Vestibule Violator
Posts: 1591
Joined: Saturday, 3rd August 2013, 18:59
Are Shoals/Nest Intentionally Much Harder?
I've found Shoals to be so much harder than swamp that it feels intentional. Swamp has always been relatively easy, and some of the newish additions like thorn hunters and treants(thank you enchanted forest!) have helped with the difficulty(or at least the previously bland enemy selection) slightly. However, it seems to me like the difference between swamp and shoals is still huge.
Spiders nest and snake pits are much of the same. Snake pits has a few nasty's, shock serpents can be a real pain without rElec, those ally teleporting nagas can be dangerous without blink, but aside from that its relatively easy. But then look at spiders nest! Emperor scorpions, ghost moths, mobs of spark wasps, and fucking entropy weavers. Even their basic enemies are powerful: wolf spiders are fast and evasive, torpor snails can slow you down, tarantella's can confuse you through MR, jumping spiders can net you, and orb spiders have arguably the deadliest ability of all: They make people stop playing optimally just to tab them out of frustration. Just to add on top of that, they recently added mobs of smiting Bee-ataurs(which belong in swamp along with elec wasps imo).
However, despite being much harder, the lair branches themselves still aren't much of a challenge, but their overall difficulty isn't quite the discussion I'm looking for. Rather, its the large gap in power that the poison/water branches seem to have between their respective brethren. Is it intentional? Should it be? Am I completely wrong to say the difficulty difference is huge?
Personally, I don't have any issue with higher difficulty in most circumstances, but the non-slime lair branches are so easy most of the time that ending up with the 'harder' branch for each time just makes the game go longer with roughly the same probability of death assuming you are playing properly. As a result of this, the response to getting shoals and spiders nest is not "damn, I got the hard branches"(what I presume is the desired effect) but rather "whelp, looks like I'm in for a longer, more frustrating game."
Keep in mind, this is largely just my experience, and much is it is hyperbole for the purpose of the discussion. I don't mean to make any big statement here or try to push for a change from the devs, I'm just curious how other people view the disparity in challenge between the branches.
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