[1.6.0] The game feels entirely overtuned/general feedback

[Congrolios]

Just for reference, I put in about 140 hours in 3-4 weeks before 1.6 was released. This was a mix of normal, nightmare and insane (mostly nightmare and insane). Today I have mostly been trying normal and a little nightmare, primarily playing a gunslinger, sun paladin and archer.

When I started playing today most things felt wrong to me:

1) Accuracy is terrible. Even putting points into the accuracy talent and using accuracy gear I'm just missing all the time. This isn't fun, but it also makes the game artificially difficult. I'm not dying because I'm bad, I'm dying because I had an unlucky attack roll. To make things worse, it doesn't seem to affect NPCs; they hit me every time.

2) Damage seems greatly reduced. I don't know if this is due to the power changes or a change in enemy armor or what, but it takes considerably longer to kill anything now. Trolls in Trollmire, for example, maybe took 2 shots on an archer on normal mode before. Now they're like 8+ (granted, many of those are misses). This applies to most enemies in the original campaign up through the first half of the game (before going East).

3) Enemy damage is GREATLY increased. If you start in the east you are very likely to be instant killed if you happen to run into 2 nagas at once and they poison spray you. Subject Z was doing 80% of my life on one shot when I was decently geared. For trash fights, before I would sometimes have to pop a rune or infusion, maybe a cooldown or play really well to live. Now if I don't do this for damn near every fight in the game I'm dead. Incoming damage is so much higher now. This may be related to slower kill times due to lower accuracy and player damage, I'm not sure. But I've never been 1 shot on normal before, in a T1 dungeon, and it's happened 3 times today.

4) Enemies kiting is annoying. I thought they weren't supposed to kite forever, but I had several instances today where they just wouldn't stop. Even as a range class, because of travel time and the accuracy issues, this can make the game so damn tedious.

5) I've seen it mentioned elsewhere but will say it again; some of the uniques are way too strong. Thief Lord and Subject Z in particular come to mind (and the fox that summons darkness in the T1 zone; the Writhing One?). In their current state these bosses are going to be hard passes for me because they're so dangerous with low payoff. Especially because I have no chance in hell to save the Yeek who gets 1 shot when I open the door and take my first turn.

Those are the biggest issues I can think of at the moment. Normal mode seriously feels like playing on insane in 1.5.10 to me. It's just awful. Nightmare was a bit better, maybe because of more and better loot, but it was still not really fun and a lot harder than pre-patch. I'll try insane tomorrow and see what I think but right now I went from wanting to play ToME a lot to wanting to play something else.

[Snarvid]

I would generally agree it feels harder. Some of that is the loss of the drowning start that used to be standard on higher difficulties, but my recollection is that the higher difficulties were to be made easier to compensate for this and the early game for weapon damage characters were supposed to be buffed, I feel like this is not the case (I'm playing on Insane). I've bounced off more zones (finding a very tough enemy who halts my progress who I can neither defeat nor avoid) as a weapon wielder than I am used to (Mitosis wielding Treant rare, I'm looking at you), and I feel a bit confined to Drem for their much stronger early game at the moment (Drem Oozemancers and Psyshots are bananas good).

I have 1k+ hours of playtime over many years.

[Cathbald]

Can't speak about the changes to normal/nightmare balance but start is generally easier on insane now.
East start IS harder but not "you're dead" hard, i do have to skip the boss usually though (easy since you land on the stairs)

Accuracy is unchanged ? 2/5 in combat acc and gloves of acc is enough until mid-late T2. Very rarely i go 3/5 combat acc

Enemy damage is not the same as before, mage and weapon user can be equally dangerous , rather than mostly melee.

Asslord was nerfed on release, he is not the powerhouse he was in beta. I've also seen a lot a complaints i don't buy about Z and Weirdling.

[Snarvid]

Can't speak about the changes to normal/nightmare balance but start is generally easier on insane now.

Enemy damage is not the same as before, mage and weapon user can be equally dangerous , rather than mostly melee.

Some snips to focus on the stuff I wanted to respond to.

I think you probably meant easier than an old non-drowning start. Much harder than an old insane drowning start.

I think the increased enemy magic damage, plus the AI changes and slower start, probably account for how much more difficulty I'm having with melee classes.

[Cathbald]

oh yeah, i didn't drown and only shopped after trollmire, sometimes kor'pul so for me it's straight up easier.
sure if you were used to the crutch it's harder

[Congrolios]

I've never drowned myself and actually don't make use of the shops much, unless I get really unlucky and still have a white weapon after a few T1s or something. As for not buying Subject Z: last night he was, no exaggeration, pulling my sun paladin in from range and dropping me to 20% health from full, on a sun paladin wearing plate. This was on normal. I had to rod of recall and cycle all my defensives and heals to try to live through his damage because I couldn't escape with his new AI. The Writhing One was one shotting me on my run last night. It's not that they're difficult, it's that they're too difficult.

Are you sure accuracy is the same? I actually never used to take the accuracy talent, except maybe a single point at the start of the game, and never missed so often as I am now with 2-3 points in the talent and focusing on accuracy from gear. Granted, I don't have any logs or statistics and maybe I'm just wanting to see misses to support my feelings of normal/nightmare being significantly more difficult than before, but it certainly feels like accuracy is considerably worse to me.

I'm glad to know damage is higher than before, though. Honestly, maybe that is the entire reason why I think it feels like too much now. I'm just getting blown up.

I'll try insane later today and see what I think. Maybe I'll still think insane is fine but it's just nightmare/normal that are too much.

[Azriel]

Just playing an alchemist on insane and at least in this game it was far harder than before.

Are there more rares now?

[Snarvid]

Just playing an alchemist on insane and at least in this game it was far harder than before.

Are there more rares now?

Again, if enemy mages do more damage, Alchemist's keep-away game is going to be less effective than it was previously.

@Cath My understanding, based on posts I cannot source, was that Insanity was explicitly being tuned to balance the loss of drowning as a default starting strategy (or crutch, as you like).

[anonymous000]

I am playing a solipsist in Nightmare. The game in the East is a bit of a slog. It seems the bosses are a lot more tanky than before, they now have much higher HP, resistance and armour. Worse yet with the AI change they are using heals or pain suppression much more often. The fight sometimes become a war of attrition where I can't kill them and they can't kill me either, at the end I just lose patience and run away. I can't imagine what the fight could be if I played a melee class.

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.

And please don't make Corrupted Sand Wyrm kite when it is low on life. If you pursued it and killed it you could be stuck in the collapsed funnel. This is especially true in the alternative sandworm lair

[visage]

It would be really nice if there were a 1.6 changelog that was, like, 2x-3x as long as the one here. Something that went more into the broad-brush changes to each changed class/etc rather than "revised Defilers", without getting to the line-by-line code changes. Is there such a document? (Tometips' changelog is admittedly better than nothing.)

One thing that I'm finding in Insane/Madness (which do not appear in the changelog above at all) is that the level scaling now seems much closer to that in Normal/Nightmare. I really wish I knew what other changes have been made to the higher difficulty levels, beyond the reduced starting money and the removal of drowning.

1) Accuracy is terrible.

I've been playing around with the new Cursed, Doomed, and Wyrmics on Insane along with some melee Adventurers on Madness and I have not yet noticed accuracy being a problem. I'll keep an eye on it to try to get a feel for just how often my characters are missing, though.

2) Damage seems greatly reduced. I don't know if this is due to the power changes or a change in enemy armor or what, but it takes considerably longer to kill anything now. Trolls in Trollmire, for example, maybe took 2 shots on an archer on normal mode before. Now they're like 8+ (granted, many of those are misses).

Has this applied to all of your characters, or is this more about the previously-ridiculously-overpowered Archer getting a big nerf in 1.6?

[astreoth]

yeah early game accuracy is a problem in order to hit as consistently as possible you need 18 higher accuracy than your opponent has defense and even then theirs a 5% miss chance accuracy can't over come.
and considering early on you'll only start with ten-ish accuracy from the talent and a lot of early enemies can have defense.
in particular I've seen starting dungeon snakes with more defense than you'll have accuracy.

so yeah my advice to over come this is to try and get accuracy up as soon as possible you'll need about ~20 points just to consistently hit anything with no defense and you'll want more to deal with the things that actually have defense.
try to watch out for any spell like talents they don't check defense and a lot of them have good burst damage that early on, a torq of mind blast or wand of conjuration can be really useful in the tier ones before you can get enough combat training to hit consistently.

Edit: oh the formula for how often you hit is that if your accuracy equals the opponents defense you'll hit half the time and the chance goes up or down by 5% for every point of difference so if your building defense you'll only get hit 5% of the time if your defense is 18 points higher than the attackers accuracy.

[Azriel]

Playing a wyrmic now all i can say this game has become tedious for melee fighters.

Fighting single mobs dozens of turns is no fun and when the mob is an oozemancer with mucus
you run away and try again and again and again until you are lucky with its mucus cast so you
don't die from its stacking poison.

Having opponents at level 18 or 19 that have 100% armor hardiness and 100 armor is annoying cause
my char has far lower weapon damage and can't hurt it.

-> Playing games shoud be fun but right now for me this game is no fun but feels like work!

[shieldwall]

Is it normal, that Insane start is with 0 money and at level 1? Not sure how it's supposed to ease an insane playthrough start.

[darkgod]

Yes the armour thing is overtuned :/ and will be reigned on soon

Shieldwall; the point is not that 0 money helps you, it's the the other changes should. That they do or not is an orthogonal problem to that and should be discusses for sure

[Snarvid]

I think killing oozemancer enemies has always been a problem, especially when they've got mitosis, resolve, and automated cloak tesselation. Horridbad as melee now, though.

I also feel like the tuning warps the old arc of the game - it used to be that weapon damage effects were bad early and skill damage could not compete late. Now it feels like weapons are straight up worse at all points, making their early game very punishing indeed, while skill damage, if anything, got better. WAI?