PVE Feedback and suggested reworks.

This makes no sense.

Just sailing a Galleon is 10X harder than any other ships. I can solo both the Brig and the Sloop like I’m JFK cruising around Martha’s Vineyard.

Keeping the Galleon a float? Damn thing is built to sink and built to sink fast!

Sloop is nigh unsinkable! (Unless I die I can keep a Sloop afloat forever!).

I’ve seen 2 man sloops take 40 + cannon balls and not even miss a beat (cause they so easy to bail and keep afloat!).

The difficulty of the game is already scaled.

@glannigan Galleon has 4x the players, so it can deal a lot more damage (400 per broadside instead of 100 or 200) Galleon sinks quicker yes, but has more players, also take into account that it isn't taking on water from 100% of the holes, unlike sloop and brig. (6 holes could be 3 actual ones) it can bail at roughly half the rate (2 decks instead of 1), but has 2x the players so that makes sense.
If you are coordinated you can keep a galleon afloat, it can also run away quicker (such as to get to shallow water) What I think is that sea monsters should be actual monsters, not just easy things that you take down every day with no challenge whatsoever. I admit the numbers I gave were a bit too high and could use a bit of scaling. If you give me specific variables for damage I can add that in. My main problem is that the only "real" threat is other players (I personally don't find them a problem since you can always run away but others don't always understand this)

@triheadedmonkey Ok, idk exactly how I did what I did, was trying to make something bold and probably messed up, will try to refrain from doing that in the future, thank you for changing it.

@wilbymagicbear 200% difficulty for solo would be fun, would probably drive people away from the game if they didn't want to do open crews (or for some reason didn't want to use stuff like discord lfg for getting a crew of "randoms") and didn't have any friends that played though.

@ruggles-forever Here is what I do to counter Krakens and Megs on sloop (assuming you guys are on sloop) figure you guys might find it useful. For the megalodons immediately raise sails once they pop up and start turning the ship in a way that you can get more shots in than with them just circling around, this also tends to reduce the amount of times you are hit.
For Krakens you should go below deck whenever the kraken either makes you start seeing brown "dust" (for lack of better words to describe it) or if you want to be extra careful whenever he starts making noises. Shoot cannonballs into him when he isn't making noises. For weaponry use sword for slashing him in case he does start eating you (I tend to never get eaten anymore so if you get used to it you really don't need it but I would always carry it just in case) and EOR for quickscoping him. When you have to go below deck shoot him through the back or side ports since the Kraken cant get you as long as you aren't above deck. Bail through these too, they tend to be more efficient than bailing out the front. Hope this helps you guys, Good Luck!

@steveboddy Except you can avoid Meg and Kraken. Making them harder would just mean that you would have an actual reason to avoid them. Individual "threats" should be a problem and should not have to rely on other threats also being there to be a threat. When I first got the game Kraken and Megalodon were actually kind of hard, simply since I didn't know how to counter them, once you learn how to counter them they are a bit too easy, Making them at least scale with your reputation (maybe the amount of them you kill) would make them at least a threat to experienced players, which they should be, not the jokes that they currently are.

@jofjjay

They just spent the passed few months nerfing the spawns on these encounters. They aren't going to buff them back up. Too many noobs that try to play this game solo and then whine when they get sunk.

We the experienced players of the game tried to give them advice but we were met with disdain. They would claim all we were doing was telling them to "git gud" and that we were being a bully and being mean to the players.

So after a solid year and half of the game they nerfed the Kraken to where its basically a joke to solo. Brig is no different still easy as hell but you'll notice that players still complain about the Kraken wrapping the stairs and crying over split milk.

Sorry man. I want to have faith in Rare but they are really bad at changing and re-balancing the game.

They had a good thing with combat and changed that now its completely garbage and the balance is out of whack. The PvE encounters were getting better then they went ahead and hit everything with a nerf hammer.

The problem is that to Rare time spent=difficult.

Like the Tall Tales. The bosses are just time consuming. That's it. They have a ton of life and all you do is just whack away at it. The more crew you have the more life they bosses have. Just time consuming.

The skeletons AI with guns is crazy overpowered, still doable but again takes time to chip away at the numbers.

Devils Roar used to have Auto aiming Volcano's that would immediately erupt after arriving to the island and then if you waited outside its range just to return later it would erupt again within 1 minute. It wasn't difficult just time consuming and an annoyance.

Now the issue could be that they are limited to what they can do. If you look at the game structurally, its kind hard to really do outlandish changes and balances to the game. The game is based on simple mechanics.

I used to be happy when I solo slooped and the Kraken spawned. You had to kill 4 tentacles before nerfed it and I would get crazy loot. For some reason players still think its a myth that the Kraken drops fort loot. I still get it now and then but I used to get it all the time before the nerf.

So I doubt any changes are going to happen or will happen. Also any idea that makes it harder for a player to avoid a PvE encounter is not a good idea. The game is based on choice. Whether or not we want to run or fight. Making it significantly harder to run from something is going to cause a lot more headaches from the players who STILL complain that everything is too hard.

@ruggles-forever No problem, if you guys ever need any tips or help let me know, I will mainly be able to help in pvp-related things though.

@triheadedmonkey Ok, thanks for the help, I would normally use tab for paragraphs so things are nicer but for some reason that doesn't work on here. Is there any other way to indent or do I just have to find others ways to make my writing not a wall of text? Thank you for your time moderating these forums.

@steveboddy

Re-read what I wrote :):)

I was correlating with Rare's belief of what constitutes as difficult.

Rare makes things "more difficult" by making things taking longer which is not fun and just purely annoying.

However the thing is that the game has an issue structurally. They can't balance or make a wide number of changes because of how simple they have the mechanics.

Simple mechanics isn't a bad thing but you can't use simple mechanics to make a game with innovations or complexity.

SIDE NOTE Interaction between players, negative or positive, is suppose to be a huge part of the game, however, we have a good portion of the player base that continuously begs to remove or somehow avoid these interactions and so Rare tries to mitigate the avoidance with other things.

Again this is our fault as a player base and Rare's fault for not taking a stronger stance of their vision.

@wilbymagicbear Yeah for sure, sloop warning (in my case brig) wasn't around when I started but I knew it was going to be hard and learned quickly. It really annoys me how many solo players I encounter, (especially since most are really bad and thus I have no challenge whatsoever, I would do arena but random crews in there are awful and discord LFG for it can take a while, plus my ping tends to be really really high there so its hard for me to play) it tends to be me in a solo-sloop (or sometimes brig when I feel like it, don't solo-brig very much at all anymore) and the rest mainly solo or 2 man sloops/brigs. I rarely see a galley and really wish that I saw them in every server. LFG being implemented into the game would be great since for now we have to use discord servers and other 3rd party sources. I wasn't actually playing or involved during beta but watched a few videos from back then, wasn't sloop added in secondary? I assumed that based on how it was presented. Maybe Rare should do an actual tutorial so that people are at least...…. half-decent? Maybe then open-crews (also an integrated LFG) would actually be bearable?

@jofjjay

Some lesser known facts about this:
-Megalodons are different in difficulty, scaling with rarity (excluding the Crested Queen and the Hungering One, think of it as a seafarer's chest to a castaway's)
-Kraken tentacles can be driven off once, at which point they go down and resurface elsewhere. It is after being driven off again that they do not come back, and drop their reward. This, coupled with the critical hit zone aspect (they take less damage closer to the base of it, the inner mouth is a critical hit zone), is why players who know the mechanics can easily solo a kraken, even on a galleon. It also has a limit to how many must be killed completely: Two on a sloop, six on a brigantine, and all eight on a galleon. This means the galleon must effectively fight off 16 of them, while the sloop only 4 (though a very unlucky new one may end up destroying 10 before it leaves).
-The game cannot keep track of crew size, only ship size as of now. This is why duoing all of the skeleton captains and Lords in the tall tales on a sloop is the easiest way to do it, why soloing a galleon gives you the same difficulty of threats as a full one, and why sea creatures on a sloop is so easy - the sloop is scaled for solo play (also, you'll never have a better coordinated team then a solo crew).
-Only things which spawn for a ship specifically scale for it, meaning things like strongholds, roaming skeleton ships, skeleton fleets and volcanoes are the same for every ship.

@ultmateragnarok Thanks! For the megalodons I never really payed attention to whether they were harder or not, just did the same strategy. Did not realize they took more damage with the mouth so I will use that from now on. I didnt realize it was based on ship size and not player count for stuff the spawns. Thank you for giving me some info, did not realize some of this, hey you learn something new every day, I will apply this all, (especially the kraken one, its already easy for me, now it will be even easier lol)