Isn't there plenty of bone weapons, scythes, hatchets, and swords in the early game? I like to play the Berserker often and didn't notice this issue. Sure, the hand axes break pretty soon but they are too strong for the early game anyway and should not last too long. :)
Viewing post in Rebalance enemies and AI persistence.
I think i got a good idea for chases. Give all AI a motivation meter. This meter won't affect anything other than the odds of them giving upp a chase and going home. It would passively decrease every turn in a chase and increase every time they close the distance. A chase would start/be recognized after a set amount of turns spent running, the amount of turns needed to initiate one would reset with every melee attack landed but not ranged attacks or skills. ranged attacks and skills can't stop a chase either unlike melee attacks. this meter would only even be active during a hunt. pls tweak as you see fit, i thought this could be a tactical and usefulf way of deciding the outcome for chases. (both AI and player have to run for the chase countdown to start)
How about you just give all items higher durability? Or make weapons do a lot more damage?
Weapon degradation in this game is horribly debilitating.
it's annoying having to carry around a dozen weapons just to burn through them all in just five enemies.
Picking up other weapons and continuing the fight is doable, but not if you're a dex build dagger oriented class. You'll do no damage at all.
Even worse is your bow breaking in the middle of a battle with a bunch of enemies still coming for you.
So far Orc Berserkers and Fallen knights, are the only classes that i had better success with.
That means you might be a little too biased in play testing.
Guys if you feel strongly about durability being an issue, there's a mod on our Discord channel that removes durability from all items. It's available in pinned messages on the #modding channel. From what I heard it takes 15 minutes to modify all items if you just want to double or triple it instead.
I will want to keep deteriorating items because that's how the game is balanced, there's tons of loot, even artifacts are not extremely rare, they can be crafted too, but everything is temporary. That being said, I'll do more testing with the bows and daggers, because it's true that bows on AI come into play around level 3, and before that, the only way to get them is crafting primitive bows or having a lucky find in random stashes. There's only one enemy type early that has iron daggers and the situation is similar with craftable stone daggers. I'll play around more with Poachers and Nomads to see how I can improve this, but if you have some interesting suggestions where enemies could have useful early items for these professions, I would love to hear it.
I think minions would be too strong if they scaled, especially the permanent ones that have no limits like zombies and skeletons. They still serve as meatshields in the late game, and I think I'll add corpse explosion synergy so zombies can be exploded, but I don't want a horde of zombies to be effective against gods or late-game bosses.
no of course, that would make the game easy. if we have scaling for summons it should be almost entirely an increase to hp. That way they would keep being viable meatshields which is their only purpose. late game they cant even protect me since they die in about one hit and then the aggro shifts towards me again. a minimal damage increase could be there not that it would matter. You could add a skill specifically for buffing minions or a single minions. Did you fix skeleton champion? last time it was bugged. and about corpse explosion, i dont know if it changed in the latest version but from what i remember it should change. perhaps make it so it does full damage to minions as well and allowing that to trigger chain reactions. because now there really isnt a situation were it's worth using compared to the other skills.
I've recently finished the game with Necromancer and made appropriate tweaks in v0.7.2 (a few small ones are yet to come). I'm happy about the early, mid, and late game of the Necromancer now. Skeletons provide enough of a meatshield until the very end (while not making your character do whatever it pleases without thinking) and the new Corpse Explosion working on zombies and skeletons make them very viable for big damage (and corpse explosion has no cooldown). I don't plan any more buffs to necromancers in 1.0, other than some AI tweaks.