tela2k

I personally like how it's gone from, "priests have 2-4 spells/level worth using, and you'll have to experiment to learn what they are," to "priests have only 2-4 spells/level worth using, and you'd better guess right the first time!" but hey at least Xoti starts with the single-target attack in the game Man that signature is useful. Was going to call you out for being a monster and a sadist.

@cokane Suggestions 1 and 2 might actually happen. 3 tied to the next suggestion 4 I would like as a optional system, I would use it. 5 I hate the empower mechanic. I'd like to see it completely removed. Unfortunately I believe here I'm in the minority. Like I could play DF with all kinds of attrition mechanics, but not when they're mild annoyances, that just make the game feel unnecessarily restrictive. If it had a F:NV style hardcore mode I'd probably give it a try, I enjoyed it in that one. Or making some dungeons lock resting until you've finished them or whatever (I mean how can you sleep in a cave full of ghouls, huh?), and you can't leave because door slammed shut or whatever. But there is no way that stuff can be in the core experience, since that stuff only appeals to a nieche group out of an already small audience. @Multihog Good post, agreed. Though I never played Jagged Alliance, but as far as I remember, it's more a 4X/Turn-based strategy game like the two newer XCOMs and not an RPG? If the injury system works anything like XCOM then it's pretty much impossible to implement in any way into Deadfire. In DF if your guys got injured and were "out" for a certain period of time you could just wait, no hurry, no rush. But the Avatar Project doesn't wait for your favourite ranger to heal up, no sir, it's time for a retaliation mission! @Mr. Unsworth-Mitchell I kind of missed this before, but now that it was quoted: it seems quite bold naming yourself "a tactical thinker" and calling everyone who disagrees "a casual" on a gaming forum. Maybe you didn't mean it like that, but that's like dressing up in a moose costume and running across a shooting range. @lMarcusl Agreed, agreed, agreed. I believe in this combat system, they'll fix it and it will be amazing. Although I'm slightly worried about the lack of special encounters. Like the really tough and interesting fights you'll remember ten years down the line.

Or just keep the current system but restrict rest to safe zones (inns, ship) and fully cleared dungeon levels. BG's "You cannot rest here...monsters are about" was one of the few rest mechanics/restrictions that encouraged me to soldier on with an injured/depleted party. The only way to really prevent rest spamming in an area is to fully disable it on a conditional basis, imo. Quick rests: I don't generally like the idea of forcing you to walk back to your ship. It takes you 20s there and 20s back in most places in the game, so you'll probably do it, and it'll just feel like a waste of time. BG rest: You could always leave almost every dungeon and spam rest, kill some hobgoblins, return to the dungeon fully charged. Only one that comes to mind, I think the Underdark mind flayer dungeon is a no-rest zone and you can't leave untill you've killed the brain. I'd honestly like stuff like that in Deadfire. You'd probably need to make sure there's an autosave before any closed dungeon, and also inform the player that there's no rest to be had. There's quite a bit of yammering about resting, injuries, encounter/rest in this thread. I think there's a kind of joy that comes with finding items that make you immune to Hold Person, Charm Person, etc, and that joy comes from the sheer terror that can be inflicted by those abilities. Seeing your favourite character get torn apart by undead while frozen still by a Hold Person spell makes you hate that spell with a passion. Yes I get that these are solved by hard counters, but I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that. Your immunity-to-Hold Person item doesn't protect you against a dragon's breath attack, for example. This kind of encounter design may well revolve around simply using the right tools for the job, but even this is ultimately more enjoyable than hitting a block of flesh again and again for 3 mins. That said I'm happy to hear alternatives. I mean maybe it's not great filling the game with stuff you need to hard counter, but some of it would still be nice. Knowledge is power. Getting rekt by the above mentioned mind flayers, then going through your spell books and items wondering what you're going to do, coming up with a solution and gibbing those brain sucking octopus faces feels pretty damn good. I like how there are so many thing to learn in those games. Also: -Weapon inefficent. Weapon inefficient. Weapon inefficient. -Imprisoned. Imprisoned. Imprisoned. Imprisoned. Imprisoned. Imprisoned. "Huh.. Ummh.." -Now that you're late into the game and you have learned to use all your spells and have come to rely on them, how about they just don't work in the next few demon filled rooms? -Aec'Letec healing guys at the end of BG1:Totsc -Demon in Unseeing Eye you have to heal to kill. -Sendai statues (nothing much to this, except SHE JUST KEEPS ON COMING) It's like getting a puzzle instead of a standard encounter. Reloading is usually involved, but atleast they make you stop and think for a change.

Good thing is, you did touch on many core issues there. Would've been slightly disappointed, if I'd read two pages worth of random rambling. I'll keep this very short, since currently it's me who needs a rest, which fortunately doesn't cost me anything. 1. Good food needs to be more scarce anyhow, whether it's tied to resting or not. There are so many of those lobsters just laying around, and they're basically protection from magic scrolls. Immunity to three afflictions, available to you in heaps and piles, c'mon guys. Although, theoretically, if the game was hard enough, you'd start chewing through those, and then food would actually start feeling scarce, because you'd want to keep your super immunities up. 2. Encounter design does indeed feel very lacking right now, as does enemy AI. This is the main reason I believe the feel of combat might change significantly for the better, if they just put more effort into it. (Which they are apparently doing right now) Also I agree, Deadfire probably can't work without upwards level scaling. 3. I don't think they should balance the game from Trial of Iron or Expert Mode perspective. People do those when they know the game through and through anyway, difficulty spikes shouldn't matter. I'm pretty sure that part of the community is just happier the harder Triple Crown Solo is to do. 4. As long as there is a wait mechanic in the game, you can't restrict resting by time. I'd be totally OK with your suggestion of 1 injury = 1 food, it's a start at least. 5. Southeast and northwest corners of the map have a couple of encounters on random islands, don't miss them.

I don't think there is a definitive answer to be had to that, since it also does come down to preference. However I do think even if the fights are all going to be the BF (Big Fight) category of fights, there is no reason the level you are taking the fight at, your gear, enemy composition, enemy tactics, enemy placement and consumables couldn't change the sense of difficulty in any given fight. I don't see why everything has to be maximum difficulty to still be engaging, and you can't even design for that, since so many variables affect the the difficulty of a specific encounter. The window is smaller now, since wasting an ability isn't a disaster, and the scripts you can give your party are much better, so if it's outside of the (admittedly smaller) window, you'll just fast mode it. However the worst thing about per rest were the fights where you had to cast CC trash pack after trash pack just because you couldn't trust Aloth not to lose you an unlosable fight by wiping your party. The best were those moments where you actually had to take fights, while your party was already on the edge. How much weight do you give that stuff, like I said, personal preference. But it's not like I'm not slightly worried getting the fights overall feel right is going to be quite a challenge for Obsidian in a game this complex (as stated above by KDubya), since you honestly have to look at every encounter on it's own (which apparently is what they are doing), but they also need to make changes to enemy AI, to make different creatures play differently, and I'd guess that's quite a bit of work. Although as I understand it, the massive SCS mod for the Baldur's Gate series was originally created by one dude, and it changes pretty much every fight and every creature in the game. In short: Fights outside a certain window you will probably just fast mode in Deadfire, meaning fights need to be tougher overall to force the player to engage with the mechanics. Trash fights are now pointless, and level scaling is probably necessary. You see this as a loss, I see it as a win. There is still going to be variance in perceived encounter difficulty, but it's up to Obsidian to make them fun and not repetetive. Flamesium also made some good points about this earlier in the thread: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99893-combat-is-now-mostly-a-dull-chore/?p=2027479 https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99893-combat-is-now-mostly-a-dull-chore/?p=2027658 Edit: last paragraph

Just so many opinions, many point of views and people I lose track of who said what. So I think it's this from page 1: Encounter design between per rest and per encounter: SF = Small Fight, BF = Big Fight Per rest SF, SF, SF, BF *REST* SF, SF, BF *REST* Per encounter BF, BF, BF, BF, BF ad infinitum Having smaller fights in per rest is interesting, since you'll auto attack them to death, because you want to save abilities. (sense of difficulty) Having smaller fights in per encounter isn't interesting, since you'll just drop your biggest spells on them and win. (no sense of difficulty) It of course isn't really binary with only small and big fights, there's every kind of fight in between, and you don't just auto attack everything, also there are going to be small fights in per encounter but as stated above, biggest spell on them, whats the point. I just tried to keep it simple. If this isn't your point then I'm going to need an ELI5.

True, the window for the difficulty where you engage with the mechanics or just let the combat scripts steamroll is now much smaller. The difficulty hasn't changed, but the need for personally giving orders is lessened. Deadfire low level fights don't require you to play well at all, true. If the content is easy enough you'll just let the scripts handle it especially with the new improved system. Maybe it wastes a spell but whatever, it's per encounter. That's actually what happened on my first playthrough. But PoE1 low level fights weren't exactly fun either. I feel like you guys are talking about some theoretical idea what attrition could do, not what it actually did in PoE. You used per encounters fight after fight after fight, one or two per rests if it was a bit tougher, and then emptied your tank in a tough fight and rested, because the cost of resting was minimal. The way you take the easy fights in that game is insanely repetetive and boring. And I'm pretty sure that is what people mean when they say the resting system was tedious. The situation hasn't really changed that much. Fights below your level are easy it's just that now you can empty your tank every time and when you enter an area that is way below your level, let the scripts handle it. Of course it's not good having fights, that are so easy you want to let the combat scripts take care of them, but I don't see how to avoid that. Every RPG ever has had trash fights, that's what the power curve does in these games. Having to personally cast the same spells everytime to own those easy fights doesn't really appeal to me either. Per rest abilities, in my opionion, for reasons stated above, was not the solution. For it to work the resting resource needs to be extremely scarce. Really give this some thought, whether you'd honestly enjoy this. Fights need to be lower overall power, you'd do everything in the game in order of difficulty starting from the bottom, never use abilities in a fight unless you absolutely have to, actually combined with doing everything in order of difficulty you probably won't use them a majority of the time. And the punishment, the reason you are doing everything the easisest way possible? Having to run back town to rest and get more camping supplies and suffer the loadign screens in between. Flamesium already pointed this out earlier, that a fear of loading screens just can't be good game design. This is why it never happened in PoE and there where plenty of camping supplies, per encounter abilities and later even spell masteries as per encs to casters. Health/endurance was not the solution. I mean when did you ever rest for health and not abilities? Also someone said the BG style ambush rest was a good solution. Spamming Z and getting xp for a couple of spiders before rest, that was the system. Injuries do nothing at the moment anyhow, but even if food was scarce, you don't get knocked down in low level fights, so it's always only going to affect tough fights. And tdphys's idea of getting accumulating injuries from low level fights is.. dude.. You'd only send in your tank with maximum deflection buffs and hide everyone outside vision range, afraid that the xaurips are gonna ruin your dungeon run by a random injury to your wizard. Empowers go into the same category with injuries, resting isn't restricted. I don't see why it isn't okay to accept that in a game like this fights below your level are always going to be boring trash and the most fun you can get out of them is pulverizing them with a 9th level spell? Even if you don't use your abilities at all enemies aren't going to be able to kill a party probably even two levels above them. You can level scale them sure if you want to, but they'll still have lower penetration and armor rating, because of worse gear, and you'll still crush them, just like you did in late game PoE with the level scaling options turned on. And early game you won't crush the trash anyway, because you're trash yourself. Early game wasn't a problem in PoE1 and it isn't one in Deadfire either. My personal feeling on the matter is that per encounter doesn't exactly fix the problem, but it removes a pointless system that didn't fix it either. I like tough fights. I've only ever played any of these games on the hardest difficulty, because I enjoy the challenge. But I don't enjoy artificial difficulty that just makes the game more tedious. So my questions are: Can't easy fights just be plain easy without an additional mechanic on top to make them hurt? If one is needed then what would it be? (Lots of ideas on knockouts earlier in this thread, but again, you don't get knocked out in easy fights.)

Agree on many points in your post, but just wanted to point out, that from the writers perspective the Watcher had the benefit of already knowing the Big Secret from the first game. If you were someone else, then they'd either have to ignore it or have the new character learn the same thing we already knew as players, which would probably be pretty lame.

The current system system is just a kind of a strange mismash of per rest and per encounter, like they weren't sure which way to go with it. Per encounter ability usage restricted by limited mana pool, that is however recoverable with per rest empowers, which can also be used to buff your abilities instead! Health regenerates but you get injuries which can only be cured by resting, which costs you absolutely nothing. Actually you can use it to prebuff and gain back all the stuff that is still per rest for some reason! Ummh. Only thing missing is having some cooldowns in the mix, I wonder if we could fit those in too. I liked the old system, but still think the move towards per encounter ability usage was a good one, it's just that the current system is a bit of a mess. Add the encounter difficulty issues on top and it does take some goodwill to believe it will ever work. Personally I think, as I've stated earlier in this thread, that once they get things ironed out, the benefits will outweigh the issues in the end.

This is the kind of system that is either amazing or terrible. Maybe if it's like over 50 morale raises stats and under 50 morale reduces stats, then you also get that sense of achievement from winning fights without dropping people? I mean it could be +1ACC/5 morale or whatever, +-10 ACC at max/min morale. That's a lot of accuracy gained or lost for 5 people. Or 1 all defenses every 10 morale or +RES if you want to make it lore friendly. The downside though is winning that exciting fight with one guy standing would leave a bitter aftertaste. "Congratulations on winning this tough encounter, enjoy your -20 morale." Would have to get to play with this to get a feeling for it. It could probably be abused by clearing packs in small portions, but few systems in a single player game can be made cheese proof. Still think it would be a step forward from the current injury system that does absolutely nothing. It would have to be optional though, since if you suck at the game you might find yourself at constant 1/100 morale and feel like the game hates you. Which isn't really the point of single player RPGs for most people. But I would do a playthrough with this to see how it feels. Obviously the game needs to be difficult for this to have any meaning, right now the +/- system would just be a constant buff.

You have my curiosity. How do you regain morale if you got your butt totally kicked in a dungeon? Tavern? Game is back to running to tavern and back again. And if you can carry stuff that gives morale (beer!) then again same problem as with injuries and food before. I honestly like this party morale thing more than the injury system, imho they could as well both be implemented cotemporally, but that still leaves the problem of abundance of resources unsolved. Of course you could make it simple, winning battles raises morale and party member being knocked unconscious lowers morale, but that's a pretty punishing system if you get into the bad end of the morale spectrum. Can't win a fight anymore since stats are terrible, so you can't raise morale. A system like that would have to be optional, there is no way they implement that universally. I guess it does the same thing, you mentioned the vignettes, like with the ship when I took it down to 1 it gave me plenty of opportunity to raise morale with scripted interactions. It's actually very difficult to get your crew to mutiny.

Said some of this before, but since nerf vs buff seems to be a hot topic right now: I've personally always enjoyed most the DotA philosophy of balancing. Many of the abilities and synergies in that game are so ridiculous that it's incredible the game even works, let alone has a thriving competetive scene. Strong vs strong rather than weak vs weak. First buff the Deadfire mobs and give them the same abilities you have and then make them use those. Great successes and harsh punishments. Before anyone complains about comparing PvP and PvE: XCOM2 is much the same, you might feel overpowered one moment, and then be totally screwed the next, because a couple enemies used their abilities in a way you didn't expect. So going with the DotA thing, let every ability keep it's unique feeling, only in the absolute worst gamebreaking cases should abilities be nerfed by removing features. If an ability doesn't feel unique and is just being compared to another which does more of the same, then change it until it's different enough. I honestly wouldn't want to remove cleaving stance or swift flurry self proccing, but would much rather see difficulty buffed to a point where that kind of stuff seems reasonable. I mean right now sure cutting down mobs with cleaving stance feels about as good as mauling old ladies, but if the enemies are strong enough to cause you serious problems, then turning them to strawberry jam with that 5 Crit 2 Hit is going to feel pretty damn justified. Risk of nerf waves is always you end up with a bland and sterile feeling game. It might be difficult but it isn't satisfying. Obviously this approach would require having a look at all the abilities and buffing them and altering them where multiple abilities do the same thing with different numbers. Give enemies high level abilities and make sure they can use them. Surely this is much more work than just nerfing stuff, but it would definitely result in a better game. And again I'll just keep repeating this: the Curses might solve much of the problem. Everyone gets to fine tune the difficulty how they want. Add enough monster buffs and self nerfs or whatever and surely the game will be difficult enough even for the worst masochists. TL;DR There are many ways to balance. Balanced ≠ satisfying

Well I've never tried either PoE on other difficulties, so I can't really comment on the difference there, but I found Deadfire PotD to be so much easier than PoE1 PotD, that I can barely compare the two. I don't want to sound like I'm exaggerating here, but I find it difficult to believe anyone would disagree. PoE1 PotD is actually sometimes very challenging and engaging, sometimes just faceroll, but so is every RPG as pointed out earlier, but Deadfire was just a stomp, no personal input required (after maybe level 9). It's like two different worlds. BG I find kind of hard to value here, probably shouldn't have brought it up. It's been such a long time since I've played it without SCS and I play it with so many mods anyhow, that it's so far from the original game it would be impossible to gauge the original difficulty level from my recent experiences. Also it's a kind of a weird example since the game is mostly about knowing what you're going to fight next and knowing the spellbooks and consumables through and through to be able to prepare for that. If you know what you're doing it's a cake walk and if you don't it feels outright unfair.

They said in the latest Q&A stream, that fixing PotD is going to take time, because they have to look at every encounter separately. I would take that as a sign that they're really looking into what enemies do and how the fights play out. As in upgraded scripts, more abilities, more interesting mix of enemies maybe. I mean if they were going the Bethesda way of difficulty increase, that shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes, right? Down 500 iron arrows and it's only half hp

I get what you mean of course, it makes for that nice feeling of dispair in the vein of Darkest Dungeon and the achievement feels all the sweeter for it. Although I don't think PoE ever forced me into that situation, I guess I was stocked up when I jumped into drake pit. It was mostly just self imposed, still having one or two packs of camping gear, but refusing to rest just for the extra challenge. This is also why earlier in the thread there was an idea about accumulating injuries, that maybe you can only remove with medical supplies / other items / resting on ship. So maybe something like that will be implemented later as an optional feature, if the devs happen to hear about it, like it and can actually implement it.

There are a lot of ideas for making Deadifire's challenge to suit different people here If they add Berath's Curses, or call them whatever you want, then surely there's going to be something to make resources more scarce in the game, less empowers, maybe you can only rest on the boat as has been suggested, whatever. I don't think your two ability resource systems wish is ever going to be fulfilled unfortunately, since it's most likely just way too much work. I don't know if the devs read that thread but adding my ideas there at least made me feel a bit better.

If tactical means having to save your scarce resources then: 1. The per rest saving in PoE didn't really matter all that much in the first place. Most fights in the game you can do just fine with per encounter abilities, especially after you get masteries. And when you did have to use your abilities there is such a massive difference between party power that you can just absolutely crush any fight you want to if you just empty your stores. What it does do it allows for a greater discrepancy between encounters, the toughest fights can be ten times tougher than a normal fight in the same dungeon, just because your party can peak to incredible power if necessary. But the price for that is one camping supply, of which you have two, and every dungeon is filled with those. Not very tactical. 2. The health/endurance system, I already said this earlier in this thread, but it doesn't do anything. Forces you to rest at some point maybe after using dangerous implement for too long. Costs you one camping supply. No matter what you'll still rest before every boss fight since you'll want to have that +10/15 ACC. Also not very tactical. Does casual mean getting to use your abilities in every fight instead of trying to win fights without using / minimal usage of your abilities? Gameplay wise as a player I know which one I'd choose, and if that makes me a casual then I'm a happy casual. The only problem is how well they'll be able to differentiate encounters from each other since you use the same abilities every time. In the first game it was very binary, you either used no/minimal abilities or you threw everything and the kitchen sink at them.

Yeah, this. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why people are singling out POE 2 for being too easy. I wouldn't be able to name a crpg that's harder than POE 1 & 2. Maybe you had a different experience, but mine was fast mode auto combat. PoE1 is much more difficult, not even comparable at the moment. BG-trilogy is more difficult even without mods. D:OS is definitely much more difficult, although it did suffer from crazy power creep. The Witcher games are way more difficult, even the 3rd game and even in the end since you still, no matter how OP you are, have to dodge those instagibs and spam that fast attack till your fingers bleed. I was literally away from keyboard fast moding boss fights in Deadfire on the hardest difficulty. There is no doubt it's badly borked at the moment, hence all these threads about it.

They actually changed that a lot at some point. My first playthrough in 2015 I remember a lot of trash everywhere around PoE1, but felt like they had made some big changes to monster density somewhere between 1.0 -> 3.0. All playthroughs are PotD and I rarely felt in my most recent playthrough that there's too many enemies around. Or maybe yeah they could reduce the density even more and just make every encounter more interesting. It's just that filling an area with mobs is easy, designing an interesting encounter is a lot harder.

So much for the logical explanation then. Also got the happy Maia ending even though she screwed them over and murdered the high commander. Remained respected by her people everywhere she went. Well I guess fear brings respect, never know when she is going to shoot you in the face. Game is bugged.

Since others already answered the difficulty question, I'll just say I don't believe Deadfire being easy is part of this trend. I think they honestly just messed up and didn't have the time to test and fix before release. Waiting for the patch

tdphys: The pseudo-rng injury system would make deflection king. I would never ever play a melee rogue (my favourite playstyle) ever again in that system. So it also changes game balance quite radically. And like Multihog pointed out it would be much better, if it were tied to something you could avoid and thus when you get an injury you'd say "ah man I messed up" instead of "nice rng osfrog." I get where the need comes from, and like the idea of seeing realistic wear and tear on my party, but I don't think you can tie it to deflection and then what else do you tie it to? Even if it's something actively avoidable like interrupts causing injuries, you'd have to concentration condom your team all the time again making that resolve + concenration buff the only spell you ever cast with your priest. My guess is, great on paper, impossible to implement. Tigranes: You can still have those tough fights where you used all your class mana, you have three guys down and are using consumables trying to kite the last monsters hoping your wizard can tank with that last arcane veil you got the mana from with that last empower. It's still possible if the balance is right. But the thing you and OP are right about is that the old system had inbuilt control on peak power. You have that massive (on casters not on anyone else unfortunately) pool of abilities, but you want to save them, and thus self impose difficulty on easy fights. And then you can suddenly have a really tough fight but, if you've been saving your per rests, you can dig into your ability stores. So there's a lot of variance in how strong the player can be at any given moment, which does make encounter design a lot easier I guess. Now the variance is smaller, but it is not non-existent. But it does put a lot more emphasis on encounter design, which in it's current state is garbage, but I'm interested to see what they come up with. On encounter design: Someone already brought up Diablo, which has zero variance in player peak power. You're always exactly as powerful. So now that PoE is moving closer to it with less VIPP maybe it should be said (even though I suspect some will want to lynch me for even comparing the two series), that diablo 2 and 3 both have pretty much just one trick to differentiate tough fights from normal ones: dodging bullets. Ground target aoe dmg that fills the room in the end, instakill projectiles, you get into melee you get gibbed, that kind of stuff. Some of that stuff we already have and I think we saw it more in Deadfire too (the megaworm actually oneshot Eder). The traditional IE solution to enemy attacks is buff up and tank through it, position backline out of the way to begin with. The action RPG solution is dodge or die. Kind of less emphasis on player intellect and more on player dexterity? So I dunno, we might be seeing more of that in the future. Whether Deadfire mechanics are up to the task remains to be seen. It's just really hard to break down the pros and cons of everything, since the low difficulty makes fights in the game feel like mush and everyone has their own explanations why combat sucks. Edit: bad englando

Yeah BG2 is a completely different system from PoE1 and PoE2. Resting isn't really limited in any way (except for possibly having to murder some hobgoblins.) BG is mostly just about knowing the priest and mage spell books in and out, so you know which spells you'll want to memorize for the coming fights. Which is something I love about the old IE games. So many choices, so many ways to do things. Or well, ermh, when in doubt chain contingency abi-dalzims, abi-dalzims, abi-dalzims. Or protection from X scroll. So much cheese too.

I agree with what you said here. After completing the game, I was surprised that there wasn't an adra dragon or Llengrath type battle to really make things interesting. On Vet, the only encounters I had trouble with were against fampyrs and that's cause they used MY party members against me :D Oh well, time for a PotD playthrough to see how that goes. Played my only playthrough on PotD and my experience was exaclty the same as yours. Sometime around around lvl 9-10 I fixed proper combat scripts for my party and then fast moded every fight in the game, except for vampire island where I had to give personal input. I did some fooling around with fighting solo and stuff to see what kind of potential the combat system had, but the current difficulty just makes it a complete trainwreck.

Yeah that's a tough one actually. Most games are like that though aren't they? Even if you only have press square for fast attack and press triangle for strong attack, the boss fight somehow has to be harder than common fights. Usually done by making you use consumables, or the boss having special moves that you have to have a special tactic against, or some gimmick like "destroy healing crystals before you can damage the boss." WoW, D:OS, whatever you name it, they all work like this. So I guess it's all going to come down to encounter design in the end. Maybe attacks you need to evade with the new mobility abilities, maybe difficulty difference between a normal and a tough fight is that it forces you to use your potions and summons or prebuff with food. But I can already see a problem arise here though, since the game is huge, there are so many fights, so many consumables, abilities in different multiclass and party compositions, that it might take an insane amount of effort to balance it right, and still some comps might stomp a specific encounter and others might find it plain impossible. Or maybe you need that one consumable that you only get from the other side of the world on that island in that vase, or was it in the chest on that different island? The empower mechanic ofc is designed to soften the curve between fights, but that's just a magic button to make a tough fight easier. Another thing I actually forgot in my list of concerns is the penetration mechanic. Say you had those "by the skin of your teeth" fights but you got there, you reached the last fight, but the boss has 2 points more armor than anything else in the dungeon. Now the fight is impossible. Great. Unless you prebuff with food to increase penetration. But maybe the boss also has domination and you wanted to eat that lobster for the affliction immunity and now you have to choose? Actually if the difficulty is increased enough food is going to play a huge role in the game. Is that fun? Maybe it is. I honestly don't know. Edit: D:OS not DoS