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Midnight Spire Games109 days ago (1 edit)

Hi, thank you for the review.  A few responses:

The miss rate is a little higher than I'd like, at least for players to enemies.  I am looking at reducing enemy defense slightly across the board, and probably slightly increasing the strength of accuracy buffs/debuffs.  A basic attack against an even-level target with average Agility (9), with no other modifiers, will hit about 75% of the time.  I don't mind increasing the baseline a bit.  Most skills have a bonus to hit, usually +20 (percentage points) for single-targeted ones.  ACC and DEF both increase by +5 per level.

Enemy and player turn frequencies are both calculated in the same way.  Turn frequency is entirely based on Agility, and initial turn order is a random number modified by Agility.  The default party's AGI ranges from 7 to 10, with Monica being the fastest.  For perspective, AGI 15 acts roughly twice as often as AGI 5.  So, checking the common enemies in the Emergency Room:

  1. Scavenger: AGI 8
  2. Styringe: AGI 9
  3. Expird: AGI 3
  4. Conservator: AGI 9

Thus, several enemies have a slight speed advantage over several party members, but Monica is faster than any of these, and Expird is by far the slowest.  I can consider reducing some of these AGI scores by a point or two (which would also drop their DEF slightly), but I am not aware of any programmatic issue here.

All of that said, the difficulty and pace isn't that far off from where I want it, including acquisition of equipment.  There are two T2 items available in the subway, another immediately and trivially accessible in 1C, and two more that can be acquired before entering 1E, plus about 700 in additional currency from loot boxes in 1C.  These loot drops are a big chunk of your income, you are not expected to farm it all from random encounters.  I don't intend to make dramatic changes here.  I am considering bumping up the T1 equipment slightly, so that the jump to T2 isn't as huge and enemies aren't as brutal to start out.  This gap is far more impactful than the enemy stats, since the enemies in the ER become pretty easy to kill after getting a little bit stronger.

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hythrain109 days ago

In all honesty, a 25% miss rate still sounds a bit too high. One thing I find people can forget is that RNG in games isn't as random as one thinks, and previous rolls do weight it. If the intended miss rate is 25% when looking at an even level, it's quite possible for players to potentially get up to a 40% miss rate while the enemies get a 10% miss rate due to the RNG from both of them working to try and balance the system generally around that 25% mark. Using a 20% miss rate may work better as that would reduce the potential variance down.

The two items in the subway are the Iron Greatsword and the Black Maxi, yes? I have both of those as well as every other item in the subway (I went digging around a lot). I'm unsure what areas are supposed to be 1C and 1E, but if 1E is supposed to refer to the Emergency Room area then I don't know where these three items you refer to would be.



I also want to be clear that I've searched this entire area out. Only the items behind bars that I can't access have not been collected. So that 700 currency you spoke of, I have it. Everything I've said is from the context of having collected it. It's still very difficult to make any real progress due to the various reasons I've laid out. Not expecting players to farm is all well and good, but it's what a lot of people are going to do if the game is too difficult; either that or stop playing.

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Midnight Spire Games109 days ago

The other item from the subway is the Black Bodice.  From your map, I can see that you have found the Black Maxi and Iron Plate in the ER already.  The switch to open the nurse's dungeon is currently accessible to you; it contains a Black Whip and an encounter that drops an extra 100 Rm (in addition to the standard enemy drops).  Since you have also reached the surgery wing, a rare light weapon and accessory can be picked up fairly quickly after first entering, with a few more items found further in.  The gated items near the hospital entrance cannot be collected yet.  There are a couple other hidden items in the ER, but nothing important.

Before I go on, I am not trying to deny that you had a bad experience, but I do contest some of your specifics, and this in turn leaves me unsure of what needs tuning.

I am not really concerned about players choosing to grind when/if they find it necessary, this is part of the reason there are random encounters in the first place; however, I disagree that the pace of acquiring upgrades can be pegged solely to the pace of grinding the weakest enemies for currency, because this is not the only source of either currency or equipment.  The player is also not expected to buy every upgrade before moving on to the next area (where there are more treasures to find and XP and Rm drop more rapidly), or even to buy everything at all, since the best equipment is unique and found in the dungeon.  If the player does choose to grind, even just reaching the next experience level will itself reduce the difficulty long before grinding enough money to buy everything.

This is also why I have a disconnect with the characterization that the game is unnecessarily padded with grinding.  This implies that progression is simply (and deliberately) not possible without taking considerable time to do nothing but fight random encounters, and I don't consider that accurate.  The enemies in each area are balanced around the assumption that the player did little if any grinding to get through the previous one; I played through these maps one by one, without grinding, and scaled the next map to match how strong I had gotten naturally by that point.  I cannot see this approach as padding.  My initial (and honestly most) balancing was done with the default party, but the difficulty curve has held generally true for every party build I have played so far, including one with no healer (ironically my fastest run).  

I recognize that knowing the game inside and out allows me to complete it much faster and easier than someone unfamiliar with it, but if the game is padded with grinding, then I myself would not be able to complete it without significant time spent grinding, any more than anyone else would, because the math just wouldn't allow it.  Moreover, the fact that I know exactly how to advance means that my balancing is based on fighting even fewer encounters (and thus earning less XP/Rm) than an unfamiliar player would.

This is the problem: I can't reduce the grind because I didn't add any and don't see any to reduce.  Just increasing the amount of Rm dropped from enemies does not, from my perspective, really make sense to do, since I don't feel it would really materially address your complaints.  There are things that I can consider doing to make the early game more forgiving, some of which we have discussed already.  The cost of healing and wipe recovery is something else I'm willing to look at it.  However, when you describe your experience as being insanely difficult and frustrating to the point that you struggle to progress any further, it is difficult for me to match this to the text of your feedback and thus assess the root of it.  I will take a look at your stream and see what I can observe.

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hythrain109 days ago

Ok, perhaps I can shed a bit of light to help out. Before I do that, though, I should preface that I jumped back into the game and completed the demo. I chose to go with a "dive in, clear a few required fights while running from every random encounter, leave to heal then repeat" approach. This did result in me getting my gear improved a bit along the way, but even when I got to the point of clearing the demo I felt like encounters could still be rough.

So everything I detailed is just how everything compounds onto the difficulty. From the high player miss rate to how strong enemies are to the low RM gains outside of specific treasures to the random resistance against spells, view everything I said as a total package. Not everything needs to be addressed to improve the difficulty curve. It just requires the right changes.

For example, if the player miss rate was lower and monsters were a bit weaker (such that it wasn't possible for the enemies to focus one character down and kill them before that character ever got a turn. Yes, this happened quite a few times for me, even moreso when I hit the surgery wing in full), that alone would adjust things enough. A lower miss rate would mean the player is hitting more often and defeating enemies faster, meaning enemies drop faster and players aren't taking as many attacks. Enemies doing a bit less damage would also mean that players have more health going into subsequent fights, which encourages them to keep pushing instead of going back to heal every few fights. Alternatively, boosting RM gain could be done instead of weakening the monsters, meaning players can choose to grind a bit and get some gear to improve their stats.

In short, it's not about improving everything. The reason I got into the RM grind thing a bit more was because of the counter arguments you were making to that particular area, but it's not something that matters if other areas are adjusted.

Also, I plan to do another run through the demo on my own to try out different classes (and to see if there's other feedback I can give). As such, is there any info you can provide about the different classes that may not be obvious (things like jobs intended for front/back row or ways to use stat modifications to change those intended rows)? Just any sort of info that would be helpful to know.

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Midnight Spire Games109 days ago (1 edit)

When you create your party, each class will have a blurb about its defining skills and primary role, as well as two stats that have a minimum of 8 to set up its baseline.  Since stats determine equipment proficiency, how you set those up is significant in how the character's role ends up playing out.  For example, in my last playthrough I gave Moon high Endurance and Riposte and put her up front as a caster-tank, and that worked out decently.  One of my playtesters used the default party, but ended up turning Simon (Life) into a ranged attacker and letting Alis (Sun) do most of the healing.  Magic (e.g. Destruction) scales more with level than equipment, so the intent is for "caster" classes to be able to choose more balanced stats / equipment while still having reasonable skill damage, or to focus completely on casting stats and equipment to maximize skill output.

In general, the classes most suited to be put in the front row are War, Vengeance, and (slightly less so) Hunt, since several of their skills depend on weapon range.  Vengeance's Overpower is strictly short-range, and War's Champion skill works best for a front-row tank (though it's still useful as a self-heal either way).  War and Vengeance I believe are also the only two that start with 8 END minimum, so it's easy to boost them up to 12 for heavy armor.  Of course, you can still put any of these three in the back with a bow or glaive.  The other classes' skill sets are more magic-focused, so they can potentially do well in a hybrid front-row or focused caster back-row role.  I ended up skewing the class distribution too far towards casters, I know.

It's not a perfect ruleset, so I'm sure there are gaps and things I didn't consider.  I can't promise that literally any party build is viable, but as I mentioned I was able to complete the game without any of the primary healing classes, so that goes a long way to proving out build variance.

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hythrain107 days ago

Okay, so I have an update for you. After doing a test run with other classes, I decided to just restart from the beginning with the balanced team, keeping notes of the entire experience. I kept notes on things like when I did fixed or random encounters, how those encounters played out, when I would return to heal, when I acquired and equipped new equipment, etc. I can share these notes with you if you want, but I'm going to list conclusions I can draw up from this anyway. Should you want the notes, keep in mind  that with fixed fights, you wouldn't always be able to know what fight I was talking about.

Ok, so the first thing I noticed was how much the damage jumps from the subway to the hospital. Going purely by basic enemies, I was only taking 3 to 7 damage while in the Subway. By contrast, the starting range I saw in the hospital was 9 to 22 before crits; effectively three times the damage. Obviously this lowers as you acquire more defensive gear, but jumping to triple the damage from before is a lot when the player's defensive stats have only gone up by 5 points while HP has only increased by 8 to 15 points depending on the who it is. For three of the five units, that high end is more than half of their HP. While it's not half for Monica, Monica's skills see her harm herself so a single Dispatch would make it more than half her HP. Regardless, three enemies all hitting that top range on a single target will kill them. It feels like this damage should be what you get when you hit the second part of the hospital (assuming you've not gotten any defensive gear equipped) but not the first part. I could see 6 to 18 being the first part; still possible for three enemies hitting one target for that high end to take out someone, but that's now only going to be your back row mages rather than everyone. To go even further on this, some of the stronger enemies (like the bed and those found in the second area) can nearly one-shot Jomi and Simon without crits. They are guaranteed kills if they crit. Later on when players have stronger defenses, the biggest issue then becomes how large the enemy packs are. Packs in the last area can get up to 8 enemies, with many of them including 3+ Ossipedes (which I think are the deadliest enemy you encounter prior to the third area, simply due to how often they attack and their ability to skip turns. The bed is a close runner-up, but the beds are only fought in fixed fights before the third area and other than the one that traps you in the Emergency Ward, you typically have stronger defenses by the time you fight them. Also the only skill that makes them dangerous is Rampage, which as I said can nearly one-shot Jomi and Simon without critting, but this is mitigated by the time you get to the third area)

Next was the miss rate and just how bad it is. You said that using a skill is supposed to be +20% accuracy. With a planned miss rate of 25%, that means a skill should only miss 5% of the time (assuming you're viewing that +20% as adding flatly onto the 75% hit chance). In such a situation, an accuracy buff of 20 should entirely remove the miss rate for skills. This is flat out NOT what happens. I have seen multiple misses from skills when I had an accuracy buff and no debuffs. So there is a VERY big problem with the miss rate as it's not operating as intended.

The next problem I noticed was MP usage. While it improves over time, it starts off being VERY rough. As the primary caster, Jomi goes into the Hospital with enough MP to Detonate 5 times.  This wasn't that bad in the subway, where a non-resisted Detonate would kill any normal enemy, but in the Hospital's first area it can't do this even if you accessorize her for Magic Attack. You need to be level 3 and have at least an additional +10 Magic Attack from gear compared to the starter gear before she can, I think. I assume this because I know level 3 and +6 Magic (from accessories) doesn't do it. So basically, Jomi gets five turns to do damage and then she has nothing (her other skill is more useful on enemies that will live long enough, such as the bed enemy and bosses). That's, at best, 2.5 fights. Funny enough, this was about how often I could survive before I needed to run back and heal due to general damage also being done. While I focused primarily on Jomi for this, MP is an issue for everyone. It's just most noticeable for Jomi.

This brings me to the last issue: buffs and debuffs. Most of the time, enemies will strike first and often will use skills that reduce accuracy, skip someone's next turn or puts a row of people to sleep. All three of these effects can be rough, especially if done first turn. Heck, I had a fight that involved three Conservators where literally each round, one of them would use sleep. Every time, Monica was put to sleep at full duration and Mila or Alis would be put to sleep with 2 turns. Being constantly slammed with debuffs, especially the sleep one, just drags the fights out. Meanwhile, there are a lot of times where certain buffs don't seem to work. For example, Mila's Guardian. I've had times where more than 40% of all attacks made while Guardian is up go to targets besides Mila (and Monica does NOT have the debuff that makes her become an increased target, which I also feel is just something that shouldn't be a thing given she already lowers her defense by 20). At minimum, those in the back row should never be targets if Guardian is active. Also, it's just dumb that if Monica uses Dispatch and misses, she still takes the damage. I'd argue that shouldn't be a thing.

I would list the speed of which enemies get to attack being a problem, especially for the Ossipedes who happen to have a skill that causes a Sip effect, but I have this feeling that that's not going to change.

In terms of RM, it basically worked out to break even; by the time I was fighting the final boss, I had just finished getting full equipment (so long as I made the effort to minimize my return trips and to try and get everything). So in terms of RM, that grind doesn't need to be changed.

So really, the biggest improvements that can be made are to fix the miss rate (I'd argue for an 80% chance to hit before buffs, debuffs and skills are factored in), to lower the damage of enemies found in the Emergency Ward to make them more manageable, to make adjustments to the MP cost of skills (rather than just giving more MP, because given other skills you get later on I think this is more balanced), to improve the chance that monster debuffs are resisted (especially AOE ones) and to improve certain buffs so that they're more effective. I won't say all of these changes should be done. These are just the biggest ones that can be made. At minimum, I'd say that three should be done: the miss rate should be fixed, the damage from enemies in the Ward should be a bit weaker (If they don't already, why not have enemies have their own levels, with the levels going up in each area. That way, you can tune the enemies for each area and thus keep the first area weaker while still making those same enemies a threat when they appear in the second and third areas) and one of the other things should also be done.

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Midnight Spire Games106 days ago

Thank you for the detailed report.  I have actually been keeping an eye on accuracy for a little while now (since before FBQ), and while as I said I have not been able to identify any issues with number generation that I can clearly separate from cognitive bias, I do agree that it doesn't "feel" right.  I do have some ideas that I am going to try out to see if they help.

One thing that does contribute to this is that accuracy is capped at 95% for any given attack, so this can cause e.g. Command + Overpower still missing even a Scavenger on occasion, which makes the player think "how did that miss?!"  I think I will remove this cap, at least for players, since it isn't really benefiting the gameplay.

The subway enemies are intentionally quite weak since they're just tutorial fodder and not meant as a serious obstacle (before I toned them down, I used to get complaints about them being too hard for the tutorial, in fact), but I am looking into bringing down the difficulty spike when entering the hospital just a tad.

Most AoE debuffs are intended to have a lower success rate than single-target ones, but I think this isn't configured properly in all cases.  I'll do a pass over these.  Alluring Scent in particular is probably too effective, especially when facing multiple Conservators.

I'll run some numbers on Champion and see if it matches up with where I want it, but I will also consider the suggestion to have it protect the back row specifically.  Targeting is weighted by position, with Champion adding a big number to the user's weight, but it doesn't make the user a total magnet (though one might argue that it should).

I am not sure I agree that Dispatch should only cost HP on a hit, since it is a fair bit stronger than e.g. Flashing Blade and the real cost of using it is split between HP and MP, but I do see your point.  I will think about it.

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hythrain106 days ago

For the miss rate, I do think what I mentioned before about RNG and enemy attacks is playing into it. My general experience has been that when enemies miss more often, I hit more often. This could also be why AOE debuffs are landing more often as well.

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hythrain109 days ago (2 edits)

Also I'm now frustrated because, as I'm now going back into the game to try and make more progress, I'm remembering things I wanted to suggest that I forgot about, such as putting the Defend option lower in the menu instead of making it the second choice.

Edit: Also forgot about the frustration of the random resistance to spells and some things just being outright traps that harm you. Yet more things that build onto the difficulty (but at least that latter one can actually be fun and avoidable).

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