Tl;dr for this is a patronizing “Look, you’re trying to have fun wrong.”
Break the locks.
8 Likes
I actually started writing a new steam review to go along with switching my review to positive. But then I decided, f-that, Fatshark still has this scummy crafting system. If they give us a way to remove locks it still won’t be a great system, but it will be tolerable and players would have a way to at least work towards a defined outcome.
So as long as the locks stay as they are, my review stays negative.
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“This system isn’t fun and I don’t want to keep using it”
Then don’t. Just play the fun parts of the game. I really do understand the unfun of chasing the godroll. My point is the godroll really doesn’t matter. The game is still completely playable with a 370 base weapon, and is in fact what most of my weapons are sitting at. You are not playing this game to chase the godroll, you are playing it to purge heretics.
Why not suggest to make the unfun parts fun? Ignoring it has strong “it’s just a mole” vibes. Suggesting why one isn’t having fun with an aspect of a game is more productive than trying to sweep it under the rug. Even ignoring god rolls, a lot of weapons still want certain blessings to function at a good enough level, and the blessing grind is just as bad.
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To you.
You don’t know me.
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Yeah, I don’t know why there needs to be layers. Getting the t4 blessings takes long enough. I have 800 hours in the game and still don’t have all blessings unlocked. The locks serve no purpose. Just extra grind for no reason.
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If you want to continue being upset over doing (maybe) 3% less damage than you COULD be doing then go ahead and and keep not having fun. You do you boo boo. My previous recommendation to install a mod that increases your damage by 3% still stands.
Not true. This has been debated ad nauseum at this point but it’s not about just being able to do “3% less damage”.
If you want a specific combo of perks and blessings on a weapon, with specific modifiers, to hit certain break points. It is frustrating.
If I want a power sword with slaughterer V4, power cycler V4, 25% damage vs flak and 25% damage vs maniac with specific modifiers the odds are horrendous.
The game SHOULD be about skill. Just like picking your talents, picking your gear based on what you want. Do you want to be good at killing hordes? Elites? Specialists? The modifiers, perks, and blessings all affect that. Before the patch even strange modifier combos existed like people wanting the surge staff for control vs damage; so wanting modifiers that resulted in that (aside from the usual as much damage as possible). This is especially frustrating when some players can get lucky and get these “perfect” items, meaning they can hit break points you can’t.
This isn’t an AARPG where the allure is getting great loot. In my opinion, and from the opinions of many others, what distinguishes Tide games from other games is the high skill ceiling. And part of that is a good build that hits specific break points and choosing your gear around that. Choice, however, is removed from there. And it cheapens the experience if your skill is hampered by luck, or greatly improved by luck. It makes the game a balancing nightmare if you have “rare” weapons that overperform everything requiring nerfs that have down trickle effects on “normal” weapons.
If a 380 boltgun with perfect perks and blessings is “too strong” any nerfs to the weapon, blessings and perks will hamper non god-rolled weapons. And if you balance the game around 380 perfect items it hurts everyone else. And if it isn’t balanced with those “perfect” items in mind, than those lucky few have an unfair advantage.
Easiest solution? Give everyone REASONABLE access to all permutations and combinations of gear and balance the game around all eventualities and combinations.
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This is a Co-Op ONLY game. other players being (slightly) stronger DOES NOT hurt you in any way.
“unfair advantage” this IS NOT a PvP game. If you see other players being stronger than you as a problem then the balance issues with psyker and veteran right now are SOOOOO much worse than the crafting system. The game should be balanced around the 375 power, 20% damage buff on one perk, and T3 on one blessing weapon. It is okay for players to be marginally stronger than other players in a CO-OP game. Your skill will still carry you through Auric missions more than certain breakpoints can. The randomness of getting various skilled teammates will carry you more or less than any breakpoint even will.
Proper solutions I’ll agree the game needs:
-Fast way to bulk buy and sell weapons
-Easy way to tell in shops if you do or don’t already have a blessing on a weapon
-Ability to ‘strip down’ a weapon back to profane, starting the upgrade system again an resetting the locks
-Balancing around the 375 two T3 two T4 weapon
-Better Melk store (can earn small amounts of hexa-nuggets after missions are done, can see the shop without having to swap characters, the gamble guns aren’t complete shiet)
-The small nodes in the skill tree are in groups so you have more choice over what upgrades you get, allowing players who need the breakpoints by a little bit to get that extra 3% damage, and the “lucky few” who don’t can take other options.
Untrue. Do you not see all the threads asking to nerf Assail? What about Javelins in VT2? What about when flamer could eliminate everything? People want to play the game and feel impactful. Even based on Fatsharks design goals they want every player to feel they can do some “cool” thing that may be harder for another. Maybe that’s horde clear with a flamer. Maybe it’s melting a boss with a hammer. Maybe it’s sniping a bunch of specials. If some builds and combos make other players participation obsolete or removes much need for feeling the struggle the experience is worse. Look at all the people who wanted constant high intensity shock troop gauntlet because the game was too easy.
The solutions you propose aren’t good enough. It will still feel like a scummy gacha mobile free to play game that wants me to login as much as possible and waste time. Although for compromises resetting good bases back to profane is probably the one I think that would help the most.
And the nodes aren’t that free nor necessarily what you need. 25% damage vs carapace isn’t the same as 3% more global damage. Nor does it mean based on your talent choices that picking more damage is within reach or not already selected as a mandatory talent with other ones you are already picking. Your gear should be designed around your talent choices NOT the other way around.
TLDNR. Break points exist. This is a game that doesn’t use a modular damage system. Slightly stronger can have meaningful gameplay impacts especially on higher difficulties. And yes, despite it being a cooperative game, it can ruin peoples experience. Cooperative or competitive is irrelevant.
8 Likes
Massive patchnotes with weapon rebalancing.
Welcome changes for the most part, i would say.
Weapon damage changes as well as blessing changes are part of the update.
Meaning that some perks and blessings might have to be swapped.
Some weapons might need certain modifier numbers to get to new breakpoints.
How do we adjust our weapons without having a good crafting system?
Please FS.
Remove diamantine cost from consecration and let us spend our diamantine to
- learn blessings of choice without rng
- upgrade item modifiers (until an item is full 80 or full 100)
- remove locks from our items
4 Likes
This is not comparable to .1% of players having breakpoints you don’t on specific weapons vs specific enemies. A small fraction of players being a bit stronger than you is not comparable to glaring balance issues that affect players at all progression levels.
Ty for acknowledging this. Fatshark if you’re reading this, this would be a great change to help the game feel more progressable at higher tiers, benefiting both sides of this argument.
My argument is a T3 vs T4. It is VERY hard to get an all T4 in what you want, even harder on a 380 weapon. Making a compromise on a T3 perk/blessing and on a 375 weapon instead of 380 DRASTICALLY reduces the difficulty in obtaining these. So the difference here is a 5% damage to carapace. The ability to swap a 5% toughness damage reduction for 5% ranged/melee damage in s tree will be able to affect your breakpoints just as much. #BreakTheLocks does not need to be the solution here.
These breakpoints do not matter as much as other aspects in the game, and your weapon rolls are not the only way to affect whether or not you can reach them, regarding game balance. If you have specific weapons that you NEED the godroll weapon to hit important breakpoints, that are intended to be the strength of the weapon, then the solution is balancing the weapon for the 375/T3/T4.
I don’t think this is the right solution for this game, but I will mention and ask your opinions on variable damage (idk if that’s what you mean by modular damage). If player’s hits roll damage with a range from -10 to +10% damage modifier this would drastically soften the needed breakpoints, making your ALMOST breakpoint weapon hit the breakpoint 10-90% of the time instead of 0%, but making the 100% breakpoint harder to achieve. This would dramatically reduce the difference between players with/without certain breakpoints (which I don’t feel is that much anyways, but is definitely there.)
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Disagree. A revolver that can one shot most specials with 5 in the chamber compared to two shots will feel very different to another person on the team also trying to kill those same specials.
There have been lots of suggestions. Diamantine to unlock locks. Have what gets locked on a weapon be what you change. Being able to upgrade the tiers of what is locked but not the type. etc.
My point is that may not be an option for you. My build may specifically require all 30 talents to do what I want it to do (a stealth zealot that has lots of up time on stealth and reduces cool down on their ability) and because I am moving from the very far right to the very far left of the tree it doesn’t mean I can swap those talents out. Also, along the way, there IS no option for a global increase to 5% damage along any of those paths.
Even getting a 375 weapon with all T3 perks and blessings you want is mathematically very unlikely. And if you balance around even that it sucks if you don’t get the right types of blessings and perks, let alone their tiers. The process itself of acquiring them is also very unfun and hostile.
No, not variable, modular as in shooting an arm can destroy the arm, the legs, torso, etc. In tide games it’s all one health pool and having 100% health and 1% health for enemies and players doesn’t affect combat capability. So the damage you do is irrelevant until they’re dead. Headshots do more damage and can stagger more, but that’s it and has more to do with aiming but usually you calculate breakpoints on weakspot and body shots.
Adding randomness to both enemy health pools and weapon damage would make break points less relevant but I don’t think it’s the right solution for this genre. The gear should be secondary to your skill and tertiary to your talents.
3 Likes
I don’t believe that any specials/elite share amour type and health, so the difference at most would be ONE type of special/Elite, and would a miniscule % of players that have it when you don’t, and ONLY when they are running that specific weapon & class. If you truly believe this is comparable to the balance catastrophe that was bolter on launch and similar issues then I fear no changes will make you happy.
Also a great suggestion I would love to see implemented!
My suggestion to fix this is to take the crosspoints in-between trees and make them one node that you pick your choice of upgrade, with the option to pick more than one different one. This decreases the penalty for crossing trees and increases player’s choice and build variety.
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Not true. There’s a reason these calculators and armour types exist to maximize the amount of break points a blessing or perk would hit. Especially combinations. With your specific modifiers.
(Obviously recent patches have made a lot of these outdated, but that’s another con for current crafting. The constant balancing and patching [which should happen] really makes the current crafting system that much more painful).
For talents I am ok with costs and restrictions to make choices feel meaningful for the talents. That it would cost me more to move from ranged focus to melee and vice versa, as a kind of tax.
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Are you familiar with the phrase “Players will optimize the fun out of games”?
The reason why stats were just bars and not numbers shown when this game launched? to keep players from optimizing the fun out of the game. You have simply optimized the fun out of your game. The developers need to sort out the breakpoints for all the specials and elites so that you can’t optimize so hard the game becomes less fun if you don’t.
I haven’t asked yet so tell me, how many of these one shot break points are you missing on your revolver? Would this be solved by a slight buff to the revolver’s damage? Would this be solved by a different gun like a bolt action rifle, with more damage but a single shot? Does your revolver on Zealot hitting all these breakpoints make a Veteran using it feel like he gets less cool stuff because his class’ ranged damage buff don’t do anything that useful anymore?
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Just got to level 30. Blessings didn’t really register until that point. At first I thought it was pretty cool, I mean, 4 types of blessings gives a lot of variety.
Two days later I realized they are all incremental, nearly insignificant boosts, offering essentially no variety. Some weapons only have a few, but you have to level up that weapon and sacrifice it. It’s clearly a resource sink. Not to mention that getting free weapons for a class that has a ton will take even longer if they have few shared weapons.
What a waste of time.
Then I realized you guys have been playing without the ability to reroll at all. I felt really bad that such a good game saddled with a system designed by someone that clearly spent too much time designing mobile games targeting people with gambling addictions, then just de-monetized it.
And then I just read the patch notes with the buffs and nerfs. If the game was a little worse and didn’t have re-rolls, it would be a deal breaker.
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Humans are optimization machines. Evolution and natural selection has geared us towards it. Personally I embrace it. It’s why I like games like satisfactory, factorio, or mindustry. It’s why as a System admin I love making scripts and automating things. Even in my house I try to automate things with sensors and timers.
Now, I am probably abnormal in the extent but everyone optimizes everything to some extent. There’s a reason sub-optimal choices aren’t popular and if there’s an obvious “op” option most players will pick it.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with optimizing. What I think, as a developer, is you have varying difficulties and the harder difficulties are generally going to be your “try hards” who do all the theory crafting and optimizing. Your cataclysm difficulty where there are no material rewards to do so (same as legend) and the only players going there are for the challenge and to put their builds to the test.
The better solution, isn’t to hamper players attempting to optimize, that’s a losing battle. The better alternative is to present meaningful choices. More damage to crowds, but less to armor. Better range, but longer weapon swap speeds. Good against ragers, but not crushers. Etc. You should just have compelling choices that make it so you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but you can be rewarded by doing the research and picking good synergies (a staff for crowds, a blitz for specials/elites, a sword for heavies/monsters). And so on. Or never being able to have everything. Just hoping another team mate can cover your weakness but you can by hyper specialized into dealing with specific threats or utility.
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That’s the weird part about this game’s crafting. It feels like something that was intended to be monetized…but just…isn’t.
Like, I hate that model, but I get it. It’s weird however that the developer’s think that it’s okay to just let that system sit there generating frustration without an outlet. People will throw money at frustration, but if they can’t even do that, all it does it honk-off the playerbase and undercut literally everything else Fatshark puts out for the game.
If they just wanted more engagement and hooks for interest, putting all that wasted XP after 30 to use upgrading weapons/perks/blessings would have been the ideal way to do that.
So, we end up with a crafting system from a cash-grab mobile game in a coop RPG shooter, but with no monetization or consistent development ability, doing nothing but creating lots of ill-will towards the developer on the part of the playerbase and no revenue stream to boot.
The only conclusion I can come to is that some manager or exec is really wedded to this idea and nobody is in a position to tell them that 6+ layers of RNG on items in an RPG is a stupid idea that they should feel stupid for implementing and stupid for continuing with.
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The skill trees are huge, but the next step is some sort of prestige system to keep more people engaged. The leveling is very fast, so I am surprised they didn’t figure something out.
People like me that are unlikely to regularly play damnation regularly could use an edge, even if it’s 1% to some stat. Other people would prestige just for frames or other cosmetics.
1 Like