The game is too easy and every build becomes OP way too fast.

[faverodefavero]

Asside from the major things that have already been said, god damn this game is easy. Throwing granades and using medicine should have a maximum number of sucessive uses, like 2 or 3, tied to a perk or somthing and after that enter a minute or two colldown. Also, number of granades, medicine and food trough out the game, found randomly, should be reduced to five times less. I'm not even kiding. Easy change to make.

 

[DKDArtagnan]

You don't need legendary hacks to be vastly overpowered as a Netrunner in this game, because the problem isn't the damage itself - but the inability of the enemies to effectively respond when being attacked at range and the player is hidden (or moves away).

I was overpowered against "Very High" targets on "Very Hard" difficulty with not a single Rare Hack (I had one, but didn't use it) - around level 6 or 7. The combination of Breach Protocol damage resistance lowering - and the +100% damage to unaware enemies meant I could utterly obliterate Very High threat targets at range, with zero challenge or issue. Enemy Netrunners rarely do anything - and when they do, you simply move out of range and you're safe.

The scaling itself is awfully simplistic - but the core issue is that they implemented a bunch of tools for the player - that the enemies can't do anything about.

Same goes for ranged attacks through walls. If you stand beneath or above the place you're shooting at - the enemies won't be able to find you. They simply go back to non-alerted state after a minute or so.

So, not only are you outlevelling 90% of the content way, way before the level cap - meaning you're dealing more damage to them than you would ever need, they also neglected to put into place ceilings for crit chance and crit damage - meaning you will be absurdly above the damage potential that would make anything a remote challenge.

But, again, that's just icing on this cake of zero balance effort.

The core issue is the AI and the slow responses to attacks.

Furthermore, if you invest even a little into body/health - and melee skills, you can simply run fast and slaughter everything in sight - because they're TOO SLOW to respond. This is made worse by slow-mo stuff and armor cyberware - where you're literally immortal.

Then we have the no-cooldown no-limit health injectors - that you can spam and indefinitely stay at 100% health. What's even worse than that, is that you will have dozens or even hundreds of those at low levels, if you pick them up.

Everything about balance in this game is a complete mess.

That's unfortunate enough, but it doesn't exactly help that people who have no idea what the game is actually like - who focus on the story exclusively and don't actually think about combat balance are constantly saying that "it's fine, I like it as it is".

That will not help them and it will NOT help game balance. If you enjoy zero challenge and you don't like to put any effort into developing or optimizing your character - that's completely cool. Games are for everyone.

But that's what Normal mode is for.

Very Hard should be...... Very hard.

Right now, all difficulties are utterly trivial after level 5 - if you put any points into damage skills or use ANY weapon effectively.

It's a travesty.

 

[strangerism]

very much true but this is the pleasure of playing an rpg where with some effort and planning you can twink your char to become hard to beat. Said that a bit of balance is necessary.

I think some of the unbalance comes from mods, for instance the armadillo mod doesn't scale quite well with gear type. I can put a +100 armour mod on a hat that has 30 innate armour, it doesn't make much sense when I can put the same mod into a jacket that has innate armour of 100.

Also if the ui showed items level it would be much easier to spot where the inbalance issues are, at the moment everything is too opaque

 

[DKDArtagnan]

very much true but this is the pleasure of playing an rpg where with some effort and planning you can twink your char to become hard to beat. Said that a bit of balance is necessary.

I think some of the unbalance comes from mods, for instance the armadillo mod doesn't scale quite well with gear type. I can put a +100 armour mod on a hat that has 30 innate armour, it doesn't make much sense when I can put the same mod into a jacket that has innate armour of 100.

Also if the ui showed items level it would be much easier to spot where the inbalance issues are, at the moment everything is too opaque

Mods are absurdly powerful, yes. But you don't actually need them at all. They're just more damage on top of alreadly absurdly high damage.

I agree that there should be a reward for investing wisely towards the latter half of a well balanced RPG.

However, you shouldn't be trivially killing everything with zero effort starting at level 5, which you can easily do now. Yes, after Act 2 begins - you CAN meet enemies that will be challenging with simplistic gun/melee builds, but that's because they're 10+ levels above you and simply take a long time to kill. You can still do it easily with hacking or ranged stealth attacks - you just need to be patient. That's not meaningful in any way.

Also, if you want to be rewarded early - play Normal. They even worded the difficulties in that way.

Very Hard is INTENDED to be challenging throughout - and should REQUIRE an optimal character for the majority of the game.

It isn't even remotely like that now.

While the math would be nice to have exposed - it doesn't really take a genius to see that killing Very High threat enemies with zero effort means that the math is off.

About the only thing that's so-so and halfway decent is enemy damage at Very Hard - because they CAN kill you quickly for the most part when you're exposed (though you can always spam health inhalers), at least until you buy Cyberware armor, at which point they really can't.

 

[ottffss1]

I think balance can be fixed simpler than reworking the whole ai and adding more/ special enemies now that I think of it - maybe tweaks.

-of course values on weapons/ abilities and cooldowns and ram cos of hacks has to be adjusted, as well as the weapons and perks.
-hacking should only be possible/ or the more complex hacks at least if you physically jack into an enemy (like the 2018 trailer)
-keep your street cred locked to your mac level, so you can't get ridiculous gold cyberware early
-tone down the effectiveness of health stims
-This is most important: all the COOL TOOLS at the players' disposal - tech rifles that shot through walls/ cc hack effects like blindness and root shoot be given to enemies as well so they can use that stuff against the player. Imagine going into a compound with a bunch of enemies with tech rifles and if you alert them well you're gonna be shot at from all floors, rooted, blinded etc.

 

[DKDArtagnan]

Giving enemies Tech Rifles and having them use them effectively would demonstrate why they probably shouldn't be in the game, because you will be one-shot with zero ways to defend against them.

That's not challenge, that's just dumb.

It's OK for players to get them - but it should be late in the game, and the enemy AI MUST respond effectively when their buddy is head-shot through a wall. As in, they should start moving aggressively and seeking you out FAST - instead of standing around waiting to get shot, or - even worse - go out of alerted state and pretend nothing happened - so you can headshot them again.

 

[HipsterJesus42]

very much true but this is the pleasure of playing an rpg where with some effort and planning you can twink your char to become hard to beat. Said that a bit of balance is necessary.

I think some of the unbalance comes from mods, for instance the armadillo mod doesn't scale quite well with gear type. I can put a +100 armour mod on a hat that has 30 innate armour, it doesn't make much sense when I can put the same mod into a jacket that has innate armour of 100.

Also if the ui showed items level it would be much easier to spot where the inbalance issues are, at the moment everything is too opaque

I definitely agree that some balance is needed. The flat numbered mods are not "meant" to be used early game. You need slots to put them in, and a source of better quality ones. But, both of those things are very easy to find if you look for them. To me the problem is less the mods themselves and more the availability of them at early stages of the game. And while it's true that you can put them on grievously underpowered gear and breeze through the game, this is also the only way to keep items which you can't afford to level viable. It's a matter of making the game harder or making it more accessible. As this is the kind of decision that would affect people on all difficulties, and it's a AAA game, they'll probably always fall on the side of accessibility.

 

[Sanctuary777]

You don't need legendary hacks to be vastly overpowered as a Netrunner in this game, because the problem isn't the damage itself - but the inability of the enemies to effectively respond when being attacked at range and the player is hidden (or moves away).

I was overpowered against "Very High" targets on "Very Hard" difficulty with not a single Rare Hack (I had one, but didn't use it) - around level 6 or 7. The combination of Breach Protocol damage resistance lowering - and the +100% damage to unaware enemies meant I could utterly obliterate Very High threat targets at range, with zero challenge or issue. Enemy Netrunners rarely do anything - and when they do, you simply move out of range and you're safe.

This is technically true, but I wouldn't say you were "overpowered" by that point since at that level, and with such a low ram, you're sitting around for ages waiting for it to replenish just so you can actually use another hack, if you have enough ram to even cast one in the first place. At that point in the game, cheese mode is just using a TECH sniper since the enemies effectively can't do anything about like you said (distance).

So, not only are you outlevelling 90% of the content way, way before the level cap - meaning you're dealing more damage to them than you would ever need, they also neglected to put into place ceilings for crit chance and crit damage - meaning you will be absurdly above the damage potential that would make anything a remote challenge.

But, again, that's just icing on this cake of zero balance effort.

They kind of balanced crit chance and crit damage. Really! Currently, having more than 1 crit chance and 1 crit damage mod in your clothing (but they absolutely cannot be in the same piece of clothing) do not stack at all. No idea if that's intentional, or a bug, but the Deadeye mod that adds both 15% crit chance and 30% damage doesn't even work at all period.

I definitely agree that some balance is needed. The flat numbered mods are not "meant" to be used early game. You need slots to put them in, and a source of better quality ones. But, both of those things are very easy to find if you look for them. To me the problem is less the mods themselves and more the availability of them at early stages of the game. And while it's true that you can put them on grievously underpowered gear and breeze through the game, this is also the only way to keep items which you can't afford to level viable. It's a matter of making the game harder or making it more accessible. As this is the kind of decision that would affect people on all difficulties, and it's a AAA game, they'll probably always fall on the side of accessibility.

Developers that actually put any effort into the difficulties do more than simply inflate health pools or damage. They also change the way other modifiers work, which is what needs to be done with this game above Normal. As far as "accessibility" goes, since around 2007 or so, all of the difficulty options have effectively dropped one tier in AAA games, where Normal became the new Easy and Hard was the default Normal from before that period. It's a similar issue with this game, except the difficulty quickly suicides off the top of the Arasaka building even on Very Hard.

 

[strangerism]

Mods are absurdly powerful, yes. But you don't actually need them at all. They're just more damage on top of alreadly absurdly high damage.

I agree that there should be a reward for investing wisely towards the latter half of a well balanced RPG.

However, you shouldn't be trivially killing everything with zero effort starting at level 5, which you can easily do now. Yes, after Act 2 begins - you CAN meet enemies that will be challenging with simplistic gun/melee builds, but that's because they're 10+ levels above you and simply take a long time to kill. You can still do it easily with hacking or ranged stealth attacks - you just need to be patient. That's not meaningful in any way.

Also, if you want to be rewarded early - play Normal. They even worded the difficulties in that way.

Very Hard is INTENDED to be challenging throughout - and should REQUIRE an optimal character for the majority of the game.

It isn't even remotely like that now.

While the math would be nice to have exposed - it doesn't really take a genius to see that killing Very High threat enemies with zero effort means that the math is off.

About the only thing that's so-so and halfway decent is enemy damage at Very Hard - because they CAN kill you quickly for the most part when you're exposed (though you can always spam health inhalers), at least until you buy Cyberware armor, at which point they really can't.

I agree, when I said we need item level shown is so we can find out the source of the problem more clearly. Right now is impossible to see if the armour of an item is balanced or not as there is no level indication that allows us to compare it with other items. that's all

Also I am playing at lvl30 on very hard (body 6 no perks, plenty of armour buffs from cool) sure I can kill fast but I can get easily killed as well, e.g. snipers or shootgun types can almost one shot me and rifle and pistols guy can take me down with 4/5 if I don't heal.

So very hard is still quite hard if it sends you to the reload screen when you're not careful/reactive enough or don't cheat the ai with stealth

 

[DKDArtagnan]

CDPR will probably spend the next few months desperately trying to make this game run on last-gen consoles.

Even when they had all the success and popularity in the world with W3 - they never bothered to balance it propely. W3 was also a pushover in the early game on Death March, once you got over the initial hurdle of absurdly high damage enemies (their way of "balancing" the game).

No, if this game will ever be remotely balanced, it will be due to the modding community - and it will take many months, if not a few years.

 

[strangerism]

This is technically true, but I wouldn't say you were "overpowered" by that point since at that level, and with such a low ram, you're sitting around for ages waiting for it to replenish just so you can actually use another hack, if you have enough ram to even cast one in the first place. At that point in the game, cheese mode is just using a TECH sniper since the enemies effectively can't do anything about like you said (distance).



They kind of balanced crit chance and crit damage. Really! Currently, having more than 1 crit chance and 1 crit damage mod in your clothing (but they absolutely cannot be in the same piece of clothing) do not stack at all. No idea if that's intentional, or a bug, but the Deadeye mod that adds both 15% crit chance and 30% damage doesn't even work at all period.

I tried to look at the stats window in the char screen and the numbers in there never quite made sense. It's is very hard to discern what works or not and how at the moment

 

[DKDArtagnan]

This is technically true, but I wouldn't say you were "overpowered" by that point since at that level, and with such a low ram, you're sitting around for ages waiting for it to replenish just so you can actually use another one. At that point in the game, cheese mode is just using a TECH sniper since the enemies effectively can't do anything about like you said (distance).

You don't have low ram. You simply hack access points to get money - and you dismantle items to sell crafting components. I had Rare cyberdecks with 8+ Memory very early on in the game. You get street cred like crazy doing random missions and gigs. Nothing is really gated behind the level itself that I've found - except the better hacks, which you don't need.

Also, with the right perks, you can get Breach Protocol to a state where you don't need much RAM at all.

As I said, it was trivial - and I mean that.

They kind of balanced crit chance and crit damage. Really! Currently, having more than 1 crit chance and 1 crit damage mod in your clothing (but they absolutely cannot be in the same piece of clothing) do not stack at all. No idea if that's intentional, or a bug, but the Deadeye mod that adds both 15% crit chance and 30% damage doesn't even work at all period.

Kind of balanced? What about the 60% crit chance armor mods? I've seen countless reports of 100% crit chance from several people.

Games should have a crit cap to avoid the absurdities of that sort of thing. Either that, or you better be VERY competent when you're balancing your game around scaling enemies.

CDPR obviously either don't care - or don't have the time or understanding it takes to accomplish balance in even the remotest of ways.

 

[Aetrion]

The scaling itself is awfully simplistic - but the core issue is that they implemented a bunch of tools for the player - that the enemies can't do anything about.

I think you can break down the balance problems with this game into two distinct core issues:
1. The player has tools that the enemies cannot counter in any way.
2. The players stats scale way faster than the enemies' when you actually collect good gear and pick effective perks.

 

[Attidd]

TBF most snipers are op, esp to head. As they should be

In other games snipers are countered by the level design. For example you inevitably have to move in eventually, and if you keep sniping enemies in metal gear solid then someone is going to find their corpse and alert everyone. Once they're alerted helicopters come in, the mission gets harder as everyone gets more defensive and reinforcements start to appear. Some games have drones that fly up to approach you, and enemies will have their own snipers gunning for you.

But in this game there's no AI to come after you, also you can snipe through walls. I think people are missing a lot of context as to what makes sniping good in other games but bad in this game.

It sucks that a lot of people don't understand how important level design and enemy design is in games. Doesn't matter how much you nerf the perks or weapons in this game. The awful design and AI is severely holding this game back from being as good as other games.

 

[Sanctuary777]

You don't have low ram. You simply hack access points to get money - and you dismantle items to sell crafting components. I had Rare cyberdecks with 8+ Memory very early on in the game. You get street cred like crazy doing random missions and gigs. Nothing is really gated behind the level itself that I've found - except the better hacks, which you don't need.

Also, with the right perks, you can get Breach Protocol to a state where you don't need much RAM at all.

As I said, it was trivial - and I mean that.

You're being completely disingenuous. The 14K deck is super easy to get, which I never said to the contrary, but it's insufficient to be "overpowered" through hacking alone at that level and difficulty. When facing Very High threats on Very Hard, your hack costs skyrocket. So yes, you will have a low ram count compared to what it costs to hack an enemy and you will be waiting for a very long time to clear them all out that way. Ram regeneration is extremely slow prior to having a lot invested into the trees or having the Memory Boost cyberware that returns ram on a kill.

You must also not have actually been paying attention, but there are quite a lot of enemies that you can't even use Breach on for whatever reason. Besides that, you won't have 37 street cred at level 7, it's not possible. By the time you get that much, you would be at least level 12, if not much higher. So you claiming things aren't "gated" is again, disingenuous because you have to actually be doing the gigs or side missions to even reach higher levels of street credit, which in turn also forces you to level up.

 

[Attidd]

very much true but this is the pleasure of playing an rpg where with some effort and planning you can twink your char to become hard to beat. Said that a bit of balance is necessary.

I think some of the unbalance comes from mods, for instance the armadillo mod doesn't scale quite well with gear type. I can put a +100 armour mod on a hat that has 30 innate armour, it doesn't make much sense when I can put the same mod into a jacket that has innate armour of 100.

Also if the ui showed items level it would be much easier to spot where the inbalance issues are, at the moment everything is too opaque

In other RPG's the AI actually tries to kill you though. It doesn't take effort or planning to become impossible to beat. Grab ANY tech weapon and shoot through walls, it doesn't matter if you have 0 perks and it's a crappy tech gun with no mods. You will still kill everything just fine on very hard. Seriously, go to any store and buy a cyberdeck and just spam contagion on enemies, did that require effort or planning to do that? no. Is your definition of planning to just grab all perks that increase damage, move your crosshair on the enemy and then one hit kill them?

 

[mewpokemon]

I must confess, I didn't try to abuse the system on my first run though and did the story very quickly so didn't notice many of the problems but I was aware of the possibility.

I also haven't really tried the netrunner stuff until now and still only dabbling.

But I read here that you don't need to make a physical breach on a network to infiltrate it? At all? And you can turn everything into nuclear bombs? Ridiculous! Why is anything other than devices so directly connected? It goes against the mythology IMHO...

And they have no idea or even reaction to your doing breaches on them as a target? Aren't we given notifications? Someone in a team should be able to react or they should raise an alarm of some kind?

"Hey, you know, I'm sure someone tried to log my local node at work today, honey?"

Once you have breached any old thing, you can access anything connected to it at all? And people/enemies are always connected to something?

Worse, they can't react at all to pure damage from snipers, even?

I don't get the slow time stuff. Don't you already get bonuses to speed and automatic evasion?

I am more and more perplexed by how this game isn't what it seemed to be.

 

[strangerism]

I must confess, I didn't try to abuse the system on my first run though and did the story very quickly so didn't notice many of the problems but I was aware of the possibility.

I also haven't really tried the netrunner stuff until now and still only dabbling.

But I read here that you don't need to make a physical breach on a network to infiltrate it? At all? And you can turn everything into nuclear bombs? Ridiculous! Why is anything other than devices so directly connected? It goes against the mythology IMHO...

And they have no idea or even reaction to your doing breaches on them as a target? Aren't we given notifications? Someone in a team should be able to react or they should raise an alarm of some kind?

"Hey, you know, I'm sure someone tried to log my local node at work today, honey?"

Once you have breached any old thing, you can access anything connected to it at all? And people/enemies are always connected to something?

Worse, they can't react at all to pure damage from snipers, even?

I don't get the slow time stuff. Don't you already get bonuses to speed and automatic evasion?

I am more and more perplexed by how this game isn't what it seemed to be.

like you said and the poster who replied me, most of the systems are not balanced against us. An enemy should be able to counter attack you hacking him and at the same time there should be perks that mitigate such resistences. So far netrunning seems quite arcadey.

I got to say though that sometimes many quickhacks are disabled on some enemies, maybe there is some blocking intelligence based checks (my int is at 5 and I am lvl30 something)

 

[ottffss1]

I must confess, I didn't try to abuse the system on my first run though and did the story very quickly so didn't notice many of the problems but I was aware of the possibility.

I also haven't really tried the netrunner stuff until now and still only dabbling.

But I read here that you don't need to make a physical breach on a network to infiltrate it? At all? And you can turn everything into nuclear bombs? Ridiculous! Why is anything other than devices so directly connected? It goes against the mythology IMHO...

And they have no idea or even reaction to your doing breaches on them as a target? Aren't we given notifications? Someone in a team should be able to react or they should raise an alarm of some kind?

"Hey, you know, I'm sure someone tried to log my local node at work today, honey?"

Once you have breached any old thing, you can access anything connected to it at all? And people/enemies are always connected to something?

Worse, they can't react at all to pure damage from snipers, even?

I don't get the slow time stuff. Don't you already get bonuses to speed and automatic evasion?

I am more and more perplexed by how this game isn't what it seemed to be.

Nope, they streamlined hacking from the 2018 trailer to make it easier, all you need is your scanner. So you can safely kill a whole warehouse or base of enemies from a mile away inside your car if you just hack into their camera system and they don't know what to do to you because the ai doesn't react to that stuff.

If you start uploading hacks one after another enemies do sometimes use an ability called "reveal position" on you but they don't do it fast enough, and even after your position is revealed if you are far away and hacking through a camera they don't run to you and just stand around are are helpless.

Also at some point after epic/ legendary hacks they scale so much that one mass aoe damage hack like contagion will start to kill multiple enemies at a time with only one hack.

 

[BxBaracus]

They should also reduce the amount of legendary/iconic items u find ,completely for free with no level requirement.
Locking them behind a boss fight or tough area to clear, fine, but right now u can pretty much accidently find legendary/iconic op weapons early on.

I found a legedary overture very early on with 300 base damage , with very high crit chance and damage , still use it, havent upgraded it once an i make 5000 damage per headshot, found legendary police sunglasses at the same spot 3 armour mod slots, and at this point my sun glasses had more armour than any other pieces combined.

Or iconic fenrir , just makes insane amount of burn damage , better then 90 pecent of smg u find afterwards.