Been playing since the early access went live a few days ago. While the game is of course meant to be played over a long period of time, some of the scaling of enemies in the game seems a bit too quick.
Dungeon after level 10 become nearly impossible and a lot of people seem to be getting stuck around chapter 3 or 4.
I am at chapter 8 still using the tutorial level 2 weapon, level 2 tutorial shoulders, the level 1 ring from tutorial, and the level 1 shield from tutorial, showing how wide loot disparity can be while trying to progress.
One possible fix for this is to have more guaranteed drops during the storyline of the game so that not all equipment has to be RNG based. Being half way through the game with 1/4 equipment being non leveled tutorial items just shows how heavily the game can RNG. PQ1 did this pretty well by giving unique equipment from quests that wasn’t best in slot, but was enough to fill gaps while progressing through the game. Seemingly all unique drops currently within the game seem to be dungeon locked rather than quest locked, making the consistency of progression a lot harder, not to mention the difficulty curve of dungeons being way beyond leveling up until max level.
How in the universe did you make it that far with gear that weak? You should have been borderline auto-destroyed by Chapter 3 with gear that weak. I’m struggling to get through Chapter 5 with green/blue gear averaging level 10-11, even with good board management/play (scorpions are the absolute worst with the poison/blind combo).
IMO, the game is balanced around requiring players to grind gear (RNG drops) and shards/runes/scrolls to upgrade the gear. For now, I’ve found that the best way to get off the starting blocks in terms of gear upgrades is to run multiple classes through the story for keys and gems. The first run through each story node with a given class yields a fresh set of keys and gems to farm.
The big gear upgrades are in Ruby and Diamond chests. I don’t personally send pets on expeditions to unlock chests that are any lower quality than Ruby. Yes, this is painfully slow (12h per Ruby and 24h per Diamond chest), but the payouts are worth the wait.
Side note personal observation: The free daily Ruby key in the VIP monthly subscription grants a huge advantage over F2P players, especially at the start of the game.
Per Salty,
Dungeons are working as designed. Gear scores for dungeons are based on expected gear for your character level. So, at character level 15, dungeons expect level 15 gear to be equipped by the player for a solid chance of succeeding.
Outside of why for some reason that the newbie set of gear given in Chapter 1 does not include a pair of starter boots, the whole game is balanced around RNG drops. I can’t see this changing in the future.
Quite a few characters can ramp like crazy with a good starting board. I heard Paladin has a near infinite stun lock, but I personally use Assassin that can setup for 1,000s of damage with level 1 common spells. Just requires a lot of percent math to make sure the enemy is perfectly in chip kill range, then chip kill them using the board and specifically not spells. This resets most/all mana and makes it so they don’t get an attack off without requiring stun. Can also just do a 1 turn setup into stun if the board works for it so that the following turn sets up into ramp.
The game is being operated under a live service model, similar to Gems of War. As such, there is little reason to not expect the formal launch of the game to not include the 15 chapters present in Early Access. More chapters could be included in future updates, similar to how Gems of War received a second world map.
That said, in my personal opinion, I would think that many of the current game issues present in Early Access are going to be resolved before the game formally launches. I do not believe that it will be easy at all for players to reach end-game when the game formally launches. I would be very surprised if the methods being used by players to leapfrog to the later sections of the game were not removed before the game launches. If so, those players are going to lose most of their advantages when they would be required to grind out the required gear to fight end-game matches in the way that those encounters were designed to be fought.
By my personal guesstimates, I am thinking that it is supposed to take 4-6 months of grinding at a minimum to reach the current end of the story, if not longer.
The game will launch with the full 15 chapter story, and consequent major updates will include a few more chapters each time to expand the world and continue the story. (We are just starting to discuss the next lot of narrative now…!)
We will be doing a lot of balance changing as we work towards worldwide release.
@Salty I would also like to have confirmation on this.
There are dozens of people with over 100 hours already who wouldn’t be playing nearly as much if it was to all get wiped. And while I haven’t tried as I have been waiting for official Steam release, I have heard some people have already spent money on the game as well.
Nearly everything currently broken with the in game economy is against the player’s favor anyways.
Pretty sure there are players with more play time than most of the devs currently, as Lelouch is likely around 300 hours or so.