Insane Difficulty: First Opinions - Insane Difficulty

1:21 to beat through Flashman which helped show me how rusty/bad I am at the moment. Flashman was a fun fight, but I can't say the same about some of the random battles. I am playing it on my psp so I can't take any screenshots sadly.

The Good:
- It was more challenging
- One of the fights made me laugh when I first saw it

The Bad:
- Some fights felt more gimmicky rather than being difficult
- My skill


Thoughts on Formations and Enemies:
- Fuck almost every fight with a Quaker. The global stun is annoying and they have too much health for starting chips in my opinion.

- While I do like fights with fans one of the fights is harder than the Flashman fight. I'm talking about the Vacuum/beetle/swordie fight. Unless I got lucky with my chips this fight would usually kill me. Swordie uses area grab way to much to be paired with a vacuum and double bomber. They also got me to cheese much more than I did in vanilla. After killing the other enemies I would have to sit there cycling through chips to use all my heals before I moved on.

- The fight with two fans and lava made me laugh until I messed up and took 50 lava panel damage.

- I like the improved speed, but not the improved health on some enemies. 3 enemies with a total of over 250 health is just annoying when all you have is 40 damage cannons and 30 damage shot abilities.


Final Thoughts:
- It would have been much easier if I had spent some time farming, but that is for suckers.
- I would like to see what it plays like with the enemies having more damage and slightly lower health.
- I have high hopes.

hance, on 30 August 2014 - 12:06 AM, said:

They have 70 HP as of now (80 in vanilla), but that makes me think they should have 60 HP. Gonna change it for the hotfix.

hance, on 30 August 2014 - 12:06 AM, said:

While I'm okay with having a few selected battles being slightly harder, I'm also considering tweaking the escape rate of those battles so they're easier to escape from. Also, Beetle's HP could use a nerf to 60 HP. Thoughts?

hance, on 30 August 2014 - 12:06 AM, said:

Higher escape rate right there.

hance, on 30 August 2014 - 12:06 AM, said:

In the context of balancing, I agree (until I get to the post-ending content heh).

hance, on 30 August 2014 - 12:06 AM, said:

The high damage part will come within time, for obvious reasons. But I'll still won't make it a 2 hit kill, because that wouldn't be much fun, would it?
About the HP, I have mixed thoughts. I don't want enemies to be walking tanks, but I also don't want the game to turn into a 1 shot fest, kill or be killed. I want to avoid that as much as I can.

hance, on 30 August 2014 - 12:06 AM, said:

Thank you.

If you happen to know of any other enemies who could use a tweaking in their HP, please let me know. As of now though, most if not all of the enemies who were modified, had their HP toned down, not up.

Appreciate the feedback.

I patched up to 0.2.2 from 0.2.0 and have beaten through all the modified content. After playing more I take back some of the things I said.

Hart-Hunt, on 30 August 2014 - 07:05 AM, said:

I failed to escape twice...

Hart-Hunt, on 30 August 2014 - 07:05 AM, said:

Hart-Hunt, on 30 August 2014 - 07:05 AM, said:

It's not that I think they have too much health, but that they have too much health for that stage of the game. Most of these enemies didn't show up until you had a decent amount of 50+ damage chips. Quakers I think need a speed nerf instead of a damage/health nerf.

It looks to me like all the enemies speed up once they hit 50% health. Playing through again I didn't have any trouble with fights until I got to a Quaker Rat combo. If I killed one of them immediately the fight wasn't an issue, but if I didn't I would just be stunlocked to death. It was made worse when I hit the rat with a shot ability dropping it to 10 health and increasing its speed even more.

The Quaker/vacuum/miner guy fight however was much tougher than anything this early in vanilla, but if you positioned yourself smartly and timed stuff right you could beat it easily, but if you messed up it would hurt.

One funny aspect of the speed buffs to enemies was the Gutsman fight. Because of hit increased speed it was literally impossible for him to kill me if I didn't stand at the front. He would keep doing his tile shatter and breaking everything besides the one tile you are on.

Hart-Hunt, on 30 August 2014 - 07:05 AM, said:

I agree with having hard normal fights, but not cheap death sentence ones. The only fight I tried to run away from was the 2x fan fight. I don't want to talk about beetles.

Oh, should've mentioned, the escape rates haven't been modified yet. They are gonna though, really soon, I just need to get some spare time to design it thoroughly. But yeah, basically I'll make the 2xFan and 2xWindbox battles 100% escapeable.

Interesting about the Quakers. Sounds like a good idea to test them with a slightly nerfed speed. I'll keep a close eye on both their speed and HP. Same with the Beetles. Beetles got an AI nerf in 0.2.2, but they might need one more nerf.

Only enemies that get a speed up after certain HP are Rattys.

In general, these first rebalances are the most important ones, since from there on I'll be able to ramp things up accordingly. But I need to set this base difficulty accurately for the base player.

I don't think I have fought a beetle in 0.2.2, but in the previous versions they are quite a pain.

Generally in Quaker battles, always aim to kill Rattys first if they are in the formation. This is so you can always hide in the back row to successfully evade the Quaker's attacks without fear of the Ratty's tracking bombs. Upon landing, if you are standing in the back row(or 2 spaces between you and the Quaker), you'll always have enough time to avoid their attacks, even with the stun.

It's the Rattys that are the danger in almost every formation. I recommend to 1HKO them as quickly as possible. They move 7 times before attacking and if you use a shotgun chip with a atk+10 or a heat/bubble chip, you can dispatch them without worry of the tracking bomb occasionally getting in the way.

Yes, that's the concept I had with that fight, to have a squishy enemy that when taken out makes the fight infinitely easier. I'll be doing the work now and see if the AI nerf of the quakers + the HP nerf to 60 solves the issue with them - Them and the beetles are the two units that I slipeed when modding their AI.

And yeah Hance, the beetles' AI was updated to be much more friendly for their first version in 0.2.2. They were a pain in the ass in the previous version, because they had too little delay after their attacks, leaving little to no window to attack them (plus a little bit more faster in general, making them beasts).