Heh. I sure walked into that one. “Phrasing!”
Update is out
2 new adventures in 2022
pvp mode
Social lobby
non-Vr version in April 2022
Some first impressions:
The new scenario has more drastic new gameplay elements, unlike Dungeon 2 darkness, like water puddles (protect against fire damage, but extra damage against freeze and it seems it can cause chain reaction for electrical damage, at least it happens with the stun spell), new enemies (there is a river serpent who can summon big water waves which pushes allies and enemies 3 or 4 tiles, changing the positioning of everyone, and creating new puddles in the process, also can teleport to other water puddles, there is a shaman who can use the water to summon new root doggies), and the bard is cool:
-He is melee fighter/support, 3 dmg on attack
-He has a reusable song (like mage stun or hunter arrows) called Bravery I which give -1 dmg recieved for 4 turns to an ally. Casting it again in someone seems to modify it to Bravery II which adds +1 dmg done.
-He has some spells, like a silence aoe, a tornado summon (which can damage your allies, careful), a sustained aoe healing, and a damage/confusion aoe spell.
You are in the US? I potentially could tomorrow, but I’m in Europe, gmt+1. edit: oh you are in Australia. When do you can in your early morning ?
LOL Australia internet truly sucks. It’s a small game.
edit: game is on sale on Steam, btw
I’m going for lunch in 20 mins, so a bit too late now. Maybe tomorrow?
You up for a game now?
Lol yeah, I was thinking that the time difference is too much to make this practical.
edit: and lol at the thought of waking up at 6am on Saturday for a video game :P
I have done three attempts in the new scenario, and I can say the final boss can fuck off. It’s the hardest one so far, enough to say it needs tweaking. Or for the devs to implement a difficulty setting, as the game lacks one right now. If you thought the second boss was hard, this is worse.
It’s a dual boss, both with high hp.
They are immune to most (all?) CC, silences, etc. I think basically the single immunity they don’t have is poison immunity.
Unlike the first two scenario’s bosses, they are immune to hunter’s mark. Why? Because screw you, that’s why.
One of them has replenishing armor and summon lots of roots around you, and can heal with rain.
The root spam means that the cannons, ballistas and others allies are less effective, as they randomly attack to any enemy entity, and it seems they prioritize enemies with less hp, so they waste their turns in the roots instead of the real enemies.
The roots smack you, making you jump to a random tile, sometimes a room away, separating your team.
The other boss is a ranged enemy, with a chain lightning ability that depletes fast your heal.
I have not played the new scenario yet, but as much as I love Demeo, I get the feeling the dev team struggles on balancing. The first scenario was too easy. The second one was much harder and with annoying mechanics that made it not fun. It sounds like the third one is a pain at the boss fight. I still think (or thought before this new content if it’s changed) classes could use a balance pass as the mage is clearly the least fun as the player is a stun bot for everyone else with some boom a few times per game. Hunter’s Mark and the Coin radically shifted key fights in nearly broken ways. Yet that state of “balance” has persisted for a long time.
The difficulty goes 1st dungeon < 2nd dungeon < 3rd dungeon so I wonder if it actually is intended or what. I would prefer if they all had the same difficulty and then players could choose easy / medium / hard very hard in a normal difficulty setting.
Yeah.
1= so easy it’s like a tutorial
2= feel about right, but with annoying darkness mechanics that let monsters attack you from across the map through terrain issues or darkness where you cannot attack the same monsters attacking you
3=don’t know
I think a difficulty slider would be nice, but it feels like a bigger problem than that. Take out Coin and Mark and keep the mid boss spawn rate of the second scenario, and the first one would be waaaay harder.
Some runs successes I had depended a lot of what I could buy in the shop just before (Mark for the boss, ballistas, summon elemental) so yeah maybe it needs a bit more of balancing.
For now, I’d say the bard seems slightly weaker than the others classes.
I’ve had three runs on the Roots of Evil module. First attempt, I actually died on the first level - just overwhelmed by the number of monsters. Second attempt, more cautious, but couldn’t figure out how to kill the Root Lord boss because he kept replenishing his shields and I never seemed to do any damage to it. So despite having four ballistas and a healing ward and several summons, I got completed annihilated by being thrown all over the place.
After a quick check on the internet… Turns out the Sigataurian Javelin that you get from the new Sigataur monster not only removes a massive chunk of the Root Lord’s health but also removes all their armour. So on my second run, he only managed to use his roots ability once before I killed him in a couple of rounds. The other boss seems to either create rain or use lightning, but if you put down a Lure she just runs towards the lure and doesn’t even attack it, just stands there while you beat her down. Again, stupidly easy.
The sad thing about this is that this new adventure is actually quite well balanced except for the bosses. Then they’re either almost impossible (if you don’t have the lance and a lure) or too easy (if you do). Shame really. Previous OP tactics like using the coin or hunters mark on bosses dont work here, but they’ve just added other tricks instead.
Overall though still my favourite module - I like the new monsters which are challenging.
Coin doesn’t work in the bosses since ages ago. The text description indicates it now.
The first boss is easy, so no comments in that.
The second one is hard, but he is vulnerable to hunter’s mark. That together poison’s arrow and he can be killed, while the rest of the team keeps the rats at bay. But he is too binary, playing with the hunter vs playing without her makes a ton of difference.
The third boss is invulnerable to hunter’s mark. Which feels cheap, they just gave them a new invulnerability type just for that single card effect that no one else in the game have, just to avoid being killed with that. I would prefer if they rebalance the card (maybe do +50% dmg to all bosses instead of +100%), instead of introducing weird exceptions.
They fight is also designed in a way that ally spam (rats, wolf, elemental, ballistas, etc) is less useful.
What I didn’t know was about the spear. Thanks for the hint, although again it reinforces the notion that they want you to discover the specific gimmick of each scenario to beat it, instead of using a balanced approach of solid tactics in general.
Yes the contrast between Demeo balance and my other favourite (non-VR) dungeon crawler Gloomhaven is massive. The latter is so finely balanced that after 3 hours of play it still always seems to come down to a last turn win or loss…
I wasn’t aware of the pedigree of some of the creators
Left 4 Dead, Valve stuff, Nox.
New article:
Demeo’s PC version is a cool TRPG hangout that probably won’t get as many players as it deserves | Rock Paper Shotgun
It looks pretty cool. I skim read half the article, and I got Wildermyth vibes from it :).
You can try the demo of the 2d version here
I hadn’t play in the last two months, so I decided to do a game today…
I actually wanted to try this, but I found no Sigataurian dude on the second floor, I even explored a bit more than I had to finish the floor, but no dice.
In any case, even without the Javelin I could finally beat the bosses of the third dungeon.
…because it’s clear they have nerfed the shit out of the encounter. It’s notably easier now, easier than the rat boss of the second floor imo (unless they have changed it too). Specifically, now the boss floor is more empty, they have removed lots of base enemies that the floor started with, so now you can focus on the bosses much harder.
Although my impression that the boss isn’t fun to play against because the immunities is still true. It feels so stupid to have hands full of cards and not being able to use anything against them:
Charm, Mark cards from Hunter? Nope, immune!
Confusion, lock abilities from Bard? Nope, immune!
Blind, Panic, Stun, Frozen, Tangled? No, no, no, and no.
I would prefer if they game balanced depended more on ‘resistances’ than ‘immunities’.
edit: I just watched a video with a good tactic against this boss, I don’t know how I didn’t think of it before. He has 4 shields and regenerate 3 per turn, so the way to beat him is to do all the attacks possible in a single turn, to maximize damage. That means using all the 0 cost cards possible, from the throw acid and throw bone cards (which does low damage, but any damage will subtract one shield), to the ‘one more thing’ card that gives an extra action. And of course, if possible, the 500g card that drops the ceiling on enemies with multiple attacks is good against him.