Anyone have found the combat of this game boring and silly?

I've restarted this game after spending a bit of time on it, and get bored.

Returned and found the same problem.

For example, in the first forest, my 3rd level party of 6 useless (God chosen...) heros, is sleep-locked by fungi (well, 1 is enough) that act always first (and more often then the party it seems) and always make them sleep and make then damage.
Sleep. Damage.... until everyone is dead.

Now, I've mapped all the forest, but is mostly based on luck: what random encounters I get.

I think this is bad design and balancing.

If I remember correctly (and I'm thinking of the right forest) you have to sneak past the mushrooms and not engage them. They have an area of 'awareness' that you can navigate through without them seeing you. I agree that sometimes it is possible to stumble upon some hugely powerful enemies but usually you'll have a chance to escape. For what it's worth, once I sussed this out I enjoyed the game very much.

yea encounters are set in strength, if you run into something too strong there are other places to go, you can come back later.

Those big mushrooms aren't suppose to be attacked at early levels, their poison/sleep attacks will quickly wipe you out. Try them again at level 10+ see how you do. There are 2 blue ones in the middle that are very dangerous with their poison, the 2 red outside ones cast sleep. Annoying, but poison will wipe you out very fast if you let them pour a bunch on your party.

At levels 8-10 i tried to fight those groups, i did get lucky enough to kill a group or 2, but it took a LOT of reloading to get lucky enough with the attacks to kill them. I gave up and came back much later.

But combat yes is a tad boring, its pretty laughable how bad the crit system is, i spend more time fail critical hitting myself than actually doing a critical hit on the enemy. Go to cast a heal spell. . crit hit self you take 13 damage. My thief who is suppose to be more agile and better crit fails attacks all the same, even with high agility. Its laughable really. Just a feature that people have talked about being bad for quite a long time.

And Speed seems to the most important stat. Take the mushrooms, if you can hit them a couple times before you are put to sleep, you can win. But this game gives clues also. One of the letters you find in exploring says that the Mushrooms can be bypassed if you walk carefully. Of course, the letter is next to a dead body.

yes speed is the most important stat in the game. Unlike a turn based game that you are used to that uses initiative (you go/they go or they go/you go), a speed based system is both easier, and more difficult.

Its easier in that you need to put 1 of your stat raises into speed each time you level up a character, for ALL characters. Speed is an important stat that has to be maxed on every character in order for them to function, it is a speed based combat system. I think FF10 system also was speed based and you also could stun or "delay" foes so you could attack more before they could. Similar system. A few of the LOTR games were speed based.

So speed most important, raise it every time, all the time. The first time you have to sneak past the mushrooms because of your low level, once you hit level 10+ you can see how you do against them. I was level 15 when i came back and wiped them out. Luckly no need to fight them until you are a good level. Some ugly looking spuds though.

I'm continuing playing this game and, while my character keep leveling up, I more and more convinced that the whole system has big, nasty flows.

* Hit chances are way off and come in cluser:
If one attack missed, you got a good cache of other 2~3 misses immediately after
* When a turn finish, for purposes of bleeding/poison purposes, you don't know.
It seems purely random (it is not), but is absolutely not clear.
* Loot is absolutely mundane and nearly worthless and useless
* For being an RPG there is too much enfasis on a right or wrong build. You can really reach a point where your party can't progress, because is not strong enough. Seriously?
* Dynamic initiative system, again, could be a nice idea but gots too much unknown for the player to make guesses. Stun will slow you down, but other factor? Try the arena: I got to make 2 attack in a row, but after the first, my PC shift place. Why? Who knows...
* It seems that old-school is interpreted as randomly pissing off players.
* The world is open but if you stray in the wrong direction you are obliterated. It is fine, per se, but the game is always cryptic is what is going on and you are are in deadly are.

Now, all this get buried in "but is old school". Not, it;s generally broken.
I was a young kid when RPGs where in their infacy (yes I'm that old) and remember when Wizardrys, Ishtar, Ultima, Eye of the beholder were coming out and playing them... their were hard, but fair and generally not pissing you off.

This is very true, it seems that there are no unique items. Only shitty diablo-style items with random prefixes and suffixes.

But the real problem with this game is all the copy-pasted contet - 4 evil princes, 4 magic towers, 4 temples, 4 tombs, 4 witches etc. After defeating first prince's red soldiers you will fight the same soldiers, but they have higher levels and this time blue colors. It looks like they wanted to make game longer, but it was done artifically and in the result it's not worth playing after 1/4 part, because once you have seen the 1/4 of the game you have seen all.

Yes, also this one is true.

I don't want to bash the devs, that from my understanding, have started from a kickstart and worked hard to bring us this game.
I hope that they will listen to all this complaints and use them to make a sequel that will iron out these fundamental problems.


Also.... I'd like to see discarded this "old school" thing that, generally, means nothing.

Early game is mostly about hoping mages and archers don't one-shot your back line. In other words, a craps shoot.

Later on, after you actually can afford some gear and you get to stabilize your builds, it's more about stacking bleeds and stuns. Poison and burning will work too.

Anyway, the gameplay stabilizes mid-game, but it got too grindy and I never finished. It's too easy to wreck builds forever, and too many skills are there just to be n00b traps.

Some aspects are better balanced than other. DOTs are sort of in a good place, but I hate the noob traps and extremely delicate build paths. And apparently Arcane Soldier is just useless (or at best Hard Mode).

...I've since discovered that Arcane Soldier is only horrible if you level up their unique skills too much. The damage bonus scales with weapon damage, but the mana cost also scales way too much. It's much more powerful to hit several burning attacks than to only be able to cast a high-level one once. It's still a bizarre design, and skill scaling overall is inconsistent and n00b trappy.