New Player Experience Improvements

[Fortescue]

So you think certain aspects of Nightmare and beyond are more unfair than others? Interesting.

This is a commonly reported observation and is what fuels most informed balance discussions.

I've abstained from most difficulty discussions on purpose

[Suslik]

I only play on normal

apparently that's the reason why some skirmisher talents deal 600+ damage/turn on nm rares while you're like level 15 ._.

[Fortescue]

I only play on normal

apparently that's the reason why some skirmisher talents deal 600+ damage/turn on nm rares while you're like level 15 ._.

Actually I didn't code Skirmisher so don't blame numbers on me Blame me for passive chance of 100% mitigation on projectiles and melee, though.

[DragonMasterHawk]

Reasons I don't like adventuring parties:

1. They are incredibly small maps with 2-5(?) elite mobs. Since they're randomly placed, sometimes you can fight them 1-by-1, and sometimes you start in sight of 3 of them. This drastically alters the difficulty of the fight in a way that generally can't happen in normal areas (you either have opportunities to scout and prepare, or you start next to a bunch of strong guys, but you're still on the stairs so you can opt out).
2. They converge around the Sandworm Lair, which can make it unduly frustrating to enter/leave, as well as talk to Agrimley if he spawns there.
3. They're entirely uncontrollable. It would be different I think if, for example, there weren't adventuring parties unless you opted to complete a quest that spawned them.
4. Most important: Games are generally about rising and falling action--the ability to supply players with many intense moments without overwhelming them. I believe the world map should be a reprieve compared to the dungeon you just completed, a place to catch your breath. Since adventuring parties were implemented, this is no longer the case. Out of the fire, and into the fire. It's remarkably annoying.

[Fortescue]

I agree with your Most Important bit. It would be nice if exploring at least the West was not stressful for new players.

[Davion Fuxa]

In relation to Adventurer Parties, I wonder if it makes sense if potentially we just changed Adventuring Parties so that they were no longer always 100% hostile unless you pissed them off. Maybe treat them like the Assassin Lord where you have a mild discussion with them and potentially get away unharmed.

Maybe in the conversation they'll demand you give them your alchemical ingredients for one of the elixirs, and if you comply with the demand you might potential lose out on obtaining said elixir if adventuring parties manage to collect the components they needed to make said elixir. If you refuse, situation as present

Another idea is perhaps they might be a little more friendly, and opt to just offer to trade your alchemical ingredients for some of there's, thus resulting in them still potentially making an elixir but allowing you to make one yourself in return (IE, once you get the ingredients and run off to the alchemist for the potion you can now make, you know 100% which elixir from the other guys will be made).

Other stuff could also be done - like meeting an Adventuring party might trigger an event that say some wild Zigur Patrol appeared to attack the adventurers and you just happened to stumble in. If your Anti-Magic you can help the Zigur, if you are an Arcane player then you can help the adventurers, and if you are neither then maybe you just give some random free loot from scavenging the battle scene.

[donkatsu]

Adventurer parties are 100% avoidable, it's just tedious to spam the wait button until their random walk finally moves them out of the way of where you're trying to go. Either make them optional, with absolutely no penalty for refusing the fight, or somehow mandatory and unavoidable. Currently it's effectively the former except you have to mindlessly press a button a bunch of times in order to make it happen.

[Davion Fuxa]

I think before they were 100% avoidable because they behaved like Orc Patrols - but this was changed because of how difficult and adventuring party can potentially end up being.

[Zizzo]

Adventurer parties are 100% avoidable, [...]

No, they aren't. They can ambush you around corners, or trap you in one of those cubbyholes in the forests south of Daikara, where there's no place to run if their random walk carries them toward you instead of away from you. Happened to me repeatedly before I finally put my foot down.

How come everyone hates adventuring parties so much? I only play on normal and tend to eat them for free loot and xp pretty easily.

I play normal too, and before I started blocking them, they generally ate me.

[donkatsu]

They are 100% avoidable if you actually take care to avoid them. That means no turning sharp corners (go around wide so you can see where you're going), and waiting around nooks to make sure there aren't any adventurer parties nearby before you dive into them. Of course if you just press autoexplore you'll run into them every once in a while. That is why I bring up the button mashing.

[Suslik]

They are 100% avoidable.

Really, no. Forest near the fortress, there's a thin 1-square wide passage that you can enter with no parties around and when you're trying to escape you may suddenly find that the exit is blocked by a party. When you return, other exit may be blocked as well. Happened to me only once in ~500 hours of gameplay but still very frustrating.

And yeah the fact that sometimes you spawn surrounded and that's like 100% death ticket(especially if it's am patrol and you are a mage) and sometimes you just lure them out 1 by 1 safely is really the worst.

[donkatsu]

If you're trying to make a point about an event that has happened only once in 500 hours, you're clearly just being pedantic for the sake of being contrary. According to my profile I've played 1200 hours, and I have never once run into an adventurer party when I didn't want to.

[HousePet]

There are far more important things to address for the new player experience, most new players have played some sort of game like this before and would know that adventurers are murderous bastards.
Invoking higher difficulties as examples of hard adventurer parties is also silly, as any new player playing on nightmare or above is really trying to get killed.

An important thing to do would be to encourage players to run away, and make sure they realise that dungeons can be exited if they are too hard.

[DeNarr]

Well, here are some of my "New Player Experiences" that were not that great.

1. No starting Mage class. The Alchemist seems like a very odd choice to be the base class for Mages, and you don't get a normal mage until you get the Archmage.

2. It took me a long time to unlock the Archmage, because the game never told me what "Artifacts" were. I kept auto-selling them, and it wasn't until I happened to replace an item that was an arcane artifact that I was able to complete that quest.

3. The game naturally starts with you being unable to see the whole screen, and I had to ask here on the forums how to fix that. (I haven't actually gotten home to test that fix yet).

4. Auto explore was great to find out about, though I find myself using it more often as a quicker way of resting. If there's a button to quick rest, it would be nice if that tutorial mentioned it.

5. The Graveyard quest. I got that quest with one character, opened a casket hoping for treasure, and proceeded to die. Ok, I was being greedy. I'll try just doing the quest as he asked, and coming back later to get the treasure. Nope! Even worse idea. Would be good if the quest warned that it was a high level quest, as I lost 2 characters to it.

6. General boss strength can be very strange. I get warned about the secret area in the Trollmire, yet have never had a problem there even right at the beginning. Yet I get told to go to the maze, and I die every single time. I've just stopped going there for now.

7. The "Inscription" button is so vague. Took me a few characters to figure out what it was doing.

8. I hate feeling like I need to look up a game on a wiki in order to play it properly, so some clues on how to unlock characters in game would be nice.

That's all I can think of for now. Despite all those "experiences", I'm still really enjoying the game, and hoping to learn more.

[Fortescue]

4. Auto explore was great to find out about, though I find myself using it more often as a quicker way of resting. If there's a button to quick rest, it would be nice if that tutorial mentioned it.

Rest is just "r" on your kb by default, but if the tutorial doesn't tell you that it really should.