Dense Blocks of HP

[SagaDC]

Just a minor point of criticism, but enemy Health/Hit-Points should probably be reassessed at some point. Unless the player is supposed to get NPC companions to help him somewhere along the line, the current format turns most battles into a long-winded war of attrition. By the time the player reaches Junkyard, most enemies seem to have hundreds of Hit Points, and even lowly dogs can absorb entire bursts of Assault Rifle fire before collapsing.

I can certainly deal with the difficulty curve using some roundabout tactics (choke points, tactical trap placement, and regular retreating) but some battles quickly become absurdly deadly (the Burrower cavern in GMS Station comes to mind, where you're set upon by dozens of foes simultaneously). I'm all for a difficult game, but I dread to think what will appear later down the line given the current rate of enemy growth. I don't relish the thought of fighting enemies who have to be hit dozens of times before dying.

[Elhazzared]

I feel you on the GMS burrower part, especially since not only it's incredibly hard (nearly impossible to do at the proper time) it doesn't really gives you any rewards except the odd bit that flies from the dead critters and a corpse to loot at the far end of the cave. but other than that I don't feel there is a too big of a problem with the health of NPCs. Crafted grenades kill almost anything. a mark 5 will kill anything short of the mutant and even then it will leave the mutant nearly dead. Mark 3 grenades are enough to nearly kill and sometimes even kill the mutant dogs. Sniper rifles can one shot anything in the game and only mutant have chances to survive. Similarly a decent assault rifle with the feat to make it shot 1 or 2 extra rounds on a burst will kill anything short of a mutant unless of course RNG is screwing you over and you're missing a lot of the shots.

[SagaDC]

True, but that assumes that all players are running an assault-rifle toting chemist with sufficient Grenade skills to avoid blowing themselves up. Forcing a player to roll with a very specific character build isn't ideal. I enjoy Melee and the like, but I'm never going to use it if every enemy at midgame and onward can soak up every swing of my electro-sledgehammer and then tear me to shreds in a single return attack.

The mutants in Junkyard are pretty rough, too, with their huge HP reserves, immobilizing attacks, and tendency to leave lethal pools of acid everywhere. I quickly gave up on using my melee character around that point, since even acid-resistant armor wasn't enough to avoid a quick and bloody death. My demo/trapper character made it through without much trouble, but every one of my other builds struggled to overcome the inevitable swarms of mutants.

And, unlike the Burrower caverns, Junkyard isn't optional. You have to make it all the way through that area to progress the story.

[Elhazzared]

I dunno which build you made for your mellee but one of the rule of the thumb is always have 2 fighting skills if you want to survive. Mellee is decent, especially since it doesn't wastes ammo although yes it means you take some damage. Primary mellee at first sight for me seams to be the bad choice however some people have managed to go full mellee with success so maybe it's your build that is wrong. I'd imagine a mellee would complement with throwing and grenade crafting because if your main spec is mellee that means low firearms skills and probably no feats either which makes your use of firearms limited.

One important thing to have in mind is that there are good builds and bad builds. Bad builds will have a hard time and the game design takes that into account. If you don't make your skills right then it isn't right that you're as good as someone who does. So this raises 2 points. You have to learn to do proper builds and if you want to make the game harder than it already is then you can make a worse skill set to increase the dificulty.

[SagaDC]

That's fine, you can assume that my builds are 'bad' based on my minor critique. I'm not really interested in arguing about that, since the quality of my builds or lack thereof has little to do with what I'm talking about. I stand by my original point, which is that the Hit Point creep far exceeds that of most other games.

Initially, enemies have something in the area of thirty to fifty hit points (Rathounds). It escalates from there, to the point where you begin encountering foes with a hundred or so hit points at GMS station. From there, though, it jumps radically (Siphoners, Burrowers, and pretty much everything in Junkyard) when 250+ becomes the standard. That, coupled with the fact that many of those enemies (Psi-Beetles, Mutants, Lunatics) can kill even a well-prepared adventurer in two or three attacks, might infer that the numbers could stand to be tweaked a little.

Simply giving every enemy more health does not make battles more interesting or more difficult. It makes them more tedious, especially for anyone who's not ready to spam grenades everywhere (or invest heavily in Psi abilities). Grenades should not be absolutely required in all builds simply because every enemy becomes a damage-sink by mid-game.

EDIT - As an aside, your last post basically amounted to a long-winded 'learn to play'. Please don't automatically assume that I am somehow at fault, simply because I made a suggestion on a suggestion forum.

[Elhazzared]

I am not automaticly assuming you're bad or telling you to learn how to play, but I always say this to players. Builds aren't supposed to be too specific in oder to be viable good builds, but there are certain requirements (shall we put it that way?) in order to make the character good. Yes, enemies HP escalates rather fast. this might be for alpha test purposes or that might be the intended difficulty curve... Still the purpose of a grenade is hardly to just kill very tough opponents easly. One on one your sledgehammer should be more than enough to kill most things... Maybe not a mutant but most things. Grenades are supposed to be your area of effect weapon. No matter what situation, no matter what skill set you use, it's ovbious that you can't take on multiple opponents. Be it with guns, psi abillities or mellee. Single targeted attacks will not win against multiple opponents. So if you do mellee then you probably have to really have throwing in order to have some good control. I wouldn't say Psi abillities because quite frankly. Psi abillities are good, but they are good if you are fully investing into psi, otherwise you see enemies resist your stuns and have incredibly lower damage outputs which make the psi not worth it.

Mellee works well with throwing (crafting grenades too because you don't get high end grenades otherwise... not at the moment anyway, they will probably be available in the future) because of the AoE.

Guns work well throwing too, you can make it work with mellee on a lesser damage base since you have less str but your grenade throwing is gonna be as RNG as hell. You can also use crossbows instead of mellee.

Crossbows work well with throwing and especially well with psi if you heavly invest into will.

Psi works best with crossbows. Also works with mellee on a lower str base or guns.

Trying to go outside this sphere is possible, but it means the game becomes incredibly hard because your combat skill set is not prepared to deal with some situations. In your case it is not prepared to deal with multiple opponents from what I can understand... The problem does not lie in mellee itself nor does it lies in the opponents HP. In fact if you lower the opponents HP than the good combat skill sets are going to just blow through enemies like they didn't exist.

[Styg]

Mutants in Depot A are on the extreme end of health scale and I can understand how a pure melee non-stealth character can have trouble there. While my goal is to make all skills viable throughout the games in different encounters, as Elhazzared said, it's usually a good practice (not a complete necessity) to pick a secondary combat skill that will complement your primary one. The game is being balanced (not saying it's perfectly balanced though) around the fact that the player will have crowd control utilities on their side.

If you're having trouble, I suggest trying to use flashbangs, shock bolts and other disabling weapons. Even if you haven't invested skill points in them, they should be fairly effective at close range.

Burrowers, like some other encounters, have a tendency to dish too much upfront ranged damage that's hard to recover from and I'm aware of that. We'll see how introduction of energy shield will affect those fights before I do any rebalancing there.

As for the health scaling throughout the game, I don't plan on making every encounter a battle of attrition, but certainly some. And while health will continue to scale, so will your damage output so it shouldn't end up being much different from the mid game.

Anyway, balancing this sort of stuff is an ongoing process and we'll see how it works out once we get to the endgame. Let me know if my advises helped you and and keep the balance feedback coming, it's always useful.

[Elhazzared]

They can actually sccater much more than that. I've thrown grenades having 0 skill in it and watch it go way over 5 titles away, in fact I've thrown grenades at the extre of throwing range and it was so badly thrown that I ended up in the blast radius so you can imagine how much it scatered back.

[Elhazzared]

lol

As for your tests... I dunno I remember opening the door at the GMS of the cantina, then pull way back and try to toss a grenade to prove them to come after me. I know I was on the limite of the range because the character had to move a few titles foward before he could throw it and the first time it blew on my face... Well not exactly on my face but i was caught in the blast and the guys inside were thinking... the fuck?! I will admit that is the only time I remember seeing so much scatter, other times I can be sure cause well, I susually don't throw grenades that far anyway but I think it happened a few times. Might have been a bug I suppose.

[SagaDC]

Just to make it clear, my melee character is one of several characters that I've used to play through (most) of the existing content - although he IS the only one I've actually had significant trouble with in Junkyard. Most of your other suggestions on playstyle aren't particularly helpful (to me, at least), Elhazzared, because I've already used them in other builds. I have a gunner who uses grenades. I have a dedicated psychic. I have a stealthy crossbow guy who uses traps.

Even with those characters, the huge chunks of health and damage output from later opponents can become frustrating. I've watched my gun specialist dole out 300+ damage in a single well-aimed shot, only to have a Mutant shrug it off, walk across the entire screen, and then kill me with a gout of acid. Special crossbow ammunition is handy, but useless when battles are deliberately designed to pit you against three or four opponents at once.

Stealth is certainly a viable approach to most situations in the game, but as with most skills it requires a very heavy investment to make it usable, and requires you to wear very light armor (meaning that combat becomes even more of a death sentence). Plus, of course, there's no real reward for being stealthy - beyond surviving and gathering loot from containers, you miss out on significant XP gain, making you even more ill-prepared for later parts of the game.

The most common suggestion tends to be 'build and use grenades', implying that all characters should invest heavily in Mechanics and Chemistry. When the most common suggestion for success in mid-game areas is 'make and use the best explosives in the game', then the balance is probably off a little. Besides, those explosives won't be of much help after you've thrown your first grenade, and you're stuck on 'grenade cooldown' for five turns.

Regardless, I understand that this is a game that's still in development. Shields will almost certainly shift the balance a little, once they're implemented. To make it clear, I've enjoyed what there is of the game very much, and I've apparently sunk 180+ hours into it already (if my Steam account is to be believed). I simply felt compelled to comment on the fact that, for an Alpha that only presents us with the first 30-35% of a game, the enemies quickly become overwhelming - before the campaign is even at it's halfway point.

I just don't relish the thought of running into opponents with 1,000+ Hit Points at mid-game, and 10,000+ at end-game.

[Elhazzared]

I don't think it's a very large investment. 10 mechanics and 44 chemistry for mk5 grenades, you can get that by the time you are about to enter the junkyard and that's on a 5 Int character.

While I may tend to agree with you that the general answer is, use grenades, they are the only form of CC available in the form of large area damage for non-psikers... now as for they not really doing much and having a long cooldown time... Well I don't see how that is possible. There is no situation in which you'll ever agro more than 1 mutant (it is possible but you have to be trying in order for that to happen and normally you'd be doing the opposite) Even if the aggro comes with a pack of mutated dogs, throw a mk5 and all dogs are dead, mutant is bellow 100 life for sure.

Special sniper attacks also tend to leave the mutant bellow 100 health in almost all cases so they aren't much of a threat. Even if they spit at you they won't kill you with just that. All my characters have 5 constitution and on leather armor they can survive that, the globs the dogs throw and maybe a couple bites so I don't understand how are you dying so easly just to the acid spits.

The only real time I felt dificulty in the junkyard (specificly depot A) was with my psiker and that was because of some freakish bug in which almost every single time the stealth was being ignored, they just went completly red as soon as I was in their vision range. Since psikers have a lot less damage potential (albeit much more utillity) I did relied on the stealth to start the engagement favorably and because of my inabillity to do so, it was indeed an uphill battle. I can tell you the last part of depot A took me 3 hours to complete but again, that was because of a but. My gunner character just stomped their face in a second because the stealth was working and I had weapons that just blew entired hordes to pieces. In fact I actually remember playing with the dogs, filling a narrow passage once with caltrops, provoking them and watch them run to me only to die very shortly after they cleared the caltrops (poison is wonderful).

Speaking of that, Styg. You know what would be great? A way for characters (but characters only cause it would piss me off if NPCs could too ) to step over caltrops and just ignore their damage or maybe just a way of removing them without hurting ourselfs.

[SagaDC]

[Comment Redacted]

EDIT - I've given my personal opinion on the matter of HP Creep and the basic assumption that all players HAVE to use Mk5 grenades. If other people disagree with that assessment, then that's fine. Moving on now.

[Kaerius]

MK4 is sufficient to get you through the content, easier to make too, can make roughly twice as many as MK5s(hexogen is the bottleneck).

But I think we can all agree that there's a few encounters that are unbalanced, especially the burrowers(both GMS and the other burrower infested facility).

Mutants/mutant dogs are OP too, but if you can find/craft some mutant dog leather armor, they become much more manageable. (The new enemies SW of GMS can drop that btw, with some luck).

There's also some encounters with stun/incapacitate spam, or large stacks of tackle that can basically kill you without a chance to fight back, forcing you to approach differently, after reloading your last save.

[Elhazzared]

I have actually never crafted MK4 though I image they are decent. Still my reasoning for not crafting was that with the current content, MK3 is enough for everything that it's not a mutant. Especially because even mutated dogs or humans that won't die from it will be left at death's door anyway. MK5 I use specificly to hit both mutated dogs with a mutant in the pack so the mutant is left nearly dead so my assault rifle can then finish it off... I am unsure if MK4 is capable of archieving the same results but since I am conservative with my grenades I never really ran out.

[UnLimiTeD]

I've actually been fine with mk2s on characters using heavy armour.
Blow them right in your face, it will barely scratch. Follow up with pyrokinesis and you're golden.
But yeh, I never invested in throwing skills myself.
It's essentially the ability that's good for absolutely nothing but using the one item type that will solve every problem in the game.
That's cheap. man.