What is with the difficulty increase.
Pleth_Droban390
Member Posts: 4 ★
Listen, I’m new to the forums so I don’t have all the fancy lingo, but I know numbers and something ain’t adding up. My “starting five” are all at 10,000 or close to it. I’m facing guys in Road to the Labyrinth that are 12,000 to 15,000 and absolutely pummeling them. Sixty five, seventy even eighty hits and they’re still standing. My unblocked level two special is doing one percent damage. Meanwhile they don’t need to hit me more than five or six times (or zero times, thank you Abomination) and clearing my character out. They’re doing five percent damage with a fully blocked combo, and seven to ten with a blocked level one special. By the numbers they’re only a bit stronger than me, but I’m game they’re ten times stronger. Does Kabam not know what numbers mean. Am I doing something wrong
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Edit: You've also gotta remember that you're currently facing content that became pretty outdated 3-5 years ago. There was once a much steadier increase in difficulty with the Side and Event quests being that stepping stone. As time passed, the lower level content got harder and more rewarding. It should start to even out for you pretty soon.
I did Road to Labyrinth with r5 4*s and a r4 5*nf
The difficulty hasn't increased
It's just that players have become less skilled and lazier as new players get access to powerful champions faster than we used to get
They now get champs like herc who can take Specials and still survive while we used to have champions like heimdall as our only saving grace...
Imagine not being able to understand nodes even when you have 5*r5(since only those have 10k+ rating other than 6* r2 and above) champions and ranting about it on forums saying that the game has become more difficult while more than 75% of the summoners did those fights with much less powerful champions...
"My 6*r5 Hulkling is not doing more than 1% in this quest and the opponent kills me in two combos. The game has lost its balance and is no longer fun"
Those will be good days...
TLDR; get good.
Champion PI means nothing. This is a defender in the Paragon difficulty in the monthly EQ. About 3x the PI of my attacker.
Once you're done with RTTL, you'll unlock Realm of Labyrinth and those defenders are 4*'s with PI of 70k to 80k. All that matters is the nodes and your counters.
Back in the day, we'd regularly be using 4* starlords to build a combo of 400 to take those defenders down.
If your in game name is your forum name without the 390, you’ve got some 5*R5 champs and some 6*R2 champs. If you can’t complete Act 5 with champs at that level you need to practice, learn how different champs work, and learn to read and play around nodes.
Story content is not about spending. Battlegrounds and top tier AQ and AW, spending helps. For story content, you shouldn’t have to spend anything but time. For context I’m 100% free to play and I’m paragon. I’ve completed up through Act 8.2. I’m not an exceptional player. There is a learning curve but the content is extremely doable. Most of us completed that content (Act 5/RTTL) with much lower level champs and we didn’t have all the new powerhouses like Hercules available either.
So my advice is first, it’s a game, it should be fun. If you aren’t enjoying the challenge take another break and come back later. Second, learn to intercept and not just parry everything. Third, read the nodes and champ abilities and start to learn how to play around nodes or take advantage of them.
Act 5 is where the game gets a little more complex and less smash the defender with your strongest champ. It only gets more complex from there but that’s the fun. It turns into a game of finding the right champ or counter or play style to get though a complicated node/defender combo. If that’s not appealing to you then this may not be the game for you.
I did the labyrinth too, you gotta Dex or block these opponents a lot, specifically if there's safeguard, where only strong DOT champs work. Don't mind, if you gotta use a revive or two, no shame in that.
And trust me you wanna settle down for the difficulty, because Act 6 is a real pain in the cheeks (they say it was even worse). Istg, I thought masochism and bio-hazard were the worst, until i met lifecycle. I never thought I would even get Uncollected, and here I'm at Cav.
You can kinda expect difficulty now, due to summoners scoring really OP champs of 5 or 6 star, way before they are supposed to.
Ps: Not defending the game, but trust me everything gets less complicated when you learn how to Dex and parry.
In the early acts, difficulty mostly just ramped up by using higher ranked champions. Act 4 did throw twists, like that linked up Venom, but for the most part difficulty got higher by numbers getting bigger. In Act 5 difficulty started to get increased with more sophisticated nodes. Things don't just get bigger numbers, they get nodes that favor certain kinds of damage or abilities. In Act 6, the nodes become even more sophisticated, requiring specific tactics to get passed them. Infamously Act 6.1.1 introduced (at least for most players) the No Retreat node which punishes playes for dashing backwards too often. This can be mitigated by certain champs, but the more fundamental requirement was to practice specific styles of play and being more aware of timing-specific requirements. This sort of things continues into Act 7 and Act 8 with things like Paradox and Weapon nodes. This is something players have to adjust to, and in spite of the fact that it adds complexity to the game, it makes it a lot easier than the alternative, which was exponential numbers growth. There was a whole giant debate about it which peaked during Act 7.1.1 beta, and in which I had some role in myself.
You're mostly wrong about the game "favoring" big spenders and "unaddicted noobs." In general, it favors intelligent and skilled play. Spending does offer advantages, because it is supposed to, but no one can make the credible argument that game progress - particularly the pre-Paragon pre-Act 7/8 progress - is gated to spending. In fact, Kabam completely refactored the early game - particularly Acts 1 through 4 - to streamline them and make them much easier and quicker for new players to traverse. They also *packed* them with units, to make it easier for new players to quickly do things like unlock and rank up masteries. The resources that veteran players had to scratch and claw to get to reach Uncollected are practically given away today, and the skills and tactics required to clear Act 6 are now commonplace in guides and tutorials and videos. And Act 6 itself is now maybe half as difficult as it was when it first came out, as it was rebalanced to target more moderate player skill and rosters.
Assuming blindly what someone does and does not know about the game is always dangerous, but in point of fact you do have extremely obvious gaps in your knowledge. Road to Labyrinth is not some weird state of the art high difficulty edge case content. It wasn't even all that hard when it first came out. It isn't broken or strange. If you're having trouble with it, the odds are very high that it is something you're doing wrong. The difficulty jump from Act 4 to Act 5 was noteworthy years ago when Act 5 first came out, but in the context of the current game it is a speed bump that the majority of players - free or otherwise - now get past. Uncollected is the new floor for the game, with the earlier parts of the game quickly becoming an extended tutorial. Completely free and completely new players are regularly getting to and beating the Collector. And if they have difficulty, the game will come along and just hand them champs ten times better than what veterans had to use. It is not uncommon for new players to be beating the Collector with 5* and 6* champs these days. That's partially what makes that particular jump in difficulty no longer noteworthy.
Player progression in this game, which is to say roster progression, is today *vastly faster* than it used to be, while Act 4 and Act 5 have more or less been standing still for years. Player progression doesn't just "match up" with the difficulty increases, it dramatically surpasses difficulty increases in Story Arc content. So much so that monthly quest content was recently refactored *upward* in difficulty to account for the fact that current player roster progression was making a mockery of that content.
You need to consider that your prior four years of experience did not fully prepare you for the game as it is today. Compared to the game pre-Act 5, most of the skills currently seen as standard are not things that were common back then. You're still playing in a parry-dominated world. Back then intercepting was a state of the art skill. Today it is something players need to have in their base skill set just to get past certain content. Nodes used to be something you could ignore or figure out during play. Today, we *constantly* get questions, complaints, and rants from players who don't understand why they can't beat a fight and therefore the game must be broken when it is just that they don't realize they are fighting with Safeguard, Protection, Lifecycle, Power Shield, or one of the many other nodes in the game that are now relatively common but you need to be aware of and understand to work around. Because literacy was not required in the pre-Act 5 game, but it is pretty essential now.
You can be humble and ask questions and accept the fact that when people point out stuff it is worth considering what they are saying, or you can fight back and reject any response that doesn't confirm your awesomeness and suggests the problem is with the game and not you. In which case the forums will not be kind. Personally, I advocate politeness whenever possible, but I'm not going to stand in the way of the train if you insist on standing on the tracks.
Basically, you never had an issue until now because until now you were playing the junior varsity version of the game. The game has moved on, and it didn't just scale everything up. It added more ways to kill you, and also more ways to beat it, and you have to learn what those are. Or not, it is your call.
If you are getting trashed with max 5 stars and r2 6 stars that is 100% a "you" problem.
Although one can blame Kabam for making it far too easy to rank up and get 5 stars and 6 stars which has allowed players to muscle through early content by using champs far stronger than content was originally designed for which in turn causes many players to never learn the basic fundamentals or in this case never learn to "git gud".
Otherwise it sounds like “when I was young, I used to walk to the shops and got caned at school”, but time has changed and they are not allowed to use cane anymore, or chalk either, or dialup internet and e-scooters as well. Haha 😂
But, seriously if some of you more experienced players can try now and honestly tell us if it is has the same difficulty.
My guess is, while Kabam might let players levelled up more easily to make you feel good. They just
Increase the difficulties to make up for it. So it is just a “perception” of having higher ranks
If you refuse to accept reality or to ask for advices, I believe a good old "git gud" is necessary