Let‘s help the developers to balance the game

[Sir Davion]

So since i‘m getting annoyed by all those unconstructive posts let‘s collect our ideas in this thread for a better deadfire experience on higher difficulty levels. Most likely the developers thought of most of the stuff but maybe if tons of people post their ideas here it‘ll help the developers. Just post your idea with a short explanation.

 

Plz no discussions just post your ideas.  If you want to discuss stuff go to this thread https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/97067-difficulty-above-path-of-the-damned/

 

• Make food/resting more scarce: since you can remove injuries, curses, hangovers and regain empower with the plainest of food. Maybe let it only work with processed/crafted food and also you need higher quality food the higher level you are. Normal food till lvl 5 positive food 5+ very positive food 10+ etc. Having to actually worry about those two injuries and the -8 might curse or even about your party member permanently dying makes the game already harder.
• Less empower points per level on higher difficulties this would also make the +1 empower point talent usefull together with the food changes and you would have really to think about how to spent your points (metagaming), imo PotD shouldn't be actually doable on your first run at least not in a way that is fun XD
• Make stuff more expensive so you really have to think when and what you upgrade
• Make it so the only possible way to play PotD is with (ofc working) upwards scaling so you always have to fight encounters at your level or higher (I actually felt the game was decently balanced as long as you fought encounters at your level or higher add inuries and curses and scarce empower attacks to that and you already have a much more challenging experience
• So now an idea that is harder to implement. You have created such an elegant an awesome system with the affliction/inspiration stuff but when i'm playing the game i hardly ever have to think about it. Change encounters in a way you really have to understand this sytem and have to play it to "own" encounters. Enemies should use much more Inspirations on themselves and Afflictions on you.
• What i wouldn't like to see: Nerfing/changing class abilities and passives too much. Surely there needs to be some balancing done. But don't nerf it to hard. I really love the core of the game. For lots of people it's fun to be op especially people who like to play on lower difficulties. Also i personally like to be OP sporadically even if i'm playing on PotD but you should have to be careful when to be op

 

Also some ideas for QoL improvement:

• If you open your map make it so you can travel instantly to any point of interest you have already visited without having to walk to the border of a map. This would also improve the problem of changing your party a bit since your boat is always only one click away
• Let us always watch the skill tree of our classes. This has already been stated a lot. Just give us a button to open the skilltree in our character screen

Edited May 16, 2018 by Sir Davion

[Dorftek]

Yeah there need to be some punishment or cost to regain Empower points. Either that or a fat nerf to empowering.

 

Since the removal of Health/Endurance system healing feels overpowered. A slight nerf to many heals especially the fighters rapid recovery wouldn't hurt imo.

 

Summoning creatures doesn't break stealth, so a summoner can stay in stealth completely safe from any kind of aggro and spam summons. Make all spells break stealth.

 

There are quite a few abilities that need tuning, I haven't played enough to list them but some abilities seems very broken.

 

I can't belive they haven't fixed invisibility in this game either, still, like in the first game going invisible breaks combat and resets the encounter. If playing solo. If I drag pull an encounter I can kill one guy, go invisible and they run back to their spawn and I enter stealth and then repeat. Would be a lot more fun if I could play my solo assassin and use invisibility to create backstabs in combat rather then resetting the encounter.

 

Enemies aren't trying to debuff you enough, they do not use enough tricks on you to feel very threatening.

 

Summoned weapons need buffing to compete with unique weapons.

[master guardian]

@OP

 

Dude you have seriously missed the boat this has been well discussed

 

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/97171-potd-difficulty-launch-not-tuned-discussion-thread/

 

The issue is not tweaking classes the issue is currrently veteran difficulty and POTD have not been tuned and adjusted yet. Playing POTD is basically the same as playing on the easiest difficulty 

[M4xw0lf]

I think I would like to see some penalty for empower instead of a limited use per encounter. I'm thinking of something like an 'exhausted' injury, which stacks and will kill you if you use empower too often. This should of course be dependent on your (power) level, so you can maybe use empower once per encounter at a low level and up to three or four times at high level, but also weaken yourself a lot. This would make empower a sort of all or nothing choice to turn battles at a crucial point - land the final devastating blow on the biggest baddest enemy and destroy him, or go down because you have worn yourself out too early.

 

Possible penalties of this exhausted injury might be reduced maximum health (going to -100%) and penalties on all attributes.

Edited May 16, 2018 by M4xw0lf

[Ondb]

Word "balance" in single player RPG is becoming the worse thing happening in gaming industry.....

[M4xw0lf]

Word "balance" in single player RPG is becoming the worse thing happening in gaming industry.....

Call it what you want then, but right now the game is too easy on the higher difficulties and some classes are ridiculously better than others, and these things should be addressed because they ultimately limit the fun that is to be had with the game.

[Zeitzbach]

The first half of the balance changes are QoL nerfing and tedious balancing more than actual challenges just to avoid nerfing classes.

 

What needs to be nerfed are

 

1) Magic skill damage scalign especially the large AoE. Right now, magic easily outdamage anything that isn't bugged to deal bloated damage or if you're not wearing legendary gear at level 10.

 

2) Armor rating damage bonus. Easy +100% damage on giant empowered AoE is ridiculous.

 

3) Empowered damage skill. Almost doubling your damage is WAYYYY too high. Something like +30% is already generous in most game.

 

Then we can buff the gutted skills like Conjuration type magic and shapeshifting.

 

We can avoid it all we want but if classes can easily get up to 200 or 300% damage bonus with a few buff and crit while the more fair options are stuck at 130% or something, it shows that player damage are currently as bloated as the economy post level 13. It's kinda dumb the game has to rely on giving enemies double unbending proc just so they don't die right away.

Edited May 16, 2018 by Zeitzbach

[flamesium]

Difficulty being balanced right is critical. Every aspect of the intricate combat system goes straight out the window if the difficulty is too low. When the difficulty is right the combat system sings.

 

The main cause of the trouble is they've designed the Armour / Pen system in such a way that the sweet spot between 'trivial' and 'very difficult' is tiny. The tail off from Pen to No Pen is still much too steep to allow any margin for error in encounter design. They've left themselves very little margin for error.

 

I'm playing Veteran with 'Only Scale Up' on 'All' and I'd say the difficulty feels 'right' for Veteran maybe every 1 in 5 fights and I assume these are when I've wandered into areas I'm underleveled for. The majority of fights feel trivial (as in, no real need to change weapons, stances, use consumables or worry about what the enemy is doing) which shouldn't be the case with these difficulty settings.

[Witness41920]

Due to the limited choice of spells, I'd like to see the ability to "unlearn" selected spells and replace them with other spells every other level or so, specifically for the Priest whose upper-half of his spellbook negates the lower half of his spellbook. Either that or allow different tier buffs to stack to some degree (not a full stack because that would be insane) or benefit somehow. 

[Pyrofox]

Some thoughts on Wizards:

• Ryngrim's Enervating Terror is completely broken, a good sized AOE terrify with bonus weaken with a base duration of 20 seconds. It alone trivialises most encounters. The weaken could be removed, the duration could be halved, the AOE could be decreased, it could be nerfed in two out of three of those ways and it would still be great, that's how busted this spell is. Easily the best CC in the game unless I'm missing something truly absurd. 
• Wall spells need to break stealth, at the moment they're a free cast that gathers a group of enemies for a nuke or a terror. Combine that with the fact you can cast a wall spell directly on an enemy and they won't move out of it makes them very broken, and higher level wall spells are no joke.
• Llengrath's Safeguard needs to be combat only, it's a massive defensive buff with a base duration of 60 seconds that you can set up before fights for free. 
• Substantial Phantom has no spells of its own to cast, maybe that's a bug specific to me? Needs to be fixed either way.

[Ondb]

 

Word "balance" in single player RPG is becoming the worse thing happening in gaming industry.....

Call it what you want then, but right now the game is too easy on the higher difficulties and some classes are ridiculously better than others, and these things should be addressed because they ultimately limit the fun that is to be had with the game.

 

 

Some classes are ridiculously better than others. If i happen to play such a class:

 

1. How i am affecting your single player experience with different class ???

2. Obsidian will nerf this class in future and ruin my game experience and my fun, based on your "balanced" view.

 

Lets pretend you play some class as main character. I will post and urge obsidian to ruin this class in the name of holy balanced "something". One day you will get patch and your main character is ruined. I do not think it will be fun experience for you.

 

Nerfing classes, spells, abilities (in patches) in single player RPG is the biggest reason, the games are not fun as they used to be.

[M4xw0lf]

 

 

Word "balance" in single player RPG is becoming the worse thing happening in gaming industry.....

Call it what you want then, but right now the game is too easy on the higher difficulties and some classes are ridiculously better than others, and these things should be addressed because they ultimately limit the fun that is to be had with the game.

 

 

Some classes are ridiculously better than others. If i happen to play such a class:

 

1. How i am affecting your single player experience with different class ???

2. Obsidian will nerf this class in future and ruin my game experience and my fun, based on your "balanced" view.

 

Lets pretend you play some class as main character. I will post and urge obsidian to ruin this class in the name of holy balanced "something". One day you will get patch and your main character is ruined. I do not think it will be fun experience for you.

 

Nerfing classes, spells, abilities (in patches) in single player RPG is the biggest reason, the games are not fun as they used to be.

 

You're just making up stuff now. Nobody wants to ruin your class, but maybe someone just wants to play something different than you and also wants it to, you know, not suck. Right now the game is not hard enough in any case, so most likely some stuff will be nerfed anyway.

But when only some classes or combinations are viable for the higher difficulties, there is simply no choice of your own style of play, and thus less fun. Obviously the developer should try to make the maximum of class variety viable and fun to play.

Edited May 16, 2018 by M4xw0lf

[Voss]

Word "balance" in single player RPG is becoming the worse thing happening in gaming industry.....

Hardly. What the characters can do should be in step with each other, as should the opposition they face.

 

Doing otherwise hits required classes and lots and lots of party wipes. Or exactly what happens in this game: a complete lack of challenging or even engaging content.

 

I recently fought Nemnok, while at least 4 levels below him, and Pallegina managed to tank him for the entire fight, and never went under 75% health. And was still wearing her default un-upgraded armor, a +1 intellect amulet, and a greatsword she picked up in that dungeon, and that's it.

 

And that was the most difficult fight I've had so far.

 

Something is seriously wrong here.

[Ninjamestari]

How about just removing the whole empower idea entirely? It's an utterly pointless feature that doesn't really add anything to the game. Same with wounds. Resting is so easy and has zero cost to it that it's another completely pointless feature that could safely be removed from the entire game.

Edited May 16, 2018 by Ninjamestari

[TheMetaphysician]

Here are some productive ideas:

 

(1) Add more enemies, and tougher enemies, to lots of encounters. I want that screen full!

(2) Make level scaling upward increase armor and penetration in addition to other statistics.

(3) I second the suggestion that enemies apply more afflictions and inspirations.

(4) Revert to the gear-stacking rules of PoE 1. Right now, a ring of protection stacks with another ring of protection. Disallow that.

 

I'll post more if I think of more.

[Lord_Mord]

 

(4) Revert to the gear-stacking rules of PoE 1. Right now, a ring of protection stacks with another ring of protection. Disallow that.

 

Everything else: Yes. That: Over my dead body.

 

I love crazy stacking stuff. How much rings can you wear, anyway?

[M4xw0lf]

 

 

(4) Revert to the gear-stacking rules of PoE 1. Right now, a ring of protection stacks with another ring of protection. Disallow that.

 

Everything else: Yes. That: Over my dead body.

 

I love crazy stacking stuff. How much rings can you wear, anyway?

 

Yeah, the non-stacking in Pillars 1 led to me shuffling around more or less the gear of my entire party every time I found another item with a bigger bonus and wanted to maximize its usefulness. I think the stacking is ok in Deadfire, boni seem overall smaller, so it's not a factor in breaking the game's difficulty.

[mazeltov]

Initial thoughts from playing up to level 9 on PotD, with suggestions aimed only at that difficulty:

 

• Make Empower only restore class resources, not enable busted ability usages. Possibly have the use of Empower apply an Injury as another poster mentioned, giving your party an edge in one combat, but straining their ability to push farther that rest period.
• Bring back camping supplies, limit them to being purchased in ports/towns, and possibly allow a limited number to be stored on your ship (insert something about cargo space upgrades here).
• Lower casting times on most spells that have a 4.5 or 3 second casting time. Very few spells justify glacially slow cast and recovery. A handful of very powerful ones (e.g. Devotions, Moonwell) should stay slow cast, but if a spell has both a mediocre effect and long action times, as many do, it gets instantly passed over without a second thought. This could make enemy casters more dangerous as well.
• Make sure enemies not only continue to scale Penetration, but most of them should probably be using dual damage weapon types (including monster natural weapons), to make it harder for players to get tanky versus a wide spectrum of attacks. Stuff like Scepters, Morningstars, Warhammers, and whatnot. Maybe add an additional elemental weakness to armor (2 total) on PotD.
• Tone down consumables of all kinds, and their scaling. Starting to see absurd figures at just 7 Alchemy.

Again, initial thoughts. Not sure how feasible all of them are or whether they will hold up through a more complete playthrough of the game.

Edited May 16, 2018 by mazeltov

[Ad Hoc]

Some high-tier inspirations feel a bit weak. Compare the level 1 wizard spell Fleet Feet with the level 3 wizard spell Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, a spell that's also trying to kill you. I don't know what sort of methodological concerns they had when creating the status effects, but would an increase in attribute magnitude per tier, such as 3/6/9, be unreasonable?

[ArnoldRimmer]

stuff is already too expensive - I can't buy anything. And there should be more magical weapons or at least let us enchant any old weapon like in PoE 1.

[M4xw0lf]

stuff is already too expensive - I can't buy anything. And there should be more magical weapons or at least let us enchant any old weapon like in PoE 1.

Don't let your impression from the first hour fool you. You will have tons of money once exceptional and superb weapons start dropping, let alone legendary.

[tela2k]

1. Give enemies more penetration or increase recovery malus on heavy armor. So either make it so there is a good reason to use medium or light armor for frontliners for damage reasons, or make enemies pierce heavy armor so it doesn't feel like IDDQD.

2. I really like the idea people have been throwing around about Berath's Curses. Macro maluses on gold and xp and optional extra abilites to enemies, extra enemies, extra penetration or armor or health or stats or whatever to enemies from the start of the game would be great. Gives the player a lot of room to fit the difficulty to suit their personal taste.

3. Agree on removing empower. I. Hate. It. It's so gimmicky, it doesn't make sense lorewise and feels unsatisfying.

Resting is fine, not the greatest mechanic, but they just have to make high tier food extremely rare and up the difficulty enough to prebuff with Captain's Banquet or whatever
and to make it feel like you're strategically using a rare resource. Injuries is harder to fix, you can always just hardtack them away, unless there are multiple tough fights in a row so you wouldn't want to rest to keep your Captain's Banquet buff. This unfortunately is probably not going to happen anymore as they've designed this abomination into the ability trees. (Apologies for the mean words, but I really dislike it)

4. Super Enemies. At the current moment there just aren't any scary fights in the game, and even after all the difficulty changes there won't be more than a couple challenging fights anyhow unless they make some pretty radical changes. I guess this is probably DLC stuff but I really like some Twisted Rune/Kangaxx/Firkraag/Llengrath/Alpine Dragon/Adra Dragon content, that's completely optional but really puts your party to the test and gives the best rewards. Or if possible XCOM2: WotC style Pirate Lords or something who keep on being a pain and humiliating you until you're strong enough to take them on. Taking down a Chosen in XCOM2 feels like a massive step forward everytime. At least some kind of strong late game enemies are needed anyhow.
 

Edited May 16, 2018 by tela2k

[TheMetaphysician]

Here's another suggestion: in addition to making level scaling give bonuses to armor and penetration, add armor and penetration bonuses to the PotD stat bonuses. That'll make you have to care more about penetration and armor on PotD, which is what you want (having to master all the mechanics).

[TheMetaphysician]

I second (or third, or fourth) the suggestion about Berath's Curses. Some random ideas for curses:

 

(1) Double and triple enemy damage.

(2) Modify level scaling - to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6 etc. above your level. If you already have level scaling, it shouldn't be that hard to just tell it to calculate based on your level +1 or +2 or so on, right?

(3) Disable healing for your own party. Disable summoning for your own party.

(4) Disable resting (away from ship or inn).

[JibSail]

Since you guys seem to up for a challenge and seem to dislike rest spamming, I have two suggestions here.

One decent and one a little radical.

 

1. Limit the player on the amount of food they can carry and only allow access to the stash from the ship, or an inn.

 

2. Make some quests instances where you are required to resolve it within 24 hours of starting it. Since resting takes time, it would not only fix that issue, but it would also counter the inherent awefulness and flaws of camping supplies.

 

Anywho, I can't imagine these being implemented as defaults. They both attack the general quality of life deadfire set out to create. I can however see them added as options when starting a game. The same way expert mode is an option.