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Challenge Difficulty Refinements
Sentinel
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I've been enjoying the different tiers of challenge difficulty so far. One thing I have noticed is that the time to kill in encounters has increased dramatically under the tiers for Master and Vestige. This is nice at times since it allows combat mechanics to have enough time to engage even for fairly normal enemies. At the same time, while the danger to my character has risen, some encounters end up overstaying their welcome as the time to kill drags on.
One suggestion I would have is an experiment with a challenge difficulty setting which has a focus on having a low time to kill for both the player and NPCs. For example at a Vestige-like Tier, rather than reducing damage done by 80%, player damage would perhaps be reduced by 50%, which would be in conjunction with the 600% enemy damage dealt modifier.
Another refinement would be to make the enemy damage dealt modifier applied non-linearly in which low damage values are given a higher multiplier than already high damage values. This is really meant to address the issue where certain attacks in Vestige mode insta-kill the player since they were initially tuned for 1/6th of the damage being received. I'm not sure what the best non-linear curve would be here (that's where some testing would be helpful), but perhaps it would be something like:
Just some thoughts. I enjoy encounters with a manageable level of danger and a low time to kill on either end, but it comes down to preference.
One suggestion I would have is an experiment with a challenge difficulty setting which has a focus on having a low time to kill for both the player and NPCs. For example at a Vestige-like Tier, rather than reducing damage done by 80%, player damage would perhaps be reduced by 50%, which would be in conjunction with the 600% enemy damage dealt modifier.
Another refinement would be to make the enemy damage dealt modifier applied non-linearly in which low damage values are given a higher multiplier than already high damage values. This is really meant to address the issue where certain attacks in Vestige mode insta-kill the player since they were initially tuned for 1/6th of the damage being received. I'm not sure what the best non-linear curve would be here (that's where some testing would be helpful), but perhaps it would be something like:
- An attack from an NPC has a base damage of 1000 damage. Under the challenge difficulty this is scaled up by 600% to 6000 damage.
- An attack from an NPC that has a base damage of 10000 damage is scaled up by 150% to 15000 damage.
- An attack from an NPC that has a base damage of 30000+ damage is given no scaling.
Just some thoughts. I enjoy encounters with a manageable level of danger and a low time to kill on either end, but it comes down to preference.
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