What difficulty are you playing on and how do you fare? (Poll)

[Anthedon]

Were you playing without a Wizard or a Cipher? What level were you?

No Cipher, but it was mostly due to sloppiness. I just wanted to be done with it at that point and had probably missed some good items/spells/upgrades along the way.

 

[Starwars]

I played on Hard and didn't find it that difficult. Not really sure I want to bump it up to PotD on a replay either because... well, I kinda find there are enough enemies in the game-world as is, I don't really wanna push that even further. I might though.

I had a few wipes here and there in the game, mostly due to bad screw-ups from me. It definitely didn't feel particularly hard though overall.

I think a bit of reduced XP gain would be good, plus buffing up certain encounters some. Particularly on the crit path. I certainly don't mind that the hardest encounters are off the main path, I like that. But I think it's a shame that the main path should feel lik a completel cake-walk if one likes to do a lot of side-quests.

I actually wouldn't have minded *some* scaling there, but eh.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

Those of you who killed Nalrend the wise (bounty Ogre) how did you do it? What chars and levels and shit did you have?

My peeps are just getting raped by the infinite insect swarms

This was kind of a tough fight. One i probably reloaded the most...
I was standing at the cave entrance, lured the elder bears - killed them, let the Ogres come. And well... if you want an easy win use Aloth's petrification spell and then nuke the petrified ogres with AoE - Druid is preferable. Hitting with an Estoc is also nice. Level 11 party - Monk, Eder, GM, Hiravias, Aloth, Durance. But i guess you can do it as soon as Aloth gets petrification. Note: petrified targets get 4x damage. I did not know it at the time and wondered why GM hits for 100+ and Hiravias critted Flame balls for 200...

I guess you could also win without petrification cheese by suppressing the insect swarm with Durance's "Suppress affliction" and heals obviously. Other damage from them should not bother you much, because Eder is invulnerable with 100+ deflection of his and can block them forever.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Finished the game on hard.

There was one (1) fight in the entire game that gave me some trubble and, by extension, only one that was actually fun.

Just about everything else was a variation on select all -> left click.

Incredible.

 

[Ninjerk]

Finished the game on hard.

There was one (1) fight in the entire game that gave me some trubble and, by extension, only one that was actually fun.

Just about everything else was a variation on select all -> left click.

Incredible.

Play solo+PotD

 

[Aeschylus]

Played it on hard, with a Monk, which was challenging at the beginning after the patch, but ultimately the game has a very steep drop off in difficulty in the late game. Never really felt threatened after hitting level 11 (except for the final boss of Od Nua).

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I'm doing expert, POD, and am going for the "no one goes unconscious" achievement.

I'll give up the no unconsciousness achievement if things get untenable, but I just completed Act 1 with no problems. Some of the fights have been hard to no go unconscious in at first (especially the boss fights), but usually once you figure out the right way to do things they suddenly become very easy. Which seems to be the trend. If things are too hard it's probably because you are doing them wrong. There's very few "close calls" once you know what you're doing.

Of course, "the right way of doing things" often involves funneling all enemies through choke points, which can get kind of tedious....but honestly, I'm not sure if an expert, POD, no unconscious run would be possible without doing that.

Identifying relevant choke points does make my OCD compulsion to complete a singleton, expert, POD, Iron Man run someday seem that much more plausible, though. Especially if you have a parallel "test save" to do battles first before attempting them on the iron man save.

Although it would be insanely difficult to manage some of the boss fights that are impossible to trigger without enemies spawning all around you, as retreating to choke points could be difficult. Which would probably rule out things like killing Readric.

 

[Old Hans]

The ranger pet is really good at triggering boss encounters while everyone hides in the other room giggling.

 

[Ellef]

I'm doing expert, POD, and am going for the "no one goes unconscious" achievement.

No one goes unconscious should be easy enough if you have the patience. It's just too much hassle when you realised you haven't saved in 20 battles and your wizard goes down in the last second of a fight.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I'm doing expert, POD, and am going for the "no one goes unconscious" achievement.

No one goes unconscious should be easy enough if you have the patience. It's just too much hassle when you realised you haven't saved in 20 battles and your wizard goes down in the last second of a fight.

It's kind of annoying at times, but honestly I think POD would be way too easy without it. It does take quite a bit of resting and micromanaging, but most battles can be done first try if you don't mind party members getting knocked out.

 

[Ellef]

I'm doing expert, POD, and am going for the "no one goes unconscious" achievement.

No one goes unconscious should be easy enough if you have the patience. It's just too much hassle when you realised you haven't saved in 20 battles and your wizard goes down in the last second of a fight.

It's kind of annoying at times, but honestly I think POD would be way too easy without it. It does take quite a bit of resting and micromanaging, but most battles can be done first try if you don't mind party members getting knocked out.

Well yeah I generally reload if one member gets knocked down, but I'm not replaying a whole section if I haven't got a recent save because one guy goes down. Not a big fan of achievements anyway.

 

[Mexi]

For the hours I've played, I went with normal difficulty. I got my ass kicked by the bear. I tried to kill it single-handed, right from the start. I went back with Edor and the wizard elf, and we beat it pretty easily without any hassle. When I go back to playing again, I think I'll try hard.

 

[Ninjerk]

The game doesn't handle Sparfel being murdered before he's... murdered very well.

 

[Hatred]

My Thread on the official forum about the game being too easy is one of the most viewed and commented, i hope devs will notice that game is crappy unbalanced and maybe they'll nerf xp gains and buff enemies stats

Yeah but its dropping like a rock. Tbh I think about 80% of the posts are put in there by about six people. Since I've stopped acting like a baby with a pitchfork in those forums I am noticing a lot of the conversations that people are having are more than a little carebear. Couldn't OE just make a game for people who were totally disabled and then just put in an easy mode that had all the enemy stats cut in half or something in order to keep whoever the fk is finding easy to be hard quiet.
Fuck there is literally a petition to give an option to loot one body at a time. The game has combat so fucking broken and unplayable that I can't bring myself to finish the game and the good folks on the OE forums are bitching about wanting to loot one body at a fucking time.

 

[Shadenuat]

Almost got stuck on the fourth bounty from first stack - the ogre shaman one, on PoTD. Basically I think this is what happened: I took a bounty before reaching & cleaning it's location first, which is an ogre cave near Twin Elms. Usually there are multiple ogres outside and inside. So I go into the cave and face:
Bounty boss
2 elder bears
A few ogre matrones
A few ogre druids
Regular ogres

All stuck into one encounter.
Now I'm not sure if it's just a regular PoTD bounty encounter or two encounters overlapped, but it was funny to find 2 pairs of magical boots inside a chest - I think that for sure was from 2 encounters.

After dying 10 times to insect plague spam, since I don't have any regular casters in my party, I had to resort to scroll spamming (Confusion, Paralyze and Lightning bolt).

 

[norolim]

Playing on Hard and taking it slow (haven't reached Defiance Bay yet), so I can't judge how difficult the whole game is. So far the only encounters that provided a real challenge were the 3 wolves I had to fight solo and shades/shadows before I recruited more characters. I mean, I managed to clear Eothas temple is Gilded Vail with 3 characters (including my PC) on lvl 3. The shades were a pain and I had to reload several times before I found a way (no cheesing) to defeat a certain group of 2 Shades and 4 Shadows (1 Shadow was there, 2-3 additional ones were summoned by the Shades) without having anyone knocked out (that's how I'm playing for added difficulty). After that though, I didn't encounter anything that would require too much effort and some battles, like the Witches, were a joke. To sum up, the game on Hard seems moderate/easy, apart from some infrequent spikes that probably result from me going to places too early and Shades having that teleport ability.

 

[Hatred]

Since the XP curve is totally borked it will only get easier too.

 

[Jarpie]

Since the XP curve is totally borked it will only get easier too.

What they could do is to make the requirements to get the next level higher so they wouldn't have to touch quest exps.

 

[Kirkpatrick]

Second playthrough with four classes I've not played before (chanter, barbarian, monk and rogue) on PotD. No casters, so, it's harder of course, but isn't something outrageous. At Eothas temple with lv.3 chanter and rest of the gang at level 2.

 

[Hatred]

I'd be happy with anything which fixed it. I still think the numbers from the side quests are a bit too much. The entire design approach to xp feels wrong to me. Expecting people to rush through the game in 15 hours is, well its just not what I expect from an 'IE successor'. If I was to try and make a full list of my issues with the combat it might actually take a while.

 

[Shadenuat]

Ooh they oomped the sky dragon encounter. Or maybe it's PoTD. Anyway on PoTD it's fairly decent, it's breath attack actually does something - can almost kill party, and it uses it's stuns all the time.
However since it doesn't have any strong adds and can't cast spells you can stun it and kill it. Still dragon's defences are bonkers, it takes a lot of time to pierce through them with regular means (without petrify).

 

[Shevek]

It might be nice if there was a difficulty between hard and PotD that added the monsters of PotD (it adds some right?) but didn't alter monster stats.

 

[Old Hans]

one thing ive noticed playing on Trials of iron is if your current fight is going HORRIBLE, you can just quit the game and it starts at the last save. I HAVENT TRIED IT THOUGH SO DONT JUDGE ME

 

[MrMarbles]

Playing it on hard, since the bears at the start I've had two wipes; one when I wandered into searing fall drakes at lvl 4 and one the first time I encountered ogre druids, two stomped in and I wasn't ready for the Insect Plague.

The difficulty is ok, I don't see how people can just select all and left click though. I have to micro every time. (It gets tedious when every map is completely stuffed with enemies. Didn't know you could cram that many blights into one patch of forest...) Maybe it's just me being neurotic, I hate resting so I try to get through each battle without taking a scratch. It's doable with the right debuffs/priest DR/cipher pain block and the occasional summon.

 

[Ninjerk]

one thing ive noticed playing on Trials of iron is if your current fight is going HORRIBLE, you can just quit the game and it starts at the last save. I HAVENT TRIED IT THOUGH SO DONT JUDGE ME

Yeah, the first TCS Cipher did that and admitted it