Hard mode becomes hard in an unfun way (Spoilers)

[Eman]

Hi all,

I figured I'd try Hard Mode since I love a challenge. I go out, get killed by some bunnies and bees, learn to properly block and fight and have an amazing time. With each progressive monster/boss I become happier as I realize that this game requires a great deal of skill and that I could gain those skills if I kept practicing. Losing was fun and all was well.

This peaked at Phaseman. An amazing challenge that required good reflexes and rewarded perfect blocks. Every time I failed, I grew more determined. After that, the challenges went downhill. Instead of a few creatures with which to predict and fight, the game fabricated difficulty by adding more creatures. Santa's Toy machine was bad. The few rooms in the Temple of Seasons where regular mobs spawned like crazy and made you fight through multiple waves while trying to dodge an element of your choice (Screw you tornadoes and spiky plants) caused me more trouble than any previous boss.

And here's my huge beef, the game quits rewarding blocking. When 3 mages are firing projectiles as multiple melee units are rushing you, blocking is never the option. Even if you perfectly block a single projectile, in that time some other projectile or melee unit is going to hit you. If you perfectly block a melee attack, the time it takes to counter attack will ensure something else hits you in the meantime. The only viable solution seemed to be constant kiting, but as a mostly melee character, that's not so easy.

Instead of feeling like my skill and reflexes were improving and winning the battle, the amount of health orbs that dropped or the rng of the many projectiles or spawning minions seemed to determine the outcome. Then you have bosses like the 3 headed hydra that is basically unwinnable without the ice boots and Winter whose attacks require a fair amount of skill and a ton of luck to not be killed by. A single mistake during his 'I cover 90% of the screen with a blizzard' means you just lost the fight. And it's not a short fight. Also, being melee on Winter means you can't attack him safely while he creates his ice spikes.

I was ready to finish this game and write a rave review for it on Steam going on about how it's hard but fair, but now I'm having a hard time being motivated to continue. I haven't seen a good reason to block since Phaseman and I haven't really felt good about winning a hard fight in a while. I wish the difficulty was in challenging mobs and bosses, not just putting more creatures and projectiles on the screen then you can handle. Anyone else feeling this way?

 

[Own]

Hard mode, I think, assumes you're exploiting every possible way to tilt the game in your favor. The best equipment, cleverly allocated talent points, a few cards, maybe a gold skill and plenty of potions. The +20 DEF or +20% ATK potions are fairly insane for a low gold cost.

As for Winter requiring luck, about 5 people have beaten him while only being hit once or twice in Arcade. It is possible to dodge everything he throws at you on Hard / in Arcade, it's just ridiculously difficult to do so.

If you want a reason to block, try delving into Arcade Mode. That'll motivate you to block like a madman. Blocking isn't quite as important in Story due to death being without consequences, I guess.

 

[GarlicJelly]

I've beaten the hydra without using the boots or my shield, on hard. The hydra requires more patience than it requires skill if you're using Piercing Dash to avoid all the attacks during the fight. I would recommend everyone to farm the boots first if they're going to do the fight on Hard since it takes forever to beat that fight if you can't hit the boss much because you're sliding around on the slippery floor.

Other than that I agree with almost everything you're saying (apart from the Toy Factory, I liked that fight because the Gifts spit out 3 bombs instead of 1 which forces you to be careful with your attacks). The room in the Season Temple where you are stuck for 5 minutes in one long battle for survival with no use for your shield is one of the two things I hate on Hard (the other being the Crystal boss after Phaseman). I'd like to see the number of monsters reduced and increase their movements and attacks to be quicker to counterbalance for the reduced amount of threats. I don't think that just because we can die as much as we want in Story mode means that we want to die a lot while we wait for that one lucky run. Normal is perfectly balanced in the sense that if you know what you're doing you won't die no matter what while in Hard you might still die even if you do everything right. I think Hard should be hard, not unfair. I think of myself as skilled enough to manage Hard mode but I clearly don't in some sections and I don't have something obvious to point at in my playstyle. I just think that it's too difficult in a way that devalues my skill level.

 

[Eman]

Own - It sounds like maybe I am just not allocating my talent points correctly and maybe I'm just not cut out for Hard Mode. I never thought to constantly chug pots, but that may help. Currently I'm building a Battlemage (Without the same-named talent which is odd). I took everything that enhanced my crit, aflix on attack and magic damage on attack. I thought it would be fun to be a hybrid.

GoodStuff - Thanks for the feedback. The Toy Machine may be fine, but it's a bit counter intuitive. To get to the part where you can do real damage (Train slamming into the machine) requires that you largely ignore the Toy Machine and focus the minions. And if screw up the lever sequence you get punished pretty badly by having to survive another round of mobs. But I guess it's fine. It certainly felt more skill based then the mob spawner rooms. And I really like the last sentence in your post. That's how I feel as well.

Finally, I think that 2H weapon might be very under powered. It's only real advantage is it's distance. The spells associated with 2H are generally worse (I want a dash too!) and the weapons themselves deal less damage, and deal it slower. Which I wasn't expecting.

 

[GarlicJelly]

If you go full crit build with 2h in Story mode you pretty much outclass Shadow Clone which is by far the best build in Story mode right now. Something has to be the worst option but what saves the 2h is that it's really good for Arcade mode. You can keep your distance and you deal a lot of damage with 1 hit.

 

[Teddy]

I think we should definitely "nerf" the room in the Temple of Seasons that I suspect you're talking about (the one in the room with the large pool of water). Not only is it exceedingly difficult in a not-very-interesting way, but it also has no sense of progress which gives players no indication if they are doing better than before or how close they are to the end.

The difficulty isn't set in stone in other aspects either (although it's not guaranteed to change, of course)! We'll probably do one or two sweeps where we tweak the difficulty on both Normal and Hard before the game is done, but it's unclear what results that will yield.

As Own alluded, Hard mode is currently fashioned after near mastery of several of the game's aspects, including stuff like Perfect Guard, learning enemy patterns and discovering counters (perfect guarding hydra headbutts, shielding hydra spore clouds, etc), balancing safety and damage output and also obtaining suitable gear. Mechanics, strategy, tactics and imaginary numbers!

I can totally see why someone wouldn't fully enjoy such difficulty, but with the lack of nuance, we've gone for Normal as "Challenging" and Hard as "Really Tough". There are plans of adding both Casual (Really Easy), as well as a Nightmare (Really Tough). In such a case, I think we'll dial down Hard a bit!

A somewhat related effort we'll make is to make certain interactions more obvious, through better indicators, game over-taunts or bag tips. For example, some people actually don't get that you can switch season on the Hydra battle, which makes the fight actually impossible instead of just difficult! Also, the Toy Machine will be changed so dealing X % damage to his hull will trigger another set of redirectable trains.

A more advanced example we've talked about is making Winters spike row attack different in that it will show "cracks" in the floor exactly where it will appear, with a tighter timing as trade off. Now players need to keep track of the initial spikes, calculate the probable trajectory and then micro adjust positioning in the 0.5 seconds it takes them to burst out.

We'll throw in a a few of the more basic ones in the next stable patch, but I'm guessing they won't help you much since they will mostly be "hey, you can jump down from the shoulders when he does the electric attack!"

Anyway, I guess this wasn't the reply you were rooting for, but perhaps it shines some light on our reasoning behind how Hard currently is balanced, and also gives some hope for a brighter tomorrow if/when those additional difficulties hit!

PS: The winter hydra will be pleased to know the snow shoes will be nerfed next patch (sorry)

 

[Eman]

Thanks for the reply! It means a lot to me that you actually read my rambling of a post. Speaking of Hydra, I feel kind of stupid now. After getting my shield broken, I never thought to attempt a perfect guard on the headbutt. Also shielding the spores never popped into my mind, so I assumed you just had to run the whole time and change seasons ASAP during Summer. So that fight may be more balanced then I suspected.

And you definitely know the room I'm talking about in the Temple of Seasons. As my bag asked me "Are you even trying?" for the 50th time I found myself wanting to punch something.

Love the idea for Winter's spike attack. And as long as good timing and shielding are rewarded then I'm totally on board. I do love this game by the way, and I'm very excited to see the finished product.

Thanks again!

-Me

 

[Ardeof]

Hard mode, I think, assumes you're exploiting every possible way to tilt the game in your favor

Winter isn't that difficult of a boss. I used a wand and auto attacked and (sometimes) got the snow golem to join in on the fray and do some real DPS. Still managed to win in Hard Mode with not many tries.

As for Hydra, it's an extremely easy boss. Choose the Autumn season as the orb spawns and all you have to worry about is a low amount of damage (50 or so if you don't block) and dodging the hydras while "blinded" by spores. Knowing where they'll attack, you can also guess where the heads will be even with the lack of map visibility. If anything, the only thing that the Hydra punishes is not trying to use the orbs to your advantage. The most dangerous is the Winter Hydra. No reason to change the season to winter, unless you want to become some sort of ice-cream for the Hydras. Also to note, the Hydras can be damaged during a different season so it's basically:

The Hydra with the same season will use its ability, if that Hydra is defeated and the other two Hydras are left, they won't use their abilities during the incorrect season. Meaning that all that there is to fight after summer/autumn Hydra are two headbutting Hydras that do little to no damage. It would have been more interesting, and immensely more difficult if there weren't orbs and the season changed after each round of attacks. That would mean actually learning all three Hydra attacks instead of 1.

As to OP's concern about the boss battles, I think the devs are mixing things up decently enough. Phaseman and GUN-D4M were a bit of a concern because i'm not a fan of japanese arcade games(*ahem*

) . Yet that was just one event area, which is the Flying Fortress. Vilya and Teddy/Freddy don't battle that way, nor does Giga Slime. As for the Temple of Seasons, I found the battles with the monsters in the area to be too easy. In fact, during my time there collecting the recipe items, the Frosty Friend was 1 hitting the knights and wizards with the slam attack.

Also @Eman , do you not have points in Shield Bearer/Quick Reflexes? Something like +30% movement while shielding and +37.5% increased "window of opportunity" to make a perfect guard. The movement should be enough to move around while blocking both projectile and meelee attacks. What I found odd about both the GUN-D4M and Hydra fights are that the shield breaking isn't based on damage done. Even with a shield that blocks 375 damage, it'll break anyway unless with a perfect guard. Though against GUN-D4M perfect guarding is a less than optimal way to do damage.

 

[GarlicJelly]

Winter isn't that difficult of a boss. I used a wand and auto attacked and (sometimes) got the snow golem to join in on the fray and do some real DPS. Still managed to win in Hard Mode with not many tries.

As for Hydra, it's an extremely easy boss. Choose the Autumn season as the orb spawns and all you have to worry about is a low amount of damage (50 or so if you don't block) and dodging the hydras while "blinded" by spores. Knowing where they'll attack, you can also guess where the heads will be even with the lack of map visibility. If anything, the only thing that the Hydra punishes is not trying to use the orbs to your advantage. The most dangerous is the Winter Hydra. No reason to change the season to winter, unless you want to become some sort of ice-cream for the Hydras. Also to note, the Hydras can be damaged during a different season so it's basically:

The Hydra with the same season will use its ability, if that Hydra is defeated and the other two Hydras are left, they won't use their abilities during the incorrect season. Meaning that all that there is to fight after summer/autumn Hydra are two headbutting Hydras that do little to no damage. It would have been more interesting, and immensely more difficult if there weren't orbs and the season changed after each round of attacks. That would mean actually learning all three Hydra attacks instead of 1.

As to OP's concern about the boss battles, I think the devs are mixing things up decently enough. Phaseman and GUN-D4M were a bit of a concern because i'm not a fan of japanese arcade games(*ahem*

) . Yet that was just one event area, which is the Flying Fortress. Vilya and Teddy/Freddy don't battle that way, nor does Giga Slime. As for the Temple of Seasons, I found the battles with the monsters in the area to be too easy. In fact, during my time there collecting the recipe items, the Frosty Friend was 1 hitting the knights and wizards with the slam attack.

Also @Eman , do you not have points in Shield Bearer/Quick Reflexes? Something like +30% movement while shielding and +37.5% increased "window of opportunity" to make a perfect guard. The movement should be enough to move around while blocking both projectile and meelee attacks. What I found odd about both the GUN-D4M and Hydra fights are that the shield breaking isn't based on damage done. Even with a shield that blocks 375 damage, it'll break anyway unless with a perfect guard. Though against GUN-D4M perfect guarding is a less than optimal way to do damage.

Some attacks are shield breaking which means that they will break your shield no matter what unless you perfect guard them. The boars charge attack, GUND4M's hands, the hydra heads and Vilya's charged attack all instantly break your shield unless you perfect guard them. I also don't believe that you beat Winter on Hard with only a wand. That fight must have taken over 10 mintues and I don't think anybody can survive 10 minutes against Winter. I want video proof.

 

[Eman]

Winter isn't that difficult of a boss. I used a wand and auto attacked and (sometimes) got the snow golem to join in on the fray and do some real DPS. Still managed to win in Hard Mode with not many tries.

As for Hydra, it's an extremely easy boss. Choose the Autumn season as the orb spawns and all you have to worry about is a low amount of damage (50 or so if you don't block) and dodging the hydras while "blinded" by spores. Knowing where they'll attack, you can also guess where the heads will be even with the lack of map visibility. If anything, the only thing that the Hydra punishes is not trying to use the orbs to your advantage. The most dangerous is the Winter Hydra. No reason to change the season to winter, unless you want to become some sort of ice-cream for the Hydras. Also to note, the Hydras can be damaged during a different season so it's basically:

The Hydra with the same season will use its ability, if that Hydra is defeated and the other two Hydras are left, they won't use their abilities during the incorrect season. Meaning that all that there is to fight after summer/autumn Hydra are two headbutting Hydras that do little to no damage. It would have been more interesting, and immensely more difficult if there weren't orbs and the season changed after each round of attacks. That would mean actually learning all three Hydra attacks instead of 1.

As to OP's concern about the boss battles, I think the devs are mixing things up decently enough. Phaseman and GUN-D4M were a bit of a concern because i'm not a fan of japanese arcade games(*ahem*

) . Yet that was just one event area, which is the Flying Fortress. Vilya and Teddy/Freddy don't battle that way, nor does Giga Slime. As for the Temple of Seasons, I found the battles with the monsters in the area to be too easy. In fact, during my time there collecting the recipe items, the Frosty Friend was 1 hitting the knights and wizards with the slam attack.

Also @Eman , do you not have points in Shield Bearer/Quick Reflexes? Something like +30% movement while shielding and +37.5% increased "window of opportunity" to make a perfect guard. The movement should be enough to move around while blocking both projectile and meelee attacks. What I found odd about both the GUN-D4M and Hydra fights are that the shield breaking isn't based on damage done. Even with a shield that blocks 375 damage, it'll break anyway unless with a perfect guard. Though against GUN-D4M perfect guarding is a less than optimal way to do damage.

Oh I'm sure my build sucks. I have full points in the electric orbs that deal damage when I attack, the lightning cloud that follows me, and the 2H move that knocks enemies away.

My talents are all about hybridization. I deal extra melee damage after I cast a spell, have increased crit chance/damage, high chance of applying an afix and extra damage for afix'd enemies. Oh, and Frost Nova. That's been helpful. I was hoping I could do well even with a build I made up.

Also, Hydra was doing tons of damage when it landed a headbutt, so maybe you have much better defenses. I have the best gear I know of, but everything still hurts like crazy. Sounds like I'm just not as naturally talented at this type of game as most of you.

 

[Slit08]

I think having these 4 difficulty options is a really, really good way to do this. Because it really helps people adjust the game to their needs, to their personal diffficulty. Most people want to play the game ona very balanced difficulty setting and thus would choose Normal difficulty. Other people want a really tough challenge without having to perfect every mechanic in the game and would thus choose hard difficulties. Other people who are really ahrdcore gamers and laugh be tortured in games and play Touhou or IWBTG fangames all the day will probably choose Nightmare difficulty. And then there's people who don't care much for a challenge and rather want to enjoy the atmosphere and the story of the game and thus would like to choose casual.

So yeah, having a differentiated difficulty setting with four choosable options might be the way to go.
I would make the Hard difficulty slightly easier, just a tiny little bit reducing the speed of few selected boss attacks by a few milliseconds.
Nightmare difficulty on the other hand should be harder than the current Hard difficulty. It should be really insane. I always love to choose Phaseman and GunD4M as prime examples for difficulty due to their bullet hell attacks as it's very easy to describe different difficulty settings by both the number of bullets these guys fire at you and the pattern of bullets. Take GunD4M's final bullet hell attack for example (which btw is a classic avoidance attack in case you weren't familiar with this term.. it's a frequently used form of boss battle or boss fight phase in both Touhou and IWBTG fangames). I think the "new", adjusted Hard difficulty shouldn't change the number of bullets for this attack (other boss battles might need a slight nerf like Winter or the Season Hydra - though really not all that much, just a tiny little bit... Hard should still remain hard after all ). On Nightmare however you could and should go even more insane with the final desperation attack: more bullets, additional bullet patterns and a longer duration of this final phase.
What I would definiately try to avoid though is making Nightmare difficulty too insane by makign each hit an instant kill. I think that would push it too much. Despite all the projectile spam that I would love to see on this difficulty setting I'd hate to die with every single hit I take. The gamage output and the HP of the bosses shouldn't be altered much. I think what would be more interesting is changing the attacks of the bosses by making them attack way faster and throw a lot more things at you.

Personally I'd finish developing all the content for the game and just then start adjusting all the difficulty settings. With a finished game content wise you have all the enemies and especially all of the boss battles in the game and can compare them. I still hope that the further you get into the game the harder the bosses become. The upcoming main boss of the third dungeon should be harder than Winter on all difficulty settings, the main boss of the fourth dungeon should be even harder and the final boss should be your biggest challenge in the game even requiring some skill on Normal difficulty. Despite having 4 difficulty settings there should be a natural difficulty curve during your playthrough. The difficulty shouldn't be all over the place which thankfully you managed to do pretty well so far.

So yeah, that's all I have to say about difficulty settings for this game. As I mentioned I'd personally wait with adjusting the difficulty of already existing bosses until the rest has been finished so that you guys get a better feeling of how to balance all the bosses against each other.

 

[GarlicJelly]

Oh I'm sure my build sucks. I have full points in the electric orbs that deal damage when I attack, the lightning cloud that follows me, and the 2H move that knocks enemies away.

My talents are all about hybridization. I deal extra melee damage after I cast a spell, have increased crit chance/damage, high chance of applying an afix and extra damage for afix'd enemies. Oh, and Frost Nova. That's been helpful. I was hoping I could do well even with a build I made up.

Also, Hydra was doing tons of damage when it landed a headbutt, so maybe you have much better defenses. I have the best gear I know of, but everything still hurts like crazy. Sounds like I'm just not as naturally talented at this type of game as most of you.

Not even with the best gear will you survive more than 4 attacks from any boss on Hard difficulty. Whatever build you're running does not affect your ability to beat bosses (except for maybe Winter) but it does affect how long the fight will be. The less damage your build does the more time the fight will take which means that there will be more time to screw up and get hit. I think it's more than possible to beat the Hydra on Hard with your build if you use the frostling boots. I've beaten it with just Whirlslash on Hard so you should have no problem as long as you have the boots and stay in the winter season.

 

[Eman]

Not even with the best gear will you survive more than 4 attacks from any boss on Hard difficulty. Whatever build you're running does not affect your ability to beat bosses (except for maybe Winter) but it does affect how long the fight will be. The less damage your build does the more time the fight will take which means that there will be more time to screw up and get hit. I think it's more than possible to beat the Hydra on Hard with your build if you use the frostling boots. I've beaten it with just Whirlslash on Hard so you should have no problem as long as you have the boots and stay in the winter season.

And that's exactly how I beat it. Set to Winter Season, equipped boots...which the Dev stated above will be nerfed :-O

Then I proceeded to smash heads while dodging the ice beam. Ice beam doesn't do much damage, but being frozen is a 90% chance at a free headbutt. My biggest qualm after I got the pattern down is the final head takes nearly 0 damage until the end, at which point it switches between headbutts and ice attacks. Which means killing it takes FOREVER. I think the final head should probably just headbutt until it's dead, because at that point you already did the difficult part. No reason to punish the player by making them take 10 more mins to kill the last head.

Still haven't beat Winter, but I've only tried 3 times. After being one shot by the mist, I gave up for the day.

 

[Ardeof]

Not even with the best gear will you survive more than 4 attacks from any boss on Hard difficulty.

Do bosses do 25% hp per attack in Hard mode? I'm quite certain I tried Hard Mode on my main character (shows in the UI that difficulty is set to Hard) and the bosses typically do anywhere from 5% to 10% of my char's max HP. The difference depends on whether i'm wearing Meelee armor or Mage, and what I decide to make max HP (Which can be over 1k).

Just tested on Giga Slime, it does somewhere between 55 to 75 damage (with the hammer attack) when Mage type armor is equipped. With almost 800 HP, that's about 7.5% of Maximum HP. Perhaps my character is in Normal Mode even though I set the difficulty to Hard Mode?

Edit: Also with warrior armor equipped, the Giga Slime averaged about 33 dmg (31 to 35, depending on if more defensive armor was equipped or hp was preferred), and that's 3.2% of max hp (when 940hp), or 3.4% of max hp (when 1020 hp, 18 less defense). This also shows that Max HP gain has to be about 5x greater than 1 Def to be just as efficient. Though i'm uncertain if later on in SoG there'll be monsters that are unique and do flat amounts of damage and whatnot.

 

[GarlicJelly]

Do bosses do 25% hp per attack in Hard mode? I'm quite certain I tried Hard Mode on my main character (shows in the UI that difficulty is set to Hard) and the bosses typically do anywhere from 5% to 10% of my char's max HP. The difference depends on whether i'm wearing Meelee armor or Mage, and what I decide to make max HP (Which can be over 1k).

Just tested on Giga Slime, it does somewhere between 55 to 75 damage (with the hammer attack) when Mage type armor is equipped. With almost 800 HP, that's about 7.5% of Maximum HP. Perhaps my character is in Normal Mode even though I set the difficulty to Hard Mode?

Edit: Also with warrior armor equipped, the Giga Slime averaged about 33 dmg (31 to 35, depending on if more defensive armor was equipped or hp was preferred), and that's 3.2% of max hp (when 940hp), or 3.4% of max hp (when 1020 hp, 18 less defense). This also shows that Max HP gain has to be about 5x greater than 1 Def to be just as efficient. Though i'm uncertain if later on in SoG there'll be monsters that are unique and do flat amounts of damage and whatnot.

Bosses in Hard difficulty don't deal a % based damage but they are most likely based on the average Max HP that a player has when they reach the boss with minimal farming. So a player like me who speedruns Normal difficulty would be around level 19 after beating Winter without farming anything extra. A lvl 19 character has 496 HP without any extra HP items or talents. So, how do you have over 1k HP? I guess this means that the Max HP vs Def is really imbalanced. I guess people should stop looking for DEF gear and look for HP items instead.

 

[GarlicJelly]

And that's exactly how I beat it. Set to Winter Season, equipped boots...which the Dev stated above will be nerfed :-O

Then I proceeded to smash heads while dodging the ice beam. Ice beam doesn't do much damage, but being frozen is a 90% chance at a free headbutt. My biggest qualm after I got the pattern down is the final head takes nearly 0 damage until the end, at which point it switches between headbutts and ice attacks. Which means killing it takes FOREVER. I think the final head should probably just headbutt until it's dead, because at that point you already did the difficult part. No reason to punish the player by making them take 10 more mins to kill the last head.

Still haven't beat Winter, but I've only tried 3 times. After being one shot by the mist, I gave up for the day.

I don't think that the last head should just headbutt but there could be a 10-25% chance that the head will do the special attack instead of the headbutt.

 

[Ardeof]

Bosses in Hard difficulty don't deal a % based damage but they are most likely based on the average Max HP that a player has when they reach the boss with minimal farming. So a player like me who speedruns Normal difficulty would be around level 19 after beating Winter without farming anything extra. A lvl 19 character has 496 HP without any extra HP items or talents. So, how do you have over 1k HP? I guess this means that the Max HP vs Def is really imbalanced. I guess people should stop looking for DEF gear and look for HP items instead.

My character actually lacks all %HP enhancements, such as the pet % bonus and the Talent "Tenacity". What i'm showing is the flat HP of my lvl 21 character. I'll post some images. Bit of a spoiler ahead, skip rest of paragraph if you dislike spoilers: Also I should note that this is a 100% character, so all of the card HP bonuses are in affect (Bloomo + 50, Pecko + 100). That's about 640 at lvl 21 without any HP bonus from cards.

Also, it's the other way around with defense. An 18 defense item is worth around 90 HP. A 5 defense item is worth +25 hp. So if anything defense is overpowered unless, of course, certain monsters/bosses begin to do different types of damage. Then the max hp vs. def would depend on the type of monsters the character is fighting.

 

[GarlicJelly]

My character actually lacks all %HP enhancements, such as the pet % bonus and the Talent "Tenacity". What i'm showing is the flat HP of my lvl 21 character. I'll post some images. Also I should note that this is a 100% character, so all of the card HP bonuses are in affect (Bloomo + 50, Pecko + 100). That's about 640 at lvl 21 without any HP bonus from cards.

Also, it's the other way around with defense. An 18 defense item is worth around 90 HP. A 5 defense item is worth +25 hp. So if anything defense is overpowered unless, of course, certain monsters/bosses begin to do different types of damage. Then the max hp vs. def would depend on the type of monsters the character is fighting.

Actually, if each Def is worth 5 HP then it's more worth to go with all the Max HP items if all you're looking for is to be more tanky. If you're also using 5 talent points to increase your Max HP by another 10% then the difference is almost 100 HP in favour of Max HP and that's just the items counted so if you also add in the base HP of your character then your gear + talent will be even more effective than the Def stats.

It also makes more sense that Winter is easier for you if you have all the cards. But you can't really compare a fully decked out (See what I did there? A card pun..) character to a character that's following the progression without farming everything before moving on to the next area.

 

[Ardeof]

Actually, if each Def is worth 5 HP then it's more worth to go with all the Max HP items if all you're looking for is to be more tanky. If you're also using 5 talent points to increase your Max HP by another 10% then the difference is almost 100 HP in favour of Max HP and that's just the items counted so if you also add in the base HP of your character then your gear + talent will be even more effective than the Def stats.

This is true to an extent. Though I think the Talent "Last Stand" could be worth as much if not more than "Tenacity". 10% Max HP vs. +60% Defense when under 20% hp is quite a lot of defense. That's about a 12 damage reduction (from 31 to 18 or 19). With 940HP, 20% of that is 188. So 187 hp and each attack does 18. That means that the boss would require 10 attacks to deplete the HP pool. Considering that the default damage done is about 7.5%, this means that the defense drastically increases. With some math, this is what a Giga Slime would have to do in order to defeat a Max HP char vs Defense char:

HP Char
Max HP: 1080 (+10%), therefore: 1,188. Damage taken from slime: About 42 (HP shirt instead of Def shirt)
HP Pool: 28.2 attacks. 28-29 attacks from Giga Slime, based on some of the random dmg amounts. If you forego the HP shirt and try the Def shirt, the char would have a 1144 HP pool and take 35 dmg, which would result in Giga Slime requiring 32~33 attacks.

Def Char
Max HP: 940, Damage taken from Giga Slime: About 31. When hp < 20%, +60% def increase. Testing this, the damage from Giga Slime when below 20% hp was about 25. To get below 20% hp, it'd take Giga Slime 25 attacks. From there, there is a damage reduction of 6. Which would mean the Def Char has a defense pool of 25 attacks + 6.6 (165/25). With a bit of rng, that's a total of 30~31 attacks from Giga Slime. That's 1~2 more attacks.

So as a summary, it really does come down to a mixture of both items. Going full HP isn't optimal, and going full Def isn't either. For a bit more theory fun, a 940HP Def char with Tenacity instead of Last Stand would have a HP pool of 1,044 and require 33~34 attacks. This would also suggest that Tenacity is a much better Talent to choose than Last Stand, even with lower HP. Just to make certain, if the HP char (1,040 HP, since that was the better result, the 10% being 1,144) chose Last Stand, they'd take 23~24 attacks from Giga Slime and with Last Stand Giga Slime would have to do 5~7 more attacks. Which would be a total of 28~31 attacks. That's an average of 3~5 more attacks just because of using Tenacity instead of Last Stand.

Now that i'm looking at these numbers, i'm thinking i'll change my character's Talent from Last Stand to Tenacity... haha..

Edit: Also forgot to switch to the Mage Accessories when calculating the Mage HP, so the mage actually only has an updated amount of 869 compared to the previous 940 (When wearing +75hp pendants). Bit of an oversight there. While the magic damage is significantly different, the difference between two hitting Giga Slime and 3 hitting Giga Slime isn't that great of a difference. I suppose this is a bit of a derailing of OP's thread though. Sorry about that Eman.

 

[Ardeof]

Still haven't beat Winter, but I've only tried 3 times. After being one shot by the mist, I gave up for the day.

Winter just takes a bit of learning, similar to the Hydras. I think it'll just take a couple more tries and then you'll start seeing most of his patterns, and then the amount of damage taken will decrease and as a result you'll find that Winter has many limitations.