Inaccurate Attacks on Chronicles
In comments on the new game, a lot of people have been complaining that the accuracy calculations feel wrong or unfair. I wish this was new to me, but exactly the same thing happened on the release of both of the previous games.
In the interests of science, I added a new function to my editor. It simulates 10,000 attacks using the actual functions from the game (the editor is the game, compiled with different flags). Here are the results:
So. That’s that, then.
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about 1 year ago
that may be, but it feels really so, for example, my assasin has 10% crit, but as I startet him, I have land no one crit till he got lvl 4!
same with 95% crit, I missed with my warry sometimes, without debuffs on me or enemy, even with stance “ur atack can not be avoid” 3-4 atack’s in row
about 1 year ago
I don’t understand how that’s possible. It’s like the bizarre bug reports I sometimes still get for Book of Dread where people say that healing decreases their health or whatever.
about 1 year ago
ou – second 95% CRIT means 95% HIT…. yes may be something bugged, a little bug also comes by me often after some playtime – “enemys defeaded” and “rooms explored” show not red, it’s not easy to find then not explored rooms…
about 1 year ago
Garin, in all honesty, the attacks might be statistically wrong, but they are definitely not unfair. It’s the game that generates a serious impression of being unfair, and if its not the randomizer, then it’s part of the mechanics themselves. It’s simply not credible that a fight that looks unwinnable 9 times out of ten turns out to be a breeze at the 10th effort and it robs the player of the sense of achievement. Likewise, a fight that looks perfectly doable but ends in slaughter because the opponents seem to happily ignore blinding (read: For whatever reason continue to hit consistently) or any other effects feels inherently unfair. Note: They might not actually do so. But if their success rate is darn high for blinded foes, then SOMETHING is wrong. So it might be worthwhile looking at the mechanics and the modifiers. Personally, I feel that Holy Light is way underpowered against undead – not the least because by the time you actually get undead, namely in act II, they are so strong that it’s almost wasted power which you need more for healing etc. to get rid of curse of mortality etc.
I loved the previous games and played through them, but right at the moment, I’m all about to give up on the new one, as the frustration/reward ratio just doesn’t make it worthwhile anymore. Book of Dread did have its hard parts, but not the potential to get simply stuck with no way to do anything that Chronicles has. No healing potions, nothing in the Emporium, no money to restock, nowhere to go, what do you do? Probably in most cases, the answer will be “throw up your hands and walk away from the game”. I feel like there’s still plenty of tweaking to do.
about 1 year ago
Another comment:
As an example of adding insult to injury, the Wiki states to take Necromancers out as quickly as possible. If at the same time, they or their groups are given spells that can direct attention away from them, such advice is really more aggravating than useful. This is an issue that could easily be settled by simply giving them a different set of skills. Making a monster so powerful that you need to take it out quickly but then robbing the player of the ability to do so is not making it hard, it’s making it frustrating.
I know it’s tough with all the criticism pouring in but honestly, it pains me myelf: I loved all your other games, including Dragon Age: Journeys, which I played despite never playing Dragon Age itself, but Chronicles turns out to be a well of frustrations for me. But I do not see anything as truly broken, I think a lot of the problems can be tackled by a bit of tweaking, and I sincerely hope you don’t feel so discouraged as to cancel the series. Please, do go on!
about 1 year ago
On a completely unrelated note, the most recent message I can see while logged out is the “Welcome back!” post. Both on my home computers and the campus ones. Might want to look over group permissions, unless this change was an intentional one (and that doesn’t seem likely).
about 1 year ago
Thanks, I had noticed some weirdness with that but I hadn’t related it to login status. I’ll look into it.
about 1 year ago
I usualy hit the mark on the game. And I’m not surprized when I miss. Some folks can be so unhappy about a few small parts of a game. If they don’t want to miss, they should find some unnering gear. Or always have the rogue with theif’s luck.
No complains thus far from me.
about 1 year ago
The problem is one I recognized as soon as I started playing – people expect attacks to function the same way as they would in a Fire Emblem games, using accuracy formula known as “True Hit.” Here, instead of determining if an attack hits by generating a random number and calling the attack a hit if the accuracy is larger than it, 2 random numbers are generated, and averaged. If this average is smaller than the accuracy, then the attack is a hit. This means that the accuracies that the game tells the player they have are actually false, and more to what the player expects will happen versus what will really happen. When the player sees a 90% hit chance they think “Oh, 90%, so I’m definitely going to hit” and fail to account for the significant 10% chance to hit. If there’s anything that’s frustrating for someone playing a game it’s when the game feels like it’s cheating and obscuring some mechanic – even when it’s being completely honest. The combination of these two pieces works to make the player remember their misses in critical situations more then their hits which can result in a very frustrating experience.
So how does True Hit remedy this perceived problem? It biases all accuracies towards 0%, 50%, or 100%, whichever is closest. If the game says the player has a 90% accuracy, they will actually hit with a 98.1% accuracy, meaning instead of missing 1/10 attacks, they miss every 1/50 attacks, quintupling their accuracy. More information can be found here: http://serenesforest.net/general/truehit.html, which includes a breakdown of what the true his is for all accuracies from 0-100%.
So, would I advise you switch over to true hit? That depends what sort of game you want to have. If you want all the numbers in the game to mean exactly what they show then keep it how it is now. If you want the numbers in the game to more accurately reflect what people think they are than switch over to true hit. Either way you’ll probably get a bit of flack from people who want one way or the other, but I’m sure you’re used to that by now. Of course, you could always (I say having no idea how complicated this would be) make a build that uses true hit and give the beta testers a chance to try it and get their impressions on it.
Either way, I’ve been seriously enjoying Chronicles, true hit or statistically true hit. Keep up the great work!
about 1 year ago
This is interesting, thanks.
about 1 year ago
long time player of monsters den here, and lurking on this blog up until now. My verdict overall from playing through all 3 of the main campaigns of chronicles is that I’m totally satisfied. The game is harder than I was expecting, maybe I’d go so far as to say it’s harder than it should be (those campaign run throughs? all on beginner >_> imagine my shame), but I’m not disappointed at all. I could go on all day about what I thought, but here’s the main points I took with me from my first successful playthrough of those three campaigns:
#1 point I want to say is that I love the new battle system, what with the action clocks and everything. it really rewards faster characters, more so than the cyclical systems of previous monsters den games where, no matter how fast you are, you’d still only end up with one turn per cycle. where as now, a faster character will probably end up taking more actions than a slower one, in a given span of time. The idea of skills only taking up part of the action clock or manipulating the action clock of other units was also fabulous – intercession was an awesome skill even though it looked underwhelming; every single time I saw these changes coming into play, I was amazed by how well they came together. Fantastic job done here and I really want to emphasize how pleased I was with this system; it’s easy to go on all day about the things you don’t like but tougher to elaborate on the things you did enjoy, and I definitely enjoyed this change. I have no complaints with the accuracy system you mentioned here actually – people are naturally more inclined to remember the 5% misses that made them lose a battle, than the 95% hits that went as planned. That’s just how psychology is; the 5% ends up looming in a person’s short term memory and becomes massively inflated.
#2 Now I have to take some more critical positions. gotta say that some skills were definitely nerfed. holy light is just so much weaker than it used to be because undead have definitely gotten some pumping-up (similar complaint on smite – the double damage vs undead would be really nice). Undead have markedly enhanced dodge rates and holy light really doesn’t have the oomph to return the favor so I don’t often feel inclined to use it, where as it was an incredible skill in book of dread and was basically a must-have in survival mode. The extra 10 power cost for cleric’s standard heal really shows, too. I’d rather have heal at 25 and smite at 35 than vice versa. Perhaps this is intentional but mage missiles, and in fact many of the mage spells (electrical storm used to be so good…), are basically only useful in the first campaign; after that weapon damage scales way too fast for your intellect to keep up so a mage’s spells often end up way weaker than their direct damage output from a normal attack (case in point: I had a mage equipped with a staff, enchanted with spark of legend, so that the weapon damage scaled with level. the guy’s weapon damage was 2x that of even the strongest spell. he was inflicting 75 damage per weapon hit and his spells topped out at maybe 40, and that’s if he was lucky. I was boosting intellect every time he leveled up, yet his weapon was growing so much faster than his spell damage so all the damage spells were basically pointless). I’ve basically only been playing clerics, warriors, mages and ranger-warden because I don’t see enough survivability in the other classes; see #4.
#3 in the equipment department. perhaps this is because I was more used to the really numbers-heavy inventory screens of previous monsters’ den games, where it was easier to see the nitty-gritty numbers paying back from my equips. But I get the feeling that regen+ equipment has really been weakened, and magic-supporting equipment in general is weaker. Meanwhile big shields have become crazy good – they take away so little quickness compared to older games, and quickness is even more important in this new battle system – so basically all other offhands (especially censers, which were awesome in book of dread) are useless. Why heal 5HP more when I can just get 5% more damage protection with my gigantic kite shield? I end up feeling torn because I loved censers in book of dread but I always wanted to make use of tower shields as well; in chronicles censers have become worthless while tower shields are superpowered. Meanwhile skulls/grimoires/tomes/charms/fetishes are just generally pretty weak with only a few points of power regen or +max power. There’s basically no reason for me to play with a scepter when I can use a staff; the staff gives typically around twice as much direct damage (see #2) and none of the mage’s offhands are worth having the extra slot because they’re just… so weak. Back in book of dread I could equip a cleric with enough runed equipment to get +25 power regen and drop free heals every turn in survival mode – I feel that the reward for finding all that equipment was really worth it but it’s almost impossible to find crazy configs like that in chronicles. Perhaps that’s fair. I personally find that crossbows are in the same boat as tower shields; they take away so little quickness (esp since ranger is a fast character) that there’s often little to no advantage to using a regular bow, unless the bow has way more specials than the crossbow. (Side note: I miss my hail of arrows! Is that now a ranger-marksman skill? I’ve only been playing warden because I need herbal remedies+healing lore stances just to stay alive)
#4 general difficulty of the game… has definitely gone up. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but as always with issues of difficulty, there’s a fine line in the sand. Best examples of this are Curse of mortality (necromancer) and Terrified (fearsower), both of which are unbelievably strong and can singlehandedly render a fight unwinnable. I thought the cult enemies were all around pretty fair (in fact, aetherguards are easier than they used to be imo. damn those neophytes), and demons were fair enough (as long as you know to prioritize the fearsowers/ragebringers over thralls/spellslaves), but those undead in campaign II were intense difficulty what with their boosted dodge rates (specter/phantom), newfound summoning powers (wailing widow dropping anguished rebels on my face) and the relatively low power of holy light/smite. I could typically run through standard difficulty in book of dread without any serious hitches – every fight needed planning, so nothing was a giveaway, but nothing felt out of reach either, and I knew that if I took the time to think it out I’d find a way to win any battle. Maybe I’m just bad at the game? but chronicles didn’t always feel so doable to me. Boss of 3rd campaign, the soul eating guy, had me on the verge of walking away (ultimately I kept at it because I love this series and I knew I could find a way – I hope you do the same, garin!) because I had been playing on standard difficulty for all three campaigns and I’d used up all my elixirs of protection/alertness/quickness on previous campaigns. Couldn’t buy those potions from the emporium either because I’d invested consumables to the third tier and they wouldn’t sell any of the battle-buffing potions anymore. Restarted altogether and playing from scratch with beginner difficulty, I had to use 4 elixirs of quickness, 2 elixirs of protection (on my clerics – I had to run two clerics because i needed the healing >_>) and 4 elixirs of alertness just to stand a chance against the soul guy, and the only reason I had so many elixirs ready to use was because I hadn’t had to consume them all on the earlier bosses as I had in standard difficulty. I haven’t even tried using rogues or the ranger-marksman because they don’t have enough tanking/healing skills for me to feel confident that I can survive the campaigns – as a result my current team is both clerics, ranger (all these characters can heal and I often find myself needing all the help I can get) and conjuror (for damage, and because arcane armor can keep him alive on his own). So it’s definitely gotten harder. Too hard? I don’t think I alone can be the judge of that, but it’s not out of the question.
I know that was a lot of criticism, but I think you can only properly criticize a game if you’re passionate or at least serious about it, and I want to emphasize, again, that overall I was satisfied (to say the least!) with chronicles and I’d give it at least 8/10 right now. The engine is great and everything I was hoping to see in this new release, I saw. I hope you keep at it, because you have some great stuff right here and I can’t be the only one that’s enjoyed playing it. Can’t wait to see what you have in store for us.
about 1 year ago
Thanks a lot for that. A couple of things you mention sound like bugs, so I will look into those.
And yeah, Hail of Arrows is a Marksman skill.
about 1 year ago
I gotta say, so far I’ve very impressed with the game overall, and love the more cerebral approach to the battle system. I’m currently working to finish Campaign III. To do so, I had to run my party(Marksman, Champion, Cleric and Rogue) through Campaign I several times to get in position both from an equipment and level standpoint. I’m playing on Veteran, with Experience as the detractor. Each battle in this game requires a dedicated plan of attack, which I love. You’ve put together the G.O.A.T of all dungeon crawlers, and should be uber proud of your achievement. To me, it was well worth the wait.
about 1 year ago
Chronicles is the first Monster Den game I play, I love this game but there are things I would love to see improvements on them.
1. Act 2 is super hard. All those monsters keep dodging my attacks and reviving the dead ones. I have had a hard time in Act 2. However, I have no such problem in Act 3 which I go through easily, almost as easy as the Act 1. Maybe you can switch the orders or change the difficulty of Act 2 ?
2. As mentioned by someone else, most offhand items except shields are useless. Even my assassin is using a light shield.
3. I think the power regen during battle can be increased a bit because in most games, you won’t have enough power to use all the skills you want to use. Then you can only save the power for the most necessary skill such as heals, while the accessory or secondary skills are left untouched.
4. Accuracy of some high-level skills should be increased a bit. Because you won’t use a skill which costs a lot of power but has a high chance of missing.
about 1 year ago
I forgot to mention one more thing. As a huge fan of RPG games, I can see one element which may make this game much better.
That is the uniqueness of classes. In some RPG I have played, each character has a unique role in the team. Some focused on buffs, some focus on fast damage, while some focus on special abilities to manipulate the field.
In Chornicles, most classes do not have unique roles. For example, the role of mages as ranged damage output can be easily replaced by rangers, while you don’t even need a warrior as a meat shield if you have a high-defense clerics. The only unique class in this game is conjuror for his Time Warp.
This could be both beneficial and detrimental to a RPG game. Overlapping of characters’ roles open possibility of different creative combinations. On the other hand, the importance of choosing the right combination becomes less.
about 1 year ago
OH SNAP! I finished all five campaigns (okay well you can’t really finish survivor mode so let’s not count campaign IV) on beginner mode with my level 15 confessor/inquisitor/warden/conjuror party. Thanks to a massive stock of potions and recovery items I was able to just keep on ticking. So for fun I decided to try going for terrible two (the achievement where you clear an entire campaign using only two characters). I took my confessor and my warden into a battle against a guardian and 2 acolytes… and I barely won. The cleric nearly died and my party (of two) won the fight with a quarter of its HP remaining. This is where it’s at 8D from now on I’ll know better than to complain about the difficulty of the standard campaign.
Anyway I’ll revise some of my previous comments now that I’ve cleared all the campaigns. Firstly, I’d say for sure campaign II was the hardest, undead all the way! Campaign V was actually easier than campaign II, because a) I had stockpiled so many potions by then that I could clear almost any boss fight by spamming pre-battle elixirs, and b) more importantly, there are way fewer undead in campaign V because it’s a mix of all enemies; since undead are the strongest opposing army by far, that actually makes the game easier. Occasionally there were some pretty wild combos – skeletal guards using shield protection on a row of spellslaves is really annoying since all my damage dealers were ranged – but it was nowhere near the challenge of a necromancer calling down servitude on his skeletal guard and then reviving the other guard that I had just killed because I had to focus fire on it due to servitude. The firepower of a necromancer, covering himself via servitude and dropping curses of mortality all over the place, was probably the biggest challenge in the game and campaign V didn’t force me to face any of that. IMO close second in challenge is doomcaller+ragebringer+fearsower battles. Terrifying from fearsowers and impending doom from doomcallers is really quite devastating, and ragebringer is just generally annoying with all those -accuracy and DoT curses but it doesn’t compare to the other two. Still, necromancer trumps them both because of all its crowd controlling abilities. Btw for people having trouble – Warden’s force of nature stance is lifesaving when enemies try to play this misdirection game on you with skills like necromancer’s servitude or cult guardian’s shield protection. Wipe the buff in one hit and keep going. If not for force of nature the necromancer would definitely have pasted my team.
As for my complaint about the mage equipment. I was actually a bit off the mark on this one! My endgame conjuror was equipped with a staff originally as I had said, but then i found the scorchwand (has this awesome curse, ignite. deals dps, reduces armor and slows. crazy good!) and the curse was too compelling for me to pass up. Having wielded this weapon straight through to the endgame, I will admit that there are ways to keep the mage’s spells viable if you keep his intellect really high (scorchwand was giving +6 int). The scorchwand’s direct attack was really strong because direct attacks from staff/scepter also scale with int, but if I dropped an electrocute on an enemy that was about to move, I could typically deal about 20% more damage than the direct attack. Freeze had damage that was less than my direct attack though. After I found the scorchwand, I also found an awesome epic orb (epic is the purple border), that gave +25 weapon damage. This is the kind of offhand that would be worth wielding over a staff! It also pushed my scorchwand’s direct attack up so high that only one attack could top it (max damage electrocute was 120, scorchwand with the orb topped out at 90, everything else was 80 or below). SO looking back from that, I will admit that if you have enough int, you can keep some of the mage’s spells at high damage, worth using through the game. But to put it in perspective, every single item in his inventory was +3 int or better so I was REALLY pumping that intellect stat, and there were only two moves in his skillset worth using by the end despite this: electrocute (for enemies with 80% full action clock or higher) and direct attack (everything else). Fireball, freeze, mage missile all useless because the damage was too far down. I occasionally used time warp but in the long run the straight up damage was simply better.
Overall, I would say that the quickest fix, in the short term (ie without playtesting your enemies all over and all that stuff) to make the game easier is to increase the availability of elixirs of protection and quickness (trollsblood and alertness potions are also pretty useful but they aren’t as good as those two). Those potions can simplify any fight massively if you have enough of them, but right now they’re pretty tough to find in the emporium and you often can’t count on getting them as loot so you have to use them sparingly. Higher availability = easier game. Typically if I was having difficulty in a fight, using elixirs of protection on my two clerics (the tanks) and elixirs of quickness on my ranger/mage (the damage dealers) would cut the difficulty down to size easily. If I added more elixirs (alertness for example; I had like 20 of those by the end of the four campaigns) then the difficulty of even an intense battle (the fat guy with the whip that was eating souls) would be well within reason.
I’m trying to come up with major pivots about which game balance swings but it’s tough =P the obvious one is curse of mortality/impending doom. This curse is basically guaranteed death. Because it’s curse type, purify is the only reliable way to remove it, and clerics aren’t usually fast enough to handle that reliably, yet the damage is so huge that the victim basically has to be at 100% HP to survive. Needs to be either easier to dispel, or deal less damage – I never calculated what percentage curse of mortality is currently dealing, but 50% of the target’s max would be a fair challenge imo. In the case of impending doom, I’d also say that making it disappear when the caster dies would be a nice contributor to balance (ie instead of changing the buff’s type, make it disappear when the casting doomcaller is killed). Doomcallers are easy enough to kill that, if you go all out on a doomcaller from the moment it drops impending doom, you should be able to dispose of the thing, and then that would clear the curse and save your victim. That’s not really an option for curse of mortality though because necromancers just take too long to kill for that to be useful. Terrified is also a dangerous buff but while it’s very strong, it was never gamebreaking on its own imo, due to the probabilistic nature of it – sometimes your guy will flee, but sometimes he won’t. Terrify usually became a problem when I wasn’t paying attention or couldn’t prioritize a purify to remove it, and then suddenly one of my guys would walk out of the battle and boom game over. I personally think terrify is okay where it is, but that’s me.
One more thing I should probably add… all my comments are based on experience with my party, which is confessor/inquisitor (both basically play the same role. They tank and heal. they have poor damage output but that’s not really their purpose), conjuror (electrocute for the precision and accuracy, fireball for area damage and direct attacks for all-around high damage output. Conjuror’s unique skills, disintegrate/war golem/time warp, were not that good, but arcane armor is a REALLY good stance when in a pinch so I’d keep the conjuror over the sorcerer. Sorcerer gets the +damage stance and it also gets incinerate, both of which I bet I’d use if I had them, but conjuror is a safer bet overall) and warden (deals great damage with pierce, high accuracy with marksmanship stance against annoyingly dodgy enemies like vamps, and has the tactical utility of pin for on-demand stuns. Meanwhile can also heal with herbal remedy/healing lore stance combo – in late game this combination was a stronger heal than either cleric. It healed like 50 and my clerics were healing like 35 so seriously this combination is crazy good. Also has a revive skill for a total of 3 revivers, so there’s so much insurance. As a side note, this guy uses up the most power of all my units and typically he has the least power left over at the end of a battle). This team is extremely defensive as you can see from all the healing, and I think by far warden is the best unit on it. It has so much flexibility – tactical stuns, area with pierce, very solid damage output and superb accuracy, high speed, healing of all sorts, and on top of that, it has force of nature for precision elimination of buffs that threaten your game plan. Because of the defensive nature of my team, and its ability to take off buffs with force of nature, my experience with the game was skewed in favor of the way this team plays.
What I will say for sure about my team is that force of nature is ridiculously powerful in those clutch moments, and honestly to stand up against teams like the necromancer you NEED it (because you can shut off servitude basically on demand. Also fantastic against death knights with their powerful martial experience buff, and anything along those lines). I personally doubt I would have been able to beat any campaign without the warden in my team, especially #2. I also feel that rogues are the weakest class. They have all kinds of fancy attacks, but none match the direct damage output of a mage, and they don’t have the support skills of the ranger. I used to run warriors – the leader type in particular is good because it has shrug it off for support – but ultimately not as good as having another cleric.
@mattysouthside: sounds like you’re better at this than me =P How are you running the team? And what equipment were you aiming for that forced you to farm campaign I? I’m still stinging from having to play on beginner so I’d love to hear more. Definitely agree that the tactical aspect of monsters den is something I’ve found in very few other games, although it appears that i’m not quite as good at it as you are.
about 1 year ago
To be honest , rogues aren’t as great as they appear to be. But the fact is I’ve been using assassin since the beginning till now (Act 5). The reason is simple : Instant skill of stunned enemy. Combined with Marksman’s stunning skill, you have high chance of eliminating one front-line enemy before everyone moves.
My does not have 2 clerics but I have a super meat shield (the warrior). His HP is equal to the sum of the whole party. I usually use him to draw enemies’ attention and use holy light to lower enemies’ accuracy. The best thing is my meat shield is wearing a ring which gives 40% bonus when healed. My warrior can out-heal any damage by using the Resolve skill himself, zero need for cleric.
Hails of Arrows of Marksman doesn’t look good but it’s in fact super-powerful with Eagle’s Eye. Combined with various area attack, you can wipe out half of the field in turn 3/4
about 1 year ago
agree on hail of arrows, it was wicked in book of dread. +accuracy items and bows of lethality made it absolutely incredible. Haven’t gotten a chance to try it in chronicles cause I haven’t used marksman yet, though
As for coup de grace/pin combos… I can see how that’s useful because it would be great against units that aren’t very squishy. I’ve been playing with 3 unused characters plus a level 17 cleric just to train my other characters and I can’t deny how much precision damage a bunch of rogues can lay down. idk though, the lack of support just really shakes me
Just curious, but what’s the ring that you have equipped? is it a standard item that you could find in a typical drop or is it unique? (ie purple/orange)
about 1 year ago
It’s called Silver Ring of Recovery, green, tier 4. I got it from loots.
It said “+40 bonus when healed”. Absolutely awesome.
about 1 year ago
I think the incredible difficulty of the Necromancer with his guards could be easily toned down by revising some of the nerfing of cleric skills you mentioned. I really think that Holy Light and Smite have been crippled. The fight against undead should be where clerics shine, but at least in my case, they have all their hands full healing folks, which means that the offense in general is impaired in those fights.
about 1 year ago
I just defeated Necromancer in Act 5 (Yes, in Act 5). I think I find a way to beat him easily.
1. Use poison as soon as possible, before he used any ,meat shield. Rangers have the best poison skill in game.
2. Use all kinds of area attack as long as your can hit Necromancer. Again, rangers have the best area skill in game.
3. Time your attack precisely. What you need to do is to take down a meat shield, and attack the Necromancer before another meat shield is up. If you are not in danger, feel free to use your cleric for additional fire power on the meat shield. Save your strongest cannon on the Necromancer after meat shield is down.
about 1 year ago
I’ll add to the ranger recommendation here: force of nature SAVES GAMES vs necromancer. Imo the whole reason necromancer is difficult is because he keeps reviving his allies, so you want to focus fire him down, but then he drops servitude on them so you have to take down those allies the tough way and by then the necromancer’s killed you all with Curse of mortality. Warden can dispel servitude so you can get back to focus firing the necromancer asap, so the way I usually beat necromancers was by just going all in on them and dispelling servitude with the ranger (their skeletal guards in campaign II have poor damage output so I don’t really care about killing them).
about 1 year ago
The problem is that the extra effect on Holy Light still suggests the cleric as an undead fighter – when in fact, he’s almost more needed for the healing and curse-removing. I believe the nerfing of the cleric was a regrettable design decision, especially as it was accompanied by a significant buffing of the undead faction. In essence, it made the undead faction heavily unbalanced. I don’t doubt it is doable, but it makes things depend to no small degree on luck. When your damage dealers get taken out very early, there’s little your ranger can do.
about 1 year ago
double cleric saved me here =P I had both clerics tanking in front row so both could heal; healing flash is an amazing skill for sure. warden’s herbal remedy + healing lore stance is a really strong heal as well actually. it kind of helps that right now my party is at lv35 though so we’re all decked out in healing/recovery items for +healing skill/heals received.
about 1 year ago
Yeah, well, it doesn’t really do anything about my point that even after all characters have all of their respective skills, you still have to repeat the same ol’ same ol’ fights just to finally, at one point down the road, achieve a reasonable chance at surviving the end of campaign II. BoD was way better balanced.
about 1 year ago
Gave the game about 2 hours last night: I’m liking it so far, but some of the design decisions are pretty questionable. The difficulty is pretty unpleasant.
I’m sure we’ll be seeing some tweaking of things in the coming weeks.
about 1 year ago
Ive played previous games and in my opinion:
1. Love the new battle system
2. undead are strong because so far only chance to incerease accu is rogue skill. So far didnt see any +hit items. And do me honest the only annoying thing is when i got 60-70% to hit on monster and i miss 2-3 times in a row with 1 char.
3. mages dmg seems weak and flush power to fast, spells could use weapon dmg +int for calculation dmg. started using ranger and hes doing way better in 2nd line
4. rogues poison are weak and take way too much time to take effect. Before it does any dmg i can hit already again. more int based skills could make more different builds or hybrids. Also 10% crit is really low even with items its quite useless compared to evasion + half cost sneak atack (also on cleric)
5. dualwield coudl help rogue dmg even with 25%/50% dmg
6. warrior skills could scale with endu or str not int.
7. Could use big red number when hovering on enemies to see how much dmg they will suffer not only that fade effect on their hp.
Love the game . But now this one seems more on luck/random than previous ones
about 1 year ago
I’m still playing and enjoying Chronicles, and I’ll probably play it again with a different party when I’m done (or maybe play one of the previous games again). My boyfriend is enjoying it as well.
I’m definitely having a harder time with it than the first two MD games, and admittedly I get overly frustrated when I miss a lot, but that’s a flaw with me, not with the game. I’m glad you posted those statistics here because it shuts me up whenever I want to whine “this isn’t faaaaair!” The boss fight with the reviving/healing guys in the back row, and the shielding guys in the front, drove me crazy. That’s the only fight so far I would say I didn’t enjoy as much, but hey, it pushed me to consider a better strategy a few times.
Anyway, you seem very hard on yourself about this game on Twitter, which I can relate to. But it’s kind of sad because I think you did an amazing job on the whole series. One thing I would like to see is more complex auto-sort conditions on item bags, and maybe the #7 suggestion Vunar just posted above me. I’m liking the inventory system and radial HP fade effect as they are, though.
I have put a decent amount of time into Chronicles, and I look forward to playing it at some point every day. I’ve always been a Kongregate fan over Armor Games (never even played a game on AG before), but I couldn’t wait for the release there!
about 1 year ago
Any one wants to export their saves so you can play on another computer ? I just got a new computer and I don’t want to turn on the old one just to play a game.
Or, can we save the progress online in our AG account ?
about 1 year ago
Best dynamic duo for a team. Conjuror to summon golems in front row. And bottom ranger(warden?) to apply thorns to golems and back row. Also to do heals.
Then you have five people to fight with. Good luck.
about 1 year ago
trying this out right now on campaign I, it works SO well. thanks man. I don’t usually need thorns support on golems but it really does work, way better than tactics that use a tank character (the last time i tried dynamic duo, it was confessor+warden. failed miserably). for any fight below 4 people I can typically get by on one golem. if only one enemy is a melee unit I can sometimes get by without golems at all
about 1 year ago
I love Monsters Den series! In chronicles i went straight for extreme mode because i love the sound of extra rewards. Took me awhile to finish act 1, but everything seemed fine. I leveled up to 5 and took the same team into act 2. The first group was of 4.. 2 banshee and 2 other ghosts with armor.. red and blue i think… they just wipe the floor with me. It’s almost always 1 hit kills too. After many many attempts.. i finally defeated them.. but with half my team standing and in poor health. I’m thinking extreme mode is meant for geared up characters? I don’t wanna go down to veteran mode or run through act 1 again to find better gears. I think i’ll try it on veteran and see how that goes. I need to unlock that achievement anyway. Also, the accuracy seems hax but this doesn’t bother me. If i miss, i miss.. if i hit.. great! Love this game
about 1 year ago
So I’ve went down to veteran mode for act 2 and I’m no longer getting 1 shotted. I’m getting 2 shotted.. haha but this is ok, it only happens sometimes and the rest of my team can clean up. It’s smooth sailing now. Hopefully i can move it back to extreme for act 3. Holy Light made a group of 5 miss attacks on everyone the whole fight and unlocked flawless victory achievement. It’s funny when my archer with 95% accuracy misses attack when i need it the most. And my Assassin with with 65-75% almsot never misses. I don’t think it’s a glitch.. just luck of the draw. I like the game as is.
about 1 year ago
tip for extreme mode: It’s SO much easier once you’ve played for a while. You’ll need a pile of elixirs (i have like 20 of each) for fights, lots of achievements (700+ renown) and lots of scrolls of deception (I’m at around 35), but if you have all that it’s pretty reasonable. If you bring a strong party through several runs of campaign I beginner and avoid using any items (just spam shrines when you need to recover, and never use scrolls of deception), you can get that much stuff pretty easily.
At 700+ renown, you can buy the architect’s plans and skeleton key for 2k and 900 respectively. The former reveals the entire level except secret rooms, and the latter unlocks all locked doors (equivalent to a door lever). The trick is to use both those items on each floor (so you can see where to go without wasting scrolls, and you don’t have to waste time going after the door lever), then walk through the floor using scrolls of deception to find all the objectives and move on without getting into many fights. You can use the elixirs to pump up before any battle that you want to or have to play (protection and quicksilver are the best. alertness seems to be the most common so I don’t hesitate to use those on smaller battles) and with enough scrolls, you can safely skip all the other ones. Reducing the number of fights you get into in this way makes it much easier
about 1 year ago
one persistent problem I encounter in the series is that monsters (including golem summon of the conjuror) simply grow too rapidly in terms of health and damage scale, and the items drops of adequate level and desirable features are few and far in between, causing the successive levels in campaigns to become increasingly overwhelming.
For example, while the party is lv 1 or 2, any normal monster will be downed within two or three hits whereas the enemies can never hope to take down a tank character within a single volley.
While I understand that initial ease may be intended as a lure, the rate at which monsters grow in damage scale and health is ridiculous.
In the previous installments, at least characters can obtain items equal to their own level, but now I find my lv 8 party disarmed to the teeth with tier 3/level 4 equipment.
I really don’t think apex forge, with its current appearance frequency, is a sufficient remedy.
about 1 year ago
What difficulty are you in ? You can try beginners level to grind for equipment before switching to high levels.
about 1 year ago
the rate at which monsters scale depends significantly on the difficulty level of the game. At level 1 beginner mode, my mage and ranger together could two shot an acolyte. At level 31 in beginner mode, the same thing is still possible. On the other hand, at level 31 in extreme mode, i’m lucky if my mage and ranger can 4-shot an acolyte. (Managed to beat extreme on campaign 1 btw by spamming elixirs and scrolls of deception to dodge battles)
As for loot… loot hunting is part of rpgs like this, there’s really no way around it =P As waterzxc suggested, what I usually do is take my main party on a few runs of beginner level to just find good equips and stockpile cash. I only make runs on higher difficulty if I have enough scrolls/elixirs to dodge problematic battles and if I like my equipment loadout. In other words, grind moar
about 1 year ago
I have a question.
Achieve two left list
what is
1. Wholesaler – Sell bag’s contents of 75+items?
2. Hide and Seek – Find a secret door
what is 75 + items?
Where is secret door?
about 1 year ago
Wholesaler: If you look at the top of a bag (the bar where its name is), you’ll see a small bar showing how many items are in the bag (80/100 or whatever). Go into the emporium and next to that indicator will be a button to sell all the items in a bag at once. If the bag has 75 or more items in it and you sell them all using that button, you get this achievement
Hide and seek: When you go into a room, you might see a little bluish mark on the wall, in the shape of a door (you’ll only see it while you’re in the room; if you leave the room it disappears). Click the mark and a room will open up on the other side, typically a room with treasure in it. The blue mark is a secret door
about 1 year ago
Oh my god !
thank you very much!
you are my hero!
thank you so much
about 1 year ago
Not sure this is the right place but, While playing as the Elementalist I noticed that if you select a spell in the first two stances(that way it’s cheaper) you can then switch to the damage stance and that spell will cost more and should no longer be able to be cast, but even if you don’t have the power to cast it, you will still be able to use it and your power will just go to zero.
Basically, you can select a spell with 50 power cost in the first two stances (if you have 50 power) switch to the damage stance, the cost will go up to 60 but you can still use the spell. Check it out.
about 1 year ago
I need to take back my previous comment about the shields being over-powerful. I just got a offhand dagger which almost doubles my assassin’s attack. Now he can one shot kill most monsters.
Daggers rule !!
about 1 year ago
well, it might have taken a while, but I can proudly say I’m now settled into chronicles. No matter what difficulty or campaign I play on, I never feel completely overwhelmed or struggling to win on lucky dodges/criticals. I can look at my party decked out in their epic-level equipment and be confident that it’ll work its way out of any situation. This is the part where I definitely enjoy monsters den the most, hands down was worth the effort. 10/10!
my endgame party btw is
inquisitor (knight-general aegis, imperial pauldrons, shatterstorm, heavy armor giving bolster and heightened reflexes. items give +100 bonus when healed and +15 to healing skills. Basically a pure tank with the occasional fervor, and provides an extra user of smite/heal)
confessor (liturgy on the covenant of blood – awesome epic level censer gives +healing skills and burst heal, this item was good enough to prove me wrong about shields. rubicite breastplate for regen, forestguard helm, blessed pauldrons. high powered spammer of healing flashes – this skill is way better than heal at high levels – and smites. lack of shield gives him like 10% less damage resist than the inquis, but he’s still a pretty good tank, and the liturgy lets him recover like a boss – +28 to healing skills, +90 to heals received from a ring, and liturgy gives +70HP to wielder when he casts a heal to any character, so he can easily heal himself for over 150/500 with a healing flash, or hit up any ally for around 100HP)
conjuror (scorchwand with spark of legend – this item is beastly! icon of savantir for +int, as well as all his armor giving +int, literally every single item is +12 or higher. spams electrocutes against high-dodge enemies, summons golems for long battles as support, disintegrates any problematic enemies against mobs that have a revive – cough acolyte runath battle – and drops regular attacks when electrocute is too weak. occasionally uses mage missiles because his int is actually high enough to be worth it but this is very mana intensive, using 20 every half turn, and i try to save mana for electrocute because electrocute is way more reliable for scoring kills. ultimately i think i prefer conjuror over sorcerer because golems are way better than they look at high levels, and at high difficulties almost any battle will last long enough that you’ll need them)
warden (mosswood crossbow with my other spark of legend makes this guy a scary good healer. also packing a forestguard helm, other than that all his equips are +dex and many are +int as well. deals excellent damage via pierce or regular attacks, control buffs via force of nature, great accuracy due to marksman, the occasional revive off second wind which is great for reviving the mage when he dies from vamps/infiltrators stabbing back row, and can heal like crazy – more than either of my clerics – with herbal remedy+mosswood crossbow bonuses+healing lore stance. all around best unit, so versatile in so many ways)
about 1 year ago
whew seems I’m here pretty often… anyway I’m going for a really long survival run (aiming for 100+ waves) and I have some notes for people who are curious about the mechanics of survival
- Terrify had me really worried in survival mode because I was afraid that the character would never come back and I’d be stuck one guy down for the rest of the campaign. Not so; when a new wave of enemies enters, any units that have retreated away will return. I think that includes regular retreats as well as those that are caused by terrify. A wargolem actually got terrified and I didn’t really care about purifying it (as I mentioned, I was really afraid of losing a character permanently, so as soon as someone got terrified, the next cleric to act HAD to use purify on the victim. but i didn’t care about the golem lol so I let it get terrified to see what would happen). so that’s how I found out. the golem actually took a turn to retreat (I expected it to unsummon itself or something?), like any other character, and then I was surprised to find that it returned during the next wave, in the same position and condition (ie its HP and mana) as it had been before
- Going for survival achievements (clear 10 waves, and clear 30 waves on standard or higher)? The first time I went for them, I used the options dialog to quit to main menu – turns out this does not give the achievement. You get the achievement for a campaign when it ends, and there’s basically one way to end survival mode: every member of your party is either retreated or dead. So when going for these achievements, don’t quit to main menu; end the campaign properly – I just mass retreat when I feel like stopping – and you’ll get them when it’s over
- Seems to me that some of the waves are fixed. I can’t make any guarantees because I haven’t been keeping track, but my previous survival run (up to wave 35 on standard – for achievements) had at least a few waves that I recognized when I started the run I am currently on – I recognized the enemy configurations and their positions. Every time I’ve played survival I can recognize these same waves again and again so i’m willing to bet that the entire campaign is preset, and rolls over after a while – idk how long. Side note – estimating here but it seems that roughly every tenth wave has a significant enemy – i had to fight a soul eating guy on one of these waves for example, and I think one of them had a cult ascendant (the glowing guy). I’ve also had to fight necromancers which was, as expected, a fair challenge.
- As survival progresses, the enemies will slowly clock up their levels to exceed your average significantly. current party level average is ~39, but at wave 45 of survival my enemies are around level 42. They started out at 39 but it just keeps going up. Eventually they’ll become insurmountable but I’ll worry about that when I get there =P
- When the survival campaign ends (see my other point about ending the campaign by retreat/death), you’ll get rewards as with any other quest, and you get exp – lots of it. If you do a long run of survival chances are you’ll get a lot of experience; my 35-wave run gave my entire party 4 levels up (this was at around level 35 btw). In addition I got 6 dimensional pockets as item rewards (they’re a consumable; when you use them, 1 or 2 items will appear for free).
about 1 year ago
oh and one more thing. at 1k renown (get every single achievement), you can buy apex forges for 2k each! item upgrading ftw
about 1 year ago
u just gave me a reason to lvl ALL the heros to 10!
about 1 year ago
btw is there any offial bug report? 1 of my items (demon’s tooth) is bugging with spark of legend.
(the “on miss” effect isnt scaling properly,probably because usually such effects do not scale)
about 1 year ago
some effects do not scale, yeah. i’m not sure which one you’re referring to exactly though
Also: I’m on wave 61 atm, and the wave I just received is the same as wave #1 (2 ragebringers in the central column, and a thrall in the front row on either side), so I’m gonna bet that here is where the waves wrap around
about 1 year ago
That’s right. Although many of the early waves have random elements, and most of the later non-boss waves are completely random each time.
about 1 year ago
i know that some effects dont scale, but this one should, cause it does usually(eg when upgrading it with apex forges). Its just not affected by spark of legend.
about 1 year ago
on that note, i`m in riftstorm keep, inner sanctum.. but the map is total black. it happened as soon as i entered the dungeon. i can see everything except the map. eg. health bar, map name, quest, character, inventory… and even though i just started the new dungeon, it says enemies defeated and rooms explored are at 100%. i tried going back to previous room and going back down again, and refreshing page. Nothing changed, so i will exit dungeon by going up.7
about 1 year ago
Sorry, I screwed up.. there’s a bug in v1.02. There’s a version v1.021 in the queue that fixes it, but I have to wait for someone else to upload it.
The bug only occurs if you’re not logged in to an Armor Games account, so that’s one workaround. Otherwise, I think things will work relatively normally if you can find your party by scrolling around with the arrow keys or WASD.
about 1 year ago
It’s no problem. =D darn, i didn’ t try the arrow keys. But thanks for the fix, i sign into armor games now.
about 1 year ago
I never had a problem with the hit %s, but you should double-check crits. I had Deadly on my assassin pretty much non-stop for the first 6 levels because the poison damage didn’t really seem worth it, but after two Act I runs with about 5 crits total, I mostly gave up on it. I’m *probably* just very unlucky, but it might be worth looking into.
about 1 year ago
There is a method to perform pseudo-random actions –
for example, Hero has 25% chance to have critical on attack. So normally he got 25% on first attack, 25% on second, and so on. This means, he has about 10% to have no criticals 8 times in line, and about 1% to miss 16 times.
And in this method when he perform first attack he got only 7% to crit, then 14% on 2-st, 21% on 3-rd, 28% on 4-th, and so on.
This mean, he will automatically hit on 15-th attack.
This allow you to prevent players from unlimited crits or misses.
(i gave this number only for example, real number depends on what you want to get in result )
about 1 year ago
Hi guys!
First of all, the game is amazing. It is almost unclear to me, how come I just found it now, I have been searching for a proper TBS fantasy rpg ever since I stopped playing Jagged Alliance 2 (Of course that is not fantasy).
Now, to the topic: I’m level 10 and so far it was very good, but I just can’t kill act III boss, the one that soul harvests. I’m playing on veteran and this is the first spot where the game is causing me trouble. I have 2 archers, a sorcerer and a warrior (general).
So far it was not that hard, although I had died a couple of times, but at this point I don’t see a way to win the fight. Should I start all over again, to reach higher levels? Because if so, that’s not a good thing
the 1600 hp to wear down is kind of impossible, if the fat bloke is spawning the minions, whom have really high hp as well. Normally I hit around 90-80 with all characters, but stun is not working on either of the enemies at this point.
AM I doing something wrong?
about 1 year ago
Took a day…and I could kill it. Awesome
I noticed halfway through that the middle square on front row is -15 quickness 
) Although it took like 55 retries.