Difficulty level

[wanderon]

That's one hell of a necro.

 

Read two pages of this wondering why it sounded like these people had never played the game before I determined I was reading posts from July 2014

 

I started on normal found it fairly challenging but after 1.06 have moved up to hard as it appeared normal had been nerfed (fewer enemies for specific battles was what I noticed first)

 

Now I am finding hard to be just a bit more challenging than normal was originally altho part of that is no doubt my familiarity with the first two chapters after restarting a dozen or more characters (and have only broken into chap 3 with one which I immediately set aside for now and made 3 more new ones )

There's a long-standing bug relating to difficulty and the number of placed opponents. You probably ran into that one, because Normal should not have been nerfed in 1.06, afaik.

 

The bug has been hard to pin down and was still around as late as 1.05, and I'm not sure if they've managed to resolve it yet.

 

 

Had not heard that - interesting - oddly enough the same general thing with difficulty happened when I played the beta - normal was quite difficult early on but eventually I ended up playing on hard and while many fights took longer to play out I did find myself being successful more often than not - maybe I'm just getting more familiar with the battles and mechanics - if this keeps up I may have try POTD

[Luckmann]

It's most noticeable in the prologue, where it's really easy to notice what you're facing. I've had games on Hard that for some reason started spawning the number of enemies from Easy. I think changing the difficulty to Easy and then back to Hard should solve it, but obviously the encounters for the maps you've already been on is already set.

[Zekram Bogg]

Wow, an animancer got a hold of this thread.

 

But to the main point, and something of just another possible "user experience"  feedback for Obs staff is my experience. 

 

I started playing PoE last weekend on normal and got through a huge chunk of the first "half" I'd say (basically everyhing outside of Defiance Bay that I could do - so Dyrwood and surrounding areas - was complete except for a lot of Od Nua exploration before I headed to Defiance Bay proper, which has been supremely easy since I'm now a bit over leveled for the zone). Then I saw stuff on the Triple Crown Solo achievement and started rolling Triple Crown characters (and dying horribly after getting through the tutorial dungeon zone in Valewood.

 

It was the experience of playing on Triple Crown regs that really taught me how the mechanics of this game truly work. On normal I was able to ignore a TON of stuff and just move through everything given a little bit of Dark Souls style trial and error with reloading. It's not like there wasn't resistance (there were plenty of hard fights and party wipe losses as I figured out how to fight), but for instance, it wasn't until I HAD to know that you don't really get XP for kills on Triple Crown mode that I should be focusing more on turning in quests than killing wolves in Valewood and such in order to get up a couple levels in order to survive. Eventually, after about 4 attempts at a solo Triple Crown run that ended horribly quickly, I started going for just Triple Crown with an actual party (still a couple of attempts in though after misjudging the strength of those bears in Valewood).

 

Frankly I'm finding that playing under these conditions is really the only way to play at this point. It's forced me to be far more tactical, and put a lot more thought into every encounter. I'm absolutely loving it.

 

The only thing that really bothers me is the lack of spell cones and info. I mean, I get that Expert mode is there to turn off "helper" features, and I appreciate that for the dialogue trees and the removal of all the little indicators and the stash access restrictions but I didn't see the cones and AoE effect markations so much as a "helper" feature as absolutely critical to know how to spell cast properly in battle. Especially with the yellow "safe" zones of effect in PoE, and whether or not a spell even has them. There's really no way to know the proper  AoE of a spell otherwise in Triple Crown other than using it a LOT and kind of getting a feel for it, and since Triple Crown emphasizes avoiding any and all non-critical fights you might encounter you're not going to getting a feel for it as often. This has led to Aloth burning Eder more than a couple of times now with Fans of Flame and almost causing me to wipe on a level that's far too preventable to be anything other than annoying.

 

Frankly, I think that this one aspect should be altered a bit based on this experience. Basicially that on expert mode either this is the one helper feature not ticked off, OR there's a new set of art created for it or something. Like, instead of a visual of the EXACT AoE or Cone of a spell effect showing, there's still a visual indicator, but it's vaguer. Just the out line of the cone or something that shows it's width for the standard range, but terminates at half the distance of the cones range and isn't "filled in" to show red or yellow effects. For circular AoEs just a general circle outline at half the spell's effective range (again, without color) would still be very useful for spell placement.

 

I mean, I get that part of the point of the mode is so you can't micromanage the placement of a spell to the point that you can fire with 100% surety of safety, and I can get behind that idea, but I'm finding that the way it currently is is a little too extreme - it's the only bit of extremeness of this mode I find not equally fulfilling, just annoying.