Thanks @Nullzone ! Would still be nice to differentiate “Legenadaries” vs. Enchantment level (and Legenedaries have +0 by default, so going to take a lot of enchanting! )
@ArtNJ: Interesting that two folks can read this so differently. For me, I read the "Healing" part in the descriptions as "all healing", and the one for Haste where it specifically says "auto attack/heal" that it only affects auto-heals but not skill-heals, which seems logical to me. @MikaMobile : Could you clarify please? 1) Does the Bard's continuous Heal count as auto-attack/heal? 2) Does any of the 3 (of Haste, Critchance, Critpower) affect his continual heal? 3) Does +Skillhaste/+Skillpower affect his continual heal? Always welcome And seconding that. An obvious visual identifier for Legendaries would be nice. Maybe some kind of ornament in a corner, e.g. a star top-left?
Natsuko with high Rewind (Instant Cooldown Chance) gear and her passive talent that makes Blade Rush knock down enemies it hits for two seconds can be insanely broken if you get lucky; she can lock down essentially the entire battlefield while also getting damage in. If you also have the talent that makes Blade Rush damage heal her, it gets even more nuts. Pair that with her Counter skill potentially making her invulnerable for multiple chained skill durations, and you have a monstrously powerful tank. Also, a question for those who have used Erik (Berserker) often: should I be going for raw power/crit, or haste to increase his DPS? I'm using a Scroll of Fury and Leviathan Scale right now, but I'm wondering if boosting Haste isn't better in the long term. Or are they both functionally identical in terms of DPS output? Thanks!
Good question. For characters who are damage dealers Life Steal is better, since it's 'active' as opposed to 'passive' regeneration. But if you're using a Tank character who's built more to soak up damage than to deal it, Regen may be better, since Life Steal is a percentage of damage done, but Regeneration is a flat amount that's constant. One exception to this is Rynn, the Shadow Knight, assuming you invest in his passive talent that shares half of his Life Steal percentage with his teammates. In that instance, even though Rynn is a Tank, using Life Steal is probably better than Regeneration, since it's a team-wide buff with the right passive. Hope this helps!
I agree, some seconds ago I finished the game. I got the Legendary for Rynn which grants him 40 power and 10% life drain. He has a total of 36% life drain and shares half of it with the rest of the team.
@Jazzpha : Thanks a lot for the insights on the Samurai! Very interesting. Re Eric the Barbarian: In my winning all-melee party he ended up using 2 "Runes of the Serpent +6" with +15% Haste/Critchance each. Before I got those at what I consider a usable level (I think that was +4 Enchantment, but not sure), I used pure +Haste items and he did very well with those. No idea which one is ultimately better, someone (not me ) needs to do the math to be sure. @se99jmk re Regen or Lifesteal? Like Jazzpha says, good question. For Rynn it's obvious to pump his Lifesteal as high as you can, as the whole party benefits from it. Early on, I used a (low-level) Vampire Tooth on my Cedric with some success, and he was definitely not geared for damage. However, I immediately swapped them when I got a Zara's Signet ring with +16% Healing received. Much better results, at least that's what it looked like to me. At some point, the combined healing from my Warpriest and Rynn's shared Lifesteal was high enough that I swapped the +Heal Ring (and whatever else I used for him, can't remember) for +Haste items. He completed the game with a Tempest Stone +5 (+25% Haste) and an Antique Hourglass +6 (+15% Haste & Skill Haste). Didn't find a good 2nd Tempest Stone yet to swap the Hourglass out, as I'd prefer more Haste on him. His skill cooldowns are good enough for me even without the Hourglass. Same as for Crit vs Haste above, someone needs to do the math to figure out which one is better and where the tipping points are. My take on it: Healing from your healers has to be enough to keep you alive, so the damage-dealers and tanks can use other stuff than Lifesteal or Regen items. That said, the highest Regen I've seen so far is +15. Even with 2 Troll Amulets that's +30 only, which doesn't sound like much when I look at my Cedric's 1225 HP. I *think* that early on Regen is more powerful. Numbercrunching time: Let's assume 5% Lifesteal for Cedric: He comes with 10 base Power, and his Tier-2 Sword gives +13 Power for a total of 23. Assuming +0% Haste for what I think means 1 attack per second, we end up with 23 x 0,05 = 1,15 HP Lifesteal, which we can round down to 1 HP. Very easy to do better with a +Regen item Now, let's add some more: Let's say 2x Vampire Tooth for 10% Lifesteal, plus some from Rynn: 10% from his skill, and another 10% from 2x Vampire Tooth. 20%, half of that gets shared. So Cedric ends up with 20% total Lifesteal and 4.6hp returned. Let's be nasty and round down to 4hp. Still easy to top with a decent +Regen item. However, don't forget that with more Lifesteal and more Power, the numbers will go up quite a bit: My winning party's Rynn has 32% Lifesteal, giving 16% to the others. Cedric has 90 Power and +40% Haste, for a combined damage of 90 * 1.4 = 126 * 0,16 = 20.16 HP Lifesteal. And that's without any Lifesteal items on Cedric. UPDATE: And I don't even have the Legendary with another +10% Lifesteal that Roger mentioned while I was writing. Let's see: That'd be 40% Lifesteal on Rynn, for 20% shared. 126 x 0.2 = 25.2 hp Lifesteal. Coming quite close to the max. possible Regen of 30 I've seen so far. Let's replace his +Haste stuff with more Teeth and see how that goes: Rynn's numbers same as above, plus 20% for Cedric with 2x Vampire Tooth +5. So, 90 Power and 36% Lifesteal for 90 x 0,36 = 32,4 HP return. Even better than with the +Haste items. However, pay attention that this comes with the cost of Cedric dealing 40% less damage, which in my book is a huge tradeoff that you have to take into account. UPDATE: With Rynn's Legendary on top of the above, we end up at 90 x 0.4 = 36 HP return. Only with adding Rynn into the picture we get to a spot where the maximum Lifesteal I can easily put on Cedric slightly outperforms 2x +15 Regen amulets. Without Rynn, those +Regen items are easily superior to Lifesteal. Note though that this doesn't take Criticals and Skill damage into account. Adding those two in will make the math *a lot* more complicated, what with cooldowns and stuff. E.g. I can easily imagine that November with her Icestorm will get much better mileage out of Lifesteal than a single-attack melee guy. Then, to make things even more complicated, we should also look at the +% Healing from Zara's Signet ring. I just saw a +8 in the Shop, with a whopping +34% Healing effect. But so not going to do that now Also, *very* important: Regen also works while you are running away, which is handy as you should only do that when you are low on health already anyways. Summary for now: IF you *really* need it, go with Regen, especially early on. Later on, do the math and see which one gives you the better returns. It'd be *highly* interesting to know if e.g. Haste also affects Regeneration. @MikaMobile ? If I get my hands on a good Troll Amulet I'll give it a shot and see how it goes.
@Nullzone You're welcome! I should also mention re: the Samurai that the knockdown from Blade Rush doesn't stack, so you should wait for the knockdown to end before zipping back across the screen for maximum efficiency. And try not to get antsy and activate Counter while the Knockdown is running, because there's nothing to Counter if they can't attack you. I know that probably sounds obvious, but I made that mistake more than a few times before training myself out of it!
@Nullzone the developer confirmed that haste increases the speed of ticks of the bard's normal healing, but not healing under Power Chord. Also confirmed that crit doesn't boost bard healing.
Thanks for the info, very much appreciated! Definitely weird, though. I just got the Bard's Legendary Strings, and those come with +5% Critchance. Why give a Legendary a useless stat? UPDATE: Not useless at all. Should have read the fine print:
Maybe I'm not gearing my party right for it, but I've consistently found Song of War too risky to use. The increased damage doesn't seem to be worth the lack of healing, in that I still don't kill enemies quickly enough to avoid taking a lot of damage in return. Is there an 'optimal' party loadout for minimizing Song of War risk that people have found works for them? Thanks!
SPOILERS Here is my review of the endgame: Call me crazy, but I wish the grind was a bit harder. The grind is surprisingly quick once you get to the higher levels of arena (50 plus) and I quickly kitted out my pyromancer in uber gear and broke the game. Rewind is utterly broken once you get 100 percent, and even without deflect 100 percent, I still got to wave 68. A tip: don’t get deflect if you want to be able to complete the arena to get bonuses. The only way to end if you have deflect maxed is to forfeit the run. You still get the loot, but no bonus tomes, and at level 101 I lost out on probably 5k+ tomes. So yeah, pyromancer is completely op. I haven’t tested anyone else out at a high level in endgame, but I imagine with enough stat stacking Frost mage could be good, too. The talent that makes your meteors stun guys is super clutch though. Chain endless meteor = gg. On another note: for those wondering, there are a finite number of legendaries And once you have them all the chest no longer spawns. Also, a note for the dev: the victory screen tome bonus needs to be fixed in high level arena. It just keeps calculating 6 tomes at a time for a very long time. I’d say try and crunch the bonus into the final number instead of 6 at a time. All in all, I have had good fun with this, and I’m curious to try multiplayer. Thank you Mikamobile!
The next update will be fixing some bugs and massively tuning down the potential for crazy power accumulation via the arena. Difficulty per wave will scale faster at the high end, and rewards won’t multiply into the stratosphere. Also, rewind and deflection will cap at 50%.
If I were you I would strongly consider hardcapping a number of the stats. It's a tricky line to straddle because upgrading stats is the fun part. I don't envy your position because balancing is tough, but perhaps consider some sort of soft cap like From Soft does. That way you can keep sinking crystals into gear and it feels good, but it's not breaking the game. For example, my pyromancer does 600 damage and like 500 spell damage. He one shots everything through level 100 of arena. There are no interesting tactical choices at the higher level. It's either kill things in one hit or die in one hit. I probably only represent like 1% of the BH2 population, but we min maxers are out here, and any balancing would be noticed and appreciated. P.s. I'm still waiting at the post combat party level screen after my arena run. It's been 20 minutes of "+6 skill points." Probably due to the 255 million xp. LOL. I was getting like a casual 2 million gold per wave near the end there. Edit: I ended up closing the game after 45 minutes and starting over. If you get to a high level arena, just forfeit instead of dying, otherwise you'll be stuck at the victory screen for god only knows how long. Cheers.
I was running pyro, bard (song of war), war priest(as tank and heals) and a barbarian (probably the most interchangeable, but it's nice to have an auto attacker). Basically I'd keep the bard on song of war until/unless the group was getting low and then I'd swap to heal mode and power chord burst the team back up to healthy. Worked just fine for me from like level 20 on.
@MikeMobile, Aside from bragging rights, are there any benefits gained from playing the game entirely at the highest possible difficulty level? For example, does this increase experience points, offer more rewards, higher quality, rarer, or better items, unlock items or artifacts otherwise cannot be gained by other means, etc.?
Being able to do missions for items helps, because the random loot offers lots of opportunities to experiment. As far as the risks of buying legendaries go, I haven’t progressed far enough to get one but you could always copy your save and experiment on the copy. I did that so I could use a little bit of knowledge saved up to unlock character’s passives to get a better sense of how their progressions might work for team building.
Just a warning for you arena grinders: I ran through it about three times to around level 100 and got enough resources to boost all my main party into the stratosphere. I’m gonna take a stab at it and say that I got around 250k crystals and 300 million gold. It’s crazy. We are talking a 40k hp tank, a rogue who autos for 20k and life steals for 40k. And in the impossible event of any of my guys taking damage(I was not able to test this, as I took no damage by this point), my priestess could start spamming group invulnerability. Like, it’s legitimately obscene. I would be very careful of arena until the rewards get adjusted down. In the mean time I will be starting a fresh run where I can play the game as intended. Edit: did one more run on max difficulty. I was one shotting everything with my rogue til around 160 at which point I surrendered and made 3.3 million crystals.
I agree with others, legendary items should have some kind of special border. The arena is a really great place to get rewards, I only had 1 crash so far. Right at the beginning of wave 1, I used the latest update of the game and iOS, an iPad Air 2. My hardware shouldn‘t be a problem. Odette used her high damage skill and Mint was trying to heal. Cedric was also in the team as well as Cyrus but I didn‘t select them. I hope that I got all the information right. Did somebody also noticed that sometimes if Odette uses her Drain Life skill the „bubble“ won‘t hit your hero especially if the hero is moving which is pretty annoying as life won‘t be healed. I‘ve the skill which lets her heal 2 heroes and I see it happen from time to time. What is the highest cost to upgrade skills? If just one skill would be left, how many books would be needed?
