I just realized the normal difficulty was easy for me. I guess it's my learning curve creeping up in the background; I thought I wasn't good at bullet hell games. I'm willing to try harder difficulties, however bosses are already challenging for me at normal difficulty. I just find myself overpowered against floor's hazard, maybe because of my Isaac's experience, yet I'm afraid of certain bosses. I remember TLF has two distinct difficulty levels: management VS fight, and I wonder how good (or bad) it would be for SR to have something like that. I would like to push up the challenges of the floors and resource scarcity, but the bullet hell thing is hard enough for me.
TL;DR: in my current experience, floors are near-boring and bosses are challenging enough. Does Misery Arcen thinks SR would actually benefit from splitting difficulty option between resources management VS bullet hell?
I don't want to go into too much detail just yet, but the game's difficulty balance will be changing.
Right now, it has issues. Basically, the game's difficulty curve is effectively backwards; the further you go into the game the easier it gets on a given run as your power level skyrockets, causing even the game's final bosses to go down like paper in many cases if you've been choosing your build carefully enough. Needless to say.... I intended for them NOT to die if you looked at them too hard. But this sure does affect normal enemies too, which, like bosses, need to be able to stick around long enough to generate their attacks.
In other words, the mid/late-game's increase in difficulty, in terms of patterns getting more and more loopy, is mostly nullified.
So we're working on some changes there. Well, I say "we", but I myself am fantastically terrible at things involving math, and that's mostly where the problem is, in how player stats and boosts are handled. The others are all good at it from what I've seen though, so that should get fixed soon enough.
....also normal enemy HP is too low. This one is my fault, I wasn't really paying attention to this as I kept assigning them values (most new enemies that appear only in the late game are my design), so their HP is just all over the place and in some cases equal to early-game ones. Yeah, oops. Not JUST the late-game though but the mid-game is affected by this too.
Though, normal enemy HP doesn't mean all that much till the wonky math bits are dealt with anyway, so right now isn't the time to change them. Currently I'm still dealing with the blasted rooms.
Certainly try Hard if you like, though be aware that in your version Hard mode is wildly imbalanced due to the room issue. That issue isn't AS noticeable on Normal, but tends to go into overdrive on Hard as I tended to get a bit enthusiastic in my hard-mode designs (so, ALOT of things not fit for the rooms they're in, way more than on Normal). For example, Blaze Cannons that fire side shots that fire more piercing bullets. About as fun as it sounds! But the rooms are a mess with stuff like that, though as I said, that fix is coming.
As for the idea of a difficulty split? I think I have an idea as to what you mean by that, but I cant even conceive of how that'd work. That would likely take too much time/effort to do. In the end, dealing with the math is one huge thing that'll make the resource bit more interesting (since right now you barely have to even think about your build in order to go all-powerful), and there's still changes coming for actual items and also item pools too.
So, hopefully, that aspect will just outright get a lot better. I agree, it's not in a good place right now.
