Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

The tale of the siblings Althea and Shea https://www.winterwolves.com/seasonsofthewolf.htm
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fabulaparva
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by fabulaparva »

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


EDIT: Act 1 was fine, imo.
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jack1974
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by jack1974 »

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 ...
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yayswords
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by yayswords »

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.
If at first try it doesn't explode, it ain't Jack who wrote the code.
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fabulaparva
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by fabulaparva »

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 :P
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jack1974
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by jack1974 »

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 :)
Troyen
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by Troyen »

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?
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jack1974
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by jack1974 »

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 :)
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fabulaparva
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by fabulaparva »

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? :P

+ 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. :P

+ 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. :P


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.
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jack1974
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by jack1974 »

Thanks for the info. Well I still had people whining that Loren in Easy was too hard... :lol: 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 :wink:
renke_
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Re: Act 2: Easy / Hard battles

Post by renke_ »

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