[Egil]

Uh.

Chaos. I'm not sure if you've actually went grinding yet

Did you even read what I was saying? I would not have said something if I didn't already try grinding.

-I have went solo grinding in a regular dungeon, and only suffered when I acted like an idiot. (see: running into a pack of spatials, which I proceeded to murder the next turn anyways)
-I have went solo in group matches at the Arena, and while it wasn't a complete walk in the park, I found that they are entirely doable.
-I have went solo against a Dungeon Boss +50% my level that didn't have a bare-bones/poor skill set, and secured a win.

I'd also like to mention that you pretty much just ran into the big new weakness of Vampires; their ability to sustain is crippled without taking a hit to their SC buffs, or a risky offense that can be easily outdamaged. In PvP, it might only be an issue against certain opponents, but it's one hell of a weakness if your plan is to go all Rambo through a dungeon, or in an event that uses more-than-sporadic fights.

tl;dr stop getting salty just because you don't have a grindmage to get your PvP-oriented characters through PvE

[Rendar]

>Don't have a grindmage

>Literally did 1 LE with 2 grindmages (alongside my hexer scum self)

>It was a slog through hell and no one was happy, and it was about a third or fourth of the time it used to.

[Autumn]

I was leveling my axe character on it's own and it can hardly survive as a full blown tank, I don't see what the argument is for when HP is just too damn high for so many enemies, even lowering it slightly helps more.

[Ranylyn]

My issue with it is that sustain is essentially required for single battles when enemies hit so hard and take so long to kill. It's not HARD to win, it's just painfully long-winded and boring.

[Chaos]

After going a round with low-level solo grinding on a mage (who does NOT have a legend journal), I find the 'enemies have too much HP' argument even less sensible than before. I have trashed an entire level 10~12 dungeon (which I entered at level 9), only left once to grab pickaxes, destroyed the boss fight without ever taking damage in about 5 or so turns, and walked out at level 26. With or without spells, enemies are getting trashed quite easily, and even the massive amount of HP that a Dungeon Boss gets does not stop them from getting stomped.

I also question whether people are taking advantage of enemy movement/skill sets, or just run in at full steam and expect to be the unstoppable force.

If you're hoping to blaze through with a tank, I don't see it as unnatural that they take so long; when your build is meant to outlast before any sort of outpacing, you are going to run into drawn-out fights by principle. If you don't want to run into that issue? Team up with some powerhouse or two and play the shield to their sword.... or play offense for the grind and then grab a Fruit of Fluidity for your actual build.
....or grab mercenaries.
....or start using bear/pit traps.

[Autumn]

Whether you're a tank duelist or a dodgy duelist you do basically the same damage anyway actually. (A huge problem in tank vs dodge atm but I'll digress that another time) The point being, PvE is probably at it's best, the least engaging part of the game, that part is saved for the roleplay, what I originally came to the game for, I'm not asking to blaze through all the levels, I'm just asking for monsters to get their HP numbers tweaked so its not too terrible of a slog, it takes me on a duelist character about 7-10 minutes to finish a single fight, lowering the HP by 25% or even 30% just lowers this to 4-5 minutes, which I find to be an acceptable solo grind time.

The only other option I see is raising exp gained from monsters to make the longer battles more worth it.

[Ranylyn]

After more testing:

- Some builds blow through everything like nothing.
- Some builds struggle with everything
- The latter far outweigh the former

Seems to me like it's worth easing off on enemy HP if so many builds struggle.

[Neus]

I'm willing to make adjustments in either direction they're needed but I'd rather have more details about which character builds/classes are having trouble with which monsters for what reason. Obviously there are a lot of variables, like race, stat build, level, equipment (and upgrade level), if you had battle items, and so on. If monsters need HP lowered then that can happen, but if there's a more sensible solution then I'd like to look into that as well.

[Lolzytripd]

Low health dodge based melee characters are the guys suffering the most, due to most enemies have strong autohits.

[Autumn]

Honestly lolzy, I think generally speaking, all of the classes are designed to be able to get through each of the fights eventually, there's no class that has 'troubles' clearing, just some of their clear times can be drastically longer than some others.

When going over each of the classes, and leveling with a friend, a fresh 1-60 run actually, just in the last few days actually, I leveled as Verglas/Demon hunter Hyattr, and they leveled as Demon Hunter/Hexer, even that took a while, and mostly when leveling through that, I felt as if I was doing quite enough damage on that character, everything I did felt satisfying as long as I allocated the right stat points along the way, the only issue that ever arose between us was the general bulk of the monsters, it made it so that we could not do a Crazy dungeon together really without horribly dying, and in the regular dungeons, we felt as if we were competent enough to get through the fight eventually, albeit it taking quite some time, I'll list off a few problems we experienced along the way that could honestly be fixed with only minor tweaks to HP (Lowering the global HP of non boss monsters by say...20%ish)

Survivability: Both of us were playing tank classes that had decent ways of dealing area of effect damage, so it's not like we actually had problems being damaged by individual monsters, both of us usually focused on the nearest monster near ourselves to avoid racking up too much damage on either of us, so that we may regen it after.
This being said, when you cannot kill monsters fast enough and they start to rack up damage against you when they swarm, this applies to damage dealers as well, they'll be taking less damage the longer the fight goes on, cause they can weed out the most threatening monsters with efficiency.

FP Issues: The classes we played had really nice ways to recover their own FP efficiently, so we ended up being able to consistently use our skills effectively as long as we played it smart, but I cannot imagine the same for anyone who does not have a very efficient way to recover their own FP.

Weapon durability: When doing basic attacks vs the monsters with pretty nice above-average damage, each one took anywhere from 5-6 hits before it finally went down, some classes who end up using durability more (Void assassins, Magic Gunner.) will need to carry lots of repair powder, or make constant trips to a repair shop, some have suggested weapon swapping in battle for a momentum cost before, this might help.

Worth: Every battle taking so long mostly led up to constantly asking if each one was worth the time spent into it, each monster taking so long to kill but to only reward a fraction of EXP for each one mostly leads to Crazy dungeons being *ahem* Crazy sources of EXP.

I guess what I'm mostly trying to say here is that almost every class has an effective enough strategy at killing monsters, that much wouldn't ever need to be changed I don't think really, and honestly, if you ask me, the most practical solution is less HP, but more EXP could work out too.

I still think party play is very much encouraged to get the most out of your grinding, the high HP Values have effected this as well.