a youtube video on optimal builds and routes in order to not ruin my early game experience by running myself bankrupt through durability. The curve is not smooth.
I want to bring up Clair Obscur. Clair Obscur also has the unpleasant surprise of unknown mob levels and bumping into something that you have no idea whether you can fight or get obliterated, and by Act 3 it happens all the time and the side bosses are brutal.
But Clair Obscur is fine because you get crushed, you reload right near what killed you, and gives you the decision to determine to try again if it was close enough and learn the encounters and dodge and parry timings, or go somewhere else and get stronger and come back later without losing anything in the process for the trial and error run teaching you you need to do something different via failure.
Games that demand tight, well-executed performance to clear content should NOT be punishing players for progressing through learning the content and timing.
This is crucial because if you don’t want to just spam dodge and want to actually learn parry timings, you need to be given the room to parry and fail without ruining yourself. The game should not punish you for dying while trying to learn timings.