The General Level Scaling / Difficulty Thread (not POTD)

[hunnybear]

I still could not figure out how to enable level scaling in game, it is greyed out. If possible I don't want to fiddle with registries as well. Am I missing something?

 

The game is not fun at this stage, too easy. Please help.

[jaganntha]

Potd - level scale all - only upward, its the best way I found, the challenging is good this way some fight are really hard, but not imposible, dont go to overleveled places. And the bug that doesnt show the skull is nice, improves inmurshion 

Edited May 11, 2018 by jaganntha

[kiqqun]

Okay, so I am playing at veteran difficulty and started without level scaling enabled. I am now sailing to Poke Kahara (or whats it called?) so I guess I am still at the beginning of the game. Whatever, the difficulty is a joke. Until now I do not need: Potions, any Quickslot items, any interest in the stats of my enemys, any care about buffs/debuffs, etc. etc. etc. Its a total dissappointment for anyone who wants to really use all the mechanics the game has to offer.

 

As I dont want to start all over again I am wondering: WHY am I not allowed to swtich to the highest difficulty OR enable level scaling in my current savegame?! I just dont get this punishment. Now I have to decide wether I keep playing and just hope the game gets more difficult later or I start a completely new game.

 

What the ****. I dont get the decision of making highest difficulty only chooseable at a new game start.

[Ashen Rohk]

It's probably to do with achievements or the basic premise that the AI is different to the Story - Veteran difficulties and would be a pain in the ass to load in.

 

Just like you can't change it up to PotD mid game, you can't change it down from PotD either. That'd be my guess anyway.

[mbellis111]

Since scaling is done per save I am skeptical that that registry value handles it. However it is our best lead at the moment.

 

Can anyone please try and confirm that editing this value change gets scaling in game? The best way would be to go to a new island for a quest known to be lower level, and check if the enemies are scaling. Then reload your game with it set off and check the same enemies.

 

It is possible that if scaling isn't meant to be changed mid game this value will not do anything. We can't be sure of what rider scripts are run when difficulty/scaling is changed through the UI. Furthermore we don't know if the scaling is done upon entering a new map (and it just checks the value), when a new game is started, or when the value is toggled.

 

My guess is that it is done upon entering a new map, mostly because going to Story Mode sets scaling to All. This is likely to scale enemies down to give players an easier experience on that setting.

 

This means if we find to hack the value there is a good chance it will apply to new maps. Anyone who can test this empirically should do so. (Unfortunately I am I work now).

 

For me I am holding off playing any further because my options are redoing 10 hours of content, or risk being stuck ina game that is too easy.

[Creative]

I'm about 25 hours into the game right now on Veteran difficulty and am finding some fights, especially random trash mobs a bit too easy and it's ruining some of the fun for me. I want to turn on upwards level scaling only but I'm unsure how too. I know there's an option under difficulty in the options menu ingame, but it's currently grayed out. How do I enable it? Can I? Is it bugged? When I first created the game I saw the option to enable it, but I figured I'd leave it as default and just change it later if I felt I wanted too. Please don't tell me that the only time you get to adjust that is at game creation. Surely they would've said at the start that it was an option you can't change at a later date? Cause if that's true I don't know how they can expect someone to know whether they want level scaling on or not before they've actually had a chance to play the game. I'm gonna be so pissed if this turns out to be an option you can't change mid game.

 

Is it possible to turn it on? Are there console commands to do so?

[Slotharingia]

I was wondering the same thing.

[Azzinoth224]

Do you play on PotD? I noticed that you can't change any difficulty settings on PotD, not even the level scaling.

[Wormerine]

Level scaling can't be changed once the game is started - the choice is permanent. 

[Wormerine]

As the POTD changes enemy stats my gues would be that is has something to do with it. Similarly you can change content scaling option.

[bleedthefreak]

Which is a bummer, I forgot to set it when I started and didn't notice for like 12 hours. Not wanting to start over, I'm just going to have an easy critical path I guess.

[basilkingcalcifer]

I was curious of upward level scaling was imperative to have a challenging experience throughout, now I know

[Amalith]

Can anyone please try and confirm that editing this value change gets scaling in game? The best way would be to go to a new island for a quest known to be lower level, and check if the enemies are scaling. Then reload your game with it set off and check the same enemies.

 

It personally did nothing for me. I went to stuff I knew was lower level that I already had then progressed the story/exploration enough to find new stuff and still the same deal, I'm afraid. I obviously could have done something wrong but I tried with all the values (0-2). It's worth noting that each time I went back to change a value, it had reset to (1).

[Creative]

There better be a way to change the scaling mid game. This game is waaaay too ****ing easy. I decided to go with Veteran cause I was worried I'd be stuck at a difficulty that I couldn't lower, but holy **** do I regret that right now. The ease in difficulty this game has is ruining a lot of the fun for me. I'm way too far into the game to restart at this point, and killing 90% of mobs is so ****ing boring cause there's no thinking that needs to go into any of it. Need a way to fix this asap.

Edited May 11, 2018 by Creative

[Creative]

Do you play on PotD? I noticed that you can't change any difficulty settings on PotD, not even the level scaling.

No I'm playing on Veteran. Reason being I was worried the game would be too hard on PotD and I didn't want to be stuck in a place where I couldn't lower the difficulty. Boy do I regret doing that... The game is a ****ing cake walk. I could count on one hand the amount of times I've come across a fight so far during my 30 hour playthrough that I needed to actually think about.

[Creative]

Level scaling can't be changed once the game is started - the choice is permanent. 

Why would they not mention that anywhere? I planned to change it later in my play through once I had a grasp for how difficult the game was. How can they expect anyone to make that decision before anybody has played it? It's ridiculous.

[Erik Dirk]

POTD is supposed to have more enemies, not just better stats. Changing stats mid game should be easy to code. Changing number of enemies would probably be harder.

I'd have thought it'd be pretty easy to nerf the stats of extra enemies though. I.e soft coding additional difficulty levels.

[Purudaya]

Does anyone know how exactly level scaling affects encounters? For instance, is a single ogre just as hard to defeat at level 12 as it is at level 4 (TESIV: Oblivion Style) or does the game instead just throw more ogres (or a different creature entirely) at you at level 12 than it would at level 4?

 

I'm asking because I chose upward level scaling for critical path only (and have mostly avoided the critical path), but I'm finding myself over-levelled for a lot of the side content since reaching lvl 10.

 

I'd like to enable upward scaling for everything through the console/registry, but I don't want to be eventually fighting level 20 xaurips if that's how the game handles scaling. Does anybody have experience with this?

Edited May 12, 2018 by Purudaya

[Mihai]

I haven't started playing yet, I'm waiting for them to fix the import issues, but since I see many people saying the game is too easy, I'm curious how easy it compared to the first game. More specific about the veteran difficulty. Is it easier than the first game if you use the scaling option?

 

And I really wish they'd allow us to change it to POTD mid game, even if that disables the achievement for it. (because that surely is the only reason as in first POE you could easily change it to POTD with the console). 

[z_liquid]

It is true that PotD is fairly easy compared to PoE 1. There's a lot of low-level fights around, and there is really no reason to fight higher-level monsters unless you absolutely want to. I got upscaling set to all and "only scale upwards", but it just doesn't do enough, fights at your level or below are all extremely easy.

 

Not to mention you level up quite fast, so getting access to high-level abilities isn't an issue.

[Armanz]

I'm generally fairly bad at powergaming in these kinds of RPGs.

Pillars 1 for me on standard was pretty tough at plenty points throughout the game. On the second and third playthrough I still found the boss battles challenging enough but due to increased knowledge easier than before.

15-20 hours into the sequel i had to switch from standard to veteran because it was too easy. I'm 30 hours in now so had a bit experience with veteran now but it still doesn't seem very challenging. I think had 1 fight so far where I got partywhiped (twice), I think it was

an ambush on the way to the Radiant Heart (or whatever it's called) in Dunnage.

 

 

Edit: I haven't bothered going anywhere that's more than 1 lvl above me (except for occasional enemies of questlines that were 2 lvls above me but that doesn't really count). Sadly, I didn't enable upwards scaling and now it's disabled.

Edited May 12, 2018 by Armanz

[z_liquid]

Frankly at this point, even a flat health + damage buff to monsters wouldn't be such a bad idea. Also wish they could look into the scaling, because right now upscaled fights aren't any different from any other fight.

Edited May 12, 2018 by z_liquid

[Voss]

Eh. That would make fights longer, but wouldn't make them interesting (or challenging).

 

I've had to reload for exactly two fights:

One my cipher was in conversation range (melee range) with a red, three skull rated ogre bounty, and the other was my first ship battle, where my cipher was in pistol range of 8 or so enemies at the start of the fight, and I didn't know or have any way to anticipate at 4 more melee enemies would hop the upper deck railing and run down at her. Because nothing and no one has ever been able to move past an obstacle ever before in these games. :/

 

Other than that, I've had one character fall in battle...ever, in some sort of wave battle against undead in the Undercity, where they just kept spawning. Accuracy on both sides seems to be a real issue, as bonuses are much more rare, but defenses seem to be roughly the same as they were in pillars 1

Edited May 12, 2018 by Voss

[Zeitzbach]

PoE2 is a lot easier and I believe this is more because of the new Armor Rating system. Currently, the bonus is so crazy. A few points of pen and you deal twice the usual damage. A few points below the armor rating and you deal absolutely no damage.

 

You heavily suffer from this in the early game gets shot death for absolutely no effort by 30 damage a hit because of their low armor. You deal decent damage with spell because it pens just about right.

 

Then 10 levels later.

 

Every spells deals twice its stated damage because of the overpen from level scaling, more with empowered. Enemy can barely scratch anyone with 12 or 13 armor rating. Even if you upscales all enemies, they don't change their gears resulting in low armor rating and penetration.

 

The bonus gonna need to be rescaled and that will fix A LOT of balance issues. I will miss my 2k damage Salvo and 700 AoE damage Maelstorm though when this gets mixed.

[Starwars]

There's also the fact that Deadfire is quite open and I'm guessing you would run into real trouble if you went off the beaten path early in the game, but I think most people will just turn away if they see one of those 3 skulls encounters (same if you see them in the journal). It's a lot easier to "plan" your playthrough in Deadfire since the game tells you "hey, this is beyond your level".

Though you can turn those skull things off. 

 

Nevertheless, I definitely agree. Stuff like the crit path as well as the areas sorta surrounding Neketaka (and some encounters in Neketaka) could really stand to be buffed up. I've had one party wipe on Hard in 28 hours of playtime and that was me just screwing around and doing something really stupid. 

And I'd be the first to admit that while I'm not bad at these games, I'm really not a great player. I mean, I think I've used Empower like... three times in all that playtime, and two of those were in the same encounter.

 

But yeah, I miss something like the Eothas temple in Gilded Vale, or going into Caed Nua the first time where you really had to be quite careful. And those weren't areas "out of the way" at all (in fact, Caed Nua is on the crit path).

Edited May 12, 2018 by Starwars