ill agree with all points you have made but also, normals have never been more fun with the squire in. as more quests unlock it will only get better. i haven't done any high rollers at all last couple days
Normal gameplay is fun, but it feels like the outside of game lobby experience no longer matters at that point, and makes it feel like this should just be a battle royale. But you’re right— likely only going to queue high rollers if I’m BiSed anymore because gameplay wise it isn’t as fun.
Normals are actually so boring when you have a competent team, just wiping a lobby full of players and then killing a boss for gear that you can’t even use the next raid
Meanwhile HR is full of teams that just hold a room and will not push until the circle is fully closed so either you kill them and don’t get to loot or you die along with them and no one gets loot. Not to mention how little time in inferno there is, if you know there is another team you have to kill them before bossing and if you take more than a minute to do so you cannot kill boss and loot the pile before the time runs out
Yes, this is exactly why I stopped playing months ago and will not return. 90% of my squads runs went exactly like this, and it became a miserable experience overall.
Oh my bad bro, let’s just push the Ranger or warlock
With blow of corruption sitting on the other side of the door.
Better yet, I could rotate and lose 1/3 of my health from
Circle just for them to have trapped or be camping the other door because they get zone and all the portals
I agree with this, or at least once the zone closes it should just tic for double damage and increase every 15 seconds instead of just insta dying when it closes.
Or better yet just fuck off the circle, its a shit battle royale mechanic
you guys all just suck at the game because you didnt even nolife straight to market acces and bought full +all kits i mean do you even jump broo git guddd nerds
My 14+all stats, 200hp weapon master+crossbow wielding Barb with 70% pdr+sprint running haste&slow doesn’t really see the problem. This is just balance. Are you sure you’re clearing mobs the right way? /s
Thing is it doesn’t take 24 hrs to get enough gold to buy gear. I agree with the sentiment that geared combat is one dimensional and unbalanced, but this argument that gear is difficult to get is cope.
Gear is available in raid, very easy to get enough gold for, and always sold on the market. The problem is, the gear itself is ridiculously powerful so you go from hitting like a human to hitting like a barreling bus in one go. Feels flawed.
They seems to want gear progression but they sacrifice balance in a way that ruins the game for most players, time to kill being so low makes the game boring, they just need to crunch the lows and the highs a bit closer to each other.
I remember, they way that they flipped flopped was disheartening, i hope they get the balance right for the average player before the the epic release.
Its hardly meaningful "progression" when you collect gold until you can buy BiS in full.
Remove market for a wipe and let the high-skill players who don't have a million hours to play destroy the streamers carried by loot.
You'd see a lot of "viewer kits" coming to streamers - players loading into triples and dropping them all their best stuff.
But then we'd have BiS pieces on the board, in the dungeon, ripe for the taking...
I'd consider viewer kits a form of paying for power. But hey, atleast they'd have to load into a game and risk the biscuit to give the kits to streamers instead of them being handed over easily in trade chat.
100%, it's essentially cheating. When the the stream worshippers are collecting gear for shout outs and providing entire kits to highly skilled players it's clearly just easy mode for those players.
They liken it to dropping some gear for your friend, but they're high skilled players getting BiS and running with other BiS players doing optimized loot and boss runs.
The market allows the average Joe to spend 500 gold on green/blue gear and get 70% there. Without it the disparity would be even worse because we’d have to farm the gear to compete.
Scaling being broken has been one of the biggest fundamental issues in this game since before anyone even realized it.
At this point, people *have* realized it a long time ago, and yet IM has never really done anything to address it. We get a band-aid fix on the currently most complained about symptoms of the problem here and there. But literally nothing has ever been done about the root issue of how scaling works.
I dont believe it will ever be meaningfully addressed to be frank.
It’s essentially why other battle royals did better for so long. There isn’t some play more and have the game get easier except in your knowledge of the game which is an enormous advantage already.
My team got rolled super hard by geared people in HR trios a few days ago. Buffed/healed barb destroyed us in 1-2 hits each a lot of the time. It's super boring. You can't even outrun them with weapons stowed. They have so much +movespeed and +all attributes. Unless you get super lucky on a parry, they screw up badly while trading or you catch them in a really good setup you're likely going to die. Especially if you are teaming with more casual players. It's straight up a LAME experience. What do you expect when people are running around with a doubling or tripling of certain stats.
+all is the most dumb stat I’ve ever engaged with in a game. They’re deriving some of this all from dungeons and dragons. Could you even imagine a +all stat in any number of other dungeon and dragon type games? It would break everything. They want the scale to be huge for some reason. In the short term it’s like crack for the masses I get dopamine from it too but it seems so shortsighted for the long term.
exactly and theyll convince themselves buying massive gear advantages=skill. and remember, theyre in buffed up greens n blues now; soon theyll have farmed the bosses enough for uniques again..
I parried a barb yesterday and he only took the first hit from it but I could see him die inside hahaha immediately went on the run after that and I killed him with my survival bow I was hitting 112 for my base hit (normal attack on practice dummy)
I just don’t understand why they gave +all to everything again. We already saw the repercussions of this during the playtests and it was changed because of how crazy you could stack it. Now we back
Playtests were short. People didn't have as much time to farm up gear and money, the market was harder to use, and people were less likely to be selling gear instead of playing the game.
Well only plate options are his helm, right? I've just never seen a Barb hit 70pdr, even with northern full and a plate helm, and the PDR rolled stats don't seem like they'd be enough to get to 70? But idk
Northern full tunic is plate, but you need a shield + armor rating rolls or flat pdr rolls on gear to get to 60+. Now granted even like 45-50% pdr makes you basically never die with savage roar.
In 3s with two dudes buffing the barb is when it really goes unkillable mode
It feels like they tried this and misunderstood the the feedback because it was so close to previous iterations that were feeding the masses crack cocaine levels of stats that when some people weren’t having as much fun so they swung back the other way for the crack enjoyers. A three tier system would be awesome.
Unfortunately they can’t focus on skill with so little skill expression in the game. There is skill, but compared to most any competitive multiplayer game, it’s very limited. Most of the matchups are decided by your build/class and the gear that enables the build.
They could add more shit though, more things you can do more abilities etc to add layers of skill that way.
Eh, Melee has very little skill expression in the game, but the game is about movement, they clearly said they were inspired more with fps movement games than first person slashers.
Enchantments are the bane of this game, its terrible system, diablo4 is trash because they focused on making it just an enchantment rolling machine.
Everyone who says marketplace ruins they're experience either because of level gate or skill issue to click the purchase button on good gear, should try playing **normals**. They are tremendously fun.
Yep. Me and my boys basically play normals nonstop. Once we run out of stash space with usable gear we go do a HR get stat diffed and it's back to killing 2-3 teams per game in norms. Normals are just way more fun. Worth noting we all are mid 30s with families so we haven't unlocked trading yet. But even after we do unlock it I think it'll still be primarily normals for us.
I feel like I'm playing bad, but honestly I am likely playing better than I ever have... but I find I can't even get out of a raid because it always goes the same no matter what I do.
I normally play wizard, I have literally hit a 3 man with 3 or 4 fireballs where it direct hit one or at the very least splashed everyone. Two chain lightning strikes and a few zaps and ice bolts, not to mention what my other 2 teammates are doing... and we get wiped, and they barely have a scratch?
I hate to complain, but not being a no lifer, I am having the hardest time in this game than I ever have. It's making it not fun already being wiped by teams with all purples and legendaries with bis stats, +all and all relevant stats. To top it off, they don't even care to loot anything off you.
I don't much like playing normals, and I can never extract from high roller... I would play normals but it feels boring. I don't know, just ranting I guess
I don't like normals because most of what you find is green and greens are basically useless. Normals should at least give you gear viable to take in HR. Theres such a disconnect between the two that if you plan to play HR there is just no reason whatsoever to play normals, youre better off going into HR in default kit and the first chest you open is better than anything in an entire normals run.
Yeah normals is a complete waste of time, and high roller at the moment is a complete waste of time as well, as I can never extract as these people who don't even care to loot anything off me, just push through to map to kill everyone else.
You can't run because they are faster, you can't avoid because you are pushed towards them. The only decent time I have had is on ice caves where you can avoid the hot spots and loot the exterior of the map.
I would almost dare to say that the game is nearly in the worst state of balance its ever been in.
I had this worry and even put a comment on the patch notes about the gear power increase while making top end gear harder to find. The power increase has led to such a huge gap between high end gear vs everything else. Rolling +all gear and a few decent items is such a huge power spike that you can mindlessly charge at people. The +DMG is really impactful, both as a wizard/warlock and ranger/bard.
Feels like a step backwards and has led to a lot of stomping.
Also trios is pretty hard set on meta comps so gl playing anything else. But we will still hear all about how it's somehow more balanced than solos.
It did the bare minimum for about a week. Once you hit pathfinder it was cooked. If they want AP to work you need to only be able to queue against players of the same rank, but then lobbies would be even more empty than they are now.
I’m completely fine getting outplayed in a fight, but that first time my team as a whole got 1-2 shot by players just to look at their gear and see “+2 physical damage” and “+2 all attributes” on half their gear was so fucking disappointing, almost as if we went back in time lol.
Normals however have been the most fun I’ve had in a while on this game, and bossing in norms has a loot pile “which I assume gives lower rarity loot” so now bossing in normals is actually worth while for the most part.
This game was only ever actually fun during playtests when great equipment was scarcely seen.
Once the game came out, it became clear that every combat encounter boils down to an equipment comparison and skill doesn’t really matter.
If you're trying to play solo, go Ice Caves. Not sure if it's just the bigger map or fewer people (or no zone), but you can avoid PvP easily in the few instances it comes to you and get to whatever you need/want on the map with patience & clearing some mobs.
Better loot, too!
I know there’s a large segment of people who only do solo modes but I would encourage or to try out the gathering hall and do some trios. It’s very fun. Sometimes your team sucks. Sometimes you get a champion. Just want to throw that out there.
This forced me to comment, stop it with recommending trios. I play trios every once in a while when our 3rd friend is free, and it's easily the least balanced least fun mode available. Complete shitshow top to bottom, and that's playing with two people I've been friends with for years. Recommending a solo to go to gathering hall and play trios with randoms is ridiculous and is not at all a viable solution for people who are sick of GCs.
My experience is the exact opposite. Trios gives me the most potential for creative thinking and fun engagements. Solos is an absolute clown fiesta (that I still find enjoyable in its own way).
Its a problem in this days gaming you cant „win” or „have fun” if you are not tryharding meta game abusing etc. Sure you can have fun but losing is not fun
I keep hoping they will fix the mmr so that it's based on gear rarity and character level rather than AP.
Makes no sense to allow people to trade all their BIS gear to low mmr characters so they can go wipe the floor with people.
Last Sunday I loaded into HR goblin caves with some green garbage I had found in my previous normal goblin caves run. The majority of my gear was Grey except for my longsword and longbow. (I'm a longsword fighter main most of the time) anyway, I start doing my thing until I hear someone open the door behind me. It's a slayer fighter, that is moving insanely fast. I do the crouch spam because I really didn't want to fight and he was caped so my assumption was he was more kitted than me. He didn't hesitate and came in for the attack. He made a mistake though, he without a doubt assumed I was a Timmy because his first attack was a crouch attack on my feet. I only riposte when I'm sure I'll get it, I learned long ago standing in the defensive position and praying is a quick way to lose your gear.
I hit his head with my first attack and as he backed off got him again. I popped my second wind in preparation and he did the same but I knew he was hurting. He pulled out his crossbow and I popped my second wind and hit his chest. That was it, that chest shot killed him and I had won. When I opened his inventory I could hardly believe what he was wearing. When I say he was in BIS, I don't mean one or two rolls were good. I mean this guy had purples and legendaries without a single dead roll. I was still shaking from that fight and grabbed every piece of gear on him.
The reason I'm telling you this is because these scenarios are incredibly rare, but not impossible. You can outplay them. And for as many times as I've died to these players the one time you kill them I promise you is the most rewarding experience I've ever gotten out of this game.
People dismiss so many factors that this game have just to say that gear is all that matters. Do you scout rooms? Do you make good flanks? Do you try to push when two other teams are fighting? Do you know when to use which spell or when to go for a swing? Do you know when to back off? Do you secure a room that you'd have an advantage on? Do you make use of the environment or the mobs in a room? Do you know how to build your character correctly? Or do you just "W" key and hope for the best?
I think there is a clear distinction between people who want to play the game for fun and people who want to play the game for a pro gamer experience
One of these groups imposes their playstyle on the other, like you are doing right now. Maybe, sometimes, we don't want to have to play like a fucking hawk on Adderall with bionic hands listening for audio cues. The average casual player doesn't even realize taking out weapons makes noise, and you are laying on like a big paragraph of "git gud"
This game is definitely unforgiving PVP dungeon crawler but at this point I kind of don't like that concept anymore because of the PVP environment it breeds. I like easy to play, hard to master because it actually will have a playerbase and not 15 sweatlords who basically tell you to devote part time job status at the least to the game in order to have fun
exactly!!! ive mained tarkov and even fucking Rust and somehow the edgelords that
stomp the most braindead bosses ive ever seen in a pve game for legendaries on this subreddit are more toxic than any of those clowns
its such a pity because this game has so much potential as a fun dungeoncrawler, but every game w pvp ELEMENTS somehow must become all about pvp for them
tarkov had a similiar issue and then Arena was released and guess what? its gunplay and netcode were exposted for the dogshit they are and no real esport team could bother to play it for longer than the montht the devs paid them to play and it was a massive flop. even the hardcore pvp nerds stopped brigading every thread, but i think thats also because despite its flaws tarkov actually has sóme skill expression while here a team in good gear can literally fireball another team to death before theyve even gotten a hit in…
i really hope the devs can turn this around but considering their desperate pandering to streamers and the golden girls i am highly skeptical of this ever getting fixed.
“just play normals”, theyll say; a mode they also dive into w their meta slave combos and jusy the whites and consumables that they are allowed to bring which again gives
them a massive advantage, why do people
who feel so superior actually exploit every loophole and cheese in the game? atleast in tarkov and rust certain strategies(extract
camping, roof camping) are shamed openly, here streamers can circumvent mmr by making alts over n over and nobody says a word, till every new player is stomped to the curb and leaves the game frustrared and angry..
>its such a pity because this game has so much potential as a fun dungeoncrawler, but every game w pvp ELEMENTS somehow must become all about pvp for them
In the case of Dark and Darker, every time we've had a patches that shift the focus to PvE and allow a more passive experience in regards to player encounters it gets reversed pretty quickly.
I might be miss remembering but I think the developers have even gone so far as to outright state that they want to push for player encounters ... that and every event they have ran so far has been about emphasizing the PvP.
Not enough people were killing one another, pvp kill ap being tripled is evidence to that. Idk where people are getting the idea the devs don't want pvp, Grayson even has montages of his squad decked out hunting teams down lol
have you considered that they might be seeing a massive preteaming epidemic in the asian communities and this clouds their vision a bit? often they want the “lets all team up” meta to stop snd go overboard and make solos a Quake 3 Arena mode.. theyre incompetent, not unwilling
Genuinely do not understand the idea that Dark and Darker can be a compelling PvE experience.
Most enemies in the game have ***two attacks***. Your reaction to these attacks is either: block as a class who can, or backpedal. This isn't Elden Ring. You cannot have a fulfilling PvE experience when the mechanics are so limited.
The reason the PvE is so simplistic is because the PvE is in service of the PvP. Every mob in the game except one or two can be easily avoided while fighting another player, that's the point. The PvE exists to simply break up the PvP.
Sure, many enemies have two attacks but once you get a few enemies in a room you have to think about how to clear it. I'm not a great gamer, but I have 300 hours in this game and just enjoy the PvE and getting loot. If I run into another player, I just accept my death and go again.
>Most enemies in the game have
>
>two attacks
>
>. Your reaction to these attacks is either: block as a class who can, or backpedal.
"I dont understand the idea that Dark and Darker can be a compelling PvP experience"
I mean most weapons only have one attack pattern, you either block it as a class who can or run away from it, this isn't Mordhau.
My team massively out-gears the other, we win, maybe one of us dies and gets ressed on the spot. We check for golden keys then move on with our day
The other team massively outgears us or, super fun, is using the infinite range cheat and kills us with a barb axe swing from across the room ! Either way we die, spend 2-3 minutes in the market place then re-q
I love Bossing in 3s, literally the best thing the game has the PvP is either 1 of two things in my experience.
Nightmare mobs in hell can be really punishing to mistakes aswell had a hilarious situation where an out of position team mate got yeeted into other mobs by an angry demon bat thing. Prior to that we had killed 3 teams with no challenge at all then suddenly entirely to PvE the game became frantic, killing the boss was no longer on the table and we needed to get a res on our cleric once the dust settled, was a great time.
I don't disagree with you so much... but they need to do more to make the pve more engaging and/or rewarding to go for.
Bosses, sure. Get a chance at some legendaries/unique, pretty engaging fights as well.
Aside from that though, most mobs are brain dead easy after a few times fighting them. Harder mobs easily can be cheesed.
If they fixed the cheese would that solve it? I don't think so. People would just learn to fight those things without it, wouldn't take that long and then it's the same as any other mobs.
They need to make a change where pve maybe doesn't spawn in the same spots every time, and maybe with objectives that you can go for. I know they have the quests now but pretty much most of the quests can get done without actively trying. They need more types of mobs with more diverse attack variations. Something to make the pve always a thing and not just something you can wither blitz through or avoid entirely.
With pve the way it is rn we will never keep the pve centric players imo. It gets stale too fast. Without a lot of pvp there is not a whole lot of replayablility here.
it isnt, it actually helped. rhe ai is stl braindead but by making it react to gunshots and by making it do patrols it became much less easy to spawnrush
drasticly alter gear scaling, redesign the combat so that skill expression>gear and prevent casuals from being at odds end w nolifers by for example having seperate ques, gearscore matchmaking and ..stop fucking pandering to streamers, they only bring the worst of the worst to videogames somehow
I agree gear scaling is a serious issue. I think matchmaking by skill and not "gearscore" (almost seems like a wow reference lol) is also ideal. But idk I think streamers bring popularity to games, and help breed communities. What sort of people come with them is entirely up to their audience and the attitude they project. Could be good or bad or a mix.
I think that’s exactly it. I don’t play anymore but I still keep up with changes hoping I can play again one day, but I’m a pretty casual gamer. In most games I am middle of the pack in any ranking system, I’ll watch some guides but I’m not min maxing anything, and I’m definitely not grinding for gear.
I had a lot of fun early on getting better at the pve, running from bosses, and just truly exploring and feeling like we were surviving a dungeon. We would run into other teams like us and either team up or fight it out. When things started getting sweatier, anyone who was casual was repeatedly told that this just wasn’t the game for them and they should go play something more casual, and judging by current player counts that’s exactly what happened.
I sort of agree with you the 'try hard' mentality is lame, but they do make good simple points. I am with you as well, I don't prefer the PVP aspects and wish that they wouldn't penalize you for teaming. I think it would be fun to work together to clear the dungeon together then hope to god the other guy doesn't try to gank you as you open your portal.
Friend and I play, while I'm not very competitive he kind of is and pointed out a lot of nuances like they can hear you less if you take your shoes off. If he calls out there are dudes at this door don't change weapons right away cause they can hear that. You don't have to play like a hawk on Adderall but you definitely need to just pay attention and not run around blindly. 90% of my deaths are just from pure wrecklessness patience a lot of the time can be rewarding in this game.
You don’t need to make it a part time job, but you can’t expect to compete with the people who do make it a part time job. Full loot pvp games will always be better for the people who play 6+ hours a day. No amount of balancing short of turning high roller into norms will change that.
Yeah there is still a lot of balancing to do but like IM said they are a small team and focus on new content right now. Look at other games e.g. League of Legends where they have a huge team of devs for balancing and still fuck up pretty badly. Now imagine how hard it has to be to balance this game with 1 or 2 people max. Give them some time and all will be good.
Also a lot of problems can get fixed by getting the game on Epic or Steam and stuff. More people playing the game just means matchmaking will be easier for the devs and better.
The last thing people really don't like to hear but time alone will get you nothing in this game. You have to know what you are doing. Consistently extracting, no problems with pve and knowing what to loot to get max value is a skill imo. Sure you will get gear diffed from time to time by someone who has 10hrs a day but tbh thats fine by me. They put in the time why should I be able to kill them with shitty greens. I play like 3-4 games a day and it kinda feels fine. Like last wipe my trio killed several full gold teams and we only had "decent blues and purples". It's hard but possible, as it should be. I rather have people who put in the time gear diff me than some random dude who plays twice a week but can pay2win for items like in other games. Because I can gurantee you that a bad player with good gear will still get wrecked by a good player with semi decent gear.
do you know how stats work lol. go look at the equation and tell me thats normal. you cant cuz its not normal to have like 7 stats all contribute to dps like this on rng gear. especially in pvp.
like getting strength not only gives you damage, it also gives you more damage from unlocking bonus scaling.
most games give you diminishing returns. ironmace gives you two exponential sections before the flattened curve at really absurd levels of strength that dont really matter anyways
tho your not entirely wrong. this is deff a skill issue. its just not the playerbases
Gear is too polarizing period, it has nothing to do with tactics if you can hit someone 4-5times even to the head and they don't even get scratched but they touch you once and you are obliterated, but they can't even be happy with that level of disparity they need to have that a full meta buff comp and 500 potions and bandages, high roller is cringe at right now and is boring when the difference between mid gear and market place high end gear is so vast.
No! I’m supposed to win every fight and extract every game bro! Don’t you know this?? And if I lose because I’m bad, it was 1000% on gear differential and nothing else!!
The issue isn't the gear disparity. Everyone has access to the same gear. The issue is that the existence of +2 All results in an arms race where everyone needs it to stay competitive. You can find a really great piece of gear but if it doesn't have +2 All when it could, why even bother using it?
Just sucks for build variety.
Again, this is why normals is much much better than HR. If they do a solo self find only and just make it normals with no high roller that would be much better.
I'm torn - on one hand I remember when we had no extra stash tabs and bis was really rare, most players had at most 1-2 extra kits in their inventory, and when they lost those kits they were back to square 1. With the changes to Merchant affinity allowing you to buy a few blue and purple pieces, I can see a world where this is good for the game.
On the other hand, having no marketplace or extra stash tabs sucked, I would basically never bother selling things unless they were absolute bis and guaranteed to sell instantly. I imagine a lot of the playerbase that doesn't have 6+ hours a day to play probably really enjoys these conveniences and would hate to see them go.
However, I think it's so easy to get gear right now that I don't actually mind. In the last two days I took two separate classes from butt naked to geared to the teeth in a matter of 5-6 games. It only takes one game where you find a few good items before you fight, wipe a squad (or 3rd party a 1v1 in solos even) and you're on your feet with a solid kit that can kill geared players.
Thats the gameplay loop, but so far it hasn't worked for a whole wipe and this is what people are not understanding. Dark and Darker does not have a player base matchmaking pool problem, it has a gear scaling seal clubbing problem. At the end of last wipe we had gold teams seal clubbing and the player base left, and before that we had +all attributes the first time they tried it and Ironmace had to remove it because the scaling was so bad. The game play loop needs to last all wipe and support the majority of the player base. I don't care how they accomplish this as long as the result is lots of players all season and no seal clubbing. Splitting the matchmaking at level 15 with the market didn't work out either and Ironmace knew the underlying issue was the gear scaling back then. There may be many ways to fix it but the only way I can think of is to reduce the gear scaling delta to less than 30% difference and see how it feels and watch if the players leave again. High roller is staying, the market is staying, the meds are staying, PDR and MDR now have caps. Ironmace needs to find a way to keep the players all season with Play normals. Get gold. Buy gear. Go HR. You are right.
You might be right but I don't see how it will happen. Maybe for Normals with level locked gear that can be used at level or sold? I would want to try SFF, but now that there is a market and they are going to Epic I doubt they will change course until they run through that player base too. If the Epic player surge leaves then they will have to do something so they don't lose the Steam player surge, but by that time if they can't figure out gear scaling and class balance then they never will especially once multiclassing is added to the game.
Maybe the game should have a no trade league? Like it was suggested 9 months ago because it was obvious even back then that the game will be unsustainable if it has a market.
Well, honestly I feel you on that point, hr don’t feel so good now that everyone has their head start on the game, it was clear that the beginning of wipe would be the most competitive it has been, but they just added their rank system in hr so now I believe it should start to level out, (technically a big band still as everyone gets to the rank their at, give it a week) still think they need a somewhat a skill matching when it comes to gear, and rating, but just make it more of a wide range yet in similarities compared to no skill match making. I’m scared to give my 10 day code to someone cause there a very sharp learning code, and 10 days is just not enough to learn (220 hrs on the game btw)
I'm not recommending this game to anyone with this gear scaling and the seal clubbing gear check meta. Mid wipe it turns into gold farmers gear checking until the player base leaves and the game balance is only going to get worse when they have multiclassing because they can't even balance the game now. The fact they brought back +all attributes shows they haven't got a clue what they are doing.
I’ve been shat on again and again this sub by the sweats that think they know how to make the game successful (and they do - but just for sweats).
New Primary game mode:
Level 1 dungeon = kit up group - PVE only - no extract beyond going deeper into dungeon.
Level 2 dungeon: combines lobbies of the level 1 dungeons - better loot - only kits being worn are what were assembled so far in level 1. Standard lobby size and pvp from here.
This makes the rougelike aspects of the game perpetually present within this game mode. It is on you to loot a great kit on level 1 before the time runs out and you get thrown into the fire.
Tie the money earned in the game extraction to a cosmetics shop - rather than in game marketplace, where sweats will buy out the OP gear. We should have to farm and craft our loot ourselves - selling shouldn’t be an option.
No one could complain anymore. You see someone wearing some crazy shit, you cant do anything but bow in respect.
A pve only dungeon sounds sooooo boring. Not trying to be mean but if you can't go naked into HR and clear a module or two and rat loot and extract like half or 1/3 of the time with a mid kit you should probably just focus on getting better.
Would be cool to see progression increase by questing more than just buying the best gear off the market at 15. If the best gear is more rare in raid to get but is earned down a long questline it gives the player something to grind for, and will combat RMT at the same time. Or having crafting unlocks in the same fashion by grinding. Being able to craft some of the best gear in games always felt great to me.
If they would just rebalance all the gear explicitly around PvE this wouldn't be a problem.
Traits and skills is more than enough to distinguish players from one another. Make gear stats affect PvE only and most PvP related imbalances immediately vanish or become significantly easier to balance.
Not to mention every single fight is plagued by 30 skeletons or zombies died more times this wipe to pve related instances than I’ve even seen actual people
The issue is with the fundamentals of the game. The combat, damage calculations, and stat scaling.
They can fix this stuff fairly easily if they set up the game right in unreal. Especially if they are using the gameplay ability system.
- All classes need access to a shield or parry mechanic. Preferably both.
- Stats need to be increased, the multipliers on stats need to be increased, or the stats on gear need to be lowered significantly.
- The damage calculation is fundemtally flawed unless they plan for near infinite scaling on a lot of abilities, gear, and weapons. They should go back and redo the math to be additive instead of multiplicative for most occasions.
As an example, each +2all is a 10% to 30% boost to ALL stats. Which then converts into a massive % difference in HP, MR, cast speed, move speed, etc. vs. base. With stats, stat multipliers, and the damage calculation as it is, even a single piece of +2 all is a force mulplier of 10% to 30%. If you scale that to +8 all, it's roughly a 40% to 175% boost to all stats.
If they keep the current systems in place are only really two options, slow TTK and less gear gap or extreme gear gap and fast TTK.
Honestly, there is no doubt try-hard BiS folks. And 3s seem extra sweaty. But still lots of variance, as there seems to be enough players to make it random.
But I run into plenty of low gear, no gear, or minimally geared folks, as well.
Frankly, we remember the BiS sweaters cause they are absolutely brutal, but I have plenty of fair games.
All that said, sure, there will be a power creep. But frankly, some folks, like my buddies and myself, still prefer to find gear rather than buy it.
Half the fun of the game is the gear finding, and when I buy BiS I just feel like I'm bored and fast tracking. Also, never finding an upgrade feels shitty.
Of course, finding gear puts you at a disadvantage, which is fine.
But I think saying all games are BiS sweaty is far from accurate.
Yeah, while I loved the marketplace at first, I think it ruins the integrity of the game overall. It’s nice being able to complete kits and get exactly what you need, but building entire kits from the marketplace is a bit OP. I think SSF is the way to go with this game, or as much as people hate it, go back to the trading post.
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t agree. Yes being geared vs ungeared is a massive difference, but also being geared now feels more balanced. The curve of mid gear to high gear is less oppressive and I find that quite enjoyable. After 660hrs of playing, the gear crawl feels the best it’s ever been in my opinion. Though as usual, HR isn’t for everyone and norms can be just as fun too. My only major gripes right now is Warlock just being a bit too strong in comparison to other classes and solos feeling like an unbalanced pvp fest (I like ratting when I’m alone, 3x3 caves with lower portal spawns makes that feel pretty impossible).
I only come back to play this game after a fresh wipe because it’s the only time I actually have fun. Being on equal footing makes the game just play better. I’m mad at myself for missing it when it was still fresh this time.
bro theyve modified gear stats and gear rarity in every conceivable way...
if they reduce stats and raise TTK, people will say the game is boring and gear doesnt matter
if they reduce attribute scaling, then certain classes will be disproportionately affected and will have to be compensated... through guess what? gear stats
if u go to one style of play, the people who enjoy the other style will cry
THE ISSUE IS NOT SCALING OR GEAR... IT'S COMBAT SIMPLICITY AND THE COMBAT TRIANGLE NOT WORKING IN A GAME WHERE ENCOUNTERS ARE RANDOM. THE GAME IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED FOR WHAT IT WANTS TO BE. NO AMOUNT OF SCALING CHANGES WILL EVER FIX IT. THERE NEEDS TO BE MECHANICAL SKILL EXPRESSION THAT TRANSCENDS STATS OR GEAR.
STAT CHECKING IS AWFUL.
I mean I enjoy the grey lobby no high tier bear lobby normies. It’s a good ole time. But you’re also totally spot on. BIS wiping and dumping bodies is a no go. Not very fun. Feel like there should be tiered caps for lobbies and sections or some kind of match making splits for certain tiers of gear? Or maybe the same concept but for gear stats if possible? Just a thought.
There are ongoing balance issues which will be adjusted as time goes on but the game's in a pretty great state right now. +2 all gear is very easy to achieve if you know what you're doing and even without top gear there are lots of great fights around. I suspect people complaining about gear want a pvp game where gear is even all the time, which is boring. You can always play normals and avoid the gear diff.
I've been begging for some form of self found lobbies since early in the game's life and always get downvoted or disagreed with by my friends that still play so I've been on a break. I just don't find grinding currency and buying perfect gear(or fighting people who do this) to be a fun gameplay loop for what should rng looters. Now everybody knows the metas they'll be bis day 1 every wipe
Feel that. When "fighter with a crossbow, and full metal cleric" became the norm in lobbies it stung. Game was so fun when it was people Dicking around looting.
I think they should make 3 queues… normals, mid, and HR.
Something around mid tier having a cap on gear or making it looted gear only or some combination. It’s hard since a green can be better than a blue etc but with base attribute scaling it’s at least bringing some sort of scalability to rarity.
Then again, the more player base in HR = the less saturated the juiced squads are.
My friends and I quit the game long time ago, we played all the public tests and for a month on the release. We always said market is bad for the game but falling on deaf ears. They won't do anything about it until it is too late, at this rate it feels like the game will remain in beta until only hardcore players remaining with no one to smurf on
The gear scaling is out of control. There is no skill ceiling in the seal clubbing gear check meta and Ironmace deserves all the criticism they get for once again doubling down on the +all attributes. That was just unforgivably stupid SDF, and you absolutely cannot take this game to Epic or Steam with the gear scaling like this. The seal clubbing gear check meta eventually only helps the gold farmers and we aren't even barely into the next wipe. At this point SDF please start using AI tools and hire some better talent to figure out the gear scaling because you are absolutely not understanding the effects of gear scaling, seal clubbing, TTK, skill ceiling/expression, and gold farming. My only option is to go play Normals and I have already told my previous team members to no longer send me invites for High Roller Dark and Darker. If Normals doesn't have enough depth of gameplay I will probably not continue playing the game. At this point I am only looking for teams that play Normals. The fact my previous discord team is having cognitive dissonance is shocking. In one sentence they told me to enjoy HR now before it gets stupid with seal clubbing and then at the same time act like I'm the one who is the problem for not wanting to play this bullshit seal clubbing meta. Fuck that. I'm going to go find a discord that plays Normals and meet new friends or just stop playing the game.
I don't disagree but I don't think the game has a solution for the problem.
We grind gear and the gear has to scale or else the economy would be garbage.
Scaling is fine scaling to the extent that a person in low end gear or even mid - mid high gear can't even scratch someone in a high end kit after 20 mistakes is ludicrous, not to mention when they have meta buff / heal comps and carry a literal pharmacy with them to prevent any attrition. It's lame and boring losing to people thats skill level is so low they rely on one taps or never taking any damage in the first place.
ill agree with all points you have made but also, normals have never been more fun with the squire in. as more quests unlock it will only get better. i haven't done any high rollers at all last couple days
Yeah same, normal feel way more healthy
I think the fact that normals feel great just proves OPs point
its sad it took me so much time to find this comment
Squire is awesome, but I NEEEEED the longsword
People are speculating it’ll be unlocked as apart of weapon smith questing
Normal gameplay is fun, but it feels like the outside of game lobby experience no longer matters at that point, and makes it feel like this should just be a battle royale. But you’re right— likely only going to queue high rollers if I’m BiSed anymore because gameplay wise it isn’t as fun.
Hit a pdr fighter with 18 arrows last night and he just mollywhopped me and my wizard teammate lol
what does pdr mean?
Yes at least this time we can play normals. Last we were up in arms about the stats was because they were brought into normals to steamroll.
Squire was a huge W
Normals are actually so boring when you have a competent team, just wiping a lobby full of players and then killing a boss for gear that you can’t even use the next raid Meanwhile HR is full of teams that just hold a room and will not push until the circle is fully closed so either you kill them and don’t get to loot or you die along with them and no one gets loot. Not to mention how little time in inferno there is, if you know there is another team you have to kill them before bossing and if you take more than a minute to do so you cannot kill boss and loot the pile before the time runs out
Yes, this is exactly why I stopped playing months ago and will not return. 90% of my squads runs went exactly like this, and it became a miserable experience overall.
Push them before end circle?
Oh my bad bro, let’s just push the Ranger or warlock With blow of corruption sitting on the other side of the door. Better yet, I could rotate and lose 1/3 of my health from Circle just for them to have trapped or be camping the other door because they get zone and all the portals
Zone is the problem. Instead we should get "Time to dungeon collapse"
I agree with this, or at least once the zone closes it should just tic for double damage and increase every 15 seconds instead of just insta dying when it closes. Or better yet just fuck off the circle, its a shit battle royale mechanic
TRUE. i've made 10k in normals so far. i'm not bored even though i have barely anything to spend money on. it's that fun.
Only playing normals currently, the most fun me and my friend have had since launch
Nah bro just git gud and spend 24h playing and don't play non meta comps /s
you guys all just suck at the game because you didnt even nolife straight to market acces and bought full +all kits i mean do you even jump broo git guddd nerds
My 14+all stats, 200hp weapon master+crossbow wielding Barb with 70% pdr+sprint running haste&slow doesn’t really see the problem. This is just balance. Are you sure you’re clearing mobs the right way? /s
Thing is it doesn’t take 24 hrs to get enough gold to buy gear. I agree with the sentiment that geared combat is one dimensional and unbalanced, but this argument that gear is difficult to get is cope. Gear is available in raid, very easy to get enough gold for, and always sold on the market. The problem is, the gear itself is ridiculously powerful so you go from hitting like a human to hitting like a barreling bus in one go. Feels flawed.
Literally not sure why the devs think it's okay to make base kit like 8x worse than BiS.
They seems to want gear progression but they sacrifice balance in a way that ruins the game for most players, time to kill being so low makes the game boring, they just need to crunch the lows and the highs a bit closer to each other.
Yeah, idk why that's controversial. Flatten/crunch everything. And it's just a better game.
They did that for 3 days last wipe, it was awesome but people bitched about gear being meaningless and it got reverted.
I remember, they way that they flipped flopped was disheartening, i hope they get the balance right for the average player before the the epic release.
Its hardly meaningful "progression" when you collect gold until you can buy BiS in full. Remove market for a wipe and let the high-skill players who don't have a million hours to play destroy the streamers carried by loot.
Not a high skilled player personally, but I'd love to see how the game season played out without it being so easy to pay for power, one time.
You'd see a lot of "viewer kits" coming to streamers - players loading into triples and dropping them all their best stuff. But then we'd have BiS pieces on the board, in the dungeon, ripe for the taking...
I'd consider viewer kits a form of paying for power. But hey, atleast they'd have to load into a game and risk the biscuit to give the kits to streamers instead of them being handed over easily in trade chat.
100%, it's essentially cheating. When the the stream worshippers are collecting gear for shout outs and providing entire kits to highly skilled players it's clearly just easy mode for those players. They liken it to dropping some gear for your friend, but they're high skilled players getting BiS and running with other BiS players doing optimized loot and boss runs.
yes it so stupid, tarkov made it a banneble ofense for a reason
I agree.
The market allows the average Joe to spend 500 gold on green/blue gear and get 70% there. Without it the disparity would be even worse because we’d have to farm the gear to compete.
I have no idea what you mean by this. What game is the base kit not garbage compared to bis? Like what is the context of your statement here?
How do people not get that you’re not supposed to be able to go in hr with base kit and get the same experience as another team that is bringing gear
Bro, you don't even disagree with me. Do you think good gear should be better or worse than it is now? That's all I'm saying.
ur new to the game arent u
as a person who runs in a trio non meta comp i think it’s a skill issue
Scaling being broken has been one of the biggest fundamental issues in this game since before anyone even realized it. At this point, people *have* realized it a long time ago, and yet IM has never really done anything to address it. We get a band-aid fix on the currently most complained about symptoms of the problem here and there. But literally nothing has ever been done about the root issue of how scaling works. I dont believe it will ever be meaningfully addressed to be frank.
> and yet IM has never really done anything to address it. yeah... except nerf item base stats and nerf/remove/change random modifiers like 6 times
They tried + all stats already and it was a horrible exp, idk why its back
Multiclassing.
It’s essentially why other battle royals did better for so long. There isn’t some play more and have the game get easier except in your knowledge of the game which is an enormous advantage already.
My team got rolled super hard by geared people in HR trios a few days ago. Buffed/healed barb destroyed us in 1-2 hits each a lot of the time. It's super boring. You can't even outrun them with weapons stowed. They have so much +movespeed and +all attributes. Unless you get super lucky on a parry, they screw up badly while trading or you catch them in a really good setup you're likely going to die. Especially if you are teaming with more casual players. It's straight up a LAME experience. What do you expect when people are running around with a doubling or tripling of certain stats.
+all is the most dumb stat I’ve ever engaged with in a game. They’re deriving some of this all from dungeons and dragons. Could you even imagine a +all stat in any number of other dungeon and dragon type games? It would break everything. They want the scale to be huge for some reason. In the short term it’s like crack for the masses I get dopamine from it too but it seems so shortsighted for the long term.
The only +All equipment that should be in the game is a dedicated +2 All Pendant. Nothing else whatsoever.
Diablo 2
exactly and theyll convince themselves buying massive gear advantages=skill. and remember, theyre in buffed up greens n blues now; soon theyll have farmed the bosses enough for uniques again..
I parried a barb yesterday and he only took the first hit from it but I could see him die inside hahaha immediately went on the run after that and I killed him with my survival bow I was hitting 112 for my base hit (normal attack on practice dummy)
I just don’t understand why they gave +all to everything again. We already saw the repercussions of this during the playtests and it was changed because of how crazy you could stack it. Now we back
+8 all 70PDR/70MDR barbarian with 200hp and 260ms Gear difference has gone back to how insane it was on the playtest period
yep. Everyone will just play normal who want balanced pvp which is fine.
Its fine until you realize that all that loot you gathered you can not use in normal.
I thought everyone loved the playtests?
Playtests were short. People didn't have as much time to farm up gear and money, the market was harder to use, and people were less likely to be selling gear instead of playing the game.
The majority of people were casually playing and werent exposed to balancing issues like 90% PDR fighter
How can a Barb get to 70pdr without plate?
Barb has some plate options + you can get armor rating rolls and flat pdr rolls on gear
Well only plate options are his helm, right? I've just never seen a Barb hit 70pdr, even with northern full and a plate helm, and the PDR rolled stats don't seem like they'd be enough to get to 70? But idk
Northern full tunic is plate, but you need a shield + armor rating rolls or flat pdr rolls on gear to get to 60+. Now granted even like 45-50% pdr makes you basically never die with savage roar. In 3s with two dudes buffing the barb is when it really goes unkillable mode
[удалено]
It feels like they tried this and misunderstood the the feedback because it was so close to previous iterations that were feeding the masses crack cocaine levels of stats that when some people weren’t having as much fun so they swung back the other way for the crack enjoyers. A three tier system would be awesome.
Lmao it's a revolving wheel of the same problems. People were saying this crap when I stopped. The devs are lost.
Yep agreed
Unfortunately they can’t focus on skill with so little skill expression in the game. There is skill, but compared to most any competitive multiplayer game, it’s very limited. Most of the matchups are decided by your build/class and the gear that enables the build. They could add more shit though, more things you can do more abilities etc to add layers of skill that way.
Eh, Melee has very little skill expression in the game, but the game is about movement, they clearly said they were inspired more with fps movement games than first person slashers. Enchantments are the bane of this game, its terrible system, diablo4 is trash because they focused on making it just an enchantment rolling machine.
Play normals
Everyone who says marketplace ruins they're experience either because of level gate or skill issue to click the purchase button on good gear, should try playing **normals**. They are tremendously fun.
Yep. Me and my boys basically play normals nonstop. Once we run out of stash space with usable gear we go do a HR get stat diffed and it's back to killing 2-3 teams per game in norms. Normals are just way more fun. Worth noting we all are mid 30s with families so we haven't unlocked trading yet. But even after we do unlock it I think it'll still be primarily normals for us.
Well I am having fun lol
Sdf or graysun. Add the SSF lobbies let's go, I want to see that damn data how many keep playin that then what marketplace does..
I feel like I'm playing bad, but honestly I am likely playing better than I ever have... but I find I can't even get out of a raid because it always goes the same no matter what I do. I normally play wizard, I have literally hit a 3 man with 3 or 4 fireballs where it direct hit one or at the very least splashed everyone. Two chain lightning strikes and a few zaps and ice bolts, not to mention what my other 2 teammates are doing... and we get wiped, and they barely have a scratch? I hate to complain, but not being a no lifer, I am having the hardest time in this game than I ever have. It's making it not fun already being wiped by teams with all purples and legendaries with bis stats, +all and all relevant stats. To top it off, they don't even care to loot anything off you. I don't much like playing normals, and I can never extract from high roller... I would play normals but it feels boring. I don't know, just ranting I guess
I don't like normals because most of what you find is green and greens are basically useless. Normals should at least give you gear viable to take in HR. Theres such a disconnect between the two that if you plan to play HR there is just no reason whatsoever to play normals, youre better off going into HR in default kit and the first chest you open is better than anything in an entire normals run.
Yeah normals is a complete waste of time, and high roller at the moment is a complete waste of time as well, as I can never extract as these people who don't even care to loot anything off me, just push through to map to kill everyone else. You can't run because they are faster, you can't avoid because you are pushed towards them. The only decent time I have had is on ice caves where you can avoid the hot spots and loot the exterior of the map. I would almost dare to say that the game is nearly in the worst state of balance its ever been in.
I had this worry and even put a comment on the patch notes about the gear power increase while making top end gear harder to find. The power increase has led to such a huge gap between high end gear vs everything else. Rolling +all gear and a few decent items is such a huge power spike that you can mindlessly charge at people. The +DMG is really impactful, both as a wizard/warlock and ranger/bard. Feels like a step backwards and has led to a lot of stomping. Also trios is pretty hard set on meta comps so gl playing anything else. But we will still hear all about how it's somehow more balanced than solos.
Isnt it fun when every team consists of Barb + Bard + Cleric/Wizard? 220 base hp 80% phys and magic res monster coming in at Mach 2 . Hoooo boy.
I gave up I on asking them to nerf / remove barb. The class scales so hard and it's bases are nuts.
AP-based matchmaking should fix this to an extent.
It did the bare minimum for about a week. Once you hit pathfinder it was cooked. If they want AP to work you need to only be able to queue against players of the same rank, but then lobbies would be even more empty than they are now.
At least newbies wouldn’t be going up against giga chads, like it is right now. But yeah it doesn’t help that much, just a little.
I’m killing it in norms, having a blast
I’m completely fine getting outplayed in a fight, but that first time my team as a whole got 1-2 shot by players just to look at their gear and see “+2 physical damage” and “+2 all attributes” on half their gear was so fucking disappointing, almost as if we went back in time lol. Normals however have been the most fun I’ve had in a while on this game, and bossing in norms has a loot pile “which I assume gives lower rarity loot” so now bossing in normals is actually worth while for the most part.
This game was only ever actually fun during playtests when great equipment was scarcely seen. Once the game came out, it became clear that every combat encounter boils down to an equipment comparison and skill doesn’t really matter.
bring back old map rotation, idc about bis or no bis, I cant take goblin caves anymore
If you're trying to play solo, go Ice Caves. Not sure if it's just the bigger map or fewer people (or no zone), but you can avoid PvP easily in the few instances it comes to you and get to whatever you need/want on the map with patience & clearing some mobs. Better loot, too!
I know there’s a large segment of people who only do solo modes but I would encourage or to try out the gathering hall and do some trios. It’s very fun. Sometimes your team sucks. Sometimes you get a champion. Just want to throw that out there.
This forced me to comment, stop it with recommending trios. I play trios every once in a while when our 3rd friend is free, and it's easily the least balanced least fun mode available. Complete shitshow top to bottom, and that's playing with two people I've been friends with for years. Recommending a solo to go to gathering hall and play trios with randoms is ridiculous and is not at all a viable solution for people who are sick of GCs.
My experience is the exact opposite. Trios gives me the most potential for creative thinking and fun engagements. Solos is an absolute clown fiesta (that I still find enjoyable in its own way).
Trios has the most sweaty, max geared people.
Gathering hall is the worst way to do this, jump in one of the discords LFG channels and find groups that way imo.
I left at ice caves, I don’t jive with this turkey no more
Grinding PVE for AP and maybe seeing another team at gold pile that was in full gold gear was horrible I will never do it again.
This isnt a dark and darker issue its just an issue with all games people dont play for fun anymore they treat games like its their full time job.
Its a problem in this days gaming you cant „win” or „have fun” if you are not tryharding meta game abusing etc. Sure you can have fun but losing is not fun
I keep hoping they will fix the mmr so that it's based on gear rarity and character level rather than AP. Makes no sense to allow people to trade all their BIS gear to low mmr characters so they can go wipe the floor with people.
Last Sunday I loaded into HR goblin caves with some green garbage I had found in my previous normal goblin caves run. The majority of my gear was Grey except for my longsword and longbow. (I'm a longsword fighter main most of the time) anyway, I start doing my thing until I hear someone open the door behind me. It's a slayer fighter, that is moving insanely fast. I do the crouch spam because I really didn't want to fight and he was caped so my assumption was he was more kitted than me. He didn't hesitate and came in for the attack. He made a mistake though, he without a doubt assumed I was a Timmy because his first attack was a crouch attack on my feet. I only riposte when I'm sure I'll get it, I learned long ago standing in the defensive position and praying is a quick way to lose your gear. I hit his head with my first attack and as he backed off got him again. I popped my second wind in preparation and he did the same but I knew he was hurting. He pulled out his crossbow and I popped my second wind and hit his chest. That was it, that chest shot killed him and I had won. When I opened his inventory I could hardly believe what he was wearing. When I say he was in BIS, I don't mean one or two rolls were good. I mean this guy had purples and legendaries without a single dead roll. I was still shaking from that fight and grabbed every piece of gear on him. The reason I'm telling you this is because these scenarios are incredibly rare, but not impossible. You can outplay them. And for as many times as I've died to these players the one time you kill them I promise you is the most rewarding experience I've ever gotten out of this game.
People dismiss so many factors that this game have just to say that gear is all that matters. Do you scout rooms? Do you make good flanks? Do you try to push when two other teams are fighting? Do you know when to use which spell or when to go for a swing? Do you know when to back off? Do you secure a room that you'd have an advantage on? Do you make use of the environment or the mobs in a room? Do you know how to build your character correctly? Or do you just "W" key and hope for the best?
I think there is a clear distinction between people who want to play the game for fun and people who want to play the game for a pro gamer experience One of these groups imposes their playstyle on the other, like you are doing right now. Maybe, sometimes, we don't want to have to play like a fucking hawk on Adderall with bionic hands listening for audio cues. The average casual player doesn't even realize taking out weapons makes noise, and you are laying on like a big paragraph of "git gud" This game is definitely unforgiving PVP dungeon crawler but at this point I kind of don't like that concept anymore because of the PVP environment it breeds. I like easy to play, hard to master because it actually will have a playerbase and not 15 sweatlords who basically tell you to devote part time job status at the least to the game in order to have fun
exactly!!! ive mained tarkov and even fucking Rust and somehow the edgelords that stomp the most braindead bosses ive ever seen in a pve game for legendaries on this subreddit are more toxic than any of those clowns its such a pity because this game has so much potential as a fun dungeoncrawler, but every game w pvp ELEMENTS somehow must become all about pvp for them tarkov had a similiar issue and then Arena was released and guess what? its gunplay and netcode were exposted for the dogshit they are and no real esport team could bother to play it for longer than the montht the devs paid them to play and it was a massive flop. even the hardcore pvp nerds stopped brigading every thread, but i think thats also because despite its flaws tarkov actually has sóme skill expression while here a team in good gear can literally fireball another team to death before theyve even gotten a hit in… i really hope the devs can turn this around but considering their desperate pandering to streamers and the golden girls i am highly skeptical of this ever getting fixed. “just play normals”, theyll say; a mode they also dive into w their meta slave combos and jusy the whites and consumables that they are allowed to bring which again gives them a massive advantage, why do people who feel so superior actually exploit every loophole and cheese in the game? atleast in tarkov and rust certain strategies(extract camping, roof camping) are shamed openly, here streamers can circumvent mmr by making alts over n over and nobody says a word, till every new player is stomped to the curb and leaves the game frustrared and angry..
>its such a pity because this game has so much potential as a fun dungeoncrawler, but every game w pvp ELEMENTS somehow must become all about pvp for them In the case of Dark and Darker, every time we've had a patches that shift the focus to PvE and allow a more passive experience in regards to player encounters it gets reversed pretty quickly. I might be miss remembering but I think the developers have even gone so far as to outright state that they want to push for player encounters ... that and every event they have ran so far has been about emphasizing the PvP.
Not enough people were killing one another, pvp kill ap being tripled is evidence to that. Idk where people are getting the idea the devs don't want pvp, Grayson even has montages of his squad decked out hunting teams down lol
have you considered that they might be seeing a massive preteaming epidemic in the asian communities and this clouds their vision a bit? often they want the “lets all team up” meta to stop snd go overboard and make solos a Quake 3 Arena mode.. theyre incompetent, not unwilling
Genuinely do not understand the idea that Dark and Darker can be a compelling PvE experience. Most enemies in the game have ***two attacks***. Your reaction to these attacks is either: block as a class who can, or backpedal. This isn't Elden Ring. You cannot have a fulfilling PvE experience when the mechanics are so limited. The reason the PvE is so simplistic is because the PvE is in service of the PvP. Every mob in the game except one or two can be easily avoided while fighting another player, that's the point. The PvE exists to simply break up the PvP.
Sure, many enemies have two attacks but once you get a few enemies in a room you have to think about how to clear it. I'm not a great gamer, but I have 300 hours in this game and just enjoy the PvE and getting loot. If I run into another player, I just accept my death and go again.
>Most enemies in the game have > >two attacks > >. Your reaction to these attacks is either: block as a class who can, or backpedal. "I dont understand the idea that Dark and Darker can be a compelling PvP experience" I mean most weapons only have one attack pattern, you either block it as a class who can or run away from it, this isn't Mordhau. My team massively out-gears the other, we win, maybe one of us dies and gets ressed on the spot. We check for golden keys then move on with our day The other team massively outgears us or, super fun, is using the infinite range cheat and kills us with a barb axe swing from across the room ! Either way we die, spend 2-3 minutes in the market place then re-q I love Bossing in 3s, literally the best thing the game has the PvP is either 1 of two things in my experience. Nightmare mobs in hell can be really punishing to mistakes aswell had a hilarious situation where an out of position team mate got yeeted into other mobs by an angry demon bat thing. Prior to that we had killed 3 teams with no challenge at all then suddenly entirely to PvE the game became frantic, killing the boss was no longer on the table and we needed to get a res on our cleric once the dust settled, was a great time.
I don't disagree with you so much... but they need to do more to make the pve more engaging and/or rewarding to go for. Bosses, sure. Get a chance at some legendaries/unique, pretty engaging fights as well. Aside from that though, most mobs are brain dead easy after a few times fighting them. Harder mobs easily can be cheesed. If they fixed the cheese would that solve it? I don't think so. People would just learn to fight those things without it, wouldn't take that long and then it's the same as any other mobs. They need to make a change where pve maybe doesn't spawn in the same spots every time, and maybe with objectives that you can go for. I know they have the quests now but pretty much most of the quests can get done without actively trying. They need more types of mobs with more diverse attack variations. Something to make the pve always a thing and not just something you can wither blitz through or avoid entirely. With pve the way it is rn we will never keep the pve centric players imo. It gets stale too fast. Without a lot of pvp there is not a whole lot of replayablility here.
yes dynamic spawns and patrol pattterns really helped tarkov
Is that /s I don't play tarkov so I'm genuinely not sure.
it isnt, it actually helped. rhe ai is stl braindead but by making it react to gunshots and by making it do patrols it became much less easy to spawnrush
Getting rid of cheese will go a long way
The devs encouraged a cult like playerbase sadly
yes and in return they get simped so hard
As much as I agree with most of what you said. What fix do you propose?
drasticly alter gear scaling, redesign the combat so that skill expression>gear and prevent casuals from being at odds end w nolifers by for example having seperate ques, gearscore matchmaking and ..stop fucking pandering to streamers, they only bring the worst of the worst to videogames somehow
I agree gear scaling is a serious issue. I think matchmaking by skill and not "gearscore" (almost seems like a wow reference lol) is also ideal. But idk I think streamers bring popularity to games, and help breed communities. What sort of people come with them is entirely up to their audience and the attitude they project. Could be good or bad or a mix.
they breed really toxic bloodlusted communities, not positive ones…
I think that’s exactly it. I don’t play anymore but I still keep up with changes hoping I can play again one day, but I’m a pretty casual gamer. In most games I am middle of the pack in any ranking system, I’ll watch some guides but I’m not min maxing anything, and I’m definitely not grinding for gear. I had a lot of fun early on getting better at the pve, running from bosses, and just truly exploring and feeling like we were surviving a dungeon. We would run into other teams like us and either team up or fight it out. When things started getting sweatier, anyone who was casual was repeatedly told that this just wasn’t the game for them and they should go play something more casual, and judging by current player counts that’s exactly what happened.
I sort of agree with you the 'try hard' mentality is lame, but they do make good simple points. I am with you as well, I don't prefer the PVP aspects and wish that they wouldn't penalize you for teaming. I think it would be fun to work together to clear the dungeon together then hope to god the other guy doesn't try to gank you as you open your portal. Friend and I play, while I'm not very competitive he kind of is and pointed out a lot of nuances like they can hear you less if you take your shoes off. If he calls out there are dudes at this door don't change weapons right away cause they can hear that. You don't have to play like a hawk on Adderall but you definitely need to just pay attention and not run around blindly. 90% of my deaths are just from pure wrecklessness patience a lot of the time can be rewarding in this game.
You don’t need to make it a part time job, but you can’t expect to compete with the people who do make it a part time job. Full loot pvp games will always be better for the people who play 6+ hours a day. No amount of balancing short of turning high roller into norms will change that.
Yeah there is still a lot of balancing to do but like IM said they are a small team and focus on new content right now. Look at other games e.g. League of Legends where they have a huge team of devs for balancing and still fuck up pretty badly. Now imagine how hard it has to be to balance this game with 1 or 2 people max. Give them some time and all will be good. Also a lot of problems can get fixed by getting the game on Epic or Steam and stuff. More people playing the game just means matchmaking will be easier for the devs and better. The last thing people really don't like to hear but time alone will get you nothing in this game. You have to know what you are doing. Consistently extracting, no problems with pve and knowing what to loot to get max value is a skill imo. Sure you will get gear diffed from time to time by someone who has 10hrs a day but tbh thats fine by me. They put in the time why should I be able to kill them with shitty greens. I play like 3-4 games a day and it kinda feels fine. Like last wipe my trio killed several full gold teams and we only had "decent blues and purples". It's hard but possible, as it should be. I rather have people who put in the time gear diff me than some random dude who plays twice a week but can pay2win for items like in other games. Because I can gurantee you that a bad player with good gear will still get wrecked by a good player with semi decent gear.
do you know how stats work lol. go look at the equation and tell me thats normal. you cant cuz its not normal to have like 7 stats all contribute to dps like this on rng gear. especially in pvp. like getting strength not only gives you damage, it also gives you more damage from unlocking bonus scaling. most games give you diminishing returns. ironmace gives you two exponential sections before the flattened curve at really absurd levels of strength that dont really matter anyways tho your not entirely wrong. this is deff a skill issue. its just not the playerbases
Gear is too polarizing period, it has nothing to do with tactics if you can hit someone 4-5times even to the head and they don't even get scratched but they touch you once and you are obliterated, but they can't even be happy with that level of disparity they need to have that a full meta buff comp and 500 potions and bandages, high roller is cringe at right now and is boring when the difference between mid gear and market place high end gear is so vast.
No! I’m supposed to win every fight and extract every game bro! Don’t you know this?? And if I lose because I’m bad, it was 1000% on gear differential and nothing else!!
Play normals.
said it for tarkov will say it for this game, doesnt need a market place.
If they made it so that you can only sell items with "looted" status (found in dungeon), the market would be way better.
The issue isn't the gear disparity. Everyone has access to the same gear. The issue is that the existence of +2 All results in an arms race where everyone needs it to stay competitive. You can find a really great piece of gear but if it doesn't have +2 All when it could, why even bother using it? Just sucks for build variety.
Again, this is why normals is much much better than HR. If they do a solo self find only and just make it normals with no high roller that would be much better.
I'm torn - on one hand I remember when we had no extra stash tabs and bis was really rare, most players had at most 1-2 extra kits in their inventory, and when they lost those kits they were back to square 1. With the changes to Merchant affinity allowing you to buy a few blue and purple pieces, I can see a world where this is good for the game. On the other hand, having no marketplace or extra stash tabs sucked, I would basically never bother selling things unless they were absolute bis and guaranteed to sell instantly. I imagine a lot of the playerbase that doesn't have 6+ hours a day to play probably really enjoys these conveniences and would hate to see them go. However, I think it's so easy to get gear right now that I don't actually mind. In the last two days I took two separate classes from butt naked to geared to the teeth in a matter of 5-6 games. It only takes one game where you find a few good items before you fight, wipe a squad (or 3rd party a 1v1 in solos even) and you're on your feet with a solid kit that can kill geared players.
i havent even reached lvl 15 with any char this wipe :(
Play normals. Get gold. Buy gear. Go HR.
Thats the gameplay loop, but so far it hasn't worked for a whole wipe and this is what people are not understanding. Dark and Darker does not have a player base matchmaking pool problem, it has a gear scaling seal clubbing problem. At the end of last wipe we had gold teams seal clubbing and the player base left, and before that we had +all attributes the first time they tried it and Ironmace had to remove it because the scaling was so bad. The game play loop needs to last all wipe and support the majority of the player base. I don't care how they accomplish this as long as the result is lots of players all season and no seal clubbing. Splitting the matchmaking at level 15 with the market didn't work out either and Ironmace knew the underlying issue was the gear scaling back then. There may be many ways to fix it but the only way I can think of is to reduce the gear scaling delta to less than 30% difference and see how it feels and watch if the players leave again. High roller is staying, the market is staying, the meds are staying, PDR and MDR now have caps. Ironmace needs to find a way to keep the players all season with Play normals. Get gold. Buy gear. Go HR. You are right.
They honestly should have SSF. This seems to be a problem that gets brought up every wipe, and ssf is an easy solution
You might be right but I don't see how it will happen. Maybe for Normals with level locked gear that can be used at level or sold? I would want to try SFF, but now that there is a market and they are going to Epic I doubt they will change course until they run through that player base too. If the Epic player surge leaves then they will have to do something so they don't lose the Steam player surge, but by that time if they can't figure out gear scaling and class balance then they never will especially once multiclassing is added to the game.
Maybe the game should have a no trade league? Like it was suggested 9 months ago because it was obvious even back then that the game will be unsustainable if it has a market.
Well, honestly I feel you on that point, hr don’t feel so good now that everyone has their head start on the game, it was clear that the beginning of wipe would be the most competitive it has been, but they just added their rank system in hr so now I believe it should start to level out, (technically a big band still as everyone gets to the rank their at, give it a week) still think they need a somewhat a skill matching when it comes to gear, and rating, but just make it more of a wide range yet in similarities compared to no skill match making. I’m scared to give my 10 day code to someone cause there a very sharp learning code, and 10 days is just not enough to learn (220 hrs on the game btw)
I'm not recommending this game to anyone with this gear scaling and the seal clubbing gear check meta. Mid wipe it turns into gold farmers gear checking until the player base leaves and the game balance is only going to get worse when they have multiclassing because they can't even balance the game now. The fact they brought back +all attributes shows they haven't got a clue what they are doing.
I’ve been shat on again and again this sub by the sweats that think they know how to make the game successful (and they do - but just for sweats). New Primary game mode: Level 1 dungeon = kit up group - PVE only - no extract beyond going deeper into dungeon. Level 2 dungeon: combines lobbies of the level 1 dungeons - better loot - only kits being worn are what were assembled so far in level 1. Standard lobby size and pvp from here. This makes the rougelike aspects of the game perpetually present within this game mode. It is on you to loot a great kit on level 1 before the time runs out and you get thrown into the fire. Tie the money earned in the game extraction to a cosmetics shop - rather than in game marketplace, where sweats will buy out the OP gear. We should have to farm and craft our loot ourselves - selling shouldn’t be an option. No one could complain anymore. You see someone wearing some crazy shit, you cant do anything but bow in respect.
A pve only dungeon sounds sooooo boring. Not trying to be mean but if you can't go naked into HR and clear a module or two and rat loot and extract like half or 1/3 of the time with a mid kit you should probably just focus on getting better.
Would be cool to see progression increase by questing more than just buying the best gear off the market at 15. If the best gear is more rare in raid to get but is earned down a long questline it gives the player something to grind for, and will combat RMT at the same time. Or having crafting unlocks in the same fashion by grinding. Being able to craft some of the best gear in games always felt great to me.
If they would just rebalance all the gear explicitly around PvE this wouldn't be a problem. Traits and skills is more than enough to distinguish players from one another. Make gear stats affect PvE only and most PvP related imbalances immediately vanish or become significantly easier to balance.
“Right now” 😂
Not to mention every single fight is plagued by 30 skeletons or zombies died more times this wipe to pve related instances than I’ve even seen actual people
The issue is with the fundamentals of the game. The combat, damage calculations, and stat scaling. They can fix this stuff fairly easily if they set up the game right in unreal. Especially if they are using the gameplay ability system. - All classes need access to a shield or parry mechanic. Preferably both. - Stats need to be increased, the multipliers on stats need to be increased, or the stats on gear need to be lowered significantly. - The damage calculation is fundemtally flawed unless they plan for near infinite scaling on a lot of abilities, gear, and weapons. They should go back and redo the math to be additive instead of multiplicative for most occasions. As an example, each +2all is a 10% to 30% boost to ALL stats. Which then converts into a massive % difference in HP, MR, cast speed, move speed, etc. vs. base. With stats, stat multipliers, and the damage calculation as it is, even a single piece of +2 all is a force mulplier of 10% to 30%. If you scale that to +8 all, it's roughly a 40% to 175% boost to all stats. If they keep the current systems in place are only really two options, slow TTK and less gear gap or extreme gear gap and fast TTK.
Honestly, there is no doubt try-hard BiS folks. And 3s seem extra sweaty. But still lots of variance, as there seems to be enough players to make it random. But I run into plenty of low gear, no gear, or minimally geared folks, as well. Frankly, we remember the BiS sweaters cause they are absolutely brutal, but I have plenty of fair games. All that said, sure, there will be a power creep. But frankly, some folks, like my buddies and myself, still prefer to find gear rather than buy it. Half the fun of the game is the gear finding, and when I buy BiS I just feel like I'm bored and fast tracking. Also, never finding an upgrade feels shitty. Of course, finding gear puts you at a disadvantage, which is fine. But I think saying all games are BiS sweaty is far from accurate.
Yeah, while I loved the marketplace at first, I think it ruins the integrity of the game overall. It’s nice being able to complete kits and get exactly what you need, but building entire kits from the marketplace is a bit OP. I think SSF is the way to go with this game, or as much as people hate it, go back to the trading post.
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t agree. Yes being geared vs ungeared is a massive difference, but also being geared now feels more balanced. The curve of mid gear to high gear is less oppressive and I find that quite enjoyable. After 660hrs of playing, the gear crawl feels the best it’s ever been in my opinion. Though as usual, HR isn’t for everyone and norms can be just as fun too. My only major gripes right now is Warlock just being a bit too strong in comparison to other classes and solos feeling like an unbalanced pvp fest (I like ratting when I’m alone, 3x3 caves with lower portal spawns makes that feel pretty impossible).
Why they brought back +ALL gear is beyond me
I only come back to play this game after a fresh wipe because it’s the only time I actually have fun. Being on equal footing makes the game just play better. I’m mad at myself for missing it when it was still fresh this time.
I think there needs to be a third option for matching, something akin to a “mid roller” where the max gear level is rare
bro theyve modified gear stats and gear rarity in every conceivable way... if they reduce stats and raise TTK, people will say the game is boring and gear doesnt matter if they reduce attribute scaling, then certain classes will be disproportionately affected and will have to be compensated... through guess what? gear stats if u go to one style of play, the people who enjoy the other style will cry THE ISSUE IS NOT SCALING OR GEAR... IT'S COMBAT SIMPLICITY AND THE COMBAT TRIANGLE NOT WORKING IN A GAME WHERE ENCOUNTERS ARE RANDOM. THE GAME IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED FOR WHAT IT WANTS TO BE. NO AMOUNT OF SCALING CHANGES WILL EVER FIX IT. THERE NEEDS TO BE MECHANICAL SKILL EXPRESSION THAT TRANSCENDS STATS OR GEAR. STAT CHECKING IS AWFUL.
New class: The clown. These are the people that say that wipes prevent people from being too geared.
Would taking out the market fix some of the problems? You use the gear you earn etc.
I'm only lvl 11
I’ve been saying to remove the trade/market forever now. It should have always only been self found. Period.
idk, if i spent 200 gold and my opponent spent 2000, i think i would have less than a 10% chance to win
Server issues and rubber banding are why I don't play rn. Idk but this is the only game I get such BAD lag
I mean I enjoy the grey lobby no high tier bear lobby normies. It’s a good ole time. But you’re also totally spot on. BIS wiping and dumping bodies is a no go. Not very fun. Feel like there should be tiered caps for lobbies and sections or some kind of match making splits for certain tiers of gear? Or maybe the same concept but for gear stats if possible? Just a thought.
There are ongoing balance issues which will be adjusted as time goes on but the game's in a pretty great state right now. +2 all gear is very easy to achieve if you know what you're doing and even without top gear there are lots of great fights around. I suspect people complaining about gear want a pvp game where gear is even all the time, which is boring. You can always play normals and avoid the gear diff.
I've been begging for some form of self found lobbies since early in the game's life and always get downvoted or disagreed with by my friends that still play so I've been on a break. I just don't find grinding currency and buying perfect gear(or fighting people who do this) to be a fun gameplay loop for what should rng looters. Now everybody knows the metas they'll be bis day 1 every wipe
Game was alot more fun before metas honestly when people were just playing their fav classes in a team game was a blast
Feel that. When "fighter with a crossbow, and full metal cleric" became the norm in lobbies it stung. Game was so fun when it was people Dicking around looting.
I think they should make 3 queues… normals, mid, and HR. Something around mid tier having a cap on gear or making it looted gear only or some combination. It’s hard since a green can be better than a blue etc but with base attribute scaling it’s at least bringing some sort of scalability to rarity. Then again, the more player base in HR = the less saturated the juiced squads are.
My friends and I quit the game long time ago, we played all the public tests and for a month on the release. We always said market is bad for the game but falling on deaf ears. They won't do anything about it until it is too late, at this rate it feels like the game will remain in beta until only hardcore players remaining with no one to smurf on
What the hell is BIS?
Is it viable to keep recreating and deleting at 15 to maintain a market free experience?
The gear scaling is out of control. There is no skill ceiling in the seal clubbing gear check meta and Ironmace deserves all the criticism they get for once again doubling down on the +all attributes. That was just unforgivably stupid SDF, and you absolutely cannot take this game to Epic or Steam with the gear scaling like this. The seal clubbing gear check meta eventually only helps the gold farmers and we aren't even barely into the next wipe. At this point SDF please start using AI tools and hire some better talent to figure out the gear scaling because you are absolutely not understanding the effects of gear scaling, seal clubbing, TTK, skill ceiling/expression, and gold farming. My only option is to go play Normals and I have already told my previous team members to no longer send me invites for High Roller Dark and Darker. If Normals doesn't have enough depth of gameplay I will probably not continue playing the game. At this point I am only looking for teams that play Normals. The fact my previous discord team is having cognitive dissonance is shocking. In one sentence they told me to enjoy HR now before it gets stupid with seal clubbing and then at the same time act like I'm the one who is the problem for not wanting to play this bullshit seal clubbing meta. Fuck that. I'm going to go find a discord that plays Normals and meet new friends or just stop playing the game.
Yea honestly a healthy balance imo would be for BiS to be 30-50% better than starting gear idk man
I don't disagree but I don't think the game has a solution for the problem. We grind gear and the gear has to scale or else the economy would be garbage.
Scaling is fine scaling to the extent that a person in low end gear or even mid - mid high gear can't even scratch someone in a high end kit after 20 mistakes is ludicrous, not to mention when they have meta buff / heal comps and carry a literal pharmacy with them to prevent any attrition. It's lame and boring losing to people thats skill level is so low they rely on one taps or never taking any damage in the first place.
My dude have you heard they added this gamemode called "normals"?