Well, it’s pretty rough. The good news is I’ve figured this all out and settled on a strategy.
The first thing I did was play the first DLC story mission. It’s level 200 but you can’t actually die. That mission gives you some basic level 200 equipment. Then I unlocked a level 300 side mission on Chaos difficulty. I farmed that for 15 minutes. Now I had a decent set of equipment near level 300.
The goal of the DLC is to play through a bunch of missions on Bahamut difficulty to earn items that unlock story progress. The minimum mission level on that difficulty is 200. Should be no problem with my level 300 equipment, right? Well the stages are fun but the bosses are still extremely challenging. The scaling is pretty messed up, and it feels like your break gauge goes down super fast now.
After struggling with the elemental boss for an hour, I decided to give in and start using the cheat mode they built into the DLC for content tourists. It gives you infinite break gauge at the cost of fewer mission rewards. Since I wasn’t going to use the low-level equipment from the missions anyway, I figured this was the way to go. It’s not necessary for the regular enemies but I think it’s going to come in handy for the bosses. I just started a new mission to put my theory to the test.
Overall this DLC is really poor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they retune the whole thing for the second DLC. In the meantime there are ways to move past it. With the cheat mode, there are certain obscure builds that literally become invincible due to the infinite break gauge. It just seems silly to force casual players to figure that out.
Cross-posting from the GotM thread, but I finally dug into Trials of the Dragon King.
Feelings are a bit more mixed on this one. It adds a new weapon type, three jobs, and two boss fights, which are all solid enough, and a new difficulty mode. But no new main missions, no new enemy types, and no enemy placement variations in existing missions, all of which did a lot to make the Nioh games feel fresh after adding their DLC. And the new difficulty setting is heavily reliant on self-balancing, with needing me to both set the mission level and apply optional debuffs for greater rewards, which is a paradigm I’ve never been a fan of. All that said, the combat is still a lot of fun, and it was good to have a reason to dip back in for another dozen-odd hours and experiment with some new builds.
And yeah, like @TimJames, I wound up just jumping 100+ levels at once. Started out playing “normally”, doing a few missions at levels around my actual gear level, but progress was very slow and I soon realized that going straight to 400 and killing a few basic enemies was a much easier way to gear up.
Also, I’m not a big achievement guy, but it’s a bit shitty of them to add new achievements with the DLC on consoles, but not for the Epic version.
Anyway, hoping for something a bit more substantive for Wanderer of the Rift.
DLC2 is out, but the option to start it doesn’t even appear until you’ve completed DLC1, which I haven’t. I guess I’ll get to this sometime in 2023.
Definitely one of the weirdest DLC plans I’ve ever seen. I suspect it’s less expensive to design and test it this way, so the whole thing ends up feeling cheap.
One general-interest note: the latest patch made a change that has thrown the theory crafting farmers for a loop, but also made other things easier and more powerful. There’s a lot here for them to crunch on. Note you do NOT need to get into that for the base game. My earlier concern about the DLC still applies, so take caution buying the season pass if you dislike that kind of thing.
I’ve been playing Wanderer of the Rift (DLC 2) for the past week or so, and just finished the main story mode. Overall, I’m really happy with it.
For one thing, the structure is definitely a lot closer to what I was hoping for than DLC1 was. In DLC1, I never liked the whole process of having to granularly dial in your own difficulty settings by picking both the trials modifiers and the mission level, and then just going back through the original story missions with higher enemy stats but no changes to placement or level gimmicks. With DLC2, the structure is based around getting you right into the combat, with a choice of portals to different randomized encounters.
The new systems give a bunch of different bars to fill, monster stories to progress, and bonuses to mix and match, which is generally effective at giving a little extra long-term structure to the endless fighting. And overall, you’re just progressing through a gradually increasing difficulty level rather than having to balance things yourself.
Trying to put together builds is fun and interesting, but can quickly become maddening as the number of possible combinations continues to balloon. And there’s a bit of a catch-22 going on for trying new builds, as you have to invest a large chunk of resources to get something new up anywhere close to par with the “main” builds. I made a conscious choice to try and avoid letting it become too grindy by ignoring other people’s builds, and not thinking about anything too long before getting back to the action, but there are some major rabbit holes that you could go down if you wanted to.
The PC version is finally in good technical shape! Don’t know why it took so long to get here, but it’s been stable running at 4K@120Hz with DLSS on my 3080, and looks noticeably sharper and less smeary than it did in the past.
As for downsides, well, as with DLC1, I’m a bit disappointed that there aren’t any new standard enemy types or full-scale new levels/environments, which would be very welcome in adding more variety.
And for the ugly – I have yet to fail a floor of the labyrinth, but I’m pretty sure whenever that happens, I’ll be done. The way it’s set up is that you have a “rift point” bar, and you get points by completing portals, and lose points by failing portals. Fill the bar and you progress to the next “floor” of the labyrinth (everything gets harder). Empty it and you’re kicked out and have to start all the way over from floor 1, including losing all progress you’ve made on the monster quests. That hasn’t happened yet (on floor 26 out of 100) – so far they always start you off with enough of a point buffer that you can safely fail one portal without getting kicked out, and I’ve been able to do relatively easy portals when I was running low.
Now, I love roguelikes, but this is not the right structure for a long-term loot game. There’s no way I’ll have the patience to go back through a bunch of floors that are both relatively easy based on the power level I’ve built up, and where the loot is guaranteed to be irrelevant to me. Sending you back a few floors would have been more than enough incentive not to die. But oh well – I’ll just plan to play as long as I’m enjoying it (which I am so far!).
Isn’t this similar to what they did with Nioh? Each DLC extended the story into a new region/time period and added a new difficulty mode? Admittedly, I didn’t play it until it arrived on PC with everything included, but I certainly don’t remember a way to skip ahead.
Wow, I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I’ll have to give it a chance then. The PC performance sounds amazing too. No more crazy slowdown when breaking enemies in 120 fps mode?
Well, it turns out that this didn’t end up happening. I’ve been dipping in for a floor or two at a time over the last month, and actually did wind up finishing all 100 floors. There were a couple of times where I failed the first mission on a new floor and had to be really careful on the next attempt, but I was always able to recover.
Still really enjoy the combat, and as with Nioh, the build options really unfurl in the endgame so it was a lot of fun trying to figure out what to put together with all the tools you have access to. Over the course of the tower, I spent significant time with builds for Breaker, Sage, Black Mage, Lancer, Ronin, Samurai, Mage, Assassin, and Warrior and had fun with all of them.
I wound up gravitating toward using Runic Protection (hits reduce MP instead of HP) to stay alive, and generating loads of MP by combining the MP on parry stat with the Carbuncle summon who also gives MP when you parry, and then the Samurai 600% affinity effect to also trigger parry effects on use of a combo ability effect. This was plenty for most of the tower, but eventually I was running into trouble because one missed parry on the wrong attack wouldn’t do enough damage to drain my MP, but it would empty my Break gauge, which stuns you and strips your buffs, usually getting me killed in short order.
To solve that, I switched over to Berserker, a job that I had barely touched in my time up until now, since the job ability just makes it impossible to be broken while active. And with that change, I was able to push through the final floors. Still had to be careful with a few bosses that can dispel all your buffs, and I could get into trouble if I didn’t notice them expiring or accidentally ran out of mana, but for the most part I could survive anything.
I’m sure there are much more efficient builds out there, but it was fun looking for synergies myself and seeing if I could make them work.
And with that, I’m done until the final DLC shows up. Hoping for some more enemies and locations to add to the variety, and some better UI for dealing with loot, as that got to be a slog at points.
Easily my GotY in terms of time spent (280 hours), though I might give the nod to Elden Ring overall for having higher highs and a greater accomplishment. But something about the rhythms of the combat systems these guys put together really clicks for me, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doing the same thing next year with Wo Long.
I’m playing this now. Oddly enough, it demands more of my GPU than Elden Ring did, for whatever reason, and to run it at comfortable temperatures I had to adjust the settings in a way that it looks terrible. But it’s fun and I’m enjoying it regardless of that.
If I have any negative-ish comments (apart from performance and whatnot), it’s that, from all the levels they could have picked from FF XIV, they went with Sastasha…??? It’s the first dungeon in the game, and for that reason probably the most recognizable, but still far from being the most memorable dungeon from FF XIV, even if you consider just ARR.
Still, it was fun. And the boss fight for that level was pretty cool.
I know what some of those words mean! I have about 10 reddit threads I plan to consult with as I work through the DLC. I’m sure I’ll ask you some questions too. For whatever reason, it seems way more daunting and difficult than the Nioh builds. I doubt it will end up that way.
I might play two more runs of Bayonetta 3 first instead. I might need a month or two.
