Nightwind wrote on 2023-01-12 19:57:25:
I'm going to be the bad guy here and point out that if you've leveled 70+ dragons who actively get stopped by the same venue so much that you never level them further using the same stat distribution every time that the game may be telling you early that what you're doing doesn't work.
Real Time Strategy games will eat you alive if your APM is low and LARP games will shun you if you're too much of a jerk when you play. Different games reward different playstyles.
While there are many downsides to the coli having it point out early (as opposed to several hours in) that what you're doing isn't optimal and is much better than waiting until you get up to Forgotten Caves or Bamboo Falls where you've spent 7+ hours getting there.
The problem with this argument is that even if you have absolutely optimal stats, the venue is awful (in my opinion). I have done the Scorched Forest while level-appropriate numerous times in different ways— with bad stats, with good stats and Eliminate, with good stats and no Eliminate, with good stats and a healer— and it's never been anything less than miserable. The problem is that the difficulty spikes, but there's no way to compensate around that to make it easier, which makes people feel like they're doing something wrong even if they're not.
I mean, you're not wrong in that often people
aren't statting their dragons optimally, and it's good to catch it earlier rather than later even if catching it at all is discouraging because whoops gotta get a new team (been there, done that). But when even people who are statting optimally struggle with the stage (and I have talked to not-me new people using guides who felt this way in the past; I don't know if they still feel this way, obviously), I think it's worth people looking at and thinking about why that continues to be the case, and why other stages have grown in difficulty to match that instead of remaining easier.
For example, the only reason the Sandswept Delta isn't equal levels of hard is because it level-matches the ability to equip Ambush. Without equipping Ambush— which I did the first two times I leveled, once the wrong way and once the right way— it is just as miserable a slog as SF and can function as a good roadblock because Ambush and good statting will take that difficulty away and praise you for doing the right thing. I suppose the counter for that would be that if you've made it that far slogging through on non-optimal stats, Ambush would still help, but it won't be the same kind of fix that Ambush + optimal stats is.
But the Scorched Forest just has nothing to make it any less miserable, in my experience. A healer with a nicely statted team made it more survivable, but it didn't feel any faster than keeping my all-fighter teams back in the Woodland Path long enough to skip the Forest entirely (which I normally do even though it's slower). The only thing that alters the difficulty at all is the addition of Eliminate to make battles less sloggy and dangerous (because obviously if you can kill things faster you take less damage and cut down on the number of times when an enemy just… hits or crits you unavoidably to death in your first battle), and that's a pretty steep price to put on the third stage of the Coliseum when a newbie can no longer happen upon Eliminate by farming until the Blooming Grove.
Though, again, my take on it is mostly that I don't necessarily expect a revamp, but just that I'd like the devs to consider not tankifying every single low-to-mid-level venue in the future. I'm not going to rehash all that because I think it's pretty irrelevant to what you're saying about the Scorched Forest itself and what it's trying to accomplish, but I did just want to mention that I personally am not expecting the SF itself to change so much as talking about my own experiences (and tangentially the experiences others new to the game have shared with me) in the hopes that huge difficulty spike tanky enemies forever does not become the norm any more than it already is.
