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Overall Great Game, Just Wish it Had More Options and Difficulty

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#1

Overall

I love the game. I love the art, I like the music, the story is fun, I love the lore books, the gameplay is great, both in combat and in exploring the dungeons. Enemies are interesting/annoying to fight, the bosses are pretty neat. I’m really looking forward to a sequel (there’s going to be more of these, right? Right!?). Just some nitpicks/areas of improvement.

Combat

Combat is excellent, except for two issues. One is that buffs and debuffs last very short durations, so either you don’t use them (Mantle of Aramus, Gaia’s Fist) or they’re the only thing you use (Gully and Taunt, Heroism, Shatter, Cripple). Most of them could stand to be basically doubled in duration (except Calibretto’s Invigorating Mist and the like), so that support characters can do things other than cycling the same handful of buffs/debuffs. And that certain other strategies/combos might become viable, once you can actually stack certain buffs/debuffs together.

The other issues is that, aside from Garrison and Knolan, overcharge is hard to come by, which makes taking advantage of the very powerful overcharge perks/masteries difficult. Monika completely wastes overcharge whenever its spent on something like Stealth or Lightning Reflexes. We have no ability to control where our overcharge gets spent except by not using abilities. This eliminates a whole swath of possible choices in combat, because a lot of the time the answer to the question “do I really want to use up my overcharge on that?” is “no”.

Difficulty

Once you get enough perk points and abilities unlocked for builds to really start coming together, the game becomes too easy. The main problem seems to be enemy health. Enemies do a good amount of damage, but they’re basically made of paper. Even new game plus C’Drall just sort of folds under the sheer damage an endgame party can dish out.

Broadly, I’d add a health buff to enemies based on the difficulty level. Heroic has 50% more health, legendary has 100%, mythic has 150%. I would even further buff boss HP under higher difficulties, just so they’d be meaty (maybe just double boss HP before applying the difficulty mod). I’d also add an additional difficulty level (tentatively dubbed “mythic plus”) which is unlocked by hitting max level on NG+; it increases damage done by 20% and health by 400%, boosts the dungeon enemies to level 33 across the board (boss is 34), makes all gear drops level 27, and has increased legendary drop chance compared to mythic. This also makes old dungeons relevant later in the game, and gives more build options.

Also, C’Drall’s zone should count as a dungeon and have difficulty modifiers, so people have the option of fighting extra hard C’Drall.

Perks

Gully
Taunt II: taunt is for redirecting damage, not doing it. It should either increase the number of attacks taunt lasts for, or increase the damage reduction during taunt.

Red Monika
Chimera Sting II: increased damage over making it apply 2 random debuffs?

Alumon
Shadow Whip II: the attack for increasing follow-up damage should get more follow-up damage (make the buff bigger).
Soul Shard II: the attack for doing lots of damage doesn’t get more damage as its upgrade? This is the one place it would be perfect!

Crafting

I like a lot about the crafting system. Though there are two problems, I feel. The first is the lack of things to craft, both in missing tiers to upgrade people’s gear (i.e. only half the characters get an upgrade at most levels of armor or weapon), and in lacking alternate options to customize characters with (i.e. everyone has to wear the same jewelry, no alternate weapon or armor for different builds). The second is that crafting mats drop much slower than the characters level, so by the time you actually get enough to craft a decent set you’ll be six levels above it and can buy better (common!) gear from the blacksmith.

I would substantially increase the drop rates of low-level crafting mats. Also make crafting mats cheaper to buy (except for endgame stuff). And let you buy more at a given time, so you have more ability to throw money at bad luck rather than running the dungeons so many times you hit max level absurdly early. And I know it’d be a chunk of work, but it’d be nice to have to more gear options to craft. Especially for enchanting in the end-game, why are there so few end-game enchants? Where’s my end-game keen and swiftness and inner fire enchants?

I’d suggest making “Advanced” versions of old gear to fill slots, as in higher-level equivalents of items, so you can re-use art assets. For example, it’d be nice to have an Advanced Overcharged Mythril Band as an option for endgame builds. You can do the same thing to fill out the missing low-level armor and weapons too. This would reduce the amount of work it’d take to give more gameplay options. Also, you could use similar recipes, which would make older zone materials more relevant (would work nicely with mythic plus difficulty).

Endgame Content

I want there to be more things to do once I have all these gear and perk options! Getting to the end of the game and gearing up and then there not being anything to do with it (aside from curbstomp C’Drall) is a little disappointing. This is the hardest problem to fix, because adding new content is a huge amount of work and its not like it’d bring in extra money to cover costs. Just, it’d be nice if there were more stuff to do. Maybe a really simple dungeon filled with powered-up versions of old bosses?

Interesting Jewelry

I think it’d be nice if there were a bunch of endgame jewelry that did unusual things. Like a trinket called “Matador’s Cape” that redirects single target attacks to you and gives a chunk of evasion. Or a ring that gives each of your allies a point of overcharge every time one of your ignites, poisons, or bleeds ticks. A necklace that makes your buffs and debuffs last longer. That kind of stuff.

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#2

I do agree that the game has problem with you using same actions all the time(Gully using taunt) I don’t think adding duration would make much of a difference because then they would probably also decrease the dmg from poison, bleeds etc. but more importabtly how few rounds fights last on average. And yes some abilities are pretty much useless(Stealth and aoe attacks except burst)

Heavily disagree on overcharge gain. Getting overcharge at the moment is way too easy if anything(how the game is currently). Biggest thing about overcharge is that 2 actions most of the time equals ability free of charge( yes some require 25 but you won’t be using them a lot.) thus making mana almost useless.more overcharge gain–> mana gets indirectly nerfed. Most of the game i would have mana at 100%.
Of course if enemies were tougher and did more dmg etc. that would require more frequent ability usage than maybe every third turn(for heals example) but buffing overcharge gain so that one perk would get buffed seems like a bad idea. (rather do something about the perk itself if does have problems)And as you said, the game is already easy, why make it easier? Also basic actions do too much damage as they are so adding more overcharge to them would just make the situation even worse. No opinion on the choice “do i want to use overcharge” option cause if you dont want to use overcharge for it then you probably shouldn’t even use the ability to begin with.

Yes the game never is “difficult”. Probably because they wanted all the combinations to “work” thus making the game easy. Not sure about the amounts but yes, enemies should have more health, especially the bosses. Though another way to make the game more difficult: increase the number of enemies at once to 4 or 5. (also increase the base amount you get from encounters. what’s the point of single skeleton “ambushing” from the grave that dies in one turn ?)Also making the “waves” work differently in dungeons. When you kill enemy, making a another enemy replace it from the reserve so that the waves would not be as useless as they are. Arena’s better because atleast there’s the time limit so you can’t screw around and waste time while only one enemy is alive from the “wave”.

yes another “dungeon difficulty” for max level chars would be nice. I think adding max char level content behind NG+, not a good idea. Make it possible on regular one too. Of course i would just say make another difficulty setting that would lower the possible amount of levels from monster example. level 13 monsters only gives you levels till level 10. OR making it that you would have to be multiple levels OVER the monsters level before you could kill it with 1-2 actions.(not having you one shot enemies when you’re couple levels under)

difficulty options for last boss sounds good to me. Make some of us able to make the fight challenging.

  • Taunt II perk has it’s funny moments(though it also requires certain ring) that the attacker ends up taking more damage than the defender if they use multiple hit attacks.(and probably the idea to be a thing against multiple hitting enemies) increasing the amount of attacks you would provoke would make it that you never pretty much had to use it more than once per fight mostly(they probably were thinking about the bosses especially)

  • chimera sting II. some of the debuffs are powerfull especially once you get the perk that lets poison, ignite and bleed crit also possible crit would apply poison too with certain perk so 3 debuffs with basic action.

  • Shadow whip II. no it shouldn’t. again same thing, would be too powerful again basic actions should not be the go to thing that you use when thinking about damage the buff is already powerful.

  • Soul shard II. well this perk is more about covering the weakness of the attack making the perk “better”(in my opinion) than just pure damage buff(and for the “dmg” perk to matter this action would end up doing too much especially when combining it with the your shadow whip idea.) and basic action should not do more damage than abilities that actually use resources.

crafting i agree that you should be able to craft gear for all character from all tiers. other stuff i’m gonna skip cause i also skipped using crafting,enchanting etc. because game lacked difficulty.

Lack of end game content is true. both of us talked about this already some but yea difficulty options for dungeons for max level, max level boss rush in the arena and certain party combination challenges, hidden dungeon for those who completed all the dungeons with our suggested dungeon difficulty. difficulty “modes” for the last boss and yea probably a feature in the next game or a dlc/expansion for the current game.

yes interesting jewelry or gear in that matter would be nice. also just character specific jewelry would be nice. won’t go into the your given ideas but yea things that would give more than just pure stats but they’re hard to balance(usually too OP or useless)

all the critisim did not take into account monster buffs and such cause we would actually have to try the game with them to give accurate critisim. But still the gap between actions and abilities is too small(except some like monikas execute)

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