Originally Posted by Weirdstone
Hi,

I've been playing this for a few hours now and I have to say the difficulty (normal) is ruining my enjoyment of it. I appreciate things shouldn't be too easy but, you know, this is the start of the game?!? Surely the idea is to get the player up to speed, figure out the mechanics, allow them to explore?

I've arrived in the city, the guards keep telling me I'm under experienced to go outside, fair enough, but how am I supposed to level up in the city?? I can find only a handful of quests all of which bestow very little XP.

If I venture out of town (yes I have a party of 4, all lvl 3-4) I'm pretty much restricted by encounter diffculty to only one area of the map: NW(ish) where there are level 3 or lvl 4 mobs. Essentially making it a linear experience so far. I thought the game was supposed to be the exact opposite of that? This would be fine if said encounters didn't pit me against 13(!) lvl 4 opponents or bomb undead that decimate my party in one explosion.

I think I might just have to admit defeat and turn it to easy (the shame!) but for me this 'normal' difficulty on what is still essentially a starting area is pretty ridiculous. There seems to be poison everywhere and I'm yet to create more than one fire arrow and have encountered little to no fire spells to counter it. None of my party have them.

Clearly I'm missing something fundamental here, but I'm yet to discover what that is. Balancing seems way off to me and it really is ruining my enjoyment of it. Any tips much appreciated

thanks smile


I would say it's not just you. The amount of AP and skills enemies get along with group size is most certainly unwieldy in the beginning. I am level 11 now and the mobs I fight all do 4-5 actions per turn while my party can only do 1-2. Pure elemental damage ranges from 1/3 to 1/2 of my health even with 25 resist and the 50% resist last only 3 turns so they aren't much help. The mechanics of the game almost force you to go out of character to min/max your way through the content.

For instance I am using 4 blood knights ( witchcraft + man at arms), but to get through a large fire section set of encounters I had to teach one of them water magic to use rain. Without rain I would have been stuck fetching water barrels for several hours. Completely out of character but had to be done to get through. If you don't steal and rob graves you are more than likely to be very short on gold and decent equipment for all of the early game. Things like this rub me the wrong way in what is supposed to be an rpg.

The lack of item variety can also make things harder. I wanted to stick to two handed but there are seemingly no 2 handed blunt weapons until much higher level. This means I either stay in character as a 2handed knight that I invested heavily skill wise and ability point wise into using 2handed weapons or I go to 1 handed and shield so I can get some weapon variety. You wind up hacking through a lot of undead at a major penalty if you don't go blunt.

Talents aren't very exciting and talents like poor zombie are hard to fit in. Good luck setting up poison fields to heal when every enemy can use fire.

Lastly there is no reliable base of items to pull from for certain elements. If you don't have a buff mage your not going to have proper elemental resist for quite some time. You can't buy a fire resist ring etc to help you through the fire portion, or a shock ring to help you with air elementals. Considering how punishing elemental damage is I feel this is either an oversight.

This game is feeling more like vanilla skyrim to me the more I play it. It's going to take a few mods here and there to make my character progression more fun and less restrictive. Mainly weapon variety, elemental gear,and more talents.

Last edited by ExiledTyrant; 06/07/14 08:44 PM.