Tree-based talent generation on enemies = balance nightmare

[cybaster]

1.7 is completely out of whack at higher difficulties.

Making the talent generation more predictable and comprehensible to the player in a way that they can react to strategically sounds good on paper. In practice it just gives every boss and unique a huge boost to talent synergy which leads to more dangerous and better defended monsters overall.

[Sirrocco]

It seriously cranks the difficulty on the lower difficulties, too. I'm reasonably competent as far as a normal difficulty player goes, and this has seriously cranked the number of bosses that I have to pay real attention to lest they kill me. It also means that a decent number of the bosses are now "engage, try to kill them, disengage, heal, come back and try again, see if you can manage to seal the deal on one of them before they seal the deal on you." This is happening on normal, within the first 20 levels. I got unlucky with Gunsnake and had that happen to me on my third dungeon. I imagine that it must be making the adventuring parties and Zigur patrols into absolute nightmares.

Was this intended to dramatically increase the difficulty level?

[cybaster]

probably not intended; i remember this kind of thing happening the last time there was a drastic talent rework involving monsters, was gradually repaired as many months went by as individual synergies were identified and nerfed. doubtless this run will be much the same.

based on my observations so far the worst of it is a spike early-midgame, where damage levels scale wildly in the second tier zones before player defenses can catch up.

i got a necro over that hump in insane/roguelike and he's been sitting on his lichform extra life for 20 levels with a parasite collar as backup.

the problem in a grand sense is that the game throws all that damage at you all at once but sprinkles good resistance/survivability gear randarts ten levels after where you can generally expect to be 1shot. in spite of the content of my first post in this thread the change to class-based talents weighted towards completing talent trees could work but the scaling is going to need major revision.

[darkgod]

If i understand correctly the problem is the appearance of T3 & T4 talents too early right?
And no this was not really meant to drastically increase difficulty, more like to make the game more varied and to reign in on rares having 3 pages of talents

[visage]

If i understand correctly the problem is the appearance of T3 & T4 talents too early right?

I suspect that's not quite the issue. Talents within a category tend to synergize. If a rare has their class points scattered across all of the T1 and T2 talents they have available, they've got less synergy than if they're deeply invested in a smaller number of categories. That would suggest that if you didn't want a difficulty increase with this change, enemy talent points need to scale more slowly with level than before.

Edit: It occurs to me that one way to make enemy talent points scale more slowly would be to tweak their mastery levels.

[cybaster]

If i understand correctly the problem is the appearance of T3 & T4 talents too early right?
And no this was not really meant to drastically increase difficulty, more like to make the game more varied and to reign in on rares having 3 pages of talents

That's part of it, but having the talents built around working classes mean more monsters just... work better, like the classes themselves. When the game generates a unique/boss with two hard-hitting melee classes it's frequently brown trousers time, because it's highly likely the monster spawned with a bunch of melee-centric talents that work really well together to delete players. Marauder springs to mind as being a terror in tier 2 on insane, if it gets paired with a class that adds to its melee capabilities.

[cybaster]

Small update: my personal experience so far indicates that certain enemies are synergizing with some of the classes to present threats far in excess of the stuff around them. An example: hummerhorn unique/bosses that roll synergizing melee classes use this damage with their extreme speed to absolutely shred; they also tend to be difficult to flee from.

It sounds like a joke, but given their placement right at the gate of tier 2 content, the bees are the ones doing the laughing on insane. They are so far the biggest source of and-then-suddenly-our-hero-died for me.

[Pyros]

Small update: my personal experience so far indicates that certain enemies are synergizing with some of the classes to present threats far in excess of the stuff around them. An example: hummerhorn unique/bosses that roll synergizing melee classes use this damage with their extreme speed to absolutely shred; they also tend to be difficult to flee from.

It sounds like a joke, but given their placement right at the gate of tier 2 content, the bees are the ones doing the laughing on insane. They are so far the biggest source of and-then-suddenly-our-hero-died for me.

This isn't new though, bees were super scary last version too because some of the best damage increases were actually low tier skills, such as Rampage(first skill) and GWF(also first skill) and a combo of both was devastating on a global speed body(bees especially and snakes to a lesser extent).

I would say the most noticeable changes so far is some classes use skills that didn't use to be a factor/very rare that are actually devastating. The biggest culprits are all the clone making skills, such as Inner Demons(this happened before but not as frequently), Split(I don't think I've ever had a CoE split me in 1.6) and Shadow Simulcarum(happened a couple of times in 1.6 but now is a lot more common).

Ironically my only death so far is to one of the skills I thought was crap when I played the class, Tremor Engine on Sawbutcher. 12secs pins every turn after it activates, leading into ~300dmg(after mitigation) volcano has been a big issue although it's mostly a matter of counting the pins and dispelling only the last one but I've got caught trying to remove one earlier and then you just take ridiculous damage into another tremor engine with the sawbutcher staying at range spamming low damage furnaces.

Ultimately the game is certainly a bit harder, but I don't think it's crazily so, part of the difficulty is just getting used to certain skills you didn't see before so you don't expect them/forget they even exist because at player scaling they're not so great but when a monster has 16levels in it, it actually does a lot of work.

[whitelion]

I would say the most noticeable changes so far is some classes use skills that didn't use to be a factor/very rare that are actually devastating. The biggest culprits are all the clone making skills, such as Inner Demons(this happened before but not as frequently), Split(I don't think I've ever had a CoE split me in 1.6) and Shadow Simulcarum(happened a couple of times in 1.6 but now is a lot more common).

This has been my experience too, and it also seems like some of these skills appear earlier. It's now fairly common (on insane at least) to encounter Inner Demons in a T1 like Heart of Gloom, which I don't remember being the case in 1.6. Spatial Tether is also very dangerous since it removes your ability to run away/reposition, and I barely remember needing to think about it in 1.6 whereas I do it now. It seems monsters now are more likely to know/use it.

[Pyros]

I would say the most noticeable changes so far is some classes use skills that didn't use to be a factor/very rare that are actually devastating. The biggest culprits are all the clone making skills, such as Inner Demons(this happened before but not as frequently), Split(I don't think I've ever had a CoE split me in 1.6) and Shadow Simulcarum(happened a couple of times in 1.6 but now is a lot more common).

This has been my experience too, and it also seems like some of these skills appear earlier. It's now fairly common (on insane at least) to encounter Inner Demons in a T1 like Heart of Gloom, which I don't remember being the case in 1.6. Spatial Tether is also very dangerous since it removes your ability to run away/reposition, and I barely remember needing to think about it in 1.6 whereas I do it now. It seems monsters now are more likely to know/use it.

Tether is a tier2 skill so it wasn't that uncommon before, it's just Chronomancers in general are pretty rare(both now and in 1.6) compared to some other classes so you didn't see it too much. It also often comes with Anchor now which is pretty deadly once you get banished and such. I remember one PM in EoR campaign in the last area back in 1.6 that had the combo and it was the first time I saw it and he basically obliterated me. Now it happens more often(also TWs now have the proper dog skills so they have the mini unstoppable thing) which makes them more dangerous, but still Chronomancers are pretty rare.

It is however dispellable and the effect ends there, while if you get Simulacrum or Split, even if you dispel the effect, the clone still stays and murders you(in the case of split it actually even does more damage if you dispel it since split reduces damage you take). Inner Demons I believe you can always dispel without a demon popping, but that's assuming you're not sleeping/still have a dispel after removing sleep/nightmare/slumber. Doesn't help that clones for some reason seem to take no damage even though they always pop with terrible life values, even when cloning a glass cannon build that has no defenses, so killing them is actually a pain.

I'd say the other annoying thing is many more monsters seem to have healing reduction now. Every other summoner/wyrmic has Nexus, rogues constantly have insidious poison(although they sometimes use the other points, which are just as bad tbh besides leeching) and it's virtually impossible to remove since they reapply it every turn, a lot of melee mobs have Bleeding Edge, a lot of reavers/corruptors have Epidemic and so on and so a fairly large amount of randboss combos end up with one way to reduce healing(generally by 80+% too once you're 30+ due to talent levels) so stuff like regen and direct healing is a lot less potent at keeping you alive unless it's coupled with high saves or good removal.