They definitely increased enemy health and damage early on. Enemies can do 20+ damage per turn on Floor 2 now.
It's not that I mind the increased difficulty, but now it just makes it much clearer when there are balance issues with RNG. If you don't get really good items early, your run will be over faster. There needs to be some design decisions made to better improve the quality of early game runs.
You can focus on a build all you want but if you don't get lucky enough to get the items you need for the build, you're left being really weakened and have zero chance of getting to endless mode. Relying on getting luck rings still requires luck to even get them in the first place.
Also even the floor arrangements require luck, because the first floor could have more or less stuff on it, giving you an easier or harder time right away. A run where you get 3 locked rooms and no keys on the first floor is pretty bad. A run where you get 3 heart locations on the first floor but no shops to sell anything means you're missing out on probably 2 of those heart locations because you won't have enough money to afford them.
I get the game is supposed to have RNG, but I just think it would be nicer if we could strategically counter it in some ways. When a game ends up devolving into dice rolls, I lose all interest. If I feel I have no agency, I lose all interest. The more smart choices I can make, the more rewarding it feels.
I think they need to tweak the RNG algorithms to be a bit more conditional for more consistent quality play throughs. For example, if you're going to have multiple locked rooms on a floor, there should be equivalent keys attainable somewhere on the floor. If on the first floor there's 3 locked rooms but I can't get keys anywhere, that's bad game design.
Feels like they tweaked the difficulty quite a bit. Seems MUCH harder to get to the endless mode now. There are enemies doing 21 damage a turn on like floor 2.
If you don't get really good items early, your run is just dead. I'm not sure I like the change. Feels more like this is turning into RNG simulator where it's all about your loot drops and less about strategically organizing your backpack.
I think this game suffers from balance issues. Mainly due to them trying to balance the game to deal with getting strong gear early on a lucky run. The best solution for this is to let players power up common items easier. The only current way to do this is with the Forge. There needs to be a way to like... socket gems on to weapons and armor, or something... in order to improve them. Right now it's like, you either get a really good weapon and it's too easy, or you get stuck with a basic one and your run just ends.
Feels too dependent on RNG to the point where I don't feel like I have much agency anymore. I'd love to turn a bad run into a good one using some strategy but as of now I'm just finding myself restarting by floor 2 if I haven't found something worthwhile.
Is it just me or do shops on level 1 generally have amazing items you can't afford, and shops on lower levels have nothing but crap? Like when I have 5 coins I see Legendary items in the shop. When I have 99 coins I see a bunch of Common items.
Feels like the shop needs to balance it's goods based on the floor number. Really frustrating to see an AMAZING item on Floor 1 shop that there's no possible way I can afford. Even if I sold my entire inventory.
Is there literally any build aside from cleaver build that can make it to floor 100 and beyond? Feels like the weakest part of this game right now is the lack of diversity in builds to get far. A lot of builds reach a cap where you can't improve them anymore and eventually you're just overwhelmed by the enemies that forever scale past you.
I've found that a lot of manastones on their own don't cause much lag, but when you have adjacent items that utilize the mana stones in some way (powering them up, requiring them, etc) then the calculations get insane and that's when lag happens a lot.
For example, if you have like 10 manastones and a wand, it's not that bad. 10 manastones a wand and a shield ring that uses mana, and now it's churning.
Unfortunately this is just a case where you have a bad enemy matchup for your build. Fire isn't necessarily a big deal, but you weren't killing the summoned monsters fast enough so they just started multiplying and stacking that burn damage on you.
These fights where something is summoning other monsters basically boils down to: Can you eliminate the summons quickly enough to give you a turn to deal damage to the summoner? If not, you're in for an uphill battle.
You have a couple of choices:
1. Kill them fast before they can stack a lot of poison on you. You don't need to be able to 1 shot them. They only poison once every other turn at minimum
2. Get a couple of Cleansing Rags attached to a weapon so you can remove poison each attack, and combine that with some heals/regen through either a beginner wand or from heart gemstone or vampirism
Generally the main goal is just... get rid of the poison dealers first. The longer they live, the more poison will stack on you. All other damage is manageable.
Very addicting game. It's just too bad that the level scaling curve isn't very balanced. You can have a really great setup but no matter what, eventually the enemies will out scale you faster. No matter how much you optimize your build, if you don't get insanely lucky to constantly upgrade it, you will eventually just run into a wall you can't overcome, through no real fault of your own.
You can build very tanky, with massive heals and scaling damage, but the enemies just get tankier, deal more damage, start laying curses on you every turn, etc. There's just no build that scales enough to keep up.
I'm not sure what the game/developer wants me to build here... If I go full damage, eventually I run into enemies that abuse that with spikes or just massive walls of HP. If I go more of a tank build, the enemy damage just out scales it until 50 armor is nothing, and each turn has you taking 100 damage total.
Hey glad to hear it! I wasn't aware the area was like your entire zone so it's probably okay that it is so crowded then. I thought for some reason you'd be able to go harvest more stuff elsewhere so that's the only reason I felt that starting spot was so crowded. If that whole space is like your "farm land" then that's totally fine. :)
Glad to hear about the changes! I hope the camera thing works out because that was probably the number one thing that stood out to me as being a bit strange to wrap my head around. Even if there was simple an option to toggle the rotating off or something that would do the trick too!
Hey Claudia! The game is looking great! I had a chance to briefly play the tech demo and here are my thoughts:
- I have to agree with others in the previous demo comments that the camera movement is odd. I wasn't expecting the camera to rotate as I moved left/right. It feels very claustrophobic like we are confined to this small area and being watched instead of the camera just pinning to the player's position and rotating with the mouse. I don't think any camera rotation should be tied directly to movement, but maybe that's just my personal feeling
- I tried the monster battle with my 3 slimes and it seemed alright but I was sort of disappointed/discouraged when in the first move, all 3 enemy slimes attacked first and instantly defeated one of my slimes before I ever had a chance to attack. I'm all for challenging fights but this feels a bit unfair for a brand new player to experience. I would expect any single full health slime to survive at least one turn of attacks even if it was being focused by all 3 enemies. At least so I can plan a defense and heal it and learn that I should have blocked or something.
It really discouraged me from wanting to continue battling because I was already basically doomed at the start and felt powerless. I also couldn't flee so I was stuck watching my opponent slowly eat away at my slime's life bars until they were all wiped out, and that was grueling and not fun at all. Not the best way to leave a player feeling in their first actual battle, for sure.
- Maybe it's just for the tech demo, but I felt the nature area was a bit crowded and had so much stuff that even though I ran around chopping/breaking and collecting stuff, it didn't feel like I made any sort of dent at all, and I'm not sure if it was resetting each day or what... but I think it could have been better if I felt my actions had some permanence to the world... like there was only so much stuff there to harvest resources from and then I'd have to explore. As of now it felt more like I just had to do extra work to get an endless supply of materials right around my house.
- I think I had an issue when using the chest where I couldn't press up on the keyboard to go back to the top of the chest inventory... it would only let me go down or left/right I believe.
- One last note about the battling... I hope there is a way to disable attack animations or speed them up or something in the future because while it's nice to have them there, I don't think anyone is going to really want to sit through every attack animation from start to finish over and over for possibly hundreds of battles. It might help just to make the turns more brief and to the point. I'm not sure the camera needs to necessarily cut to a different angle of each monster as they attack. I think they could just attack quickly from the stationary camera and that would be fine. I feel like the attacks could all be about 4x faster. It was especially painful with as I mentioned above... me being basically forced to lose and watch every attack animation in full.
Sorry for listing basically a lot of complaints/gripes... Just wanting to help make the game better! It's looking great so far though. The overall appearance and majority of the interfaces/controls are very smooth and look great.
