Dev Log #56: Experimental Branch with Version 1.0.3.13

[Stavrophore]

Even at level 15 with maxed Sneak and Detection I am still not even close of getting the jump on the new Death Stalker

What's your detection? Mine is near 300 and its like it isnt there :/ And what is more retarded that flares can reveal them only when your throw the flare, not when they move through the light that the flare emits. So you cant really flare chokepoints and hope that crawlers will reveal themselves while going through the chokepoint.Sure it was like that before, but its more annoying when you absolutely have to get them while spotted, because you are toasted if they have their turn. Anyone tried super duper high DT against melee to see if it stop their attack from injecting poison?

 

[Parabalus]

Wouldn't mind seeing some DC footage on dominating, I can already imagine tripled robot count in Arke and Eye with 10k HP.

Bladelings being crit immune I can get, but the mushrooms in DC on the other hand .

Except mushrooms can be countered by single piece of armor laying around... Speaking of does it still provide nearly 100% immunity on dominating?

What armor?

http://www.underrail.com/wiki/index.php?title=Biohazard_Suit

i can assume that on dominating shrooms can cut through that acid DR

You mean for the spore cannons? I was mostly thinking about the melee ones which are a crit immune borefest to kill.

 

[epeli]

Maybe you should play on hard instead, I think I'd be more fun for you. You've spent a week posting about your struggle with the difficulty and your tone doesn't sound like you're enjoying it very much.

You might as well suggest parading through town with a huge "CUCK HERE" sign.

Hah. Yeah, I had figured this might be a wasted effort thanks to attitudes like that.

I will not return to Hard. It is too easy at this point. A lot of Dominating is not even hard, just obnoxious.

Well, best of luck then. I wasn't suggesting hard mode to insult or patronize, I sincerely think you would like it better now. As I said before, it's not the same as it used to be. The current normal is closer to the old hard, as far as encounters and enemy stats go.

If I may give you some general tips for DOMINATING, re-evaluate your need of defenses. Your character is literally as low HP as possible within the ruleset, and that is never a good thing. While it was a pretty good idea even on the old hard mode, I think it's the main reason you're finding the increased difficulty obnoxious. You cannot overpower your way through too easy encounters with a highly offensive character anymore.
And another thing, always reconsider your tactics and options if an encounter seems ridiculous or impossible. There certainly is balancing work to be done on all 4 difficulties, but nothing too egregious. The bladeling fight is not too hard on DOMINATING and it doesn't require cheesing or any particular build. Although this was before the bladelings got their current bugged speed buff, I did it without any traps on a character that was ill-suited for it (rather crit-dependent energy/chem pistolero) and I've now seen others do it easily with reasonable amount of traps combined with other tricks.

Completing is not the problem. Fun is. Being forced to spam bear traps and molotov cocktails is hardly something I want to do on all my builds.

Oh for fuck's sake. Me being calm and polite is only encouraging you to continue, isn't it? Let's try a different approach. Look, I am honestly trying my best to help your dumb ass have fun, but my god you are not making it easy. You insist on playing at a difficulty that is obviously not the best one for you, do so with a glass cannon and whine because it is glass, AND you keep using retarded tactics. When said tactics don't work you just try and take them to the extreme (lol 80 bear traps??) and then whine it isn't fun. Well no shit, I wouldn't have patience for that crap either. You don't have to spam bear traps or molotovs. They're great in moderation but spamming them like a tard is just a crutch. Only YOU are forcing yourself to do stupid shit.

Spoonfeeding anyone on how to play is the last thing I want to do, but it seriously sounds like you need some help with your bladeling troubles. So here's one example of something more fun you could do: How about we treat the bladelings as jews. You with me on this one? Goood. So go grab some 10 gas grenades, 10 poisoned caltrops and turn the mine entrance into a makeshift gas chamber. Lay down some of those bear traps of yours too, for good measure. Have fun wrecking contaminated bladelings that now take up to tripled damage from all sources and are already at least half-dead!

 

[Sykar]

Even at level 15 with maxed Sneak and Detection I am still not even close of getting the jump on the new Death Stalker

What's your detection? Mine is near 300 and its like it isnt there :/ And what is more retarded that flares can reveal them only when your throw the flare, not when they move through the light that the flare emits. So you cant really flare chokepoints and hope that crawlers will reveal themselves while going through the chokepoint.Sure it was like that before, but its more annoying when you absolutely have to get them while spotted, because you are toasted if they have their turn. Anyone tried super duper high DT against melee to see if it stop their attack from injecting poison?

Mine is in the 270s so a bit lower than yours.

Maybe you should play on hard instead, I think I'd be more fun for you. You've spent a week posting about your struggle with the difficulty and your tone doesn't sound like you're enjoying it very much.

You might as well suggest parading through town with a huge "CUCK HERE" sign.

Hah. Yeah, I had figured this might be a wasted effort thanks to attitudes like that.

I will not return to Hard. It is too easy at this point. A lot of Dominating is not even hard, just obnoxious.

Well, best of luck then. I wasn't suggesting hard mode to insult or patronize, I sincerely think you would like it better now. As I said before, it's not the same as it used to be. The current normal is closer to the old hard, as far as encounters and enemy stats go.

If I may give you some general tips for DOMINATING, re-evaluate your need of defenses. Your character is literally as low HP as possible within the ruleset, and that is never a good thing. While it was a pretty good idea even on the old hard mode, I think it's the main reason you're finding the increased difficulty obnoxious. You cannot overpower your way through too easy encounters with a highly offensive character anymore.
And another thing, always reconsider your tactics and options if an encounter seems ridiculous or impossible. There certainly is balancing work to be done on all 4 difficulties, but nothing too egregious. The bladeling fight is not too hard on DOMINATING and it doesn't require cheesing or any particular build. Although this was before the bladelings got their current bugged speed buff, I did it without any traps on a character that was ill-suited for it (rather crit-dependent energy/chem pistolero) and I've now seen others do it easily with reasonable amount of traps combined with other tricks.

Completing is not the problem. Fun is. Being forced to spam bear traps and molotov cocktails is hardly something I want to do on all my builds.

Oh for fuck's sake. Me being calm and polite is only encouraging you to continue, isn't it? Let's try a different approach. Look, I am honestly trying my best to help your dumb ass have fun, but my god you are not making it easy. You insist on playing at a difficulty that is obviously not the best one for you, do so with a glass cannon and whine because it is glass, AND you keep using retarded tactics. When said tactics don't work you just try and take them to the extreme (lol 80 bear traps??) and then whine it isn't fun. Well no shit, I wouldn't have patience for that crap either. You don't have to spam bear traps or molotovs. They're great in moderation but spamming them like a tard is just a crutch. Only YOU are forcing yourself to do stupid shit.

Spoonfeeding anyone on how to play is the last thing I want to do, but it seriously sounds like you need some help with your bladeling troubles. So here's one example of something more fun you could do: How about we treat the bladelings as jews. You with me on this one? Goood. So go grab some 10 gas grenades, 10 poisoned caltrops and turn the mine entrance into a makeshift gas chamber. Lay down some of those bear traps of yours too, for good measure. Have fun wrecking contaminated bladelings that now take up to tripled damage from all sources and are already at least half-dead!

I have a better idea, why don't you shove your patronizing ass out of my face because quite frankly you are either too stupid or willfully not understanding the issue.

 

[Fenix]

I have a dick of knee-lenght, I can show you...

 

[Styg]

Styg please add smelting metal scraps into metal plates in foundry[low quality? or quality depends on mechanics?] or add option to use scraps in making bear traps. I need low quality plates, but its hard to get them.

Good idea. Will do at some point.

 

[Black Angel]

Good idea. Will do at some point.

At first, I thought you're referring to Lhynn's post there..........

 

[epeli]

Who cares about some retarded fetchquest? I want my taste for blood back to where it was at release, and the stupid changes to infused leather need to be reversed, and uncap dodge/evasion chance for fucks sake, its already the single most expensive and least useful form of defense in the game.
A new difficulty after a series of nerfs feels like a slap in the face.

Evasion and dodge feel really useless on dominating, where endgame enemies will have 200-250 attack. You wouild then need 500-650 evasion/dodge[good luck getting that dodge on anything than max agility build] to dodge at least 50% of time. That's insane.

You know, I thought Stavrophore was on the right track here, but interestingly someone who played through the endgame on current iteration of DOMINATING said his evasion of 181 was still viable (but noticeably weaker than on hard - some hits got through instead of being safe from ranged attacks) at the institute elevator fight. And faceless are particularly bad for defense skills on higher difficulties.
edit: That sounded too good, I should note that he did die once because evasion was unreliable and a fatal burst got through after his shield was down.

And some good news for Lhynn--defense skills are not capped. I recently did some playtesting on that and they certainly can drop hit chance down to the absolute minimum of 10%, and that is even before other modifers reduce hit chance further. (range, darkness, move&shoot penalty, close quarters penalty, degraded weapon, etc.)

 

[Polydeuces]

Are you guys going to push out the beta branch to the stable one before releasing the expansion, or should I just suck it up and move to the beta?

 

[razvedchiki]

Will saves from beta work on the stable version?

 

[Lhynn]

I should note that he did die once because evasion was unreliable and a fatal burst got through after his shield was down.

As i said, its just too RNG dependant to be viable anymore, and the faceless in the elevator figth are super easy. Its as bad as AoD or worse.
Been thinking of just putting points towards other forms of mitigation like thought control, electronics, psychokinesis or quick tinkering when the expansion hits.

 

[epeli]

Are you guys going to push out the beta branch to the stable one before releasing the expansion, or should I just suck it up and move to the beta?

I reckon the beta branch will be pushed to stable a good time before the expansion's release.

Will saves from beta work on the stable version?

Generally speaking Underrail saves won't work in older versions, but newer versions should always be compatible with old saves.

As i said, its just too RNG dependant to be viable anymore, and the faceless in the elevator figth are super easy. Its as bad as AoD or worse.
Been thinking of just putting points towards other forms of mitigation like thought control, electronics, psychokinesis or quick tinkering when the expansion hits.

True, the elevator fight is easy. You can just sit back and wait. But now the invaders in that fight are perhaps the worst nightmare when it comes to effectiveness of your defense skills. They enter battle trance (what are these, dorfs?) that increases their attack skills depending on difficulty. I expected the increased hit chances to be particularly bad on dominating for characters that rely heavily on the defense skills. So I was quite surprised to see someone comment on that fight, saying "dodge/evasion build received a slight but noticeable nerf at dominating". Well, he wasn't playing "pure" dodge/evasion build, so the impact wouldn't have been the worst on his character.

Trying other forms of mitigation sounds like a good idea. Defense skills also work best in combination with others, imho. Relying too much on one trick (be it offensively or defensively) doesn't work too well on Underrail, but that will never stop us from minmaxing.

 

[Lhynn]

I remember playing a character with close to 500 dodge on hard and still getting tagged around 30% of the time or more. I never really much cared for it because thanks to my shields and the fact that i won initiative i could mostly wrap the fight in the 1st-2nd round.

The increase in hp is by far the worst thing, enemies are now brick walls (which imho hurts the pacing of the combat horribly, and is one of the reasons i say underrail would have failed if dominating had been an option on release) and fights will take more than twice the time, taking into account increased enemies and increase in hp pools.

The increase in enemy spawns and the new types of enemies is great, the blind increase in stats without regard for how it impacts the game as a whole is lazy and retarded, and has the very predictable effect of making the game bad.

 

[toro]

I remember playing a character with close to 500 dodge on hard and still getting tagged around 30% of the time or more. I never really much cared for it because thanks to my shields and the fact that i won initiative i could mostly wrap the fight in the 1st-2nd.

The increase in hp is by far the worst thing, enemies are now brick walls (which imho hurts the pacing of the combat horribly, and is one of the reasons i say underrail would have failed if dominating had been an option on release) and fights will take more than twice the time, taking into account increased enemies and increase in hp pools.

The increase in enemy spawns and the new types of enemies is great, the blind increase in stats without regard for how it impacts the game as a whole is lazy and retarded, and has the very predictable effect of making the game bad.

I wanted to try the beta branch but I guess it's a waste of time atm. Thanks for the info.

 

[Polydeuces]

Are you guys going to push out the beta branch to the stable one before releasing the expansion, or should I just suck it up and move to the beta?

I reckon the beta branch will be pushed to stable a good time before the expansion's release.

Will saves from beta work on the stable version?

Generally speaking Underrail saves won't work in older versions, but newer versions should always be compatible with old saves.

As i said, its just too RNG dependant to be viable anymore, and the faceless in the elevator figth are super easy. Its as bad as AoD or worse.
Been thinking of just putting points towards other forms of mitigation like thought control, electronics, psychokinesis or quick tinkering when the expansion hits.

True, the elevator fight is easy. You can just sit back and wait. But now the invaders in that fight are perhaps the worst nightmare when it comes to effectiveness of your defense skills. They enter battle trance (what are these, dorfs?) that increases their attack skills depending on difficulty. I expected the increased hit chances to be particularly bad on dominating for characters that rely heavily on the defense skills. So I was quite surprised to see someone comment on that fight, saying "dodge/evasion build received a slight but noticeable nerf at dominating". Well, he wasn't playing "pure" dodge/evasion build, so the impact wouldn't have been the worst on his character.

Trying other forms of mitigation sounds like a good idea. Defense skills also work best in combination with others, imho. Relying too much on one trick (be it offensively or defensively) doesn't work too well on Underrail, but that will never stop us from minmaxing.

Hohoho, better hunker down with a test character then. Cheers man!

 

[razvedchiki]

damn i hoped for some expedtions at christmas

 

[Sykar]

I remember playing a character with close to 500 dodge on hard and still getting tagged around 30% of the time or more. I never really much cared for it because thanks to my shields and the fact that i won initiative i could mostly wrap the fight in the 1st-2nd round.

The increase in hp is by far the worst thing, enemies are now brick walls (which imho hurts the pacing of the combat horribly, and is one of the reasons i say underrail would have failed if dominating had been an option on release) and fights will take more than twice the time, taking into account increased enemies and increase in hp pools.

The increase in enemy spawns and the new types of enemies is great, the blind increase in stats without regard for how it impacts the game as a whole is lazy and retarded, and has the very predictable effect of making the game bad.

Imho the new death stalker and the new coil spider are the worst, probably because I like stealth characters so much but those two are basically hard counters. The only way to get the jump on the Greater Coilspider is initiating combat before you are in her aggro radius, otherwise you will just get spotted in less than 0.1 seconds and it has a high initiative. It shoots a sort of lighting ball which explodes with a huge radius working like EMP.

Death Stalker is just obnoxious in terms of stealth and stealth detection. That would not be too bad if not for the new and utterly ridiculous debuff which essentially lets you chose between be stunned or die asap since it triggers in any kind of medicine.

 

[razvedchiki]

sykar
we get it.

 

[Sykar]

sykar
we get it.

Was I talking to you?

 

[Lhynn]

Im fine with stealth having a hard counter. Most builds do. More enemies should have the ability to catch stealthed characters no matter their score, the technology exists today, so theres no reason why it shouldnt exist in that setting.

 

[Sykar]

Im fine with stealth having a hard counter. Most builds do. More enemies should have the ability to catch stealthed characters no matter their score, the technology exists today, so theres no reason why it shouldnt exist in that setting.

That would be fine if you could fight back. The Greater Coil Spiders I found could be outranged as a Sniper but I am not sure how stealthy melees will handle them.
Death Stalkers though are almost unbeatable due to the debuff which makes you incapable of using any kind of medicine because it will outright kill you. Their alpha strike is just brutal, wonder if it ignores shields as well. I think it is poor design when you are basically doomed when you meet a certain type of enemy.

 

[Tygrende]

Death Stalkers though are almost unbeatable

Not really.

Just so you know, on DOMINATING, Black Crawler is basically a Death Stalker on steroids with 2000 HP. There's around 12 Death Stalkers on the upper level of the lair, I managed to beat them just fine. I haven't used a single bear trap, too.

due to the debuff which makes you incapable of using any kind of medicine because it will outright kill you.

It wouldn't "outright kill you" if you didn't make a build with 3 CON and Psi Empathy, in other words with lowest HP possible.

Even then, 70-80 bio damage is not enough to kill you instantly, unless you are below level 9.

Their alpha strike is just brutal

Wouldn't be so brutal if you didn't make a build with lowest HP possible. See a pattern here?

I'm assuming you already dealt with the bladeling waves so you should have access to super steel. You can always make infused pig leather armor with high density padding, sounds like bonus HP and really high DR vs. melee are exactly the things you need.

I think it is poor design when you are basically doomed when you meet a certain type of enemy.

DOMINATING is certainly not meant to be beatable with all builds. Have you even read the in-game description of it?

 

[Fenix]

Hm.... Interesting, what spec. bullet combinations are useful against them?
Inever used them before.
Contaminated bulled with 5 mm pistol, shock bullet - do they stun?

 

[Tygrende]

Hm.... Interesting, what spec. bullet combinations are useful against them?

Against Death Stalkers? I would say W2C hands down, they have pretty high mechanical DR/DT.

Now that we can craft W2C and it only takes 20 chemistry to do so, I honestly don't see much point in making special bullets, W2C and JHP are almost always superior. I guess a few builds with an unique gimmick might get some use out of them (like bleed builds using 7.62 micro-shrapnel). I admittedly never used 8.6 incendiary, if the burning debuff also causes the enemy to run around in panic they might be pretty good. I guess they might also be decent vs. Rathound King, seeing as he takes 100% more heat damage.

shock bullet - do they stun?

Nope, just flat electricity damage bonus.

 

[Fenix]

What about contaminated bullet? They add (I think) bonus damage right? Like 1-2-3 shots from 5 mm pistol wit them before main caliber.