I absolutely agree the drop rates suck
I also think the crafting system is hell but both can be fixed without even needing to touch difficulty
(also I didn’t get my red longbow until 1000 hours in despite being a huntsman player at the time)
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So I’m pretty confident we have each experienced how crappy it can be especially with how rng natured the current red drop system is. Also as incan stated both can be fixed without really touching the difficulty itself. I also personally would not care if the reds were bit more common in champion to help out the new guy.
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I’ve played this game since launch on Xbox ( look when I joined forums )
I understand how it is and was.
The biggest motivators for folks quitting the game on console was:
Controls
Insane grind ( it was and still is, this coming from an old EQ player )
Difficultly vs Perceived Reward
Bugs
The progression of the game has curated a very specific and small community that tend to be very talented and obsessive players. That’s cool. V2 is a good game.
Imo, it doesn’t matter a hill of beans how difficult or easy vet players see certain difficulty levels because they’ve moved past them.
I’d like to see MORE players and consistent difficulty gatekeeping.
If throwing more reds at people gets them to stay, I’m all for that too.
Oranges and optimizing loot is just a crazy grind anyways to reach breakpoints. Eventually you can build/copy most playstyle builds with time and patience rerolling.
Let folks play in a natural way with consistent difficulty levels, appropriate gatekeeping missions, and realistic cosmetic drops.
Most of us will still be here playing either going chill mode on legend or stretching our legs with friends on cata.
Its largely immaterial how easy/difficult legend should be based on feelings.
Its more important than the second mission of the game’s end event shouldn’t be harder than literally every boss mission and easier than most of the next difficulty lol
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Lmao. These are some facts. I have 2500 hours or so in and I still don’t have a red Mace/Shield, but have gotten 7-8 longbows
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This topic seems to strive from being anything constructive, however I have to add that I believe more “casual” players have as much right and are as important to discuss such topics as “elitists”.
Balancing those two surely are always tricky.
But simply ignoring or not allowing so many players, who clearly struggle, to discuss such topics seems to me not very beneficial for the game.
Those wars between “elitists” and “casuals” seem to become so frequent in this forum…
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Reds and drops rates really go beyond the scope of this thread but as I already said the system can and should be improved. Even disregarding my personal believes regarding min-maxed stats.
Well I still frequent legend of all things even tough I have pretty much completed everything this game has to offer apart from some weaves content. For me it still matters. I agree that the difficulty should be more consistent across the board but pocket nerfing cod like what happened with fort won’t exactly fix any of the underlying issues but just makes the event too easy.
To some extend I agree
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It’s not about that. Generally there is little point in having a conversation if your stance towards the party with whom you want to engage is that of it being comprised from
Of course that in theory resorting to insults is a valid strategy to get your point across. It’s been documented since Arthur Schopenhauer’s Art of Being Right. However, in practice I’d say you are generally better off finding something more meaningful to do with your time in that situation.
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Which is the argument. Any good game, or even skill in life, are made of foundational building blocks.
In order to increase skill, you must be faced with more difficult challenges that focus on specific skills whether they be mechanical, positioning, or knowledge based.
It makes little sense from a foundational perspective to make CoD the most difficult mission.
It makes even less sense that completion of CoD doesn’t matter to accessing Cata.
If the goal is a smooth progression system that gives players the opportunity to develop skills in order to progress, its counter productive to deny them the skill building opportunities to make them successful at subsequent skill ratings.
The game teaches legend players how to play on legend ( except cod )
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I’d like to point out that the problem with CoD is not the inherent difficulty, but that it’s Fake difficulty .
You are playing against a cheater with a stacked deck.
Can you win? Of course, you can, but not everyone is Stu Hungar.
You are forced to fight in a ring, around a killzone (you get slowed and lose stamina if you drop in it) without any cover or chokepoint. And the killzone affects only the players, not the enemies.
Multiple specials can carpet bomb the area from the distance and you cannot reliably think to kill them in time during hordes and armored foes’ waves.
And the armored foes are intermixed with hordes causing a drastic reduction of cleave and crowd control.
This “more of everything” recipe Fatshark has for increasing the difficulty is plainly a failure and we can see that either in the weapon balance and in the maps where the spawning are just crazy.
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Although I am fairly quiet in this discussion I definitely observe it quite interested.
Please don’t feel directly approached. My comment is aimed to both parties (‘casual’ and ‘elitists’).
His expression is of course exaggerated and unfitting.
I am just trying to redirect the discussion back towards the light.
I’m sorry, what
How would you ever sensibly increase challenge (without turning everything into one-hit damage sponges) other than by creating more complex situations with more enemies? If anything, arenas and enemy compositions that present a new challenge are the right way to mix things up. This map event just ended up spawning a bit much relative to the difficulty it’s in.
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Consistency is a big point in my eyes.
Right now as I see it convo legend finale (and enchanters lair finale on leg+) are standout spikes way above anything else at their respective difficulty levels.
There is both inconsistency between map difficulty (why is convo 10x harder than against the grain?) and inconsistency during the level (why is the entire of convo boringly easy gatekeeping followed by a finale that annihilates most pub teams).
If you are arguing legend should be harder then well, that’s your own opinion. In my view champ->legend is already enough of a jump and legend->cata is fine as well. Maybe in an ideal world champ would be the grind difficulty and legend just gets a little bit extra bonus grind % for having big difficulty spikes, I can see that generating a lot less heat.
Also I think we just need less of this elitist 4k hours pc player vs casual ‘git gud’ dichotomy. If you consider any complaint as someone who needs to ‘git gud’ then you have effectively put yourself on ignore mode for 2/3 of the posters here (many of which are experienced cata+ players) and are no longer really taking part in a discussion. Likewise if you consider all counterarguments as 4k+ hour PC elitists who never play anything less that DWONSC3 twins hypertwitch then you are also putting your hands over your ears.
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I’m sorry if I was unclear.
I was referring in particular to “fill all the maps with armored foes” approach which makes CC weapons like 2H sword a joke.
I don’t know if you’ve played Verm1, but the original concept behind CoD’s finale can be found in the map Chain of Fire. The final event there demands that the players hold down a pressure plate atop a beacon for a set amount of time in order to light it ablaze. It is very much equivalent to the requirement of sitting inside the circle for a set amount of time in order to disrupt the scunner ritual, though obviously within the dimensions of the first game.
Now, the thing is that only potato players actually attempted to hold the plate and get hammered from all angles while doing so. The clever thing to do was to just touch the plate and then move to a defensible position (like a corner of the ramparts atop the beacon), since the event’s force exhausted quite rapidly and you had a much easier time holding the plate down after the first two waves were dealt with. Obviously they wanted to make Verm2 a bit harder so the waves in CoD aren’t that easy to exhaust, but you can still do it if everyone gets pushed off and you just fight everything that was spawned up to that point. It’s just that you need to reach a breakpoint in the ritual’s progress to actually make headway and you’ll have new waves spawning once someone goes back up.
I believe Fatshark’s goal is to keep the mission very RNG based. So that every mission seems different and is a new experience. The “more of everything” approach makes an arguably good job at keeping that RNG.
Now we have to ask ourselves what the other options would be? How make an event more difficult without just increasing the amount of enemies (and the increased stats of said enemies) with the restriction that the changes also keep the RNG.
Changing something of the event itself? Maybe let the result of the failed ritual be a Chaos Spawn seems to me a good idea.
There are differences in the soup itself. If I am not mistaken, the lower difficulties just slow you down. While the higher difficulties actually remove stamina over time.
Played it.
If I remember well there was no fallback in the progress and anyway you could easily defend the center because:
Enemies came from a distance and didn’t drop or climb from 2 inches away
You didn’t have blighstormers .
No Chaos warriors or shielded Northmen
The general pace of VT1 combat was slower and there was no hyperdensity.
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Basically there seem to be two factions raising shields at one another here :
- Convo is good, other maps are too easy.
- Other maps are good, Convo is too hard (or too inconsistent, or gives too big of a handicap).
What I gather from this is that the one thing everyone agrees on is that the difficulty of Convo is higher than all other maps, which makes it undeniably relatively OP, and that answers @FatsharkJulia’s 6-month-old question.
What to do about it is up to FS and what their vision is for the game - and I trust them with this.
Complaints specific to Convo that emerged :
- The specials and elite spawns are inconsistent from one run to another
- The visual effects are a handicap
The reasons for the increased perceived difficulty in QP, that are reasonably mitigated in premade groups or dealt with by regular Cata and higher players :
- The layout of the event is a challenge as players are easily surrounded
- The unusual level of required teamwork compared to the rest of the map, or other maps and end-events
- The specials and elite spawns are relentless, regardless of event progression, making the slightest mistake difficult to recover from
- Going for full-book runs, which dramatically decrease success rate on Convo compared to full-book runs on other maps (in fact I think the success rate for Convo with no book is similar to other maps with full books)
- The respawn points are in hard-to-get-out-of semi-dead-ends, which makes going for revives a riskier move than finishing the event with downed players (which is counterintuitive in such a coop game)
- The puddle of goo - though it is usually entirely avoided
- Effectively, all of the above mean that once the event goes south, it’s very hard to save it, and the odds of it going south in QP are multiplied
Ultimately, the things the devs should do (in my opinion) is :
- Analyze the specials and elite spawns, perhaps tweak the numbers to make them more consistent (does not mean easier or harder, just make the success of the run less reliant on luck and more on skill)
- Do something about the blinding/twisting screen effect upon entering/quitting the ritual circle, like removing the 1 second black screen and applying the distortion to peripheral vision but not the center of the screen to allow for special spotting and sniping.
The things they could do include :
- Change the spawning of enemies to be dependant on event progress instead of time, allowing time to recover of players are pushed out of the ritual’s boundaries
- Change the respawn points for players to less enclosed areas
- Make the puddle slow enemies down or debuff them in a similar way to the player
The goal should be to increase success rate without altering the essence of what makes the event challenging and while still being fair.
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Assign a “value” to enemies and spawn a fixed amount of each value ; i.e. blightstormer and globadiers could be “A”, liches and assassins could be “B”, etc… and spawn no more than 2 As and 2 Bs per wave or at the same time ; or something like that
Obviously everything was downscaled and different in the details, but the concept is still the same. The point is that people usually still got destroyed if they attempted to hold the plate straight away, since they just got swarmed by slave rats that were far more dangerous than their present iteration while also getting nuked and skewered by guaranteed Skryre rats. However, that event had an easy fallback in the possibility of retreating from the plate, clearing the two big waves of slaves and guaranteed specials, and then resuming the event with far less threats. You can still do this in CoD as well, provided that all people bail from the plateau and clear the waves, but no progress is saved from the last sorcerer that popped and the waves resume with the same intensity once you’re back up. The concept isn’t bad at all in my opinion.
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You do realise legend and below is for casuals right? Cata exists now…