Storyline and Dungeon Power Creep too Steep?

[Lyrian]

@Tacet

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.

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.

@Tacet

Dungeon after level 10 become nearly impossible and a lot of people seem to be getting stuck around chapter 3 or 4.

Per Salty,

@Salty

I have the answers you seek!

The normal difficulty scales with your level until 50, so even though you haven’t changed difficulties it does still get harder. Difficulty I unlocks once you’ve beat normal and are level 50, then the enemies scale to a slightly higher level. Then difficulty II unlocks when you clear Difficulty I, and so on.

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.

@Tacet

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.

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.