Salt and Sacrifice

Droigan said:

Played it a bit, level 35 now. Sage using fire and ice staff and ice channel wand. Using the tier 2 fire armor from the first mage. Upgraded to level 2, staffs are level 3 and wand is level 3.

Done 5 mages. Fire, Ice, Water, Poison and wind. Four on the first area and one on the second. Tried to start a tier 6? mage hunt, but got destroyed. I ran around for a long time trying to farm the fire one and was really annoyed that I had to guess where it was going all the time (sometimes it fled while I was knocked back into another room) or where it was to begin with. Wasn't until later I realized that I could start the runes to tag specific hunts.

I encountered a lightning mage once and it wrecked me. Not seen it again, don't think I was on a hunt for it. I enjoy it, but .... it feels like a grind. On the second zone, but also know there is more to the first zone. Agree with the statement above about the map. Especially since the game sets up for backtracking with paths locked off until you find X item. Currently looking for the "wind" cloth thing a npc mentioned. Feel like I have to first run around and look for doors that unlock at random areas after getting enough mages, then after that you have to run around again to find paths locked by items, not doors.

I enjoy exploring in games, but going through the same levels several times trying to remember where a path was, after having to run through the same areas repeatedly for the mage hunts... it gets repetitive. That and I do NOT like that ammo for my staff = iron ores, which either can be farmed or bought for 100, which is very expensive. The channel ice staff is really good with the dot, so I use it alot, but I've had to run around and farm for iron ore as well.

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Rajaah said:

How tough is this game? About on par with the first one? I found the difficulty of that one to be just right.

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Intrinsic said:

I'm enjoying this less and less the further it goes on. The game loop is growing irritating chasing the mages around the map until finally being able to fight them, constantly interrupted by regular enemies, traps, other mages at the same time.

Overtuned is the word I will use. It just isn't fun. Even with full Rank 4 Heavy Armor mostly fully upgraded, level 63, one mistake and I'm pretty instantly dead on the Mage hunt. A combination of, what I would call, bad stamina management design and near zero iFrames. You just bounce around getting hit continually with nothing you can do about it.

It has been way too long since I played the original so won't go back. Some of it carried over to this sequel but I'll relist my annoyances. Exploration isn't encouraged. No map, once again, is just an asinine design decision for the sake of not having one. It just makes exploration more difficult when you're trying to remember 5+ biomes of doors with different key requirements. Flasks tied to gatherable resource. You can't just "test strats" because eventually you'll run out of components for flasks. Which means wasting time picking berries. Thankfully, most, spawn locations are around a bush or two. You can just about net zero if you gather them. But again, you are forced to gather every.single.time. Dumb design decision that adds to frustration and doesn't add anything positive. [the offensives flasks I could understand, maybe, but healing flasks you need to explore with]

All of that would be easier to understand except that progression is boring. Maybe it is the Paladin starter class, but the skill tree is boring. +1 str, +1 carry, +3 heavy armor. These artificial roadblocks to progression aren't really guarding anything interesting or making me care about anything. Upgrade materials are also rare and spread over 5 (?) different categories (Ashpyr, Frostpyr, Blazpyr, Voidpyr, Mosspyr, some others also I think). Barely had enough to do the one Class 4 Heavy set. God forbid if I want to experiment and try some others.

Anyways. A lot of complaining, probably b/c I've been beating my head against a mage for the last little bit so it is just piling up. Need to take a break for today and maybe come back tomorrow. Revisiting this when Fextralife is filled out with item info, maps, NPCs, Co-op, and all the other stuff would also probably be a good idea.

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