While I am definitely enjoying where things have been going recently (even if things are a bit "bare" at the moment), when I came back to play some AVWW after a couple month hiatus in the most recent patch, with a new world, I found a rather nasty surprise waiting for me. Monsters, if I may put it this way, spawn way too many freakin bullets that last for extended periods of time.
I think I should put it more eloquently than that though. Before this recent patch, I will agree that enemies really did not do much. They fired a couple spells off and then I killed them, often without taking any damage, so I welcomed the patch notes which said that there were more bullets spawned to make thing more interesting. Then I went into an area with Lightning Espers and Water Espers (or whatever their name was, they fire a ton of bolts of water). My screen then immediately began to fill with bullets. To say the least this is hard to dodge. In corridors, it often became impossible to dodge the 3*2+6*2 bullets being spawned by two Lightning Espers and two Water Espers, all wedged into some corner. (even a single Lightning Esper with its three bullet spread can make a small corridor a corridor of unavoidable damage) On top of this problem of Touhou-esque bullet generation, they also fire spells of fast. This not only makes waves of hard/impossible to avoid spells, but it creates a constant stream of them. I even found a point where two Water Espers were firing waves of spells through a corridor in some stairs, creating a nigh-impossible to avoid damage "wall" of water spells all the way across the narrow stairway.
With the new system of not having potions, this is particularly bad, causing all sorts of times where I can't avoid damage and I can't heal it without killing more enemies, causing me to lose more health, in a vicious cycle. In fact, I found that just sitting directly in the line of fire and spamming spells to kill enemies as fast as possible, getting the small health-restoring particles they drop, was often the best strategy to retain the most amount of health. Occasionally dodging when there is a chance of getting through the wall of spells helped, but doing so constantly would generally just lead me to losing MORE health because I was hitting enemies less. (granted, I should probably use tab auto-aiming, but I don't usually think about it or use it)
I would also like to bring up an additional point to do with monsters and damage. I decided to go to a slightly higher level area than my civilization. (level 2 in a level 3 area, specifically) It was a desert area, which I actually had never been in before due to just exploring massive buildings/cave systems largely in winter areas in the previous world. If you've been in a desert area, I'm sure you've seen the dust whirlwind enemies that spawn. The problem was when one of them hit me. At the normal 100% health point, a single hit took out a bit less than 1/3 of my health. And this enemy was just a normal enemy that spawned everywhere, in large quantities inside of buildings actually. (I entered a room and saw 4 of them immediately) On top of this, they had massive quantities of health that took me a very long time to whittle away.
Now, I know that areas above my level are supposed to be hard, but having an enemy that can kill me in roughly 4 hits when they are one level above me when I am at a normal amount of health is, in my opinion, a tad ridiculous. I was hoping to be able to explore with a challenge, not be almost insta-gibbed by entering a room with a few of these enemies in it and be unable to find some kind of ledge easily to avoid damage. (particularly if you are in a narrow corridor with little room to jump)
Now, maybe I'm just a complainer and other people find how things currently are a-ok, but I figured I'd at least start the topic for people to discuss what they think the current balance of monsters are. How hard they hit, how many projectiles are spawned, etc. I hope I'm not coming off as just a whiner and have brought up some valid points for balance discussion.
