UtU "daily" feedback - likely the last part (unless a discussion spark here, I stumble on more bugs, or until I unlock NG+)
Story pacing:
Every day, you can check a new area in town, do a hangout with one of your maid, and get handled by Bea ; which 1. make it pretty dense of content (until you run out and have to wait for story events), and 2. give you early access to some story element that kinda diminish potential future reveal (like, bea's day 4)
I dunno if the story is supposed to be fast paced, but the change in the character and their reaction feels a bit fast when you can just chain a character's hangout every day. In the same vein, I feel like lily's behavior with dungeon NPC is a bit different than the choice offered in the dialy hangouts (when you had some more modest choices options - that may just be me dreaming tho)
Having more requirement (affection, days, dungeon progress..) may increase the overall story pacing - but again I have zero clue what's the intended pace is. I know personally I did like the early version of the game when you had less content and had to wait some time (the next update) to get more event.
Dungeon scaling
Context: as usual, started my run by selling ore & crystals to try to level up as fast as I could, and I definitively did overlevel
In short, not that great. The early game is fine-ish, but the later game (when you start runing out of def ore upgrade) have a clear imbalance between player damage & defense scaling: damage scale way faster than defense, resulting in a one shot meta once the mob HP catch up to your damage, and no real way to bump your defense
- Player gain bar every run they can basically dump on free-ish atk ; defense don't have such a treatment, so it make player atk raise way faster
- Mob damage also indirectly scale on it HP : If the mob gain enough HP to need another hit to be killed, that mean it attack and deal it damage one more time (so mob damage/atk somewhat scale of their HP. I didn't really reach that point on my late-ish game save since I was far into the "dodge or die" range of damage when I stop one shooting the mob
- I definitively start every run out of my power range ; and by the time mob start dealing damage there damage increase fast every mob (I would say around +60 damage per each mob). I have absolutely no clue if starting a run closer to my power level would result in a tamer scaling or not, but in all cases, the mob damage seems to ramp up fast as soon as it get out of the 1 damage range.
I feel like dungeon run are currently one of the two variation:
- start underleveled, catch up quickly to a moment when you have some interesting decision (this is nice) due to the heat, get booted out of the interesting part a bit quickly because of the heat scaling, then start again at a underleveld point.
- start underleveld, one shot mob until they get strong enough to one shot you, then at a point they get enough HP and you pray to not fail your next evade. Start over from the underleveled part.
I kinda see the following problem with these current dungeon run:
- Unless your run are short enough than heat don't have time to build up, you never stop a run at your maximum combat power - you always stop when the heat become too big (and by extension you always start at a bad level). That's a big problem since you improve your combat power when you're in town, so you're increasing the rift from your starting point and real capacity
- Mobs HP scale way slower than mob attack : mob ramp up on damage pretty fast, but the number of hit it take to kill these don't increase fast enough in comparison.
- Bubble barrier giving you shield makes the early mob that don't deal damage irrelevant in posing any threat to your run, but it shield value don't help much on a scaled up mob. Assuming they don't die in a single hit
- You have some way to play with heat and floor (event that allows to increase or reduce heat or move dungeon floor), these are great on paper, but a bit too rare and not predictable enough to allows player to play with these.
One way to rework the heat to try to alievate these problem would be to transform the heat into a floor catchup mecanism:
- Ensure mob HP/atk scaling, and the reward make sense at any dungeon floor
- Remove heat bonus from reward, chest, mob atk & HP, etc
- Heat only increase lootbag drop, chest drop content & floor traversal
- Heat increase slowly after every mob killed
- Player have access to a potion to reduce the heat (they can use themselve if they feel the scaling become too intense)
- When you one shot a mob, gain some bonus heat (stored separately). When you fail to one shot a mob, loose some bonus heat (the idea is to fasten the early moment when you one shot everything and reset the heat when you start to be at a good place for your power level). Bonus heat is gained/lost way faster than normal heat.
Opinion on the skill and leveling:
That's really something I would wish to ear other people's feedback about (since it's a totally subjective opinion) : personally, I'm pretty fond of the skill shopping during the early game (when you don't have a lot of ressources, than every point of attack or defense can matter, and you have a limited-ish choice to what to purchase) ; squeezing that extra forge level feels great there, same with prioritizing some skill that will be usefull instead of another.
Later in the game (let say, when you starting dumping thing at the research), you have huge chunk of ore to dump into your upgrade pretty brainlessly, you start to have way more upgrade/option available to increase the same things and overall most upgrade feels less impactful.
I usually start to be less invested in the upgrade process and in the game aroud that point - which is also the moment when mob scaling start to totally break, and part of it is because it's way harder to wrap your head around what happens with your stat at these moment - which also likely mean it's way harder to balance correctly the cost and expected player level at these points.
Sadly, this run, too, I feel like i've wraped up the fun I could have in the dungeon, but I didn't even meet miss NG+, and am far from having catched up on the hangouts.
Various bugs
- Fleeing for the potion seller can trigger either a fight or a npc (I got a lot of trade opportunity when fleeing for the pots)
- Mob can do 0 damage ("estimate: 1HP")
- Sometime, I'm unable to cast comet when I do have enough HP available (see the attached save)
- Regen HP on kill can put you above max HP
- "mob will kill next turn" indicator does not account for shield (and I don't know if it take into account guaranteed dodges)
- Lily's guild wars does not seem to increase reward when lving up at the guild (I did try to skip to the next day, but it didn't change the reward either)
- Hephaestus hammer ("reduce emerald & adamantite cost") didn't reduce the price of Emi's "master lockpicking"
- Bugs like the two above happen fairly often, so I would not be surprised at all if the forge calculation is wrong at various point. As a player it does not seem easy at all to test tho - but I would recommend to do a in depth bug check for most of the upgrade before the final release.
Story pacing:
Every day, you can check a new area in town, do a hangout with one of your maid, and get handled by Bea ; which 1. make it pretty dense of content (until you run out and have to wait for story events), and 2. give you early access to some story element that kinda diminish potential future reveal (like, bea's day 4)
I dunno if the story is supposed to be fast paced, but the change in the character and their reaction feels a bit fast when you can just chain a character's hangout every day. In the same vein, I feel like lily's behavior with dungeon NPC is a bit different than the choice offered in the dialy hangouts (when you had some more modest choices options - that may just be me dreaming tho)
Having more requirement (affection, days, dungeon progress..) may increase the overall story pacing - but again I have zero clue what's the intended pace is. I know personally I did like the early version of the game when you had less content and had to wait some time (the next update) to get more event.
Dungeon scaling
Context: as usual, started my run by selling ore & crystals to try to level up as fast as I could, and I definitively did overlevel
In short, not that great. The early game is fine-ish, but the later game (when you start runing out of def ore upgrade) have a clear imbalance between player damage & defense scaling: damage scale way faster than defense, resulting in a one shot meta once the mob HP catch up to your damage, and no real way to bump your defense
- Player gain bar every run they can basically dump on free-ish atk ; defense don't have such a treatment, so it make player atk raise way faster
- Mob damage also indirectly scale on it HP : If the mob gain enough HP to need another hit to be killed, that mean it attack and deal it damage one more time (so mob damage/atk somewhat scale of their HP. I didn't really reach that point on my late-ish game save since I was far into the "dodge or die" range of damage when I stop one shooting the mob
- I definitively start every run out of my power range ; and by the time mob start dealing damage there damage increase fast every mob (I would say around +60 damage per each mob). I have absolutely no clue if starting a run closer to my power level would result in a tamer scaling or not, but in all cases, the mob damage seems to ramp up fast as soon as it get out of the 1 damage range.
I feel like dungeon run are currently one of the two variation:
- start underleveled, catch up quickly to a moment when you have some interesting decision (this is nice) due to the heat, get booted out of the interesting part a bit quickly because of the heat scaling, then start again at a underleveld point.
- start underleveld, one shot mob until they get strong enough to one shot you, then at a point they get enough HP and you pray to not fail your next evade. Start over from the underleveled part.
I kinda see the following problem with these current dungeon run:
- Unless your run are short enough than heat don't have time to build up, you never stop a run at your maximum combat power - you always stop when the heat become too big (and by extension you always start at a bad level). That's a big problem since you improve your combat power when you're in town, so you're increasing the rift from your starting point and real capacity
- Mobs HP scale way slower than mob attack : mob ramp up on damage pretty fast, but the number of hit it take to kill these don't increase fast enough in comparison.
- Bubble barrier giving you shield makes the early mob that don't deal damage irrelevant in posing any threat to your run, but it shield value don't help much on a scaled up mob. Assuming they don't die in a single hit
- You have some way to play with heat and floor (event that allows to increase or reduce heat or move dungeon floor), these are great on paper, but a bit too rare and not predictable enough to allows player to play with these.
One way to rework the heat to try to alievate these problem would be to transform the heat into a floor catchup mecanism:
- Ensure mob HP/atk scaling, and the reward make sense at any dungeon floor
- Remove heat bonus from reward, chest, mob atk & HP, etc
- Heat only increase lootbag drop, chest drop content & floor traversal
- Heat increase slowly after every mob killed
- Player have access to a potion to reduce the heat (they can use themselve if they feel the scaling become too intense)
- When you one shot a mob, gain some bonus heat (stored separately). When you fail to one shot a mob, loose some bonus heat (the idea is to fasten the early moment when you one shot everything and reset the heat when you start to be at a good place for your power level). Bonus heat is gained/lost way faster than normal heat.
Opinion on the skill and leveling:
That's really something I would wish to ear other people's feedback about (since it's a totally subjective opinion) : personally, I'm pretty fond of the skill shopping during the early game (when you don't have a lot of ressources, than every point of attack or defense can matter, and you have a limited-ish choice to what to purchase) ; squeezing that extra forge level feels great there, same with prioritizing some skill that will be usefull instead of another.
Later in the game (let say, when you starting dumping thing at the research), you have huge chunk of ore to dump into your upgrade pretty brainlessly, you start to have way more upgrade/option available to increase the same things and overall most upgrade feels less impactful.
I usually start to be less invested in the upgrade process and in the game aroud that point - which is also the moment when mob scaling start to totally break, and part of it is because it's way harder to wrap your head around what happens with your stat at these moment - which also likely mean it's way harder to balance correctly the cost and expected player level at these points.
Sadly, this run, too, I feel like i've wraped up the fun I could have in the dungeon, but I didn't even meet miss NG+, and am far from having catched up on the hangouts.
Various bugs
- Fleeing for the potion seller can trigger either a fight or a npc (I got a lot of trade opportunity when fleeing for the pots)
- Mob can do 0 damage ("estimate: 1HP")
- Sometime, I'm unable to cast comet when I do have enough HP available (see the attached save)
- Regen HP on kill can put you above max HP
- "mob will kill next turn" indicator does not account for shield (and I don't know if it take into account guaranteed dodges)
- Lily's guild wars does not seem to increase reward when lving up at the guild (I did try to skip to the next day, but it didn't change the reward either)
- Hephaestus hammer ("reduce emerald & adamantite cost") didn't reduce the price of Emi's "master lockpicking"
- Bugs like the two above happen fairly often, so I would not be surprised at all if the forge calculation is wrong at various point. As a player it does not seem easy at all to test tho - but I would recommend to do a in depth bug check for most of the upgrade before the final release.
