This is unfortunately a big issue right now, and I hope something in Chaos Wastes addresses this. I have a ton of friends who would love to get into the game, but they just don’t have the time to invest in the initial leveling/gearing systems.
Edit → Also, the power level system caps and changes from Recruit to Cataclysm confuse a lot of new players that are trying to learn stagger and cleave systems. Health and damage increases make sense, but these other invisible stats probably shouldn’t be variable across the difficulties.
This is a very valid point, especially in the leap from Champion to Legend. Having built many hours of memory muscle knowing you can often stagger a Plague Monk in Champion with various weapons and characters, to finding out you can’t stagger it in Legend unless you have very limited builds or characters is a punishing and painful process with no explanation. Getting downed in Legend by monks/zerkers is a massive frustration trigger coupled with it being baffling makes many players return to what they know in Champ and never break through the pain barrier into playing legend effectively.
And yes, it’s a pain barrier to go from breezing through Champion to getting stomped in Legend.
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Honestly I think the problem with above example is that zerker enemies are simply not a threat below legend. If they would simply be immune to staggering in their axing animation in every difficulty it would be lot less painless to unlearn bad habits.
At least that way in legend lobbies people would not simply spam attacks at them and go expecting some kind of different result because it was consistent already in the lower difficulties.
On the other hand stagger damage and talents relating to it are a hot mess for new people and I can totally understand why that might be confusing. It also does not help that the systems are barely explained in-game and you have to go trough pretty extensive tutorials to even understand the basics.
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I’ve seen this complaint many times but to be honest it makes little sense to me. If the differences between difficulty levels was boiled down to just health and damage scaling there wouldn’t be much to differentiate difficulty levels in a meaningful way.
Mass and stagger resistance are useful properties for tweaking that give a much more tangible impact on how strong an enemy feels than their health or damage output alone.
To me it sounds like you guys just want to homogenise all the difficulty levels for the sake of easy transition without considering the consequences. Dare I suggest that going up a difficulty should indeed be a large learning experience, and taking that away from it removes a lot of the enjoyment in mastering a difficulty level in which you once floundered. I’ll admit the jump between difficulties can be a bit too steep currently, but every time I’ve moved up a difficulty it’s been exciting and engaging precisely because it feels like I’m borderline playing a new game entirely.
So yeah hard pass from me on that idea. I think if such a change was made it would quickly become apparent that more was lost than gained.
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No worries; here’s a deeper dive into what seems like a hackneyed suggestion.
There are more differences between the difficulties that already exist beyond damage and health, so changing the evolution of cleave/stagger shouldn’t overly homogenize the experience. The way the AI director works and hordes during events, the patrols, the increasing lack of item spawns, the increased specials slots, horde waves and special amounts and frequencies, etc. Also, because of the change of breakpoints, certain talents and interactions change in non-linear ways as well. Ammo and health sustain due to these interactions and the viability of temp health talents change when more/beefier enemies are present. Time-to-kill increases give specializations more weight. Weapon and gear properties change in value and usage due to all the aforementioned. Just thought of the substantial increase in friendly fire as well for what it’s worth.
Hopefully these directly related considerations clarify more of the nuance in the statement/suggestion. This is why I think there is still more than enough for players to continue learning and having appreciation for, even if we get rid of the variable cleave/stagger mechanics throughout the difficulties. I also think there would be gains in reducing community toxicity at higher levels of play, since people wouldn’t be struggling with undo-ing bad habits at the same time as learning newer and different ones. You generally want to build a foundation of knowledge for your players, and continually add to that…not re-arrange the support columns when they’re trying to push their limits. If you and the devs still prefer the current learning style/deliverable, then that’s totally cool, and to each their own. I personally think it collides with the satisfying learning styles for most people on average but that’s just me.
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I did the same, thanks to a bit of guidance. Some people are just naturally better learners for certain kinds of scenarios. Some people learn games exceptionally quick. Others can play for thousands of hours and have little to no improvement. It’s something I’ve witnessed across loads of games.
Having been at the “peak” of leveling and equipment for so long, it’s easy to forget what it’s like getting started. I kind of remember though. Leveling is tedious and leveling all 5 characters from 1 to 35 is even more tedious. You have to dump so many hours just to grind up to a satisfactory power. Then you have to grind gear to get what you want.
Then even if you get DLC’s, you have to grind to get 5 reds to mulch those into dust to make a single red DLC weapon. That’s absolute bollocks when you don’t have many to begin with. If you want multiple builds, you need to get even more resources and items; which results in more grind so you can have variations of the same gear so you don’t need to dump resources to reroll for 5 minutes before every build change.
The game without grind is great and feels more sandboxy because you can just have fun with less gating holding you back. Maybe people like the gating. I don’t think I’ve seen anything to support that thus far though.
All this is just the practical stuff. It doesn’t even include some of the insane Okri challenges like 1,000 kills for throwing axe. 100 games with characters for a hat. And I think the Engineer’s masterwork pistol has a challenge for 1,000 headshots. Like… why? That’s so many. That’s such an insane time sink.
6 Likes
But again, we’re talking about developing the muscle memory and reactions to cater to Cata. If you can boost through and hit cata within 35+20 levels or whatever, then you’re definitely going to unlearn bad habits quicker than someone who has done 600 hours in legend before the buy access - cough BULLSH1T to Cata and have to unlearn far more ground in habits.
I’m not suggesting people of any time-playing-length don’t need to unlearn things, but the longer you spend NOT in Cata, the harder it is to adjust to Cata I think.
And that’s for us who know about all kinds of hidden stuff. I’m STILL showing people in legend how to Push-Stab when they’re completely baffled how I’m taking out SV with FK Greatsword. Its ridiculous that so much is hidden.
The staggering of things need to be consistent across the difficulties and as @hgjw says, if you can’t stagger Monks at Legend+, you shouldn’t be able to stagger them at Recruit. Adjust their damage/health down at lower difficulties if necessary, but left-click-spam-but-downed by plague monks at Legend is still one of the things I see QP people do and then have some kind of episode ranting about it.
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If that is meant to be the sound of the clown nose FS is wearing I fully agree.
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But I mean it already is consistent from Champion upwards? I don’t get the big deal here. Yes the step up from veteran to champion is pretty big, but if you’re the sort of player who’s ever gonna play Cata, a very small portion of your total hours by that point are gonna be spent below champion level.
I dunno this ain’t the hill I’m gonna die on, but I’m struggling you see much of an issue here. I’d be inclined to agree if it changed again from champion to Legend and then again from Legend to Cata, but as it is by the time you’re even approaching Cata you’re gonna be very familiar with what you can and can’t stagger/cleave.
its hard man…