I've made a different thread otherwise is crazy

What would like to know now, is a list of the most easy and hard battles. For Nightmare but also for Normal difficulty. I think overall balance should be acceptable, and of course depends on which skill/builds you have, if you buy a lot of items, etc. So again, really hard to say to judge it well however, if say 10 people tell me that lizardman battles are too hard, then maybe I should check it! or if the first round of exploration in Dingirra is really bad even in Normal. So I can change those "extreme situations" at least thanks!



Maybe a scheme like this:



EASY

Battle XYZ bla bla. Maybe explain why. Of course, a fun thing of RPGs is finding exploits to win, but if is really something lame I should fix it



HARD

Battle XZY bla bla. Like above. If you have saves as always feel free to send them

Like I remember all this now??



Hard

Mercenaries after just arriving in Dingirra, especially Kiduu, though with the Lugal I always tried to get 2 hammerguards 'cause the halberdiers are tough.

Elven gladiators. I replayed the previous battle more carefully so I had almost full HP/mana for this fight so it wasn't the lack of rest.



Moderate

Fighting all those gladiators to find the assassin after an already exhausting day (yes I HAD to kill all mercs, don't ask stupid questions). And probably the assassin too if I didn't have Purification.

Ants.

Dwarven gladiators. The D-bro never leaves the back row though.

The entire Galanna quest chain (or whichever required me to get that giant orb).

The guy who had Jariel's stuff.



Easy

Fire Demon. Didn't really feel like a boss fight even.

Yeldin. Whatever he did, I didn't feel it.

Riley's mom.

As I already wrote: I play normal, and battles are too hard. They are harder than "Loren" on "hard" difficulty", quite a lot more difficult.



It is easy to win any given battle. However, refreshing HP and SP is either limited (sleeping ... x days til next plot event) or quite expensive (inn). The SP-using atacks are usually much more effective than anything else. Not using special attacks means healing all the time. And there are sequences like the underground tunnel where you cannot abort between battles at all. This means, you need to replay the whole day if you won your first battle with too much loss - taken too many hits, used too many SP, used too many potions.



This difficulty is too frustrating for me, I have stopped playing for now. The weather is nice outside. Maybe I will try the "easy" difficulty when it rains the next time, but until then...

Yes I think that to get same difficulty as Loren Normal you need to play in Easy mode. Probably there's a gap too big between Easy/Normal, I will lower the Normal difficulty further on next update, lowering enemies stats overall, but still the mechanics will be the same. Sorry to be frustrating you, but I really got too many complaints about Loren's difficulty basically from anyone. I still want to have an Easy mode that anyone can win though, in case they are more interested in the story than the RPG part itself

Maybe you could just ease up on the downtime system for the lower difficulties. Like on easy you heal 50% after any fight, on normal 25%, or so. I could share page upon page about methods for making your resources last long (without using tavern/pots) but that should be for people struggling with nightmare.

It is easy to win any given battle. However, refreshing HP and SP is either limited (sleeping ... x days til next plot event) or quite expensive (inn). The SP-using atacks are usually much more effective than anything else. Not using special attacks means healing all the time. And there are sequences like the underground tunnel where you cannot abort between battles at all. This means, you need to replay the whole day if you won your first battle with too much loss - taken too many hits, used too many SP, used too many potions.

Personally, I think the "resource management" part is one of the things that makes SotW really stand out. If you really push yourself, you can overcome most opponents without much trouble, but there's always a chance you're going to run into someone while you*re still recovering from that last fight. I finished Acts 1 and 2 in Normal Mode now, and I didn't run into too many tricky situations by using special abilities rarely and only when I really needed them. (Though I failed Chalassa's quest - probably shouldn't have assassinated ALL the guards.) Also, I spent a lot of my money on pots, which really helped.

I am uploading new build, with a much easier Normal mode. I don't think I'll go lower than this though.

I can understand people coming from Loren's game - that game is MUCH EASIER. The "Easy mode" of Loren seemed like a cheat mode. And the Normal, as well, you could go on without never buying any potion. Here if you don't buy healing/energy potions you're dead (in most cases)

I did it because I want even people who aren't familiar with RPG or simply don't have the time to use all tricks, and I've kept it even for SOTW. But perhaps Normal in SOTW was a bit too difficult. After this update, I really think isn't the case, enemies are considerably weaker.

Ah well, not having enough potions "might" have been the source of my troubles...



Going back to balancing: It seems as if equiping the party with better gear gives only marginally improved combat performance. However, spamming out spells increases the damage from say 10-12 to 60-70 in most cases. Which needs potions to keep up the SP.

If you want to get hardcore about this I can assure you I beat nightmare mode without using more than one consumable in total (flashbacks excluded), and that was a scroll that I bought just to spite the Master of the Pits. I probably didn't need it, but since I had it...



Key abilities include Vaelis' Recovery, Krimm's Rage, Riley's Energize and Chalassa's Meditate. These keep mana up, though Energize very marginally so. You can leave a monster alive until you have regenerated enough. If you have a ranger, the heal is awesome and you shouldn't spend its mana on anything else if you're trying to conserve. The higher health your party has, the more efficient heals are. If you are trying to simply regenerate with a character, use fast actions. Normal attack only has 6 delay. Position swap has 4, though another 4 for the guy you swap with.



However this playstyle can get pretty annoying (delaying victories for a long time just to regen) so I don't really think it should be necessary to use in order to beat normal without using potions. And yeah I use a lot of basic attacks.



And if you don't mind playing the slot machines you can refresh the rare shop until you find some nice SP regen items. Even more annoying to do than delaying victories though.

Yes in practice, either you use lots of potions or you get early the SP regen abilities of the various characters. But also defense and speed are quite important IMHO. Depends on playing styles though.

In Loren you really didn't need to worry much about stats/buffs, only pump up attack at maximum and you'd win

Yes, speed and skill ftw.



I'm playing an EASY-mode now. I see there's a new version. I'll just quickly agree that the EASY-mode in the beginning of act 2 was not easy in version 0.8.14, because you'd see still 4 Kiduu- or Galanna-fighters in the invitations mission. Not that they couldn't be beaten, but it really felt like a normal-difficulty in RPGs in general, I'm not comparing to Loren this time.

I'll try the invitations fights again with the new version.





EDIT: Act 1 was fine, imo.

Ah so even the EASY mode was not really easy? I might need to reduce those starting combats difficulty even more then. When you have 5 party members is much easier, but with just 4 ...

Should always "risk" making easy too easy for the people who just want story. Even if it's not difficult they might not wanna spend much time in combat. I usually start new games on normal, but there was a game where that was too difficult, so I turned it down to easy after a while, and even that was too difficult. And then I envisioned some moron company taking great pride in being able to assign high stats to easymode mobs, like it was some accomplishment. Shame because I liked that story.

It's not walk in the park as the description says, that's what I meant. I mean, there are no real problems in it, but it's as if I was playing on normal, meaning that I expected difference between EASY and NM-modes to be much more significant. I haven't done any act 2 bossfights yet,though.



EDIT: Still talking about version 0.8.14, haven't gotten to 0.8.15 yet

Yes, then probably this is a situation where I need to do two separate encounters. Usually I just rebalance the enemies based on the difficulty, but in this case the problem beside each enemy stat is the QUANTITY of enemies you face. Will make sure that in Easy/Normal you don't face 5+ enemies during the first Dingirra's adventures

You could just auto-heal to full after every battle in easy mode (similar to Loren). That would take away the whole strategic resource planning, but would allow you to not have a giant gap in mob stats between easy and normal because the easy player always starts with a full bar (except on the multi-stage fights). Might be easier to balance that way?

Yes true lol, would probably be much easier this way. Maybe even too much, since if you can use the special attack every time I think would be really simple. For now I want to see the feedback on last change, maybe is already good like that

I don't think any of the boss-fights or personal quests were "too easy" on the EASY-mode v.0.8.15-16. If some one them would feel that way, then I think it's just a sign of a good build for that, like previously stated elsewhere... eg Chalassa-quest, where you can kill all the guards and still have enough mana for a few special hits and then just survive with the potions...if you distribute your skill points well enough in the beginning.



Possibly hard ones for EASY-mode:

+ The Galanna quest, specifically the ghost of Lorin and the gargoyles in the end. Depending on how many fights you pick before the last battle and how many mana-bottle you bring, you might be up for some frustration. The Gargoyles (I had 4 of them) might hit consecutive paralyzes on your whole front row and they move around relatively fast. Also, in the Lorin-fight I got debuffed quite a bit plus I guess I made a poor party choice, so to speak, just before it. Skeletons around the area I didn't find problematic, because it's easy to take away the baddies from the backrow with a couple of hits before they do any wider damage...this may drain your mana, though.... but who says you're supposed to go through all of easy with no regard to mana?



+ Area slave fights leading to the Boss. The Boss' fight difficulty was fine for EASY, imo, but I had a lot of bad luck with the other slaves before that, meaning that almost no one offered any info before I had beat them up and I got the healers in the back throwing bramble coats on both rows before Althea could say 'meep'. I don't know if the heal-effect of resting has been raised there as well since, that would help bringing it to easy level. Now it's kind of normal leveled or normal+ if you're really unlucky, meaning: it might require a bit more attention to strategy and healing opportunities than is expected from "easy". But that's just me.



+ In general, the difficulty for the personal quests is pretty much on point, except .. if you choose wrong in Krimm's quest. Meaning that your sidekicks in the last two fights might have no weapons, lol. However, this is what we save the game for before we click on a choice-button in the game.





Yeldin (surprise, he was a pushover in NM and now in EASY I expected him to just roll over, but I actually had to concentrate a bit, lol) & especially the Blades of Moon may require one to try the battle out a one or two times extra before one pulls through...if the party's build is not optimal, and the heroes' levels lower than what I had at that point, but since they are supposed to be scary boss fights, I don't think they'll need to be neccessarily tweaked. After the merc mobsters have been shown their place, it's the Galanna experience that's probably most off at the moment with EASY.

Thanks for the info. Well I still had people whining that Loren in Easy was too hard... so really impossible to make everyone happy. I think now is good, I mean even in Easy you need to spend a bit of time to get a better equipment, otherwise is better if you play a visual novel than a RPG. And anyway will likely add a cheat-mode (or better enable the one already in the code) so everyone will be able to finish the game

imho the whining (both the "too easy" and "too hard" crowd) is a good sign - it shows passion for the game