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Enigmatic Lake

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A member registered Dec 22, 2023

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Certainly, and don't forget that these are just suggestions of a single person and might not always be widely applicable. It's always possible that I'm a significant outlier, and sometimes that is unavoidable.

Going to add some more thoughts here:

Illustrating how impactful tying Dao progress to floors and rebirths is

  • In my first run, I hit my 2nd Dao after my 6th or 8th Rebirth. My 3rd Dao after the initial 10 Rebirths.
  • In my second run, I hit my 2nd Dao after my 1st Rebirth. My 3rd Dao is coming up right now after 3 Rebirths.
  • The difference on my 2nd Dao is over 1k floors because I also get access to the Dao XP pill. The difference on my 3rd Dao is also going to be 1.5k floors worth of XP. Doubled if I wait for the Dao XP pills before progressing floors of course.

That's a massive difference for the content that is currently available, and extrapolating from the gap for the 3rd Dao compared to the second I'm expecting it to snowball more and more. 


Essences
Overall, I think the Essences are good but some builds have very few to use right now (either because they have no use-case or their power is too weak) while others feel like 8 slots is too little. For example:

  • In my initial playthrough (Crit Hits + Regen), I was using Damage bonuses, Hit & Crit bonuses, Attack Speed and Dodge Chance bonuses, Regen bonuses, Flat Armor bonuses and they all synergized.
  • In my second playthrough (Burning + Damage Reduction), I was using Damage bonuses, Hit bonuses, Attack speed bonus, Regen bonus - and that's about it. Either things didn't have synergy (Crit, Dodge), were actively anti-synergistic (Flat Armor) or were so weak they aren't worth the space they take on screen (Spirit Lynx and Jade Tiger both gave less damage than a T1 Forest Wolf)

It's probably just a result of limited content, but I did notice a bit of disappointment at my options on the second playthrough.

The Void Pavillon is probably not a good way of providing currently unreachable Essences.


Damage Reduction & Armor:
A classic problem, there is anti-synergy between these two due to the order of operations (these are assumptions based on the damage numbers - there could also be something else funky going on with the damage/defense formula). First you apply the Flat Armor and then you apply the Damage Reduction. So you are essentially reducing your Flat Armor by your Damage Reduction in terms of effectiveness. That means you never want to focus on both. This could be intentional, in which you can ignore this portion.

On top of that, a good amount of damage completely ignores this system. DoT effects seem to ignore it (and it is already highly dangerous), True damage obviously ignores it. This can be fine, but it might be a bit too prevalent.

Another strange part is how Flat Armor is applied before the Critical Hit, but Damage Reduction happens after if I'm not mistaken? This seems odd because you are splitting up your damage formula. I am assuming you did something like (Damage - Armor) * (1 + IsCritHit*CritDamage%) * (1 - Damage Reduction). That's really obtuse for the player. Since you are pushing the player forwards in order to progress faster, you shouldn't worry too much about the extreme end of players not taking damage at all. If they do invest into that, then they will progress more slowly even if they never die than someone who invested into a balance since they should kill enemies significantly faster.


Just some additional general advice, especially because you are adding Dao effects to enemies. 
"For the player to fail, they must die once. For the player to succeed, they must always win (aka kill thousands of enemies)."
In other words, the player has to have significantly more potential in the moment than the enemy they are fighting (excluding bosses). Taking the example of CoreDisciples again with their Void Dao. Their Daos seem to be max level, while a normal player won't even have their first Dao maxed. Adding two defensive Daos together (Void + Blind) means the player has to be extremely strong in comparison to the rest. Void itself is a 80% uptime immunity if I'm not mistaken and Blind reduces my hit chance from 94.5% down to 44.5%. So 52.9% additional dodge chance (separate from their innate dodge chance). So compared to an enemy without Dao, I need over 10 times the damage output. Put in other words, they are not recovering 100 hp per second as you would initially think. They are recovering over 1000 HP per second. They don't have 3k HP, they have 30k HP. And that's just the Dao effects, not their damage reduction and their own dodge chance. 

Adjacent to that, I would also suggest to keep in mind that players have feelings, while PvE enemies do not. I'm not saying you didn't keep that in mind, I just know it is often something forgotten.

Suggestions:

Homogenize Dao XP either by:

  • Making it a pool for all (and implementing a level system for them);
  • Changing how Dao XP is calculated (maybe it should just look at highest floor reached).

Change the order of operations on your Damage formula:

  • Separate Damage and Defenses. First deal with all the Damage modifiers, then apply the Defense modifiers.
    • If something affects the stat of the attacking entity directly such as Roar, that should be handled at the entity level rather than the OnHit event (which I think you are doing for Roar).
  • Try to avoid anti-synergy such as Flat Armor being negatively affected by your Damage Reduction. Roar and Flat Armor do have synergy because of order of operations.

Overall it seems enjoyable enough, despite certain major roadblocks. I would have quit much earlier if I didn't decide to power through certain frustrations though.


Bugs:

Attack speed calculations seems to be handled incorrectly in several ways. Some examples from what I tested:

- Bleeding (from Hemorrhage) when applied by the enemy only applies the Attack Interval increase at max stacks.

- Bleeding (from Hemorrhage) when applied by the player's character instantly reduces enemy Attack Interval to the minimum delay (looks like 0.2 seconds or less) until the stacks wear off. Strangely, I believe this only started happening after Rebirthing the first time with Impurities (150/150 Impurities). I may not have noticed because I was nearly unkillable at that point.

- Entangle from enemies (Floors 31-40) reduces my Attack Interval from 0.5 seconds to 3.36 seconds.

Other bugs:

- Armor Penetration does not seem to function, either enemies have no Flat armor or Flat armor cannot go below 0.

- I cannot see the effects of Essences that I bought in the Void Pavillon in the Cultivation -> Aspect menu.

- I cannot enter the Sect after defeating the Sect Boss of Plane 2 (probably not implemented yet?).

- I cannot see the rarity of enemies. Give them a colour glow around their image or the HP bar.

- The save randomly seems to forget player data such as forgetting my character's name and gender (defaults to male).

- Reloading the web-version during Dao selection lets you reroll the Dao paths available to you (kind of necessary with the bad Dao paths we have it feels like)


General frustrations:

Attributes feel like they become useless: 

Might's diminishing returns seem particularly harsh. 100 points (going from 500 -> 600; a 20% investment for a 6% damage increase feels bad). The other stats either don't have such impactful diminishing returns (Resilience, Vitality) or scale multiple stats (Precision, Swiftness). 

Even the other stats at some point feel like they become pretty pointless. Vitality doesn't matter at some point because there is no regen between spawns. So if an enemy (or enemy group in plane 1) has a particularly offensive setup/Dao that left you with a tenth of your HP remaining, you start the next combat with that remaining 10% which feels very stupid of my character. I wouldn't be itching for a fight when I just survived a brutal encounter.

What I would like to see is a cap on your stats (increased by Elixirs/Body Refinement) that you break through as you hit your breakthrough into a new realm (though you'll need to decide whether to force players to consolidate all their Insights before breaking through and how you tell the player that they have to do that).

Enemy Dao power seems too random in application: 

Freeze is pretty pathetic (does the damage increase even work?). Poison can be extremely powerful when it's on a higher rarity because they tend to go down much more slowly. Void is just overpowered because Plane 2 Floor 91+ has Void with an uptime of 80% (about a 1 second window - doable but not fun). That's the same as a Dao giving 80% dodge rate (on top of their own separate dodge rate). 

My own Dao are pathetic by comparison. Regenerate for a 30% healing received and 12 flat regen (Tier 4 Regenerate)? Lol; Lmao even. Burning Heart for a 4% crit chance and +10% Crit Multi (Tier 1)? Big whoop. Then I hit Hemorrhage and that's a 50% DPS increase during the fight easily.

General Enemy strategic imbalance: 

One thing I feel that you get very off is the required imbalance between players and enemies. Players should generally feel hardier than monsters, because of two reasons.

  1. Dying isn't fun, but due to death being only a 5 sec delay that's not a big deal.
  2. Nothing dying isn't fun, and especially in an idle game that is a problem.
    1. It feels bad for a player to leave their idle game idle and return to an enemy that is still at max HP because they don't take enough damage from you, and with you at max HP because you don't take enough damage from them;
    2. Drawn-out fights should be rare. Maybe for Legendary rarity monsters, or bosses.
    3. Small caveat, I have always been a proponent of survival checks over DPS checks. That colours my feedback.

In Plane 1, you have this primarily with two enemies. The Thornback Boars and the Ancient Treant Saplings.

  1. Thornback Boars have a lot of damage and a good amount of regen while still attacking only slightly slower than the Grove Serpents (who deal only half the damage despite being portrayed as a "harder" enemy). They are a strangely powerful obstacle (there could be a reason for this).
  2. Ancient Treant Saplings have a lot of regen, but are not threatening. They are boring and may cause the player to get into the "Nothing dying" loop due to the stat scaling on higher rarities (healing 100+ HP per second is pretty hard to beat when you first encounter them).

In Plane 2, you have the two problems with multiple Dao paths. Poison can stack up very high (400 damage per tick) so it will kill you if you don't kill the target fast enough. Void, Damage reduction Daos and Attack Interval increasing Daos all quickly cause the "Nothing dying" issue.

So what should you change?

  • Primarily, cut down on the regen of everything. You can accomplish this in two ways:
    • Nothing should naturally regen more than 5% unless that their defining trait, and even if it is a defining trait you still have to solve that "Nothing dying" problem;
    • You attack the "Nothing dying" problem directly and make regen diminish over time/hit a cap. Maybe any entity, the player included, cannot regen > 5% of Max HP per second if they have already regenerated more than their Max HP this encounter - basically a kind of sudden death.
  • The rest is mostly about Dao imbalances.

Dao imbalance:

  • The Dao paths are fairly imbalanced. Things that increase your survivability directly (extra Regen, extra Damage Reduction, ...) look good on paper, but in actuality they are quite bad. Regenerate is useful at the start, but for the bulk of your gameplay (farming spirit stones) your kill speed matters a lot more (because of the "Nothing dying" problem).
    • DoT effects are powerful. Not only do they act as a Regen reduction (so it competes with Ice's Regen reduction), they also act as a multiplier on your actual damage (especially those based on your actual damage).
    • Special effects like Void and/or Light's Blind are very strong. Dodge in itself does not just reduce incoming damage, which empowers Regen. It also avoids the enemy's Dao path effects (avoids freeze stacks, dodge bleed stacks, dodge stuns, ...)
    • Some survivability effects feel very unfair when the player encounters them. If I do 450 crits on one enemy, and the next on the same floor only takes 60 damage from that same crit while still regenerating the same 120 HP; you have a massive swing in "difficulty". Enemies that are normally a breeze are suddenly impossible to kill without Armor/Damage Resistance ignoring DoT.

Random stats on enemies:

These feel more like a frustration than something interesting. The rarity system is fine, but when I feel the need to reload a floor to roll for bad stats and a bad Dao 20 times in order to beat that floor, that's bad design as it incentivizes unfun behaviour. Just have no variance on stats, you have the rarity system for that.

Suggestions:

  • Introduce a forming pill (1 High-Grade Spirit Stone; maybe scale based on the Dao Tiers/Exp you have), allowing you to reallocate Dao choices and exp. Especially while your game is in an early state, you need to have a method for players to adjust their build while still having it far enough into the game that some players encounter the weak end of your balance or bad design.
  • Avoid overlapping effects in the Dao paths: 
    • There is no need for Internal Trauma, Bleeding, Poison, Burning and Rotting Miasma all to exist. Is there an important difference between Bleeding and Burning? Not really. Is there one between Poison and Rotting Miasma? Not functionally from Plane 2 onwards (because AoE no longer matters). Internal Trauma, Bleeding and Poison would already be more than enough as DoT options. Applying these DoTs in different ways is an important functional difference IF you have synergy (such as a Dao Path that reduces enemy Attack Interval but also reduces their Attack by the same % -> Synergy with Flat Armor, Synergy with DoT on enemy when you are hit + another Dao Path that reduces Dodge Rate by a % but increases Flat Armor by the same % -> Synergy with Flat Armor, Synergy with DoT on enemy when you are hit)
      • Does stacking synergies potentially "solve" the game? Yes, but you have the Dao effects for that. If you have a Dao on the enemy that deals True Damage/has extreme Armor Penetration, you nullify the Flat Armor synergy. Just don't nullify all of the synergies or it feels cheap to the player especially if they can't adjust to this new situation.
      • An important caveat, which is also the problem with Armor Penetration currently; Don't provide Dao effects that don't have a use for the player. If the player's character has no Flat Armor to gain (because it hasn't reached Tortoises yet), then Flat Armor % increases do nothing and that Dao path is going to feel very unrewarding.
    • There is also no need for a Dao path that increases damage dealt on kill until death when you have a Dao path that increases damage outright and has similar or maybe even better numbers. One of these Dao paths is a "dead" Dao path, i.e. it has no reason to be chosen above the other.
    • An Aura that reduces enemy attack by 5% and a self buff that increases Damage Reduction by 5% are wildly different in power, because one stacks while the other does not. The Aura always reduces damage by 5%. The self buff stacks with your existing Damage Reduction. You essentially relegated one Dao into uselessness due to the existence of the other (which has synergy with other systems).
  • Show how the Dao paths scale. One path gains 75% more power from a tier up (Burning Heart: 4% Crit Chance & 10% Crit Multi -> 7% Crit Chance & 20% Crit Multi), while another gains 10% more power (Hemorrhage: 10% hit damage per stack -> 11% hit damage per stack [the Attack Interval increase doesn't work so it didn't count for me]).

There is a lot more like with the Void Pavillon and tying Dao path exp to Floors and thus to Rebirths (but having limited Rebirths thus incentivizing boring grinding of Insights into more Floors), but this is a good start I think?

p.s. Why not tie Dao path tiers to the Realms/Body Cultivation entirely? Level all known Dao paths up as you enter a new Realm maybe?