Shadowrun Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

Nah. Super-cool insult, though it's hamstrung by your completely wrong follow-up.

Silence (which cannot even target foes) and Quiet Bomb don't prevent spellcasting in this game. You seem to know as much about the game mechanics as you do about the difficulty settings.

 

No need for that, the fact that I went with Very Hard at all should make it clear that I'm no lightweigth. The combat was quite trivial the last time around, so I decided to challenge myself this time around, but I found it frustrating rather than fun. I'm using all the buffs, but the miss chance is making it difficult to use the "mark target" which seems to miss very, very often, the sniper range makes it a mite difficult to utilize it in most situations, going full buff + jump in with Glory seems to work pretty fine, but when you're always outnumbered and outgunned a long fighting mission drains your resources hard enough that it's a mite difficult to have any left by the end fight, and if the basilisks and the decking are bugged (and they are because the countdown of how many turns you have left before the backup shows up is bugged) that mission is just a complete pain in the ass.

Being incessantly pelted with grenades which makes any enemy at all a ranged AoE AP drainer is also quite unfun when it happens all the time as not only do you have to waste your own moves healing, you also randomly have someone taken out of the fight every round, so every individual fight feels more like a cross between a puzzle and a lottery regardless of whether you solve the actual puzzles. When cracking open the console and giving yourself the correct skills to be able to use every single optional gimmick against the enemies still doesn't help you much then you know something is wrong.

So, err, how do I actually adjust the difficulty? There a menu function I'm blind about or do I have to use the console?

 

Oh welllllllll my assumptions were wrong about those spells.

http://www.shadowrun.com/forums/dis...ence-and-silencers-what-exactly-do-they-do/p1 There's your answer.

I'm not wrong about the difficulty settings though, I got it directly from a developer: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...t-dragonfall-here.70906/page-120#post-2779671

Assuming it hasn't been changed for this release, click on options in the main menu. Any change applies to any game you load.

 

Nope, you're still wrong. That information pertains to vanilla Shadowrun Returns and likely also to the original Dragonfall, but not to the Director's Cut. Combat has been revamped in this re-release and even the default is markedly more difficult than vanilla SRR, as numerous others have noted in this thread.

Usually you're not this horribly wrong about absolutely everything. You seem off-balance lately, no doubt due to your lord's bumble from grace... come to think of it, "off-balance" is doubly appropriate in this context.

 

It's only more difficult because of the changes to the system. I really doubt they bumped up the statistics of enemies.

Edit: Just so there's no doubt, someone kindly load up a director's cut save from the 2nd Harfeld Manor map and verify that Dietrich's chance to hit the two guys are 17% and 23% on very hard (they should also have 20 hp which you can verify through Glory). I'm not going to download this thing just to check.

 

Yeah, I can do that in a bit.

 

Avoid placing your runners too close to each other and the enemies won't bomb you this relentless, if your runners are flanked, change their position. Man, I'm slaughtering everything on very hard and want a higher difficulty mode to start sweating a bit. About the low accuracy, keep in mind that Eiger kinda sucks at medium range as it is too far for the shotgun to hit and too close for the sniper rifle. With her, get as close as possible or as far as possible for max sniper rifle accuracy. Dietritch can equip barrier spells and you can create cover in combat with it, create cover behind enemies for Eiger to murder them with criticals. Glory pistol is okay but she truly shines on melee right now, make sure you use her adrenaline injector and cast haste on her. Blitz is good too with his SMG and his flush from cover. Use stun spells to get enemies out of cover and murder their ass.

TL;DR: Stop being a noob.

 

Well, if Roguey's willing to put so much effort into being right (actually he's still wrong) about a pointless Internet insult, to the point of editing his post an hour later, I'll oblige.

Dietrich actually has a much higher chance to hit them in DC, and they each have 30 HP, not 20 HP. Cover works differently now, however, and there are other changes as well, but it's been a long time since I've played SRR and I never played the original Dragonfall. These are actually luxuriously high hit percentages compared to the previous room. I haven't had any trouble rushing through Very Hard difficulty to get there, though it is the first mission after all.

I did notice that my melee orc misses fully 75% of the time, even with an aim buff and after running out to be cut to ribbons by enemies, which happens immediately. Melee is as nonviable as ever, especially at higher difficulties. The whiff factor in general means missing something like 3/4 of the time, or a mere 50% of the time if the enemy is flanked and you're behind them at point-blank range; the enemies hit you almost every time from across the room while you're behind cover. An exaggerated reliance on luck for a plan of action to work is bad, so if this is "normal," HBS needs to go back to the drawing board.

I have no doubt I could easily beat the game on this difficulty, with less health left after each mission and a bit more spent on medical supplies/consumables. I'm not interested in playing Whifferwhiff Rewhiffs: Whiffall, though. These are experienced Shadowrunners supposedly, not pants-pissing X-COM rookies facing interstellar aliens armed with ultratech weapons.

Hey dumbass, Shaman totems (among other effects) require your team to be bunched up in a tiny group in order to have any effect. Some grenades are fine, constant grenades are bad. That being said, I always find a way to fuck up grenade-spamming enemies, or have up until now.

 

Yeah, I kinda changed it up and got through that place without cheating or lowering difficulty. Incessant grenades suck, so totems (which I used to use before) aren't so swell. My strat was actually fairly advanced and worked out with 0 problems (the mission was a cakewalk in the end) when I did one thing - invested in some AP drugs and a tazer. Tazer is actually pretty damned good, might turn out to even be a bit too good seeing how it changed this run from nightmare to easy. Recommend it for and Decker looking to be strategicaly useful in a fight (only had pistols at lvl 2, will up it to 4 to make reloading that thing easier).

I had blitz, deiter and glory with no extra stuff apart from the drugs, used blitzes drone to duck in and othe of vents (it still got blown up off a crit in the final fight), used full buffs on glory to dart in and out and multislash people, and whenever someone tried to approach through a door or a corner overwatch on the tazer and/or drone took care of it. Summon everything there is to summon for free with Deitrich goes without saying, ofc.

The problem was that the final fight is actually bugged - if you free the basilisks it automatically eats turns so it's kinda impossible to keep the reinforcements from bursting in, and what's more sometimes the basilisks either don't spawn or don't aggro anything. I was basically trying to win through that thing w no basilisks and w big numbers on the other side at very hard without purchasing anything.

Also, one day I might even let that dwarf live, but I just bloody can't. He would given me some even stronger tazer, but bloody hell, I just can't do it.

 

The title-screen is awful. The DMS one is probably the best, while vanilla DF had way too much lens flare.

 

I have a melee character right now and while the accuracy at low strengh/close combat skills is terrible, after I hit 7 of strengh and 5 in close combat (totally ignoring the Melee skill because chance to crit only matters when you have a ton of it), I was hiting for 60% to 70% without the aim spell. After buying a 4 armor plated vest and investing 1 point on spellcasting from +2 armor from the armor spell, I had 6 armor and the only time enemies did serious damage was on critical hits from shotguns and spells. Later you can even buy cheap Force 2 (or 3? Don't remember.) Earth elementals for Dietritch that grant you a buff for 3 rounds of medium cover to wherever you go for everyone around it when the skill is used and the enemy won't flank you and you are pretty much safe.

The major problem I found wasn't survival but damage, you have to run to the enemy and many times waste AP on the process for the damage of one assault rifle shot until you have tons of strengh. Stride, cyberware and a totem that gives you more movement speed can solve this but have a ton of drawbacks as each point wasted on summoning, chi casting are points you aren't going to invest on strengh. Cyberware will cost you a ton and won't help you much. Until later in the game, when you theoretically could get 50 damage critical with -2 AP on an enemy, stun it and hit again for another 50 damage it is very good damage but your character will suck damage wise for most of the game until you pump you strengh to really high levels, it feels like you are playing with 3 characters until you get to that point. I just said fuck it and got an assault rifle guy to rape things from the start as stripping armor is very easy later on.

 

A PC samurai should never have less than 70%-ish to-hit chance, esp if ranged -- my character has more than that, and he's a decker (edit: on Hard. How big is the to-hit diff between Hard and VH?). Target marking and aim give +30% right there; Smartlink and (improved) cybereyes give more than 10% together. Hyper auto-injector (costs 0 AP) gives another 3%. Some min-maxers actually advocate going for 3 points in spirits for the eagle totem to add another 15%.

e: the only times I bunch up for Dietrich's totem are when I know the enemy doesn't have AOE attacks -- and there are quite a few of these situations. BTW, the bear totem is still pretty good for nullifying AOEs, as long as you don't stay clumped. Even then, I have yet to see an enemy throwing more than 1 grenade (and quite often those are the -AP ones).

 

Yes, if you go with a more-or-less min-maxed build, use buffs, debuffs, drugs, cyberware, and you're so close you're chowing down on the guy's dong and he's flanked, you can get to-hit above 70% or even 80%.

With a shotgun, from behind.

I just think it's a bit silly, that's all. It's not too hard, whether on Hard or Very Hard, and even with constantly whiffing the combat isn't terribly punishing, just prolonged. I might suggest upping both protagonist and enemy to-hit chances, except the enemies are already cheated up to an incredibly high to-hit chance anyway. Just now in my game, two hellhounds sat in the open and hit my Shaman (who was behind cover) over and over again with fireballs, several rounds in a row. It was too important to keep a certain large enemy devoid of AP to expend much effort on them, though I did try. Even though they were in the open, my team constantly whiffed against them. I finished the fight no problem, after whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff. I think I missed three point-blank shotgun blasts in a row one time, too, though Eiger wasn't buffed or drugged up either.

I'm a huge advocate of turn-based and don't mind long fights that much, but the length of some of these fights combined with the whiff factor tries even my patience at times.

 

Hmm sounds like I'm right and you're wrong then.

In the original Dragonfall HP doesn't scale with difficulty, at least on this particular fight, so I'm guessing they bumped that up to compensate for the higher hit chance.

lol this scrub right here

For enemies to be a challenge they need to be able to survive the attacks of your group. Since wiping out entire platoons at a time is inappropriate, this has to be done through either evasion or health. Since you've expressed a disinterest in "hp bloat" in the past, greater missing is the solution.

Although I find the "realism!!!!!!!!!!!" debate tedious, being experienced doesn't make you a deadeye. NYPD has a 33% hit chance: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/08/nyregion/08nypdgraphic.ready.html

Clearly JES with his hit/graze/miss has the nigh-perfect solution when it comes to balancing enemy survivability.

 

I can't believe that for once I'm agreeing with Roguey.

 

Cover in DF DC is actually similar to the 'graze' concept (with crit immunity and high chance to take 0.5x or 0.8x damage if behind heavy cover). I like it actually, gives a much greater emphasis on aggressive tactics and flanking instead of just blowing the entire enemy group away from the entrance of the room without moving.

 

Same here.Most turn based games I played go way overboard with the hit chance.Even when you're up someones ass,the barrel is literally pressed against their face the fucker misses.

 

Turn-based combat is an abstraction (well all video game combat really), and as noted in the link I provided up above, even though 78% of NYPD shootings involve their shooting people who didn't shoot at them first, they still only have a 33% hit-rate.

Huge difference between shooting a stationary target (what it looks like when you're playing a turn-based game) and a living person who's moving and attacking you too (what it's abstracting).

 

No, you said you doubt they've even altered the enemies' stats, which is clearly wrong yet again. Nice try, though.

What a blowhard. I'd be willing to bet I could wipe the floor with you in ANY strategy game we both have experience with.

I've continued playing on Very Hard, and it's perfectly doable, just more obnoxious and tedious as predicted. It doesn't require you to play any more tactically than Hard, only to play tactically for longer with more whiffing and a couple extra medkits used (compared to Hard). Meanwhile, your shadowrunners feel like incompetent, weak retards. What I can do is different than what I want to do; enough challenge to punish mistakes and not have the game "feel easy" is more than enough for me. If the design were better, it might be different.

"Wiping out entire platoons at a time" wouldn't happen even if hit rates were +20% what they are on Hard or Very Hard. There are other possible solutions that don't involve extreme friendly whiffing and obviously-cheated enemy accuracy.

Police officers aren't experts or even experienced. Many go years, or even their entire careers without ever firing their weapon in a combat situation, only practicing at the range enough to qualify. Shadowrunners are the equivalent of trained commandos or snipers. I spend as much or more time at the range as the average police officer, for fuck's sake.

Here's a real expert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyIq9FdTgwM#t=109

Unless of course it's your own dudes getting shot at, in which case the enemy's 90%+ accuracy with a pistol at extreme range is perfectly understandable somehow because reasons.

 

I don't know about you but I'm not looking for realism in my games. All I see is a bunch of guys standing in place and not being able to hit shit.I'm playing a video game so I don't think I need to use my imagination too much.
The problem is that the combat looks slow, feels slow ,is slow.I realize that it's TB but often it's way too slow.

 

These two statements are in direct conflict with one another.

 

Not really. The visuals and animations (and often, voice acting) these days don't leave much at all to the imagination... it's a bit of a muddled point, though.

The concept of "although the figures are standing still, imagine that they're ducking and weaving and rolling with the punches" has been around nearly since tabletop pen and paper RPGs first appeared. Hell, it's printed in a bunch of them. It's nothing new, and it's a good point, except again, what are YOUR shadowrunners doing in Shadowrun Returns such that enemies have a 90%+ hit chance on them when they're behind medium cover and presumably also dancing and weaving and rolling with the punches, same as the enemies?

That explanation shits itself when it applies only to one side.

 

And by doing so they're moving towards realism. When you look for games with such characteristics, you're looking for realism in video games.

 

You misunderstood.It's not my job as the player to imagine these fuckers are moving,dodging hiding behind cover.This is a visual medium and the devs need to SHOW me what's happening.He dodged my bullets?Fine! Add a little animation of him ducking or whatever,something minimal would suffice.Instead I need to figure out that the guy was strafing and I tried to shoot him while he did that, he strafed back and that's why I missed and my bullets fly to the side,I NEED TO IMAGINE THIS because there is zero visual feedback.That's what I mean by imagination,I'm not talking about suspension of disbelief.

 

If you're missing, there shouldn't be any animation - unless you're Neo, you can't dodge bullets.

It's pretty ironic how despite its gamist design, PoE's mechanics are actually much more simulationist than its predecessors.