Fix your damage pre-patch. Here's how.

If threshold ores like gold and platinum were possible to come by so you could gear up appropriately you might actually be right. But, seeing as how that's not the case, my argument stands.

 

Well, how confident you feel is irrelevant to the empirical evidence I've gained through experience. The betas I mentioned, I participated in closed betas, why would I waste forum space talking about all the open betas I was in?... sigh

 

The Diablo 3 beta was a beta, it was however a stress test beta. The way that Blizzard handles beta testing is as follows.

Internal Alpha Testing (Implementing features and handling game breaking bugs in the process) -> Friends and Family Beta (Fiddling with features) -> Closed beta (Game balance) -> Open Beta/Stress test (Test server architecture and find bugs caused by rare system specs or wierd player behaviour).

 

I'm just gona rehash that the term beta is flexible and we should appreciate the fact that we can still shape the game from this early point, rather then argue that the game isn't polished enough.

me I'm having a ball just listening to my character play her accordion Canon in d

 

This is EXACTLY what the game needed. Combat feels much more like it should now. Thank you, OP!

Now what we need is a fix for the gravity orb. Have you never noticed that fall damage is not consistent? I've lost count of the times I've received fall damage using the gravity orb by falling a shorter distance than I can jump.

As to the rest of this argument, why is it that every comment made by someone needs to turn into an all-out war of words? Are people that incapable of listening to other peoples' opinions without getting angry? It would seem so, but I don't get it. Read thru any given thread in this forum and there's a good chance that what started out as an innocent question or well meaning criticism gets flipped into all-out verbal warfare. Seems extremely immature to me and makes me wonder what the age base is for this game. If these are adults having these arguments, then some people need to get out of their mom's basement for a bit and go have a real life

 

The ore not appearing at proper rates is also something that can be balanced throughout the beta.

I'm not going to bother responding to you anymore. You have hijacked the thread to argue with everyone, but you are actually just plugging your ears and saying lalalaalalala, so whatever. Maybe you should start your own thread to talk about your issues with the game. This thread is for this mod.


Moving back on topic, has anyone played with this mod for a substantial period of time? Do you feel it encouraged you to explore more lower level planets or did you just hit up the highest level in your tier since it was more manageable? I'm not sure it would actually help with the way everything is right now.

 

No, I was in the D3 closed "beta" exactly as I said. And as I said it would have been more appropriately titled as a stress test. Not even the entire game was available to test so it clearly could not be called a true beta. How can you test content you have no access to?

And as Flowless above I believe the value in further discussion with you is lost.

 

No, I haven't played substantially yet. I tried out the mod and returned to the forum for an initial feedback. So far, it feels more properly balanced, and while I'm sure there are those who would exploit it (that goes for anything), my hope was that exploration would become enjoyable again, and it seems to have accomplished that.

 

Interesting! Well, I've been trying to stick to just exploring stuff within my armor and weapon ranges and I've been seeing the same effect. I'll have to try with this mod to see how it changes the effect. Maybe it'll speed up the pace a bit, although I'm pretty comfortable with the current pace. Guess it's time to stop poking about it and put it in my assets.

 

You sir, are awesome for this mod. I no longer get 1 shot by everything in full Impervium. This will do nicely till the patch lands. Thank you.

 

This is probably the main reason why they're changing the system completely, instead of just tweaking the scaling. Steep scaling was needed to stop people from rushing to the highest level in their tier. The problem is that, as we've experienced, this creates frustrating gameplay (though proper ore generation and more armors to fill in the gaps would have made things somewhat better). I haven't played with this mod, but I strongly suspect that if I did I wouldn't be able to stop myself from flying directly to a level 30 planet (I've unlocked Gamma recently).

It's kind of amazing that some people manage to complain when player feedback is taken into account and the game is modified only a few days after it's been released. By a small indie company, at that.

 

This wasn't the issue. The problem was that is the only option. Rush to the best gear or get wrecked, then once you have the best gear (Impervium) you still get wrecked. Then you realize you're getting 1 shot by level 40 enemies in gear intended for level 100 enemies, because fuck logic.

 

I think the issue is between the balance of armor and damage ON THE PLAYER. By that i mean, if it was much easier to over armor for a level range, but your damage dropped off sharply with even one or 2 levels over you, then you might make 5 stops between levels 20-30. since you would need to get new weapons every few levels or end up doing no damage. That would require removing all weapons from chests, and make them only dropped.

As it is, after the robot boss, i just dont get any value to time spent making armor. I would go past that tier, but i cannot find a gun merchant ANYWHERE in my universe near lvl 30, so fighing the dragon boss with a shot gun doing 5 damage just doesnt cut it.

 

Blizzard games are not beta'd, ever. They are showcased. When you polish a game to mirror shine, apply all your fixes and then are literally only in need of balance testing and stress testing that's really not a beta. Sure there's bugs, but there's bugs everywhere, and their betas are what most people's final products are. The problem here was that even if you went the hard route and found those threshold ores the scaling got out of hand quickly. I'm in Doom Lord, kinda powered my way to it, and Sector X (the fourth) has a lot of things that make you go back to those lower level planets, ores that are specific to a level range, etc. The strongest armor in game is equivalent to a level 36 mob, so I take about 85 damage from regular lvl 40's and get one shot by 43's. After doing this, it''s far more reasonable and I can take damage better (like 17-35, instead of 89), but it's still combat that I'm having to pay attention to what I'm doing, and small mistakes can still kill me easily. Especially when you're clearing prisons or bunkers, lol. I'm also able to keep up a lot better with my money. I had about 17k before I went and cleared three bunkers, each of which had more than one mob that could still one shot me with their rifles, now I'm down to 5k. Normally I'd be down to single digits trying to do one bunker or thing like that due to how unforgiving the armor rating is vanilla.

 

I have to admit I'm a little skeptical of the team going forward as well. The reason being isn't that the beta is imperfect and needs balancing. I clearly understand what a beta is and its intended purpose. What makes me worry is that the devs decided to trash an existing and interesting system that simply needed some balancing in favor of an entirely new and simplified system when clearly this community member has demonstrated there is a pretty easy solution. As a disclaimer I will say, as I have in all of my posts, I will reserve final judgement until launch day but I am worried at this point.

 

You are confusing public beta with beta. Blizzard betas are family and friends only until they are in a state where they only think that minor work is left to be done. The public beta is still a beta however it is a late beta.

Ultimately the beta-state is a very long stage of development in which games can spend a year or more and usually companies only publicly show their beta builds once they've reached the very final stages and near release.

This damage fix isn't a solution to the actual problem. The problem wasn't people getting one-shot, the problem was that for instance the throwing daggers and Hunting Bows that were supposed to be useful for the entire sector were producing wildly inconsistent results and even with the damage fix it would remain almost impossible for a player to effectively compare the effectiveness of two weapons without hitting an enemy with it, making the item stats near useless for comparison purposes. Additionally the damage fix would still mean that legendary items you find would often be useless due to being too low AP and that you'd have the perverse incentive to vacuum max level worlds for max AP weaponry first thing you do each sector.

 

I'm not sure that even with balancing would the original system be much clearing to understand which is one of the driving forces behind the change. Without the equations being directly presented to the player, which itself would be very confusing, it isn't possible to easily distinguish when a weapon is an upgrade or a downgrade which is a major problem.

 

Shields seem to be handled in a separate file "assets\leveling\shield.lvlmap"

That file probably needs to be tweaked as well.

 

Agreed. "Beta" has become such a loosely defined term that I think a lot of people are confused about what the Starbound beta means. The way I used understand it was that beta = minimum amount of features implemented to be even considered a "game." Balancing is not something you can even do during the alpha stage, or even early beta. What is the point of balancing when new features will likely change everything and require re-balancing anyways?

 

No, things like the dye system are minor core features that can seriously break the program in ways you don't expect. This is something that absolutely should go into early prototypes so it's ironed out by the time the project gets to beta. Things like combat balance are very rarely high priorities at that stage because if the coders are even vaguely competent, none of that will be hardcoded. Which, by the way, is why combat balance is being dealt with now, and can be adjusted by players, who lack source code access.

This doesn't mean the devs haven't been playing the game, it just means the devs haven't spent time working through the game the way a player would. That is the point of a true beta. (Please, don't mistake the marketing preview betas from major publishers with real ones.) And, judging by how fast the combat balance is getting overhauled, it looks like a high priority.