Planet threat levels are totally ambiguous now

Ok, so while I think Chucklefish are gradually getting there with the balancing, one thing I've realized with the latest patch fixing the weapon damages (and I can no longer one-hit togher enemies), is that it's impossible to tell what the real threat level is for a given planet. Before the balance update, planets in alpha sector was threat 1-10, beta was 11-20, so on, but now alpha sector are all simply threat 1, beta sector are threat 2, etc.

So now you have to beam down to a planet, ill prepared, and get your ass handed to you before you can tell that it's what previously might have been several levels beyond what you're equipped to handle. It actually even makes it difficult to tell if the game is getting reasonably balanced, because we have nothing to gauge it by.

It's probably the source of the contradictory too easy/too hard reports from people too.

I'm all for simplification for the sake of clarity, and getting rid of the stupid armor penetration system could only be a good thing, but I feel we REALLY need to have the relative difficulty meter that was promised implemented ASAP.

Thoughts?

 

Planets between sectors seem to have monsters that all have about the same health and damage. I'm pretty sure you're just experiencing random monsters getting overpowered attacks like lightning bolts, lightning balls, blood puke, ect. Any ability based attack that travels and can proc more than once on targets is doing bugged amounts of damage.

Edit: That said, one thing I would like to see sooner rather than later is the "Easy" "Normal" "Hard" indicators they said they'd put in this patch. As you dig deeper you start fighting harder monsters. I'd rather find out how hard they hit comparatively before receiving damage.

 

Well the easy/normal/hard indicators is what I was referring to.

So all the planets in a sector are supposedly of equal difficulty now? Hmmm, that takes away a lot of variety...

 

Yeah, it does. As someone who'd rather explore than dig, I'm not a fan of it. It disincentives exploring a bit since every planet has the same chance of giving you the same level of loot and ore. As long as they can produce more variety in other manners though it'll likely help.

 

The biggest problem I'm running into is really the one involving all weapons I come across being in the 8-12 dps range on all difficulty 1 planets. Before you could get some indication of where you could go to get higher level equipment so that you could fight the boss for that sector, but now there is no distinguishing characteristic to tell one planet from another.

 

Yeah exactly. Previously, you could craft a weapon that would be good up to about level 7-8, then explore planets of that threat level until you found a better weapon to take on the boss. I'm not sure the devs are thinking these changes through too thoroughly - variation is kinda the whole point of having procedural generation, is it not? Perhaps they should go back to having 100 levels, but not the armor penetration.

 

I really hope this change gets reviewed - it seems now that there is no point in exploring the sector if all planets are the same level. Whereas previously you would progress through travel in the one sector, gaining armour/upgrades etc. now there is no incentive really, apart from experiencing different environments.

 

I have to agree. They should at least add an easy, medium and hard threat level for the planets and at the same time have an easy, medium and hard threat level for enemies.

Now, let's assume I'm on an easy planet. On the surface I usually get to fight easy mobs at day time and sometimes medium mobs at night time. The lower I dig, the higher the chance that medium and hard mobs spawn.
What the planet threat level should do, is scale those easy, medium and hard mobs. For example, every mob on a medium threat level planet gets a slight health and damage buff.