Re: Scaling Past Level 80

Then HOW would you raise the difficulty??

Make them more aggressive??  Make them shielded or Armored??(That is just health by another color)....Make them use powers???  More of them???  Make them kill you in one shot???  How do you raise the difficulty and make a balanced game and people happy??

If they aren't high HP, then Biotic/Tech casters will mow through them.....If you put armor/shields on them, then you decrease Caster ability and are basically just adding health and powers resistance.....If you make more, but lower health, then a few tech/biotic explosions will finish it and make it easy, no matter how many...more waves of fighters(Dragon Age 2 did that, people hated it)  More aggressive how??  More shooting, less cover??  Maybe,but again about casters unless you tweak HP......so what would you like to see, and how do you see your changes being put into the game??

All I know is Destiny got this part right - you weren't shooting trash mobs in the head 16x to drop them (just sayin).

Ghost Recon Wildlands a headshot drops anything really.

And in both of those games, it gets real when things go down.

The Division, however, was just a bullet sponge slogfest to the point everybody quit playing for 6 months (cept fanboys).

My suggestion? Take notes from games that got it right and make difficulty hard in interesting ways instead of just bullet-sponging it up. More elite enemies on higher difficulties and less trash mobs..? Or more of everything? Or have enemies rush you in waves but they actually die when you shoot them?

Or you fans can just enjoy your bland bullet sponge soup... alone.

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@mcsupersport wrote:

Then HOW would you raise the difficulty??

Make them more aggressive??  Make them shielded or Armored??(That is just health by another color)....Make them use powers???  More of them???  Make them kill you in one shot???  How do you raise the difficulty and make a balanced game and people happy??

If they aren't high HP, then Biotic/Tech casters will mow through them.....If you put armor/shields on them, then you decrease Caster ability and are basically just adding health and powers resistance.....If you make more, but lower health, then a few tech/biotic explosions will finish it and make it easy, no matter how many...more waves of fighters(Dragon Age 2 did that, people hated it)  More aggressive how??  More shooting, less cover??  Maybe,but again about casters unless you tweak HP......so what would you like to see, and how do you see your changes being put into the game??

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How you make them harder is scaling up the dmg their attacks do. All of their attacks.Not to the point where trash mobs one shot you but totally to the point where you need to use cover and tactics, skill, to get through the battles. Also more of them. A swarm of slightly higher damage trash mobs is going to hurt more and be more actual challenge then simply having to unload more bullets into an individual.

I'd introduce whole new enemy types that were much rarer or even nonexistent on lower difficulties,  such as a caster type enemy that will use biotic effects on you if your shields break for example.   Enjoy a piece of your own (If you play that way) medicine and experience a Pull-Throw toss off either the nearest high surface or into the nearest wall with the most enemies around it.     

Enemies start coordinating attacks against you,  comboing you,   drawing you out of cover more,  pinning you with fire more,  flanking more.    Fights intended to be more difficult may have scripted events and situations rather than relying purely on the AI trying something,   in addition to having more enemies,  rather than more health. 

Bosses should behave more like bosses and not glorified elites.   Only one seems to even be unique/named,  and even that's a generic name,  and doesn't play any differently.    Even the end game boss fight is just a "Fight everything you've fought before" shtick.  There's no actual boss fights in this game,  when with the mobility and slight parkour element to it there was room for so many cool boss fights.   

Increased aggression,  accuracy,  and damage,  but never increased health.   Bullet Sponges are not ever significantly more difficult,  they're just more tedious. 

But that'd require putting some actual work into AI so I doubt Bioware will ever make the game that engaging.    Their current AI motto seems to be 'Always target the player"  "Always know where the player is"  "Always hit with laser accuracy even when dodging".   And "Be aggressive a/f".

@mckrackin5324 I agree with you 100%.  Games need to get more creative with making enemies difficult in my opinion rather than just giving them more health.

Longer doesn't equal more difficult... it equals things being more tedious.

Take the Architects for example.  Once you know their pattern, they're actually fairly easy to kill.  The only question is how long am I going to have to be doing the same *.

To me, they were a missed opportunity.  Facing the same exact thing several times instead of facing different versions with different methods of fighting.

The crazy thing is, I felt like they got this right (or came closer to it) in Dragon Age Inquisition when it came to dragon fights.  Fighting one high dragon was not like facing another.  At least not for me as they used different tactics and abilities.

Also, trash mobs need to stay trash.  Sure there can be enemies that will stay a threat, but I need to see the fruits of my labor sometimes in the form of enemies that once gave me a hard time getting easily owned.

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@PretzleMe wrote:

@mckrackin5324 I agree with you 100%.  Games need to get more creative with making enemies difficult in my opinion rather than just giving them more health.

Longer doesn't equal more difficult... it equals things being more tedious.

Take the Architects for example.  Once you know their pattern, they're actually fairly easy to kill.  The only question is how long am I going to have to be doing the same *.

To me, they were a missed opportunity.  Facing the same exact thing several times instead of facing different versions with different methods of fighting.

The crazy thing is, I felt like they got this right (or came closer to it) in Dragon Age Inquisition when it came to dragon fights.  Fighting one high dragon was not like facing another.  At least not for me as they used different tactics and abilities.

Also, trash mobs need to stay trash.  Sure there can be enemies that will stay a threat, but I need to see the fruits of my labor sometimes in the form of enemies that once gave me a hard time getting easily owned.

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Inquisition dragons were the best bosses in a game for a long time for me. Smarter not harder.

The only problem was maybe that the first one was too easy to find too soon...maybe? I got to it at level 4 and it was ridiculously hard. lol

Like with any game I spend 500+ hours in though,I figured them out.

I don't care if I get so powerful that I bulldoze all the content,as long as I had to work to get there.

By the way...I figured out some of the dragons better than others. lol

Letting me play as one of my team mates made the world of difference. The whole teams powers mattered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZEEyHpQS-E

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@mckrackin5324 wrote:

The only problem was maybe that the first one was too easy to find too soon...maybe? I got to it at level 4 and it was ridiculously hard. lol

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LOL!  Yeah yeah, lol.  Me too.  It was... an experience... a short lived one.  Very short lived experience haha.

But yes, smarter not harder.  And yes, you figure them out, but at least they felt different.  Like you pointed out, depending upon your play style aand or powers/abilities some dragons would be easier to drop than others.

I just loathe the whole "let's just make this basic guy take 15 shots from a fully upgraded augmented modded weapon to keep things challenging" mentality,

You all LIKE dragons??  Some of the biggest bullet sponges in Dragon Age...geeze...hit hit hit, strip guard, strip guard, strip guard, hit hit hit, dodge...or get out of stagger, strip guard, strip guard, strip guard, hit hit hit...strip guard strip guard, strip guard, hit hit hit, strip guard strip guard, strip guard.....geez, you call that good enemy design....they are cool to see, fun maybe for one fight, but all in all, pretty boring when it comes down to it after you have fought them all once.....just huge HP wells to drain before you get some stuff...

I HATE ENEMIES THAT JUST EAT DAMAGE, THEN PUT FREAKIN "PROTECTION" AKA HITPOINTS BACK ON, JUST SO YOU CAN STRIP IT AGAIN...

Yeah, not much thought really, other than make them have about a million HP and go for it.....

And yeah, I hate the Kett with the shield and orb in this one too....

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@mcsupersport wrote:

You all LIKE dragons??  Some of the biggest bullet sponges in Dragon Age...geeze...

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Yes I did.  I didn't say they were perfect, I said in my opinion they were the closest thing to what I was looking for and while for you (and likely others) all you had to do was the same thing for all of them, the fights were quite different for me.

I had to switch equipment, plan team members, adjust them, control them, and the dragons seemed to have different behaviors to/for me.

Dragon Age: Inquisition: High Dragons... Experiences May Vary, lol.

Either way, they were far more interesting and varied in my opinion than facing Spongebob the giant armored remnant several times over.  Again, my opinion.

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@mcsupersport wrote:

You all LIKE dragons??  Some of the biggest bullet sponges in Dragon Age...geeze...hit hit hit, strip guard, strip guard, strip guard, hit hit hit, dodge...or get out of stagger, strip guard, strip guard, strip guard, hit hit hit...strip guard strip guard, strip guard, hit hit hit, strip guard strip guard, strip guard.....geez, you call that good enemy design....they are cool to see, fun maybe for one fight, but all in all, pretty boring when it comes down to it after you have fought them all once.....just huge HP wells to drain before you get some stuff...

I HATE ENEMIES THAT JUST EAT DAMAGE, THEN PUT FREAKIN "PROTECTION" AKA HITPOINTS BACK ON, JUST SO YOU CAN STRIP IT AGAIN...

Yeah, not much thought really, other than make them have about a million HP and go for it.....

And yeah, I hate the Kett with the shield and orb in this one too....

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You were defending the bullet sponge method of adding difficulty earlier in this same thread.

The enemies need to be smarter. They should work together and move to flank you.

They should use powers and weapons meant to strip certain defenses. This gives you something to learn about each enemy.

They should use cover and move to avoid taking damage instead of face tanking you. Bullet trading is a stupid method of combat.

They could leave their health pools as they are but make them harder to hit.

Give them disrupting abilities that block lock on skills but give those abilities a reasonable cooldown.

And the enemies should stop scaling once they are 3-4 levels above you since the game stops your progression dead at level 80.

I'm a level 96 now and the power creep of the enemy is starting to get silly. They aren't hitting much harder...or at all. My tactic is "don't get shot". But they are soaking up insane amounts of damage. To the point of actual boredom. I know they won't kill me but it's going to take forever to kill them. The Architect I beat today was ridiculous. About 30 minutes of dumping damage into it.