((NOTE: Maybe this should be multiple suggestions rather than in a single thread. But it all revolves around the new combat system and the way planets, weapons, and mobs work now)) Let me start off by saying I strongly support the new weapon DPS and Armor Stats system. Very much in favor of this rather than the Armor Penetration system. Just a few suggestions I have to help with the balancing mechanics regarding the new system. I also understand that a lot of this will be balanced out as you guys work on the numbers. So a lot in this suggestion applies to after the numbers are tweaked. Make Getting Guard NPS Weapons Harder Only took me 30 minutes to get weapons that one-shot mobs no problem. Once I got a 30 DPS weapon I had no problem killing Guard NPCs and stocking up on 100+ DPS weapons. All a cake walk. Any and all mobs I came across. Even Night mobs. Not sure how much this could be fixed with number tweaking. One thing that would help, like with most MMOs, make the NPC Guards in villages WAY harder to kill. Better armor so they hardly take damage would help. A lot more hit points also. Better yet, give them Techs that allow them to get to you and kill you. Provide a way for us to "consider" the strength of an enemy (if varying mob difficulty will exist on same planet) With the old system (as confusing as the armor penetration was) we could gauge how hard a planet and subsequent mobs were based on its threat level. Now it's hard to know. Will I be okay on a planet with a 8-12 DPS weapon? Within one hour of playing I was up to finding 100+ DPS weapons. I could never tell the difference in difficulty and could literally go anywhere and survive just fine. Starting with a weapon that's 8 DPS and finding one on the same planet that is 100 DPS is a huge range. Maybe throw in nameplates with a color code to give us an idea how hard a mob is. Hit point totals that come up on hit. Bring Back Planet Difficulty Ranges Info on a planet in the navigation screen that tell us roughly what sort of DPS we'll need to kill mobs there and be safe. If we can't add levels back, maybe an "Easy, Medium, Intermediate, Hard, and Deadly" tag can be applies to planets, with each requiring a certain DPS to be explorable (Easy - 5-15 DPS, Medium 15-30, Intermediate 30-50, and so on). We should find weapons on each planet comparable to that planet's range with the exception of finding Legendary and Rare items that will obviously be significantly better. (( I'll expand and add on this thread later. Running out of time now.))
100% agree. There needs to be progression and a good sign of progression within sectors, because if there's not, there's not as much motivation to explore more planets in your sector. I like the idea of just saying "Easy, Medium, Hard, etc." We don't really need "Danger Levels" in numbers anymore, since all of Alpha is 1 and all of Beta is 2, and so on. Just make something that is high level in Alpha "Hard" and we know that it is Alpha's level range because it's in that sector. And yeah, there needs to be an indication of how hard an enemy is so we know when we're going to get our butts kicked by trying to fight something.
I would like to point out that I have popped around to a few different planets and it seems that ALL planets in the same sector now have the same difficulty, which I feel is problematic for a different reason. It discourages exploration. It is much better to just stay on your planet and gear up, maybe pop around to a few nearby planets for resources, but that's it. Before when there was scaling within sectors, there was a reason to go to slightly harder planets, as they would be slightly better for you and you could gear up, go to them, and gear up more. Now that just doesn't seem to be the case and I feel it needs to be addressed.
I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying. The way all planets in any given sector are the same threat level completely negates the need for a threat level indicator the first place. Don't know why it was decided to dumb it down THAT far. The planet and mob threat indicator could be made to dynamically respond to the player armor level, dps and possibly used techs. So if there's a lvl 10 monster that does 100 damage and has 250hp, it would be considered "easy" for a player with high armor and a weapon that does 500dps, but "hard" for someone with no armor and a weapon that does 50dps. Or something to that effect. I'm not a fan of giving up TOO much information before landing on the planet, as this discourages exploration too. The threat level should be there though, and I think the original system was a lot better, for the same reasons Vandrick stated. The biggest problem is in the weapon dps/level system. First of all, there's a strange gap in crafted weapon levels, going from level 5 to level 15 after you get the metalworking station. The level 5 weapons do 50-100dps and the level 15 ones do 6000+. I thought this was exactly what the armor penetration system was put in place for.. Maybe the idea is to span this range to cover the whole game, from 8dps to ~10k dps in end game? And the devs are just testing out the possibilities. Who knows / we can only hope. It takes a lot away from the battles when, like you said, we can kill every enemy with one hit with the basic crafted weapons that don't require much effort to make.
