there needs to be some heavy balancing changes- the beginning of the game is near impossible with the amount of enemies that can outmuscle you, outheal you, AND outdrain you IN THE SAME VENTURE. It's like slamming your head into a wall where you lose xp each venture rather than gain any.
Honest suggestions:
-Reduce the health of buildings, or make them take bonus damage. They shouldn't have more health than my entire team COMBINED and solo carry the enemy.
_Reduce spawn rates of certain enemies. Stacked enemies that can drain are an automatic loss, since only one party member can drain, which means you will be outpaced in losing levels.
-Enemies should not all be at your party's average level. There should be a variance of levels that make it so a single enemy is the weak link, making it viable to target them to win the fight. When each enemy has counters to everything you do, and is the same level as everyone else, you bog down the game to a crawl or a flee-loop.
-Each enemy should be specialized into something. The boar being able to do high damage AND being a tank is the lowest offender- the impish mage is both a powerful healer, has high damage, can revive allies, and has plenty of health at matching level. The rat puts down buildings that trivialize the fight in the enemies' favor, while also having plenty of health and damage itself. The slimes (and other enemies that drain levels) need to be the first to be defeated, and you have to do so by draining THEM. Otherwise, they'll just keep spamming drain, outlevel you by a mile, and you'll gameover with everyone broken. But then you just end up in a loop of drain>get drained>drain>get drained, all while hoping the one character you have tanking everything else (cause if you attack the slime, the others will heal it while it barriers itself, preventing it from being drainable UNTIL IT'S ATTACKED), and the other character trying to heal the tank through the damage of every other enemy.
you can keep the healers from attacking by making them have to heal. That keeps their attack from increasing too much before you can deal with them. I think the rats (and other enemies like them) are weak to stun, they are kinda annoying though. Draining enemies you can't let focus on one target, they focus on whoever has the lowest xp total, so you don't always have to taunt. However if there are 3 of them ether run or take them down as fast as you can, you still earn more than you lose if you're quick enough. Tanks aren't a problem if you don't trigger them to taunt. This is everything I've noticed while playing this update, all you have to do is figure out the order to take out the enemies.
Your comments helped me here. I was literally about to ask if the dev rebalanced the game or added some form of difficulty options to give the player a fighting chance. But after reading your comment it sounds like they didn't.
The game's neat and all, and it's honestly the only one of its kind that I know of, but dear god did it take forever to do anything the last time I gave the game an honest try.
In the 1.0 update the healers were the biggest issue because they'd infinitely heal both their friends and themselves. In addition to that they'd sometimes decide that 80% HP was enough to heal an ally and give them something like 35 overhealth depending on the level of the healer. You literally could not kill them without breaking them. At the time there was no punishment for it so it was the ONLY way to kill 3-stacked healers without bashing your head off of your desk for two hours per fight because with my luck EVERY fight was against 3 healers.
Then 1.1 came around which rebalanced a lot of the game. I think in 1.1 when you drain and stun I think the chances/power goes up each time you target the same target. But the enemies get that buff too so each time they drain you it goes up by like 5% which just results in a back and forth until you accidentally break an enemy. Which is bad now and you actively get punished for it with an ultra nightmare difficulty superboss if you do it to the bosses of the game and some other stuff if you do it to the basic enemies.
I barely even played 1.1 because it just felt like more of the same where you HAD to break enemies to win fights but now you got your balls crushed for it as punishment. Stuns were also super unreliable as it was a 50% chance that'd decrease if the enemy was higher level and increase if you were a higher level. There's some gear in the shop that is pretty much REQUIRED to win any fight, specifically the item that gives your character TWO TURNS as that means double stun, heal, or drain which is absolutely necessary to outscale the enemies. The problem is, it's legendary and you pretty much need 3 of them.
I'm still gonna try 1.2 but this does not give me high hopes that I'll enjoy it. So far it DOES seem like overhealth was mostly solved as everyone has a cap of 3x their max health.
In all the times I've played the game I have never broken enough to fight that boss. I can understand the mindset though. It is the fastest and easiest way to end fights. I just don't like it.
If you want to play without breaking enemies I could give some more information about them (though you might know some of it already) otherwise I'll let you figure it out on your own. Just know, fights are likely to last longer.
It was the only way I didn't have to slog through hours of fights just to experience a miniscule amount of the game. Basically what I did in version 1.1 was get Red to level 100 as quickly as possible by mass draining everything. Then I swept through every fight getting Sam and Vix to level 100 as well, drained every boss as close to level 1 as I could get them, killed them all normally, and THEN broke them just to see what would happened. The result was the fight against Darkness. A level 100 superboss that drains the fuck out of your whole team every turn and by like turn 10 or something you're either dead or level 1 again.
No clue if that whole thing was changed in version 1.2 though.
Anyways I just don't think that's how the fights should be. A constant back and forth of
->Drain ->get drained ->repeat
->Damage enemy ->enemy is healed to full ->repeat
->Do anything ->thing is countered by enemy ->repeat
Is just not very fun. I mean I've played games where the odds are as stacked against you as they could possibly be (Evil West on Evil difficulty for instance) and that was WAY more fun than this because no matter how hard the enemies hit me, no matter how many times I got my ass whooped, I still felt like I had a chance against them. Sure the enemies were tanky, sure they could heal to full in seconds, but I had the tools I needed to counter them and it DIDN'T feel like a never-ending pointless battle, every kill, every action I took made ACTUAL progress in the fight. The fights were actually tense and thrilling (which is admittedly hard to do in a text based RPG so that's a moot point) and not a boring back and forth.
This isn't a bad game per se, but it needs balancing imo, it needs some more stuff to give the player some extra OOMPH. And I think that every enemy shouldn't have a counter to every ability/strategy that YOU have. Each enemy needs a more PRECISE specialization and YOU need to figure out what abilities YOU have that counters THEIR'S. NOT the other way around. It's like it's trench warfare and I'm fighting for hours, sometimes DAYS, just to gain a single foot of ground at the cost of thousands of soldiers. It isn't fun. Plain and simple.
Still, it's more balanced than Tales of Mystra though. Once again, those who know, know. And I will not elaborate.
That's the thing. you are looking at single enemies when thinking about counters when you should be looking at the group. If there is a tank you know they'll taunt if other enemies lose enough health, but they can't taunt for themselves. So if there is a healer they heal the tank meaning they aren't attacking so their attacks take longer to buff. It also means no taunt so you can drain your target.
Tinkerers are the main problem because what they make decides if you run or fight. If the enemies double up then it depends.
Not to say there aren't problems it just feels like some of what's been pointed out aren't it. Like the levels, those are fine. The healers aren't a problem ether. Drainers can be annoying and maybe only one should be able to appear but multiple are beatable.
I don't know what the problems are and I'm not going to pretend to know. All I do know is what is annoying to me, and none of it has kept me from enjoying and getting an ending. Not sure if I'll find out how to get anymore but it is what it is.
I promise I have not been thinking about them in singular terms. It's just incredibly annoying when every enemy has about 3 to 5 counters to anything I do. Whether its to them or someone else.
The fights shouldn't be a constant back and forth and the enemies shouldn't have infinite loops that can only be broken by completely rng stuns. Multiple enemy comps can only be defeated with extra turns or powerful items which require you to defeat enemies to get. And the random boss encounters are sometimes instant losses because you just straight up aren't prepared to fight them.
Every enemy type has their weaknesses that you can exploit but every enemy type shores up the weaknesses of another and sometimes multiples of the same type completely negates their own weaknesses. Tinkerers are the biggest offenders because they literally fill all roles at once. Drain totems are immediately your #1 priority as they drain from everyone and funnel it into a singular enemy which powerlevels them, barricades next as they completely gimp anything you want to do, and mending totems are actually worthless and I usually ignore them as I can easily out DPS the healing they do. The overhealth cap helps a little with infinite healing loops, and the revival cap helps a shit ton as it means you can permanently remove enemies without breaking them.
Every single fight I've done so far in this update, I've won by focusing them down one at a time until they literally can't be revived anymore. I stun whatever enemies would screw me over the most in the moment, divert attention to my characters with the most health, drain the most annoying enemies as close to level 1 as possible, then one or two-shot them as many times as I can as it distracts every enemy in the process. I save-scum the hell out of the game every single time I encounter a composition that is actual torture to fight or a boss I just don't want to deal with. If it's 2 healers (or mages/drainers) and a tinkerer and the first thing the tinkerer does (assuming both of my stuns failed to land) is shit out a 1K health barricade, I refresh the page because its genuinely faster and more rewarding than retreating or trudging through that fight. The enemies are too widespread in their skills, this wouldn't be a problem if there were more ways that the player could use early on to get stronger. But there aren't. Magic attackers are ALSO healers. Buffers/Supports are ALSO drainers. Tanks are ALSO damage dealers. And Tinkerers are the biggest pieces of shit I've ever seen and I hate them with every fiber of my being. Every single enemy can counter roughly 3 of the actions you can take with each character each turn and the only way to do what they do to you is with items.
I think its mainly that the early game is just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with and it just doesn't feel fun. It gets better as you go through and get the ball rolling but it takes considerable effort to actually GET that ball rolling.
You don't need items for normal fights, you don't even need items for slime queen.
I understand your feelings about tinkerer and even share them somewhat, but running from fights never upset me, not even reloading the last save upset.
When it comes to enemies, tank target lowest health so healing those you want to protect can be more helpful sometimes. The healers should be healing because it keeps them from using the only attack they have. Drainers only bubble if you give them the option to and even that can be helpful because it resets their drain bonus. Tinkerers I have nothing yet, just hope it's nothing too bad to deal with, don't care for them much ether. Only tip with them I can give is if all 4 spots are full they should be the first enemy you beat.
Honestly a healer having an attack spell makes sense, a tank being able to deal damage makes sense (bleed is the real killer). Though I could see swapping bubble and the spell I feel that would be more annoying to deal with.