Hard mode is too easy.

[sparklecat]

Metsu - go off and get another level elsewhere first?

[metsu]

Metsu - go off and get another level elsewhere first?

 

I think I did all the possible side content that was offered up until that point. I went through Valewood, Gilded Vale (and the temple in there), Magran's Fork, Esternwood, Black Meadow, and Anslog's Compass. 

 

But even when I reached Caed Nua, I was still getting owned on Hard. Abilities would always miss or resist, especially Mental Binding, and my party was all around Level 4. I set it to Normal but that made it too easy. Given that this is an RPG, I just assumed that all the misses meant I was too low level to do a certain piece of content but there wasn't anything else for me to do.

 

To be honest, tabletop-based combat systems are not really my cup of tea. What made me enjoy Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, and Fallout was the writing. The combat was just something I tolerated to varying degrees.

[sparklecat]

Hmm.  There's Raedric's Keep, as well; you probably won't be able to finish it just yet, but you should be able to at least get everyone up to level 4, I'd think.

[sparklecat]

Also, just in case anyone was worried about this, the final boss fight is not too easy.  I just wiped for the third time after 45 minutes and it is wonderful.

Edited April 10, 2015 by sparklecat

[Elgyn]

 

Metsu - go off and get another level elsewhere first?

 

But even when I reached Caed Nua, I was still getting owned on Hard. Abilities would always miss or resist, especially Mental Binding, and my party was all around Level 4.

 

See, that doesn't sound right. Not like you are lying, but like something is bugged. I've done CN on Hard mode before with the same set-up at the same levels and was not having any issues hitting the creeps. Hell, I don't even min/max really, (16/8/16/10/18/10 usually for Cipher.) and run as a pike Cipher, so I wasn't even gun-cheesing it.

[View619]

Also, just in case anyone was worried about this, the final boss fight is not too easy.  I just wiped for the third time after 45 minutes and it is wonderful.

 

My faith is restored.

Edited April 10, 2015 by View619

[luzarius]

Okay, I finally understand what this thread is all about. I've been playing on hard difficulty, trial of iron and the game is too easy. I guess I have to try path of the damned, or whatever the highest difficulty is called. That should probably be a good challenge.

[Zwiebelchen]

Okay, I finally understand what this thread is all about. I've been playing on hard difficulty, trial of iron and the game is too easy. I guess I have to try path of the damned, or whatever the highest difficulty is called. That should probably be a good challenge.

 

PotD is painfully hard, but only at the beginning. Once you reach Defiance Bay, the difficulty drops big time.

[Grotesque]

Sky dragon fell in about 5 seconds when I met it. 

 

In final battle, just use petrify and is an instant win.

There was actually harder to bring down the statues than Thaos.

[Justinian]

A slight ray of hope from a Shacknews interview:

 

"Urquhart fully recognizes that even though the game is out there, there is still work to be done. That includes upcoming patches, with Urquhart noting that 1.05, in particular, set to introduce some quality of life improvements. This includes allowing players to change portraits, balance tweaks, and other adjustments based on player feedback."

 

Sounds like a difficulty rebalance to me. Hopefully...

[NoQuitt]

 

Okay, I finally understand what this thread is all about. I've been playing on hard difficulty, trial of iron and the game is too easy. I guess I have to try path of the damned, or whatever the highest difficulty is called. That should probably be a good challenge.

 

PotD is painfully hard, but only at the beginning. Once you reach Defiance Bay, the difficulty drops big time.

 

Just don't leave Defiance Bay early like a big boy and squad wipe like I did:D

 

edit: unless you are good at this game. I am not. 

Edited April 10, 2015 by NoQuitt

[Doug]

Easy mode is too hard!

 

I wiped on the drake on easy  

[View619]

A slight ray of hope from a Shacknews interview:

 

"Urquhart fully recognizes that even though the game is out there, there is still work to be done. That includes upcoming patches, with Urquhart noting that 1.05, in particular, set to introduce some quality of life improvements. This includes allowing players to change portraits, balance tweaks, and other adjustments based on player feedback."

 

Sounds like a difficulty rebalance to me. Hopefully...

 

 

Could just as easily be spell, talent and class balancing. No real guarantee that difficulty will be touched at all, which would be a shame since an easy game kills all replay-ability imo.

 

I really hope they look into difficulty balancing though because the descriptions for Hard and POTD don't match up to the actually challenge levels at all, I don't think BG2 core difficulty was this easy to trivialize without cheesing the system.

Edited April 10, 2015 by View619

[Tanred]

 

Okay, I finally understand what this thread is all about. I've been playing on hard difficulty, trial of iron and the game is too easy. I guess I have to try path of the damned, or whatever the highest difficulty is called. That should probably be a good challenge.

 

PotD is painfully hard, but only at the beginning. Once you reach Defiance Bay, the difficulty drops big time.

 

 

Yeah it is true for most of the content, unfortunately.

 

However, there are few notable exceptions:

Ogre pack with ogre druids, fampyrs packs, dragons and final boss fight.

 

 

Altough I had a blast while playing the game, I am going to play the next game only on hard (or wait for a SCS-like mod). I just can't stand the filler trash combat which even on PotD is neither challenging nor interesting, only takes too much time. But it is also the issue of the encounter and level design.

[Justinian]

One of the latest reviews from CGM discusses difficulty:
 

The gameplay itself is fairly standard real-time RPG fare, with a top-down perspective and a range of abilities to use. On Normal difficulty, the game starts off with a decent challenge, provided you don’t wander off into a more difficult area without picking up some help. I managed to miss the NPC fighter in the first town until I came back to check something, which is always a fear in these kinds of games, but I did notice quickly that the game was built around the main quests. My usual tactic for any RPG is to wander about, finishing every side-quest and clearing every dungeon I can before completing the main quest. The results of this in Pillars of Eternity were twofold.

 

Firstly, I often had to return to areas I had just cleared in order to progress; this is a standard issue with my style of game, and generally doesn’t provide a problem. What is an issue, however, is that it was quite easy to become overpowered by pursuing the side-quests first, levelling up in such a way so that main encounters are trivial. The second act’s main quest became an afterthought to me in terms of challenge, burning through scores of enemies with nothing more than my Cipher’s mind-blades and paralyse attack and the rest of my party’s abilities.

 

[Mazisky]

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

 

Ah, lighthouse was fun too, but easier than the Ruler and Thaos.

Edited April 10, 2015 by Mazisky

[Matt516]

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

I'm gonna call BS. Sorry. Unless you avoided all the side-encounters that were more challenging and/or overleveled like crazy, you didn't left click your way through the game on Hard.

[Mazisky]

 

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

I'm gonna call BS. Sorry. Unless you avoided all the side-encounters that were more challenging and/or overleveled like crazy, you didn't left click your way through the game on Hard.

 

 

Why i should lie? i'm not even a good player, so it's even worse. Btw, i skipped whole Endless Path and Twin Elms. 

 

And forcing you to do Endless Path to have challenge while the other 80% of the game is easy, it is not a solution.

[Zwiebelchen]

 

Could just as easily be spell, talent and class balancing. .

 

 

This is definitely part of the problem aswell. Certain classes are certainly overpowered due to some mechanics, whereas others are significantly weaker.

 

Prime example: Wizards vs. Chanters vs. Ciphers. Due to the focus mechanic, ciphers are way stronger than the other two. Chanters are basicly just auto-attackers with some slight buffing potential until they accumulated 3 stacks (which usually doesn't happen until the critical part of the battle is over).

Wizards have huge disadvantages over the other two: restricted spell uses per rest, restricted spell selection through the spellbook mechanic, weaker stat gains, lots and lots of friendly-fire spells (most cipher and chanter abilities are foe-only!).

Ciphers are imho the single most powerful class in the game. If I were to play a game with 6-of-a-kind just for fun, I'd probably take cipher and steamroll everything. It's ridicolous how strong Grieving Mother is, even with her absolutely terrible attribute selection.

 

Other than that, I'd like to copy & paste something I already posted in another thread:

 

--> adjust the XP curve beyond level 7 slightly upwards towards exponential progression (I'd say change the 66.000 XP total to reach max level to 85.000 XP total).

--> drastically reduce bounty rewards ... those are just way overtuned.

--> reduce trap disarm XP by at least 30%. This is heavily overtuned anyway. You get almost 1000 XP from traps in Raedrics Hold alone. The quest XP reward is only twice that!

--> increase accuracy values of all hard mode enemies in act 2 by 5 and act 3 by 10. This will also affect PotD, so that's a pretty elegant solution in combination with...

--> ...a rebalancing of all defensive talents granting deflection. Tune down the deflection bonuses awarded by those talents by at least 30%. Because of the way deflection works, the bonuses are way too large (You can get a flat +30 deflection bonus through talents alone! ... this means all crits get converted to hits and all hits get converted to graces... this is just way too much impact). This will also help to reduce the enormous deflection gap between tanks and non-tanks.

--> nerf shields and shield enchants. Seriously, they just got way too much deflection on them, especially when enchanted. Again, a difference of 30 deflection means that all attacks against this target get reduced by one damage tier. Deflection is just way too easy to stack with the current OP shields in the game. 16 base deflection on large shields?

--> change Constitution to reduce the recovery penalty of armors. This will also help a lot to reduce the gap between tanks and non-tanks, by allowing casters to wear light and medium armor without too much penalty in DPS.

--> nerf constant recovery. Seriously, this ability is just way too strong. Fighters should be at least comparable to monks and paladins in terms of tanking capability. Due to the way endurance works, constant recovery is just overpowered.

 

 

All these fixes together should greatly help to fix the balancing of the game. All those are number changes, so wouldn't be hard to implement imho.

[Atheosis]

 

 

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

I'm gonna call BS. Sorry. Unless you avoided all the side-encounters that were more challenging and/or overleveled like crazy, you didn't left click your way through the game on Hard.

 

 

Why i should lie? i'm not even a good player, so it's even worse. Btw, i skipped whole Endless Path and Twin Elms. 

 

And forcing you to do Endless Path to have challenge while the other 80% of the game is easy, it is not a solution.

 

 

I find claims like the one you made rather hard to believe as well.  Only auto-attacking just doesn't seem like it would work in many fights.  If you don't counter plague of insects with spells for instance one casting of it will usually kill your squishies for instance.

[Bersercker]

 

Metsu - go off and get another level elsewhere first?

 

I think I did all the possible side content that was offered up until that point. I went through Valewood, Gilded Vale (and the temple in there), Magran's Fork, Esternwood, Black Meadow, and Anslog's Compass. 

 

But even when I reached Caed Nua, I was still getting owned on Hard. Abilities would always miss or resist, especially Mental Binding, and my party was all around Level 4. I set it to Normal but that made it too easy. Given that this is an RPG, I just assumed that all the misses meant I was too low level to do a certain piece of content but there wasn't anything else for me to do.

 

To be honest, tabletop-based combat systems are not really my cup of tea. What made me enjoy Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, and Fallout was the writing. The combat was just something I tolerated to varying degrees.

 

Was pretty hard on my first attempt with barbarian PC(Path of the Damned), but i didn't go to Raedric keep same as you. I guess you can avoid the blob of shadows, shades and phantoms in the courtyard until you get one more level so that leaves only the one indoors. Done it after about 30th save load i think. xD Better focus shades first, cause they'll keep summoning new shadows. On my second playthrough with cipher PC Caed Nua was much easier, but i did Raedric keep before that. The, um, last fight in raedric keep was like 2 times as difficult at these shades though, so better leave that fight for later as well.

Edited April 10, 2015 by Bersercker

[Mazisky]

 

 

 

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

I'm gonna call BS. Sorry. Unless you avoided all the side-encounters that were more challenging and/or overleveled like crazy, you didn't left click your way through the game on Hard.

 

 

Why i should lie? i'm not even a good player, so it's even worse. Btw, i skipped whole Endless Path and Twin Elms. 

 

And forcing you to do Endless Path to have challenge while the other 80% of the game is easy, it is not a solution.

 

 

I find claims like the one you made rather hard to believe as well.  Only auto-attacking just doesn't seem like it would work in many fights.  If you don't counter plague of insects with spells for instance one casting of it will usually kill your squishies for instance.

 

 

I just let go Eder and my chanter (heavily armored) tanking the world then select all others 4 members and click on every enemy one by one.

 

Few times i used Hiravias bouncing fireball who melts half hp of each enemy alone.

Edited April 10, 2015 by Mazisky

[Atheosis]

 

 

 

 

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

I'm gonna call BS. Sorry. Unless you avoided all the side-encounters that were more challenging and/or overleveled like crazy, you didn't left click your way through the game on Hard.

 

 

Why i should lie? i'm not even a good player, so it's even worse. Btw, i skipped whole Endless Path and Twin Elms. 

 

And forcing you to do Endless Path to have challenge while the other 80% of the game is easy, it is not a solution.

 

 

I find claims like the one you made rather hard to believe as well.  Only auto-attacking just doesn't seem like it would work in many fights.  If you don't counter plague of insects with spells for instance one casting of it will usually kill your squishies for instance.

 

 

I just let go Eder and my chanter (heavily armored) tanking the world then select all others 4 members and click on every enemy one by one.

 

 

Plague of insects can't be tanked.  It's aoe.  Also shadows, shades, spectres, etc will just teleport to your back line and start wailing on your casters.  And I didn't even mention dominate and charm attacks.  Again, I just don't see how you could get through hard only auto-attacking in all but two fights, sorry.

 

And it's not like Matt or I are arguing it isn't too easy much of the time, it's just that claims like your smack of hyperbole and that's not helpful.

Edited April 10, 2015 by Atheosis

[luzarius]

Hey guys, in all honesty hard can be difficult if you play an under powered class.

 

The Fighter class is very powerful because of that constant recovery ability, grab moon like godability and you're set.

[Mazisky]

 

 

 

 

 

The only challenging fights on hard were 2:

 

Raedric and final boss.

 

Others were just left click on enemies and wait.

 

Clearly unbalanced.

 

I'm gonna call BS. Sorry. Unless you avoided all the side-encounters that were more challenging and/or overleveled like crazy, you didn't left click your way through the game on Hard.

 

 

Why i should lie? i'm not even a good player, so it's even worse. Btw, i skipped whole Endless Path and Twin Elms. 

 

And forcing you to do Endless Path to have challenge while the other 80% of the game is easy, it is not a solution.

 

 

I find claims like the one you made rather hard to believe as well.  Only auto-attacking just doesn't seem like it would work in many fights.  If you don't counter plague of insects with spells for instance one casting of it will usually kill your squishies for instance.

 

 

I just let go Eder and my chanter (heavily armored) tanking the world then select all others 4 members and click on every enemy one by one.

 

 

Plague of insects can't be tanked.  It's aoe.  Also shadows, shades, spectres, etc will just teleport to your back line and start wailing on your casters.  And I didn't even mention dominate and charm attacks.  Again, I just don't see how you could get through hard only auto-attacking in all but two fights, sorry.

 

And it's not like Matt or I are arguing it isn't too easy much of the time, it's just that claims like your smack of hyperbole and that's not helpful.

 

 

Shadows fight in the lighthouse was harder than normal, as i said. 

Charm attacks well, i remember only the shrooms doing that but this didn't change anything, still 3+ hitting one=melt.

I don't remember plague of insetcs at all, dunno if i didn't notice it or never encountered, who throw this?