[1.6.0] The game feels entirely overtuned/general feedback

[darkgod]

Skill damage didnt change IIRC.

At the start melee does more damage than before though. I agree there is a problem later on (probably more so because of armour and such btu still)

[Snarvid]

Cath was saying enemy magic damage got better, and I’ve mostly been playing 1.6 as a Possessor as well as the newly Zigur compatible Drem Oozemancer and Psyshot. I can report better results from using host spells for early game ranged damage, and Frenzy is bonkers on both Psyshots and Oozemancers, so maybe that is where my impression comes from.

If magic enemies do more damage and are better at staying away, net effect on melee player early game is probably harder even if their early damage is modestly better (sans armor shenanigans). I ended up using Dominate Will as an early game carry, feels like it would have been much rougher without it.

[darkgod]

What enemies fleeing? rares & randbosses have that part of AI disabled. Fixed bosses that should tyr to flee still do though

[Snarvid]

I was not taking careful notes so it's just an impression. My memory is that it was primarily seen in enemies wielding steamguns, if that makes any sense?

[darkgod]

Even gunslinger rares shouldbt be actively trying to flee; if you see it please take note of the exact creature/talents/... please

[Snarvid]

Wilco!

[Snarvid]

Behavior confirmed in a unique master archer w gunslinger skills. I have screenshots of their talents, Disengage and Strafe seem potentially relevant.

[ricree]

Bosses with teleport is also a problem, when they are low on life they teleport away and later coming back to greet you with 30% of their life healed back. This goes on and on.

I lost a character because I took the Daikara portal and one of the chrono twins had teleport+healing (and a surprising amount of tank). He couldn't meaningfully hurt me, but I couldn't really do anything either before he got away and was back to full.

Stalemating against a boss that needs to die to enable to the portal was not a fun way to end that run.

[Snarvid]

Just fought a Spellblaze Crystal with the Invisibility sustain, the ability to Blind me, and a teleport. It was kill everything else on the level, then run around until you go blind, then try to kill it before it teleports away. I mean, it was not too dangerous on its own, but a pain in the ass while trying to fight other stuff.

[Peep]

As an avid madness player, Madness feels better. At first, when I was playing around, Madness felt AWFUL without the 500 gold and free levels. However, changing up my strategies I found myself getting further and further on average with all classes, even classes that used to be anathema on Madness, better.

I think this is mostly due to a few things:

1) Life Regen has been buffed, making early game easier so you can get your build online. As Life Regen might as well be seen as a damage reduction early on, it basically lets you coast through early rares that don't roll huge nuke abilities.

2) Stats have a bigger impact. Both between what seems to be a reworked damage rate and an influx of stats (through escourts), it now feels pretty good to stack stats as high as possible and reap huge modifiers.

3) Madness damage seems reigned in a touch. This might be a selection bias of the above, but it feels rarer and rarer that I'm eating a billion damage soul rot or flurry before tier 2 dungeons, which was always a risk. Doombringer mobs are still heinously overtuned (Surge of Power might be the worst ability to ever be seen on a rare) but outside of them and the normal problem children I don't feel as outgunned as normal if I'm not on an Optimal Class, which is good!

Madness still has a lot of bullshit in it, but it feels like a lot less is there now.


But also to echo the above: Invisibility is still crazy on the units that can invoke it, and teleporting can still get cooldowned to such a degree that without Tether you almost can't kill them.

Not that it's new, though...

[Snarvid]

Also, invisible Grand Necromancer in krog rescue mission. Seems tough on a timed

And as I discussed here, a simply immortal Ukruk due to armor and stacking defenses - shot several hundred times with all kinds of different grooves and ammo, no luck.

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=50198

[Congrolios]

Yeah, the invis mobs, especially if they can port and heal, can be a real nightmare to fight now. Not because they're hard, because they're annoying and can be so difficult to finally kill. I also ran into this particular problem during the Krog necro rescue mission.

I haven't had much time to play lately and I still need to try more insane, but from the little I tried insane seemed about the same as before to me. But nightmare and normal are a real struggle. I think it's a combination of the new spell damage threat coupled with the armor being too high. Today I did 2 nightmare runs with a Wyrmic (a class I never played previously). The first had anti-magic and the run was generally a lot easier; this was particularly noticeable in Rhaloren, Dreadfell and even against the Assassin Lord. Without anti-magic his poison was absolutely destroying me, doing almost 100 damage a turn; with anti-magic he was completely trivial. Magic damage definitely seems too high to me now.

Edit: To clarify: with antimagic magic damage seems maybe too low but without it it's insane. Tons of situations where I was just blowing up. I understand that I could use track or dig tunnels or whatever, but it doesn't make sense to me that I have to get into range as melee to do high damage while a caster can do the same damage, or more, from 10 range. Even my Wyrmic was too much; I was dealing 1k non-crit before the prides with my breath attacks, at a huge range and cone. Literally 1 shotting entire rooms of enemies.

[Snarvid]

I give up - I can't play 1.6 Tome in a way I enjoy after 60+ hours of trying over many evenings.

I've been working through the game a lot recently in order to try to complete a solid run with Psyshot for a guide, and over that time I cannot seem to consistently get a deathless Insane run even through T2 dungeons. Most recently my chara got 2-shot from full health with instant-hitting spells from a distance I couldn't see the opponent, despite having Automated Cloak Tesselation 5 backed up by several levels of the Steam Power generic, Antimagic Shield 1, Resolve 1, Molten Iron Blood 1, an active Primal Infusion, 25% global speed boost to give me more time to respond, and several +health items. At level 18, this isn't the lack of a drowning start causing problems, it's the tuning of magic damage and the cross-class combos of rares overwhelming even characters who have spent a large amount of their build-space specifically on durability. That, along with other issues previously discussed (enemy durability stacking, invisibility/teleport plus healing on enemies), have made the part of the game I enjoy (working out the most versatile and powerful builds I can and testing them against the game's challenges) feel relatively unrelated to survival - it's much more about "did you get unlucky on enemy spawns?" And, for me, that's not interesting.

See you in later game builds, perhaps?

[Congrolios]

I give up - I can't play 1.6 Tome in a way I enjoy after 60+ hours of trying over many evenings.

I've been working through the game a lot recently in order to try to complete a solid run with Psyshot for a guide, and I cannot seem to consistently get a deathless Insane run even through T2 dungeons. A character of mine recently got 2-shot from full health with instant-hitting spells from a distance I couldn't see the opponent, despite having Automated Cloak Tesselation 5 backed up by several levels of the Steam Power generic, Antimagic Shield 1, Resolve 1, Molten Iron Blood 1, an active Primal Infusion, 25% global speed boost to give me more time to respond, and several +health items. At level 18, this isn't the lack of a drowning start causing problems, it's the tuning of magic damage and the cross-class combos of rares overwhelming even characters who have spent a large amount of their build-space specifically on durability. That, along with other issues previously discussed (enemy durability stacking, invisibility/teleport plus healing on enemies), have made the part of the game I enjoy (working out the most versatile and powerful builds I can and testing them against the game's challenges) feel relatively unrelated to survival - it's much more about "did you get unlucky on enemy spawns?" And, for me, that's not interesting.

See you in later game builds, perhaps?

I'm with you at this point. On one of my last runs today I was in Old Forest and ran into a venus fly trap that was stacking poison on me for 300 damage a turn, was basically immune to damage and healed whenever I made progress and had teleports. This was on insane but it was just a rare, not even a boss or unique. Like you I was built to be durable but it did nothing. And like you a lot of my deaths now feel about bad luck rather than something I can really counter by playing better or building my character better or whatever.

[Mankeli]

It's good to see people starting to come forward with the many issues 1.6 currently has especially since 1.6 was to my understanding supposed to be some kind of balancing patch. If you are wondering who this Mankeli guy is you can start by checking out my winner's table https://te4.org/user/121593/wins. If you are looking for feedback from someone more knowledgeable regarding how the game actually plays out in practise you can stop now since they do not exist. I've won twice in 1.6 too. I think my first win was from 1.15 and this the first major patch I've seen that made the game just flat out worse and more unbalanced. I've been playing on and off but I've never thought about abandoning the game completely, until now. So with the introductions out of the way, let us begin. These observations are based on insane difficulty.

Weapon damage
Ok, it's sensible that end game melee damage doesn't reach the absurd levels of one-shotting elandar etc. However, melee characters didn't one shot those 100 armour bulwark mindslayers in tier-2s even in 1.5. The early and midgame balance is just awful now. You end up in endless fights especially against melee enemies where neither you or the enemy can't outdamage each other's healing (special mention to brawlers lmao). Because of the stun nerf you can't even have enemies heals on CD (and some classes don't have a stun). And because movement inf doesn't provide stun resistance anymore the player character's damage is lessened further by being stunned. I have no clue how somehow making the the first 100+ bulwark randboss even more unkillable somehow helps the late game weapon damage not spiral out of control. Also enemies in High Peak seem to have more armour now prolly because of higher scaling. Or how many wyrms with 247 armour have you seen in 1.5 that don't even have hardened core?

"But Mankeli there are already some changes to weapon damage in 1.6.1 it will all be better" Maybe it will maybe it won't. It's just that an experienced player like myself notices what's wrong after playing literally 1-2 characters. This would have easily avoided by doing some actual game testing or at least not just ignoring the feedback you got from non-devs doing the testing.

Enemy AI

NPCs being smarter can never be a bad thing

This is a quote from DG himself and it's just demonstrably untrue. Probably any basic course on programming single player PvE AI will teach you that the aim for AI in these games shouldn't be about maxing the "smartness" but to provide interesting, challenging and rewarding situations for the player. Monsters phase dooring away to heal, monsters with wraithform just literally running inside a wall to heal (seriously come on) etc isn't isn't any of these things. And no the escape behaviour isn't limited to some fixed bosses, like not at all. Also special mention to that dfell level where I used track to see that a monster is alone in the room, proceed moving in with a movement infusion, make one action and somehow three (yes 3) previously non-aggro monsters phase door/teleport from some other rooms right next to or very close to my character.

The new AI also means some key talents for some classes, like black monolith, are much worse now. Enemies can just go past it, or run away completely to find a de-tour or phase door right next to you (this gets old after the one millionth time btw). On a more broader note, increased monster density in prides for example combined with the ai changes, constant phase doors in particular, means that on some occasions I felt that position as the basic tool of surviving was mostly taken away. If you program an AI that perfectly counters your movement and you have so many monsters that there isn't many squares to move in to anyways movement become much less useful or even obsolete. A "smarter" AI can be more tedious to handle as already seen above but it can also lessen the tactical aspects of the game by making some key aspects much less useful.

Also as we will see in down below, the AI is still glitchy too. The current behaviour various from brain dead to omniscient skynet with some actually fun and interesting moments in between that are in the minority, unfortunately.

Just like in the melee damage example, some/most of these points were already brought to attention ages before the release of 1.6. BTW this is the responses you get in discord if you dare to challenge the assumption of the smarter the better:

@Mankeli dont temp me or I'll make ALL npcs in your game (and yoru game only) have max escape tactics always

And yes this from DG himself.

Final fight
I've been to the final fight three times now. First run was a doomed where I barely took any damage the whole fight, final bosses seemed content on fighting against Aeryn who is much tankier now .Elandar was iirc invisible which doesn't exactly help with his damage output. Second run was a CoE, Elandar used stonewall on like turn:2. Then at some point he proceeded to stonewalling something at the bottom right corner so basically I didn't even see him until Argoniel was dead. The max dam I took was maybe 400 or 600 at best. The third fight was a wyrmic and on that fight both of the final bosses targetted my char. Argoniel mostly targetted Aeryn, Elandar mostly targetted me and the fight ended with my wyrmic being one shot with a 3,843 K freeze (yes that is 3843 points of damage)

Now with the randclasses gone from the sorcs, the final fight was supposed to be consistently more challenging but less spiky when you "rolled wrong". The result however is the most unbalanced and uneven streak of three encounters that I've ever had in my 50+ wins. You go from 1) not taking damage to 2) barely taking any damage and the "smart AI" outsmarting itself by constantly spamming stonewall constantly to 3) being one shot by the largest amount of damage I've ever seen anyone encounter in the final fight -barring madness. And bear in mind, Elandar still has essence of speed too so I could have gotten double acted upon. While the other nukes aren't as damaging as freeze, let's say the potential damage could have been 7 K in one turn. And this is with having resistances too ofc. So the consistent but less spiky final fight means either complete invincibility when Elandar is silenced or targetting tanky Aeryn or getting hit for 7 K in one round. Or maybe your Elandar happened to roll invisibility and get's -70 % dam modifier because of that.

Also Elandar's randomness applies to many other fixed bosses as well. Vor can it really hard with elemental surge, not sustaining invisibility etc or he may be half dead after fighting a naga invasion portal or just generally useless. Bill doesn't do much before he starts rolling extra classes so at level 9 99% he can be harmless and at level 12 one shot you with 430 AREA weapon damage ie you die even behind summons.

Random damage spikes in general
So, when I first familiarized myself with the archer one rounding PCs in 1.5 with steady shot + headshot I've never ever ever ever would have thought to use that as some kind of a positive reference since it obviously was obnoxious. But here we go: At least in 1.5 you knew that archers were dangerous. You knew that the champion of uhr'rok doombringer randboss in high peak will hit hard. In 1.6 you can literally get hit for 1,8 K spell damage in the ancient elven ruins from animated toilet paper (aka animated mummy wrapping). Yes toilet paper hits you for 1,8 K in the midgame. You can hit for 1 K nukes that don't require LoF from rares in dfell ie they one shot you in a tunnel behind 8 monsters. You can hit for 2,2 K nukes from non-caster basetype rare monsters in high peak. Elandar having the potential to do 7 K damage on a round where he gets to double act was already discussed above.

I have no idea what the design goal of adding random spell damage one shots in place of random weapon damage one shots was. Most likely it wasn't a design choice at all but the result of no testing, or the critical feedback being ignored and feedback givers being shat on as seems to be the custom.

Shop roulette
So if you did drown before the early game is harder now at least from level 8 forward. This combined with the fact that you don't start with money anymore and combined with the fact the shops rerolls at lvl 10 make the early shopping even more of a slog than before if you want to play in an optimal way. Also, was drowning really that much more tedious (outside of madness) than first going through all the shops in the hopes of a better inscription (especially as a drem since for some reason they start with only two lmao) or maybe resilient belt/cloak and then doing the same again after the shops reroll at lvl 10 and then again when you have some cash to buy that one item that was in a shop that you already forgot which city it was in? Drowning was dumb yes and we can definitely argue there are other reasons it needed to go too but non-drowning non-starting cash solution doesn't make it automatically better since it can, and it is, dumb too. At least implement the shop wish list or something similar to the main game.

Conclusion
This wasn't meant to be complete list of everything that is or isn't bad in 1.6. And no 1.6 isn't all bad. Some of the class, artifact and prodigy changes are fun or at least promising. Some of the stupid/tedium increasing AI behaviour from 1.5 is gone but much more is added. Overall as I already stated however, I feel this is the first major version that made the game worse. It feels like the most unbalanced and tedious version so far so concentrating on the positive doesn't really work here. At least archer's steady shot required LoF lol.

I'm assuming that if someone actually reads this post, there will comments stating how it's impossible to get the balance 100% right on a patch as big as 1.6. And no it probably isn't possible but this is pretty far from 100 %. In addition it is possible to release a patch that isn't as bloated as this one with so many interdependent changes. Listening to people who tell you that something like the saves change is horrible instead of pushing it until public beta will also help.