[GAME BALANCE] Threat Level isn't the core issue!

But if the monsters get harder throughout the tier then how are they removing 9 levels of progression? You will still need to work through the gear to be able to beat hard monsters (and I'd imagine the boss) so how are they removing anything? This is why discussing this is completely pointless, your interpretation is different from the next person so why bother? Just leave it until you have actually played the system and then complain if it's the way you thought it would be and at least that way people can agree with you.

 

See, the issue is that a sector was never supposed to be 10 levels of progression, it was supposed to be one tier of progression where the enemies start out easy and get harder as you go. They never ever intended for you to grind 10 levels of weapons/armor within a tier, that doesn't even make sense, it's the same tier!

 

Absurd. Tiers imply that there's a range of technology available within it. I'd much rather have 100 levels across 10 tiers than 10 measly levels of progression. It's removal of gameplay.

 

What I got from the news, was that in each threat level you will only have easy/medium/or hard enemies (with enemies below ground being more difficult to kill the farther you go). So in a sector enemies will only be either easy to kill, normal to kill, or maybe some challenge to kill (what with hard mode of the last level being the same as the easy mode of the next level). So in effect how will the abilities for monsters work now that they have no levels? Will easy only have basic with more showing up, will others only show up in a specific sector?

The thing is though assuming you only have one threat level per sector (for the 10 threat levels), and the weapons are balanced to be usable throughout the entire sector, then that would mean that there wouldn't be that much difference from the weapons (with them either being easy, medium, or hard rank weapons though really it would mostly be weapons good for sector 1, weapons good for sector 2, etc.). Which would mean a condensing on weapons then too, If there are only 10 difficulty levels, then tier 1 armor should get you far in sector one then, and tier 2 in sector 2, and so on.

 

It is removal of gameplay, but it's stupid grindy korean MMO style gameplay that was never intended to be there in the first place.

 

Why do you keep saying it's a removal of gameplay when Tiy has specifically stated that nothing is being removed? How are you coming to this conclusion? Are you just assuming that Tiy is lying to the community? The game is being balanced by removing the 100 level system and replacing it with DPS weapons, HP buffs and three different levels of monsters that will change for each sector (a hard monster in the alpha sector will be the same as an easy monster in the beta sector) so no gear is being remove, no monsters are being removed and no planets are being removed. How are we losing content?

 

See, I find all the planets bland under the current system. The game's ample content is wasted when you know that at level 16 you're supposed to go to a level 16 planet and fight level 16 monsters. Once you level up to 20, you ditch the planet and go fight level 20 monsters on a level 20 planet, which feels exactly the same. Even with 1,000 types of alien, the planets feel generic and disposable. There's no fun in hanging around after you've leveled.

If I understand the plan properly, planets will now be teeming with a wide range of enemies of different difficulties. This will encourage longer stays and more exploration of the planets, and maybe even return visits.

 

Adallamus is under the mistaken impression that the intention was for you to grind 10 levels of weapons/armor per tier before taking on the boss once you reached the highest level of weapons/armor in the tier. That is why his solution to the fact there is only 1-2 different armors per tier to add 8-9 new tiers of armor per tier.

Meanwhile I suspect that Tiy had the intention that you should only need to upgrade armor/weapons 2-3 times per tier.

 

This thread just got confusing. I liked my idea best, not being egotistic, just honest. Changing one modifier could be a simple, elegant way to solve a lot of problems.
Difficulty would be a smooth curve, everything is still number based instead of a vague "easy/medium/hard" label and damage would have been easier to figure out regardless.

DPS is meaningless in this game. Continue reading before you rant: if my weapon does 25 damage, with an AP 5 and a swing speed of 1.52 or something
I'm almost never going to hit that monster as quickly as my weapon allows me too unless I'm cheesing that monster. knockback along with "Body Slam" the
game involves more "timing your blows" not "auto/spam attacking until it dies, need more DPS!"

I like the way this game as steered away from traditional RPG combat, I'd like it to improve in that regard.

edit: new posts above me to reply to, and I won't double post. --------

I'm all for difficulty variety among monsters on any given planet, rather than constraining them to a certain range within a planet's threat level. Just remove the planet threat level label altogether and leave the monster threat level, to give a base for the wider variety of monsters per planet.

 

I'd love it if they just left it up to the RNG. Every planet in Tier 1 gets a random distribution of aliens from levels 1-10 (or easy medium and hard under the new naming scheme). Some planets will be insanely difficult; some will be cakewalks. You have a spaceship and nearly infinite space, so explore the galaxy until you find a planet you want to dig into.

 

Honestly I think the biggest problem is just the stupid 'armor penetration' stat and they said they're fixing that. The rest of it I didn't understand why change it. The only issues with making progression clearer is to make it more gradual instead of leaps and bounds which is how it currently is past the first couple of sectors.

With that said, I'm more concerned about the A.I. than I am the difficulty. Not just that, but there is real lack of variance in it and strategy. There pretty much just isn't a lot of thought with fighting currently.

 

Right now it's just ridiculous forced progression, though. There's nothing actually exciting or interesting about level 7 vs level 9. it's just one planet will one-shot me and the other won't.

Not to mention that half of tier 2 is immediately obsolete. You should have enough steel for a AP 15 weapon at the very beginning of the tier, making TL 11-14 planets effectively pointless for progression.

 

Please read the entire thread.

 

Personally, there are only two problems I find with the current system
The first is that there is so much change between even 1 level, and that if the armor effect (including penetration) was divided by around 10, the game would feel more balanced.
The second, is that everything seems to die very quickly, and if damage values were divided by about 5, combat would become far more interesting.

 

Done, question still stands. How are we losing content when several people have explained to you this is far from the case yet you still avoid explaining your theory other than repeating the same thing. I'm happy to be proved wrong, claiming I didn't read the post isn't explaining an awful lot.

 

With how the bosses and weapons are done right now, there is actually only 10 real levels even if it says there's 100. Every 10 'levels' there's a boss, which then opens up the next 10 levels (sector). Everything between is just a complex and unintuitive way of saying how strong you are compared to the enemies of the planet. From what I'm getting anyways, its basically the same thing as before. Strong enemies are the ones that one-hits, or almost insta kills you (basically the ones that are "higher level than your armor level by three' at this point). Medium are the ones that are at your level and weak are obviously, the ones you've upgraded past and can handle with ease. There's no content loss, its simply under different names.

Plus, if you're concerned about the amount tiers of weapons there are... technically there will be more under a dps system. A weapon with .1 more dps is 1 tier higher than the slightly weaker one Plus it makes for comparing weapons much less annoying. Under the current level system, an armor pen 16 sword with damage of 9 does much more than an armor pen 15 sword with damage of 25. Its simply misleading right now. And since every combat system is based around these levels, it'll make sense to change them to one that doesn't make your gear obsolete even though it doesn't look obsolete.

I won't say it'll be definitely better at this point and time, but it'll be much less of a nuisance to figure out how/ what to upgrade and what you're really capable of taking on.

 

Look, I've explained condensing and the fact that we have, currently, 100 levels of progression spanning 10 tiers - The condense will make this 10 tiers with 1 level of progression each. We're losing 90 levels of randomly generated weaponry, varying in power, and 90 levels of enemy generation.

 

This is what I gather from the whole thing too but the OP keeps insisting we are losing content yet refuses to either explain further how or that he was wrong and got confused by the description.

No we are not, the enemies still generate the same, have the same power and act the same way. Weapons generate with DPS instead of AP so you will have the EXACT same weapons and armour but the names and values will change so it makes more sense and will (hopefully) add more balance so you don't get one shot by a boss because you are using armour with AP of 15 and it's level 20. Nothing is being removed, if anything more is getting added as you will now have HP boosts from the armour and the monsters will be more varied as they won't all have 100HP.

 

I have not refused to explain further and you are stubborn or blind about what streamlining is. Streamlining is when you cut lean the content to make progression in-game simpler, which is EXACTLY what's going on here. Did you read the suggestions for balance in the original post? I've explained how to add more content, not condense and rebalance what we have - And it will fix the "Being one-shot" problem, which seems to be the only problem you see as well. Enemies will NOT, in fact, generate the same way - It's stated in the blog post that there will be "Easy, Medium, and Hard" enemies in each tier of gameplay. This makes for 3 sets of enemy difficulty rather than 10 per tier, which is REMOVAL OF GAMEPLAY. 3 is less than 10. Is that a good enough explanation for you?

 

The current system is broken, you could get up to tier three within two hours of playing, go to a threat level 29 planet, find a weapon on chests in the surface, and start one hitting everything on the threat level 21 planet. The Current system is unbalanced for both players and NPC's I'd rather have a challenge when fighting things rather then just having to swing my AP Level 29 stick around.

 

No, that isn't whats going on here. Nothing is being cut, it's all just being translated into a different language essentially.

Please listen to what pretty much everyone else is telling you.