Current Events > The main thing that hurts combat in Tears of the Kingdom

(+) Yeah! (+)

Is enemies getting stronger.

All the fun, unconventional ways of fighting enemies become virtually ineffective after enemies level up past blue. Explosions tickle them, tree trunks attached to spinning mechanical devices do basically no damage. Dropping large objects on them might stun them for a bit, but won't lower the health bar much.

If you want to do damage these enemies, you have to attach something with strong fuse power to a weapon, and fight them the brawny way.

They need a system where you can upgrade to higher-damaging explosives, and perhaps more damage is done when an enemy is struck by anything that came from a mechanical device that you created.

Come to think of it, this game doesn't really need "strong" enemies or "strong" weapons. It needs versatile enemies that will engage you in ways that will cause you to think about how to make cool devices in order to defeat them.

If it's anything like BotW, you shouldn't be fighting enemies anyway. Unless you literally need to beat one to advance, there's no practical reason to bother.

s0nicfan posted...

If it's anything like BotW, you shouldn't be fighting enemies anyway

It's not. They created a whole system where you engineer your own devices to travel and fight enemies with. Plus enemies drop goodies that make your weapons stronger, so there's always an incentive to fight them.

Bump

Weapon durability is what hurts combat the most. It's far from the only problem in the game though. TotK actually manages to disrespect your time even worse than BotW did, that's quite the achievement.

But yeah, once I got an unbreakable Master Sword the game became a lot better.

s0nicfan posted...

If it's anything like BotW, you shouldn't be fighting enemies anyway. Unless you literally need to beat one to advance, there's no practical reason to bother.

Other than collecting their parts for upgrading armor, there's really no need to fight most enemies.

Yo_D_oY posted...

Other than collecting their parts for upgrading armor, there's really no need to fight most enemies.

You could not possiblybe more wrong.

Enemies actually drop goodies that make you stronger in combat.

There are also intrinsic reasons to fight enemies in this game. Maybe you just built a cool death machine with zonai devices and you want to test it out on a herd of enemies. THAT, by the way, is what I think gets taken away by enemies getting too strong. When your cool devices just tickle the monsters, it feels like they weren't worth building.

God_of_6strings posted...

You could not possiblybe more wrong.

Enemies actually drop goodies that make you stronger in combat.

There are also intrinsic reasons to fight enemies in this game. Maybe you just built a cool death machine with zonai devices and you want to test it out on a herd of enemies. THAT, by the way, is what I think gets taken away by enemies getting too strong. When your cool devices just tickle the monsters, it feels like they weren't worth building.

You don't need to be stronger in combat tho. The overworld is so open you can just walk all the enemies that are in the way of shrines and korok seeds and the dungeon bosses you kill with sages.

royic posted...

You don't need to be stronger in combat tho. The overworld is so open you can just walk all the enemies that are in the way of shrines and korok seeds and the dungeon bosses you kill with sages.

"If you intentionally decide not to play the game, the game isn't very fun."

DrizztLink posted...

"If you intentionally decide not to play the game, the game isn't very fun."

idk dude I don't make it my mission in Mario to stomp on all the goombas. If they're not even in the way of anything I'm definitely not gonna go out of my way for it. Not with combat like Zelda's.

DrizztLink posted...

"If you intentionally decide not to play the game, the game isn't very fun."

Avoiding combat or killing monsters in sneaky, underhanded ways is my play style and it didn�t make the game less fun.

Agreed, it sucks how the silver level enemies are all just damage sponges that fight identically to their normal counterparts

and most of the high level fuse items are needed in high quantities to upgrade armor so you feel like you�re wasting them if you use one to kill literally one enemy

God_of_6strings posted...

You could not possiblybe more wrong.

Enemies actually drop goodies that make you stronger in combat.

There are also intrinsic reasons to fight enemies in this game. Maybe you just built a cool death machine with zonai devices and you want to test it out on a herd of enemies. THAT, by the way, is what I think gets taken away by enemies getting too strong. When your cool devices just tickle the monsters, it feels like they weren't worth building.

Kind of proved my point. No need to fight most enemies, meaning it is mostly optional and only a few enemies are worth fighting for fuse parts. Death machines are fun, but optional. Getting quality fuse items from lynels or other enemies like that is only from a few enemies.

And once you get a nice collection of good weapons, you just repair them at rocktoroks every blood moon and now there's no reason to get more fuse parts, unless you find grinding the same enemies fun. But most people find the combat in this game very lacking.

Yo_D_oY posted...

Kind of proved my point. No need to fight most enemies, meaning it is mostly optional and only a few enemies are worth fighting for fuse parts. Death machines are fun, but optional. Getting quality fuse items from lynels or other enemies like that is only from a few enemies.

And once you get a nice collection of good weapons, you just repair them at rocktoroks every blood moon and now there's no reason to get more fuse parts, unless you find grinding the same enemies fun. But most people find the combat in this game very lacking.

The whole point of the game is nearly everything is optional

Enclave posted...

Weapon durability is what hurts combat the most.

Yea no.

Fighting stronger enemies in TotK is rewarding because you can fuse their parts to then fight even stronger enemies.
Climbing the ladder is always fun.

I thought the silver enemies were damage sponges until I actually started fusing high-level material to my weapons. Then they just get destroyed.

Someone has not been using Muddle Buds and Puffshrooms.

You're just not being creative enough.

https://youtu.be/KLM1K6DgTqY

Git gud

ZMythos posted...

Yea no.

Considering the game became way more enjoyable once I got a couple unbreakable Master Swords? Yeah.

Enclave posted...

Considering the game became way more enjoyable once I got a couple unbreakable Master Swords? Yeah.

Sounds like a lot of extra effort for a midling weapon that can crash your game.

You should just fight enemies and fuse stuff.

ZMythos posted...

Sounds like a lot of extra effort for a midling weapon that can crash your game.

You should just fight enemies and fuse stuff.

Never crashed my game, everything worked just fine. Also, what makes you think I didn't fuse stuff to my unbreakable master swords? Why do you think I needed 2 of them? One to make it a blunt weapon and one for slashing.

TotK literally managed to make weapon durability worse than BotW, that's quite an achievement.

Enclave posted...

Never crashed my game, everything worked just fine. Also, what makes you think I didn't fuse stuff to my unbreakable master swords? Why do you think I needed 2 of them? One to make it a blunt weapon and one for slashing.

TotK literally managed to make weapon durability worse than BotW, that's quite an achievement.

It didn't though. Weapons are much more durable, especially when you fuse stuff to them. They last significantly longer in my experience than they did in BOTW. Add onto that that you can now completely repair your favorite weapons every Blood Moon via Rock Octoroks. Plus Tears of the Kingdom generally gives you more combat options so you don't have to kill anything with your swords and spears if you're not feeling it.

The only downside is menu management I guess. But the combat and the weapon durability is vastly superior in TOTK than BOTW.

No, it definitely made it worse. General weapon durability was lower thanks to the degraded weapons. Add to that needing a new resource to make weapons not awful? It just compounded the issue.

There was never a lack of useful fusing materials in my playthrough. tbh it just sounds like you refused to engage with the game's systems as they were presented to you and you're complaining that the game didn't reward you for it.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to cope.

Enclave posted...

No, it definitely made it worse. General weapon durability was lower thanks to the degraded weapons. Add to that needing a new resource to make weapons not awful? It just compounded the issue.

But the game was made around the fusion mechanic. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say durability is worse in this game just because you don't like fusing stuff to your weapons. Besides, pristine weapons are abundant, and as previously mentioned, you can repair your weapons with Rock Octoroks. I mean not liking weapons breaking at all is understandable. But it's significantly better than it was in BOTW.

GeneralKenobi85 posted...

But the game was made around the fusion mechanic. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say durability is worse in this game just because you don't like fusing stuff to your weapons. Besides, pristine weapons are abundant, and as previously mentioned, you can repair your weapons with Rock Octoroks. I mean not liking weapons breaking at all is understandable. But it's significantly better than it was in BOTW.

I get the game was made around the fusion mechanic, obviously it is. Unfortunately the game being made around a really shitty mechanic dragged it down in my estimation compared to BotW and I already give BotW heavy criticism for its own durability mechanic and note, I'm one of those crazies that collected all 900 Korok seeds in BotW so it's not like I didn't enjoy the game.

After the honey moon phase, botw and totk are just not very good games. For me, majority of the fun was scaling the landscape and unlocking the map and shrines that required a bit of thinking.

I think I had more fun with wind Waker and twilight princess during their respective releases.

Even though I don't hate the weapon system and thought the fusion was a neat mechanic, it's for these reasons presented in this topic that I hope it's not the new standard for Zelda games. Would rather them stick with a more permanent weapon system.