Right now, most people on the forum have their own opinions about the game’s balance changes, but what we really need is a clear difficulty baseline for balancing.
Like, what difficulty should actually be the standard for balance? Post your thoughts below.
If enemies had the same health values in all difficulties balancing the game would be a cakewalk, there are better ways to make a game hard than sponge enemies.
the most commonly played / the one designed to be the centre of the spread. which i put as heresy , but i suspect it might actually not be an option on this list.
Auric. I remember a time, probably before Havoc, when it could be considered quite difficult, about 50/50 chance of winning/losing (which was fair for the highest difficulty, without all this fuss and restrictions with party finder). I think it’s a great indicator that now it’s very rare for anyone to use third wound curio — whereas before, it was much more common to see exactly three. Recently the sense of danger in the main game mode is quite minimal, auric winrate ~95% i guess
Damnation, Auric should then be a good challenge above that, and havoc should be the nearly impossible ball crushing difficulty for the elite gamers that want the extra extra hard challenge above that
voted Auric because VT2 weapons were balanced around Cata from 2020 onwards (which in my extremely biased opinion was when weapon balance was at its best…if you don’t include OG trollhammer and moonbow)
In my experience, it makes sense to balance breakpoints, cleave etc. around the highest normal difficulty. What’s passable in auric will be comfy in heresy etc. etc. and so the limiting factor becomes the player’s skill in said normal modes. Obviously Havoc is a different beast entirely and I don’t think anything should be balanced around H40 because that’d skew the game too much and turn Havoc into the new base game but without quickplay and the sweats would once again be left with nothing interesting for them.
