Sal's Finale too hard?


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So I ran a full run from day 1, Prestige 11, 3 mutators (allies stay after combat, can't skip drafts, sleep doesn't heal), and Sal's Finale is a huuuge jump in difficulty compared to the rest of the game. It's to the point that I would have to make the game less difficult to beat her, but if I did that, the rest of the game would be way too easy and quite boring.

What're your thoughts?

also just wanted to say, the finale is lit af

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She is considerably harder than what comes before, but it also depends a lot on what artifacts you let her use. You do essentially get 2 tries in a row, since D5 is so short and you can retry every day once.

If you want to make days 1-4 harder, I definitely wouldn't take the "can't skip drafts" mutator at first, since it will hurt your chances against Kashio too much. Consider taking the one where you don't get resolve from winning battles instead. Or the one where everyone dislikes you and no other mutator. It makes days 1-4 much harder, but doesn't really affect D5.

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Our metrics are telling us that players are beating Kashio 44% of the time they face her on prestige 0. 

Our other bosses are all at around 80%, so she is harder, although you do get the day rollback and day 5 is the shortest day so I think it is OK?

We're going to check the stats after the weekend, before we do any major adjustments.

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I know I’m just the one guy, but personally I would prefer buffing D4 bosses somewhat, maybe even D3 bosses, rather  than making Kashio much easier. I think the only thing that may feel a bit unfair is when she decides to stack 3 wounds every turn. It seems random and it’s very hard to survive that.

I think about 50% success chance for the final boss is fine. Can your metrics tell which percentage of those players were involved with the experiment? I would expect close to 100% success chance for those players, which would artificially raise that ratio.

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I agree that the game should be harder. The game is advertised as a roguelite, which means that it should be hard, and definitely shouldn't be beaten on the first or second try of the game when someone first started to play. It seems that people can easily succeed on prestige 0, especially with the legacy mechanic potentially giving a huge boost to the player. A huge part is probably due to negotiation being easier than combat, because negotiation is always 1v1 while in combat you will often face multiple enemies that can deal a lot of damage in 1 turn. I feel like D4 night quest is easier compared to D3, because your allies are more competent than the D3 ones(You can get a bartender and a battle oshnu / two spree raiders easily in D4 by doing some medium difficulty negotiations while you have to succeed a relative hard negotiation to get two smugglers - about the same power level as the D4 ones - to fight for you), and having a bunch of competent ally can help you beat the game even if your deck is not that good. Kashio fight's difficulty partly comes from you always fighting alone, forcing you to rely on your deck rather than your allies.

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Talking things through with the team, and looking at the most recent p0 numbers, I think we're going to try buffing the assassins and the handlers. The day one bosses should be pretty easy if you know what you're doing (they're part of the onboarding process), and the shroog/drusk are currently functioning as designed. 

Unfortunately, this stuff is hard to work on in experimental, because the players there tend to be a lot more experienced than the general crowd.

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I’m surprised the assassins need a buff, they’re *really* dangerous if you don’t have a pet and didn’t pick up a Boss battle graft the day before. The pet does make it considerably easier though. Kinda feels like a noob trap in that sense.

Day 1 bosses are almost a guaranteed death if you don’t convince the bouncer to help you in the fight, at least at higher prestige. It’s not a very hard negotiation, but you don’t always get there with all your resolve.

Oolo and especially Nadan are definitely too easy because of your allies, I agree with RageLeague.

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I don't think it was too hard! I managed to beat her on my third try. But at the same time I have 50 hours on the game right now, so I'm not sure if my experience would apply with newer players. But it is true (for me at least) that at that point all the others bosses feels really easy in comparaison to Kashio now!

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after the experiments, i've been kind of...demoralized to try a full run to get to her. due to klei's more...aggresive approach to difficulty (instead of coddling the video game reporters, you need to learn the ins and out of the game), i would definitely say a difficulty change to the early bosses would be good to better sift decks that would get thrashed. namely the negotiation, as skills and build around negotiation can make both the earlier "reason you can't fight kashio with a good night's sleep stats" as well as the auction less painful and therefore make kashio SIGNIFICANTLY less painful...

seriously, she can just WIN with the right artifacts

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On 1/24/2020 at 4:54 PM, RageLeague said:

I agree that the game should be harder. The game is advertised as a roguelite, which means that it should be hard, and definitely shouldn't be beaten on the first or second try of the game when someone first started to play. It seems that people can easily succeed on prestige 0, especially with the legacy mechanic potentially giving a huge boost to the player. A huge part is probably due to negotiation being easier than combat, because negotiation is always 1v1 while in combat you will often face multiple enemies that can deal a lot of damage in 1 turn. I feel like D4 night quest is easier compared to D3, because your allies are more competent than the D3 ones(You can get a bartender and a battle oshnu / two spree raiders easily in D4 by doing some medium difficulty negotiations while you have to succeed a relative hard negotiation to get two smugglers - about the same power level as the D4 ones - to fight for you), and having a bunch of competent ally can help you beat the game even if your deck is not that good. Kashio fight's difficulty partly comes from you always fighting alone, forcing you to rely on your deck rather than your allies.

I don't completely agree.

The game should have more prestige levels. It should be *able* to be harder, and the game's difficulty should be leveled out to not have crazy spikes like this. (idk I don't have Klei's metrics on that)

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In someways I feel the difficulty of the boss has spoiled parts of the game for me. Until the last update I'd never abandon a run. I liked experimenting with different card combinations to see how effective or ineffective they were. Most of the time as long as I was careful I could still get to the end of the game, sometimes doing better than others.

The problem I have now is when I get to a certain point in the game I already know if I have a good chance finish the game or not. I've now abandoned more runs in the last couple days than I had in the entire time I'd played the game before this.

Pet's have also been ruined for me. Not having them in the boss fight makes upgrading them not worth the coins and taking a special event slot. I always had a pet. It always felt part of the story for me. Now it feels kinda pointless because when you need them the most they're not there. Now I'd rather spend that money replacing grafts and adding and removing combat cards.

I also feel that diplomacy is now secondary to combat. It doesn't really matter if you can annihilate a 70 resolve deck in a couple of turns because it's not actually going to help you finish the game in a really meaningful way. In many cases I feel like an average combat upgrade should be taken over a great diplomacy upgrade because it's so much more important now.

Kashido's double shot (I think that was what it was called) was way too strong for me. I had 40+ incoming damage with additional burn every turn. It sure was demoralising losing after only managing to get through 7 damage. 

I don't mind that the end boss might be super-hard but I feel it's really changed how I have to play the game and not always for the better.

 

PS Still love the game, it's awesome.

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I haven’t played a full run since Kashio got added. I didn’t know your pet would not help you. That feels unfair to the player, since they can invest a lot into their pets and build their strategy around them (money for upgrades, opportunity to train them, grafts to empower them, cards and items), only to have their greatest strength taken away from them in the finale. That just seems wrong. Especially since Kashio already has built-in defences against pets: slam attack, grenades, counter, burn...

As for negotiation decks not being as important as battle decks, that’s intentional. Klei have mentioned that at the end of the day, you have to be able to defeat the bosses. They don’t expect you to win if you go full diplomacy.

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Ah. I just realized that a bunch of fights in the finale are improperly tagged as NO_BACKUP, where they should have been NO_BYSTANDERS. You *should* have your pets with you when I push a fix for that.

 

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On 1/27/2020 at 2:59 PM, Kevin said:

Ah. I just realized that a bunch of fights in the finale are improperly tagged as NO_BACKUP, where they should have been NO_BYSTANDERS. You *should* have your pets with you when I push a fix for that.

 

Oh thats excellent news, I went into that fight expecting to have my two pets and was very sad to not have them

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