Darkest Dungeon®

Darkest Dungeon®

Beyond Mortality by Golden Yak
Chikanuk 12 Feb, 2020 @ 12:01am
Balance feedback
First of all - sorry for poor english. You mod is fantastic both in design and graphical areas, but have some serious balance issues, imho. So these are my thoughts:
1. Crit effect - 10 is too much. 5 or 7 is better, depends on general crit chance. On this hero crits is common thing so 5 is enouth, imho.
2. Stats is okay.
3. For some strange reason debuff chance on most skills is 100% on all lvls. Monsters gain resistances on each lvl, so in late game this debuffs rarely to accure. Even enemies who have weakest debuff resistance have 50+ in champion, and many have 80+ This is very inconsistent. And imho it will make such skills harder to balance.
4. Short Controlled Burst - is ok, but slow is too big, while have this 100% on all lvl. Vs some enemies or with luck it super strong, and useless vs some. +10% per each lvl and -1\1\2\2\3 slow seems much better. But even without slow this is good skill. After all - not every skill must have some unique effects.
5. Scanner Scope - almost useless skill. Dodge debuff is good thing, but with 100% chance... Yeah. -70% moveresist is useless vs normal enemies - simply cuz they dont live long enough. And most of them can be moved without extra skill for this. After all - pull is not stun or something like it, thisi s weak effect most of the time. Especially cuz enemies can move from unwanted position. BUT! Drowned Crew will be breaked by this skill. - You put on this hero + debuff trinkets and spam this skill. And BH with +move skill chance trinket(s) spam his hook on crew. Guaranteed pull, wich is destroy main boss mechanics. Better to remove this debuff comepletely.
In general this skill is situational at best - if you dont have destealth from over sources and have stealthy enemies. But vs such enemies you have much better options, like arbalest or shieldbreaker. All of this make Scanner useless in 99% situations and gamebreaking in this 1%. My opinion - increase debuff chances to normal lvl, remove or nerf moveresist debuff, and maybe nerf defence debuff - 34 is slightly over the top, imho. And add something userful vs enemies without high dodge. -10\13\15\17\20% prot for example. Or +% crit taken.
6. Electroplasmic Overcharge - early one its punishing, later its incredible strong skill. Maybe decrease stress at early lvl, but nerf damage at later lvl? Feels kinda bad then skill just smash hero early one, this is for example abom transform have -8 stress on all lvls.
7. Attractor Beam - useless early one, okay later. Simply cuz you always shuffle yourself al lvl 0 and never at lvl 5. Same thing as with overcharge, but worse - hero give moveresist per lvl after all. And again - with debuff apllied this is really strong, without this is "meh" skill. Maybe remove shuffle, decrease and improve debuff and in general make this skill more simple? Sometimes this is better solution, imho.
8. Nucleo-Protonic Ray - BOY OH BOY, this is why this hero 100% broken. -15% damage on first 3 ranks with 4-6% crit, highwayman base hero lvl of damage, several damage buffs inc free action one? No way this is balanced, even on champion lvl this is annihilate first 3 ranks, most of times with 1+ crit. And if enemies especially tough - any aoe (highway, doggo, shieldb, any) will clear them. Who cares about damage debuff after this? This is "Press X to win" for almost any normal encounter. Nerf it please and nerf it hard. Something like -50% or -40% damage mod on first 3 ranks with -6\5\4\3\2% crit (or even -9-5). In return you can nerf his debuff - make it weaker, or affect only this skill.
9. Goligher Cage - sorry, but this is 100% useless spell. Interesting design, great visual, but you dont want to use this. HUGE stress nuke on whole party, strong stress debuff on this hero, and what in return? Good debuff, even with per lvl % improvement! But only one use. And shuffle, wich is random thing and can be userful or useless. Damage debuff is kinda weak, cuz you want this thing mainly on repeatable skill, like on occult or leper, to stack debuff on some tough enemies with huge damage attack (swine king, giants, etc). -9 speed is good indeed. But instead i can take MAA with bellow, wich have -7 without stress nuking. And its enough most of the time. If not - i can use bellow again and again.
IMHO this skill need complete rework. Also this is why this BIG BADABOOM skills, like protonic ray, cage or jester finale is hard to balance.
10. Photonic Flash Flare - okay skill if you can proc debuff. So again - i hope you will improve debuff chance. But maybe you also decrease duration from 3 to 2. Cuz right now if you can guarantee to proc debuff - you can spam it with heroes like shieldbreaker or highway, and give some tough enemies (mainly bosses) 3 stacks of -3 speed and -22 acc. Wich will destroy most of them. Also, this is why arbalest have same 2 rounds duration with slow hero base speed on Suppressing Fire.
11. Items - Focusing Lens maybe need a slight nerf - to +20 or 25% of damage. +30% is way to huge, imho. Crimson Court set is ok early one and i like idea with self damage. But no ACC buff make this set useless on this hero on champion lvl. Maybe switch set bonus to +ACC? its not very original, but he dont need this vs ghosts buffs tbh, even then he fight them. Every over item seems ok, maybe only safety googles is kinda weak - they dont provide much for the huge cost of -5ACC. Maybe minus some dodge instead? And sadly - i dont have mechanism yet, cant tell anything about it.
12. Ectomorphs - great in general. One HUGE minus - filthy soul early one have way to much horror. -3\4 on lvl one? This is to strong. Madman have this on single target nuke and you cant have 2 madmans in group. But you can have 2 souls, which is really tough early one cuz they can SPAM this ♥♥♥♥. First my encounter with them was night ambush, where they use this skill 2 times each. This put all 4 heroes from 0 stress to above 100. Make it 1\4-2\4-\3-4, cuz right now its super madmans on steroids.

Hope it will help balance this great mod. And hope it you will keep working on it!
Last edited by Chikanuk; 15 Feb, 2020 @ 11:54pm
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Showing 1-15 of 19 comments
Nive 13 Feb, 2020 @ 3:00am 
On a pure balance standpoint, I agree with a lot of these points.
Skill chances, be it a debuff, move, blight, bleed, whatever, should always increase in 10% increments per skill level.

I agree that Scanner Scope, while thematically fitting, is largely useless, especially considering the Paracausalist is a "damage" hero that doesn't benefit from marks. I personally don't think he should, though. Mark skills are a dime a dozen on the workshop these days, I'd recommend changing it into a team-wide buff of some sort, maybe mixed with a mark/enemy debuff if you really want to keep it. Could even make it a team-wide buff vs marked enemies, that way he does benefit, as well as every other class that can't bank on marks. He is a scientist, after all, so it would make sense for him learn an enemy's weakness without fail by scanning them, which would be better reflected by having him buff (educate) his team rather than potentially debuff his target.

On Attractor Tether, assuming he should self-shuffle about a 1/3rd of the time, the base shuffle should be at 63% (63-30=33) and go up 10% per level, so it's a flat 1/3rd chance each level. Could finagle the numbers here and there to make the self shuffle more or less common in general, or specifically less common at later skill levels.

I'll post more feedback later, as well as some suggestions on how to both improve his mechanical design and to reinforce his thematic design so the Paracausalist is more unique.
Naggaboo 13 Feb, 2020 @ 3:42pm 
I feel like filthy soul doing aoe horror in apprentice dungeons is a little too much. Started a new file, team I was able to make had low back rank damage. Filthy soul used the aoe horror three rounds in a row and then my entire team became afflicted. In medium/hard dungeons that's fine because I should have a team that can handle back rank foes, but when the game first starts and you can't control what comps you can make or what skills your heros can have it seems a bit much.
Golden Yak  [developer] 14 Feb, 2020 @ 5:27pm 
Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback on the Paracausalist. Game mechanics are not my strong suit, so it's very helpful. I'll definitely be considering all of it as I continue to develop the mod.
Chikanuk 16 Feb, 2020 @ 5:59am 
About Scanner Scope - maybe - prot\defence and + crit taken instead of minus move resist? You scan their weakness, after all.
Jehuty56 17 Feb, 2020 @ 8:32am 
I think the ectomorphs are a little too strong in early game, they deal massive stress heal, can heal each other/ give aegis, it's hard to deal when you see 75% of ectomorph than Unholy. but nice mod anyway !
BulletDelivery 23 Feb, 2020 @ 10:25am 
May you reduce the chance to encounter the ghosts by just a little bit?
Even in the early game you face them between rooms almost every time a fight happens.

Please only take balance advice from other people who have made good mods, not randos on Steam who have no idea what balance even means.
Chikanuk 25 Feb, 2020 @ 7:28am 
Saying that the author must not listen to the opinions of users is far from the best advice.
AFFIRMATIVE 9 Mar, 2020 @ 9:28am 
Originally posted by themidnightfoundation:
Please only take balance advice from other people who have made good mods, not randos on Steam who have no idea what balance even means.

That's a bit harsh, i would say that many are justified to call out the frequency of the ghosts given that they literally replace over half the skeletons in the ruins (or at least it did when the people in question posted their complaints, as the mod creator probably balanced it out by now), and significantly increases the difficulty for your game at the start to unreasonable amount (what with the huge stress damage they all do).

The idea is that i don't think you need to personally create good mods in order to be eligible for mod creators to listen on balancing feedback from you.
Last edited by AFFIRMATIVE; 9 Mar, 2020 @ 9:30am
OpalGotMyHeart 10 Mar, 2020 @ 11:31pm 
I know im not the only one saying this but the ectomorphs early on are both too strong and spawn too often. I mean, in my first 3 dungeons of a new game all I had spawn were ectomorphs, and in each run at least 1 member of my team did die. These monsters feel like they are balanced for level 3 dungeons, which would be fine if they were a rare spawn, but when they come at you nonstop it feels like youre wasting your time. Perhaps consider making their spawning reduced or have them start to appear only after a certain week with an event or something, because as it stands, I love this mod, but I cant justify using it when its this unbalanced.
Bloodshield975 17 Mar, 2020 @ 10:49pm 
gotta agree with above, they are way too powerful early on, 2nd real delve into ruins and every single fight bar one had ectomorphs which is stupid when i had to do 8 battles with lvl 0 and lvl 1 characters against enemies with tons of AOE, debuffs and insane amounts of stress damage, ok PROT and dodge when you don't really have the tools to deal with them yet, while they are cool enemies seeing them that early on just made me go "oh come on again?" and them showing up in those numbers that early on can pretty much cripple your start, you'll have to basically throw away entire teams because you can't get rid of the stress as fast as you get it, 4 afflictions on the 2nd run? yea i'm not spending the gold to try and fix that ♥♥♥♥ unless one of those 4 guys has amazing quirks oh and then my next team ends up with 80 odd stress the next run because of the ghosts? well ♥♥♥♥ me i guess
Last edited by Bloodshield975; 17 Mar, 2020 @ 10:49pm
GaiasDream 24 Mar, 2020 @ 2:47pm 
Ectomorphs spawn far too often, too early in L1 runs. Your work is so extremely well done, but needs nerfs and limits to make the ghosts fun and not so punishing in the early game. If you're not going to make a true L1 version of the ectomorphs, I'd say reduce them to once per small dungeon, twice per medium and 4 times encountered max per long dungeon. Thank you to the creator for your hard work on this mod.
marcel 9 May, 2020 @ 10:41am 
Maybe ectomorphs should only spawn after an event or something,
like say that after week 10 or so, you have a chance to get an event thats like:

"ectomorphs will now spawn in the ruins"

That way they wont be such a problem early game because the player will now have higher level characters and amour piercing attacks.

Uno 8 Jun, 2020 @ 12:50am 
Personally having trouble getting used to how to play the Paracausalist... I feel like "Flash Flare" should be able to be used as XXOO instead of XXXO. It never gets any use at all. Since it moves you back 2, it should be a "Get me back in my lane" move, but it never gets the chance to actually DO that 80% of the time. Since the Paracausalist is better in the back 2 lanes due to "Electroplasmic Overcharge" - the move that makes him good - is locked to the back 2 lanes.

Or maybe, to counter this issue have "Attractor Tether" move the Paracaus forward 1? 2? And possibly make the DMG Mod be around -50% or lower instead of the DMG mod being -85%?

"Scanner Scope" should Mark the Target.

"Electroplasmic Overcharge" having a 100% chance to give +5 stress is a big oof, should have something to counteract that, or give less amounts of stress. This move IS extremely good though, and I feel the Cooldown should be 3 rounds, damage buff should only be for the round that it is used. (Saying this because it could end up working better with "Nucleo-Protonic Ray", having the Cooldown end the moment the debuff from using Nucleo Ray ends.)

These are just some random changes I thought of that would make the Paracausalist a lot stronger in a fair way. Rather than just sitting in the back spamming "Short Controlled Burst" or having all of the Paracausalist's damage go from super high burst attacks to 0 due to the amount of a damage debuff the "Nucleo-Protonic Ray" has.

Also "The Goligher Cage" should have more shuffle rounds the more it is leveled up. Cause more Chaos for the enemies, honestly is already my favorite move- even tho it does no damage despite the fact that I am releasing a kraken into the enemy's face lol.

The only time I feel like the Paracausalist is extremely good is when you have a party full of them, as you can then actually get use out of moves you couldn't normally use (Such as the Flash Flare).

Overall amazing mod tho, I love the enemies. They actually scared tf out of me with the way their idle animations are lmao. But just some issues with the Paracausalist is my only gripe rn. I feel it focuses too little on the burst damage balancing + too much on being able to move enemies around. And sure- moving enemies around is great, but its not always the most helpful thing that can be done.
Golden Yak  [developer] 23 Dec, 2020 @ 8:33pm 
Going to be diving back into this mod (and working on expanding it) come 2021, so if any folks have additional comments or feedback feel free to post! I'll be looking over all previously posted stuff for sure, so I appreciate everyone who's commented!
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