ComplyOrDie

Yes, although there are some or at least one very very good mod that keeps the challenge interesting whatever you do. I certainly Obsidian could do it better hence the discussion. I'm glad they avoided scaling, Oblivion is the best example of scaling being awful. It's not a "this game is awful look at me I'm so good thread". It's a this game is great, how can difficulty be improved without forcing players who want a challenge to resort to gimmicks on hard mode, or at least on the mode specifically designed to be a pain. I think it's reasonable to discuss that.

Well the safety net is the figurine tanks, although now the price has been upped they're far less accessible which is good, as well as Durance's intervention spell. I'm currently building Eder as a Two handed dps/offtank in a new playthrough and it's a bit more fun, also ditched aloth so no fireball spam and ditched Durance. How do you build a respectable non super deflection tank without deliberately making him crap?

No, it shouldn't. This game offers so many ways to increase the difficulty. I just don't get what you people are complaining about. Play the game on PotD. If that's not hard enough, play it on Trials of Iron too. If that's not hard enough replace maiming with outright death. If that's not hard enough limit yourself to not using custom party members. If that's not hard enough limit your party size to 3 or 4. The list goes on and on. And if none of it is hard enough, congratulations, you are just too good for this game. The fact is Path was designed for people who want a "hardcore" challenge while playing Pillars, in its current state, it doesn't provide that except for one or two encounters, therefore, people will ask for it to be made a bit harder without having to resort to self handicapping, which ruins much of the fun and immersion. There are people who enjoy story and tough combat at the same time, and just want the encounters to provide that tactical challenge given that many people think a good combat system and interesting character progression have been designed. If you are content with it how it is that's fine, but there are enough people with an issue to request it's given some attention. I tend to agree you should first try path, use the standard companions, and stick on expert mode before worrying about difficulty. I have, and I'm not too good at this game, I can do most fights using very few abilities at all so skill isn't a factor. Send in the tank and shoot everything while he survives indefinitely, and to me that's not right for a mode specifically designed for sadists.

I'm in the game is too easy camp, but I voted no I'd gladly pay more, because frankly it's a triumph, I hope they sort things that personally interest me out but whatever, I just hope I can go back to the older IE games without wishing I was playing this. Wish I'd backed a higher tier, would definitely if they Kickstart another.

I have no idea how you would do it on path playing properly, I doubt it's possible. Happy to be proven wrong!

I'd say that sums it up View, although I don't think scaling is the best solution, less experience on offer combined with improving the other bits would work better I think. I think some of the enemy stats are ok, just a few of the more important ones aren't good.

Agreed. I think they could fix it by reducing the side-quest experience. Leave some, so there are reasons to do the side quests over and above the story itself, but tune it so they makes you a little more powerful and better equipped, rather than radically overpowered. That, and make tanks not so damn invulnerable, since that leads to a single tactic that works for 95% of the fights ("wade tank in, he can't be hurt anyway, and plink everything from range"). There's a lot of good stuff here. I believe some tuning could improve it and it'd be awesome. The system itself is good, and can be improved even more in the future with new abilities and spells and better monster AI. That's the frustrating thing, ok there are player attributes issues etcetera, but with a few tweaks to the enemy AI, experience gain, and enemy stats, combat could be very good throughout the game in my opinion.

Path scales things by 50% as far as I understand. Your point is certainly true of accuracy, previous examples - Goldpact Knight - base accuracy 24, Spiders - base accuracy 20-30, Trolls, base accuracy, 27. So when you scale them up by 50% on path of the damned it's still not hitting anyone with a shield. I admit I haven't looked at damage that much, but if your tank is only really ever getting grazed it would have to be crazy high to be worthwhile.

Yeah, this was on path too, it was actually cliaban where I first started thinking this is really stupidly easy. You have the trolls which are a waste of time and the animats are too. The spore room was obviously tough and the pwgra plus Druids do some good aoe, but there just aren't enough encounters like that. It was pretty much Eder he could tank anything in that dungeon and laugh it off I found, he had larder door plate mail and some decent rings on and that was more than enough. The thing that really jarred was the bunch of glanfathans at the entrance, I'm used to parties like that being the main threats, but every encounter against a human party is way too easy, usually because their accuracy is terrible and they don't use spells effectively. Think I mnetioned earlier the animats have a lightning spell which they cast from time to time, but it doesn't do enough damage or hit enough people to kill anyone even when three or four of them do it, the rest of the time they just miss Eder, this is true for a bunch of enemy types unfortunately. If you contrast this to the shadow/phantom fights, the shadows teleport to your casters and some of the phantoms/spectres seem to ignore your tank and ranged attack your priest or wizard, much more satisfying.i did the lighthouse at the same level and that requires some genuine thought and a fair bit of firefighting. Funny actually as above the majority of reloads came from durance getting instagibbed by those acid traps. I think they have actually tuned a few side encounters to be horrible, but the problem is for a difficulty like path most of them should be like that not the odd exception. I don't know if anyone's tried the boss in le la rhemen on path, my char was a nice guy so let it go but that one looked really nasty.

Think I did it at lvl 7 on my playthrough and it was just as bad. First time you find some Animats, "oh they're cool!" "wait they don't seem to be hurting me... :("

Love Durance, as in I hate Durance but he's a really memorable character. Love Eder because he's just a bit of a "lad" but with a cool story, ending of his quest left me wanting a bit more though. Aloth was okay, liked him for having the piss taken out of him by Eder, they both have a really funny line with Sagani when she sees you doing your special thing for the first time. Kana is okay, haven't done his story yet. The rest are for my second playthrough, brought GM along but I was already nearly done with Act 2 and did no sidequests in Act 3.

Only mod you need for difficulty is sword coast strategems. For TOB you should also install 'ascension' before sword Coast strategms. Theres a readme with scs about the options for each difficulty component. Turn on pprebuffing mages/clerics, stick on all the improved encounters and improved creatures and have fun dying over and over again . There's a mod called tactics which basically makes every enemy godlike but you also get godlike items I hear, scs is just the standard game with a very well scripted AI and some extra abilities for some enemies which were previously a bit lacklustre. Far easier to mod the enhanced editions.

It can't work when you have people doing very few side quests and others doing every single one before advancing the main plot. Unless you are suggesting to remove all XP rewards from side quests you can't balance the game for every single playstyle. Everybody is playing the game at they own pace. Damn right if someone is doing one sidequest they should find the progression extremely hard or near impossible. This is not an open world do whatever you want game like TES - the sidequests should be there to level and strengthen your party so you can complete the critical path. Obviously you don't need to do all of them, but doing more will make your story progression easier and doing less will make it harder. The game should be balanced with this in mind first before tuning each difficulty. "Hard" should be relatively hard all the way through the game and PotD should be near impossible except for the most experienced of players. That's not even taking into consideration that a game should get MORE difficult as the game progresses, not stay the same or get easier! I agree with everyone who suggests side quest rewards/XP should be minimal. The motivation to do side content should be because you want to explore more or do more combat, not to make the game easier and easier. Yep, for PoTD you should be scrounging around for every edge you can find just so you can survive, not deliberately avoiding interesting quests so you can keep a challenge going. Path should really force you to do at least some side quests to have a chance, because once you're playing it it's as much about the fun combat than being able to complete the game. Currently there are a few encounters that are memorable and the overwhelming majority you actually don't need to use any abilities (all trolls, most spiders, all beetles, all skeletons, all human opponents,all xaurips) and this is definitely a combo of poor enemy accuracy and high deflection tanks plus over experience. Shadows are the most regularly tough opponents although one tank plus summons will do it, it's a shame figurines are cool as they're a really big help, at least the price has been upped. The wyrm figurine and adra beetle do the job of a second tank, so save them for your tough battle per rest. Currently started a game where I've done a monk tank to see if it's more fun, took me two hours to do temple of eothas at lvl 3 and was an absolute blast. I picked up durance and kana too before going in and had the silver horn before the price was upped. Still died loads, used fireball traps, food, fire scrolls etc to manage it. That's what PoTD should be for the vast majority of the game in my opinion. Honestly I think obsidian have bigger concerns right now which is totally understandable, and just sticking all enemies from all modes and adding 50% stats was always going to make difficulty bumpy, hopefully the find the time to tweak it or a modder decides to take on the challenge .

Sorry but strongly disagree with this. Path is extremely under tuned. Vast majority of enemies cannot hit your tank so tactics become redundant. Your wizard can hit enemies but also can't hit your tank. Solution, if a fight gets tough spam fireball at your tank, everything around him will die, if no rush just have 5 ranged guys slowly pick off the horde surrounding Eder (only shoot the one he's engaged with). Literally that simple from level 5 to the end. Nobody has an ego for wanting difficulty upped, I think it's great obsidian cared enough to have hard and a path of the damned mode, nothing wrong with then asking for it to be tuned correctly.

Path is too easy for the majority due to reasons above. A few level appropriate encounters are what I was expecting (temple of eothas at lvl 3, final battle)

I guess it could be the bonus is for like 10-14 hours or so, usually I would inn -> travel -> eventually rest so a good deal of time had passed. In the temple of eothas not much time passes before you get there so could be that it's on for more than 8 hours. Hope it's that...literally first time I've ever seen it not disappear on rest though.

Fine go nuts!

That's really weird, old version I only had it until I camped then it disappeared. To me that made sense, otherwise you can run round with permanent Dragon's Rest from Dyrwood bonus...

At least from the Gilded Vale inn, despite camping afterwards the bonus does not disappear until replaced. Bug I hope...anyone else getting this?

I enjoy preparing for an adventure, you go to an inn nearby get a good resting bonus and stock up on food and camping supplies. As a qualified adventurer you really shouldn't be forgetting that kind of thing. It's preferable to the everything is on a cool down system in my opinion, resulting in use your best spells whenever available, and it's better than the spam rest after every fight because there's no reason not to system.

Tested on a new game, resting bonuses do not disappear upon camping in any of mine.

Have the labourers rest bonus from gilded veil inn +1 per +1 mech and in the temple of eothas, after resting the bonus still shows next to portrait except now only the +1 perception. Going to try resting in a common room to remove but seems very odd.

Lvl 8 isn't really THAT high for Dyrford. No one forced you to do the bounty quests, which are meant to be some of the toughest battles in the game, before Dyrford which you can go to almost immediately after Act 1. What kind of a bull**** response is this. The side quests clearly give way to much xp. Also if those bounty quests are hard then ... idk what to say. They are fkn easy at level 7 or 8. You should have the option to do quests without ruining the game. For some perspective, the backer beta was set in dyrford and you were lvl 4/5, and it wasn't too hard at all. Path of the damned is also plagued by over experience and poor enemy accuracy scores.

Um just no. Finding hard easy has nothing to do with hired adventurers. It has everything to do with over leveling from what I can see.Min-maxed hired adventurers don't affect the difficulty? I beg to differ. I'm not sure if it's possible to really overlevel in a game with a low level cap and so scarce kill XP. The most you can do is skip the hardest battles and return later, but that's just normal behavior. You still need to do quests to level up at all, so if they're too easy, they're just too easy. However, I suspect some people steamrolling the game were hit with the stat bug. I saw someone with huge, clearly unnatural AoEs who didn't notice anything was wrong. He is right in that experience is too easy to get too early, or rather, you get too much for each quest. If you do any respectable number of side quests you hit levels 4 5 6 very quickly. This does have a big affect on the difficulty. I don't think it's unfair to want to play the game and enjoy the quests while maintaining a challenge, rather than having to try to "manage" your difficulty. Of course doing quests will make things easier, but it's a bit dramatic at the moment. The other major factor is enemy accuracy versus the deflection of your main tank. 60 70 80 deflection is very easy to get very early. Many of the enemies have very low accuracies even on Path where they have been increased by 50%. For example many human enemies such as in Raedric's Hold, many spiders and Xaurips etc. have accuracy in the 30-40s on Path, meaning 20-30 on other settings. In Black Meadow on Path you find groups of three Forest Trolls, which you would think would be difficult. Unfortunately, they have an accuracy of 41, and your tank deflection will already be +20 on this. Eder also has the recovery traits, so even when the occasional hit does get through, he has fully healed by the time the next one lands. We did discuss this earlier in the thread but on testing these figures all seem to check out. There are many many encounters where this is the primary problem, and you do not need custom made adventurers to experience it (I have never hired one). I have got to the last battle on Path (which is very hard by the way), and as mentioned earlier, there have been very few difficult encounters throughout the whole main quest. I have deliberately avoided side quests or even min maxing on gear. However, if you take away the tank who can stand there and take it for as long as you like, it becomes far more challenging very very quickly, you have to cc, build an offtank reducing your dps, etc. etc. The example of the boars above is perfect. These boars are encountered very early on. On path they have an accuracy of 77, meaning just over 50 on hard. This is far far higher than anything nearby, and is in fact higher than most enemies in the entire game including some of the powerful magic enemies later on (Caen Gwla for example). The boars are challenging because you die very fast to them, and you die very fast to them because they are one of the few enemies with a reasonable chance of hitting you rather than grazing or missing. Unfortunately the way the difficulty scaling works, if you up enemy accuracy on hard, its also upped on easy which I don't think anybody wants. Solution? Nerf experience gain on Path, increase enemy accuracy bonus on Path to at least 75%. If you find hard too easy, try Path (this is a fair argument but I can see why a big big jump isn't what all Hard players want). I don't see another way to not piss all the easy/normal players off though.

Or the infinity engine games - where wizards are actually, you know, powerful. Instead of, you know, deliberately designed to be weakest class in the game.They shouldn't even be called Wizards anymore. They should be called "interns" or "Adventurer understudies" In my entire PoTD playthrough Aloth was by far no 1 damage dealer. Wizards rock, just in a different way to other ie games.