I get a level, the monsters get tougher..

[morten]

One thing I am starting to notice is that monsters are always two levels ahead of me (brutal difficulty). As a result, I feel an increase in difficulty when I level up, or put differently: Level up makes me weaker. That's what it feels like to me. Gear is what makes my characters stronger, not experience.

My wish: Make monster levels static based on their "rank" in the world. I have a feeling the TBs outright disagree with me on this, but I just had to voice my opinion. Levels feel fake and inconsequential when enemies level at the exact same rate.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using proboards

[fallen]

morten - thanks for the feedback, monsters are automatically scaled by difficulty. If you are spending your talent, attribute, and skill points effectively, you should still definitely see an increase in your efficiency in slaughtering your foe. Equipment upgrades are critical in keeping up as well. On higher difficulties, you will get the feeling of "chasing" the monsters, always fighting to keep up.

Trese Brothers games all have a very purposeful and very real difficulty scale. If you are playing on Brutal ("Pitched battles, scarce rewards"), you asked for it imho

[sgbeal]

Dec 26, 2013 0:38:21 GMT -5 fallen said:

Equipment upgrades are critical in keeping up as well.

fallen, it would be nice to be able to do so, but all the best equipment is available relatively early on! After the Blacksmith opens up his armor upgrades, there's nothing else to look forward to in terms of weapons/armor. The chests in the Great Shaman's area gave me worse weapons and armor than i had in the 4+ hours leading up to that battle. i was somewhat surprised to find that all of the best equipment was purchased/purchasable, and everything i looted was of lesser quality (normally it's the other way around in this genre, but the fixed number of looting possibilities in HoS, combined with the random loot mechanism, probably makes that less feasible).

Edit PS: this was on Easy level (version 1.1.19)

[fallen]

Yep, as mentioned on a few other forum threads, there is an authoring bug in the loot maps which is causing deficient drops in the Ratkin warrens.

[Swami]

I hope this is part of the previously noted "deficient drops" but I have found at least 4 chests which reliably give me a club and a training spear. If I have 2 already, why do I need more of them? Can't they just be turned into bags of gold or a chance at something useful?(These were before getting to Oskahold)

[fallen]

Yep.

[slayernz]

I personally would like beasties to be level set for specific areas of the map rather than scaled to your level. It means earlier creatures are definitely weaker than those you encounter deeper into the game. You can still have enemy levels scaled by difficulty, but still constrained to the dungeon they are in. Obviously xp is also constrained to monster level so if you spend more time in lower level dungeons your rewards diminish ... assuming random respawn is implemented.

[Cory Trese]

Dec 26, 2013 21:44:06 GMT -5 slayernz said:

I personally would like beasties to be level set for specific areas of the map rather than scaled to your level. It means earlier creatures are definitely weaker than those you encounter deeper into the game. You can still have enemy levels scaled by difficulty, but still constrained to the dungeon they are in. Obviously xp is also constrained to monster level so if you spend more time in lower level dungeons your rewards diminish ... assuming random respawn is implemented.

They are level set for specific areas, you are correct.

The game is carefully designed to both provide zone-dependent combat challenges as well as tiered interim sub-scalars.

As you say, this current system is awesome (and it took a lot of work to get it working like this.)

I think that the critical feature of the HoS game difficulty and zone scaling is that enemy levels are scaled by difficulty and also constrained to the dungeon they are in.

XP is also constrained to monster level and drive you to advance in the game as rewards diminish.

Respawn won't be random, it will be designed and fit into the game world like a glove -- no confusing issues will be found within the advance HoS respawn components!

[Yurak]

All observations are on Normal difficulty

I'd noticed the level based monsters much to my horror. I'd found the Humid Cave after killing the Dark Shaman. With this area being a 'starter' area I thought they'd be level 3-5, nope they matched mine (lvl 10/11).....

Also all monsters give an exp equal to their level. So Ratbows give the same exp as Giant rats, Deathkin and Shamans.

[Swami]

Jan 6, 2014 11:53:20 GMT -5 Yurak said:

Also all monsters give an exp equal to their level. So Ratbows give the same exp as Giant rats, Deathkin and Shamans.

Which does seem kind of unfair due to the difference in the difficulty of dealing with them.

[Cory Trese]

Jan 6, 2014 11:53:20 GMT -5 Yurak said:

All observations are on Normal difficulty

I'd noticed the level based monsters much to my horror. I'd found the Humid Cave after killing the Dark Shaman. With this area being a 'starter' area I thought they'd be level 3-5, nope they matched mine (lvl 10/11).....

Also all monsters give an exp equal to their level. So Ratbows give the same exp as Giant rats, Deathkin and Shamans.

Well, much to my horror we've got a few people who are misunderstanding how this RPG works -- hopefully I can help!

In this case the author of Humid Cave (that is me) wanted it to scale to the player.

The level range is a choice I made, on purpose, for very good reason. Humid Cave monsters are a challenge (even after Dark Shaman) so you get reasonable XP and Gold.

Later parts of the game, like Humid Cave, will come in Episode-range level scalers or sub-Episode-range level scalers.

Many of the monsters you fight in Episode 1 give equal experience on Normal. Also, very much by design and the result of many hours of work and careful mathematical analysis of the 64 levels / hundreds of hours of upcoming game.

Thanks -- hope that helps everyone get over the confusion / misperceptions.

[rabidbite]

I for one like having the enemies get tougher. We already have a 'reload' button. I prefer that things don't get easier. Using pathing and careful strategy I've been slaughtering groups of 10-20 mobs on Nightmare. One of my favorite strategies is to bottleneck an area with a weak enemy melee mob, plant my tank and take out the giant rats and DKs with range, while healing my tank from the meager damage of the weak melee guy (usually miss my Outlander too, given the ton of buffs I drop on him).


rabid

[fallen]

Just to re-clarify, as Cory has stated ... the power of monsters is regional. If you go passed level 10, for example, then there are parts of the world in which the monster won't keep up with you.

This may not be evident in the existing, straightforward content of Episode 1. It will become very evident that you can be under-powered or over-powered when you enter an area as the size of the world expands. If you are at a good power level, then the monster challenge level will match you, on purpose, as determined by the author.

[Cory Trese]

Everything is scaled to the player's level, and is controlled by the author.

We are building for the big picture, the 64 level long game.

Each map has a minimum and a maximum level.

Nightmare difficulty is slowly let the monsters get ahead of you, pushing them closer to the zone maximum.

As the game difficulty and maps open up in Episode 1 Act 2 and Episode 2 your character will have a LOT more options.

Trust me =)

[algesan]

Humid Cave?