Natalie

Balteus's missiles have worse tracking and a smaller blast radius
Sea Spider's defense is substantially lower
Cel 240 has lower HP, deals 15% less damage for most attacks and 25% less for some

To editorialize a bit: I think the weapon buffs are really good here. The power delta between the best weapons in the game and the median weapon quality was really substantial, and closing that gap a bit with buffs makes sense to allow a wider range of viable ACs, especially in multiplayer. I'm a little surprised that it's mostly machine guns that got buffed (I've found energy weapons as a class to be fairly weak right now), but I haven't played when them much so maybe they were a bit underjuiced as well.

The boss nerfs I'm less thrilled about. And I say that as someone who really struggled against all three of the nerfed bosses my first time through the game! At risk of opening an old discourse can of worms, part of the joy of games with actual friction is knowing that you climbed a difficult mountain, the same mountain everyone else did with the same tools available. Sometimes small tweaks here and there are necessary, but these are major debuffs, especially for Sea Spider and Cel 240, and I think that's kind of a shame.

The thing about the bosses in this game: they're hard at first, but as you learn their ins and outs and develop your build appropriately, they eventually become easy. They already did, even before this patch. I think this is even more in effect than in the Dark Souls lineage, because of the way the stagger system works and the fact that most attacks are high-frequency and low-impact. It took me two days and a dedicated build to beat Cel 240 the first time, and the second time I just walked all over her. While I already had that experience and that's fine, I'm sad that others won't get to have it in the same way, and I hope this doesn't signal a broader move on From Software's part away from their focus on (and skill at) the use of friction in game design.

#Armored Core 6 #difficulty discourse

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in reply to @nex3's post:

Claire but sleepy @ThingsBetwixt9/11/2023, 7:44 PM

i do understand where you're coming from
but like
i'll take more people enjoying the game over pride

Natalie @nex39/11/2023, 7:47 PM

I'm not sure why you think pride has anything to do with this

Claire but sleepy @ThingsBetwixt9/11/2023, 7:55 PM

sorry yeah that was presumptuous of me
I'm just kinda heated bc I've seen multiple people drop the game bc of the boss difficulty, and im worried we're gonna have to go through another era of "Beat Radahn on launch or you never played the game", but I shouldn't have been so aggressive abt it

@aune9/11/2023, 7:50 PM

I think that might be a bit too far on Cel. Having done every version of Radahn so far, I'm assuming Cel is going to get similar tuning.

hecate @hecate9/11/2023, 8:18 PM

i am really glad to see the kinetic weapons being buffed - basically all those weapons are ones i looked briefly at but either their ammo ceiling or damage output were just too low. the better reload speeds also help, because my impression was they struggled with uptime

i'm not sure how to feel about the boss changes - i just finished S-ranking every mission a couple days ago, so that's definitely not aimed at me. i think the balteus missile nerf is kinda reasonable and probably fine, since balteus is still a huge wall.

sea spider generally burns all my repair kits, but isn't really a hugely hard fight - i don't think it hits too hard? and when it's flying and gets staggered, it stays staggered for forever. kinda shrug.

the ibis changes are what interest me - i had a rough bit of it for a couple days where i kept getting it down to 10~15% hp left on phase 2 before succumbing. i ended up solving this by switching to the pile bunker and getting better at Not Missing My Melee Attacks With The Pile Bunker to just simply do more damage to ibis with more of a challenge, so that i could kill it in the same number of stagger breaks. i think that either of making it hit softer or making it have less health probably would have been fine, but both is probably gonna make it way too easy? i want to go pick at it later and see how that goes.

(i kinda wish that ng+ bosses were a bit different so that they could just tune down the first playthrough and keep ng+ the same, at least, but that doesn't work with how mission replaying actually works. alas.)

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