The damage is less but as far as I know a 5* sword is still the more powerful than a 4* sword in tier 1.

I have to agree it is very odd how (at least on the bars) the growth from the initial gear to 3* is very gradual, and then going to 4* there is an absolutely huge jump. This jump was pleasing for my sword, but on my armor I barely noticed anything. I think the problem with armor is that you just have to have faith that it is working. I don't think anyone really pays attention to whether they lose 4.25 bars or 4.75 bars each time they are hit. Maybe some numbers when you take damage would fix this but that might make this a bit too much like a JRPG :P

Edit: I still find the jelly king to be terribly hard. My first visit was successful in full 2* gear. Now one item away from full 4* and I seem to be losing more than I'm winning. Considering he's a tier 2 (2-3*) boss, he's awfully hard to beat without a Vile Striker or some 5* people in your group :S

"Soft Capped damage - If people want to waste 10 energy farming easy t1 floors in 5* equipment, why punish them? It's never fun to see your damage go down in a game."

he means that a tier2 run with a five star weapon hits harder than a a tier1 run with the same weapon. It was designed this way because there is more energy in the core, so the closer you get to the core(tier 1--> tier2---> tier3) the more damage your able too dish out. It's not really punishment because it keeps the game more challenging, instead of super easy and boring. Which it still is too easy, but it would be worse if we were able to dish out the same damage no matter what tier we were in.

As for the equipment there is a difference if you test it out you'll see the higher armor you have the better, however it really all comes down too what type of defense you have vs what type of attack you are being hit with. I prefer bars instead of numbers because this way it feels more like a fun arcade game that you put a quarter in the slot machine too play.

Quicksilvers - invincible while in their shock mode, can't be frozen or lit on fire. The strategy for this is to shield and hope for the best which is awful design imo

2 T3 menders - There are not many weapons that can out DPS their heal (especially when they get 3-4 ground heals going at once). they can perpetually revive each other. They can cast while in knockback animation (but somehow if I get hit after I drop a bomb it doesn't count? lol) I know you're thinking "oh eeksy you're just doing it wrong".. NO. I've had one arena where two menders spawned, I ran up and curse sniped the first one. Dropped a shiv to circle around to get the other and he revives the dead mender. I do a levi charge on the 2nd mender and go to pick up a 2nd curse pot that the first dropped when he died. By the time I throw the curse the first mender revives the 2nd! WTF. At this point there are 2 ground heals on the ground heals on the ground. DERP. They ended up reviving each other 5 times. This is awful design. It's not like it was hard or anything, it was just annoying.

Last wave of arena with bomber gremlins - I guess if seizures are your thing you would consider this fun otherwise the constant shaking screen and flashes are awful. Again, this isn't hard at all (in fact it is one of the easiest 3rd waves of any arena theme) but it is annoying and as a result, not fun.

• I agree, spikes are up too much, they just waste time. Definitely not fun.
• Soft capped damage, while disheartening to see your damage so low, still kills enemies quickly. It's OK the way it is.
• I disagree, Jelly King does take some skill. Being able to avoid the spins and jellies while still dealing damage isn't easy. It's not just about gear.
• I agree, equipment progression is uneven. There's barely a difference between 2* and 3*, but from 3* to 4* the stats almost double. I would expect a greater difference considering the cost for 2* is 50CE and the cost for 3* is 200CE (that's 4x the cost!).
• I don't mind the bar system in theory, but I agree that in-game the bars don't seem to reflect any actual values. For example, DVS (~8) appears to have only 1 bar less damage than Leviathan Blade (~9), but each DVS swing only deals about 3/5 to 2/3 of Levi's swing. Combuster appears to have ~7.5 normal and ~7.5 elemental damage, which implies it should total ~15 damage - but really it only hits about as hard as Levi.

>Get a room full of oils on fire with no shivermist, and you're done.

I can't picture a scenario where this actually exists where it's not preventable in the first place.

If it's an arena (fire + slimey showdown), the worst is probably the first wave of the first arena (fire puppies + 4? oilers) and then the next set of oilers in wave 2 spawn next. The rest of the arenas spawn no more than a few at a time. This is still controllable, albeit difficult.

If it's an oiler danger room, the only way to set yourself on fire is to walk into a fire trap on the side. I feel that's probably more of a player screw-up than a design flaw (considering there are also spikes on the sides, the only way really is if you misjudge your corner step).

If it's an oiler danger room, the only way to set yourself on fire is to walk into a fire trap on the side. I feel that's probably more of a player screw-up than a design flaw.

Yeah, a player screw-up... that wipes the entire group and ends the run. Completely. How is that okay, that one misstep from anyone in your party automatically means game over for everyone? What other enemy or mechanic in the game is like that?

Theoretically, Lumbers should be virtually impossible to get hit by. They're big, slow moving, slow attacking, and there are rarely more than 2 around at a time. Getting hit by them is purely a player screw-up. Yet people get hit by them fairly often for a number of reasons. Would it be okay if getting hit by say a Fire Lumber wiped the party and forced everyone back to Haven?

To clarify, it's not that Fire Oils as a mob are overpowered. It's that the occasional situations they're placed in are needlessly punishing. If they just killed everyone and then over time the fires went out on their own, that would be annoying but fine. They STAY LIT, HEAL, and SWARM you though. It's ridiculous.

This mechanic might've been fun for those that read "choose your own adventure" books, but there's nothing to be gained the way it is now.

Auto-sellers dominate gate construction. The only choice a person can make in gate construction is to dump their minerals into avoiding stratas that they dislike. There's also the matter that certain minerals only grow in certain stratas...ones that are either avoided or overlooked in favor of more profitable stratas. The new update, while adding more "variety" into the mix, takes away a large chunk of what little control a player had on gate construction.

So yeah, just what the hell do I do with these gates?

I've done both T2 and T3 arenas with oilers, and strata 1-4 fire slime danger rooms... and it's simply not true that you need a shivermist to beat them. Maybe in T3 danger rooms if you get them on fire, but, you shouldn't be doing that anyway.

In the first place, freeze vials, glacius, hail driver, and other items can inflict freeze and put them out. In the second place, they don't need to be put out, just killed. Not sure I could do it with any sword I own, to be honest, but they can certainly be gun-kited to death with umbra driver, and I would imagine that faust or gran faust would do a number on them between the knockback and the shadow damage bonus.

Oilers are certainly -difficult-, and the way they are black-on-black or flames-on-flames most of the time makes them obnoxiously hard to see, it's true. I find their graphics more annoying than their actual capabilities.

If only quicksilvers were as easy as oilers... I simply don't do shock danger rooms after the midpoint of T2 anymore. It's just suicide to go into a self-powering quicksilver room.

I use CIV, and I was actually thinking earlier today that it could do with being just a little bit less powerful in the first two strata. After that it at least takes three hits to kill a mob if you're unlucky, but a guaranteed two-hit kill is boring, in my opinion.

As I've said, the soft capped damage is not a good idea to fix your problem as it brings unnecessary irritation to players. A better way for us to have fun fighting Snarbolax or JK is to reduce the amount of increase in strength in higher star equips. It should be so that even a proto gear knight can stand a chance against a 5 star gear knight if the proto knight got the skill. One of the beautiful unique thing about this game is fighting mainly depends on the players' skills, not how high the level of the player. And if you want more challenge to have fun, then just switch to your proto gears.

Also as Ryedan (#20) has said "that's more a symptom of a lack of content. Lots of games introduce "low/mid" level content without handicapping high end players. The difference is, those games usually have plenty of fun bosses for the high end players to kill." The soft capped damage is just a lazy and terrible idea to deal with your problem.

There would be no point to have 5* gear then if it was only marginally better than the rest. One of Nick's biggest headaches has been balancing grind vs sense of progression. I won't go into much more detail about this because it's boring.

Proto gears
But fighting JK with Proto is like cutting a cookie with a piece of sandpaper. And I don't want to have to keep a set of 3* stuff just to have a decent fight.

Lack of content symptom
I see no way in which making you kill low level bosses incredibly easy so you don't fight em ever again is good.
Or their respective maps which you have to play to get tokens become a simply chore of clicking enemies once.
Why limit the players to only T3 bosses after they get maxed gear?
All bosses are different, they do not simply replace each other.
Being able to fight every boss in a somewhat challenging way is awesome.

@ComplexMuffi: I've never seen an oiler in T3 or anywhere else spit off flaming oil unless it was -already- on fire. Is this a T3 danger room thing? I don't go in those generally.

@Lt_Grim: That's lag. Your shield doesn't actually take effect until the server hears from your computer. However, there's no visual indication this has happened... the screen instantly shows your shield up, but whether it's -really- up or not, you'll find out when you get hit or not. Same thing for getting hit a long way away.

Except, of course, that phantoms wave their hands back and forth and do damage way aways in front of them, and of course, if your shield isn't already up when a devilite holds up the thing he's going to throw, it's too late. You can put your shield up, but he hits you anyway. This seems to be a 'feature' of the game even on the most lag-free connections.

Of course, lag -is- a game annoyance and there are design considerations around it (like an indicator for when the shield is 'really' up).

There's also another 'hit further than you reach' factor besides lag (but not multiple character lengths), in that the hitbox for a melee attack seems to be the same size regardless of the animated length of the weapon being swung - at least it's noticeable to me that my flourish seems to have the same reach as my leviathan blade. I can see where Levi reaches to, but flourish does damage out in the air past the end of its animated swing arc (on the first hit, the subsequent thrusts are about the right length). Snarble-barb is even shorter... not sure if it has the same hitbox but it's certainly hitting further than it looks to be. Monsters get to do the same sorta thing to us. That's fair, 'cause our animation is deceiving th... uh... oh, no wait, it's not fair.

I agree with trouserman, soft capping is not a big deal at all and I don't see the reason for complaint. You are still more powerful than your teammates and as a 5 star equipped knight. One would think you were a bad-ass and had skill, so use it. A proto-knight with the same skill as a 5 star should not stand a chance because there is no feel of progression and basically nullifies the point of even trying to get that 5-star gear you've been dreaming and working so hard for.

I don't get your point of weapons not feeling powerful until 4* level.

If you look at the progression within a series the progression is fairly even. For example the damage for the calibur line on depth 1 is:

30 -> 33 -> 36 -> 39 for calibur -> tempered calibur ->ascended calibur -> Leviathan.

Thing become a little more pronounced at depth 12, where the calibur is reaching its peak potential:
78 -> 82 -> 93 -> 92
Things are still pretty even, although notice that the Levi does LESS damage than the 4* version at this level.

If you're silly enough to take your calibur to depth 19, then of course the calibur and its 3* upgrade are being completely outclassed by their upgrades:

50 -> 74 -> 153 -> 148

"A better way for us to have fun fighting Snarbolax or JK is to reduce the amount of increase in strength in higher star equips."

I don't really understand what your implying on this line. Does that mean that we have the same amount of health attack, and def as a proto-gear? If that was true then that would be some serious nerfing. A five star-geared and proto-geared knight Imo should never be equal too each other. I don't think that would maximize fun, but frustration.

Yes, just run Snarbolax in proto gear would sort of solve the problem, although that would be kind of a turn off for high level players since we all like carrying around our favorite equips. And I'm not really sure how the cap works, all I know is they weaken higher level equips in lower tier. Can't really confirm your claim.

although that would be kind of a turn off for high level players since we all like carrying around our favorite equips

I'm sure this is a bit unusual, but I've stripped down to wolver gear, force buckler, proto sword, and super stun gun a few times, just for giggles running snarbolax. The wolver gear still made me nigh invulnerable, so I may go proto next time.

If more people are like you, then there really isn't any point in capping higher equips, is there. But just because most people don't strip down like you, it doesn't mean we have to cap the weapons, it's a lazy and terrible idea.

"Spike floors - They are fine to have, but they spend too much time "up." They should be a trap, not an obstacle. I'd have a lot more fun dodging spikes (even if they were faster) if they weren't up 50% of the time. It should either be a wall or a trap, not ping pong between those ideas, causing frustration for players."

I think they're fine as is. Sure, it is a little time-consuming to sit and wait for the spikes to go down, but they're up for that long in order to break the player's shield. They were designed for the purpose of breaking the player's shield, leaving them vulnerable if they're stupid enough to walk on them. If the time they stay up is reduced, anyone could just zip up their shield, knowing that they won't take a hit anyway because the shield can now absorb all the damage without breaking before the spikes go down.
Sorry, I disagree.

"Soft Capped damage - If people want to waste 10 energy farming easy t1 floors in 5* equipment, why punish them? It's never fun to see your damage go down in a game."

If I was able to one-shot everything in T1 with a 400+ swing with my Gran Faust I shouldn't even be doing T1 in the first place. I can already kill everything in two hits. Sure, the numbers are lower, but you can still destroy just about everything with 5* gear in T1.
Out of all your points of complaints, this one makes the least sense to me. I disagree.

"Jelly King - He requires no finess to beat, just better equipment and the correct vials. It's not fun to have a boss that (essentially) emits aoe damage, self heals, and it's just a DPS race."

The gimmick with the boss is that you have to deal as much damage as possible and keeping him in check with status ailments. He is a very straightforward boss, yes, but for a 2-3* team this makes him a tough boss to beat. It is true that you can go head-to-head with a Vile Striker/Dread Venom Striker and destroy him, but the Royal Jelly was designed to be a T2 boss, ergo he's supposed to be a challenge to players with 2* and 3* gear, not necessarily to players with 4* and 5* gear, just like the Snarbolax wasn't designed to be a challenge to players with 2*+ gear.
In my personal opinion, I like going against this boss despite being able to kill him in no time. Maybe this is what makes him fun to me, I don't know, but my point is just because you can kill him easily with 4* gear, don't think he should be powered up - he wasn't meant for it.

"Curse - Damaging a player so heavily for not understanding the mechanic is not fun (especially for newer players). A "lockout" or something would accomplish the same goal while being much more easy to grasp and actually teach people what the mechanic is instead of "Oh I died with a purple eye on me..." It would be like if you could heal while poisoned and waste hearts - not fun."

Okay, uh, that's more based on a player's stupidity than a design flaw. When you get Cursed, the weapons that become Cursed are marked by "the purple eye", so if you take damage while using a Cursed weapon...switch! Also, what kind of newbie runs into a Curse status? So far I've never been Cursed by a Phantom in T1 or T2, so my guess is that it only happens in T3 but by then you should've learned how Curses work.

"Difficulty Shielding allies - It's hard to protect allies from bullets. Your hitbox remains the same size even with the glowing shield around you."

"Out of all your points of complaints, this one makes the least sense to me."
I stand corrected! Your allies have shields as well, if you wanna go out of your way to shield them, good for you, but they shouldn't have to rely on others to protect them from bullets. They can do so just as fine on their own.
Moreover, if your hitbox became bigger, that also means that your shield would break to bullets that wouldn't have hit you which is ultimately a horrible idea. Yet again, I disagree.

"Equipment - None of the weapons feel powerful until 4* and above. The progression up until then feels meaningless and even understated by the buggy "bar" system for stat displays. It feels like a series of heavy investments without any good choices - Do I want a slow sword or a weak-fast sword? Armor also doesn't feel viscerally good - I see one more pip of health after spending thousands of crowns and hundreds of energy. Final Fantasy 11 had the same thing - I spend 45,000 gil on leap boots with 3 dexterity... yay."

I guess the big gap between 3* and 4* gear is that 3* was designed for T2, whereas 4* gear was designed for T3 thus the jump. As for the bar-system itself it needs some fixing. Like already mentioned, a Dread Venom Striker has a huge bar, but the damage it deals in comparison to other weapons is miniscule.
As for the armour, they're supposed to protect you, not necessarily increase your stanima. That's just a luxury.

"Quicksilver (Slimes) - Since I can't change my equipment inside a dungeon, sometimes I'm forced to fight them with status weapons that might cause them to wipe my party. Considering the overall weakness of status-inducing weapons vs regular weapons, it feels like it shouldn't hurt me to grab a cool status effect weapon because I'm handicapping elsewhere already."

Simple solution, switch weapons. Unless all of your weapons inflict Shock, you shouldn't have that much of a problem fighting Quicksilvers. If all of your weapons slots are occupied by Shock-inflicting weapons that's your own fault for poor planning. If you don't wanna kill your party, stand back and let your party kill them for you! They'd be more annoyed by you attacking them and causing the status affliction and wiping out the party than standing back doing something else because you'd wipe out the party otherwise.
Another thing, if you desperately want to avoid Quicksilvers, look into the gate interface to see if there are Slime-Shock areas. Avoiding this is so much easier than you'd think.

Huh. It appears that I disagree with everything you've listed. Well, shucks. Maybe you should start thinking about what makes sense and what doesn't before posting a huge rant like this.

merethif here just explained it all. Also, every time there is a loading screen a random "explanation" pops up in the bottom-left, which is fairly big and explains things with a brief, simple to understand explanation. If you don't read those, well, that's your own fault for not wanting to pay attention.

As for the spiked floors, would you like the other hazards, such as the Shock-platforms and the Freeze-, Fire,- and Poison-vents to be instant as well? They serve the exact same purpose, they just don't appear in the same places. Maybe we should add more of those to spice up variation instead. I'd actually like that.
Anyway, I went a little overboard with that, but if you want them to insta-break your shield, more power to ya, but I don't see it a big enough an issue that a patch would be in order.

For the T1 issue...Want logic? Here's your logic. Your equipment's power is based on your position in relation to the Core. The closer you are to the Core, the more energy you take in and the more powerful your equipment becomes. I'm not sure if armour shares the same amount of effect as your weaponry, but I take a quarter of a life bar when I get hit in T1 with my 5* gear. If you die even with that going for you then you obviously don't know what you're doing. It doesn't take an elite to run through T1 without dying, even for a new player.

Again, I repeat myself, the Royal Jelly wasn't designed for T3 players. A lot of weapons make him "easy" if not only because of the boost in power. I'm not saying that all 4* will immediately make him easy, it's just that strategies change with weaponry. Vile Strikers and Dread Venom Strikers are probably the best weapons in the game to use against him, but then again, correct use of any weapon can make the Royal Jelly a joke, it's just that certain weapons are overall better than others. There isn't much you can do about that. Remove that Vile Striker of yours and "have fun" if you so desire.

Soft cap or damage scaling or whatever you want to call it - well, since a Snarby run in 2* gear and in 5* gear is almost the same thing, I guess it does a reasonable job, but it could be a little stronger... except that if it were stronger 1* gear would have to be scaled back too, to many things from 2*-5* are already only 1 or 2 hit points apart.

And there are two reasons to visit T1 no matter your 'level' - Snarbolax, and Tier Fees.

Get rid of tier fees, and there's no longer any reason for people to complain, because if you want to run Snarby, bring the gear you find fun to run him in. (I like playing with my 2*/3* starts of new weapon lines to get a feel and see if I want to upgrade them, plus I'm collecting the Frumious Fang gear and that starts out 2* anyway.)

Asking people to buy another set of gear for unlocking tiers is kinda obnoxious and really, nobody's going to do it... by a 1* or 2* version of the stuff you already have? Hnhh...

(Although, I -am- going to craft a super slime slasher the next time there's a slime layer in T1.... just 'cause the graphics go with the Groundbreak Gear, though. I'm not so keen on crafting anything else in the low end.)

Also, I find it annoying that there's all these rather cool low end items that simply don't make any sense to ever buy... they're dead ends and T2 is too close to the start (and even if it wasn't easy to get into T2, it still wouldn't make sense to divert resources from getting there and getting there with upgradeable gear that will stand by you for the long haul).

You lose money on every T1 run you make, essentially, in terms of pure crowns, though of course you can sell your mats and you get gear from Snarby runs. Still, it makes more sense to get into T2 where you can profit or at least break even and have your mats sales be profit not 'catching up'.