[InsainArcaneBirdbrain]

Alright, now that the update's been out for a while, I've been noticing the state of PvE being a lot worse than it had been before. The largest culprit to this I feel is a combination of the level of hit high level mobs reach, alongside the armor nerf which has been mentioned before. To give an example, here's a lv80 firespitter mob hit.

Considering that this is just a normal mob (albeit one with high skill), the problem for dodgies already becomes apparent when the highest achievable evade from self-buffs alone is 200ish. This problem becomes even worse when fighting bandits, particularly bandit bosses which I've observed to hit well over 300 hit range, sometimes nearing 400 when factoring their extremely large flank bonus and stat bloat. It's not uncommon for a Bandit Boss to use an unavoidable head-cracker, and proceed to beat a dodgy from full to dead before the player can even react.

This problem also becomes an issue in the mine raid fights against lv90 mobs, as their hit rates are already unsurmountable from the mob lv bonus and how mobs don't scale stats (aka: that 90 skill is literally 180 hit for them. This is why the Gold raid mirror knight is infamous for rolling def/res mods that push it to 100 scaled). This comboed with the fact that if a boss rolls "Raging", they now they break 400+ hit. While mob evade is not as big an issue, wasps, vorpal rabbits, and the Feathered Serpent all can hit problematic evade at high levels still, ESPECIALLY if the Serpent rolls agile. Once the hurricane it casts goes up, an agile Gold raid Serpent can actually become impossible to hit for builds not packing evasion ignoring attacks.

As for the tanking end of the deal, the double dose of losing 10% of their def/res DR and armor being moved to pre-DR% in the calc really hurts the survivability of tanks in pve, especially when fighting multiple foes at once. Though more focused on armor itself, Mikuel already made a balance-fu about the point here (https://neus-projects.net/forums/showthr...p?tid=8374).

One final thing I want to bring up is the changes to stylish dungeon damage, rather, the decrease in the amount dealt. This frankly, was a painful and unfun change for basically everyone from what I can gather. Even with dedicated PvE clearing builds, these battles can last 7+ turns easily, or worse if it's also a crazy. This has had the unfortunate side effect of making stylish dungeons completely undesirable as they are not worth the time investment to clear anymore, and the pitiful damage makes them boring and grindy to play. I don't think I've actually seen anyone full clear a stylish dungeon since this change went in, and it drastically killed the desirability/usefulness of the Chaos Key (since cored spawns almost always spawn a door with the stylish mod.)


Tldr: The level of damage in pve from high level mobs has skyrocketed due to being rather untouched from the old system, which makes high level dungeoning feel unfair, and often straight up unfun. No matter how dodgy one becomes, there are mobs who can laugh and smack you for 200+ damage hits. For tanks, the decreased survivability can make it hard for them to survive compared to how they were before. Stylish on the other hand has become unfun, and not worth the time investment compared to just clearing a normal dungeon.


Open to ideas on how this could be resolved, but removing the +hit from levels seems to be a decent start. Moving armor back to where it was before would also be helpful overall I feel, though that would entail touching tank balance as a whole rather than just PvE. Capping, or changing how some mob modifiers, and the stat bloat of some mob types (looking at you bandits) would help make PvE a lot less of a headache as a whole. Stylish could be changed back to a 50% reduction as it was before, and that would get people to do them again I feel (Making stylish continue to apply 75% reduced damage in PvP exclusively might be a good consolation, as damage there is a lot higher overall and would allow more time for cool rp/style plays).

[Snake]

PvE needs its fine tuning ASAP. I hope this is prioritized over the other changes.