General Gameplay Discussion

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Shield toss is OK, but it's slow at doing damage.

I'll look into those buffs.

This perk here does the trick:




That said, you will make the most use of it when running a Reaper build, which goes heavy on Duration abilities. I run 3 Duration abilities and have Immovable at all times.

With the other specializations though, things are different. Haven't tried the Slayer yet, and tried the Champion for a bit - the latter focuses heavily on shielding and parrying, and triggering AoE effects every successful parry.

I'm biased since I built the systems and did the balance buuuuut this sorta falls into three camps:
1. Player doesn't understand the Layer/Resistance system and is on a higher difficulty so theyre doing basically 0 damage with their kit
2. Player has a bad build/doesn't understand how to itemize properly
3. Player is crit rushing and is very underleveled (this one is the only one I would say is a reasonable criticism, though it was intentional to get Players to feel stronger if they actually invested).

I would definitely argue none of the enemies have much health if you know what you're doing but that gap between doing it 'properly' vs. not is extreme, especially as you turn up the difficulty.

Apologies, I used terms im used to for these things - theyre a little ambiguous.

Layers = armor, barrier, blight barrier. This is the extra bar over top of health. For example, Armor takes much more damage from heavy attacks but reduced from other ones. The higher the difficulty the more that reduction increases.

Resistances = % damage reduced based on damage type. Each enemy has 1 resistance and 1 vulnerability. The resistance value increases as you turn up difficulty to the point where enemies on nightmare have max resistance.
There are both tutorials as well as recurring hints for the layer ones if Players are failing them.

Crit rushing is a phrase we used for players who do only the critical path quests and nothing else. The enemies (with some exceptions) scale to player level so it's less about scaling and more that the curve of progression for enemies assumes a certain level of gear progression. So if a player is just skipping everything they will have very low rarity and rank gear and the enemies will outpace them. This is especially true on higher difficulties as the curve is steeper.

As for critical hit damage, it's a multiplier at a specific step in the formula after stats, skills, layers, and then creature resistance. The maths are hidden almost entirely because it just ends up confusing people more unfortunately.

Hope that helps! I'm happy to dig into more specifics if you had any other questions 😀

I imagine this criticism is similar to that of Final Fantasy VII Remake players who had difficulty with a particular boss called 

A lot of players thought this boss was tough as nails, when it really wasn't. One theory I read is that this was the first time in the game where you really needed to inspect the enemy to see what their weaknesses were. Until that point, you could just waltz through the game without ever bothering to check enemy weaknesses and adapting your play style to match, so if players never learned how to use the game systems before (because they didn't need to), they were getting slaughtered.

When I played Veilguard, I had the impression enemies died quickly, so yeah, I think your suggestion that players may not have learned the game systems is reasonable. e.g. attacking darkspawn with necrotic attacks, fighting fire dragons with fire, saving up abilities for later, not using companion abilities, and so on.

What you're 'supposed' to do is use the Runes that damage convert, get penetration, or build a slightly more versatile character. In reality, however, people typically just smash their heads against the wall until it works. And yes, loadouts was actually something we just couldnt quite fit in, unfortunately because it would have made a big difference on Nightmare especially.

Well, Cressida is well on her way to romancing Taash....And ready to head to Weishaupt with Naelana. Cressida has a few outstanding Contracts to settle though, like the ones she just got from Emmerich and Harding.