Talk:New Beginnings/@comment-2601:601:200:AA7E:6130:F64C:D5E9:2562-20190112012452

This event had potential but is ultimately highly frustrating and, imo, a fantastic example of terrible game design.

Going in, I liked the idea. I liked that there was more story and world-building since the game seemed to be getting better at handling that, even tying multiple events together in an overarching story with a fairly satisfying conclusion. I also liked the idea of encounters being more of an endurance round that involved strategic management, which makes utility effects such as healing more useful to the point of possibly de-emphasizing the use of offensive skills. Up until Intermediate, I had the impression this event would do exactly that and managing skill economy added a nice strategic challenge as well.

But as a lot of others are mentioning, Advanced and Extreme are way over the top in terms of difficulty.

I don't particularly mind the arbitrary "if you don't have the right element team you do no damage for many turns and can't kill fast in general" or even the health pools of the enemies. Certain skills help to alleviate both problems even if getting lucky and rolling cards like Sahaquiel in a gacha gives a significant advantage. In fact, having a timed shielding effect would further emphasize the idea of having to outlast the enemy.

The problem is that's impossible with the sheer amount of damage the enemy deals. Instead, more radical, slightly altered versions of strategies to do Ultimate difficulty in Tower events are needed. Such encounters are polarizing in general since the player has to activate key skills on turn 1 or have a high chance to lose. This is especially so here since Demonwitch damage is so high it potentially kills GLRs through -80% ATK debuffs and/or elemental shields. The damage they deal also makes me concerned about how much more cards are going to be power crept to make high difficulty Demonwitch subjugation feasible, especially for newer/progressing players.

Imagine if instead the enemy did significantly less (as much as 95% less) damage, but had a tendency to spam offensive skill nullification, possibly even starting the battle with effects such as counterattack, offensive skill nullifer charges, or some new effect that breaks the enemy out of turn skip (or makes them immune to it temporarily). Other stats such as health and amount of waves can be readjusted so the experience doesn't feel too much like a time-consuming grind. Such "quick fixes" wouldn't be perfect since it doesn't fundamentally fix the issue that most skill activation is tied to RNG. In fact, some of changes I've suggested are utterly inelegant. However, the changes would introduce a challenge that encourages a different kind of teambuilding focused more on utility, skill economy, and understanding enemy mechanics. The changes may also make some, if not all, LR custom skills a lot more useful because they can be consistently activated. This shift of challenging players to use their brain rather than building a team that figuratively relies on a coin flip would be a good step for the game to take since it would instantly make it more mentally engaging than a majority of other games.

TL;DR: Giving enemies big numbers is typically not a good way to make the content challenging, engaging, or fun and this event exemplifies that design philosophy perfectly. It doesn't fix fundamental problems with the game (like skill RNG), raises the barrier for entry to newer and progressing players further, and can generally cause a lot of pointless frustration.