Hi everybody,

I just started playing the steam version DKS and while I'm very, very impressed with the game, I've managed to find two different weapons that provide +40 magic and +40 melee damage in the first couple of dungeons, which means that dual-wielding my character is now doing around 100 dmg per attack at level 6. Even though I'm playing on hard my guy can pretty much 1 (or at worst 2) shot everything he encounters.

Is this normal? Is anyone else experiencing this? Seems like some of these damage modifiers are out of whack with the rest of the modifiers for low level weapons. Did someone make a typo somewhere in the weapon tables?

Cheers,

H

A couple people mentioned leveling much easier at the start of the game (ie getting to level 9 by the end of the initial section of Broken Valley, rather than 7), and finding much better equipment from the smith and from loot.
A +40 damage bonus seems rather excessive, though. In D2:ED my final weapons had a comparable bonus, found/looted after level 30.

damage: 44-73
+39 melee damage
+29 magic damage

damage: 61-75
+39 melee damage


Welcome to the forum.

Thanks for the response. I guess the folks at Larian must have gotten a lot of complaints about early difficulty and overcompensated somewhat.

Anyway, the +40 magic weapon was literally the first weapon I found and I went from doing 2-4 dmg with the training sword to doing 50+ damage. I thought it rather odd that my first real weapon was more powerful than the lvl 15 requirement weapons that come as a bonus with the steam edition.

I've also noticed a variety of +20, and +30 dmg weapons for sale at the smith. I suppose I will try not using weapons with silly bonuses in order to keep the game challenging. Time to restart I guess...

I found a sword pretty early belonging to a new set, called the "Blood Echelon sword". Although it requires level 14, it's a +65 magic damage sword.

"Carlin's Mace" is definitely an example of a weapon that you can get very early in DKS, and has better stats than a Ego Draconis endgame weapon.

14-17 melee damage, 23-68 magic damage, and adds 30 to normal damage.

The steam exclusive items are pretty powerful. The orobas warhammer is +40 magical damage.

I've yet to find an excessively overpowered weapon in the early game, though. Overpowered for the beginning of the game though, yeah. But nothing I see that could last me forever. Besides the steam exclusive armor. Maybe.

Unless they changed the formula, do not underestimate the power of +damage bonuses on weapons. In Ego Draconis they got counted twice when combined with dual wielding and were more important than the base damage if you choose that weapon style.

i chose carlins sword and didnt get anything near +68 magic damage. infact an old lvl5 weapon was better than it.

i also got the blood echelon sword, which i believe is level 12 or 15 so i cant use it yet, but it doesnt add anywhere near +68 damage.

360 version.

I wonder if these huge damage bonuses on early game weapons only happening on the PC/Steam version? That would indicate that it is a bug rather than a strange design decision. Anyone with the 360 version seeing +40 damage weapons lying around the Broken Valley?

Yeah i just found that sword along with the leggings and the shield, and now at lvl 15 im an unstoppable killing machine, i have 142-162 weapon damage (my lvl 20 dual wielding in D2 didnt even had 99 weapon damage).
Heck even if i remove every piece of equipment i have and just keep the sword i have 99 - 115 weapon damage! lol

This is ridiculous, they put way too many overpowered weapons in dks...

Every weapon or piece of armor i find have at least one enchant + 2 or 3 charm on it, and most of them are better than the steam exclusive armor set.
I think they tried to make the game way too easy this time, you don't even need to buy any weapon or armor in the shops anymore (except if you want to finish a set)

Maybe in the expansion things will get harder ; )

I found a 5-7 (+20 magical damage) mace for sale at level 3 or so. A Level 2 required mace did 4-4 damage. Not long earlier I was running away from level 4 Skeletons, now I 2-shot them.

I also found a Legendary Bow at level 1 in Upton's basement. It didn't do much damage, but noticeably more that "My First Mace".

I think the Beholder Bounty boss dropped a bracelet it gave me +2 to Magic Blast - a Level 8 skill. That was at like level 3 or so. I can one-shot anything nasty.

The thrill of finding loot is back, and that is a good thing, at least. Although the Steam version definitely makes things easier, because you start off with 3 complete sets in your inventory, and you can sell the two you don't want right away.

I'm not even out of the first part, so I'll leave judgment on how overpowered this stuff is until later. Honestly, though, right now it's fun finding such amazing loot.

Maybe the fact that low-level mobs will still hurt characters that are 5 levels higher (I tested this) warrants the presence of very powerful loot everywhere.

My mage is using Carlin's Mace to finish off anything that manages to get close... I'll probably use this weapon til the end of the game, because I also bought an amazing shild called "The Wall" that greatly increases my armour ratings.

High-level weapons can add up to 100 normal damage, for example the Maxos Mallet (level 30 weapon). This makes the game much easier.

It is true alot of the critism of ED was the difficulty and the slow pace, some people may not know but ED did not do good at all, and suffered alot of bashing by reviewers and players alike. So im not surprised how much easier it is, I must commend Larian for adapting and answering criticisms with DKS, not many companies would do that, they'd just work on a sequel and ignore the game that people didnt like.

The only trouble spots in the original ED I noticed was broken valley and the final battle. Everything else seemed pretty good balance wise. Now everything feels a bit too easy with these weapons with +65 physical damage. But I guess I can always change the difficulty to hard if I felt so inclined.

Hmm ... indeed, play it on the highest difficulty if you wish

Not only the beginning and the final battle where a problem: also from at least level 24 the game became too easy (because of enemies didn't do much damage).
I hope now the DKS (I go playing on Xbox) will be still a challeging at the second part of the game (after my hero has his Battle Tower etc ...
But I think this will be nice now in the DKS.

Why didn't i get crazy overpowered weapons in early game?

Until i got to level 15 and got access to my steam unlocks i had middle of the range stuff and it was mainly my skill points and rings/necklaces etc. that did all the damage. Had pitiful maybe 50 dmg or so until then. Then i kept my set weapons rolling on via enchantments/charms to keep them relevant at level 22. Doing 160 dmg (sword + shield) at the moment base.

At the same time making it too easy and streamlined might alienate core fans, then if you fail to appeal to the mainstream you end up pleasing no one.

Where do you get the Blood Echelon Leggings and Shield? They are the only 2 pieces im missing from the set! sick of mixing my armour set with the Steam bonus stuff, mix of gold, green and pink/red it looks terrible..

I got the Blood Echelon Sword recently and it seems like it breaks the game. Even on Hard I'm invincible.

So far, at least. I'm really hoping it balances out soon, this thing is just insane.

Go on my thread in the Flames of vengance section of the forum all the Blood Echelon set is posted other than the Cuirass.

I found the pacing and difficulty pretty good up to about level 25, however at the higher levels it was a bit too easy. I was pretty OP by the end of ED - Ygerna wasn't much of a challenge - and by the time I got halfway through FoV I was literally unkillable so long as I was doing damage - due to dual-wielding two unique weapons, 72/77% criticals, max regeneration and life leech. I stopped using potions and healing spells altogether because there was no need.

Don't get me wrong, I loved being able to tweak my character to that extent, but having half of the most powerful items ingame available from vendors made it too easy, IMO.

And the problem with this is?
The main purpose of a rpg is to take you from "dogs wipe their asses with me" to "I AM THE MOTHERFUCKING GOD OF ALEROTH!", so I don't see the problem in you becoming OP at the end of the game (also considering you did a pretty good build, something not all the players are able to do).
Nevermind the fact that you have to get revenge on Ygerna at the end of FOV, so being overpowered is good, because you can laugh sadistically while raping her.

Being able to rape everything is fun for a while, but after doing it for hours on end it gets boring. If the player ends up being so powerful that he can rape everything without consequence halfway through the game, the player should be meeting more powerful enemies to match his power. Ie. if the player becomes a demi-god, he should be facing demi-gods. Being all-powerful is incredibly boring when there isn't any competition.

Or there should be more of the weak enemies and they should have abilities that allow them to be more effective in large numbers and/or support a stronger 'leader' enemy. Then you get the best of both: killing enemies by the dozen and you still have a challenge.

The problem isn't that all that the "most powerful weapons come from NPCs", in fact my weapons were found in the middle of the Flying Fortresses in the plethora of Gold Chests. The problem is that if you do EVERYTHING, which most people do, you'll hit the point where you're massively overpowered in comparison to the enemies. The enemies go to I think 27 or 28 max in ED, not counting the HoE.

I was Level 35 when I beat ED, and no level was gained in the final dungeon (In fact, I lost more experience than I gained that that point). I had equipment that gave +15 - +20 or more Strength, my damage range was over 1000-1500. The problem is that when you first go through, you want to be overpowered, and you can clearly become it. To compensate for your level, the monsters at the later areas are just hordes, instead of actually being strong. When you have 90 Archers and 35 Mages shooting at you all at once, you're bound to die eventually. And that's how the game went with enemies. Yeah, I could kill enemies in one single mouse click in the last two Flying Fortresses I did, but meanwhile when one Mouse Click removes less than 1% of the enemies in the area, that really doesn't help that much. Quantity over Quality, and there were a lot of enemies, but none of them were strong.

If you truly want a challenge in this game, the requirement is self limitation. You must not use that +100 Melee Damage | +100 Magic Damage| 20-200 Melee | +25 Strength Sword if you want the game to be hard. It's this way for just about every single game, the only difference here is that that requirement is amplified by the fact that the enemies don't keep up with your level if you do everything.

It depends on the player. In vanilla I maxed out my character and basically one-shot everything until the last map (where I was two-shotting everything), and never got bored.
That's why I was a little surprised (and angry) when I found out that in FoV the difficulty skyrocketed, and I had to use strategy to kill enemies fast.



And that's what was done in FoV. In most of the dungeons there were lots of normal level enemies (for example in the last dungeon you were getting attacked by about 10 level 40 enemies at once, and it was hard), so I guess the devs already knew this problem and understood how to solve it.