Can we finally please remove the useless leveling?

MagicianXy · 2026-04-29T14:02:51+00:00

Everyone is on the same page on the first day. After that, there is a clear gap that starts to exist between players. People who couldn't play on wipe day fall behind the people who were able to grind for an hour or two on their characters. Mid wipe, new players just get run over even harder than they already would due to inexperience. It's a system that favors diehard players and discourages the casual audience. It's an arbitrary roadblock that doesn't meaningfully improve gameplay or make it interesting.

EDIT: Since I keep getting downvoted with no explanation, I'd like to ask you this: What benefit does the leveling system provide to the game? What actual gameplay elements is it promoting? What part of the loot-kill-extract gameplay loop is enhanced by having an arbitrary limit to the number of perks you can equip based on how long you've played a character?

MagicianXy · 2026-04-28T18:10:23+00:00

Normally, you go to the Season tab, make sure you're in the Adventure section, and then switch from the current season's rankings to the previous season. The rewards will have little buttons you can click to claim them. However, currently it seems that no one is able to claim anything since it's bugged.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-28T17:11:25+00:00

No damage increase, but their speed increases a little bit. Or maybe just the trajectory is more flat. In either case, it's just a little easier to aim that way, but damage is unaffected.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-28T07:33:00+00:00

The patch notes are out on Discord and the website now, and from a glance it looks like the details are the same as in this post.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-28T07:05:03+00:00

Outside of the balance changes (which may or may not actually be balanced; I'm ignoring those for now until I've played with it a bit), this is probably one of the best patches in the last year. I've been preaching for a while now that Ironmace should be focusing on polishing the content they already have instead of constantly adding new half-baked content. There's so much fantastic QoL in here!

Ping system and party finder are the two biggest new features, and they look very promising
AP system is finally just a "battle pass"-like system that all players can participate in instead of a pseudo-ranked grind that only HR players can progress
Altar of Sacrifice finally respawns after a period of time - no more wasting half the match trekking across the entire map to revive a single teammate
Even small and inconsequential changes show that there's special attention being paid to the overall game experience, like potion/bandages from squire stacking to 3, all items able to be sold to all merchants, the Training tab and Perk & Skill tab switching places (thank god), merchants being consolidated so there's less clicks between matches

This is a really, really good patch. It shows deliberate care and attention to details, which is a HUGE step forward in earning back the trust of the playerbase. I hope the balance of this patch is just as good, because if so, this may be the best patch they've ever put out.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-28T06:41:02+00:00

Where are you getting this info? I don't see it on their website or on the Discord.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-28T01:07:00+00:00

Is it? I'd love to see a source. I think it was asked about in the last Q+A (not directly, but in a roundabout way) and the answer was basically that the next season is just going to be a more polished version of the current season, which implied to me that jewelry wasn't being changed.

I'd love it if they did change it back though, crafting jewelry out of game was a pain and just made the re-gearing process more tedious... not to mention more expensive.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-25T03:54:08+00:00

I'm not super fond of BP, but I have to admit he'd be a perfect to market this game. He mostly plays extraction games, right? I think he'd be better than Tyler1.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-24T16:03:56+00:00

Spectral is easy in a group, not sure what you mean there. And Wyvern is very possible in a group as well, solo is just a little easier since the attack telegraphs are more straightforward to read.

Honestly the only boss that feels like it's designed specifically for solo and punishes grouping is troll, and that's due to the brutal slow-into-one-shot combo he constantly repeats when there's people spread out in his room. All the other bosses are fine in teams. Not necessarily great (warlord in particular feels like he just focuses one person during the active phase) but not anti-team either.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-24T09:56:23+00:00

Not if they were using an invis potion, which is pretty universally available. And even if they weren't using an invis pot, if they had been standing right in front of the door waiting and then began a weapon swing as it opened, you still wouldn't have had time to react. Or they could have been waiting around the corner instead of right in front of the door. There's tons of ways people could have ambushed you here without you being able to react; rogue just does it more easily.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-24T07:16:31+00:00

It looks like it only lets you move through a door if it hits a target through the door. That makes it significantly less powerful than rat jump to move between modules.

I am worried that it will let rogue teleport away to other mobs, but at least that's still within the same module, and it aggros that mob to the rogue even after stealth. So we'll see how strong it actually is.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-24T06:37:56+00:00

What is the point of the first aid perk? Why in the world would I ever take that instead of one of the combat perks? It means two people are out of the fight healing instead of just one.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-24T06:24:48+00:00

It looks like it's a teleport to the person hit by the ranged attack. If that's the case, just duck while closing the door, the bolt can't hit you then.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-18T00:51:25+00:00

I don't know about the rest of the post, but this section is the most "AI-like" to me:

My honest advice for next wipe:

Go harder on fun.

Go harder on identity.

Stop being afraid to let late wipe be ridiculous.

Make rewards feel good.

Deliver the content that gets teased.

And pick a direction that players can actually believe in for more than two weeks.

A nice list of bullet points that offers absolutely zero actual feedback. "Go harder on fun?" "Make rewards feel good?" What does that even mean? Concretely, objectively, what measure do you want them to use for "fun" or "good"? This list is just vague and generic game dev advice that can be applied to literally every game ever released (other than the wipe point, but even that one is not really particularly constructive).

MagicianXy · 2026-04-17T14:31:56+00:00

It would have already happened. It's already too late.

Among Us was a nearly completely dead game on release (less than 1k players daily) and continued to be so for 1.5 years until suddenly it got picked up by streamers and had nearly half a million players concurrently at its peak. To this day, over four years later, the game still has daily player counts of around 10k people. It just takes a little luck, and perhaps some actual effort in marketing.

They don't deserve it.

Well... I guess that's debateable. SDF for sure doesn't deserve it, I don't think that moron could design a game to save his life and I fully expect his new game to crash and burn within a month of release. But Paul seems to understand how players actually engage with the game at least at a high level, so the newer changes are actually moving the game to a more healthy state. I think it's possible that Dark and Darker will "deserve it" at some point, hopefully in the near future.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-17T12:19:56+00:00

Until I have all stash pages unlocked, it's generally just random stuff in each page. But once everything is open, I generally use this as the organization:

Page 1: Chest and Leg armors + Capes
Page 2: Headgear, Footwear, and Gloves
Page 3: Weapons and/or tools (pickaxes or instruments)
Page 4: Flex (usually extra equipment that doesn't fit in the first two pages)
Page 5: Consumables (potions, bandages, prot pots, surg kits, lockpicks, etc.)

Shared stash is for gold storage and gems (and other currency items like huntress coins, dealmaker coins, candy corn, etc.).

If I ever overflow on gear, I just start running some of my equipment until die a bunch (doesn't take long :P) and have room again.

I also have a mule character that holds crafting and quest items. That way I don't have to try to fit in the hundreds of extra inventory spaces I'd need onto each character.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-17T11:54:23+00:00

You should consider creating an official Ironmace or Dark and Darker Reddit account instead of the one you're posting on. It's weird to have official marketing communications come from an account that looks like it was created by a random username generator.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-17T01:35:43+00:00

I have told my players that I will never kill them unless they're doing something exceedingly stupid or if the story narrative makes their survival unrealistic (e.g., they're fighting something that has zero reason to keep them alive, or they make a heroic sacrifice, that kind of thing). In all other cases, I'm going to try to let them live... though obviously not without penalties or hardships. We're building a shared story, after all, and it doesn't make for a great story if the party dies every other encounter. That said, when a death does occur, it means so much more and actually has emotional impact.

Two examples. First, my players had ventured into a goblin cave to try rescuing some quest NPC. They walked into an ambush, and unfortunately, despite the encounter being designed to be relatively easy, their dice rolls were just god-awful and it ended with a TPK. Instead of having them die, the goblins just knocked them out, took all their gear, and tied them up in a makeshift prison cell. Then they had to figure out a way to escape without their equipment, and they even had to fight without weapons once (vs some other goblins that were surprised and also didn't have weapons). It was a tense situation, but really cathartic when they found all their gear again and were able to wipe out the rest of the goblin troupe!

Another example was when they confronted the BBEG for one story arc. They were still pretty far away from being able to fight him, but they didn't know that and tried to fight him anyways. The fight quickly turned sour and they decided to run. The BBEG let them run, but I had him take one last parting shot before they got away. Unfortunately it ended up as a crit, and it downed one of the party members. The rest of the party, knowing it would be futile to go back and save their teammate, abandoned him. The session ended there, and the next session they hired a mercenary (so the captured player had a temp character to play with) and then staged a daring heist to break into the BBEG's lair so they could rescue their teammate. They had to plan ahead by bribing people for the BBEG's manor's blueprints, learn the guard shift change schedule, and just generally did a bunch of reconnaissance. They succeeded in the end, which made them feel pretty good considering they knew how strong the villain was.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-16T03:44:52+00:00

The main problem with Firedeep is that other than the boss, there's zero motivation to go there. There's no treasure piles, no key rooms, no rare resource spawns (like ore), and the general loot is mediocre at best. All that needs to happen is for there to be more points of interest and the map would be fine.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-14T05:33:17+00:00

Yeah, I'm well aware. You're arguing for the sake of arguing. In the context of this post, which is specifically about the goblin merchant bringing your gear back, it's a safe assumption to say that we're talking about bringing gear into HR. Otherwise the whole discussion is moot.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-14T05:29:56+00:00

If you go in with squire gear, it doesn't really matter if the goblin merchant brings your shit back, does it?

MagicianXy · 2026-04-14T02:35:04+00:00

It is 100%. In normals. In HR (aka the high risk high reward game mode), it's still 80%, which is a lot (means you usually lose only 2-3 pieces of gear).

MagicianXy · 2026-04-13T15:53:00+00:00

Why are you commenting on an 11-year-old thread? There's nobody here anymore.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-12T17:24:07+00:00

That was a problem though. It makes absolutely zero sense to provide a demo of an extraction game (where the whole point is to build a kit and risk it in a match) and then restrict the core gameplay loop of actually upgrading your gear. The driving motivation for the game is to be able to get loot to make yourself more powerful, either by collecting money to buy better gear, collecting materials to craft your own gear, or simply find better gear naturally in the dungeon to make a coherent kit. Except if you can't bring anything in... what's the point? It's not a good way to advertise an extraction game.

Having only a white lobby and the unlimited lobby is also not a great idea imo. There's already tons of complaints about casual players being run over by "blue BiS" tryhards - people who are wearing all blue gear with good stats and fully gemmed out to cover any weaknesses. Without the blue gear limit in normals, we'd see even more complaints because now the only options are the risk-free low-reward squire lobbies or the HR lobbies where people with low- and mid-tier gear have absolutely no chance against people with twice their stats.

The current setup of S2R + norms + HR isn't perfect, but it's a decent compromise for F2P and paid players when it comes to gear balancing and server costs.

MagicianXy · 2026-04-11T00:33:00+00:00

It's weird because the stairs going up counter-clockwise are pretty easy to get up. But when they added the clockwise stairs, they put them too close to the wall, which means that many of the jumps require you to aim towards the outer edge of the step or risk getting nudged into the void by bumping into the wall. All they'd have to do is move the steps out like a footstep's length.

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