#Reduce the NG Penalty / Allow Infinite Armor & Resistance Upgrade Purchases

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

elfin jewel
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Despite having fairly good gear, enchants, and class titles, having a negative armor and resistance is a bit off-putting / frustrating. While some like the Wizard can get through by out DPSing everything, others rely on a bit of survivability and it's a challenge to get these stats anywhere near positive on squishy classes. A few of my friends have commented that they're ready to give up due to the spike in difficulty. "What's the point in playing if you're negative everything despite hours of grinding and capped on XP" (I'm paraphrasing).

Either reduce NG Penalty or allow a way to infinitely buy Armor and Resistance. Personally, I have 900,000 gold and have nothing to do with it other than buy architect buffs.

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hexed lodge
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Out of curiosity, how many hours of play time you have/ng+ level your on and such?

elfin jewel
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According to Steam, 237 hours. I have not received a run by anyone, nor have I ever used mods.

hexed lodge
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mmh I've only got about 40 hours so far, obviously everyone's free to play games as much as they like but obviously theres going to be some general limit or barrier.

elfin jewel
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HOH1 had no barrier. My fiance' was NG 100+. There's no reason why HOH2 can't be the same.

hexed lodge
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I must confess, the reason for negative armour/resistance was my idea because when the original HOH release, you were able to get the values so insanely high you could resist like 99% of damage and scaling was completely broken. This was before the dlc made it easier to push ng+ levels and you can imagine the problems it can cause when people want to play together but some are new and the others were on NG+100 due to the early balance issues.

elfin jewel
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@lost sable Feel free to weigh in on this. I can tell you that she played a lot post Pyramid DLC when the statues were introduced.

The way I see it, I would think the developers would rather want folks to continue to play their game into high NG levels rather than quit after hitting a barrier. It's good for Steam charts, business, and future DLC opportunities.

native escarp
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Yea me and my mate are currently coming up to that point pretty soon, just feels way overtuned, would love to play more and try to push but when its this rough it just doesnt feel worth

hexed lodge
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Its always been a highly contested topic because on one hand sure it would be nice to keep pushing NG+ levels but the more steps/numbers you add the more spread out players become. And like the original HOH there will be updates and hopefully dlc to allow for pushing further.

elfin jewel
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I understand that line of reasoning, but that's why profiles exist. If players want to start on even footing to play with each other...switch profiles.

hexed lodge
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Yeah profiles being added is a huge help

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But I will say personally as much as I liked HOH1, I felt like I wasnt able to play with most other players without having to accept them boosting me though a ton of NG+ levels and that wasnt something I was wanting to do from my perspective. And it was a lot of hours to invest into a single game, so it was easy to feel bad at the game just because I didnt have the time to grind it constantly.

elfin jewel
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I can appreciate that. Luckily, as you said, profiles in HOH2 are great and exist for that purpose.

All I can offer from my point of view is that I want to keep playing this game as it gives me something to do and my subscribers seem to like the videos I've been producing lately. However, many (including myself) are getting frustrated with the NG scaling / balance.

In the end I think developers will want to keep the current consumer base rather than turn them away onto another game. There's less profit in a game that ends due to scaling as opposed to a game that's open-ended an infinitely replayable. Finding that balance is hard, I'm sure.

If we get infinite armor / resistance purchasing opportunities, it'll give me a reason to grind for gold and keep pushing NG levels.

hexed lodge
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All I can say is its easier to make the game easier, but making it harder will always feel terrible (its no secret no one likes a nerf), and given a few more months for more people to play though the game and increase the feedback pool hopefully will be able to work out a nice balance between the two, not to mention mods will eventually add more options/layouts and such.

elfin jewel
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Also, just food for thought...my fiance' has a Heroes of the Storm (MOBA) profile level in the hundreds. She doesn't want to stop until that's maxed for no reason other than to do it. Some people love pushing numbers.

lost sable
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@hexed lodge I think what really helped with people wanting to play together without getting boosted was the downscaling in the fountain. If someone doesn't want to get boosted, that would be a great option to add. But I definitely agree. Punishing someone as they get higher doesn't feel too good. When the pyramid dlc came out and you could infinitely upgrade your stats, that was an amazing thing! It keeps me playing to this day.

hexed lodge
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Sure, few people have mentioned the lack of downscaling so that would be a good tool to hopefully see soon along with all the other bug fixes and such that are still in the works.

stark sleet
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The thing about current armor scaling is it seems too harsh, especially on elemental resistances. HoH formula was smth like 60*ng^0,8. Overtime it decreased less armor and res than the first couple ngs.
But right now flat -199 and -200 on all the next ones seems way too heavy. Sure you get the defense from strength and equipment, but defense still seems lacking even on heavy strength based characters.
Making something like HoH diminishing scaling to decreases of armor and resistances should work out better in a long run imo.

haughty nova
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Gotta agree with this one, as it is right now, it feels that we just get punished for pushing NG+.

The game should be getting harder and taking more planning, but there's no planning as it is right now.

At most running something like a paladin, with a lot of mana and hp, to use the talent that splits incoming damage between mana and health + zeal, and try to use that since it's mostly infinite scaling to force-push our way up.

The game seems to be heading on a good direction from the latest updates, but with more and more people getting over NG+1 these flaws are going to be even more visible.

stark shoal
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I think the penalty is fine, the rewards from doing high NG is however very disappointing.

timid helm
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have to agree on the penalty on armor and resistances, it also makes the title rewards for paladin and warlock competely worthless once you are past NG+1 as you will be in the negative by 200-300 no matter what.

peak patrol
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Allowing Infinite Armor/Resistance upgrades could be a method but the down side is that at the current scaling do you really want to have to do that for every class, I would go with lowering the penalty across the board.

I think one option that could also work is removing the level cap per NG+ and just have a infinite character level.

Example
Player A has a hard time on NG+3 and keeps losing the current options are to swap to a select build and also pray to the RNG gods you get the correct skill orbs and trinkets and if fail the run you gain nothing to help progress in beating it. ((Player feels defeated having taken no steps forward))

With no level cap the player would have at least gained levels to increase his base stats for that single character and the title level bonus for all of them. ((Could at least convince themself they made progress into beating it maybe next run or the run after))

royal trench
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infinite upgrades would make pure farming the answer to all problems

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and that would also be final, as removing that would delete people progress

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💀

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now whether upgrades can be the solution to grinding ng+++ or are we supposed to rely on equipment + skill and be somewhat softcapped around ng 20-ish ? It really depends on the dev's vision of the game

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in other words, are high ng supposed to be a challenge, or additional farm content ?

hasty arch
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Wanted to throw my two cents in here as well, and say I agree completely. NG+ scaling is WAY off and feels really awful. I don't know enough about the nuances of the code behind the game to speak too much about it, but the penalty for characters combined with a huge number of enemies giving the darkness debuff thing make for an extremely unenjoyable experience.

Either the penalty for NG+ levels OR the darkness debuff would be enough on it's own, but combined you always feel like you're made of paper. Glass canon builds are fun and all, but I'd like my Paladin to remain a tank, thank you.

indigo palm
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I mean my paladin at NG+5 and with maxed out level 40+ gear I’m still getting 400+ armor so with mana shield + mana upgrades on armor you can still be a pretty good tank

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But to actually kill anything you would need a DPS like ranger to play with

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That’s just a downside to paladin in general tho

hasty arch
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Eh, I play generally solo, so it felt almost necessary to respec my pally as almost a pure int caster variation to do anything. The illusion of choice is a consequence of poorly thought out development in this case.

long mural
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adding to agree:

with enemies already getting 5% more damage per NG+, it really feels like the armor and resist penalties should be reevaluated. the 5% can even be a higher number if needed, but the negative armor and resists are goofy, and the colossal amount of them especially makes Strength junk, makes armor from equipment virtually useless, makes the Resistance prefixes for equipment totally useless (and these should be merged into one All Resistances affix anyway), and breaking Paladin's Armor of Wrath entirely

hexed lodge
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Maybe one idea would be to give strength more effect on armour? so it feels worth while as a stat and can counter the NG+ debuff better, people forget the reason for the huge negative values, is this was something came up with during HOH updates over the years due to the early runaway ng+ levels reaching to absurdly high levels. But people dont notice it as much because dlc and many other things were added to push NG+ further.

charred whale
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I felt the scaling in hoh1 was mostly fine, prior to bloodrites.

hexed lodge
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I mean, should NG+ scale forever? And maybe its a lil early to be pushing that far. Again I just dont want to see players expected to play to NG+60 just to get the most out of the game, so its an issue of balancing the average experiences versus what is currently more of the smaller margin of players. And yeah cure you might feel HOH1 is ok now but believe me thats not how it started on release.

charred whale
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What we have right now isnt so much "getting punished being more punishing"
as opposed to "the game actively just trying to prevent us from making progress"

long mural
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I don't even mind it having an effective cap at some point because the enemies outscale us and eventually one-shot. I just find the duplicate effects weird (and detrimental to Strength, Paladin, etc), i.e.

you take more damage (b/c armor and resist penalty) & enemies deal more damage

enemies take less damage & enemies have more hp (less problematic, just a weird redundancy imo, don't have as strong feelings on this one)

charred whale
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now that ive actually played with the current scaling of the game.

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I simply believe that, making the game punishing in different ways that scale with ngp, in ways that dont directly halt your progress, but punishes you for the miss-steps you take, is a better long-lasting model.

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making enemies take longer to kill and reducing our damage output, is not ideal.

merry coyote
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Bullet sponges are never fun unless there is a workaround, like mobs having resistance to certain types of damage but susceptible to others. So single type damage builds suffer but multi-damage can still manage.

This also encourages more interesting orb decisions during each play through. “Do I augment my main damage type or go with a secondary element? “ Depending on the zone, mobs, party composition, itemization, it might make sense to go one over another.

elfin jewel
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Should NG scale forever? Yes. Why wouldn't the developers want people to continue playing their game? Once that limit is reached, or folks hit a personal wall and can't progress, they get frustrated and move on to other things. If I were a developer, I'd want people to continue to play my game.

An infinite armor/resistance vendor solves almost everything and gives me something to do with my gold. It's not fun playing metas just to progress. It's not fun spending 30 minutes getting to Avatar only to be one-shotted because your wizard's armor / resistances are deep in the negative.

I'm personally ready to move onto other things until the developer does something about it.

charred whale
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"We" want solutions that dont set things in stone

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For the overall health and longevity of the game

elfin jewel
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I don't understand. Please explain.

long mural
# elfin jewel I don't understand. Please explain.

I think they mean you can't claw back a bunch of armor & resistance if people buy it from an npc. once they have it, it's forever something the game has to account for. even if some future balance change or design decision really needs them to not have that much armor or resistance

elfin jewel
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Statues were infinite in HOH1 correct?

long mural
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possibly? honestly don't remember. I never really pushed NG+ very far in HoH1

elfin jewel
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My fiance was NG 1,000+, with over 500 hours or something like that.

hexed lodge
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People overestimate how far the average HOH player went in the game

charred whale
elfin jewel
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Did the statues break the game in HOH1?

charred whale
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and your chance to get a statue decreased if it was higher level than other statues

elfin jewel
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Paladin dash runs were a grind, but we got a bit from doing them.

charred whale
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the thing with statues is though they were infinite, there was a system that restricted how fast you could level them.

elfin jewel
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Wouldn't the correct gold balance also restrict how much you could buy from a hypotehtical armor / res vendor?

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I'm not discounting your opinions. I'm just spitballing.

charred whale
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the only thing idisagree with in hoh1 was blood rites, honestly.

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the game was scale-able enough without blood rites.

long mural
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I don't even remember what blood rites were lol

hexed lodge
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I dunno anymore, I just booted up HOH1 to check my old profiles and none of them ever got that far into the game but a big thing was I ended up playing solo a lot.

charred whale
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with enough good gameplay you could climb NGs by just playing skillfully

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yes, you did outscale the game eventually, but it was a painful journey to get there

hexed lodge
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And I was one of those insane early patch testers who everytime a balance update came out would delete his profile and level up from scratch again.

charred whale
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same mostly xd

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because "testing if i can get to ng50" had no meaning

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when most players will "get to ng5 and call it a day"

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I still want difficulty scaling, I still want the game to be "infinitely scalable"
But I want the difficulty scaling system, to be different than what we have now.

elfin jewel
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I wonder if the devs were to add a fountain like in HOH1 that let you undo your res / armor purchases temporarily for your run for a positive balance.

I feel like grinding for gold to then spend on a vendor to catch up my armor and resistance would be enough for me, but I can see where others might take issue.

charred whale
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I want a more unique mechanic than "oh your armor and resistances just decrease"
Of course, that mechanic can still stay to some extent.
but I much prefer a scaling system that plays more with shadowcurse

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a more risk vs reward system

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taking risks should become more neccessary, and you should be punished for not playing "up to par" when you take risks. for instance

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trap rooms is one case where they become neccessary, and if you fail you usually die or kill the run

hexed lodge
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Honestly the whole every ng+ level gives you say -20 per level is literally my fault but it was also annoying a half decent system for balancing the never ending NG+ scale HOH presented. Everyone was trying to come up with buffs/ideas and balances, and I just got fed up and went, why not just remove stats from the players and such its not perfect but it did well for a long time.

charred whale
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the difference is that in hoh1 the increments were diminishing

hexed lodge
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It stood for a long time and when the DLC came out for HOH1 they gave people new ways to push further

elfin jewel
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I'm casual and prefer to see my armor and resistances above where I need to be before trying to NG push. It's disheartening to see, as a spellcaster, negative everything despite preparing almost as well as you can.

charred whale
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right now, my main issue is, we have exponentially increasing enemy damage

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not technically, not practically, not basically

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Well, strictly speaking its a quadratic function

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if we're using math terms

hexed lodge
charred whale
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Righht now, the way things stand, This is basicly how enemy damage increments per ngp

exponential-growth-scaled.webp
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I dont like this

elfin jewel
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Well, I hope the devs address this soon. Classes like Warlock can life-leech their way to a higher NG. Sorcerers can't. There needs to be more survivability on classes that don't have a lot of self heals.

charred whale
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Sorcerers do fine

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and yes, fire sorc has life leech

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Frost sorc just has truckload of damage

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Souls lock also has exponential growth on damage

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b ut these are outliers

hexed lodge
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Mhh, once more of us have had a lot more time to play though the game it should be clear which classes/areas are struggling, honestly with equipment and enchantments to play with theres just a lot more variables to play around with.

charred whale
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these are subclasses that get to ignore the gameplay restrictions

elfin jewel
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I enjoy the Elec spec. I shouldn't have to switch just to progress. That's my point.

charred whale
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on paper, yes, in practice, not at all

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right now, running 2x insightful or 2x hale is becoming mandatory

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along with 3x stout

sturdy moat
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as a lightning sorcerer i couldn't do anything against avatar on NG+1, after a couple of minutes of frantic attacks, unleashing every skill i could as soon as the cooldown was ready i did around 20% of his health bar, when he already ate 2 of my potions

charred whale
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because 1. we have to run insightful/hale cus we dont get enough attributes to keep up with scaling item requirements

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  1. because our armor/res is plummetting, we have to rely on getting more base hp, from enchants
hexed lodge
charred whale
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the enchanting system basicly falls apart when put to scale

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and I would prefer it didnt.

hexed lodge
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yes very, like some enchants do seem to scale? others dont

charred whale
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I want things to be More interesting than "2x attributes, 3x max hp" on my gear

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all green enchants do, blue dont

hexed lodge
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ah so thats how it goes

charred whale
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but 90% of the green enchants are just dead. because we either cant afford to put them on.
or the stats they add, are worse

sturdy moat
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i expect purple items would have modifiers that provide some changes to how a character plays, like an equipment based skill orb modifier

charred whale
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for instance, Deadly (spell crit dmg) is objectively worse than Keen (intellect). cus Keen gives the same amount of crit damage

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from the intellect it gives you

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but thats just a balancing problem

long mural
elfin jewel
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Just to take a step back for a minute, I see you folks talking about enchants, mods, and the like and I can see you've mathed out what works and what doesn't.

What about those that just want to enjoy playing and progressing, or don't understand all the behind the scenes stuff. They should be able to progress too through some simple grinding.

Casuals are going to get frustrated by metas, mathing, and the like. They just want to play the game, progress, and have fun.

charred whale
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we're not even doing it for damage sake, or for any kind of "optimal gameplay"

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we're doing it because the game scaling doesnt allow us any other choice.

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like, do you want your hero to be level 100 with level 60 gear cus you dont have enough attributes?

long mural
elfin jewel
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I can tell you now that I just attempted a wizard NG5 run, my gear was upgraded, enchanted, and 40+. Avatar one-shotted me. Could I have done better, maybe. But the damage output was insane despite collecting every trinket I could find.

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SP was 700+.

charred whale
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There are likewise, very unique ideas you can do on some of the classes, that are very fun on paper, but become very unfun down the line

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I want those to keep being fun, too

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the enchantment system has a problem where, for instance penetration enchants are just completely dead past ng0-ng1

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putting ice penetration on your frost sorcerer Sounds like a really good idea. after all you're penetrating their ice resistance more.

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But all it does it reduce ice wisps' ice res from 2000, to 1975.

sturdy moat
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penetration would have to be % based, for example if you have all gear that gives you 100 penetration, you fully ignore specific resist

copper whale
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that would be very nice

charred whale
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so 25 penetration translates to 5%

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as an example

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cus we also dont want to give people 100% penetration

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as that breaks the gameplay system

copper whale
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i don't understand why enemies on NG+ can't just deal more damage instead of nerfing armor and resistances so much

charred whale
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for a temporary stopgap it does its work well

long mural
sturdy moat
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i wish it worked like in HoH1, where even when a trinked reduced enemy damage by 5, it mitigated the damage BEFORE all multipliers were applied, so such a trinket was viable on every NG

charred whale
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when you have a planned system that suddenly doesnt play out the way you want, or it doesnt play up to scale, and you dont have time to design a better system

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then something like simple defense-loss per ngp, works as a stopgap

long mural
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even if dev wants enemies to grow exponentially, you can do that without tanking armor and resists. you just make the enemy damage growth inherently an exponential function

copper whale
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armor of wrath moment

charred whale
sturdy moat
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armor of wrath should deal damage based on your armor before negative modifiers

long mural
charred whale
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we just need to understand that its just a consequence of the ways enemy damage is being increased, is my point

copper whale
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in all honesty i wonder just how much stuff is still in development

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like, planned for release but couldn't be made in time

sturdy moat
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seems like a lot, considering blue equipment is the last tier, purple trinkets too, and there is that weird unimplemented resource in the hud when you finish the run

charred whale
long mural
charred whale
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the ngp stuff were initially gonna be built around shadow curse a lot more than we see now

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IMO, the curse system from hoh1 pyramid dlc is the best system they made.

copper whale
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i scarcely remember that tbh

charred whale
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its a very simple yet effective system that scales difficulty directly in proportion with risk taken

charred whale
copper whale
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oh yeah

charred whale
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and the stacks do things like lower your defense, lower your accuracy etc

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if you never grab any curse, you get a lot less items to work with.
if you grab too many, you will die

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a very effective way of handling balancing in that regard

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and because items are usually mandatory, you are forced to take Some amount of curse stacks

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I Know that there are plans in the background about adding more shadowcurse-centered things

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and from my impressions so far, some of the things we have is temporary

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Another thing to understand is that, when you have the intention of adding more content, you dont want players to be able to scale so far ahead that the content you add becomes trivialised

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and you dont want it to scale it up so that you need to push too deep into ngp before the content becomes accessible

whole cedar
elfin jewel
whole cedar
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How much have you played though?

Is it reasonable to expect hour 200 to be as entertaining as hour 10 in a 20 dollar game that has been out for like 2 weeks?

elfin jewel
whole cedar
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I feel like judging a game that is 2 weeks old vs a game that has been out for years and has received multiple DLCs is just setting yourself up for disappointment by creating an unrealistic expectation.

That isn't to say improving the endgame isn't a good idea, but right now I think the focus should be on the part of the game most people will interact with, not the part that will only be experienced by a tiny fraction of players that have put in more than a full time jobs worth of hours in the time the game has been out.

elfin jewel
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Your opinion has been noted, but respectfully, you're not changing mine.

whole cedar
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I'm not trying to change your view as much as I am hoping to highlight for others why I think your view is unrealistic so they don't adopt it and feel disappointed about getting 100 hours of fun out of a 20 dollar game.

If you just want what the first game has, that is still available. Enough of the game is already basically just the other games again.

merry coyote
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“For a bit of context, Crackshell is a very small operation, with pretty much all of the dev work currently going through one person, so while we're aware of the bugs and issues people have been experiencing and are doing our best to fix them as quickly as possible, we don't have the time to comment on everything.” This was from an announcement a while back. @whole cedar is right in that it’s probably better for the devs to focus on fixing the content that majority of players will touch while thinking about long term scaling solutions which can easily be botched if rushed.

elfin jewel
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I'm not a developer, but reducing the flat NG penalty on a line of code doesn't seem like it would take months to do.

Keeping veteran players returning to the game is just as important as attending to fresh blood.

merry coyote
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It’s a matter of power creep, they might have something else in mind for the long term and if there isn’t a hard cap on progress, people might blow past it and any new content that is released will be irrelevant. They definitely missed the mark on NG+ but it might be a bandaid solution for a bigger picture we aren’t privy to.

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With that said, NG+ scaling sucks and I agree with your post. I’d just rather they really nail everything else and not try to rush a suboptimal long term system that we might end up stuck with.

clear shuttle
# elfin jewel I'm not a developer, but reducing the flat NG penalty on a line of code doesn't ...

There’s a lot this doesn’t take into account. That flat number becomes more punishing as your gear falls off. Reducing the number from, say 200 to 20 will make it possible to push waaaaay farther, but suddenly NG 1-30 are an absolute cake walk. Then 30-70 becomes stale, and 70-100 creeps to a stall until suddenly you’re at the same standstill, you just got there slower. Exponential functions require pretty precise maths in games, especially if you want them so delicately fine tuned for other variables like armor and resistance, so that each NG is a freshly challenging experience.

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Personally, if I get 5 hours for every dollar spent on a game, I’m very happy. That’s super high value compared to a lot of other titles

charred whale
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a very good minimum is 1 hour per dollar.

clear shuttle
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And I’m a 110 hours currently

elfin jewel
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I also agree with the play time thing...certainly got a lot of time out of it. I just wanted to keep going and pretty much have to put this on hold for a while until something changes.

undone tendon
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Without reading the entire thread, the other issue you'll run into eventually is that resists will just go down and down and down further.

Even if armour is fixed, you'll still end up at a wall where you need to go glass cannon and kill or be killed due to resists

copper whale
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Weird idea but what if spell power didnt scale with any stat for all classes, instead individual spells had scaling with different attributes?

charred whale
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That would require a complete rebalancing of the game bceause of how dependent armor is on attributes

shut pivot
# copper whale Weird idea but what if spell power didnt scale with any stat for all classes, in...

while that could be an effective system, it would be really complicated and complex to implement. also situations where "i have one ability that scales with dex, and one ability that scales with strength" so then you're splitting stat distribution. and then if the (i forget the term. specialty? promotion? the type you pick at 10) has different primary attributes than other stuff, changing things around and the amount of respeccing would be very tedious and unfun. the complication would take away from the general simplicity that the game currently has.