Ruined King - League of Legends turn-based RPG by Battle Chasers dev

[Whisper]

How is game?

 

[Whisper]

All I remember from Battle Chasers was that it was super fucking easy and thus super fucking boring. For turn-based games you either need to go full-JRPG and have the combat be irrelevant digressions between the inane story about 14 year olds killing god, or you need to go full The Last Remnant and just make your player lose every meaningful fight 10 times in a row. Actually, I think some of those bosses took closer to triple-digits.

The Last Remnant is hardcore game?

 

[Grunker]

Why is this not in jrpg? It is emphatically a jrpg.

Played a little of this yesterday. Not enough for any conclusions, but enough to say that the Battle Chasers+ monnicker is probably not far off. It adds a couple of mechanics to Battle Chasers that increase complexity of moment-to-moment decisions-making in combat such as "lanes" which are effectively a fast (-damage), normal and slow (+damage) for all mana-costing abilities that push you less or more far down the initiative line.

The caveat is that all encounters have environmental effects (beneficial or harmful) that only happen to characters within the area on the initiative bar.

Combined with encounter design that relies on this, it makes decision making pretty meaningful. Example:

Let's say an enemy has an important buff that is dispelled if you use a mana-costing ability in the "Speed lane", that is, you cast it faster but it does less damage. So just do that, right?

Well, the ability you most want to use right now - the most optimal ability for the current state of combat - places you in the Poison Cloud hazard part of the initiative bar if you cast it in the Speed lane.

So now you have 3 choices:

1) Cast it in the speed lane, dispel the buff but take poison damage on your next turn.

2) Cast in another lane, avoid the poison, but the creature remains buffed.

3) Find a less optimal mana-costing ability with another initiative that you can perhaps cast in the speed lane AND avoid the poison.

Plenty of abilities with sufficiently diverse effects on top of this system means you have a lot of factors to take into consideration when taking your turn - and it obviously unfolds further when you take into account your current character's action's consequences for your next characters turn or whatever.

It goes without saying, these choices chiefly matter on Heroic difficulty. On lower difficulties you can commit more mistakes and so have to pay less attention to the system.

I suspect the game will throw wrenches into this system as we go along. As such, yeah, it seems fun to me.

The game is generally very pretty, but the story is anime ass, though less so than 99% of jrpgs which I suppose says very little.

The worst thing about the game so far are the PC-controls. For example, by default mouse-movements moves your ability selections between lanes, and it is really difficult (almost impossible) to change this in the input menu due to that menu being buggy as fuck. As such, selecting and using a lane ability in the appropriate lane on the correct target is an ardous proces of clicking:

1) Lane ability
2) Select the ability
3) Select the target
4) Select the lane
5) Click 'E' to execute

If during 3), 4), 5) you move the mouse or change the order, your character moves lane and you have to start from scratch basically. It is INSANELY annoying.

 

[Gradenmayer]

Why is this not in jrpg? It is emphatically a jrpg.

Played a little of this yesterday. Not enough for any conclusions, but enough to say that the Battle Chasers+ monnicker is probably not far off. It adds a couple of mechanics to Battle Chasers that increase complexity of moment-to-moment decisions-making in combat such as "lanes" which are effectively a fast (-damage), normal and slow (+damage) for all mana-costing abilities that push you less or more far down the initiative line.

The caveat is that all encounters have environmental effects (beneficial or harmful) that only happen to characters within the area on the initiative bar.

Combined with encounter design that relies on this, it makes decision making pretty meaningful. Example:

Let's say an enemy has an important buff that is dispelled if you use a mana-costing ability in the "Speed lane", that is, you cast it faster but it does less damage. So just do that, right?

Well, the ability you most want to use right now - the most optimal ability for the current state of combat - places you in the Poison Cloud hazard part of the initiative bar if you cast it in the Speed lane.

So now you have 3 choices:

1) Cast it in the speed lane, dispel the buff but take poison damage on your next turn.

2) Cast in another lane, avoid the poison, but the creature remains buffed.

3) Find a less optimal mana-costing ability with another initiative that you can perhaps cast in the speed lane AND avoid the poison.

Plenty of abilities with sufficiently diverse effects on top of this system means you have a lot of factors to take into consideration when taking your turn - and it obviously unfolds further when you take into account your current character's action's consequences for your next characters turn or whatever.

It goes without saying, these choices chiefly matter on Heroic difficulty. On lower difficulties you can commit more mistakes and so have to pay less attention to the system.

I suspect the game will throw wrenches into this system as we go along. As such, yeah, it seems fun to me.

The game is generally very pretty, but the story is anime ass, though less so than 99% of jrpgs which I suppose says very little.

The worst thing about the game so far are the PC-controls. For example, by default mouse-movements moves your ability selections between lanes, and it is really difficult (almost impossible) to change this in the input menu due to that menu being buggy as fuck. As such, selecting and using a lane ability in the appropriate lane on the correct target is an ardous proces of clicking:

1) Lane ability
2) Select the ability
3) Select the target
4) Select the lane
5) Click 'E' to execute

If during 3), 4), 5) you move the mouse or change the order, your character moves lane and you have to start from scratch basically. It is INSANELY annoying.

I didn't have issues switching lanes for abilities, since you can just use mouse wheel to scroll through them. Did happen to misclick Illaoi's heals a LOT tho, that mouse targeting is annoyingly off the mark.

Agree with your take on the difficulty, veteran is quite forgiving.

 

[Reinhardt]

Why everyone is some kind of ekera and tukohama?

 

[Grunker]

Why is this not in jrpg? It is emphatically a jrpg.

Played a little of this yesterday. Not enough for any conclusions, but enough to say that the Battle Chasers+ monnicker is probably not far off. It adds a couple of mechanics to Battle Chasers that increase complexity of moment-to-moment decisions-making in combat such as "lanes" which are effectively a fast (-damage), normal and slow (+damage) for all mana-costing abilities that push you less or more far down the initiative line.

The caveat is that all encounters have environmental effects (beneficial or harmful) that only happen to characters within the area on the initiative bar.

Combined with encounter design that relies on this, it makes decision making pretty meaningful. Example:

Let's say an enemy has an important buff that is dispelled if you use a mana-costing ability in the "Speed lane", that is, you cast it faster but it does less damage. So just do that, right?

Well, the ability you most want to use right now - the most optimal ability for the current state of combat - places you in the Poison Cloud hazard part of the initiative bar if you cast it in the Speed lane.

So now you have 3 choices:

1) Cast it in the speed lane, dispel the buff but take poison damage on your next turn.

2) Cast in another lane, avoid the poison, but the creature remains buffed.

3) Find a less optimal mana-costing ability with another initiative that you can perhaps cast in the speed lane AND avoid the poison.

Plenty of abilities with sufficiently diverse effects on top of this system means you have a lot of factors to take into consideration when taking your turn - and it obviously unfolds further when you take into account your current character's action's consequences for your next characters turn or whatever.

It goes without saying, these choices chiefly matter on Heroic difficulty. On lower difficulties you can commit more mistakes and so have to pay less attention to the system.

I suspect the game will throw wrenches into this system as we go along. As such, yeah, it seems fun to me.

The game is generally very pretty, but the story is anime ass, though less so than 99% of jrpgs which I suppose says very little.

The worst thing about the game so far are the PC-controls. For example, by default mouse-movements moves your ability selections between lanes, and it is really difficult (almost impossible) to change this in the input menu due to that menu being buggy as fuck. As such, selecting and using a lane ability in the appropriate lane on the correct target is an ardous proces of clicking:

1) Lane ability
2) Select the ability
3) Select the target
4) Select the lane
5) Click 'E' to execute

If during 3), 4), 5) you move the mouse or change the order, your character moves lane and you have to start from scratch basically. It is INSANELY annoying.

I didn't have issues switching lanes for abilities, since you can just use mouse wheel to scroll through them

No, by default *mouse movement* moves lanes, and at least in my game, the input menu is bugged so it can't really be changed properly.

 

[Arthandas]

Anyone tried the highest difficulty setting? How easy it is?

 

[Grunker]

Anyone tried the highest difficulty setting? How easy it is?

I'm playing on Heroic which is the hardest I think, but I haven't played more than a couple of hours yet. In the beginning with 2 characters it was hella hard. Now I'm on 3 characters and it's just right. Can't speak to whether it gets too easy later.

 

[Grunker]

Okay, played the game 10 hours now. Enough to see what the game has to offer, do a few side quests, unlock full party, kill quite a few minibosses, clear one huge dungeon (with a lot of missable side-content, by the way, including puzzle-quests with their own mini-boss) and defeat one actual boss.

Game is legit. If you liked Battle Chasers, you'll definetely like this, as it's basically a better version. Heroic/hardest difficulty is a fair bit difficult, at least for me, so far. Hope that keeps up. The world seems to have a good scope in terms of size and there are progression systems everywhere, which I enjoy since character customization is the main reason I play RPGs.

Fights so far have been quite diverse in terms of spicing things up - everything from just different sorts of enemy abilities or buffs to that boss I mentioned which was quite the puzzle to figure out. Satisfyingly, even when you "get it", you still have to make actual good choices during the fight, you can't just "solve the puzzle" so to speak.

One thing that has disappointed me a bit about the combat is the reliance on using a tank to soak up enemy hits via taunting and damage blocking. Fortunately, the game gives you quite a few ways to make the tank useful for other things such as dealing damage or generating resources passively, and lots of fights will try to get around your ability to control where damage is going. However the system still ties up a character to just spam Taunt -> Damage Block Ability most of the time, which is kind of a shame, and gives you far too much control over which character gets hit.

As for progression, levels give you access to new abilities, upgrades for those abilities, new tiers of those upgrades, passives and new Ultimate abilities (the party-wide Limit Break-esque bar). There's ability points for improving your character's abilities which have 6 upgrades, divided into 3 tiers, so each tier has 2 mutually exclusive upgrades. That's for each ability. Then you have Rune Shards which unlock passives that buff your character in general, equipment as well as enchanting (adds an extra effect to weapons and armor) and infusions (upgrades an item to a higher tier). As a result, each character has about 3 "roles" you can build around, but nothing is stopping you from mixing and matching those and combine abilities in unusual ways. An example would be Miss Fortune, who is obviously set up to be your basic damage dealer, but has a lot of promising ways to build her as what I would think would be quite an effective tank (she's the only one with access to the game's most incredible tank stat - Evasion).

However it won't cure a hatred of jRPGs (Infinitron can we move the thread already?) and the story is mostly utter shite, just like the Ultimate Abilities make you wait for 4 hours before their animations complete. There is a way to speed up combat animations, however. Fortunately, the story is delivered with very brisk dialogue and goes by in flashes. I wish all jRPGs had the decency to get their terrible story segments overwith as quickly. The main focus is on the combat and the overworld map exploration. The latter is kind of popamole, but still fun in its own way, much like Battle Chasers.

Side-quests are... OK, but mostly of the "oldschool jRPG" variety, so no branching paths or stuff like that. Like I said, it's a combat game first and foremost.

There are still opportunities for the game to disappoint if content gets slimmer, the fights less interesting or difficulty drops.

 

[Xunwael]

Cleared it on "heroic", took 21 hours, no NG+ to be seen.

There's probably 30+ hours of content in here if you really go looking, heck may even be 40+ if you're a completionist, but why do any of it? Very anti-grindan games with lots of pointless fluff. I was level capped long before I reached the final boss, without doing any grinding, without doing any bounties (except a couple I did by accident, and the "strongest" one, which I went out of my way to fight just to see how strong it was. spoiler: it wasn't especially strong), without going out of my way to get any of the legendary weapons, without getting lvl 3 ultimates for any of my champions (except Ahri who gets it just for killing 25 dudes in combat), and with my gears wearing mostly lvl 21-25 gear (30 presumably being the cap though the biggest I've seen was 27 or 28), and without doing any black market token grinding (for more rune points) or any journal information grinding (for yet more rune points). So yeah, there's lots of content here I didn't do, but why do it if you can beat the hardest content the game has to offer without any of it? Oh, and there are "rumours" too, which are these weird, shitty side-quests that you buy from a merchant to unlock and then you go do them and you get like 2500 gold (and no exp since you're capped, and the item drops are pointless) for a 20 minute side-quest (when you already have 100k++ gold and nothing to spend it on). I suppose they're just there if you're really into the story or whatever.

For difficulty, I got my ass kicked pretty hard by the tutorial, dying 5 times in the first hallway, before I begrudgingly started reading tooltips and looking at the little time tracker at the bottom, but then it was mostly smooth sailing. In the early game, the biggest problem is attrition, having to pop potions nonstop out of combat and eating healing food with every rest. Hardest part in my playthrough was having to do the shadow isles with that worthless pyke dipshit occupying a mandatory party slot; guy who brings no damage, no healing, no durability; just a worthless drain. But then you get Ahri at the end of that area and all those problems go away, since she spams 0-100 aoe heals every other turn. That's around the point where the game becomes boring fast. Every fight devolves into exactly the same pattern: You cast Taunt with your tank (Braum seems best, but the beefy chick who wants to jump his dick is fine too), you spam mostly heals with Ahri (unless there's no damage going out), and you got your 1 damage dealer (miss fortune is fine, the samurai guy is amazing) doing the exact same optimal moves every single encounter. This is the main reason it took almost a week to finish, since this gameplay kinda wears on you in large doses. I still had to reload maybe a dozen times total after getting Ahri, so it's not like a total breeze, but the gameplay is mostly this "tightrope" act, where if you play "perfectly" then you're never in any danger, but if you get lax about it for even a single turn at a bad moment (easy to do when you're getting bored) then maybe your tank gets oneshot by three attacks landing at the same time and then you have to pop phoenix downs but ahri is getting killed since the tank doesn't have taunt up yet after being revived and then the tank resses her but then he gets killed again because he doesn't have time to cast his defensive because he's casting phoenix downs... it spins out of control. But if you avoid that then it's just this monotonous, well... I guess it's a grind, not in the 'grinding for power' sense, but in the 'grinding your way through all the mobs in your path'-sense. You can avoid most of them if you want, but I'm not about to leave alive anything that crosses my path.

The GUI is an absolute disaster, obviously made for console and just as tedious to use with mouse & keyboard. Combat actions that should take two clicks take three or four - or more. You can't even do something as simple as click an ability on your bars and then click the enemy you want to hit. First you have to click the sub-menu for your abilities before you can click the ability itself (even though the icon is visible: console adaptation symptoms). Or if you leave your cursor sitting in the middle of the screen then it will select abilities by merely hovering over them and prioritize the hover-selection, so I'd end up casting stupid abilities since I'd just press select twice (which should default to the first ability) and since the mouse was hovering over some random ability it'd cast that instead. Even if you actively de-select it, as long as the cursor remains hovering it'll cast whatever you're hovering over. Not a big deal, you can just not have your cursor in the middle of the screen, right, but it's one of several of these little annoyances. Also, it's fairly buggy. Like, I'd lose the ability to select enemy targets with the keyboard; it would just default to target 1 and refuse to let me select any other targets, so I'd have to target enemies with the mouse if I wanted a different target, and it would require a complete restart of the game to fix, which takes fucking forever because the intro cinematics are unskippable (although, you can monkey around with the game files to change that). When you've memorized the button clicks to cast all the abilities you use then the combat does flow relatively fast (though everything still takes 3-4 times as many clicks as it needs to), but these tedious bugs still pop up to ruin the flow of it.
All the menus are awful as fuck as well, just genuinely shit. Information that could be contained in one menu is spread out over like 4, and swapping between them takes several actions of moving out of menus and into dashboards and then slowly tapping your way to your intended goal, and everything just takes so fucking long. Would take 1 second to do in two clicks with a properly made GUI designed for mouse & keyboard, but oh well this is the world we live in.
Same shit with tracking buffs/debuffs etc.; you'd think you'd just be able to mouse over them to get a popup to tell you what they do, but no. You have to go into INSPECT MODE and then scroll your way over to the unit you're interested in, and then you probably gotta scroll your way through the unit card as well because everything is designed to be viewed on a TV miles away from your face in your living room instead of a bigass monitor right in front of you so it all takes up tons of space. And you gotta take like 10 seconds to do this every time you wanna look at a buff of some kind, I ended up memorizing all of them because that was less tedious.

It also has a fair bit of bugs. Like, you'll kill a boss that upgrades a specific weapon (the preorder sword or whatever it is, which I also got - I guess it counts purchases up to well into december) when you kill him, and if you have it equipped when you do then the game freezes. Gotta unequip it before fighting him. Or some items will be unreachable. Or you'll click a quest objective and a story moment will start but your character will get stuck on terrain while walking towards the position the cinematic expects them to be in, and since they'll never reach it it'll never progress necessitating a restart. Also had a couple of loading screen freezes. And some abilities don't work as they should. Braum's 'dungeon' abilitiy to initiate with doesn't apply concussion. Beefy chick's starter ult is supposed to heal x+x*#tentacles, but it just heals for x. Probably lots of other stuff.

The story/writing is... alright. Which might meant it's "shit" depending on your standards. My standards are rock-fucking-bottom at this point. So many games now read like they're written by the same 20 monkeys locked up with typewriters in california or wherever it is they all come from and it's just offensively bad. This wasn't that. It wasn't *good*, but it wasn't... as bad as a lot of stuff. The game tries pretty hard to make you care about the characters, giving them each their own little side-sections that focus on them (except Braum, I think?), but I really didn't care. They're all very superficial, and not very interesting, much like the story and setting. Most I got out of it was a couple of chuckles at unexpected lines, like when the brooding samurai guy made an understated joke once and it caught me off guard.

Overall, I'd say it's a solidly mediocre title. It has the appearance of some interesting combat mechanics, but a few hours into it the only thing I ended up ever actually paying attention to during combat was the 'hazer/boon' zones and timing my attacks around those if able. Everything else was just pure autopiloting, and 80% of every character's abilities were pointless (outside of a few niche moments, like the Thresh fight where samurai guy's useless meditation ability could be specced to clear debuffs from the entire group as a free action while giving him huge overcharge, allowing him to just spam his ult every turn, but I think that was the only time I actually changed up my strategy from my default one since filling the party up).

 

[Grunker]

The GUI really is atrocious. I got so mad at it I switched to a controller at one point, but it’s terrible even with that.

Xunwael just out of curiosity, if you generally skipped the side content, does that mean you missed bosses like the fire wharf rat?

 

[Grunker]

Regarding Pyke, I quite disagree. His Stealth has no recovery time, neither does the Mark which is excellent against single target. Neither of them have any benefit from being used outside of Speed lane, so what you can do right off the bat is Mark -> Stealth -> Ambush (conviently, because if Mark stealths you you can just skip Stealth), the first two will you push you down the initiative bar only ever so slightly. Ambush is his bread and butter - even without a crit it's good damage, and with a crit we're talking damage rivaling Yasuo's mega-OP Raging Wind without the caveat that the ability must crit to continue. Upgraded, it even applies poison and bleed. Even at level 15 with basic runes he has +18% crit chance base, plus another 15% if Stealthed (which you'll always have active if you're using Ambush) plus another 10% from Ambush itself + potentially Yasuo buff. Then on crit you might proc Executioner which enables Death From Below to absolutely demolish. I find it's easier to use than Yasuo's level 1 ult, because it requires Overcharge. Basically I think he's FAR superior to Miss Fortune on priority enemies, while he's probably a bit worse for trash mobs (MF has more AoE, but that only matters on waves of small enemies and even then more for convenience than anything).

For trash mobs, you use Serrated Slice with the first tier A upgrade so you can stealth for free, then spend Overcharge on Ambush when you get a Stealth proc. In fact, Serrated Slice probably competes for the best basic ability in game since not only does it provide a very useful buff, it also procs a random debuff. If you really hate attrition you can spec Ambush for cost recovery until you get to a boss.

In terms of tanks, I dunno, they're quite comparable, but I liked Illaoi better. Her passive healing tree from tentacles means she'll often be outhealing the damage of enemies even of her own level, leading to a net gain of health when attacked. That's on top of the incidental attrition healing she brings later both from tentacles and, if you spec for it, runes. And I just find her more interesting to build than Braum as a tank. Also: Test of Strength is insanity with 4-6 Tentacles out. One of the few abilities good enough to skip a turn damage blocking for.

 

[1451]

This is an underwhelming game if you think about the time it took them to make it. Almost three years for such a shallow experience.
I would not even touch this if it didn't have League lore which I enjoy.

 

[Reinhardt]

League lore which I enjoy

no wonder you are dumb

 

[Xunwael]

Regarding Pyke, I quite disagree. His Stealth has no recovery time, neither does the Mark which is excellent against single target. Neither of them have any benefit from being used outside of Speed lane, so what you can do right off the bat is Mark -> Stealth -> Ambush (conviently, because if Mark stealths you you can just skip Stealth), the first two will you push you down the initiative bar only ever so slightly. Ambush is his bread and butter - even without a crit it's good damage, and with a crit we're talking damage rivaling Yasuo's mega-OP Raging Wind without the caveat that the ability must crit to continue. Upgraded, it even applies poison and bleed. Even at level 15 with basic runes he has +18% crit chance base, plus another 15% if Stealthed (which you'll always have active if you're using Ambush) plus another 10% from Ambush itself + potentially Yasuo buff. Then on crit you might proc Executioner which enables Death From Below to absolutely demolish. I find it's easier to use than Yasuo's level 1 ult, because it requires Overcharge. Basically I think he's FAR superior to Miss Fortune on priority enemies, while he's probably a bit worse for trash mobs (MF has more AoE, but that only matters on waves of small enemies and even then more for convenience than anything).

For trash mobs, you use Serrated Slice with the first tier A upgrade so you can stealth for free, then spend Overcharge on Ambush when you get a Stealth proc. In fact, Serrated Slice probably competes for the best basic ability in game since not only does it provide a very useful buff, it also procs a random debuff. If you really hate attrition you can spec Ambush for cost recovery until you get to a boss.

In terms of tanks, I dunno, they're quite comparable, but I liked Illaoi better. Her passive healing tree from tentacles means she'll often be outhealing the damage of enemies even of her own level, leading to a net gain of health when attacked. That's on top of the incidental attrition healing she brings later both from tentacles and, if you spec for it, runes. And I just find her more interesting to build than Braum as a tank. Also: Test of Strength is insanity with 4-6 Tentacles out. One of the few abilities good enough to skip a turn damage blocking for.

I just really soured on Pyke because of his introduction. The first area you take him to is filled with enemies that trigger poisons on you when you attack them (so he destealths on the start of his turn unless he's cleansed between them, which wastes the cleanser's turn) and that spam aoe attacks that also destealth. And then the guy made me have to reload a save like 20 minutes back during one of his stupid diving sessions, where he ran into a ghost that killed him 1v1 because it attacked him through stealth (makes sense, in retrospect, since otherwise stealth would make him invincible in some fights, but that wasn't obvious to me the first time this came up since some games do allow you to cheese like that).
Literally never put him in my party again after I got Ahri. Yasuo with low crit chance is middling, but he gets easy access to 100% crit chance on his multi-attack with the right runes and upgrades on the skill. It takes him a couple of turns to ramp up to the 100% crit since he has to attack a few times to stack the perma crit buff on himself, but that's not a big drawback when you're fighting several multi-waves of enemies with tens of thousands of hitpoints per fight. He also has great durability with his flow procs and (eventually) 30%+ lifesteal that translate into him never needing heals and needing to be oneshot to die.

For the tanks, they do about the same healing, but Braum's is in the form of shields which is better. Braum's aoe shield ult cleansing the party of all debuffs on an instant move is extremely strong. He also negates a ton of damage with concussion and has easy access to two pushbacks that fuck around with enemy timing. His main weakness is stun immune bosses with high single-target damage who focus him, there I think Illaoi is better. She has better mitigation with 6 tentacles up and she can channel all her healing into herself, whereas Braum's single-target shields are meh and a lot of his talent/bonus mitigation is extended to his party rather than himself. Although, I really did dislike how Illaoi's taunt is only 2 (1, when talented) turns long, while Braum's is 3 (2) turns. It costs a lot of mana to keep spamming that taunt and you don't always have the luxury of doing it with overdrive.

I didn't put a lot of thought into comparing the charactersy. Never had a fight where I felt like I couldn't easily do it with Braum+Ahri+Yasuo in their default setup, so there was no motivation to experiment. Maybe that means I'm a boring guy, and maybe that means I missed some other great strategy. But I don't see what the other characters bring. For the tank spot, Illaoi vs. Braum is a question of if you want to protect the group from oneshots or the tank itself, and mostly my problem was Ahri getting killed so I went with Braum. For the healer spot, I guess it's Ahri vs. Illaoi (or even Braum), since both the tanks can heal as well, but they don't heal anywhere near as well as Ahri so she seems just a guaranteed spot to my eyes. For the DPS, it just comes down to who brings the most damage, and Yasuo's multi-attack seems to do the most damage, and it has the advantage of the 'ramp' on it being on himself rather than on his target (as opposed to e.g., tap, or low-health executes) and it can't be removed (unlike stealth, which random aoe damage or debuffs removes), so he can freely attack whatever target he feels like at the moment and he carries it over between waves, and he doesn't have to deal with finnicky stuff like on-kill procs that require you to actually land the kill to trigger them etc. He just stands there and he attacks and he doesn't die, and he doesn't really care about whatever else is going on in the fight. He just casts his 20 mana ability that gives him 4 stacks of his buff (for a mana-free multi-attack) and has a 40% chance to give him a free turn, then he does the multi-attack, and then he does the 20 mana attack again, and you just chain this over and over for huge damage. If mana is an issue, then you do double basic attack sometimes instead of the 20 mana ability. And that's that. I mean, it's boring, but it works.

 

[Grunker]

Yasuo is better, I agree. I was comparing to Miss Fortune. I've swapped Ahri out entirely, I'm now running Illaoi, Yasuo, Pyke (did that when I found out third Serrated Slice upgrade was another +40% stealth chance for a total of 80%). Ahri is better for attrition but Pyke finishes fights much much faster and it's not like you're lacking for potions anyway if Illaoi's passive healing isn't enough somehow. For bosses, it depends on mechanics whether I want Ahri or Pyke, but I sure as hell would want either of them over MF

For the tanks, they do about the same healing, but Braum's is in the form of shields which is better.

Actives are (almost) irrelevant on tanks, I'm talking about Illaoi's passive healing - 5-15 health (depending on stats) PER tentacle PER attack (obviously raised by Attack and Healing Power). Compare this to Braum who gets a measly 5-15 hp flat per attack for his ability point.

In the end they are very comparable, because even though Braum is better at the thorns playstyle, Illaoi effectively gets a thorns like effect from the tentacle attacks. On the flip side, Braum gets pretty massive shields when critted if you spec for it, which about outweighs the healing. I hard disagree that shields are strictly better than heals - shields have the advantage that they stack on top of a full health bar, but heals have the advantage that they fight attrition.

Ultimately though like I say they are very comparable in my experience, I just find tanks to be the most boring design of the game, and at least Illaoi has a lot of passive synergies going on what with the tentacles being able to heal allies, do poison and stuns etc. And she actually has one ability which is often worth skipping a damage block for (the fact that so few are is the crux of the tank problem, you just never do anything but taunt and block...).

For the healer spot

You don't really need a healer because you have so much control over where the damage goes, unless you're fighting a specific boss. When trash mobs AoE, Prophet of An Elder God 2B (the passive that makes every tentacle strike heal allies) is more than enough - for bosses add Test of Strength on top - to heal allies back up. So that's your healer spot crammed into the tank instead, which is one of the reasons Illaoi seems more fun to me as the tank.

Braum is better at dealing with one-shots, but I don't really find that to happen very often yet. Maybe later bosses will force me to protect Yasuo and Pyke better, but so far 2-hit Stealth and Flow means I'm not getting one-shotted.

For the DPS, it just comes down to who brings the most damage, and Yasuo's multi-attack seems to do the most damage, and it has the advantage of the 'ramp' on it being on himself rather than on his target (as opposed to e.g., tap, or low-health executes)

Pyke's execute is on his ult. You're comparing apples and oranges. Pyke's primary damage source, like Yasuo's, is a lane ability: Ambush. Currently my Yasuo has more than twice the number of Rune Shards of my pyke (since I spent gold and black marks on tomes for him), and his Rising Wind deals 350x7 damage ASSUMING the chain doesn't break and that EVERY strike is a critical (even when fully buffed you'll often see one or two not be, even when fully specced for crit like I am, at least here in the midgame - I also wonder if it's bugged, because sometimes it'll crit three times in a row and still break).

That's 2450 total damage.

Pyke's Ambush deals 2x1100 assuming it crits, 2x 660 otherwise + ignite AND poison AND bleed. So that's 2200 or 1320 damage + all the damage debuffs. That's really impressive considering the disparity in runes.

In the end I think Yasuo wins pretty clearly even if Pyke actually turns out to be highest DPS, because he is more versatile. Pyke can only single target, Yasuo can do that just as well PLUS he has the best buff in the game PLUS he can AoE trash waves PLUS he can survive a one-shotty AoE better.

He's easily the most OP character in the game, but it's not because of his upfront damage compared to Pyke, IMO. Neither is it about mana - they actually work pretty much similar here. Yasuo saves on mana via Steel Tempest, Pyke does it by the Stealth procs on Serrated Slice. So both can use their primary single target nuke without mana by just autoing a few times. Pyke will often only need 1 attack to do it, Yasuo always needs 2, but this is off-set by the fact that Pyke will sometimes need 3 if he's really unlucky.

It's about Yasuo matching Pyke's single target output and having all the other stuff as well. The only thing Pyke really has over Yasuo is the best single target debuff in the game and a much, much better auto attack.

 

[Grunker]

The one thing Braum definetely does have over Illaoi is useful Ultimates, but then the problem still is that you want to damage block 99% of the time...

 

[Xunwael]

You may well be right, but to take it back to my main point, the game isn't hard enough to encourage experimentation to find out what's better than what you're already doing. If your tactic's working then I'm not here to shit on that, it reinforces my point if anything.

I wish the game had the traditional optional bosses that were a billion times harder than the main storyline bosses, so that there was reason to experiment, and to go and do all this other content, like get the legendaries and get perfect enchants and max out rune points etc., but - disappointingly - it doesn't.

 

[Grunker]

I wish the game had the traditional optional bosses that were a billion times harder than the main storyline bosses, so that there was reason to experiment, and to go and do all this other content, like get the legendaries and get perfect enchants and max out rune points etc., but - disappointingly - it doesn't.

Big agree here. Grey Docks or what they're called promises way more than the game can ultimately live up to, I agree. By all rights, this game should be filled with side activities where you can find the real meat of the game as the designers intended it. Tons of superdifficulty minibosses. I refuse to believe it would be a big drain from development - they could just reskin and rebalance a ton of existing enemies to be actually difficult.

But: if you wanted more difficult side-missions, aren't you also saying that the systems themselves are enjoyable?

Regarding the general difficulty, I find that it's useless to talk about RPG difficulty in absolute terms, because the truth is, 99% of RPGs can be trivialized, which includes Ruined King. If you take the hivemind's opinion, hard RPGs don't exist because whenever someone says a game is challenging someone will point out a strategy that trivializes it.

Like, take Pathfinder which has the entire Codex raving. If what you say is true and one-stop strategies nullify any joy from experimentation, that game should be a total dud. It's got so many strategies that basically function as cheat codes. But that's not a great way to define difficulty in RPGs I think.

I found that at least with this game, I had to be aware. That's more than you can say for most games. It's certainly more than you can say for it's direct comparison Battle Chasers (though haven't they since added another difficulty to that game? Maybe I should go back and check it out.)

But then I might be damaged from my recent experience with Solasta which could be trivialized even by playing the game in the most bog standard way.

So yeah, in essence I agree that another difficulty or superhard side bosses would be terrific, but compared to most RPGs I find that the difficulty of Ruined King is in the lower part of upper echelon.

 

[Xunwael]

But: if you wanted more difficult side-missions, aren't you also saying that the systems themselves are enjoyable?

Sure, at its core I think it has a pretty well-designed combat system, and it has some potential for min/maxing with the talent points (although these became less interesting the closer you got to the level cap since then you had enough points to max all the abilities you used, but that can be 'fixed' by making the choices harder or by offering more of them by e.g., adding 4 options to each ability instead of 3), rune points, and item choices. And it has a lot of room for interesting stuff to happen with its time economy, the different lanes, buffs/debuffs that are not simply purged but removed via interactions, etc. But very rarely did these things come up during trash fights, and while some of the bosses were pretty cool you just fight them once and that's it. There's no, like, giga version of an interesting boss that tunes everything up to 11 and forces you to play perfectly to beat it. That would be really cool, but it isn't there. So you do the boss once and it's great and then you go back to grinding while hoping for another boss to appear soon.

When I commented on it being "boring" earlier, I meant that the long march of non-boss fights were boring, which was exasperated by how unrewarding it felt to be doing them. I'm not averse to a bit of grinding, but I want my grinding to reward me, not to just be a waste of my time.

I'm repeating myself now, but if the game did have a NG+ (which I'm told battle chasers had, though I didn't finish it to find out), where you e.g., could start out with the whole party from the beginning and everything was super hard etc. (and where the enemies didn't just hit harder, forcing you to spam phoenix downs every fight, but leaned heavily into these other systems so you had to mix it up with the ability choices and timings etc.,), then it would be in the "recommended" section for me, but it doesn't.

 

[Grunker]

Okay, Xunwael, I reached the turning point now. The game had already gone from the fairly challenging early-to-mid-game to less of a challenge, but at Temple of Purification the difficulty has dropped off a cliff. If this keeps up I can see why you soured on it. Illaoi's self-healing has spiraled out of control to the point where she literally can't be damaged. It doesn't help that the game so far has balanced Ultimate abilities by requiring some amount of setup, but the level 3 ultimates just break the game as if the rune synergies didn't already. A sad end to what was a decent enough of challenge

 

[ERYFKRAD]

League lore which I enjoy.

You ignore a thousand people for this.

 

[1451]

I pick Braum for the shields, Illaoi for a tanky healer and Fortune for dps.
I like her double shot that applies burns and her lane ability is fast and deals tons of damage.
The other dps characters had the... misfortune to be in the same game with the pistol wielding bombshell.
I loathe the sections that force the player to include some party member because it reminds me of Neverwinter Nights 2. Back then, this made me drop the game.
Obviously I'm playing on normal and ignore most mechanics, I see no reason to subject myself to hp bloat. Especially when higher difficulties don't offer better rewards in terms of xp and items.

 

[Grunker]

did du launch an incoherency contest or something

 

[Gradenmayer]

Ye, game gets too easy after getting Ahri. Another proof, that healing without use limit should not be a thing in games.