One of the problems of current damage-dealing mechanics (where some stuff wrecks easier difficulties too much while being comparatively bad on Damnation) is the fact that base damage for all non-weapon damage sources is “just a number”, not tied to any effects or circumstances.
The game would work better overall if all those sources had their damage tied to enemy HP difficulty multiplier, effectively dealing the same %hp damage to enemies on any difficulty. Assail psykers would stop completely wrecking T1/2. Grenades would reliably kill chaff and not fail to do so specifically on Damnation. Bleed and soulfire would not need that much gating in order to not be super effective in T3 and below.
PS: I’m not talking about buffing any damage, except maybe vets frags and psyker’s BB. No, current Damnation is largely fine - it’s lower difficulties that should get all such damage proportionally lowered.
in vt2 they actually kinda have a system like this in place, where they cap out power levels for every difficulty except cata. I’m surprised they didn’t do that again for this.
Yeah ogryn grenade box with no scaling and the new elite values is a joke. Meanwhile even level 4 psykers can literally kill everything on T3 with assail. bad system
You really shouldn’t be playing T1 / T2 anyway. That difficulty exists, so new players can get to level 3. Likewise Malice is there to get them up to speed for Heresy, which they should start playing at lvl 15. That’s it.
If you play anything below Damnation or at the very least Heresy+ at lvl 30, then what are you doing? And at those difficulties the balance is alright.
ITT: MMO max lvl and raid ready characters are pondering, why the starting area and the mid lvl quest area for new players are so easy.
Time and again there were changes implemented by Fatshark that are clearly indicative they HAVE to respond to things being not particularly balanced for lower difficulties. Soulfire being gated into oblivion is one prime example of it. And it was never good in Damnation.
So while I don’t really appreciate elitist “You should only play it the X way, all other ways are incorrect”, that’s even beside the whole point raised in this thread. Fatshark have to balance all the difficulties at once, not only T5. And it very much shows that they’re experiencing troubles with the process.
Hm, haven’t heard of that. I’m for it though. Makes joining new friends less of a solo stomp, even though I still tend to hold back with them unless I see them struggling.
according to this there’s no power cap at legend, but I remember reading it’s around 600, and cata should be uncapped. But the site is likely right.
I don’t think this would be a good idea, and honestly I don’t really see the issue. What’s the problem this is trying to solve? That certain abilities are too strong at lower levels and too weak at higher levels?
I certainly wouldn’t want these abilities to be stronger at higher difficulties, because that would just make higher difficulties even easier. For experienced players, Damnation High-Intensity can already feel too easy at times.
And making the abilities weaker at lower difficulty would accomplish what exactly? Just make the lower difficulties harder? There are people that don’t want to be challenged per se, and just want to run through and annihilate everything. They can do that now and I wouldn’t want to take it away from them.
I agree this is problem that does not exist. Players that still playing malice on 30 lvl does not care about balance and new players dont have gears and feets to deal with heresy+.
We have multiple examples where things were nerfed specifically because they’re too strong somewhere else than T5+ (flamer, soulfire, etc). Even recent Assail nerf (although entirely justified) was aimed largely at lower difficulties - it didn’t change much at T5+.
This is generally bad for the replayability - it cuts the amount of builds that would be great for T5+.
PS: There are also “unfortunate annoyances” that happen due to absolute numbers balancing, like vets frags not killing chaff in T5 unless you pick grenade tinker.
Things being too strong at lower difficulties and too weak at higher difficulties can present problems, because it makes it much harder for the devs to hit the right balance that works well on all difficulties. For example, the Mk3 Power Sword is absolutely absurd on Malice and below–you don’t even need to power it up for the Veteran to rack up an insane amount of kills in melee. But in Damnation, it’s just a decent melee weapon. Similar thing happened to the Flamer–on Malice and below it would destroy everything, while in Damnation the Flamer’s weaknesses became more noticeable an the weapon naturally got reined in.
If you tried to make it so that the Mk3 Power Sword of Flamer were just ok on Malice, without adjusting those weapons for higher difficulties, what would that entail for Damnation? Enemies in Damnation have something like twice the HP of those in Malice (trash mobs especially). If you end up with a Flamer that struggles to clear hordes on Damnation, then it’s a hard ask to bring that weapon to DAmnation.
So now you’re talking about scaling weapons as well as abilities to the difficulty?
I’m of the opinion that in most games you should prioritize balance for the desired effect at the higher / skillful / more challenging end of play. If that isn’t good and sufficiently challenging/balanced you’ll lose your hardcore player base.
From there, so long as there isn’t anything egregious at lower difficulties, you just let it be. Most casual players aren’t going to stick around long enough for any of these balancing woes at lower difficulties to even register, IMHO.
Trying to scale the damage of all these things across difficulties just make it even more convoluted and complex to understand weapon stats, damage numbers, etc. It’s already too convoluted I feel.
The only people seemingly left out of this arrangement are people with high end gear but not the desire or skill to play on higher difficulties. So they are left steamrolling through easier difficulties. If anything, this could be fixed at a matchmaking level, so people with a high rated items and higher player levels don’t get matched as much with people still leveling up.
I do not enjoy artificial level scaling in games. If i take my god gear to a low level game i want to feel the difference. Not be gated backwards into obscurity again.
All penances that are difficulty gated, only require a minimum difficulty.
You can do all penances on heresy or damnation.
Usually it is easier/faster, too, since there are more enemies available.
I agree that your acquired gear should not be scaled down (at least not completely).
There has to be some actual power gain that is achieved by playing.
All players should feel that they are getting more powerful, and bad players should be able to use the benefit of having stronger equipment, to partially compensate for their lack of skill.
That said, op did not suggest to scale down your gear.
The suggestion was to difficulty scale everything except your gear.
This makes sense imo.
At least the damage of blitz abilities could scale.