PC Why are the devs screwing over agi/stealth in their POI design?

[KotCP]

Me personally I hate dying with a passion, so I choose stealth to minimize my chance at being killed, especially in the early game, where the most you are likely to have is a bow, unless you get lucky with the loot and opening spawn near a ShotGM.

Depending on how you handle stealth, it can potentially be pretty fast, especially if you have a lot of points spent in it and have the skill books, ESPECIALLY the no stamina drain one.

When stealth works, it affords you a control over your situation that can allow you to murder entire floors of Zeds in a short time period.

I can't tell you how many times I enjoyed stealthing into a ShameWay Factory and using a Composite Crossbow to take then entire factory out, all while running crouched and stopping to aim for the head.

Being able to smash things up so you can ensure line of sight is wonderful too, especially when From the shadows skill makes your work even more silent and the zeds less likely to react, which is especially useful when banging on metal or upgrading metel has the higher chance of waking zeds via noise, when not facing an invisible trigger of some kind.

Speed is usually not the main concern, control, personal survival and effectiveness is.

Becoming able to rip a ShameWay Factory stealthed, faster then a machine gunner rushing, is a side effect of practice and proper gear and skill acquisition.

 

[Danidas]

On my combat focused characters, I play stealth a lot, especially in the starting out of the game.

It is annoying to have this issue where the Devs seem to have programmed in an invisible trigger that suddenly activates a group of Zeds to rush at you when you get to a certain point on the map, in these POI's.  Makes me glad I played Neverwinter Nights and messed with the level creators for that old game.  Gained an understanding of "invisable location triggers."

Because of that, I have had to work around these triggers, I can't see, by simply smashing the heck out of the buildings, so I don't have to walk over the trigger and start CrossBow sniping the Zeds that should very clearly be unsuspecting, in the first place. 

Sometimes I even have to setup new caged/door access area's, to control Zed movements, should stealth fail me, often times due to these invisible triggers.  A method that started out with busting a Doorway into a 3 block wide, 2 block high, hole in the wall, before adding a new door and 2 wood bars wall replacements, so I could shoot at any Zeds that are in the next room over as well as have it as insurance, if they wake up, especially unexpectedly due to invisible wake triggers. 

With the Introduction of spears I since then changed my insurance corridor method to 2x2, place only 2 wood bars on the lower block area and have the door sideways.  If a Zed wakes now, and starts bashing the door, I can still stab it with thew spear from a safe distance.

Still, the fact that the use of invisible wake triggers is being used is quite bothersome and does feel a bet like cheating.

Unlike Neverwinter Nights the triggers in 7 Days are room wide cubes and the zombies with in do not exist until you cross into said cube. Which triggers them to spawn into the world and if set to auto aggro will instantly zero in on trying to kill you. Now said cubes are also almost always bigger then the rooms they are for to insure that no matter how you approach it they will get triggered. 

In other words if your able to bust through a wall to see the zombies to kill them that is not a auto aggro spawn volume.

The truth is that when you look at a house or building it is always completely empty of zombies and instead its sub divided into a series of versus sized cubes. Which each cube covers a room and the area around it especially towards the intended path. The moment you enter that cube the zombie spawn points with in spring to life and the allotted zombies spawn in of the type denoted by how that cube is set. If it is set to be asleep sleepers then that is what appears the same as if it is set to awake zombies and auto aggro who will instantly zero in on trying to kill you.

 

[KotCP]

I have noticed the spawn in nature of the Zeds have changed to something like that, where they arn't in the house until I get in there.  That does piss me off and feels like cheating.  I have also noticed a large increase in zeds suddenly rushing me out of no where as well, leaving me the, "they where not their a second ago, nor was this how they worked in the last A#, wtf?!?!" again feeling like I was cheated.

That being the case is why I carry the Robo(junk?) Turrets with me all the time now and setup Anti-Ambusah insurance rooms to fall back too, especially when I can't setup the whole woodbar+door thingies.

So, I am feeling cheated more often lately.

 

[Danidas]

I have noticed the spawn in nature of the Zeds have changed to something like that, where they arn't in the house until I get in there.  That does piss me off and feels like cheating.  I have also noticed a large increase in zeds suddenly rushing me out of no where as well, leaving me the, "they where not their a second ago, nor was this how they worked in the last A#, wtf?!?!" again feeling like I was cheated.

That being the case is why I carry the Robo(junk?) Turrets with me all the time now and setup Anti-Ambusah insurance rooms to fall back too, especially when I can't setup the whole woodbar+door thingies.

So, I am feeling cheated more often lately.

That feeling of being cheated is the whole point of this thread basically.

 

[meganoth]

Not 100% of the sleeper volumes need to be auto agro in a given POI for it to be "unfeasible" for a stealth build. Because the auto-agro volumes are, usually, used in locations where the stealth would make the most difference, in rooms with high number of sleepers. While the "normal" sleepers are normally in areas where there is only few zombies which would be kinda fine even if they would be auto agro as most players can handle 1-2 zombies coming at them at a time. When it is 8+ rushing you that have a magic GPS enabled to beeline straight to you no matter if in line or sight or not - THAT is a problem and can, basically, invalidate the POI for the purposes of stealth. 

Combine that with the fact that there is NOTHING in game indicating that a player is about to enter an auto aggro volume, and I'd think it is realtively easy to see the source of the frustration of players who like to play the stealth way. 

How hard would it be to write a script that goes over all the sleeper volumes in all POI's and changes ALL the sleepers to be "Awake" (flag "1") kind. Or at least change all the auto-agros (flag "2") to be just awake (flag "1"). I assume it can not be  just find-and-replace all 2's in a file with 1's as it appears the flags contain a fiar bit of more information than just the agression state of the sleepers?

Good and well that you put "unfeasible" in quotation marks. Because then it is only 100% "hyperbole" 

I agree that such locations have often more zombies in them because they are probably the equivalent of trapped locations, just that the trap is made out of zombies instead of spikes, mines or trapdoors. If my view is correct, then I aggree with hiemfire that auto-aggro volumes need a way to be detectable, like other traps are. This could be an invisible alarm sound or a visibile siren that hints at this being an auto-agrro zone.

And because they are balanced to be a difficult encounter with lots of zombies rushing you I can see why they used the auto-aggro for this. This "trap" will work better for some playstyles, worse for others. For example STR/FOR are great for such situations, PER and AGI are at a disadvantage in such situations.

It might be a good idea for other traps to have disadvantages for STR/FOR or advantages for PER/AGI to balance that out. and actually PER has Infiltrator. For AGI that is missing, an idea might be to add the ability to sneak through spike traps to the perk "into the shadows" or the sensing of auto-aggro volumes.

In the mean time, auto aggro volumes can be handled by AGI players as well, their most important weapon is their speed while they run away to get back into stealth or shoot the zombies while running away or using parcour to go where zombies can't follow. As AGI player it means the auto-aggro trap is more time-consuming to handle, but I don't think 7D2D will ever be able to be balanced on such a micro-scale, the best you can expect is a good balance of the attributes.

 

[Roland]

You can do everything much more efficiently and faster...

This isn't everyone's philosophy.

 

[Lesdeth]

This isn't everyone's philosophy.

This isn't a philosophy. It is a fact about the game. Stealth is in a poor state with how unbalanced the perks and POIs are.

You want me to drop my difficulty and use subpar light armor and subpar damage crossbows, to increase the time it takes to clear a POI and increase the risk associated with auto aggro rooms, when I can just run and gun in heavy armor and clear the whole building 10 times faster with less risk? Do you know what balance means?

 

[Jugginator]

I have gone full stealth set (light armor, not ghille) with silenced pistols, crossbows and regular bows. Shamway and Shotgun are what I run most of the time. In almost every room when you shoot one, they all aggro no matter which weapon you use.

Strange, I tested stealth to see what people were complaining about and both shamway and shotgun factories are two pois I tested it in with military armor with muffled connectors/compound crossbow/silenced sniper,desert vulture, and a shotgun (level 300 and day 700 to jump my GS up high, just added stealth points that's it). Saw only a couple rooms that woke up due to auto aggro, which I crouched a bit in a corner and they forgot about me, allowing me to pick them off. Most of the time, I'd blow the head off a zombie and the one(s) standing next to it shoulder to shoulder didn't even notice.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

This isn't a philosophy. It is a fact about the game. Stealth is in a poor state with how unbalanced the perks and POIs are.

You want me to drop my difficulty and use subpar light armor and subpar damage crossbows, to increase the time it takes to clear a POI and increase the risk associated with auto aggro rooms, when I can just run and gun in heavy armor and clear the whole building 10 times faster with less risk? Do you know what balance means?

This sounds less like Stealth is unbalanced and more like you just don't like stealth. I have never equipped heavy armor because I've never found the stamina/mobility/noise penalties to be worth it. If you feel the trade offs for heavy armor are worth it more power to you. But that says nothing about balance or player preference. In A19, I've spent almost all of my playtime in padded armor regardless of character build. 

 

[Boidster]

How hard would it be to write a script that goes over all the sleeper volumes in all POI's and changes ALL the sleepers to be "Awake" (flag "1") kind. Or at least change all the auto-agros (flag "2") to be just awake (flag "1"). I assume it can not be  just find-and-replace all 2's in a file with 1's as it appears the flags contain a fiar bit of more information than just the agression state of the sleepers?

It would not be difficult for anyone with basic sed/awk skills. You're correct it's not just "replace all 2s with 1s" - you have to find the correct XML nodes and only change the numbers within them. In Windows probably doable with a PowerShell script.

Edit: ooh, see Kalen on the job up there.

 

[hiemfire]

and actually PER has Infiltrator.

Probably one of the most misnamed perks in the game. It deals with making landmines less dangerous with the final perk also granting the ability to pick them up. Deadly Salvage would be more accurate.

 

[KotCP]

This isn't a philosophy. It is a fact about the game. Stealth is in a poor state with how unbalanced the perks and POIs are.

You want me to drop my difficulty and use subpar light armor and subpar damage crossbows, to increase the time it takes to clear a POI and increase the risk associated with auto aggro rooms, when I can just run and gun in heavy armor and clear the whole building 10 times faster with less risk? Do you know what balance means?

If you know what your doing, how to do it and what skills to purchase, Stealth can be quite fast.

Crossbows come with its own Sneak attack bonus stat of 200%.  Knives come with a 400% sneak Attack bonus.  These weapons sneak attack bonuses are added to any personal skill related sneak attack bonuses from the agi skill tree Hidden Strike and you still have skill perk books that can add another 50% on top of all that.

You get a crossbow that you can do 100 damage on with stone bolts, you can easily do 650 damage, one shotting most zeds no matter where you hit them.  And if you head shot them with only base crit bonus, you still get 1300 damage out of it, if doing doing base crit damage was even possible, but to even get the 6.5x sneak bonus from a crossbow, you have to spend points in both base agi and then hidden strike, so you are going to have a 300% crit bonus instead of base on top of personal base damage boosted by 50%, so now your Crossbow base is actually ( 150 x 6.5 ) x 300%

(( Crossbow damage times your personal base damage bonus ) times ( crossbow sneak attack damage + your sneak attack damage + special perk book sneak damage bonus)) times your headshot critical hit bonus from skill upgrades.

Crossbows suddenly become monster weapons that could 1 shot sleeping irradiated ferals and Zombie bears.

Now add From the Shadows sneak bonus to sneak speed and then the skill perk book that makes it where you don't spend stamina when sneak running, as well as the skill book that stops you from making sound when walking over trash while sneaking and not running while sneaking, and you have a stealthy person person that could clear a Shamway faster then a heavily Armored M60 player with a drum mag, because the Stamina loss will keep the heavily armored player slowed down as will the awaken zed rushes that will likely result in the player needed to use medical equipment a lot as well as chugging down a lot of stamina boosting drinks and buffs.

Being able to control the Zeds and having the freedom and focus to keep one shotting them when they don't suspect it can allow you for a silent high speed that doesn't appear to be as fast as it looks, to Rambo heavy armor machine gunner, rushing around in an adrenal rushed panic going threw hundred and thousands of bullets, that has to pause to heal, rebuff and wait for stamina regen after every room.

 

[meganoth]

If you know what your doing, how to do it and what skills to purchase, Stealth can be quite fast.

Crossbows come with its own Sneak attack bonus stat of 200%.  Knives come with a 400% sneak Attack bonus.  These weapons sneak attack bonuses are added to any personal skill related sneak attack bonuses from the agi skill tree Hidden Strike and you still have skill perk books that can add another 50% on top of all that.

You get a crossbow that you can do 100 damage on with stone bolts, you can easily do 650 damage, one shotting most zeds no matter where you hit them.  And if you head shot them with only base crit bonus, you still get 1300 damage out of it, if doing doing base crit damage was even possible, but to even get the 6.5x sneak bonus from a crossbow, you have to spend points in both base agi and then hidden strike, so you are going to have a 300% crit bonus instead of base on top of personal base damage boosted by 50%, so now your Crossbow base is actually ( 150 x 6.5 ) x 300%

(( Crossbow damage times your personal base damage bonus ) times ( crossbow sneak attack damage + your sneak attack damage + special perk book sneak damage bonus)) times your headshot critical hit bonus from skill upgrades.

Crossbows suddenly become monster weapons that could 1 shot sleeping irradiated ferals and Zombie bears.

Now add From the Shadows sneak bonus to sneak speed and then the skill perk book that makes it where you don't spend stamina when sneak running, as well as the skill book that stops you from making sound when walking over trash while sneaking and not running while sneaking, and you have a stealthy person person that could clear a Shamway faster then a heavily Armored M60 player with a drum mag, because the Stamina loss will keep the heavily armored player slowed down as will the awaken zed rushes that will likely result in the player needed to use medical equipment a lot as well as chugging down a lot of stamina boosting drinks and buffs.

Being able to control the Zeds and having the freedom and focus to keep one shotting the when they don't suspect it can allow you for a silent high speed that doesn't appear to be as fast as it looks, to Rambo heavy armor machine gunner, rushing around in an adrenal rushed panic going threw hundred and thousands of bullets, that has to pause to heal, rebuff and weight for stamina regen after every room.

i don't think this is right. All percentages added to a weapon are relative to base damage AFAIK

 

[Krougal]

While I hate a lot of things about this game and the direction it has taken the last few updates,

I gotta chime in and call bull@%$#, I love my agility build in a19. I can clear most of a POI (yes, even tier 5) with just my silenced pistol. For everything else, there is the SMG with drum mag. Stealth build isn't any worse off than any other build with the right equipment.

The new perk, stat and loot system might be complete trash (and don't even get me started on the map), but the pure agi is the most fun I've had with a19.

 

[Roland]

This isn't a philosophy. It is a fact about the game.

It's both. You can clear a POI faster by using run and gun rather than stealth. Efficiency might be debatable. But it is also a philosophy of playing any game when you choose to speed run it. You can play however you like but you should have enough self-awareness to understand that speed running a game is a choice and not something you are forced by the game design to do.

You want me to drop my difficulty and use subpar light armor and subpar damage crossbows, to increase the time it takes to clear a POI and increase the risk associated with auto aggro rooms, when I can just run and gun in heavy armor and clear the whole building 10 times faster with less risk?

I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do. I'm suggesting that lowering the difficulty to match your skill level with stealth will make it more fun for you. If you think most rooms in T4 and T5 POI's are auto aggro rooms that right there is evidence that you need more practice with stealth because it is YOU waking them up via YOUR mistakes and not some automatic trigger that you can't bypass. So you are having a tough time with stealth and playing at an extreme difficulty level. Logic would dictate that you should lower the difficulty until you a better than your current stealth abilities.

Jugginator even tested it and even in the actual auto aggro rooms it seems that if you crouch and hide they are not GPS'ing to your location-- at least in the room he tested. This could probably bear more testing because if it is consistently true that in auto aggro rooms they don't automatically target the player in addition to automatically waking up in a generally aggrivated state then this actually adds depth of gameplay to stealth.

But....it won't make clearing the POI faster if that is your goal.

 

[Danidas]

I bring back my argument that "Stealth is to Agility as Mining is to Strength".

Both are resource management systems with Stealth acting to reduce your resource use and Mining acting to supply resources.

Now both of them have limits in place and game mechanics designed to control them. For example with Stealth you have auto aggro volumes that completely negates it as well as POI design that increases the difficulty of using it. Which at the same time with Mining you have the threat of a cave in but more importantly the more you mine the greater the heat score of the chunk your in is and that naturally leads to Screamers. Who will zero on the location of what ever heat event triggered their spawn and will try to get to said location to scream about it or upon seeing you. So if you do not stop mining and go deal with the Screamers before they scream a horde upon you your going to have a bad day.

Sure the risk of Screamers is arguably a lot less then the risk of running into a room of angry zombies while unprepared but with a bit of for thought and preparations the threats can be minimized. 

Edit:

Jugginator even tested it and even in the actual auto aggro rooms it seems that if you crouch and hide they are not GPS'ing to your location-- at least in the room he tested. This could probably bear more testing because if it is consistently true that in auto aggro rooms they don't automatically target the player in addition to automatically waking up in a generally aggrivated state then this actually adds depth of gameplay to stealth.

But....it won't make clearing the POI faster if that is your goal.

I think what he actually tested is if you aggro them and run around a corner or out of line of slight then entered stealth they will forget about you. Which then makes it trivial to swing back around to take them out via sneak attacks.

 

[KotCP]

i don't think this is right. All percentages added to a weapon are relative to base damage AFAIK

So far the only thing I have seen that negates what I am saying, is Armor.

In all the stuff I wrote, I didn't take into account Zeds with armor, in which there are a few of them.  Some have light armor, some have heavier armor.

The Suit Zed in the black monkey suit has very light armor.  Still very 1 shotable.

The military Zed has armor for short, the highest end of light armor, so not something you will 1 shot early on for sure, but not long till you can 1 shot its head.

Bears and Zed bears are not 1 shot head shot-able for a decent amount of time.  Going to take some upgrades to 1 shot Xbow those in the head.

Some Zeds very clearly are heavily armored, ESPECIALLY THE SUICIDE BOMB ONE!  You better have points in Penetration and have a backup plan or additional something, just to be safe.

Armor on Zeds is the most significant factor in why, even at full Agi, Hidden Strike, and all other bonuses, you might not 1 shot a Zed, when you could be doing over 1000 points of damage to their head easily.

The math for the damage output is real, I failed to point out armor on Zeds reducing the damage done, in that previous post.

 

[Roland]

I think what he actually tested is if you aggro them and run around a corner or out of line of slight then entered stealth they will forget about you. Which then makes it trivial to swing back around to take them out via sneak attacks.

I don't think the running and hiding and then returning matters at all. That is still all traditional and acceptable stealth gameplay in ANY game involving stealth. The premise was that stealth is broken and useless because certain rooms completely negate using stealth. Now, it looks like that might not be true at all. Sure, you might have to retreat to a hiding place and then crouch in the shadows to return and kill the now awake zombies but if you're careful they won't detect you and you will still get your perk bonuses and you will still be using stealth 100% of the time. 

It's like people want the perk to do all the work for them so that they are always hidden in the shadows no matter what happens. As soon as they actually have to employ some skill in getting out of sight and actively hide in the shadows until the aggro level calms a bit that means stealth doesn't work?

I realize I'm getting ahead of myself here because this really should be reproduced by others to see if hiding and returning to the auto aggro rooms and then killing the zeds from a stealthy position for full perk benefits really does work. If it does, I don't think it is too much for TFP to ask people to employ some of their own skills to make the perks work in these situations. Even the run and gun guy will have better success if he actually....aims.

 

[Jugginator]

I don't think the running and hiding and then returning matters at all. That is still all traditional and acceptable stealth gameplay in ANY game involving stealth. The premise was that stealth is broken and useless because certain rooms completely negate using stealth. Now, it looks like that might not be true at all. Sure, you might have to retreat to a hiding place and then crouch in the shadows to return and kill the now awake zombies but if you're careful they won't detect you and you will still get your perk bonuses and you will still be using stealth 100% of the time. 

It's like people want the perk to do all the work for them so that they are always hidden in the shadows no matter what happens. As soon as they actually have to employ some skill in getting out of sight and actively hide in the shadows until the aggro level calms a bit that means stealth doesn't work?

I realize I'm getting ahead of myself here because this really should be reproduced by others to see if hiding and returning to the auto aggro rooms and then killing the zeds from a stealthy position for full perk benefits really does work. If it does, I don't think it is too much for TFP to ask people to employ some of their own skills to make the perks work in these situations. Even the run and gun guy will have better success if he actually....aims.

All of this. Stealth doesn't mean "ctrl to never be attacked again", heavy armor perk doesn't mean "wear steel armor to never be hurt again", etc.

 

[meganoth]

So far the only thing I have seen that negates what I am saying, is Armor.

In all the stuff I wrote, I didn't take into account Zeds with armor, in which there are a few of them.  Some have light armor, some have heavier armor.

The Suit Zed in the black monkey suit has very light armor.  Still very 1 shotable.

The military Zed has armor for short, the highest end of light armor, so not something you will 1 shot early on for sure, but not long till you can 1 shot its head.

Bears and Zed bears are not 1 shot head shot-able for a decent amount of time.  Going to take some upgrades to 1 shot Xbow those in the head.

Some Zeds very clearly are heavily armored, ESPECIALLY THE SUICIDE BOMB ONE!  You better have points in Penetration and have a backup plan or additional something, just to be safe.

Armor on Zeds is the most significant factor in why, even at full Agi, Hidden Strike, and all other bonuses, you might not 1 shot a Zed, when you could be doing over 1000 points of damage to their head easily.

The math for the damage output is real, I failed to point out armor on Zeds reducing the damage done, in that previous post.

You said it is "( 150 x 6.5 ) x 300%" or better said ( 150 x 6.5 ) x 3. I say it is 150 x (6.5+3).

By your calculation a single headshot would have nearly 3000 damage. I say it would be 1400 which sounds more plausible when the biggest zombie in the game has just 1000 hitpoints and would survive such a headshot only because he also has armor.