Reading this thread, it appears that there is something FC ought to consider.
Floating damage numbers. While arcadey in nature, it does wonders to tell players if what they are doing is actually effective. They could disable it by default to not ruin the immersive nature. But I will say this. Looking at the videos provided and the commentary from many here. There is quite a bit of ignorance prevalent in the playerbase.
For example, Rockslide is only a difficult boss due to its glitchy hitbox (you cannot enter empty space underneath and likewise cannot do damage to these voidspaces, making inflicting damage quite frustrating). That’s it. However many players here, many veteran players here would still struggle against this boss even if they fixed that hitbox.
Rockslide has around 4800hp. That’s it. By comparison, most bosses have between 12,000 and 15,000. However he also has 7200 armor (even the weakest rocknose has around 4,000). This grants him a 96.64% damage reduction. That means a 100 damage axe with 0 armor pen would only do around 3 damage to him.
That also makes swords without spiked weapon fittings or master weapon kits pretty much useless. Not nearly as useless as axes. But pretty bad. Likewise a World Breaker with a master weapon fitting has an obscene and overkill amount of armor pen (79%) for most things is actually quite good against Rockslide. Resulting in only around around a 17% reduction instead of 40-60% for most swords and spears.
Not only that, but the hyperarmor given by maces and hammers will likewise result in more hits. These are your preferred weapons for both you and your thralls when taking on these targets.
In fact I would recommend using maces and hammers for most PVE encounters. Usually around 40% armor pen for most encounters will suffice. The reason being is the armor values for NPCs was buffed across the board shortly after the Siptah update. This might explain why some of the content in the game seems more difficult than it actually is.
For example, all of the non-boss Rocknoses can easily be killed by a level 1 player with a stone mace. They all have around 100-140ish HP, and the mace’s armor pen is enough to deal pretty much more damage to them then they’ll do to you. Just watch the Crystal one’s porcupine attack, it hits enough times to maim an unarmored character and the bleed can get bad without bandages.
Unfortunately without mods, most of this information is hidden in the devkit. Armor values haven’t been updated on the wiki (in the case of Rockslide, he still has a knockback resistance stat on the wiki, which has been deprecated for years now).
. Did we learn this game like this? That most of the content is just another option and not really necessary?
.