I think it’s too late for this set of challenges. Zero chance they get changed. But expressing our opinion on the nature of these challenges might have an effect on future challenges. And I’d personally like those to be less “grinding things that aren’t very challenging themselves” and more “demonstrating a threshold of skill”.
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solo a cata shield shatter, crippling, illusionist Mino with no boons so you can get hats that match your skins
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P much. It’s very hard to find a reasonable middle-ground. The problem with the “demonstrating a threshold of skill” approach is that we have a long history of challenges that end up being so absurd people will just bypass them completely through various methods, thus invalidating the challenge and whatever value might have been attached to the reward. Feed me, sinner! (essentially a try it until the stars align simulator) or Fortunes of War are good examples in this regard. It’s difficult to keep track of the first one since the only reward involved is a commendation chest. But the amount of Cata FoW frames floating around players that exhibit a very rudimentary at best understanding of anything related to the game is indicative either of them being carried through the map by the people who actually like it and are good enough to beat it with a smaller team, or just the use of various exploits to circumvent it. Or the infamous 20 elite headshots streak for the engineer, requiring the use of a fairly inaccurate pistol having a delayed fire. People either rushed it at release when it was bugged and required only 5 kills, or set up conditions for it via twitch mode and standing in places where enemies could not path and would subsequently remain still, making for easy targets. It was never going to happen in a normal game and setting up a party of people knocking elites over so that you can shoot them easily again feels kinda awkward on a bunch of levels.
Personally I don’t really mind how they went about it this time and I think it could have been a lot worse. Ultimately, I guess it could have been an option to simply chuck this batch of uniforms in Lohner’s Emporium, so that people have something to spend their shillings on, or a reason to play the game and acquire them.
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I tend to agree that all of the white skins could’ve just been added to LEoW and had virtually the same effect.
As for a skill requirement, I’d rather have something that required a decision to make things harder. The Skull in the Halloween event was a very good design I think. If you wanted to ramp things up you really could ,and it meant there was a lot of choice for players to be able to carry the skull at lower difficulties, get the rituals without the skull or even miss the rituals all together.
In Path of Exile you can sanctify shrines to spawn lots of enemies for a boon, and something like this in CW for skins might suit me better I think. Some part of a map (maybe like the patchwork Demon thing) that the players can choose to smash to fight off an intense wave that would give them some progress towards a skin. It could be chosen at a shrine( like the boss giving health) so the next map had a Patchwork Demon to smash for the progress towards the skin.
but as I’ve stated already, if people gonna game the system either by cheesing FoW or rushing 1st map on CW, they’re going to do it no matter what the system happens to be.
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I just popped back to say shield shatter relentless mighty mino is absolutely awful. Instant BS right there.
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You know, it would be cool if FS added a system to Chaos Wastes where you’re supposed to find some kind of chaos relic or lost relic of the order factions and bring it to the end of the map- doing so increases the difficulty of the map, but it also increases your currency and rewards you with a unique skin if you complete the entire run doing this.
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Play BW, go out of bounds. EZ time.
This is precisely what they should have done, while keeping the current version of the challenge with X shillings as a reward instead. Challenge is no longer a necessary means to the outfits, shillings can be obtained numerous other ways so RNG nature of the challenge isn’t nearly as punishing, it’s just a bonus to help you get the outfits if you wanna go after it.
Let’s be real though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the main reason that these skins, as well as the new CW’s illusions for Forgotten Relics weapons weren’t released through LE, is because they’re terrified of the incredibly broken economy they’ve hand crafted, wherein finding a middle ground price point that’s appropriate for both those that have, and those that have not been grinding shillings this whole time is increasingly impossible.
The economy would be a lot less broken if there were actually some more cool things to damn well buy in LE, so their shunning of yet another feature they introduced then mostly dropped doesn’t do anyone any favours. Guess I’ll just have to speculate since it’s not an issue they seem willing to actually talk directly to the community about.
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My speculations are basically that either; Lohners was put into VT2 as a test for darktide with no real intent of populating it properly or there’s an issue with inventory space that means they can’t just spam the skins into the emporium without filling up people’s inventory.
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I love the grudge marked monsters as they are, but just think higher spawn chances would help- Legend 1-3 Cataclysm 2-3 maybe? Gives a better chance. Or at least have some of these normal spawning minos have a better chance to be grudge marked. But 20+ runs with 0-3 normal minos is already getting dull.
I never thought I’d be asking for more minos but here we are lollololol.
Monsters normally appearing in the maps (with the exception of the final map) will not have any Grudge Marks at all, ever (unless you are playing Cata 2+).
This is intended and should stay like this because right now Grudge Marks are a risk/reward mechanic for the Chests of Trial and in a prolonged-sense also for the map finals where may have some good boons less because you skipped to many chests before. It is all about decision about if, when and how many chests of trials you want to open.
Making them spawn for the normal monsters as well will ramp up the difficulty to much as they are no longer optional.
Frankly this aspect of the grudges should be default for all monsters rather than exclusive to grudgemarks and chaos wastes
it’d go a long way to curbing a lot of the issues with monsters being bullied way too easily by way too many things
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I wouldn’t mind a monster hp increase in cata, but I do think you’d need more changes than that.
It’s already painful enough getting stuck fighting a boss with some weapons, mace and shield vs a cata boss with 50% extra health would likely be faster to restart the entire run at that point.
Wouldn’t slow down some boss killers much either, BH cares about animation loops more than knockback range, beam bw would just do the same thing but like 10s more, sott is sott. Think a straight toughness hike would only really be a good change for the “decent/good” boss killers. Some builds still stomp even c3dw bosses, which I believe is more than a 50% increase?
Maybe an increasing knockback resist on chained staggers would be cool though? Would let the “oh banned word” ults still function, while making ledging way more situational/precise.
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Oh no, do you happen to have seen this thread:
Quick, better hide before @TmanDW hunts you down!
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grmbl grmbl [loads the Trollhammer while staring at The Book]
…
But seriously, what I think about that topic I already said in the linked thread, and I don’t think we should reproduce that entire discussion here.
Nevertheless, I can’t refrain from remarking that if your main objective is to prevent monsters from getting bullied, doing something about ults and ither outluers is waaaaay more effective than doing something about hitpoints. But I will be charitable because I think of @Incandescent highly and assume he was mostly referring to the knockback reduction part of the statement and not to the hitpoint increase.
Related: I also wouldn’t object to buffing monster damage output a little to make them more dangerous, especially in combination with a hitpoint decrease and posibly a stagger reduction / resistance. Having the difficulty of monsters lie in avoiding their damage - which is skill related - instead of in damage sponginess - which isn’t - seems like a good change in general to me.
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definitely that, I don’t want something like relentless where it’s removing a mechanic entirely just y’know, making it harder for the BW to just yeet through a trigger. As for the other stats I suppose it’s up to debate? Minos and Spawns certainly don’t need a leg up in terms of damage output or health whereas Rogers probably do (imo)
Bile trolls are likely fine as they are and Stormfiends need…a full AI rework or something
also call me a masochist but I was thinking of…maybe both
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I’d honestly even take the knockback immunity, if not then at least for certain parts of combos it might make bit more sense. Probably bit outlandish idea but I just cant stop smiling when I see swiftbow elfs running to the hills when relentless hits the field.
I guess I just find enemies with lower hitpoints & more dangerous offense - that is nevertheless explicitely counterable with skilled manuvering - more engaging. A monster that you can kill in under a minute but which requires near perfect play to not get squashed sounds a lot more fun than a monster that requires minutes of slogging away at it while getting away with putting up a half-assed defense.
For example; Imagine if the Blightstormer got its hitpoints increased by a factor of 5 while the speed and damage of the storm gets nerfed and it can’t pick you up anymore. Would that make it a more fun enemy to fight? Absolutely not. The danger - and fun! - of Blightstormers is that you need to localise and quickly dispose of them while avoiding getting walloped by other enemies and the storm. Making the storm inconsequential and the stormer a damage sponge will make fighting one require less skill, less focus and engagement, and take longer. None of those things increase fun. And the same principle I think applies to monsters. Making them harder by making them damage sponges is a lot less engaging then making them harder by making their offense more dangerous.
Some might say that actually goes against my point of nerfing ults and such, because those turn monsters into a shorter fight, as I just said I want. But that’s passing over my main point of the discrepancy between monster killers and “normal” classes, which makes monsters unbalanceable.
If someone at Fatshark completely lost their mind and put me in charge of gameplay balance, one of the first things I would do is making it so that monsters die almost as fast as they do now to monster killers and a lot faster against “normal” classes (while still leaving a factor of 3 - 5 in killing speed between DPS-ers and other classes). Probably by nerfing the monster damage ults and other outliers, and nerfing monster hitpoints concurrently. Then I would reduce monster stagger lenght and distance (not strenght) and buff monster damage. Then I would make them spawn more often during a map.
I don’t want monsters to overall be nerfed. If anything, I even want them buffed a little. I like fighting monsters, at its core, and they add a lot of fun to the game. But I’d just change the nature of the challenge they pose a bit to something that I think is more engaging. And I want the experience of fighting them a tad more consistent across different group compositions.
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yee that’s fair, I suppose I’m just so used to monsters getting blown up before they get a chance to really pose a threat that in my mind the only reasonable method to make them engaging is actually giving them the time/ability to do so
ofc there are limits, we’ve all encountered invincible/regenerating bois now and I don’t think anyone wants things to get that protracted. imo there’s a sweet spot between short but intense and long but boring there to be found.
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I tried fighting a cata rampart boss with a sienna dagger. Better to just quit and restart.
The actual solution is a far more involved attempt at fixing boss killers OPness, and will need to consider so much for various different classes and builds that it’s possibly a much easier band-aid just to slap this damage mitigating stuff on bosses.
I’d like to add as well that I’ve had some really good, challenging, fun and engaging fights with the new grudge marks. It’s not all horrible doom and gloom and some of it has made the boss encounters immense fun. It’s going to be a hard road to make the worst offending marks easier to deal with, without forcing some combinations turning the bosses into a wendy house…
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