Coyote
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2009
- Messages
- 1,149
Started playing on Hard, rerolled on PotD after a few hours, and I just reached Act 3 yesterday. (I haven't had much time to play for the last couple of weeks.) Some other difficulty-relevant factors:
So far what I've found is that the difficulty is heavily concentrated in the early areas, with almost everything after Caed Nua being a cakewalk - but man, is that early difficulty a bitch. For example, take the the shadow/phantom encounter in the main keep at Caed Nua. This was next to impossible for me after beelining there at level 3, and and it was still pretty damn tough at level 4 with some more equipment from exploration:
I'm sure that inexperience with the combat system played a role here, of course, as well as what areas I had and hadn't yet explored and the fact that I'd used up some of my scrolls/consumables on earlier encounters. My point isn't that the battle is too hard, but rather that PotD makes the early difficulty spike posed by spirit enemies even more salient.
In fact, I'm rather disappointed that nothing else has posed nearly so much of a challenge since then. After crafting/enchanting stuff and picking my levelup abilities specifically to beat this battle, I've never needed to go to such lengths of preparation again. I've barely used any potions/scrolls/traps for the past 3-4 experience levels. The only fights that have forced me to deviate significantly from my standard tactics were that talking fampyr and his death guards on level 8 of Od Nua, that locked room full of spectres/cean gwla/menpwgra on level 10, and Nalrend the Wise (the ogre bounty in Elmshore). There's a whole lot of bland filler combat, and very little that's actually engaging.
Other observations:
Overall, I don't know whether to be glad or annoyed that I chose to play on PotD; filler encounters on Hard might be even more mindless, but at least they'd go by faster with fewer enemies/lower defenses. In any case, my main advice to anyone playing on PotD would be to just be aware of that difficulty spike on the critical path when deciding how to spend your limited early crafting materials.
-I'm playing a rogue, which seems to be a very powerful class, and am otherwise using only the provided NPCs in my party.
-I'm pretty overleveled from exploring everything.
-I use spells conservatively and typically only camp when when fatigue becomes a nuisance. I've boosted everyone's athletics to at least 3 (because otherwise they get fatigued way too quickly), so it takes a while for that to happen.
-I avoided benefiting from the save/reload stat increase bug before it was patched out by stripping characters of modals/equipment as necessary.
-I haven't been doing the full party opening salvo thing that everyone recommends, nor tanking with one characters while everyone else shoots, as I've found these tactics to be ineffective. (Well, maybe "ineffective" is the wrong word, but they're slow and tedious compared to other tactics that achieve the same level of success.)
-I'm pretty overleveled from exploring everything.
-I use spells conservatively and typically only camp when when fatigue becomes a nuisance. I've boosted everyone's athletics to at least 3 (because otherwise they get fatigued way too quickly), so it takes a while for that to happen.
-I avoided benefiting from the save/reload stat increase bug before it was patched out by stripping characters of modals/equipment as necessary.
-I haven't been doing the full party opening salvo thing that everyone recommends, nor tanking with one characters while everyone else shoots, as I've found these tactics to be ineffective. (Well, maybe "ineffective" is the wrong word, but they're slow and tedious compared to other tactics that achieve the same level of success.)
So far what I've found is that the difficulty is heavily concentrated in the early areas, with almost everything after Caed Nua being a cakewalk - but man, is that early difficulty a bitch. For example, take the the shadow/phantom encounter in the main keep at Caed Nua. This was next to impossible for me after beelining there at level 3, and and it was still pretty damn tough at level 4 with some more equipment from exploration:
- Because of the buffed enemy accuracy on PotD, phantoms have a decent chance of chain-stunning Eder to death within a few seconds even with Wary Defender active and a defensive buff from Durance; this is almost certainly a TPK with no other tank. Suppress Affliction didn't seem to have any effect on the stuns.
- Because of spirits' high defenses, your attacks and debuffs will miss more often than not at that point.
- Phantoms/shadows have a relatively high DR for that point in the game against all but burn damage, so even when your attacks do land, you're not going to be thinning out their ranks very quickly (and if you get Aloth to torch them, they'll swarm him after - or frequently during - a single casting, which usually misses half of the ones who remain in the AoE anyway).
- And then of course there's the infamous teleportation, which makes casting spells rather tricky.
I'm sure that inexperience with the combat system played a role here, of course, as well as what areas I had and hadn't yet explored and the fact that I'd used up some of my scrolls/consumables on earlier encounters. My point isn't that the battle is too hard, but rather that PotD makes the early difficulty spike posed by spirit enemies even more salient.
In fact, I'm rather disappointed that nothing else has posed nearly so much of a challenge since then. After crafting/enchanting stuff and picking my levelup abilities specifically to beat this battle, I've never needed to go to such lengths of preparation again. I've barely used any potions/scrolls/traps for the past 3-4 experience levels. The only fights that have forced me to deviate significantly from my standard tactics were that talking fampyr and his death guards on level 8 of Od Nua, that locked room full of spectres/cean gwla/menpwgra on level 10, and Nalrend the Wise (the ogre bounty in Elmshore). There's a whole lot of bland filler combat, and very little that's actually engaging.
Other observations:
- Because battles tend to last longer on PotD, chanters have more opportunities to make use of their invocations, and fighting to regain focus is more of a factor for ciphers (albeit a very minor one with a decent blunderbuss).
- PotD encourages using abilities more tactically in early levels - For example, reserving abilities for more powerful enemies or using weak debuffs that reduce a defense first so that a stronger one has a better chance of connecting - rather than just spamming abilities at the beginning of battle as generally suffices on hard. However, this has been much less of a factor since reaching level 6-7, as most of the areas available during Act 2 seem to be designed for a lower-level party. Hopefully things will get more interesting once enemies catch up with my party's levels again.
- Mental Binding is overpowered as fuck, even with PotD's boost to enemy defenses; I can only assume that it's escaped nerfing so far by virtue of Mind Blades having originally been so broken that people overlooked the other level 2 cipher powers. As a level 5 power requiring 30 focus it might be reasonable, but right now there's almost never any reason for Grieving Mother to cast anything else when she's in my party, and it renders the vast majority of encounters downright trivial.
- Aside from the encounters mentioned above, the toughest encounters up to this point have continued to be the ones against spirits. Adventure party fights have been pretty disappointing; as long as you have some way (prone, paralysis, stuck, confusion, Shadowing Beyond, etc.) to get past their front lines and take out the casters quickly, they don't pose much of a challenge.
Overall, I don't know whether to be glad or annoyed that I chose to play on PotD; filler encounters on Hard might be even more mindless, but at least they'd go by faster with fewer enemies/lower defenses. In any case, my main advice to anyone playing on PotD would be to just be aware of that difficulty spike on the critical path when deciding how to spend your limited early crafting materials.
