Is 3P and 4P Arcade co-op too hard for new players in the first few floors?

[Own]

1P Arcade for new players has a slight learning curve. Your hardest challenge is learning how to fight off several bees, or realizing that you have to shield vs the flower boss.

With 3P/4P, if you bought a 4-pack with some friends to play with, suddenly that flower has rapidfire on and comes with 4 elite Slimes - and it ensnares people with roots, ensuring the slimes can 2-3 shot kill anyone.

The beehive boss battle also has a slightly larger learning curve, but it's easy to adapt to. Vilya is fair.

Gigaslime is fair. Vilya & Company are fair. But then we get to the Zoo, which is possible one of the hardest boss battles in 4P co-op. Not only is every single enemy elite except the flower, but the flower is a Halloweed. You have to dodge a constantly charging elite boar - boss-level difficulty on it's own in any other room - and make time to shield the burrowing Halloweed. I guess you're meant to lure the elite charging boar into running down all the other enemies in 4P?

Has anyone else fought the Helloweed / Zoo in 4P with new players? Does it need a small nerf in some way? Or do new people just need to learn to arrow spam down the zoo?

 

[Teddy]

Yeah, from randomly watching some arcade mode streams I agree they are a bit too much honestly! At least the Zoo - that stuff is just crazy

I'll have to talk with Fred & Vilya about it, of course, but I have a feeling we'd all agree all those encounters could use a little tweaking for the sake of unsuspecting 4-pack buyers!

 

[HexZyle]

I was warned by the game that the Arcade spoiled story content, so I didn't play it until I'd done a sizable amount of the current story.

 

[Erisior]

I don't have enough friends to play 4P :C

 

[Piotyr]

I can agree that 4p co op arcade is a bit insane, our biggest issue on the first level has been the bee hive, 50 50 chance of beating that for us really.
And the zoo we just give up when we see that hahaha.

Oh Gigaslime has a bit too much hp, we have a good fight and usually win but it gets to be a bit of a slog.

 

[Own]

The mistake many people make against the beehive battle is not taking the beehives out immediately, or not putting their backs to the wall. If you hold back against the wall and inch up / down, they can't kill you.

 

[Own]

After giving it some thought:

There's people on Twitch who want to run 3P/4P Arcade, but the problem is the first few floors have ridiculously unforgiving boss battles and so they can't get far at all. If everyone has some faint idea how to play, they should at least be able to beat Evergrind Forest.

My suggestions:

- Helloweed in 3/4P should remain stationary, and possibly bubbled, only shooting out roots every so often until it takes damage or the four slimes are dead. It should also probably not have machinegun attack speed, only increasing in attack speed when it's surrounded by multiple players.

- The Beehive Boss should spawn bees just as fast, but have a lower max bee spawn cap. Newer players struggle with bees. Making them kill 20 at once is a little crazy and extremely tedious.

- The Helloweed in The Zoo should remain stationary until all other enemies are dead. Dodging the boar, the helloweed and avoiding green slime is a little much to expect of any player. But aside from that, an Elite Boar in 3/4P is ridiculous all on it's own, it's no wonder people wipe here again, and again, and again. I'm not sure how you could better balance, the boar. Maybe make the boar non-Elite, then bubble it? Boar loses it's bubble when it's the last enemy alive, then turns Elite.

Those are the only 3 real problem battles for co-op players in Arcade. At least, the newer ones.

- Boss & Block's HP is just ridiculously high in both 1P, 2P, 3P and 4P. It feels like just a slog to kill both of them, even with an insane DPS build. Both of them feel like they have the HP bar of what any one actual boss should have. I'd be curious if the fight wouldn't feel better balanced if both their HP bars were halved.