EPTCo-op Hard>Brutal difficulty gap too great - Page 3
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flipstar
226 Posts
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BluzMan
Russian Federation4235 Posts
On November 16 2015 01:24 Blitzkrieg0 wrote: Mass Phoenix is pretty good on the shuttle map. You just need your ally to deal with ground forces (I was playing Swann and going mass tank with my friend Artanis) because you can't lift hybrids. For Swann you need to reach critical mass with your mech army such that you aren't losing units every fight. Essentially you either have the mass to steamroll through everything or you're constantly losing units and never reaching critical mass. Also upgrade the laser drill asap; that thing is amazing. I do mass phoenix there but with goon/reaver I can literally win 1v2 and straying away from that kinda makes me overly dependent on my teammate. Wouldn't be a problem with a friend, but I often play with random dudes. Overall, the concept and hero evolution is very well-done, but the missions aren't. | ||
Destructicon
4713 Posts
However there is a risk with this as well, the more difficult you make a map the more specialized your strategy must be to it and thus the more likely you can run into some balance problems if not all the commanders are well tuned. Overall though, great job and tons of space to improve. | ||
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Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
On November 16 2015 07:35 Destructicon wrote: I think the missions are fine given that they are Blizzard's first attempt, and its obviously impossible to nail every single aspect in the first go, including difficulty scaling. In the future they could/should implement more maps and difficulty scaling such that brutal maybe requires a max or near max level commander. However there is a risk with this as well, the more difficult you make a map the more specialized your strategy must be to it and thus the more likely you can run into some balance problems if not all the commanders are well tuned. Overall though, great job and tons of space to improve. It's a good point with narrowing down viable strategies. You may get levels where you have to exploit silly AI glitches to make it, like kite lings around your base for minutes while building up and that kind of things. Strategies that would never work on a human, that many players would feel a bit silly to resort to. So if you make maps that are just barely beatable for a top level player with "proper" play, you are very likely to have people find glitches that makes the same level easy even for lower level players if they know the glitches to exploit. | ||
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DrSeRRoD
United States490 Posts
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Destructicon
4713 Posts
On November 17 2015 00:17 DrSeRRoD wrote: For Hard/Brutal, are you guys doing the '2 workers per mineral patch' saturation or are you using the recommended numbers on the buildings, which is three? I wonder if I am making too few workers or spending time making too many to have the most efficient gameplay. I've switched from 3 to 2 now so I get an army a bit earlier, but I play vs Normal so it doesn't make much of a difference since the first attack doesn't come until your cooldowns are ready. It depends on commander really. For Raynor I go with 2 per mineral patch because his mules are so good, and I also add more CCs later for the option to sac SCVs if I so chose. However for Swann I feel like you have to go 3 SCV/mineral patch, otherwise you just can't keep up with the high gas income. I also feel that most commanders apart from Raynor sort of have to go 3 workers on minerals if they have a Swann on their team due to the higher then usual gas income. Or you could just build more gas dump units like banelings or high templar. | ||
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
On November 15 2015 01:11 DrSeRRoD wrote: Some people say Brutal is too easy and beat it with like level 2-5 heroes and want it to be harder. I personally get crushed because I'm a terrible player, so stick to Normal mostly, though I will probably bump it to Hard at Hero levels 7-10 when I get more advantages.I hope they don't make Brutal tougher, but maybe give people some challenging maps that never end, constant onslaught that starts at Normal and ends up at Brutal x2-3+ difficulty by the 20 minute mark or something and gets harder and harder. I win any attack-based scenario on brutal quite easily, but lose the defense scenarios pretty hard, and I only just recently got my two Protoss heroes to level 5. The difficulty has its ups and downs, and it definitely changes depending on your heroes and the opposing race. Having Zerg as your ally kind of sucks, and Terrans are a brutal enemy to face. | ||
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FeyFey
Germany10114 Posts
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loft
United States344 Posts
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DrSeRRoD
United States490 Posts
On November 17 2015 02:21 loft wrote: Honestly. Brutal is too easy. Yea, for 2 decent players it may be. It wasn't meant to defeat good players, they find that already on ladder. It's more about fun with a friend or random partner and I'd guess that for the majority of us, it is pretty brutal. They should come out with two maps for people that find brutal too easy: 1) 'how long can you last' defense mission that never ends until you die and 2) 'how fast can you finish' build and attack missions that require you to complete an objective or wipe out all enemy structures to win. Give them leaderboards and let the strong players go crazy crushing those while the not-so-good players can push through the others. | ||
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Blitzkrieg0
United States13132 Posts
On November 17 2015 01:59 Stratos_speAr wrote: I win any attack-based scenario on brutal quite easily, but lose the defense scenarios pretty hard, and I only just recently got my two Protoss heroes to level 5. The difficulty has its ups and downs, and it definitely changes depending on your heroes and the opposing race. Having Zerg as your ally kind of sucks, and Terrans are a brutal enemy to face. You just have to play through the temple mission a few times so you know what is coming. Knowing when to split and where your army needs to be for the units spawning inside your base makes the mission a lot easier. If your zerg ally is Kerrigan then set up some lurkers (8-10 lurkers can hold all the small raiding parties from the southwest spawn by themselves). Use the rest of the army to deal with the other spawns. I haven't played any Zagara so not sure on that one. The shuttle mission becomes a lot easier if you control the chokepoints to the enemies base (this will prevent a lot of the two pronged attacks). You can kill the units as they spawn in and have vision to use hero abilities that do AoE if you're going to get overwhelmed. As protoss I like mass phoenix (artanis) or voidrays (z..?) on this mission. It also helps to play this mission a few times because there are points when you need to split armies (like the first shuttle spawn will also send an attack to the right player's natural expo). Knowing this and pre-splitting makes the mission a lot easier. On November 17 2015 00:17 DrSeRRoD wrote: For Hard/Brutal, are you guys doing the '2 workers per mineral patch' saturation or are you using the recommended numbers on the buildings, which is three? I wonder if I am making too few workers or spending time making too many to have the most efficient gameplay. I've switched from 3 to 2 now so I get an army a bit earlier, but I play vs Normal so it doesn't make much of a difference since the first attack doesn't come until your cooldowns are ready. I always do 3 per mineral patch. If you're at 200/200 you melt everything anyway so you don't need the additional army supply. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
-The enemies don't tend to use a whole lot of AoE spells, which is why strategies like mass Wraiths or mass Void Rays work. When they do use Psi Storm or Fungal, they seem to prioritize things like marines instead of big stacks of air units. With a bit smarter AI, players going for mass void ray or mass wraith would at least have to try to keep an eye out lest they lose their whole army to a big fungal or something. -Amon has some pretty dumb AI sometimes. Some of this is probably unavoidable, like dancing in and out of a Dark Pylon's radius to make the enemy's troops stay in one place while you shoot them. But other parts, like how they like attacking enemy bunkers during battle or how they like charging straight to your CC or Hatchery or Nexus without killing stuff in between, could probably be adjusted. -Even when the enemy has detection, they'll still run right onto spider mines. The only time I've seen them kill spider mines without taking massive damage is when there's a big air contingent with detection that flew in advance of the ground army. With something like Zerglings or Roaches, that makes sense, but with stalkers, hydras, and tanks, they really oughta be able to see that and attack it from out of range. I don't know if the radius on spider mines is too big, or if that scan radius fix never got applied to the AI or something, but this seems very fixable. A lot of these more abusive strategies could probably be addressed, thus making it harder for really good players without much impacting the experience for less skilled players who probably weren't using those abusive strategies anyway. | ||
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Genesis128
Norway103 Posts
LotV campaign spoiler: + Show Spoiler + The mechanic would be very similar to mission 19 "Salvation" in the campaign, where you start off with the Spear of Adun, but gradually loose your powers one by one during the mission. Another option would be to measure success not only in win/loose, but somehow distinguish "great success" from "barely survived". Say you had a survival map and the waves grew progressively harder without end. One might do this by pitching hybrids that get +1 armour, +10 dmg and +100 health for each wave, and by surviving for X minutes, you get some reward or highscore reflecting your great success. This could also be a way of challenging people that find brutal too easy. | ||
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DrSeRRoD
United States490 Posts
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evaunit01
United States512 Posts
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ShambhalaWar
United States930 Posts
The diablo torments made a lot of sense, just increase difficulty like that, Brutal torment 1 - 6 or more. Brutal is tough imo, but once you start leveling the heros, not so much. Raynor is stupidly powerful even at level 10. I like how the heroes level, just make and add harder difficulties. I think there should be a huge range of difficultly in games. For example, in ninja gaiden black for xbox, there was a difficulty so high that only one person amongst the development team had beaten it. That's fucking difficult! I'm tired of too easy games for nubs! Make the nub level, but ffs make the MASTER NINJA level as well! | ||
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Juice!
Belgium295 Posts
On November 16 2015 04:48 flipstar wrote: Brutal is a joke if you have two decent players. It's a shame really, I can see this being fun with a ton higher difficulty. Right now it's even easy if you ignore the hero powers on most maps. You don't even need a good ally :D I just solo'ed a brutal map since my ally left in the first second .. And i even played the "support" artanis! ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/B8DRBaL.jpg) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0s4pwRZ.jpg) (exp is proof it was on brutal ..) | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20331 Posts
Hard is too easy, and Brutal is too hard. And by this I mean, we win Hard 100% of the time with no chance of failure, and we lose Brutal 100% of the time with no chance of success. I think part of this issue is how black and white the difficulty is. I've only had two things happen with Brutal myself: #1 - absolutely crushing defeat with no chance of coming back #2 - winning fairly easily, losing few if any units and taking bonus objectives | ||
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weikor
Austria580 Posts
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w3jjjj
United States760 Posts
On December 01 2015 09:16 Cyro wrote: I think part of this issue is how black and white the difficulty is. I've only had two things happen with Brutal myself: #1 - absolutely crushing defeat with no chance of coming back #2 - winning fairly easily, losing few if any units and taking bonus objectives I won a game on the Temple map on brutal where the temple had 6 hp remaining, it was about as close as it gets, anything farts on the temple and we would have lost. I actually really enjoyed that game compared to the one sided games. | ||
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