Welp, i dont really care about power level stuff, but isnt all these changes pointless if rats continue to stack on each other? Even current power levels that is over the top wont allow you to push/cleave stacked rat pack.
5 Likes
I agree on everything except the last sentence.
What V1 does alot better than V2 currently is the hardest difficulty. Cataclysm is insanely tough to beat without good coordination and careful progress through the level. But it was consistent, you KNEW what you were going up against.
V2 however is mostly āeasyā with insane spikes because the AI director got bored and decided to throw in 5 specials, a boss and a horde while youāre in a small area. This is awful design and ruins any fun, because Legend wipes should be occurring due to lack of teamplay or player skill, not random moments of bs that you canāt survive.
Hence why everyone resorts to using the strongest, most overpowered weapons, talents, skills without any experimentation of even contemplation of using different setups.
Another thing V1 does better is (horde) spawns, the frequency in particular. On Cata hordes felt intidimating, but the random rats strolling the streets were also dangerous enough to make players proceed carefully, but with a certain determination to progress.
V2 is a rush fest because you KNOW the next horde will be coming within a minute or two after the last one (slight exaggeration), so you have to rush to the next good spot and sometimes actually WAIT at an advantageous position to embrace the onslaught. I never had this thought in V1, ever. So why in V2? The hordes and special spawns feel soā¦formulaic to me. Too scripted in their frequency but too random in their quantity (especially when 6 specials spawn within 20 seconds).
7 Likes
this beta patch feels much better in that first part though. many wipes now are due to hordes, simply because people are either bad at the new combat, or have no ability to protect others as the live patch doesnāt require any real teamwork and everyone is a killing machine that does everything. the director spaz out moments do still happen and itās unfortunate, but most of my failed games right now are people dying in hordes because someone wonāt cover a flank, wonāt guard the guy sniping a special, etc.
2 Likes
I canāt swear to it, but over all it feels like the director is bugged.
When it spawns a special it seems like it runs a query, finds a scenario that it should spawn an Special, spawns that Specialā¦ then runs the query again prior to scanning the new environment and spawns another Special with in a fraction of a secondā¦ or did FS plan on having 2 of the exact same Specials spawn at the same time?
The director going off sometimes seems like it didnāt properly query the environment prior to spawning mobs.
I do totally agree that the difficulty spikes are a problem. I think the AI director needs to be tweaked in that, and have a much lower chance of spawning a boss while thereās a horde, or vice bersa. Itās so common on Legend that it feels like itās intentional every time.
What I mean by punishing challenge is that it should punish you for not playing well or making mistakes. In VT1, you took one hit because you got lax, it would be awhile before you could recover that health via the random healing procs. Two? You were messing up. Three and you were in serious trouble. It was a challenge mode that you had to be consistently skillful in.
Legend as it was certainly lacked that element and tried to make up for it with insane spawns. Though in general, VT2 is much more forgiving because of how easy white health is to get.
1 Like
Yeah I think that is the basis of a lot of the negative feedback āWe have to work as a team instead of competing for greencircles and I canāt kill everything with any weapon or any class so I give up.ā
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Hordes are on timers and there are specific spots in the map that trigger bosses or not when you pass them. If you canāt kill a boss fast enough you will have to deal with a horde, and need more dps on your team. The idea is so you canāt run four tanks and cheese everything.
Wait for a horde before entering an area with a boss trigger. Kill bosses faster.
2 Likes
And where are deeds then?
I understand all these mechanics, yes. Boss triggers are also stretched out; for example, on Brachsenbrucke, travesing the whole of the river bed (if the wooden bridge route is closed) can have a boss trigger, even as far as around when you go over the stone bridge.
Hordes are on such short timers that unless you wait for a horde and then dart through them every time, you have a much higher chance of getting boss and horde at the same time than even in Cata VT1. Cheesing it by waiting for hordes before you traverse them is an extremely dull tactic - perhaps sometimes the best strat, but across a whole map is just tedious as hell. And even then, hordes can come again so fast that you can get them while killing a boss unless youāre using extreme cheese strats like a team mostly composed of boss killers. And on maps like Against the Grain, there is no good spot to receive a horde prior to entering the first building area - where a boss can and often does spawn.
The odds are a bit too high, and with the higher special spawns, itās an extreme difficulty spike - I donāt think difficulty spikes are particularly enjoyable gameplay, and have been a major source of complaint. Not that they should not exist at all, but in most of my Legend runs, the main cause of wipes has been these extreme spikes like this. I think the AI director should have a reduced chance (not zero) of spawning one if the other is out.
Iām not wanting Legend just wholly neutered; Iād rather the actual hordes an enemies be more of a threat, and have the challenge spread out more instead of concentrated into āF.U.ā scenarios. Iām actually quite glad that they are fixing the hero power scaling, because it felt too easy to cleave through everything for a long time.
I am just curious how +% Power is applied.
- Does it modify raw Hero Power or scaled Powerlevel?
- Are different +% Power bonuses supposed to stack multiplicatively or additively.
Seems to me that the whole boost curve system for crits and headshots as well as power boosts is supposed to reign in rampant stacking of multiplicative damage bonuses.
Not going to lie when I first started to look into the combat mechanics of the game I thought it was needlessly complicated. The more I dive into it the more I like it, you can create a lot of nuance and noticably differentiate the whole arsenal using all the knobs and levers you have built in.
1 Like
You can still basically do thatā¦ as long as the power is 300(on both) the trait and bonus stats are great, but they were also good in v1, I donāt understand how V2 makes this any different.
Also it was even more advantageous in V1 to have a higher rarity weapon because that effected base damage and 3 traits provided a way larger benefit than 1 trait and some meager stats.
3 Likes
are you actually trying to suggest that people learn to adapt their playstyles and wait instead of advancing up all the time? the nerve!
2 Likes
also, as an aside, the amount of people not responding to audio cues in this game is tremendous.
iām talking about legend games where people ignore lurking specials behind, like a clearly audible (to me) gasrat/assassinā¦ but instead of dealing with them, they move on ahead, trigger a boss, get jumped by more specials and a horde. or not being able to discern a packmaster closing together with a large pack of slave rats.
then they come to the forums and complain about the AI director lul.
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The number of times Ive been poked in the butt by a silent rat suggests there might be something off with the sound cues.
4 Likes
not ALL rat attacks have audiocues. which is fine as per game design. you have to keep a swivel head and cover your angles. if youāre getting poked in the butt by a rat running up to you itās something u gotta correct tho. visual + audio.
in a messy horde where my party is caught out, i normally try to maintain a 360 view by turning my camera around after 2 strikes, since each strike stuns the enemy line in front, thereās a brief period u can inspect the back so you donāt get poked in the butt.
Wrong in vt1 you would always hear footsteps of enemies behind you and dropping down out of sight, you would basically sometimes play just according to what you could hear behind you. Backstab attacks of stray rats would give you an audio cue. A big part of the core gameplay was designed around having distinct audio cues for everything. Since were still having the same core gameplay, and sometimes you hear footsteps and and even very very rarely the backstab cues, we can expect this to be bugged right now.
The game is not supposed to have unnoticeable enemies sneak up from behind you!
Ofc it helps a lot if you keep checking your surroundings so you know what angle to focus most and can react and plan ahead of time before theyre mid backstab. Its not intended that you need to spin 360 all the time though. Go play some vt1 and enjoy the great and reliable soundscape the game had. Whish it would be working in vt2 as well. The curent state of the soundscape is as broken as some other areas.
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Thats a serious downgrade to how things worked in V1. Also Im not sure its in fact working as intended as sometimes you do hear things sneaking up on you.
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Iām certain it is bugged, but I also think that thereās just a lot more ambient sounds in VT2 that can drown out the sound of a backstab. It seems to have a faster pace than the first game. Either way, it needs to be heard consistently.
1 Like
I agree that the audio cues are buggy. Iām wondering if itās related to not being on dedicated servers, because it seems like there are times where only the host can hear various specials spawning.