I have friends who want to get into the game, but playing with them at 600HP is a slog. Even if I go down to basic equipment, my HP is just too high for playing recruit or veteran with them. They don’t have fun because I am destroying everything too quickly, and I don’t have fun because there is no challenge.
It would be great if we could lower our Hero Power at certain difficulty levels. For example, it’d be nice if we could just cap ourselves at 150 for Recruit and 300 for Vet. Ideally, we could also de-select all talents, so we can just use a few talents when playing lower difficulties with friends. This would help us get friends into the game and populate the player base. As it stands, none of my friends stick with the game because they want a co-op experience and it’s no fun co-oping with max-level players.
That’s true, and Back to basics Deeds exist (even if Talents still work on them), but Deeds are rare, especially on the lower difficulties and B2B even more so; and the difficulty-specific Power caps are still quite high. Limiting personal Hero Power (to help new friends along or just for self-imposed challenge) would indeed be a nice addition imo. Although I’m skeptical FS would add that into the game proper, a mod (and getting it approved, of course) could certainly do the job.
Hmm… Actually, are there other Deed modifiers that affect the character directly? I can think of Sudden Death and Abduction right away. It could be an interesting challenge mod to apply those individually and separately to each character.
the difficulty in this game for new players isn’t the power difference, it’s more of positioning and knowing what to do. as a veteran, you already know how to handle horde, look out for specials, don’t fight out in the open (people haven’t learned this on legend yet mostly)
and you know what all the bosses can do and what the maps layout are.
your friends would be still trying to figure out how to block stuff. so yea, maybe just take a shitty weapon and just follow them around and have fun.
This is connected to an old hatred I have with Hero Power since the Closed Technical Beta as it made progression and exploring balance a complete diluted mess. Since both level and gear helps rack up your score, it also means that it’s completely impossible to experience what the very first day in VT2 was as a level 1 unless you do Back to Basics deed or request Fatshark to completely zero-value your stats (Modded realm is countable too but most people want their loot who isn’t max level.)
I agree with OP in that I really would like to put myself on an equal level with my teammates more than just “equipping blacksmith weaponry”. It’s a solution but it only goes so far and a poor one at that as I’d frankly like to have my traits or attributes in exchange for talents/Hero Power, and vice-versa.