Good morning, or evening, or bad day, choose whatever suits you :theworst:
Today, I’m here to talk about how the difficulty of the game could be increased with good design, rather than by tweaking numbers to make things feel worse :eyes:
There are various things that could be changed, like the nutrition and farming system, but we’re going to talk about something more crucial, NPCs and their rewards.


Ideally, the movesets of all NPCs should be changed to have more variety, giving them both offensive and defensive capabilities (human NPCs could dodge for instance), and for them to take full advantage of these assets, an more capable AI would be required… I know this will not happen, this is just the conceptual ideal.

Now when it comes to movesets, what are minimal changes that could make enemies more challenging?
The general approach developers seem to have is to tweak damage and health numbers, which is a terrible way to go about it in my opinion…
→ If an enemy cannot hit me, boosting its damage will not make it more threatening; it will make it more punishing in case I mess up, but if it is difficult to even mess up, tweaking numbers is irrelevant. You could make the Giant Spider bosses one shot with their attack, I would still never die to them because of how slow and easy it is to avoid their attacks altogether.
→ On the other hand, if an enemy has too little HP, its moveset doesn’t really matter as it will die before it gets the opportunity to use it; this is a major issue in the Age of War, as most creatures die before they can even attack…
↳ Health and Damage adjustments are something to be done after the true design is complete! In no case is a change in numbers a replacement for proper design.


So what could be done instead of just tweaking numbers? Changing the rules.
Before the Age of War, one of the most challenging enemies was the Corrupted Wolf; it really hurt a lot, was hitting fairly fast, and was immune to hitstun.
Of course, different power levels need to be balanced in different ways, and I am against giving every enemy hitstun-immunity :notlikethis:
This is just an example of how an enemy can be made more difficult, and those combinations need to make sense to some extent → Large World Bosses such as a Rotbranch should indeed not take hitstun, it would not make sense if you just tickled it with a dagger to stop its attack :rofl:

Another example of a somewhat challenging enemy is the Arena Champion, as she can basically one shot you; however, the design is pretty bad because the danger comes from how janky and weird the AI for human NPCs works, and on top of this, she can just be knocked down over and over, destroying the entirety of the challenge :slight_smile:

Meanwhile (you might have seen me say this specific part many times already) the True Champion of the Warmaker hit like a wet noodle… Which is a shame, since he has one of the best movesets in the game (when he isn’t bugging out like an idiot of course)
→ The True Champion has fairly slow and telegraphed attacks, which can thus be avoided despite having large hitboxes. It would be perfect if the boss actually hit those massive attacks with massive damage! This is the “huge but slow” design, which is fair because you can see things coming and you can avoid them, but if you fail to avoid those slow attacks, the punishment is huge and you get one shot or close enough.


What is my proposal?

I’ve been pointing out some flaws with some examples, but I haven’t given a real direction or said what should be done. I will give some specific examples that should require minimal amount of work to implement (because I’m past the point of asking the devs to do a good job, I’m asking for a passable job instead of negative quality like we’ve seen with this update…)


Example 1: Undodgeable Attacks

Giant Crocodile + Dragon Triple Tail Swipe should be undodgeable, same for Scorpion King/Queen Tail Swipe. There is enough windup to move away, and it makes no sense to be able to avoid it entirely just because you’re rolling on the floor laughing :rofl: Rotbranch tree explosion should also be undodgeable, since it has a lot of windup but the area is huge, so you would have to move away instead of dodging in.

Yeah you’re hearing me right, everything can currently be dodged in the game (and with the current stamina regen there is also no tradeoff/penalty for it at all), so if you know what to dodge and you have a tiny bit of reactivity, you have basically mastered PvE :catnobanana: This needs to change, some attacks should be undodgeable so that the player needs to react differently (in the current case by swiftly moving away)


Example 2: Forced Crowd Control

There are many ways to implement this basic principle, but the idea is to change the rules by applying CC to the player, and then forcing them to react to the situation under those conditions.

A non-punishing example is a simple no-damage knockback effect. This could be used by the True Champion of the Warmaker when he changes phases for instance, although the animation would need to be adjusted accordingly. It could be used by bat-demons and children of Jhil as well.

A more punishing example would be for a boss like the Kinscourge to freeze the player into place before sending two skeletons to attack. It needs to be fair, as sending a horde of skeletons on an idle player would be a terrible idea, but just a couple is a welcome change of rules!


I could probably come up with many many more things, but I’m not getting paid for this, and I already did a better job than this whole update in one post :notlikethis:

Regards. Spheris.

1 Like

You could circle it. It would never hit you. All you needed to do was moving in a circle and it had no chance because it prepares the attacks and locks poorly. It has no AoE attacks. Once again, bad AI.

Great post.

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