Suggestions about re-spec to avoid confusion on the first players run

Wicked Feedback
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Hi Moon Studios and everyone,

I see the forum’s is on fire right now, the community’s split because the difficulty, and the devs are juggling like crazy trying to keep everyone happy. And in the middle of it all, there’s this beautiful game. In short i think that the most of the complaints about “excessive difficulty” aren’t really because the combat or attribute systems are poorly designed, they’re more about players messing up their stat builds or getting stuck with a weapon that just doesn’t feel right .

Let’s start with the stats reset system:

Introduction: I’ll try to keep it short. The game features an impressive variety of weapons and playstyles — this aspect is outstanding, and it seems like all players agree on that. However, the opportunities to try out different combat styles and explore the rich weapon system that No Rest for the Wicked offers are very limited. And by “limited,” I mean almost non-existent for the average casual player. I’ve seen comments complaining about stamina costs, damage output, and slow attack speeds — but I honestly don’t think those are real issues. The truth is that this game has weapons and playstyles where those concerns don’t really apply. In fact, there’s so much variety that I believe every player can find a way to play that suits them.

The problem: In practice, players need to progress far enough to unlock the stat reset function, meaning they’re stuck during the early part of the game with a very limited range of weapon options. And for any casual player taking their time, that feature might go unnoticed for easily 15+ hours of gameplay — and that’s being generous. This, to me, is the clearest case of the game unintentionally getting in its own way.

Suggestion: Please consider letting players explore weapon variety, try different combat approaches, and reset the stats. Let the depth and richness of your combat system shine from the start. Give players the chance to avoid frustrations like low damage (perhaps due to suboptimal stats), or high stamina usage (maybe because they’re dodging a lot and using a medium-to-high consumption weapon).

Possibles solutions:

  1. Include a chest at the beginning of the game with some basic weapons so that before they level up and have to increase their stats they can try out different combat styles.
  2. Making the reset statue available in the Crucible from the beginning with a indication to warning the player.
  3. The most radical solution: include this function in the bonfire. I understand that such a decision can be difficult.

Edit: The relationship between the food system and the Crucible required a separate comment. It can be found in another reply within this same topic. See here: Suggestions about re-spec to avoid confusion on the first players run - #5 by Bl.z

Edit 2: I’ve removed here the reference to the food system. I don’t want to distract from the main topic.

With all that said, let me emphasize again that I’m having a great time with your game. I think it’s an excellent piece of work, and everything I’ve shared here comes from a place of genuine appreciation and respect.

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Thank you for your summary. To engage in the debate, I’d like to clarify a few points:

  1. The stat reset isn’t aimed solely at casual players, nor is its purpose to make the game easier (I don’t think it needs that). The idea is to let players, from the very beginning of No Rest for the Wicked, explore the variety of available weapons. I believe this would help soften some of the complaints from casual players about the supposed difficulty of the combat. To be honest, I think that “difficulty” is often worsened by poor stat distribution and using a weapon that doesn’t feel satisfying to the player.
  2. The suggestion about the food system is simply meant to avoid farming, not to make the game easier. It’s about reducing a tedious task that no one enjoys—especially at the start, when the player is still unfamiliar with enemy patterns and needs to use more food to recover health.
  3. I just hope the developers don’t confuse tedium and artificial difficulty (in this case, hours of grinding and preventing stat resets) with depth and the need for players to adapt in order to overcome different challenges. We don’t need an easier game, we need a game that lets us invest our time where it truly matters.
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In regards to food, it is absolutely an issue the respawn rates of the nodes.

After saving Marin Village, I just make a daily circuit of buying out the fish, tomatoes, potatoes and lithop seeds from the cook, then port back to Marin Village and run around the village and grab all the tomatoes and fish and seeds and dracaena herbs I can from there as well as buying also from their cook.

I thought I was super well stocked with 40 tomato soups and 10-15 of 4 other more plates.

WRONG. A single Crucible run at lv27 and one overtuned HP sponge Echo Knight later, I was down to 15 tomato soups into a crucible retry to Seneschal to unlock one more feature from him, and 3 of the other plates down to boot.

When every multi-enemy fight takes 2-4 food items to clear, no amount of daily farming will compensate because of the timegated node respawn rates and the cost of ingredients to craft relative to the sheer consumption the game forces via trash mobs.

And just dying and respawning to avoid using up too much food doesn’t even work as a strategy for the crucible, so trying to progress through it is a massive resource sink and the Senechal chests are absolutely pathetic.

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Completely agree. I didn’t mention the Crucible because I understand that its roguelike gameplay, which encourages replayability and repetition, is in clear contradiction with the need to stockpile a large amount of food beforehand to face the challenge. It’s true, the Crucible worsens (significantly) the already mandatory farming, as food is only consumed inside and never recovers. In my opinion, there are two possible solutions to this problem:

  1. Include a healing system in the Crucible based on flasks. These flasks would be exclusive to the challenge, giving the player an X number of flasks per room. What would need to be evaluated is the number of flasks, whether unused ones carry over to the next room, and whether it would be possible to increase the number of usable flasks through some benefit earned during the challenge.
  2. Include a bonfire in the Senechal’s room and place a generous amount of food in the chests. This, along with the possibility of buying food from Senechal at a laughably low price, would greatly ease the food drain that the Crucible currently represents.

I’m not sure if the suggestion is better presented now. If you think it looks good, give it a vote. Maybe, with a bit of luck, the developers will take an interest in our discussion

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Yeah, it’s both a mix of node respawn rates relative to consumption in some content.

I was doing Marin Village revisit at danger lv25. Felt fairly tuned, Hotfix 2 seems to be working well there so long as there is no pestilence giving mobs steroids.

But the crucible scaling, particularly the echo knight, is crazy. The regular mobs don’t feel super health spongy in the crucible at least, but good god do they do a ton of damage with very little room to maneuve between 2-3 bruiser knights it gets silly the amount of pinballing and damage intake you take.

And the damage intake is precisely because of the amount of mobs concurrently attacking, the AI does not take into account the attack sequence of the other AI, so trying to dodge around and play defensively waiting for an opening is a losing strategy because right as one mob winds down and becomes open, the other mob is already lunging at you and swinging, and when you come out of dodging that, the other mob will be back to swinging again.

Multi-enemy fights are a vicious cycle of unavoidably taking damage in order to eliminate the first one or two. These bruiser types also besides being high poise with armor and heavy weapons, for some reason on top of their long range lunges are given ranged attacks to boot.

So unless you have a build that can dish out constant burst aoe damage to simultaneously stagger and clear multiple enemies at a time, you are going to burn through food out of sheer attrition.

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I like the food system it makes it important and meaningful. I don’t think the healing issue has major issues, maybe the herbs to make food are a bit too low. Ez fix.
However I think that if they added a natural hp regen system where you get 1hp per second when out of combat it would save on food a little bit and make it feel more balanced, also feels good to “go out and explore” while you heal a little bit. Imagine you fight and you’re like 30% HP, you have a group of enemies in front of you and to the side there’s an area you havent explored. Maybe you can go to the area you havent explored for now so you heal up a little bit?

Also it adds opportunity for +healing builds to be also an economical choice and makes them more interesting. +100% healing = 2hp per second, so in 1 minute you heal 120 hp that’s pretty good.
It’s also easy to tweak the numbers if it’s too strong.

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I like it too. While I think health regeneration outside of combat could be achieved through other means, your message made me think of something as common as adding temporal health regeneration when sitting at a bonfire. I completely agree with the added value of healing structures — it’s a strong point in their favor that makes them more relevant. I’m editing the main message.
If after editing the message you think these considerations are relevant, please vote!

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I think these small changes would be very beneficial to the game. They would make the first encounter more fun and help people try out different weapons. And a small fix to the food system like that would be nice.
ez changes :slight_smile:

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I have modified the topic :slight_smile:
If you want, review and give your opinion

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  1. Include a chest at the beginning of the game with some basic weapons so that before they level up and have to increase their stats they can try out different combat styles.

I personally don’t like this idea since it can lead to choice overload at the start and cause more harm than good. Maybe have a quick one-hander like a Straight Sword, a Wand or Staff and a Claymore perhapse a Bow as well. It basically covers the 3 main types without giving too many choices that can be too much for some. And maybe add a choice of free weapon from Fillmore when you rescue him on top of the free repairs and half off items.

  1. Making the reset statue available in the Crucible from the beginning with a indication to warning the player.

Making it both Available and part Elas questline would make it a natural way to introduce the Attribute reset mechanic to new players. Make it cost a small amount based on your level and make the upgrade from the Crucible remove the cost rather than unlocking it.

There are quite a few problems that could be addressed like people not knowing how attributes and weapon scaling works by having NPCs and Quests natural bring them up like I meantioned with Elsa and having the reset option be actual part of her questline.

You could make it so that when you speak to Fillmore in town the first time he brings up how different people choose different weapons. Or Randolph wanting to test us out before actually giving us bounties and as such could natural integrate a tutorial about weapons and attribute scaling.

I think Runes, Enchantments, Re-rolls and Infusion (Especially Elemental ones) could stand with tutorials dressed up as in-game quests.

People are far more likely to sit through and remeber something that is both not directly noticeable as a tutorial but also fits in to the game world and lore.

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About the chest: the idea isn’t to offer every weapon, which is why I said “some basic weapons". The suggestion is similar as what you mentioned: just include a few. In the tutorial, player get a sword and a shield, so the chest could have, for example: dual daggers, shortbow, staff, and mace.

And yeah, the respec option could totally be introduced by Elsa. As for how they present the system and the different weapons to the player, I’ll leave that up to the devs. What really matters is that it gets introduced.

Not sure if my point is clearer now or if it sounds good to you. If it does, vote, it helps the devs actually see this feedback too :slight_smile:
@Zhyrez

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Even I don’t really trust anyone claiming to have “definitive solutions,” I did vote in favor back when it was posted. And that’s despite i’m not being the kind of player who enjoys having a bunch of adjustable settings before starting a game. I’m one of those who prefers when a game, although offering difficulty levels, has a clear idea of what it is and what it wants to deliver.

That said, if the community is this divided and the devs are trying to please both the players who see NRFTW as an typical ARPG and those who see it like a souls-like (I think it’s neither one nor the other) they might want to take your suggestion seriusly. That’s why I voted for it.

And if you think this topic makes sense, vote. I see that we both dont want NRFTW to become a typical ARPG

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We’re apparently bump trading now so let me just point out:

The example of players building DEX but ending up using a STR weapon can happen because they can’t read, but it can also happen because a player who wanted to build a character which fit their fantasy of a DEX archetype was unable to find the weapons they expected to be able to use on such a character, or tried to use those weapons and found they were frustrating to use and struggled to progress with them compared to hitting things with a Claymore. Did you know that Claymores reliably interrupt most of the enemies in the game and the majority of DEX weapons don’t?

Additional fun fact: Calling a starting weapon “Wooden Sword” and then giving it flavour text which says that it isn’t very effective, isn’t a great idea if the intention is for this to be an end game scaling sword and the only DEX scaling 1H sword in the game

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I have to admit this looks amazing

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I’ll start by saying that I’m a normal RPG player but this is my feeling and I certainly don’t know what the right solution is.

My thought is that at the moment there are too many weapons.. obviously at the beginning it’s fine also because you can use them.. but once you choose the stats you want to increase.. 90% of the weapons become unusable.. (let’s be clear they are always useful because you resell them and make money) but from a practical point they become useless.

solutions? respec accessible with reagent right away outside the crucible.. why is this? because first of all if a person completely gets the character building wrong.. rest assured that the crucible won’t even get past the first room.

this way you would also have the chance to try all the weapons and especially all the armors.. and above all all the builds..

because let’s remember guys that the average player today relies on guides like maxroll.. (and reading on Twitter what Thomas said many get the statistics wrong.. ) but this is normal because on NRFTW there are few guides around.. at least give the chance to experiment.

a piece of advice I can also give.. give recommended basic builds directly in the game for non-expert players. because not everyone is Rax who plays 40 hours in 3 days. the average player has much less time..

as for food, there is a need for an upgrade of the basic foods

I’m currently at level 30.. but do you think it’s normal that I have something like 200 mushrooms and 200 herbs in the bank? and I’ll probably never use them again since they heal me for 60?

in fact last night I thought at this point I don’t collect them much anymore, what do I need them for?

please make sure that at level 30.. all the basic foods heal at least 100 hp.. maybe through a quest from chef Gordon!

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The interesting thing is that Thomas, in the thread about classes (linked above), clearly points out that re-spec are coming late, making it difficult for players to switch weapons and adjust their stats. What’s odd is that he doesn’t mention anything about allowing access to re-spec from the early stages of the game.

I understand your position on the wide variety of weapons, but in my opinion, this is one of the appeals of NRFTW. Overwhelming? A bit, but I think with allowing the player to explore and redistribute their stats wouldn’t block games.

Regarding food (changing the subject), you’re right, the initial ingredients become irrelevant. There are several solutions, and I trust they will come. You can (as you suggest) upgrade food, but those same ingredients could also be used to create potions for focus, stamina, damage boosts, etc.

That said, a vote would help flesh out these suggestions!