ITT: people complaining of bosses and enemies healing themselves.
I don’t know about other genres, but RPG games are notorious for this. I am playing Path of the Damned in Tyranny where enemies heal themselves unlike in lower difficulty. You just have to target healers by using Silence spell to prevent them using magic, or using spells and abilities to paralyze or stun them and concentrate all your attack onto these healers.
Hey, it is so nice to read someone mention Tyranny out of the blue. How would you rate the combat experience in Path of the Damned difficulty, compared to Hard difficulty? In my experience, Hard difficulty had become really easy and so tedious after the Ascension Hall that I mostly stopped using tactical pauses and maybe even target/ability selection after a while.
Combat feeling, even on Hard, which should pose some threat at all times, was the only disappointing thing in this game for me. Would you recommend a playthrough with Path of the Damned difficulty, and maybe an according gameplay route?
Path of the Damned is… surprisingly easy. If you find Hard difficulty easy enough then Path of the Damned should be cake walk for you too. I know the devs say they don’t punish players for not specialising on any class (in fact you’re encouraged to have mixed and matched abilities and talents from different classes), but as you probably know, some abilities prove more useful. The Leadership tree with its buffs is very useful, especially the “Undying” talent.
I’ve started as war mage in my first game, with heavy focus on magic and dual weapon fighter. But in the New Game +, I have focused more on magic but invested on the Leadership tree (it is in Path of the Damned I realised that Leadership tree is very powerful!). There is a general consensus that the mage class is the most powerful in Tyranny with the final talent in the Magic tree able to induce a powerful shock wave and almost always causes status effects on enemies. I and many players also find it easily that using spells that provide buff, particularly Haste and Mirror Image, is needed in the game to make tougher battles more manageable or easier. Sirin’s Aria of Memories is highly recommended to have as the ability summons a ghostly image of Sirin that distracts the enemies. It is also best if you also train non-mage companions to also cast healing spells to make healing streamlined.
Those are the tips I could think of when playing PotD, which is surprisingly easy if you know what you’re doing. But as I said, devs encourages players to experiment. So much so that the tips I gave, I figured them out on my own and I was surprised that many other players online have independently made the same observations and tips. Mage class is definitely the most powerful but I’m not sure about other classes and how they would do in PoTD. You could try and see how it goes! I might actually try specialising in melee next time!
Thanks for the insight. I had a random build that came up as the inventories and the characters went and didn’t have any need to actually plan any of my characters in Hard, but I may have at least the encouragement to maybe plan my characters in PotD when I play the game again.
Sekiro is the only game that I know of that gives you, the player, the ability to experience what it’s like to grow a second health bar after being defeated.
Yeah I’m sure I wouldn’t even defeat the first enemy. The fights in yakuza were tedious, I HATE grinding, but the story was so good that I was able to finish the game. And everybody talks about how souls games are insanely hard, and yakuza is easy, but for me the yakuza bosses were kind of hard.
I don’t know how the souls game are, but in yakuza the fights were all the same: wait for enemy to attack, evade, attack enemy during his backswing, retreat, repeat. The same on witcher 3 (where the fights managed to bore me enough that i forgot about the story). Maybe there are actual strategies instead of following the boring safe path, but idk. I couldn’t figure them out.
Which is weird, because in dota the skill barrier is high, execution must be close to perfect to win big fights, you must coordinate with strangers, all 5 players need to be on the same page, you kind of need to read your opponent’s mind, process so much information in a short window of time, and yet I enjoy that so much more that regular action games. My theory is that I like dota better because fights are so short yet intense. It’s usually all decided in 10-30 seconds and there’s almost no repetition. Meanwhile, in the witcher I’m evading the griffin and shooting little arrows for 10 minutes non stop.
I’ve only played the souls type games a few times but to me the main difference is that enemies hit HARD and have a variety of attacks with smooth animation that can be harder to predict at times.
At it’s core though it’s still the same loop of dodge dodge attack repeat… just a lot harder to execute
Since she’s a “companion”, she leaves an orb when she goes over. At least she did when the game came out (source, I’m definitely rocking her outfit after throwing her over)
Didn’t have trouble second time. I play like a big dumb dumb cause it both makes it more fun and also I play like a dumb dumb thinking I’m smart. I get there eventually.
Ragzlin you can put a bunch of firewine barrels on his little stage and then lure everyone next to the barrels using minor illusion. Then if you throw a firebolt at the barrels or drop the hanging brazier, boom. That usually takes out everyone except Ragzlin if you use two or three barrels. The priestess you can drop a silence on in her room that she leads you to and she wont call for help. Easy to blow her up and just walk away whistling.
Not to mention the mob of henchmen. I just slogged through a small country’s worth of peons meant to serve as a thousand papercuts, whittling my health and resources down… Then this boss comes walking in popping healing kits/potions/whatever like candy.
Traditional roguelikes tend to do NPCs/enemies which often have comparable stats to the player. With the benefit the player has is a “better AI” aka, an intelligent human behind them.
Honestly though, “boss used a healing potion” or “boss used Heal Me Daddy spell” is bad game design, and somewhat immersion breaking.
It shows you couldn’t balance out the skill and pacing, so to artificially lengthen a fight, you simply dump more health.
It’s in the class of mechanics that disrespect the player’s time: it wasn’t a long fight because you had to figure out some hidden pattern, it wasn’t long because it was hard, it wasn’t a mistake you did… You did everything right and almost killed the boss too fast, so the game artificially removed your progress.
You can have healing mechanics that aren’t lazy: elemental affinities, a healer companion that can be defeated, etc
Star Wars KotOR did this really well with the final boss. He heals himself but it makes sense why he can and you can prevent him from doing it if you know how.
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