Difficulty - a graph of my PotD playthrough

[Zwiebelchen]

So, I recently finished the game on PotD with my Monk (full tank) PC. Rest of the party was Aloth, Eder (specced as offtank), GM, Hiravius, Durance.

 

This is how the perceived difficulty of the game looked like, documented by level and notable landmarks.

 

Notice that I didn't do the second and third set of bounties, as I didn't want to trivialize the game further after reaching Dyrford Village.

 

1.05 happened around level 6 for this party. As 1.05 mostly nerfed some OP spells, it's expected the game got slightly harder in those lower levels.

 

 

Discussion:

- Difficulty is mostly fine until reaching later parts of Defiance Bay:

Gilded Vale wilderness content and dungeons are challenging, The Raedric's Hold final battle is great, the first levels of Od Nua are actually challenging at their designated levels. The first set of bounties at level 7 is nuts. Two of the bounty battles took me dozens of reloads to win. Awesomesauce!

- Most major battle zones of Defiance Bay are challenging enough: Catacombs, Sanitarium, several event battles in houses, Lighthouse island

--------------------------

- And then everything goes downhill. First major drop of difficulty happens at Heritage Hill. Compared to almost every single battle before Heritage Hill, there is a huge drop in difficulty here. You can mostly blaze through all of the battles except for the one guarding the tower outside

- Dyrford Village and surroundings have a huge drop in difficulty to almost ridicolous levels. I could suddenly equip my tanks with 2H weapons, switch to lighter armors and overall could do well just auto-attacking everything

- The only noticable spike of difficulty after reaching Dyrford village at level 8/9 were the lowest levels of Od Nua. Everything was a breeze.

 

 

 

Conclusion:

Twin Elms and Dyrford village are heavily undertuned. Up until this point, the game is almost perfectly balanced. The crit path needs a severe buff in difficulty. Considering Dyrford village was part of the Backer Beta (and thus, the most tested content in the game), I can not understand why the Dyrford village content is so ridicolously easy, compared to everything that comes prior to Dyrford.

It's also worth mentioning that there is a severe flood of unique items happening once you reach Dyrford Village.

Edited May 15, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[Shevek]

The problem is that players get too much accuracy and defense per level. If they could maintain enemy stats as they are now and drop player acc and defense gain from 3 to 2 per level, then things would be better difficulty wise

[View619]

What was your party level in Dyrford and Defiance Bay? It seems like players are still levelling too quickly, even with the recent xp tuning.

[luzarius]

I've noticed that most RPG's follow this pattern and I've come to accept it as normal. I think the game designers want you to feel powerful by end game. It's nice being able to defeat a final end game boss the first time you attempt it, especially if you're trying your hardest.

 

Do I mind if the difficult increases more so? Not at all, but as long as each fight has the potential to be won without meta gaming on Trial of Iron.

Edited May 15, 2015 by luzarius

[JONNIN]

that is neat!

I found raderic's castle to be a loot rich cakewalk,  though one or two of the caster heavy pulls can get tough.   The only difficult fight is the finale /boss and that is trivial if you just get into a room and stonewall the horde with your tanks (its significantly harder if you try it out in the middle of the big room).  

 

I found all the bounties except the one ogre cave fight to be trivial as well.   If you kill the casters first, the bounties apart from the ogre were not too challenging.  The ogres are annoying because their caster has a ton of health, self heals, and tends to get out of range etc. 

 

the bosses seem harder than that to me. 

[JONNIN]

What was your party level in Dyrford and Defiance Bay? It seems like players are still levelling too quickly, even with the recent xp tuning.

 

... I reached level 9 before talking to the duc (the hearings that lead to act II) in a game made since 1.05 doing everything I could before moving on.  I reached level 12 right after act 2 by doing the bounties as my first order of business followed by wrapping up the companion's quests and small jobs.   If you are only supposed to hit 12 near the very end, it is not quite right yet.

Edited May 15, 2015 by JONNIN

[Gunnar.Maluf]

 

What was your party level in Dyrford and Defiance Bay? It seems like players are still levelling too quickly, even with the recent xp tuning.

 

... I reached level 9 before talking to the duc (the hearings that lead to act II) in a game made since 1.05 doing everything I could before moving on.  I reached level 12 right after act 2 by doing the bounties as my first order of business followed by wrapping up the companion's quests and small jobs.   If you are only supposed to hit 12 near the very end, it is not quite right yet.

 

 

I don't think they should limit level 12 just when you reach act 4 because act 3 is too short. Almost blends to act 4 altogetther. If they want to do that

they need to remove lots of xp from quests or move quests around to fill act 3 with meat.

 

The difficulty you face depends largely on what you do and when you do it. I did the stronghold dungeon right after I got it and when things turned too difficult

I went back to the main/side quests. After a while doing them I would go back to the dungeon again, Doing that I had only 2 difficult encounters: Adra Dragon and Thaos.

[manageri]

Yeah, i was having a pretty fun time in my PotD playthrough until heritage hill + dyrford and onwards. I really dont understand why it's so hard for devs to balance late game fights with the assumption that the player is actually able to learn something and not build their characters like a drunken monkey would. Isn't that what lower difficulties are for? If the game wasn't so mod unfriendly this probably wouldn't be such an issue either but...oh well.

[Jojobobo]

There's always solo for people finding the difficulty "too easy". I'm running solo and it seems fine, I guess this is all a matter of perspective.

[Justinian]

There's always solo for people finding the difficulty "too easy". I'm running solo and it seems fine, I guess this is all a matter of perspective.

 

So by your logic we should play with a full party until halfway through the game and then suddenly run around solo for the rest... sounds like a great idea! Totally not up to the game designers to make a challenging and fun game, no - we must handicap ourselves to varying degrees to create the right level of challenge.

[Shevek]

PotD feels like what normal (hard in the beginning and a few later places) should have been.

[View619]

There's always solo for people finding the difficulty "too easy". I'm running solo and it seems fine, I guess this is all a matter of perspective.

 

People looking for a challenge should not need to gimp themselves when you have game modes stating that they will "provide a challenge for IE veterans" or that they are only for "players who want the most punishing encounters". Why should we be forced to run around solo because Hard and POTD have failed in their stated purpose?

 

Accessibility is important, but if you're not even going to try balancing your "difficult modes" then they should just be removed imo.

Edited May 16, 2015 by View619

[abaris]

 

the bosses seem harder than that to me. 

If you kill the casters first, the bounties apart from the ogre were not too challenging.  The ogres are annoying because their caster has a ton of health, self heals, and tends to get out of range etc. 

 

The ogres didn't seem challenging to me. Block the entrance, spam slicken and fire away. The casters never get to heal anyone and they go down like nothing.

[Drath]

I note

 

So, I recently finished the game on PotD with my Monk (full tank) PC. Rest of the party was Aloth, Eder (specced as offtank), GM, Hiravius, Durance.

 

Discussion:

- Difficulty is mostly fine until reaching later parts of Defiance Bay:

Gilded Vale wilderness content and dungeons are challenging, The Raedric's Hold final battle is great, the first levels of Od Nua are actually challenging at their designated levels. The first set of bounties at level 7 is nuts. Two of the bounty battles took me dozens of reloads to win. Awesomesauce!

- Most major battle zones of Defiance Bay are challenging enough: Catacombs, Sanitarium, several event battles in houses, Lighthouse island

--------------------------

- And then everything goes downhill. First major drop of difficulty happens at Heritage Hill. Compared to almost every single battle before Heritage Hill, there is a huge drop in difficulty here. You can mostly blaze through all of the battles except for the one guarding the tower outside

- Dyrford Village and surroundings have a huge drop in difficulty to almost ridicolous levels. I could suddenly equip my tanks with 2H weapons, switch to lighter armors and overall could do well just auto-attacking everything

- The only noticable spike of difficulty after reaching Dyrford village at level 8/9 were the lowest levels of Od Nua. Everything was a breeze.

 

Conclusion:

Twin Elms and Dyrford village are heavily undertuned. Up until this point, the game is almost perfectly balanced. The crit path needs a severe buff in difficulty. Considering Dyrford village was part of the Backer Beta (and thus, the most tested content in the game), I can not understand why the Dyrford village content is so ridicolously easy, compared to everything that comes prior to Dyrford.

It's also worth mentioning that there is a severe flood of unique items happening once you reach Dyrford Village.

 

I agree with some of the earlier fights being difficulty spikes. I was a little surprised at how many Boars/Wolves I was facing at Magran's Fork. Ended up taking a good deal more damage than expected for a 4-person party. Took quite some damage as well to get through the room of Skuldrs and the 4 Will of Wisps in Temple of Eothas. The Shadows were not too difficult but the Shades were irritating with their ranged attacks and summons. Found them harder to deal with in Caed Nua, facing a good number of them on open ground with no choke point. Maerwald wasn't too difficult, though he probably made it easier for me by casting Chill Fog on his Blights. Yes that happened Spread out to prevent getting AoEd, focussed/disabled him and he went down quite fast.

 

Raedric's Hold was difficult, especially the last battle. I'm glad I did Defiance Bay first before going back for it. With a 4 or 5-person party at level 4, I very much doubt if I would have made it, or at least would have required a ton of rests.Not the most natural course of action to pursue though in a first game. Ondra's Gift lighthouse is brutal at the level it is thrown at you. Other challenging fights at Defiance Bay include the one against the Forgotten, Leyra/Missing Sentries, etc. I was thinking Helig should be a tough encounter. He was a pushover though

 

Od Nua levels 3-4 for me were a good deal easier than level 2 (mostly slow, kiteable enemies or situations where you can pull one at a time). I cleared L2 halfway, went down to have a look and am glad I did. Haven't done the Drake at level 5 yet, he looks scary.

 

I'm not quite at L9 yet but I'm wondering if the difficulty drop that you experienced at Dyrford may be partially due to casters getting a very significant boost at L9 (being able to cast L1 spells every encounter, as Chill Fog and Fan of Flames spam would put a dent on massed mobs fast) and you did list having 3 casters in your party (Aloth, Hiravius, Durance).

[Zwiebelchen]

I note

 

So, I recently finished the game on PotD with my Monk (full tank) PC. Rest of the party was Aloth, Eder (specced as offtank), GM, Hiravius, Durance.

 

Discussion:

- Difficulty is mostly fine until reaching later parts of Defiance Bay:

Gilded Vale wilderness content and dungeons are challenging, The Raedric's Hold final battle is great, the first levels of Od Nua are actually challenging at their designated levels. The first set of bounties at level 7 is nuts. Two of the bounty battles took me dozens of reloads to win. Awesomesauce!

- Most major battle zones of Defiance Bay are challenging enough: Catacombs, Sanitarium, several event battles in houses, Lighthouse island

--------------------------

- And then everything goes downhill. First major drop of difficulty happens at Heritage Hill. Compared to almost every single battle before Heritage Hill, there is a huge drop in difficulty here. You can mostly blaze through all of the battles except for the one guarding the tower outside

- Dyrford Village and surroundings have a huge drop in difficulty to almost ridicolous levels. I could suddenly equip my tanks with 2H weapons, switch to lighter armors and overall could do well just auto-attacking everything

- The only noticable spike of difficulty after reaching Dyrford village at level 8/9 were the lowest levels of Od Nua. Everything was a breeze.

 

Conclusion:

Twin Elms and Dyrford village are heavily undertuned. Up until this point, the game is almost perfectly balanced. The crit path needs a severe buff in difficulty. Considering Dyrford village was part of the Backer Beta (and thus, the most tested content in the game), I can not understand why the Dyrford village content is so ridicolously easy, compared to everything that comes prior to Dyrford.

It's also worth mentioning that there is a severe flood of unique items happening once you reach Dyrford Village.

 

I agree with some of the earlier fights being difficulty spikes. I was a little surprised at how many Boars/Wolves I was facing at Magran's Fork. Ended up taking a good deal more damage than expected for a 4-person party. Took quite some damage as well to get through the room of Skuldrs and the 4 Will of Wisps in Temple of Eothas. The Shadows were not too difficult but the Shades were irritating with their ranged attacks and summons. Found them harder to deal with in Caed Nua, facing a good number of them on open ground with no choke point. Maerwald wasn't too difficult, though he probably made it easier for me by casting Chill Fog on his Blights. Yes that happened Spread out to prevent getting AoEd, focussed/disabled him and he went down quite fast.

 

Raedric's Hold was difficult, especially the last battle. I'm glad I did Defiance Bay first before going back for it. With a 4 or 5-person party at level 4, I very much doubt if I would have made it, or at least would have required a ton of rests.Not the most natural course of action to pursue though in a first game. Ondra's Gift lighthouse is brutal at the level it is thrown at you. Other challenging fights at Defiance Bay include the one against the Forgotten, Leyra/Missing Sentries, etc. I was thinking Helig should be a tough encounter. He was a pushover though

 

Od Nua levels 3-4 for me were a good deal easier than level 2 (mostly slow, kiteable enemies or situations where you can pull one at a time). I cleared L2 halfway, went down to have a look and am glad I did. Haven't done the Drake at level 5 yet, he looks scary.

 

I'm not quite at L9 yet but I'm wondering if the difficulty drop that you experienced at Dyrford may be partially due to casters getting a very significant boost at L9 (being able to cast L1 spells every encounter, as Chill Fog and Fan of Flames spam would put a dent on massed mobs fast) and you did list having 3 casters in your party (Aloth, Hiravius, Durance).

 

The difficulty drop at level 9 is not due to the first level spells becoming per-encounter. I rarely even used the first level spells for all encounters post Dyrford.

 

The problem is not that the general difficulty of the game is too low. In fact, everything until defiance bay feels perfectly balanced.

I made this graph to demonstrate how the difficulty problems are more related to undertuned encounters on a per-region basis.

 

Basicly, it feels like Twin Elms and Dyrford Village were initially designed to be mid-level zones, then changed to be endgame content at a later point of developement, but weren't adjusted for the increased character level.

Leveling is king in PoE. Remember that each character level offsets your accuracy and enemy accuracy by 6. You gain 3 accuracy and 3 deflection (which is comparable to a losing 3 accuracy when attacking this character). Dyrford village feels like it was tuned for level 5 characters. If we now take a look at this graph; then I hit Dyrford village at an average character level of 9. Which means that party/enemy combat accuracy receives an offset of 24. This is almost enough to convert almost all grazes to hits and halfway through to convert all hits to crits. Add two more talents and two more class abilities on top of it (which mostly further buff accuracy or deflection) and the problem is pretty obvious:

Encounters in Dyrford and Twin Elms are simply undertuned. And while their specific encounter levels might already be level 9-10, their stats won't reflect that. Several enemies in Dyrford and Twin Elms actually have less accuracy than enemies in Magran's fork and surroundings (boars and lions are among the hardest hitting enemies in the game).

 

 

What we can extract from this graph is that applying a band-aid fix that affects all encounters equally would ultimately break the game. Instead, what is actually required would be a whole encounter re-design of Dyrford and Twin Elms.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[Klice]

Dyrford village feels like it was tuned for level 5 characters.

That's about the level I was when I reached it and did the quests. Just like Raedric's hold, I did it right after Gilded Vale at level 3 or 4 I think, on Hard. I'm quite happy that I managed to beat him without pulling or retreating, that I did it like it was "supposed" to be; I did end up with only two or one people alive though. That said, the problem remains for Twin Elms.

I guess that's the problem with (semi) open world, since you can do everything when you want, if you go to a location that was designed for a level lower than your actual level, it may be problematic... To be clear, I do not blame you for coming back later, but it's not an easy task to balance everything.

 

I guess level scaling is probably the least bad idea

Edited May 18, 2015 by Klice

[Zwiebelchen]

 

Dyrford village feels like it was tuned for level 5 characters.

That's about the level I was when I reached it and done the quests. Just like Raedric's hold, I did it right after Gilded Vale at level 3 or 4 I think, on Hard. I'm quite happy that I managed to beat him without pulling or retreating, like it was "supposed" to be; I did end up with only two or one people alive, if I remember correctly.

I guess that's the problem with (semi) open world, since you can do everything when you want, if you go to a location that was designed for a level lower than your actual level, it may be problematic... To be clear, I do not blame you for coming back later, but it's not an easy task to balance everything.

 

I guess level scaling is probably the least bad idea

 

 

While I agree that the missing level scaling definitely is an issue here, it doesn't really apply here, because we are talking PotD difficulty, which was meant for completionists and min/maxers.

 

Rushers that reach Dyrford as low as level 5 always have the option to pull on the difficulty slider if the content is too hard for them. But we are talking the highest possible difficulty level here. I can't "turn it up to eleven" when there's no option to do so.

 

 

The tools to fix this issue are there: we have different encounter designs depending on the selected difficulty level. Literally all this game needs is adjusted encounter designs in Dyrford and Twin Elms for the encounter sets at "hard" difficulty. "Easy" and "Medium" can stay the way they are.

Adjusting the "Hard" sets will automaticly apply to PotD aswell, so it elegantly fixes two problems at the same time.

[Varana]

I would agree with Klice that the openness is the major issue here. I'd never have classified Dyrford as "endgame content". You can do Dyrford before anything in Defiance Bay, without "rushing". It's just about taking the "wrong" turn. That means Dyrford is potentially Chapter One content.

In my first run, I basically did this - I wanted the GM and skipped Pallegina, so I went to Dyrford first. I only went to DBay when cultists, ogres and drakes were a bit much.

[JONNIN]

The problem with the difficulty levels ...   AI is a big part of it.   The enemy does not know how to use spells, buff and debuff.   It does not know how to swap weapon sets.  It wants to focus fire your casters but it won't take the drive-by hit to do so.   It has no potions or scrolls.    1/4 of the fights or so would be very, very hard if the mobs coordinated and played smarter.  

 

Hard is redundant, its just normal with a couple of extra enemy.   POTD is fine, its the next step up from "normal" really.   Want it harder still?  Need a new difficulty level, but again, if they just made it smarter....

[nipsen]

The problem is that players get too much accuracy and defense per level. If they could maintain enemy stats as they are now and drop player acc and defense gain from 3 to 2 per level, then things would be better difficulty wise

:D hahahah. No! You don't say! That comes as a /huge/ surprise!

[perilisk]

The problem with the difficulty levels ...   AI is a big part of it.   The enemy does not know how to use spells, buff and debuff.   It does not know how to swap weapon sets.  It wants to focus fire your casters but it won't take the drive-by hit to do so.   It has no potions or scrolls.    1/4 of the fights or so would be very, very hard if the mobs coordinated and played smarter.  

 

Hard is redundant, its just normal with a couple of extra enemy.   POTD is fine, its the next step up from "normal" really.   Want it harder still?  Need a new difficulty level, but again, if they just made it smarter....

 

Truthfully, it doesn't even have to be smart. It just has to have enough different attack patterns, strengths, and weaknesses that you can't utilize the same strategy for every battle. That is, it doesn't matter whether the enemy is smart, so long as it forces the player to be smart.

[AndreaColombo]

But smart enemies are all kinds of fun to play against. I agree that enemies should use consumables and scrolls strategically, coordinate their attacks, and intelligently cast buffs/debuffs. Making smart decisions on whom to engage and whether to disengage would be necessary too.

[Youngx]

I found that the overall challenge of the game was good, but I do agree that some parts were way to easy in comparison to others.

 

I also found that I was max level with still about 15-20% content left.  That was a big disappointment.

[AndreaColombo]

I actually don't mind maxing out a bit earlier than right at the end. I want to enjoy the power of my character's full potential for a few fights before it's over (something that has always bugged me in other games.)

 

Of course I would expect the remaining content to be balanced around the fact that I will likely be maxed out when I do it (or at least the crit path to scale wiylth level.)

[FlintlockJazz]

So, I recently finished the game on PotD with my Monk (full tank) PC. Rest of the party was Aloth, Eder (specced as offtank), GM, Hiravius, Durance.

 

This is how the perceived difficulty of the game looked like, documented by level and notable landmarks.

 

Notice that I didn't do the second and third set of bounties, as I didn't want to trivialize the game further after reaching Dyrford Village.

 

1.05 happened around level 6 for this party. As 1.05 mostly nerfed some OP spells, it's expected the game got slightly harder in those lower levels.

 

 

Discussion:

- Difficulty is mostly fine until reaching later parts of Defiance Bay:

Gilded Vale wilderness content and dungeons are challenging, The Raedric's Hold final battle is great, the first levels of Od Nua are actually challenging at their designated levels. The first set of bounties at level 7 is nuts. Two of the bounty battles took me dozens of reloads to win. Awesomesauce!

- Most major battle zones of Defiance Bay are challenging enough: Catacombs, Sanitarium, several event battles in houses, Lighthouse island

--------------------------

- And then everything goes downhill. First major drop of difficulty happens at Heritage Hill. Compared to almost every single battle before Heritage Hill, there is a huge drop in difficulty here. You can mostly blaze through all of the battles except for the one guarding the tower outside

- Dyrford Village and surroundings have a huge drop in difficulty to almost ridicolous levels. I could suddenly equip my tanks with 2H weapons, switch to lighter armors and overall could do well just auto-attacking everything

- The only noticable spike of difficulty after reaching Dyrford village at level 8/9 were the lowest levels of Od Nua. Everything was a breeze.

 

 

 

Conclusion:

Twin Elms and Dyrford village are heavily undertuned. Up until this point, the game is almost perfectly balanced. The crit path needs a severe buff in difficulty. Considering Dyrford village was part of the Backer Beta (and thus, the most tested content in the game), I can not understand why the Dyrford village content is so ridicolously easy, compared to everything that comes prior to Dyrford.

It's also worth mentioning that there is a severe flood of unique items happening once you reach Dyrford Village.

Have you considered leaving certain things like the bounties which you yourself stated required reloads they were that hard for later or even not at all?  They give quite a bit of xp and so may get you overlevelled for the point of the game you are at.  Remember, the devs need to balance these games not only for those who do everything but also for those who don't do everything and without level-scaling this means not making it too hard just in case the player hasn't levelled up too much, or as in the case with these games where quests can often be done in different order meaning that one person might do one quest first and another a different one, with their levels being different for when they finally get to the same quest.  This issue cropped up in BG2 especially if you did all the sidequests in Athkatla and surroundings as they were all made available at the same time which meant they were all the same difficulty but by the time you finished the last sidequest you could be substantially higher level than intended, but I liked having all those quests open to me to pick and choose as I liked and I would not want level scaling in as it made the world feel real and my character like he was actually getting more competent.... *shrug*

 

EDIT: Also as to hitting max level with so much of the game left, same thing happened again with BG2 until they released ToB, it seems to be a fundamental issue with these types of games that seems hard to get around even today.  Why do you think so many cop out with 'level scaling'?

Edited May 19, 2015 by FlintlockJazz