I agree, I don’t want the game to lead to the one-button spam solution for everything gameplay, but this can be solved with just some balancing tweaks.
But what your gameplay against the knight shows (by the way, well played) is for me a bigger problem.
Regardless of which weapon you’re wielding, you would approach this fight most likely in the same way.
But imagine if you were carrying a dagger that didn’t allow you to parry or carry a shield, but instead deal´s bonus damage when you attacked an enemy from behind.
Or imagine wielding a two-handed sword that deals bonus damage when you hit an enemy in the front, but has a negative effect that gives your dodge roll a cooldown. However, you’re also wearing a ring that gives you bonus attack speed and lifesteal every second you don’t dodge, stacking up, leading to the most manly fight known to men and the universe.
Okay, at that point, I’m just fantasizing about Tryndamere from LoL.
generally playstyles could be more diverse. that’s why i think mages and archers shouldn’t be forced in melee. there has to be more than, “roll, parry, smash, repeat”
I think that the issue that this game has goes deeper than all of the mini tweaks that we all can suggest.
The main issue is:
What Moon Studio wants for No Rest For The Wicked ?
Is this visceral combat system just a marketing thing or will it be the core of the gameplay ?
And if it is suppose to be the core of the gameplay, for me, for now, it feels that they are going in the opposite direction from mid game and later on.
And its not a high level game difficulty issue. Raising or lowering health bars or whatever resources won’t solve it.
Right, I mean I slaughtered the Echo Knight with the Chipped Daggers which just has the regular flurry. I don’t know what was the cheapest aspect of the fight - the life/focus/stamina regen or the stunlock.
Aside from the Echo Knight it made the rest of the game absurdly easy as well. Only shielded opponents make you stop for a moment to maneuver. Everything else just dies.
I DON’T agree with completely getting rid of “gain X on hit” - these are key mechanics in both ARPGs and Souls. You couldn’t even hope to play through Diablo II on Nightmare/Hell without lifesteal. Just needs a bit of tweaking. It’s the Flurry runes that need to be nerfed or gone altogether. I did find a legendary rapier that has a version of Flurry that costs 100 focus instead of the dagger’s 50 and that one doesn’t seem to stagger as much. Make Flurry more expensive and/or no stagger perhaps?
An alternative for not removing it is restricting the proc to the first hit of a multi-hit attack. I don’t remember this kind of effect being necessary for any Souls game that I’ve played. Truth be told I can’t think of how to even get this effect in them.
As for ARPGs, this one is meant to be slower and encourage the use of food to keep you afloat instead of crutching hard on the affix.
Ranged weapons can already play entirely from range due to the current state of Focus% on Damage affixes, so this change will only really impact people who were not already taking advantage of those overpowered bonuses for some unknown reason. As for whether these builds should be able to play from range, I think it would be interesting to allow variations in playstyle so that ranged characters who DO dip in and out of melee to build focus would be able to deal more damage. Let them get faster regen to use more range abilities in return for the higher risk and challenge of going into melee to hit things between spells/bow shots.
By design it’s clear that Ranged weapon gameplay shouldn’t lean as hard on basic attacks, because their basic attacks just don’t have as much going on as the melee combat does. Casting Arrow over and over again from 30m away simply isn’t very engaging, so having this be a builder with the main source of damage being Focus abilities makes far more sense for Range/caster builds than it does for melee. The question then is how you allow these builds to access more Focus regeneration to support that playstyle without ending up with the infinite Focus attack spam we currently have in melee.
That question brings us on to Attributes and makes you wonder what exactly the current Attribute design is trying to do. It might make sense for Range builds to choose to sacrifice damage or survivability in order to get more Focus to fuel their ranged ability gameplay, except they don’t have to. You currently double your Focus pool by investing just 6 Attribute points into it, then with 2 Focus rings you have quadrupled your Focus pool (And quadrupled the amount of Focus recovered from %Focus on damage dealt) for essentially no Attribute investment at all. The %Focus on Damage Dealt rolls on weapons are also taken at no real ‘cost’ because there is nothing remotely comparable in value that you would give up in order to get these. So every build takes these as the objectively best option and now Focus is “Solved” for all characters.
Would it not make far more sense for abundant Focus to require significant sacrifices to achieve? Sacrifices which ranged characters might need to make to enable their ranged ability playstyle, where Hybrid characters might make slightly fewer tradeoffs because they don’t need to rely entirely on range abilities. The current attribute system doesn’t support these kinds of decisions, instead all we’re currently doing is picking a Damage attribute which increases weapon scaling in the same way as every other Damage attribute and where every build does the same thing in the same way.
Picture this kind of situation instead:
Focus on Damage dealt is gone entirely
‘Free’ ranged abilities deal low damage and build Focus, but not nearly as fast as melee attacks build Focus
Ranged Focus abilities deal significant damage but their costs require a lot of free attacks to fuel
The ‘Focus’ attribute increases the amount of Focus gained from both melee and free ranged attacks, but you need a lot more than just 6 points if you want to be able to use a lot of ranged abilities
Now if you plan to build for an entirely ranged playstyle you need a lot of points in the Focus attribute, meaning you have an actual build decision to make. This likely requires sacrificing something else like equipment weight or damage. Hybrids who use a mixture of melee and range would not require as much investment into the Focus attribute because melee recovers Focus faster. Pure melee builds should not be as reliant on Focus spenders to deal damage so could choose to put those Attribute points into weight for higher armour and so on.
This would likely require some Softcaps on the value of the stat, and these kind of utility Attributes likely won’t scale to infinitely high levels because they are altering gameplay (Number of basic attacks you need between abilities) but if you don’t do something like this with Attributes then you don’t have any real build differences.
No, ranged characters have their own set of mechanics they have to contend with, running out of resources, being squishy etc. to force mages or archers into melee is the craziest thing I have ever heard.
A lot to unpack here. I’m going to discuss this bit-by-bit and make it more digestible.
I think it’s safe to say we both agree this enchantment is highly problematic. The amount of power it has granted has more than trivialized enemies.
Again, I wholeheartedly agree here in trying to incentivize melee gameplay. I drafted up some enchantments in another post that prefers when you chain together runes and normal attacks. At the end of the day, my goal is to limit how much a player can trivialize combat. It’s unavoidable to a degree because of the nature of ARPGs but it can be minimized.
Yes, Focus on Damage Dealt is far too problematic and cannot exist in its current form. There are more engaging ways to make this work. I know ARPGs are straightforward with stats like these but we have a different sandbox entirely, we can do better. They’ve also decided to allow Stamina attacks with bows as a testing ground for pure Ranger playstyles and I think that’s a good start.
Making ranged runes be significantly stronger but at a higher cost I think works for me. I will say, many enemies have ways to close the gap so I may be ovethinking how much ranged will trivialize this game compared to others. Ideally they also fix how much we benefit from the early points in stats since the scaling is too generous.
A lot of the issues currently is, thankfully, numbers tuning. The rings giving too much leeway on Focus can be resolved by reducing the numbers so you really have to invest in it.
Edit: I swear I hit reply on posts but I don’t see it actually reply to the person.
I would say, especially in a Souls Like game, that if ranged weapon have a balance issue, as a general rule I would tweak the AIs first, not the player skills or attributes.
At a high level we all know how playing a ranged weapon should feel like and I don’t think that there is that much to reinvent here.
And if the challenge is not there it’s not that you have not enough tools. Its more because the AI doesn’t have the answers to counter you.
Maybe they will add in harder content and monsters in game. It seems like there will be multiple difficulty’s to the crucible. So right now you just blast content and are able to kill shit fast once you get some good runes and what not. And maybe focus builds could be nurfed a bit or they can buff stamina and other stats with different affixes.
But I’m sure it just comes down to difficulty if there were monsters that were harder to kill and with different shield mechanics. Or even attacks that can drain focus. Vampire for health or focus drain.
There’s just tweaking that needs to be done I can feel it too seems like a balance thing and I’m sure they’ll figure it out
Let me just note here that nerfing rune spam and forcing archers/mages into melee are two different issues.
IMHO Rune spam is a genuine problem because it circumvents most of the combat mechanics.
Archers being forced into melee is now tied into focus, but doesn’t have to be. IIRC developers themselves said that normal stamina base attack for bows might be coming. If that then also circumvents most of the combat mechanics is another debate. Let’s keep this thread for the rune spam issue first.
I’m sorry to disappoint but this game is a mixture of world exploration that Moon is known for, but also the repetitive content from ARPGs. The Crucible will be expanded upon in the future, it’s Thomas’s ambitious vision to have it styled after Hades.
