u/Shot-Confection-3720

Im currently at level 7 and have gotten to starting in your heart shall burn. Im playing on nightmare with walk softly, even ground, take it slow and grizzly end. Its been a struggle but i appreciate it for how it exposes all the complexity in the game in terms of gear and progression.

My problem right now is that i just cant get through in your heart shall burn. While defending the ballista i get whacked either by the second group or, at best the third. Theres this issue where the party AI is constantly trying to hug eachother, leading to my mages getting oneshot by fatass templars who have a bar of guard immediately. Its hard to say for me what exactly is the reason. Things can go well and then, in a moment, half the party gets one-shot and im left clumsily trying to do something with whoevers left.

My inquisitor is a two-handed warrior with the chain pull, the spin riposte that knocks enemies down and the ground pound that knocks down enemies. Im using a sword and shield Blackwall with the taunting shout, charge, hook and warhorn. I doubled up on mages with Vivienne, who has the immolate with the no cooldown upgrade, dispel, barrier and barrage. Solas has barrage, barrier, winters grasp and ice wall, as well as the passive that causes barriers to explode and freeze. All of them are wearing crafted gear with mods for base stats (strength, magic, constitution). Vivienne is using the wrath of Lovias and Solas is using the dreamweavers staff and the two warriors use crafted weapons. All have crafted upgrades slotted.

Im considering rebounding and doing filler in the hinterlands and the coast to hopefully reach level 8. I suppose i could minmax my gear more by grinding materials, but short of what ive done now, i dont know what kinds of stat packages are optimal for crafting results. I do have all the recipes from redcliff purchased.

Id appreciate any feedback, explanations and elaborations. I get its aspirational content and i can "just lower the difficulty and increase it back latter" but i dont wanna. Its tedious and frustrating but even so i wanna do it.

Im currently at level 7 and have gotten to starting in your heart shall burn. Im playing on nightmare with walk softly, even ground, take it slow and grizzly end. Its been a struggle but i appreciate it for how it exposes all the complexity in the game in terms of gear and progression.

My problem right now is that i just cant get through in your heart shall burn. While defending the ballista i get whacked either by the second group or, at best the third. Theres this issue where the party AI is constantly trying to hug eachother, leading to my mages getting oneshot by fatass templars who have a bar of guard immediately. Its hard to say for me what exactly is the reason. Things can go well and then, in a moment, half the party gets one-shot and im left clumsily trying to do something with whoevers left.

My inquisitor is a two-handed warrior with the chain pull, the spin riposte that knocks enemies down and the ground pound that knocks down enemies. Im using a sword and shield Blackwall with the taunting shout, charge, hook and warhorn. I doubled up on mages with Vivienne, who has the immolate with the no cooldown upgrade, dispel, barrier and barrage. Solas has barrage, barrier, winters grasp and ice wall, as well as the passive that causes barriers to explode and freeze. All of them are wearing crafted gear with mods for base stats (strength, magic, constitution). Vivienne is using the wrath of Lovias and Solas is using the dreamweavers staff and the two warriors use crafted weapons. All have crafted upgrades slotted.

Im considering rebounding and doing filler in the hinterlands and the coast to hopefully reach level 8. I suppose i could minmax my gear more by grinding materials, but short of what ive done now, i dont know what kinds of stat packages are optimal for crafting results. I do have all the recipes from redcliff purchased.

Id appreciate any feedback, explanations and elaborations. I get its aspirational content and i can "just lower the difficulty and increase it back latter" but i dont wanna. Its tedious and frustrating but even so i wanna do it.

Dislaimer: This count is an approximation. I only count the stuff on the wiki, but im sure there are things that arent on the wiki. If youre interested in how flexible the games dialogue is and why its common to hear new lines in same situations even after hundreds of hours, there is a great GDC 2024 talk by cyberpunks scene system designer called "make a choice, see what happens" in the GDC vault you can watch for free.

The game also has an unknown number of instances where an attribute investment changes something V says, without alerting the player that their choices changed things. An example being Johnny changing his summary of Vs life based on lifepath as a more obvious one. The youtuber breadballer has a growing playlist of the more obscure examples.

My methodology was also to exclude breaching doors, hotwiring things with tech and hacking access points, but to count everything else. I think access points arent really skill checks in terms of their effect and body and tech checks are, but for the sake of the argument i excluded all three. As the last note, cyberpunk has a lot of flexibility in terms of content that the player may or may not experience. These checks are spread across dozens of scene variants, different outcomes, dialogues the player may never engage in because they chose different options and so on.

The final result of my (imperfect) count is 315 skill checks, with 160 of them belonging to attributes and 155 belonging to lifepath dialogue. For lifepath, the corpo has the most at 66, followed by street kid at 52 and nomad with 37. The numbers might seem lobsided, but ive observed that nomad checks usually involve more content to them than other ones, especially when dealing with nomads.

As for attributes, intelligence was at the top with 43 options (with a few of those being pcs that can be hacked). Bottom one was reflex at 23 which i expected. What i didnt expect is that, removing all the hotwiring and level interactions, tech is the second lowest at 25. Body and cool have 33 and 36 checks respectively.

I consider all of this to be a huge jump relative to the witcher 3, a game that had maybe a dozen skill checks in total, all coming from the same perk.

This is a vent post.

I returned to the game after last playing it between 2018 and 2020 and started again with a new account. Im having a great time. The game is a lot more challenging than i remember and much better put together. Back when i last started playing i recall fumbling around until natah, into second dream and so on, which was the big hype draw at the time. I like the structure there is now a lot more. Last time i remember the game being trivial with exceptions of harsh spikes and then flipflopping between the two, while this time the challenge is a lot more consistent.

The exception to this are many of the starchart bosses and archwing missions. For the former, i was pissed off beyond measure by the two deimos bosses. Lephantis drove me wild with how tedious and frustrating it was. Wait 15 seconds for the mouth to open, shoot for three seconds, repeat. Wait for the scythe third to stop flailling around and shoot for a few seconds until its time to wait again.

Im sure this is okay with built out weapons and frames that get one shots, but im not in that part of the game yet, so this fight was three quarters doing nothing or having my shots get immuned by the model and waiting for the boss to stop having its fun flailling around so i can damage him. Vay Hek can also go fuck himself.

I find the combination of miniscule damage spots, teaspoon sized damage phases, constant jittery movement and total invulnerability on most of the model to be infuriating, which was demonstrated best by the pandora archwing mission that made me angry enough to vent here. I have to shoot this tiny engine on the back of the ship thats constantly running away and making sharp turns. Fine. But half the time my shots bloom out and hit the ship instead doing no damage. Okay. And the engine is a meatsack that can take several magazines to go down due to all the dispersed shots. Uhhh. So the most reliable way is to stay up the ships ass constantly, at which point i get blasted by the mines it keeps dropping behind itself. Why?

And thats just the introduction, as i then have to shoot out four tiny circles on the inside of the ships wings that can also take a 100 + rounds to down each even with damage mods, while being given the time to shoot out maybe two before the engine reboots, while constantly getting harassed by drones, mines and having my field of view cluttered in particles and alpha effects as the ship keeps spazzing up and down. Why?