Look: balancing weapons, abilities, and everything else is difficult. Especially when you’re working with multiple difficulty options.
My suggestion, both to reduce the work of your programmers for any future update and to ensure a more consistent experience, is probably mildly heretical by Tide standards, but it’s simple:
Stop changing enemy health across difficulties.
Every difficulty bump not only adds more enemies, but makes them individually tougher. This makes it harder to balance weapons (the all-important ‘breakpoints’ for semi-auto or slow melee weapons especially) and generates a ton of extra work for…well, little to no benefit from my perspective.
It’d be far simpler to work with both for players and the devs if difficulties only changed enemy types and numbers rather than also changing health. It would ensure more consistent weapon behavior, allow for more fine-tuning of balance with player builds, and give everyone involved a break from having to math out stuff to ensure weapons don’t end up being overpowered.
Well it would make early game players feel like they are hitting their enemies with a wet noodle.
It would also make certain individual enemies insanely strong for early game players.
There is a good reason for so many games having enemy hp scale with difficulty.
This would require such a radical rework of almlst every game system that I don’t think it’s in any way practical. The damage output of a fully levled and geared Martydom Zealot is so far past anything a level 10 player can even come close to achieving.
I think a bit better would be having t4 and t5, which I believe are what most people play, should have the same or near the same breakpoints (I believe they are already the latter). Easier to balance the fame for the majority of the playerbase while not screwing over new players completely.
So? Weapons already don’t have much of a variance between 0-80 on a damage stat.
I would also be amenable to something like this. My beef is with how even with all endgame stacks of damage you still can’t consistently do in Damnation things a weapon should be designed for that you can in Malice and Heresy - Thunder Hammers, headshots with infantry lasguns on elites, etc. It makes certain weapons and builds less useful.
I have a reversed opinion tbh, each difficulty should have tones of enemies, more or less the same ammount across every tier, but only changing enemy stats and adding new mechanincs.
Like lets say on heresy+ bobmer now can perform a suicide blow, gunner has frag nades, dog can smell invisible players, crusher can charge, mute smashing players 5 times, etc.
So people who want to progress and learn will do, and learning process also will be fresh cause of new mechanics, newbies and casuals will have their time to learn and power fantasy difficulty.
Nah, they should just balance the weapons on the damnation difficulty.
It might mean some weapons will be insanely powerful on lower difficulties, but they’re supposed to be easier anyway.
They won’t really be doing this because the devs self admitted to playing mostly Malice and balancing around it.
I personally agree with the idea of not making HP bars a balance factor. Maybe give some enemies some weaker armor in lower difficulties, tops. Ontop of that, weapons having a damage stat etc is absolutely meaningless to begin with, so get rid of that too.
The game is extremely obviously not balanced around Malice at this point. Most things these days are very strong even against Damnation health pools. Less people would need to look to the most extreme Auric modifiers for a challenge if gear actually was balanced around Malice health pools.
Again this is very evident by how easy it is for only part of a team to out DPS spawn rates on basic Damnation.
No I’m observing a clear trend in decreased time to kill and overall power creep over the game’s life so far. I don’t know how you possibly miss that TBH. I agree the game might have originally been balanced around Malice, but now the number of things you can one shot in Damnation makes absolutely no sense in the context of apparently being balanced around health pools half that big. Like how do you explain thunder shovel single target damage and stick to “it’s balanced around Malice”
They probably just gave it some amount of armor pen and damage and didn’t really care that it ends up oneshotting crushers on damnation, too. They probably also don’t test with minmaxed weapons on malice, doubt they’d have one with thrust and whatnot
If you pay attention to Damnation breakpoints enough it becomes very hard to believe they’re not tuned the way they are intentionally. There’s very clear intent in the number tuning in regard to Damnation health pools and if you refuse to see it I don’t know what else to tell you
You’re welcome to believe the devs don’t pay much attention to tuning to the top difficulty but there’s also heaps of evidence in VT2 that tuning to top difficulty is exactly what they do.
This could work if you make all weapons a stock model that has no variations in stats then have them defined by only blessings and perks.
I’m actually for this and also to remove the leveling all together.
The endgame is great fun to play but far to hard to recommend to friends.
So if you did rework it like that your easy mode just has hordes and like 3 elites.
Then medium has way more of everything and hard is just endless waves like we got.
That said I don’t think we will ever get that so I would settle for 3 or 5 times xp.
That way when I recommend my mates the game I don’t have to put the warning out that you need to go leveling up your class for 20 hours to max out and play with me also FYI there’s 4 classes so good luck.
It’s pretty clear by all other game design aspects that they dont balance around damnation, though. You literally have infinite ammo via survivalist because the amount of elites juice it up so hard you can go infinite. Certain passives and auras let people have infinite ability uptime in any bog standard damnation room. The game clearly is not balanced around the amount of elites thrown at you in damnation. HP values? I dont know, maybe they consider it after all. There is no way in hell they actually go into damnation games though. A lot of game mechanics are absolutely anti balanced for higher enemy counts and end up being absurdly abusable.
Also it’s not really a matter of me believing, there’s actual dev posts where it’s stated.
Never meant to imply they always did a good job at balancing, or that they play test their stuff well enough, just that damage and HP numbers are clearly tuned with Damnation in mind.
If you can produce the post where they say they balance around Malice that’d be great, my recollection is that the wording is somewhat more ambiguous than that, but I do think it’s likely that treat malice as the “default” so to speak, while still considering Damnation in how things are tuned. Regarding abilities like survivalist scaling too well into high difficulties I think that’s more of a result of them trying to give people the feeling of power a lot ask for while still trying to maintain difficulty, and their answer to that was enemy spam, which favours on kill requirements.
Again not saying they’re great at balance just the damn is definitely a consideration.
