So, I'm guessing that most people have noticed that combat seems really swingy: you often either take massive damage or just completely steamroll the enemy. Well, I think I figured out why.

 

When you reload an area, the Damage Threshold of the enemies in it drops to 0.

 

Steps to reproduce:

1) Start a new game

2) Head to Dyrford Crossing

3) Quicksave

4) Attack the first group of beetles you see. Look at the damage you're doing to them and hover over a damage line to get the attack breakdown. You should see something like "33.6 - 30.0 = 3.4 Slash Damage".

5) Quickload

6) Attack the same group of beetles and look at your damage again. This time you should be getting something along the lines of "33.6 - 0.0 = 33.6 Slash Damage"

 

Expected behavior:

The beetles should still have their 30 DT after you load your save!

 

As you can see, this can change the difficulty of an encounter massively, especially against heavily armored enemies like the beetles.

The bug seems to occur when the game reloads an area you have previously visited. In other words, the first time you enter an area with a character, enemy DT works correctly, but if you either save and reload afterwards or leave and re-enter the area, enemy DT drops to zero.

Hello Doc V,

 

Thank you for your posting. This is definitely an issue that is causing combat to have radical swings in difficulty. Fortunately we are aware of this persistence issue and are working hard to have it resolved in our next update. This bug should only be present in the map that you load into and should correct itself as you transition into other areas.

 

Thank you for your support during the backer beta!