Difficulty Curve Problems

Hiya there.

New player here. I'm mostly enjoying the game. I've enjoyed the story so far, and like the complex 'no one right answer' character advancement.

But something I'm still having trouble with is the difficulty curve. It seems to be all over the place. I'll be walking around the map and one moment I am 'sexy shoeless god of war' and killing everything in my way without breaking a sweat...then I die in two seconds flat to something.

It got a bit easier since I stopped trying for a clever and complex character build around active defenses to try and prolong my life and just went for a two-handed damage monkey - but it's still an issue.

It's mostly boss fights - going from carving my way easily through the area beforehand I hit the boss fights and am lucky to maybe grind 50% of it's health before dying to one of it's many one-hit-kill attacks. But it's a problem in areas as well. I'll be exploring and not having any problems then wham I'm pasted all over the scenery.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Your characters are not public, so it's hard to tell. It's usually a lack of defenses or unawareness of certain gameplay mechanics. E.g. corrupted blood or bleeding in general can kill you very fast in certain situations. Same thing for chaos damage, most players neglect chaos resistance, and if you are not aware of your enemies, you can die very quickly to e.g. Rogue Exiles or bosses that use large amounts of chaos damage. Then there is reflected damage, corpse explosions, and lots of other very deadly situations that you have to be aware of.

So, yes, in this game, there are lots of sources of spike damage that can kill you very fast if you are not aware or attentive. That's why I stopped playing hardcore, you can just get unlucky and then you'll have to reroll.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I think I've unhidden them now. As with so many of these settings, I wasn't aware it was even there...ops.

It's the speed of it that's the real problem. Going from fine to 'restart the area' in a couple of seconds flat doesn't give me much of a chance to do anything about it. And that whole 'fuck you, you die' feeling gets frustrating fast.

I looked at your Scion, and you have low life and your resistances are not capped. You need capped resistances, otherwise elemental burst damage will end you. Try to run a purity of elements aura and maybe use a Bismuth flask until you can fix it with rolls on gear.

Additionally, you should aim for 180%-200% increased life at level 90. You currently have 119%, and the life rolls on your gear aren't great.

Do master missions so you get a hideout and can craft life and resistances on gear. On lvl 63 you should have close to 75 all resistances amd 3000 life

The scion is the character that didn't work.

I was trying to solve the 'roadkill' problem by building around a bunch of HP and defensive powers, but ended up short of DPS and far too complicated.

The slayer works much better, despite having half the HP and nothing like the regen or counterstrike abilities. I'm really not sure why. It might be as simple as the damage output, although on paper the two are comparable.

I like the game. I really do... But I don't like the 'what the fuck just happened!?!' moments.

You have to realize that it's a complex game with many mechanics that are not evident and can't be learned from just playing. If you want to get good at it, you either have to copy other people's builds, or read all ingame help pages and as much as you can on the wiki.

Yeah, I'm having the same problem.

I get that it is supposed to be an in depth, challenging game. What is really getting me is that my character is killing everything until you hit a boss who just vapourise you. No warning, no encounters become tricky to warn you that things are getting tough than your character. No, it's all minions bursting like loot pinata and then you get the option where you want to respawn.

Yeah, I also don't like it that bosses are huge damage sponges. Makes some builds impossible that are otherwise quite good. Maybe it would be better if they added difficulty with complex boss mechanics instead of simply requiring tons of DPS.

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Rushing_Jaws wrote:

Yeah, I'm having the same problem.

No warning, no encounters become tricky to warn you that things are getting tough than your character. No, it's all minions bursting like loot pinata and then you get the option where you want to respawn.

It helped me a LOT when I realised if you re-entered the area before it reset (Ie respawn at the spawn point rather than town) the boss doesn't recover, so you can take a few bites at it. The xp penalty isn't that bad so far. I spent a long time going back to town and then replaying areas to level or messing around with gems to try and work out how to beat the boss fights in one go before discovering I didn't strictly have to.

It's possible that is even how you are ment to do boss fights. Die a few times trying to work out what the lead ins for it's various uber attacks etc are, and then eventually finish it off.



But i'm seeing the same thing in normal play as well. Boring, boring, easy, la, la, la - Fuck. I'm finding area encounters that take me from max hits to red mist in a second or two. So one moment of in attention, or slight failure to click on the right bit of the screen, or deciding to press the encounter rather than run, or, or, or...and it's it's "Dead again, screw you." The encounters seem to be either easy 'click and kill' or really tricky. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground.

I'm pretty much roadblocked at act 6 with this marauder character right now. Act 5? Cake walk slaughter fest (*). Act 6? I'm really struggling to finish areas. I wish I knew why so I could do something about it.



....of course, I am limited in things I can do about it. I'm a new player, so I don't have a huge resource of kit to draw upon - my equipment list is what I have got in treasure drops. Currency items evaporate quick the moment you start trying to upgrade equipment hoping that a hundred armour points or the right type of gem slots might give you enough of an extra boost to help. I don't have any unspent passive points for more life/resistances/DPS/whatever. I could use refund points to shuffle them around a bit, but gains there would be kinda marginal and involve sacrifices I don't want to make.

I get that it's a complicated game with many moving parts. You know, the unsolvable logic puzzle and 'oooh, how do I do this interesting skill thing' is part of the appeal.



But, ultimately, if the answer is "Well, you need several years learning the game mate" that is a bit of a barrier to entry.



Hum. That turned out a bit longer and rantier than I ment it to be.



* = bar the boss fight, which I did just by spamming respawns. But that's partly because, well, I didn't care enough to try and do it elegantly, carefully and properly.