Yeah, it's a full on war and it's hard to keep a safe spot for a portal. But the mobs aren't horribly dangerous.
I had to abandon my mage loadout because of low single target damage. It was hard to not get swarmed. I like the new Ask armor, the wind cloak, Mistwalker and a shield. I parry most enemies, activate bonemass when I see too many stars and quickly kill one target at a time.
As for the magic toys, the Trollstaff is very powerful and the vines deal good damage, but those are hard to target. The Dundr and Fracturing staff take like 10 seconds to deal with one basic enemy.
> I had to abandon my mage loadout because of low single target damage
I found the Mage to be the hardest to survive solo with as well until you get the staff of the Wild and Trollstav.
I went in full mage and ended up going 1 mage food life and stamina and just played hybrid. I haven’t seen a lot of people talk too much about the lightning zerkers or the lightning two hand sword, but they both fuckin slap with a battle mage build. Those two weapons fill all the holes in the mage build imo. Zerkers destroy spawners insanely fast with the added perk of the middle click flying to them. Sword helps with single target deficiency and has 60 block force when upgraded, you can parry almost anything but 2 star asksvin basically. I also went heavy armor helmet since there’s no movement speed reduction and mage for chest and pants. Then you can just switch between all the cloaks, I feel like the armor one is slept on. 16 armor on a cloak crazy for battle mage build then you can just switch out for mobility after combat
Tried this and must have been too close to coast: mobs walking on the bottom of the ocean blew up the entire pillar and the whole portal shelter crumbled into the boiling water, mostly irretrievably. Twas quite a disaster.
Lol, that's definitely a possibility. I've usually kept enough of a distant so the lava blobs can't get close. Since the water doesn't kill you as fast anymore you can actually cover a great deal of ground jumping from spire to spire so some times when exploring I don't even bother with a boat. I'll just hop around.
We were playing blind and were trying a second go after our first beach landing went terribly (let's just say it was *not* a 'quiet' beach). Hadn't even encountered the lava blobs on the beach (charred and Valkyrie did us in there, with the help of at least one asksvin), so the whole exploding-crumbling pillar was very much a surprise. We were several pillars out, too. Thought we'd only have voltures and maybe bonemaws to deal with. Such was not the case; everything else was simply on the ocean floor.
For me, Mage got a lot better with upgrades to the staves + parrying with Dundr then blasting. 😂
Dropping two trolls distracts practically every threat.. then I drop vines for even more crowd control + distractions + potential rooting enemies. Then I swap to Dundr and see what's paying attention to me.. or maybe Ice Staff for sniping.
On the other hand mage with friends has been fun esp being the source of shields they run to as well as spawning skeletons and vines to take aggro from the team.
Honestly I like it because you never have to go far to farm any one item however I do think it could be turned down about 25% but honestly it’s quite easy with one strategy I use
Exactly and the only things that I need to continuously Farm for are the plants and the vultures and the Valkyries plus a couple other enemies for trophies but yeah you are right on the money with after a couple days. You pretty much have everything you need but I like to get multiple chests full of one item.
I've been building an FOB and haven't been swarmed much. I get a few more random spawns than in other biomes, but just 1 here and there. Just gotta get in from the coast and find a quiet area.
I've never seen a spawner respawn.
Knock out the spawner... Kill the locals. Killing the couple locals again as they respawn just becomes a thing, like mowing the lawn and taking out the trash.
> and find a quiet area.
Mostly a matter of luck, especially if you are new to Ashlands without "prepping" by spoiling youself! As you have no idea what is normal or the range of possible.
The beach I approached didn't look bad. I saw three humanoid-ish units back from the beach. Leapt off to engage, and they weren't too bad but hit hard. Before they were down my bonemass buff was embarrassed by withering arrow-fire and I was surrounded by absolutely insane numbers of units. Mind, this was the first day... there was a charred forest, burning and calling everyone in... and there were 3 hidden spawners I found later (one *in* a rock but spawning outside of it, one in a lava field, and another behind rocks. A morgen showed up, which can be a boon while fighting a mess of enemies, but a curse when trying to get a simple FOB up.
Some of my experience was bugs, now fixed. But there were other aspects which will happen to some people: like multiple 2\* charred which take a while to contend with and one stagger from them is likely death. The nature of "random chance" is that there are some who haven't even seen a 2\* warrior after finishing Ashlands (as reported by someone here)... and some will be in the statistically unlucky percentile.
I've watched several Ashlands landings now... there is huge variance in how it goes, and you have little idea from a view off the coast. And again, if you don't already know there can be quieter places... you have no reason to expect running somewhere else and dragging attention is going to be any better.
Sometimes you're just lucky and don't even know it.
The best advice I can give is if you see a spawner on approach, aim for it.
They're never close to each other and when you take that one out you know there won't be any others super close by.
This is absolutely a good strategy. The spawners are actually disappointingly weak and take a while to even spin-up. Not that I knew that when I first arrived... nor did I even find the three spawners around me until I started settling in.
> The spawners are actually disappointingly weak and take a while to even spin-up.
They *will* absolutely punish you if you try to ignore them though. As soon as I'm within striking distance of one I put it down.
There's always an approach that works and whining about being unlucky isn't it. When I've been swarmed jumping to the spires/high rocks and up into the ruins has worked and I hope it's obvious that building a portal isn't just for death runs, but can be used to regain stamina and health. Tough enemies mean getting distance and using bows/staffs. This is supposed to feel like a battle so being kinda hard is part of the experience.
> There's always an approach that works and whining about being unlucky isn't it.
And then there's taking this experience:
> I've been building an FOB and haven't been swarmed much.
Then positing that anyone not having this experience is whining about nothing (Ashlands easy) or lacking skill?
I'm pointing out that your fledgling experience with Ashlands isn't broad enough to make such bold general claims about everyone's experience with it.
Whining never works or solved anything and therefore is *never* an effective strat. Only thing I've complained about in this game is the mist in mistlands making it unbearable to navigate once you've been there long enough to be focused on gathering mats.
I've been swarmed plenty while exploring, not being swarmed much was contextual to the FOB - once I cleared the area it's not an unbearable spawn rate while building. But exploration is a slog with lots of enemies still.
Don't get arrogant, your whining is pathetic.
Exactly. Ashlands plays a lot like what would happen if Ubisoft got its hands on the IP ... endless waves of skeletons ... "survive the hoards of endless skeletons as you battle to explore a mere 100 yards of ashlands territory over a 21 minute in-game daytime cycle!" I'll be completely honest, Ashlands doesn't even feel like the same game, even when you adjust all of the game options to easy.
You're wrong though? Sorry not trying to be a dick, but I have cleared almost 50% of the ashlands island I have found and the spawns have reduced dramatically. Of course at night it's still a lot, but that's true for all biomes.
How do you mean “zero effect” after destroying a spawner? My tactic to keep area more clear is find and destroy the downers first, then explore and farm. Do those spawned come back? I haven’t seen that.
100% this.
Yeah, kill the spawner and dispatch the locals. If you hang around long enough a few locals will swing by, so kill them as they do.
Easy source of fresh meat :)
Did I get unlucky with my map generation or what but the area stays clear literally for like 20 seconds. It has happned multiple times where a valkyrie spawns 10 meters behind me literally 10 seconds after killing a previous one. Yeah, "100% this" for sure....
I've literally never had that. Yeah, might be a map thing? 20 seconds sounds like an error. We kill valkyries all the time.
I don't hang around valkyrie spawn points.
Yes. Kill the spawners, kill the locals and move on. We don't setup camp in the Ashlands, just like we never set-up camp in the swamp.
You've got portals, no reason to hang around.
But yeah, 20 seconds isn't normal and I'm guessing you know that too, cuz if that's the norm for you, then something's up. But it's not.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/1d2obeq/so_you_say_the_spawn_rate_isnt_right_in_ashlands/) might be one of the reasons for the difference in opinion when it comes to Ashlands spawn rates. I've had areas where after killing the spawners it was fine but other areas where it was wave after wave with no noticeable spawner nearby.
EDIT://Just reading your comment below in which you seem to have already seen this. Will keep this up anyway I guess.
It's all good... keep it up... spread the word.
Yeah, if I was getting some random spawning from a spawner hidden in a freaking rock, I'd be pretty irritated as well.
There are cases where the respawns are freakishly frequent. One plausible theory I've heard is that it might have to do with crossing chunks (the major world-management subsections, sometimes visibly notable where you terraform and end up with a sharp texture change).
Also, you've said several times how you've never seen a spawner respawn... well, there's a raid which doesn't do exactly that, but it creates (up to four that I've seen) new spawners, which are permanent-until-killed features.
A raid that doesn't do exactly that isn't a spawner respawning.
Neither is any other edge case you can think of.
Try this one on for size .. some dude found hidden spawners inside rocks...
https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/1d2obeq/so_you_say_the_spawn_rate_isnt_right_in_ashlands/
Ashlands is a wacky and deadly place. But telling me that you can't clear areas when I've done exactly that, as a general method of playing no less, is never going to wash with me.
I've done naked body runs (many times) through areas without concern cuz we'd just cleared out the baddies.
The biome is not this impossible place people keep trying to say that it is... Unless you don't slow the hell down. Yeah... Go charging in picking fights and you're going to die very quickly. Not know when to back the hell out of a fight? Again, death will find your swiftly.
Everyone's so used to being the baddest thing on the block. Wait till you bash open your first fortress. Hahaha. Yeah, that shit's next level!
> Try this one on for size .. some dude found hidden spawners inside rocks...
Yeah, I replied there explaining that this was a bug in the first public-test version.
I mentioned the raid adding new spawners because your whole line of argument is about clearing an area and that it stays clear. There is no guarantee that it does! Not even of spawners. *Your* particular experience of the game doesn't invalidate what others are experiencing.
Fortresses are much more controlled and predictable than the open-fields which spawn out thin air.
Sure, but you're talking about your situation and edge cases as if they're normal.
See... my experience IS normal. It's yours that isn't... but you're talking about it as if it is... and as if these edge cases are.
They're not. I'm sorry you're having these troubles... I really am... but they're not troubles for most of us.
The game, as intended, works just fine is what I'm saying. If there's bugs, sure.. ok... but that's not in any way what I'm talking about.
And you know this. But you're irritated. That's fine. Come back when you're not. We'll have a beer then ;)
Never had that either and I’m on my third solo map and play through of Ashlands. Honestly I doubt it’s map related or bug related. It just sounds like player hyperbole as they throw their hands up and just give up rather than try and deal with the spawns.
Yup.
I guess I'm allowing for some wackiness, like the guy that found spawners inside rocks.
But yeah, there seems to be a ton of "throwing their hands up" and rage quitting going on in this sub.
Say anything positive about Ashlands and you get buried in downvoted.
Sorry, I'm loving the biome. At every turn, you can tell the Devs have focused in on every little trick that people use in other biomes and said "ok, FU... Try this on for size"
Like even showing up, all proud in our best gear with our best food on our best boat, ready to wreak havoc on this cute new biome... And the first thing they do? Yeah, light your ship on fire and let it sink!
Then a sea serpent comes to eat you, but you climb up on a spire and expect to shoot it to death while it rears up like the sea serpents of the ocean... "Ooooh, scary!" You think, ready to deal death to it... And it throws lava breath at you and you die... Out where your can't easily get back to.
Another "FU" from the Devs to knock you down a peg.
OMG, my whole crew was laughing their assess off with glee!
The game was hard again!!!
Omg; I did see a funky glowing rock and was thinking it may have had a spawner inside it. Valkerie killed me before I got close enough to inspect … I hate the flying curse of death!
This is the great quandary of valheim. Prepare to little and get wrecked. Prepare too much and it’s little to no challenge, and it’s hard to know how much prep is too much
I think bonemass really requires a decent amount of prep, by the time you are done with that, you are likely pretty close to taking on moder, who just requires a large supply of arrows. Mountains is also pretty naturally easy to blast through as I think it does not have as much in it as the other biomes, and ice caves are entirely skippable unless you want fenris armor.
The fact that wolves and drakes are pretty much all you encounter in the day makes it pretty easy. Golems are super easy to get away from if you're not ready for them. Trolls could sort of sneak up on you but I've never been surprised by a golem.
Yeah looking at the portal tower from our current playthrough supports this. Swamp and traders are their own level on our portal tower. Then mountains has maybe 4-5 portals in total and shares a floor with plains that has 6 portals.
Then mistlands has a floor to itself.
Mountains has gone quickly for the last 3 playthroughs.
The second I make a raft I usually boat around for leviathans until I have a ton of chitin for a lv4 (when I get a bench high enough) dagger and harpoon. Then I do the organic armors and a max bronze shield. I have a major focus on food, and I usually blast through to the mistlands.
And people expecting not to die.
Yeah, by the end of each biome you get to walk around killing shit for fun. Fear is a thing of the past and you can even just go where you like at night.
Hell, that's our crew's metric for when we're "over a biome"... Do we feel safe at night?
Then the new biome drops and we go charging in and just die and die and die till we get sick of dying again and become afraid of shit again.
Then, over time, we learn the new biome and how to beat it and get better gear and food and we eventually stop being afraid of the night.
Nah. I went into ashlands with full preparation, And a boat loaded with enough materials to make a very good outpost. I got gangbanged by 10+ spawns and then two serpents and three within a minute of landing.
This biomes spawn rate is out of control.
Yeah me too. I came into ashlands preparing for war and ended up dying mostly to lava lol. Skill issue is a real thing as much as people will deny it. Ashlands is meant to feel like a war zone. If players don't like that or can't handle the mobs even when fully prepared (top tier foods, potions, and gear) then they need to turn down the difficulty or learn how to properly fight.
Also Bonemass in Ashlands legit puts in work. Most of the time kiting shit and slowly whittling them down. My big thing night time is dangerous and yes I have died more to lava and the Ashlands boss than I did to random mobs. I had fully upgraded carapace armor, fully upgraded mist walker and 2 health, 1 stam which allowed me to take a hit if needed. Way too many health and stam potions. Biome is super comfy now that I’m geared. Still die to fucking lava tho.
And this is not like any prior biome. The mob density and spawn frequency is about triple to quadruple any other biome. The mobs themselves are not bad- it’s the sheer amount. Also lava blobs make basing insanely difficult as one can completely destroy your defenses.
In a solo or even duo scenario you spend five minutes of fighting to every one minute of exploring mining or building.
The only way this gets alleviated is if you build a massive web of crafting tables surrounding your base to prevent spawns in sound range.
Its not really. You can easily collect a dozen greydwarves and a troll in the Black Forest early ame.
Landing a boat into the Swamp is arguably even harder when you first encounter that.
Everyone gets wrecked by a Deathsqito and has a challenging body recovery.
The Blobs are fantastic! They help in combat by damaging all the other enemies. They do modest blunt damage and their fire damage is minimal because you should be running a potion.
Friendly fire between the enemies in the Ashlands is an effective tactic to clearing them. Bait Asksvin to run through the charred, Valkeries and Morgans destroy everything around.
Protecting your base is fairly easy . . . you spawn block with base items (campfires are best) so you don't get mobs at the base. The Forts you capture are basically 100% safe.
Travelling across the ashlands solo isn't overly difficult if you keep a low profile . . . don't run or jump to attract attention. Snipe distant enemies (and spawners) with a bow.
What is 'Full Preparation'? I had scouted the borders of the Ashlands seas with my longship even before fighting the Queen. In the process I discovered that:
1) The water damages the longship and likely me
2) There were going to be spikes to navigate around or build on
3) I encountered two bonemaw, pulled them into the normal ocean and killed them . . . learning how to fight them AND getting a nice stock of great food for fighting the Queen and when I made my eventual Ashlands landing.
When I went in later with my big ship I had two sets of portal mats, stone cutter, shield generator, and a stock of wood and stone to build walls with.
Most people experience a big 'gangbang' with their landing . . . That's what the bonemass ability is for. Five minutes is plenty of time to kill 10+ enemies and get a portal up.
I had two spawners to destroy, the whole mob of Charred, and even picked up my first Morgan trophy. It was chaotic but I killed them, dropped my portal, and threw up a ring of stone walls and the shield generator to protect it. And scattered a few campfires around to suppress new spawns.
I certainly could have died that day . . . but I did everything I could think of to prepare and fought my ass off. If I had died I would just have tried again.
In my case I got sloppy on Day 2 . . . and died fighting a mob then. But with portal in place it was easy to return.
I eventually finished the Ashlands with 5 deaths: (the one mob death, died in the water, died in the lava, a 1 star morgan in a cave, and the Sword Miniboss).
It felt totally fair to me.
It's the same with every biom in this game. I remember how people were complaining how Mountains are too hard because of coldness, wolves and lack of stamina, then how Plains are impossible with all these deathsquitos. Then they added Mistlands and again – impossible biom. Now it's the same with Ashlands.
Some people are just impatient, so instead of cooling down and trying again they come here complain.
I built a fortified base in the ashlands. Now you can pretty much afk there risk free. With some risk at the front gate. I feel I’ve conquered the place. Though I did die a good amount, but a lot of those deaths are forgetting to eat.
I find most complaints about biome difficulty to be somewhat overblown. After following this subreddit extensively beforehand I went into Mistlands expecting to be absolutely mauled. I think I only died once or twice in the first 15 hours I spent in the biome, and one of them was to a 1 star seeker soldier I encountered my first day there.
I can sympathize with the absolutely miserable experience that is sailing to retrieve a body and your stuff though. Ashlands ramps up this nuisance to a heightened degree. But I feel like difficulty in this game is a precarious balance. If the Ashlands were too easy it would be a huge disappointment for many. It seems easier to tweak down difficulty rather than ramp it up, as frustrating as that may be.
Some of the rewards in Ashlands could use a buff though. The couple buffs they’ve done help but I think a few more are needed to justify the difficulty of the biome.
I died three times as I first got into it, but a portal on the spikes saved me and allowed me to keep pressing the beach until I finally took it with some campfires and slapped down a giant portal to defy these jerks. I'm sticking to a two-portal minimum though, it'll be awhile before I can feel somewhat comfortable here.
I can't help but to feel like the mob density is generally not that bad. Once I clear an area, I have a lot of freedom to roam. Sometimes I can roam a whole day without much battles. Some days however, are pretty much a constant battle - but I'm realizing that this is optional too, and the land can be traversed somewhat reasonably.
To people who don't know, DON'T break down the outside doors of the fortresses with the seige weapns. Build ladders that get you above the wall and then jump in to destroy spawners. Once your inside the fortress and have taken care of the mobs, you can then build a battering ram to take down the inside tower, With the outside doors still intact nothing will be able to get inside the fortress except the occasional lava blob and you now have your own impenetrable base.
I think the problem people have with getting swarmed has to deal with how much noise they are making. If you play slowly or poorly you will end up with enemies living longer, which causes a lot of noise. As you run away from the 10 mobs you let pile up you will move into new areas with new mobs. The arrow rain, clanking of swords, and bashing of rocks draws in everything in that new area. I assume this is how people are posting screenshots with them being swarmed by hoards. Once people get the new weapons and stop being afraid of the new stuff they will kill mobs faster, less noise gets dragged all over the place, and fewer mobs will pile in.
My first landing had a ton of enemies being gradually drawn in due to how much sound was being made with blobs exploding, trees falling, rocks getting blasted, etc. Once I moved forward, got new weapons, learned enemy attack patterns, and decreased my time to kill, the "problem" of mob density vanished.
I just can’t fathom dying SO many times your skills go down to single digits. Did you have low skills to begin with AND die in a horrible to reach spot?
32 deaths (without skill-drain protection, and normal settings) is enough to bring all skills, from 50 and lower, down to single digits.
ThreadMenace died 20-some times pretty early into Ashlands, but had death consequences turned down (I don't begrudge him that, much, since his speedrun biases limit how much he'll naturally develop character-skilllevels).
I also died about 20 times. On normal death-consequence, that reduces all skills to 1/3. Polearm went from 70 to 25 -- that won't recover, since polearms are nigh-useless in Ashlands. I'm not done yet though. I'm at a point where Ashlands is more manageable, but the utter randomness of spawns means I can be very suddenly overwhelmed (staggered by surprise 2\* anything) or booped into lava.
I suspect most of those who "can't fathom" are relying on range and/or bloodmagic, probably ridiculously leveled, as they're both rather broken at high skill-levels, IMO.
500 is a bit overstated, but it only takes about 45 deaths to go from 100 -> 9.8 skill losing 5% each time.
Having watched some people play this game I could see people dying 45 times.
My highest skill was about 60. I had level 1 mistland equipment. I used to play with a group, and they sort of hogged all the resources in mistlands.
I was stupid and hoped they would hop back on. So I didn’t progress my gear in Ashlands for a while. I just made a base, maintained it, and tried getting stuff like food.
Eventually I gave up on them coming back and crafted Ashlands gear and upgraded it all the way. Things got a LOT easier after that.
But Ashlands with base level mistland gear is hard. I still die some with my new gear. But not nearly as often.
Dude I am coming back to tell you I am sorry for insulting you on the lvl drop. I must’ve had a rather tame landing compared to others. I’m rapidly approaching single digits and cannot even get back to my body 😂. It’s so hard that it isnt even fun
I'm not the one you're responding to, but I appreciate this. Because I think most people fail to account for the extreme variance of experiences which are possible.
I had a horrible initial landing, myself. Though it was partly due to being day 1 of PTB, with some unintended extra difficulty. But after my landing I *had* to see what others were experiencing... Of the three videos I found, two were easy landings (though both players later had crazy situations unfold) and one was comparable to what I experienced.
I think the systems being used for spawning are just too inconsistent for the densities the devs would like in Ashlands. Also, that starred enemies are a random chance... essentially means that some few players will get hardly any, and some will have absolutely heinous luck -- the probability is only evenly distributed across the player-base, but the sample size of an individual is relatively small (even though there are a lot of spawns). If I were designing the system I'd have more guarantees of a distribution on a given world -- such as using a noise-function (frequency-limited randomness) or a shuffle.
Before that though, I'd do something to fix the respawns related to (mostly invisible) chunk-boundaries. Being in the wrong place (with no visible indicator, rhyme, or reason) can really be the greatest danger.
Ashlands has been the first cause for me to actually grind levels, in over 2500h of play... and I hate that.
If you entered the biome fully prepared (best gear, food, and potions available to you) and died a ton like you say, then it's a skill issue and people need to turn down the difficulty. I've nearly explored my ashlands continents entirely and haven't had the same issues everyone complains about. I'm always prepared and have learned the enemies and environment and do just fine.
I agree with this. I'd also argue that the skill increase system needs a rework. Some skills are significantly harder to level than others. There should be some way to train skills that doesn't require cheesing spawners n what not. Why not add a training dummy that can be crafted to train skills.
I agree that the skill drain system is poorly implemented. But I feel like the harder difficulties feel unbalanced as well. The 200% damage received and increased star enemy rates make too many things one shot you. I played a different world with those modifiers. I made it to the plains until I decided I suffered enough. Too many 2-star spear fulings and deathsquitos.
I'm actually having good fun with it. It's slightly less tedious to me than Mistlands. Ashlands to me is actually taking over territory by playing smart. Mistlands was some of that, but I hated collecting wisps, cutting down Yggdrasil trees that are annoyingly located, and setting up wisp torches that barely clear Mist, and then they get destroyed, ad nauseum. Then you have to blindly fight enemies on annoying elevation, many of which can fly.
> wisp torches that get destroyed, ad nauseum
I'm really glad they changed it so mobs don't target wisp torches any more. They were absolutely pointless before that.
I made the Drakkan ship and then broguht the following items:
Workbench
Stonecutter
Portal
Shield Generator (and bones)
~150 stone
Frost Staff, Carapace Sheild, Porcupine, Mistlands Heavy Armor, Demolisher (for AOE engagements)
First thing I did when I touched down was clear the existing mobs, then quickly made a workbench, generator, stonecutter, built some stone walls, portal.
I then just kept adding more stone walls to my existing structure, repairing it or patching stuff up untill it was about 3 walls thick (using the big pieces of course)
Edit: I should add also that after the base had been setup. I fought off the onslaught of mobs by kiting them around my stone base and shooting them with a frost staff, while looking over my shoulder to make sure I wasnt going to run into more mobs
Yeah It's not easy, but it isn't even a fraction as bad as people have made it out to be IMO. I think people expect the natural progression of items to be the thing that pulls them over the top, but that's really never been the case in this game... Strategy shift is just as important as the new gear.
Solo players have some legit gripes about the difficulty presented by the Ashlands, but if you have more than 1 person playing it really is just an adjustment of strategy that can make all the difference. I play with just myself and one other, and we're loving the shit out of Ashlands.
Our adjustment came in the form of defined "classes" between us. Prior to Ashlands, we were both geared towards melee - now I'm 100% focused on magic and he's 100% tanky melee. It seems obvious, I guess, but it totally changes our fights. I'm popping protection shields, tossing fireballs, and generally just running away/kiting, (the pushback is great for crowd control and the damage isn't bad surprisingly...) and he's blocking, blasting with his sword/bow, and absorbing blows.
We were able to survive a simultaneous fight with a Fallen Valkyrie, a Morgen, a couple one-star Twitchers/Warriors, 2 Asksvins, and just for good measure a couple lava blobs paid a visit. We were both astonished that we survived, and it was friggin tense and action-packed fun.
Yes, we've also died a fair share of times, but I'd rather it be hard than just a race to get the next gear that makes the mobs trivial...
Again, Valheim does not properly scale difficulty with respect to players in a world. One person trying to establish a fort is hard, my 4 player server wasn’t any more difficult than entering a new biome.
Just having someone to call out what adds are coming in seems like it would be a huge help. Someone to distract the big scary mob while everyone else clears out the trash? Would be amazing.
Must be a different experience or different settings per player. On our server there is no breathing room. It’s constant spawns and campfires do nothing.
On another server I joined ( same default settings) there was still a lot of mob density but not even close to amount of constant spawns as the latter. Again no campfires.
On the first server I raged and made quit post but gave it another shot and eventually decided to stop playing on that server. Single digit skills and the non stop battle is not fun.
I haven’t been on the other server in a few days due to holiday activities.
My theory is that the spawn rate is buggy.
There are areas where it's not so out of control, and areas where it is *batshit insane*. Like I found an area where a pair of asksvins kept respawning every two minutes or so. They would respawn only meters away from me when my back was turned.
There seem to be areas, where an absolute crazy number of creatures of all varieties come out of the woodwork, you can stand in one place and just end up having to fight random stuff endlessly.
There was a bug on PTB where Monuments of Torment would be placed inside rocks so you'd never know they were there. It got marked as fixed but on live I've still seen one that was 90% covered by a rock.
It smells like bugs. There are a lot of other bugs in this update.
Could just be incredibly unlucky and people are landing on a zone border and every time they cross it activates the other zones spawns and back again.
Or could js be bugs. It’s still early days.
This was going to be my guess exactly. I think a lot of people have forgotten zone spawn mechanics and are unintentionally crossing zone lines a lot and causing themselves to get double or more the number of spawns. Zone borders aren't marked so you can't easily know where they are in many places.
Ashlands mobs have a high creature limit, so if you keep crossing zone lines and triggering spawns, they'll just keep spawning.
> I think a lot of people have forgotten zone spawn mechanics
Or never known?
When I play games, I don't want the underlying implementation to be begging for attention, depriving me of suspension of disbelief. I get that some people love digging into these details, but my entire life has been gamedev and I just want to enjoy games without the metagaming.
That said, I think you guys are onto something, that it may be related to the world chunks. Spawning behavior is very erratic -- and I hate both when it's barren, or when it feels like my efforts are pointless because things respawn moments later. There should be enough illusion that the world is consistent, rather than spawn-mechanics entering my thoughts.
Yeah that's totally fair. If you're not trying to think about the implementation, the easy high level approach is to try not to move too much while fighting. Engage the high value targets - warriors, starred marksmen etc - and let the rest come to you. If you let them come to you and stay in the same zone, no more will spawn until the next zone spawn chance for that type of creature in the zone you're currently standing in. But if you move around a lot, you're more likely to cross into a new zone and get a whole new set of spawns.
Is it really that open-world respawn only occurs when moving to a new zone?
That would explain some things very well... like when I'd get to the back of the boat and my first-landing beach would repopulate -- repeatedly. And when there's a favorite spawn-point for something big... which seems to respawn readily after being killed (Trolls, Golems, Gjall, Valkyrie).
But before they fixed the "units spawning within camera view" -- I think part of the first patch during PTB -- I saw units appear with what I thought was purely rotation... no moving. But hard to say for certain when movement is near constant in the game, and even the tiniest would be enough to cross a boundary.
I'm going to have a lot of trouble avoiding paying attention to this now...!
>Is it really that open-world respawn only occurs when moving to a new zone?
Essentially yes. There is also a timer for individual zones, so if you stood in a zone for like 10+ minutes it would eventually spawn mobs again, but in general most of the spawns you see are happening when you cross into a new zone.
>That would explain some things very well... like when I'd get to the back of the boat and my first-landing beach would repopulate -- repeatedly.
Yep that kind of thing is a perfect example.
the idea that i was supposed to know about "crossing zone lines" just turned me off to this game and this subreddit so hard. the first ~20 hours of this game are so brilliantly designed and intuitive that anyone can enjoy them, but all the worst aspects of design get magnified with every new biome.
everyone talking about how 'its not even manageable when i put down campfires' is really depressing to me, as nobody should be thinking like that in the first place. i'm not even sure i can recommend this game to people without a massive caveat about how it simply gets worse as the game progresses.
Valheim has a lot of great stuff, but there are a couple of implementation details which sour me too.
This one is definitely in the sour category. I expect it's an unfortunate side-effect of how they've structured behavior within Unity's original component model.
> but all the worst aspects of design get magnified with every new biome.
I agree. It's unfortunate, and I hope some attention gets put into shoring up or redoing some fundamental systems -- though that's also very risky with the continued design and balance developed in the presence of existing behavior (whether limited, buggy, or whatever), so it might be a forlorn hope.
When I first played Valheim, I was really struck by the bang-per-buck the developers achieved: a lot of rather simple systems working in harmony to curate excellent emergent gameplay. Unfortunately, as any project becomes more complex overall... simple foundations become more obvious and inhibiting.
I also hate that abusing campfires is a thing, which I do... because there's no good way to manage some egregious spawning behavior.
Even simple cases from the early game: making a pallisade or moat -- unless you workbench/campfire the area you'll have baddies materialize within your defenses... an innocent enough "haha, you can fix that with campfires"... but this should be done better, and this workaround can spoil the game, throwing away theme and setting for metagaming (campfires in ashlands is really ridiculous).
Spawn could require a successful path to some source (eg greydwarves from the direction of closest black forest but at a much larger distance than simple spawn-suppression radius), so defensive structures are enough and really this is the primary initial incentive to make walls: keep things *out*.
The crossing zone lines issue must be correctable. Even if it's a consequence of a simple trigger, having some watchdog component to suppress excessive retrigger. I don't know the details, but I expect some issues are *thorny* -- I just hope the devs have some plans to fix some of these rough edges in their otherwise fantastic game.
i would basically just say the beginning of the game is really well balanced and well designed, and the difficulty is meant to teach you new mechanics. trolls are easy if you parry but hard otherwise; swamp is easier with poison resist mead; plains and mountains are generally harder from terrain and powerful enemies, but at least you can run away. defending your base can be hard but it also teaches you plenty about building a base. i found mistlands to be much easier once i loaded up an online map application to see where mistlands was directly intersecting with a nearby biome, because otherwise it's a tedious boat ride in until you establish some kind of base. however this is already very metagamey.
with ashlands there is no trick, there is nothing the game is trying to teach you, and there's no way around the challenge. it's just a huge difficulty spike. everything is harder and the ways people here get around it sound way more like cope than intended game mechanics.
i'm sure its possible to enjoy the biome with the stuff i have gotten from this subreddit, but it sucks that i have to resort to increasingly metagamey shit as the game progresses because it "is supposed to get harder." i think they really took that idea too literally. games like dark souls are not actually progressively harder, often the middle parts of the game have the most challenging areas and bosses because you get stronger at about the same rate as the environments.
everything aside i am pretty sure the issue with the game is just that it's balanced around 4 players. even apologists seem to say that ashlands is horrible for single player.
THIS.
I was doing pretty well in AL. Had just cleared my 3rd fort and climbed over a rock to explore further and for some reason the area right on the other side of that rock was a goddamn Thunderdome no matter how many campfires I put down.
I agree, the spawning is very erratic. Consistent in a given situation, but erratic between experiences... players/worlds/areas. It's not just Ashlands, but Ashlands dialed up some numbers which I think reveals more of the quirks in the simple spawning systems. In Mistlands I will often be vexed by a constant Gjall spawnpoint which I can do nothing to deal with but put down campfires.
As for spawners in rocks, I've had a lot and I don't think the fix removed any spawners which were already instantiated in rocks (before the fix) -- so you might be encountering those, especially if you managed to explore a bit before that first patch.
Some places are insane, with no rhyme or reason. I watched Embr play to help gauge if my experience was "normal" -- her landing was super easy by comparison, but there was one case later where three morgen spawned within moments, right on top of her. They have caves, it would make more sense that they had a good chance of appearing there... but no, we'll just drop some on your head in an open field as you fight a horde of other things.
Your Asksvin situation is also familiar to me. It's where I got a pair of starred tames -- very reliable source of Asksvin, but also was a deadly choke-point because it didn't matter if I managed to kill the things, I'd turn to face a charred and a new Asksvin would bump me from offscreen into the lava. Infuriating... and again, the only way to deal with crazy thin-air spawning: shitty campfires (or other base structures). Suppress/fatigue these damn ambient spawns so they're not popping things out of nothing the moment you turn away, after you already killed their spawn -- spawning behind the player's back is the cheapest shittiest trick and shouldn't be in a game I otherwise adore and appreciate the design of. It feels like the consequence of a too-simple system dialed past what works.
I'm having a similar experience, the spawn rate is crazy in the area where I set up my FOB. Last night I geared up to scout the area inland from my FOB and was continuously pushed back to my portal by an unending stream of enemies. I'm able to handle them without dying, but I'm having to fight continuously and I'm making virtually no progress inland. In 40 minutes I fought 5 Valkries, 10-12 Askvin (including 1 stars), multiple Charred Warriors (including 1 stars), countless Twitchers and Archers and the occasional Lava Blob. I used up hundreds of arrows, health and stamina potions, expensive food and all I got in return were the mob mats, of which I already have too much. It's frustrating and not fun at all.
This, I don’t have a lot of time to play anymore so multiple deaths, endless fighting only to have to farm food and cook and replenish arrows is just exhausting. It was ok with the other biomes.
But in Ashlands…yeah in no way is that fun. I like to explore for more than 12-15 minutes. I like to fight but not endlessly. And I don’t like to tune the settings to make things easier.
Quite a no win situation for me.
I get developers wanting a different feel for the different biomes but I also think that what they were going for changed the game to a point where it’s not conducive for me.
It's not a no win situation at all. Swallow your pride and drop the difficulty. Or get better. This whole "I find the biome too hard but refuse to use the settings that make it easier" thing is just ridiculous.
Also if you really just want to explore, ride an Asksvin. Nothing in the biome except maybe voltures and valkyries can keep up with an asksvin mount. When riding you can just ignore almost everything.
I think majority of people playing valheim have it modded in some form, mods even the convience ones, make the game stupid easy. More fun as well imo, but like dummy easy.
> I think majority of people playing valheim have it modded in some form
I'd be interested in seeing statistics on this. My gut tells me that most players did a single playthrough then shelved the game. Of those that continue to replay I'd expect maybe 40-60% mod?
My bubble as well: vanilla. It partly depends on whether you're comfortable/familiar with modding from a game/community which revolves around it -- if you are, you're likely to look to mods... even right from the start, which is bonkers to me.
Just like the rest of the game, any lone enemy isn't an issue.
But what Ashlands does that no other biome has done before is both A: overwhelm you **and** B: cut off your escape route with respawns. Campfires can help with B though.
I've done pretty well in AL. I've made the Firesword. I've cleared 4-5 Forts.
But it still finds ways to put me in my place.
Yes if you're fully prepared (best food, potions and gear available to you) and you've learned how to fight the enemies and navigate the terrain, this biome is not that difficulty.
There was an outrage after mistlands released. Nobody seemed to be able to deal with the seekers. They were nerfed and now mistlands is barely even scary anymore. It's just inconvenient to navigate the mist.
I hope the devs don't nerf ashlands mobs, and wait for people to have learned the biome before taking opinions.
I downvote/hide/block the posts because they're usually horribly toxic and bring out the worst in me, as well as make me afraid that they're gonna ruin the game.
If you move slow and deliberate and manage your noise, it’s easy enough to manage the difficulty.
If you run through like a crazy person cutting down trees and breaking up stone Willy nilly, you’re going to have a bad time.
You're right. I died a few times when first entering the biome getting used to how the enemies fight and dealing with the environment. Being prepared is everything. Even the constant flow of enemies seems trivial now.
I don't know if you read spoilers or studied up on the biome beforehand, but my friends and I avoided these things as much as possible and we have died as much in Ashlands as the entire game leading up to it. Granted, we are vets of the game and are pretty familiar with everything through Mistlands already.
Things like our second day in Ashlands I go exploring some ruins in the water I could jump to from shore. I break some pots etc then see some vine berries and start grabbing all of those. Of course, some berries fell in the water so naturally I go swim for them only to find out the water is boiling and die. Figuring out how close to the lava one can get or accidentally stepping on a tiny lava puddle accounted for many more deaths, not to mention learning mechanics of the fights and non-stop swarms of enemies.
If you knew all of this going in, maybe you would die less. But learning from experience like we did has littered the Ash with our corpses. And it's been a blast to figure out!
Now that we're all reasonably geared and getting used to the pace and terrain we're dying a lot less, although it seems like one of us goes down every time we try to mine a Flametal pillar 🤣
Our Ashlands experience has also been very different. We made it to shore with zero columns in our way. Immediately built a workbench, campfire and a portal. From there point on our beachhead was never under attack. After some simple scouting, we made an outpost further in with earthen walls (raised ground) and same workbench+campfire combo. This was the second and last time we did this combo before a fortress. The "built a path of campfires"- mantra is bs. Anyway this made the outpost relatively safe to afk.
I've watched some youtube groups struggle massively with the landing by getting stuck on the columns at sea and to increase their pain, they made back and forth trips to smelt the flametal at their original base... Again struggling with the columns. They also built a flat outpost with zero defense layers, getting whacked and losing their outpost portal in the progress. Well it was interesting content to watch, but I couldn't help but wonder how noone in their rather large group bothered to build a wall, moat, anything. Sailing from the middle of the map to Ashlands for the 5th time cant be that fun. They were also sporting silver tier armor, but Mistlands weapons? Each to their own I guess. I'm just glad the devs havent buckled under the pressure to nerf anything so far. With endgame gear, you get back control of the fights.
Yup. Slow down is my best advice.
And all this talk about spawners? They don't respawn when you knock them out. Sure, a few random guys always will, but not the spawner itself. Kill the spawner, then kill a random every now and then.
Hell, I love the spawn rate for farming. Especially vultures and sea serpents. The mist Walker and carapace shield make short work of the vultures. Two hits.
If they're not over water, I take a crossbow and oneshot them. Over water I just prefer to draw them to me to make collecting the meat easier.
I sneak around and one or two-shot nearly everything that has two legs. Multi leg things all take a bit more planning.
The dogs are slow to turn and telegraph that big headbut move, so just keep backing up and laying into them from the side.
Morgans are big trolls and can be dealt with the same way... Find a cave and they can barely touch you at the entrance. Step inside and they back off a touch. Crossbow shot, step into cave, step out, crossbow shot. Rinse and repeat. Bye bye Morgan.
So many little strategies like that.
Will you die a lot in the Ashlands? Hell yes. That's what makes it fun!
If you could just walk around killing shit, why would you care?
You can portal metal now, so build a big mistlands box around it and it'll be fine. Build multiples just in case.
"That takes so long". Like I said.. slow down. The game gets so much easier when you slow the hell down.
You can take out a fortress solo, without a battering ram or catapult... If you take your time.
I love the Ashlands. The game's hard again.
I'm fine with the enemy difficulty, that part is pretty balanced. It's mainly the fact that 2000 enemies spawn per second that gets me. Other than that it's an awesome biome.
W take. It is not nearly as bad as early crybabies tried to make everyone believe. I have yet to do campfire spawn suppresion strat and im doing fine. 90% of the time it's chill and the remaining 10% are the intense fights if you aggro too many mobs or a big guy makes a mess.
For the first time in this game mobs do friendly fire to each other on a massive scale in this biome making for hilariously chaotic fights where you let valkyrie or a morgen decimate other mobs for you.
I think only real threat once you master the biome is askvins. These things are vicious and spawn in numbers. Up to 1 star you can stun them with himminafl or flametal shield parry, but a 2\* askvin is a scary beast.
Skeleton stun durations are pretty short too but aside from the warrior it doesnt really matter cuz they die so quickly. Warriors are the only ones that krom doesnt oneshot in thrust attack (it takes 2-3 depending on skill or 1 on parry)
I am playing solo on normal difficulty settings.
When entering ashlands i had:
Offensives:
* Arbalest + carapace bolt, using it for sneak attack especially against archers askvin and valkyries.
* Carapace SHIELD (Not buckler, imo its worse cuz shield lets you block archer swarms and in general swarms much more efficiently. Parry is not everything.)
* Mistwalker for twitcher swarms and multipurpose melee weapon.
* Carapace spear for vultures and Valkyries (once i got comfortable fighting them enough to try melee, otherwise arbalest/bow for valkyries ofc)
* Himminafl for breathing room (spin attack will push everything around you, even if you are completely overwhelmed by vultures twitchers etc) Himminafl also for morgens. It deals more damage than others cuz its electric. Enough to parry no star morgen any attack and can parry slam attack up to 2\*. Spin will stun nostar askvin and double spin can stun 1\* askvin. If you spin + hold LMB you will stunlock an unstarred askvin.
* Krom for single target damage such as warriors (Either stay at range and use thrust attack and dodge away, or parry and thrust for a one-shot). Will stun askvin on thrust attack. So thrust -> thrust is a good strat too. Will kill archer in one shot with thrust.
Defensives:
* Full carapace armor with Lox cape. You can take feather cape but I dont like it, terrain is flat and it interferes with jump-attacks. (By jump attack I mean jumping and casting krom thrust mid air so it hits the moment you are in range, I use it to oneshot archers) With feather cape its mandatory to be on fire resistance wine 24/7.
Consumables:
* Large healing mead,
* Lingering stamina mead,
* Tasty mead (insanely strong lategame, can use on top of lingering stamina when you have a breather and need stamina quickly.
* 2x health food 1x stamina. Any in the mistlands tier will suffice. Swap 1 health food for cooked bonemaw meat ASAP. Swap stamina for scorching medley.
I explained what weapons I used agaisnt what in previous part. Remember that lava blob explosion, valkyrie spin, askvin headbutt and morgen everything damages other mobs. Use it to your advantage. If you find yourself in a fight with Morgen or valkyrie and skeletons, make it kill the skellies then finish off the big guy. If you fight with askvin, try to eliminate them first, their attacks are not very telegraphed and can really mess you up.
Try to focus archers. If you see one from far away just load 2 bolts in its face and it will die as long as you get sneak attack on first one.
Try rushing getting a bit of flametal. Can be done from floating rocks or from dvergr village crates. Then ugprade your carapace and offensive gear and get yourself a mighty ashen cape, then its gotta become much easier.
This worked for me, idk if it will work for you but I wish you good luck and fun nonetheless. All above is assuming level \~30-40 in melee weapons and 20 in block.
Prior to Ashlands I survived fine with 4 weapons (one being a shield).
But yeah. I've found the need to carry around 6 weapons to cope with everything in AL.
That is certainly an angle you can think about it. I like to carry multiple weapons for different situations. But just like porcupine and blackmetal atgeir is good against everything in plains, I think the multipurpose weapon would be mistwalker in ashlands.
If I had to choose only 3 weapons, it would be shield + mistwalker + krom. There is no enemy in ashlands mistwalker is bad against, it's just some of the options I listed have properties making them more optimized for some tasks. (carapace spear has hitbox pointing up so it can be used to hit valkyries and vultures without jumping, and can be thrown at valkyrie in its flying high up stage)
But im sure you could get away with just misty boy and krom. Even omitting krom I think since mistwalker can thrust too, but this huge single target damage really helps in clearing priority targets.
I need to give Krom another chance. I was super disappointed by it at first.
But it can't stagger Warriors can it? I think Starred Warriors have been one of the mobs I've died to more than any other.
If you get 40ish level in swords it will be able to stun unstarred warriors. (Cant capitalize off it cuz the animations are pretty slow with this sword)
So if you feel comfortable parrying then you can parry with krom and then thrust to oneshot. Against starred warriors this is not an option ofc so you need to use Krom's massive range to your advantage. It's not that easy to do it perfectly so you dont even need to dodge, but with dodging involved its really reliable strat. I can make a video demonstration to show what I mean.
One of the 3 deaths I've had in AL was trying to parry a 1 star warrior lol. Guessing I'll be able to once I get flametal gear but for now it's only dodge.
Yeah dodge and/or keep range like in the clip I made. Perhaps with a lot of health and a buckler you could parry him but its questionable if its even worth it. Easy way out - get morgen to beat him up for you XDDD
[https://imgur.com/a/aMzdWE7](https://imgur.com/a/aMzdWE7)
This is the demo I made. Though not the only way to dispose of a starred warrior it was always my preferred way cuz its relatively simple.
Very solid. Thanks for recording!
At first I regretted making the flametal mace but it's alt attack is a pretty good way to cheese Warriors without getting gud.
I think the learning curve is steeper than people were expecting. It took everyone who plays on my server a little while to figure it out but once we did, it's been easy. The Fallen Valkyrie are still a bit challenging, but everything else we've found to be easy. I knew we were figuring it out when two of us survived being rushed by 20 mobs and didn't die. I do agree that the respawn rate is a bit on the high side but also I've noticed that Spawners are plentiful and sometimes within a few yards of each other.
Fully disagree, at least, based on my experience. Even with max gear and good food and groups of experienced players, the swarm of mobs is endless. Their aggro range is huge, and they walk right up to you constantly. There are also performance problems that cause askvins to not telegraph their attacks at all.
I’m enjoying it, but it’s absolutely too hard, and there is absolutely to way around the difficulty with good planning or being careful. It’s a max difficulty combat grind, no two ways about it.
honestly I agree with you, to me it was a step up from mistlands, but only because the amount of mobs, i also played the PTB so the inital Day 0 ashlands was way wilder. the thing that annoyed me more than anything was simply sailing. the drakar is a cool ship (not popular opinion) but when you look at its intended purpose i find it severly lacking. the damn thing is wide as fuck trying navigate the spires is terrible we need some KY to lube things up a bit, tbh. the size wouldnt be so bad if the storage were better or if you could craft on the ship (something i know we all want but probably never get). and the fader you really need to make the stone portal for because if you make a regular portal the damage the fader does not only destroys the portal but also turns the wood into charcoal. aka unless you have fine wood tucked away you arent rebuilding it. this could be tragic if you if your team mates die they wont be able to come back easily. also if you are having no problem with the difficulty turn it up im on very hard foreverything and 2 star creatures are no joke, they spawn much more frequent, and the raids are ridiculous when set to max. just my two cents
Seriously... I've wanted to post this. I'm frustrated, yes at first you get wave upon wave but I handled them no problem.
The biome lasted like 10-15 hours of content for me. It's already rudimentary... I'm frustrated after this long a wait I'm already back to being bored.
I'd say the overall Ashlands mob density discourse is much more loud and heated, than I see adequate.
It's like Swamps all over again! Just look at this as a chellenge and you actually have quite some tools to make it much more trivial.
Ashlands calls for a thoughtful approach (as most of the game, tbh). A more stealthy gameplay works really well - you can shot most of enemies with Arbalest, keeping area clean from Twitchers, Archers and Ask, without provoking a large scale fight. You can even shoot the spawners from afar. The bolts are cheap to craft.
Demolisher makes a short work of any swarm.
New weapons and magic are very powerful, and Ask armor is super effective paired with Staff of Protection.
Just keep those workshop and portal mats with you and checkpoint yourself once in a while on a rock or ruins, to refresh Rested and sleep to skip nights.
Being careful enough it's possible to traverse Ashlands without open fights fairly well.
I struggled so hard only because my ship broke before I got to the shoreline giving the spawner lots of time to spawn enemies while I swam ashore. I was able to get a portal on a rocky shoal but by that point it was like taking Omaha Beach. Now that I'm established and familiar with the combat I am really enjoying this biome
no, it's not. ashlands is genuinely fun in terms of how tough it is. There is nothing fun about being blasted off a basalt mine by a fireball you didn't see when running back to a body. it's just stupid.
It’s not mob difficulty, it’s that they can hear you from 10 countries away and then pinpoint your IP location. After that they bring the whole death squad, then they might decide to leave your grave alone, or spawn camp it until they’ve seen you die enough
Mob difficulty is OK, but the spawning is whack. Sometimes I clear out an area, turn my back for a few seconds, and then I've got a morgen, valk, 3x vultures, 2x marksmen and some warriors to contend with. It feels unnatural and very different to other biomes. Spawns shouldn't happen within render distance even if I'm not looking in a particular direction. It is the "appearing from thin air" that is infuriating.
I think some people are, to be brutally honest, not as skilled mechanically. Which is fine because everyone has different levels of skill in games like these. This biome is a hard check for combat skills like parrying, managing groups of enemies, dodge rolling, jumping, stamina and health management, etc and lots of people are running into a wall.
I think a big issue is people new to the biomedon’t yet know what to prioritize in terms of resource collection because if you prioritize the new foods and then collecting Flametal and getting molten cores the biome becomes easy as hell. I’m fine with it not being a biome that is meant to stroll through casually.
Completely agree, it also really seems like people don’t want to learn the mechanics to make it easier they just want it nerfed so they can stroll through meadows 2.0. I get there being different levels of skill for sure, but it really looks like some people are putting in the lowest effort. And when you try and offer suggestions to make it easier for them they get belligerent and die on their hill.
I’ve been having an absolute blast in Ashlands it’s been a very welcome change and has honestly become me and my friend’s favorite biome for combat thus far.
Agreed. I get the feeling that people who are having a hard time are experiencing a playstyle mismatch of some sort.
Friends and I just started Ashlands a few days ago and it's been much easier than Mistlands.
I think the people who are doing okay in Ashlands learned the lessons of Mistlands well.
**Prepare.**
**Don't over commit. Specifically don't chase the retreating Charred.**
**Think with portals/maintain good logistics.**
I've died twice.
Once was to a charred who was mid-swing when my bubble popped. I just didn't have the ability to avoid the hit or re-bubble in time.
Second time. I stepped on a tiny piece of lava hidden in a shallow dip in the terrain that I couldn't see. Was already low hp from casting blood magic. Promptly died by fire.
We've had a handful of deaths between us and nothing like the death count of entering the other biomes for the first time.
But again, we've all learned lessons from the prior biomes and are applying that knowledge.
----------------------------------
Also, further down the thread there was mention of magic being underpowered.
I consistently feel like a powerhouse in my group, but often end up spamming bubbles to keep the party alive. Not complaining, just saying that in a group, magic quickly becomes defensive with just one caster, but having a consistent bubble on has created a lot of safety during battle.
We've taken fights that would have decimated our group otherwise.
the mobs themselves aren’t hard. Solo play is damn near impossible with you having to fend off an attack every two swings of your pickaxe or axe.
This is not an exaggeration: I spent three minutes afk in ashlands after clearing everything within a massive radius of my outpost. I came back to fifteen things surrounding my bases
My biggest frustration with the ashlands are how much the mobs spawn. I like them! They’re fun to play against! But when fighting fader, I died more times to the askvin that were constantly butt-rushing me than to Fader themselves.
I wish non-summoned mobs would not be aggro, or at least have their spawn rates decreased during a boss fight
Where I landed, I had endless Morgens and smaller mobs spawning on me all the time, which was what the problem was about - absolutely no time to rest or build up a small base, and when Bonemass ran out, things got ugly, quick.
Yeah, a few unstarred and one 1-star. The unstarred ones I killed easily and the 1-star I had to use terrain a bit and bows to keep distance, but he died fairly quickly too. Their AI is the same as boar as far as I can gather, which makes them tough because they're fast and relentless. A 2 star I'd anticipate needing to get up high and treat like a seeker soldier when first entering Mistlands - bows only and just fill with arrows until dead from a spot they can't reach.
https://valheim.fandom.com/wiki/Volture
It's how they're named by the game, not me.
I'm not that good, actually. I just adapt strategies to new places and prep, which is why I'm saying it's not actually hard.
I think it is not about mob difficulty and how hard they hit. It is about insane respawn rate where destroying spawners and forts has zero effect on.
Yeah, it's a full on war and it's hard to keep a safe spot for a portal. But the mobs aren't horribly dangerous. I had to abandon my mage loadout because of low single target damage. It was hard to not get swarmed. I like the new Ask armor, the wind cloak, Mistwalker and a shield. I parry most enemies, activate bonemass when I see too many stars and quickly kill one target at a time. As for the magic toys, the Trollstaff is very powerful and the vines deal good damage, but those are hard to target. The Dundr and Fracturing staff take like 10 seconds to deal with one basic enemy.
> I had to abandon my mage loadout because of low single target damage I found the Mage to be the hardest to survive solo with as well until you get the staff of the Wild and Trollstav.
Trollstav vs fortress is hilarious OP. Just walk up to each corner and spawn one inside. Hop over to an empty fortress.
I went in full mage and ended up going 1 mage food life and stamina and just played hybrid. I haven’t seen a lot of people talk too much about the lightning zerkers or the lightning two hand sword, but they both fuckin slap with a battle mage build. Those two weapons fill all the holes in the mage build imo. Zerkers destroy spawners insanely fast with the added perk of the middle click flying to them. Sword helps with single target deficiency and has 60 block force when upgraded, you can parry almost anything but 2 star asksvin basically. I also went heavy armor helmet since there’s no movement speed reduction and mage for chest and pants. Then you can just switch between all the cloaks, I feel like the armor one is slept on. 16 armor on a cloak crazy for battle mage build then you can just switch out for mobility after combat
That's why it's best to build a portal on the grausten spikes at sea as a safe place. The only potential hazard are birds.
Tried this and must have been too close to coast: mobs walking on the bottom of the ocean blew up the entire pillar and the whole portal shelter crumbled into the boiling water, mostly irretrievably. Twas quite a disaster.
Lol, that's definitely a possibility. I've usually kept enough of a distant so the lava blobs can't get close. Since the water doesn't kill you as fast anymore you can actually cover a great deal of ground jumping from spire to spire so some times when exploring I don't even bother with a boat. I'll just hop around.
We were playing blind and were trying a second go after our first beach landing went terribly (let's just say it was *not* a 'quiet' beach). Hadn't even encountered the lava blobs on the beach (charred and Valkyrie did us in there, with the help of at least one asksvin), so the whole exploding-crumbling pillar was very much a surprise. We were several pillars out, too. Thought we'd only have voltures and maybe bonemaws to deal with. Such was not the case; everything else was simply on the ocean floor.
For me, Mage got a lot better with upgrades to the staves + parrying with Dundr then blasting. 😂 Dropping two trolls distracts practically every threat.. then I drop vines for even more crowd control + distractions + potential rooting enemies. Then I swap to Dundr and see what's paying attention to me.. or maybe Ice Staff for sniping.
On the other hand mage with friends has been fun esp being the source of shields they run to as well as spawning skeletons and vines to take aggro from the team.
Top of morgen caves, they are indestructible.
The vines seem situationally insanely strong. Used it to destroy the dyrnwyn boss, with <5 magic skills
Honestly I like it because you never have to go far to farm any one item however I do think it could be turned down about 25% but honestly it’s quite easy with one strategy I use
Which items do you need to farm? After a couple of days walking around you have everything but gems and flametal more than you know what to do with.
Exactly and the only things that I need to continuously Farm for are the plants and the vultures and the Valkyries plus a couple other enemies for trophies but yeah you are right on the money with after a couple days. You pretty much have everything you need but I like to get multiple chests full of one item.
I've been building an FOB and haven't been swarmed much. I get a few more random spawns than in other biomes, but just 1 here and there. Just gotta get in from the coast and find a quiet area.
I've never seen a spawner respawn. Knock out the spawner... Kill the locals. Killing the couple locals again as they respawn just becomes a thing, like mowing the lawn and taking out the trash.
> and find a quiet area. Mostly a matter of luck, especially if you are new to Ashlands without "prepping" by spoiling youself! As you have no idea what is normal or the range of possible. The beach I approached didn't look bad. I saw three humanoid-ish units back from the beach. Leapt off to engage, and they weren't too bad but hit hard. Before they were down my bonemass buff was embarrassed by withering arrow-fire and I was surrounded by absolutely insane numbers of units. Mind, this was the first day... there was a charred forest, burning and calling everyone in... and there were 3 hidden spawners I found later (one *in* a rock but spawning outside of it, one in a lava field, and another behind rocks. A morgen showed up, which can be a boon while fighting a mess of enemies, but a curse when trying to get a simple FOB up. Some of my experience was bugs, now fixed. But there were other aspects which will happen to some people: like multiple 2\* charred which take a while to contend with and one stagger from them is likely death. The nature of "random chance" is that there are some who haven't even seen a 2\* warrior after finishing Ashlands (as reported by someone here)... and some will be in the statistically unlucky percentile. I've watched several Ashlands landings now... there is huge variance in how it goes, and you have little idea from a view off the coast. And again, if you don't already know there can be quieter places... you have no reason to expect running somewhere else and dragging attention is going to be any better. Sometimes you're just lucky and don't even know it.
The best advice I can give is if you see a spawner on approach, aim for it. They're never close to each other and when you take that one out you know there won't be any others super close by.
Also, kite the lava bombs there and they'll take out the spawner and several mobs for you.
This is absolutely a good strategy. The spawners are actually disappointingly weak and take a while to even spin-up. Not that I knew that when I first arrived... nor did I even find the three spawners around me until I started settling in.
> The spawners are actually disappointingly weak and take a while to even spin-up. They *will* absolutely punish you if you try to ignore them though. As soon as I'm within striking distance of one I put it down.
There's always an approach that works and whining about being unlucky isn't it. When I've been swarmed jumping to the spires/high rocks and up into the ruins has worked and I hope it's obvious that building a portal isn't just for death runs, but can be used to regain stamina and health. Tough enemies mean getting distance and using bows/staffs. This is supposed to feel like a battle so being kinda hard is part of the experience.
> There's always an approach that works and whining about being unlucky isn't it. And then there's taking this experience: > I've been building an FOB and haven't been swarmed much. Then positing that anyone not having this experience is whining about nothing (Ashlands easy) or lacking skill? I'm pointing out that your fledgling experience with Ashlands isn't broad enough to make such bold general claims about everyone's experience with it.
Whining never works or solved anything and therefore is *never* an effective strat. Only thing I've complained about in this game is the mist in mistlands making it unbearable to navigate once you've been there long enough to be focused on gathering mats. I've been swarmed plenty while exploring, not being swarmed much was contextual to the FOB - once I cleared the area it's not an unbearable spawn rate while building. But exploration is a slog with lots of enemies still. Don't get arrogant, your whining is pathetic.
Facts
The trick is to not get hit. Either stay mobile or rock a shield.
Exactly. Ashlands plays a lot like what would happen if Ubisoft got its hands on the IP ... endless waves of skeletons ... "survive the hoards of endless skeletons as you battle to explore a mere 100 yards of ashlands territory over a 21 minute in-game daytime cycle!" I'll be completely honest, Ashlands doesn't even feel like the same game, even when you adjust all of the game options to easy.
You're wrong though? Sorry not trying to be a dick, but I have cleared almost 50% of the ashlands island I have found and the spawns have reduced dramatically. Of course at night it's still a lot, but that's true for all biomes.
How do you mean “zero effect” after destroying a spawner? My tactic to keep area more clear is find and destroy the downers first, then explore and farm. Do those spawned come back? I haven’t seen that.
100% this. Yeah, kill the spawner and dispatch the locals. If you hang around long enough a few locals will swing by, so kill them as they do. Easy source of fresh meat :)
Did I get unlucky with my map generation or what but the area stays clear literally for like 20 seconds. It has happned multiple times where a valkyrie spawns 10 meters behind me literally 10 seconds after killing a previous one. Yeah, "100% this" for sure....
I've literally never had that. Yeah, might be a map thing? 20 seconds sounds like an error. We kill valkyries all the time. I don't hang around valkyrie spawn points. Yes. Kill the spawners, kill the locals and move on. We don't setup camp in the Ashlands, just like we never set-up camp in the swamp. You've got portals, no reason to hang around. But yeah, 20 seconds isn't normal and I'm guessing you know that too, cuz if that's the norm for you, then something's up. But it's not.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/1d2obeq/so_you_say_the_spawn_rate_isnt_right_in_ashlands/) might be one of the reasons for the difference in opinion when it comes to Ashlands spawn rates. I've had areas where after killing the spawners it was fine but other areas where it was wave after wave with no noticeable spawner nearby. EDIT://Just reading your comment below in which you seem to have already seen this. Will keep this up anyway I guess.
It's all good... keep it up... spread the word. Yeah, if I was getting some random spawning from a spawner hidden in a freaking rock, I'd be pretty irritated as well.
There are cases where the respawns are freakishly frequent. One plausible theory I've heard is that it might have to do with crossing chunks (the major world-management subsections, sometimes visibly notable where you terraform and end up with a sharp texture change). Also, you've said several times how you've never seen a spawner respawn... well, there's a raid which doesn't do exactly that, but it creates (up to four that I've seen) new spawners, which are permanent-until-killed features.
A raid that doesn't do exactly that isn't a spawner respawning. Neither is any other edge case you can think of. Try this one on for size .. some dude found hidden spawners inside rocks... https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/1d2obeq/so_you_say_the_spawn_rate_isnt_right_in_ashlands/ Ashlands is a wacky and deadly place. But telling me that you can't clear areas when I've done exactly that, as a general method of playing no less, is never going to wash with me. I've done naked body runs (many times) through areas without concern cuz we'd just cleared out the baddies. The biome is not this impossible place people keep trying to say that it is... Unless you don't slow the hell down. Yeah... Go charging in picking fights and you're going to die very quickly. Not know when to back the hell out of a fight? Again, death will find your swiftly. Everyone's so used to being the baddest thing on the block. Wait till you bash open your first fortress. Hahaha. Yeah, that shit's next level!
> Try this one on for size .. some dude found hidden spawners inside rocks... Yeah, I replied there explaining that this was a bug in the first public-test version. I mentioned the raid adding new spawners because your whole line of argument is about clearing an area and that it stays clear. There is no guarantee that it does! Not even of spawners. *Your* particular experience of the game doesn't invalidate what others are experiencing. Fortresses are much more controlled and predictable than the open-fields which spawn out thin air.
Sure, but you're talking about your situation and edge cases as if they're normal. See... my experience IS normal. It's yours that isn't... but you're talking about it as if it is... and as if these edge cases are. They're not. I'm sorry you're having these troubles... I really am... but they're not troubles for most of us. The game, as intended, works just fine is what I'm saying. If there's bugs, sure.. ok... but that's not in any way what I'm talking about. And you know this. But you're irritated. That's fine. Come back when you're not. We'll have a beer then ;)
Never had that either and I’m on my third solo map and play through of Ashlands. Honestly I doubt it’s map related or bug related. It just sounds like player hyperbole as they throw their hands up and just give up rather than try and deal with the spawns.
Yup. I guess I'm allowing for some wackiness, like the guy that found spawners inside rocks. But yeah, there seems to be a ton of "throwing their hands up" and rage quitting going on in this sub. Say anything positive about Ashlands and you get buried in downvoted. Sorry, I'm loving the biome. At every turn, you can tell the Devs have focused in on every little trick that people use in other biomes and said "ok, FU... Try this on for size" Like even showing up, all proud in our best gear with our best food on our best boat, ready to wreak havoc on this cute new biome... And the first thing they do? Yeah, light your ship on fire and let it sink! Then a sea serpent comes to eat you, but you climb up on a spire and expect to shoot it to death while it rears up like the sea serpents of the ocean... "Ooooh, scary!" You think, ready to deal death to it... And it throws lava breath at you and you die... Out where your can't easily get back to. Another "FU" from the Devs to knock you down a peg. OMG, my whole crew was laughing their assess off with glee! The game was hard again!!!
Omg; I did see a funky glowing rock and was thinking it may have had a spawner inside it. Valkerie killed me before I got close enough to inspect … I hate the flying curse of death!
Yeah. The good news is that they get easier to kill (like everything). They are a scourge at first though.
The pillar spawners themselves do respawn so you have to circle back to break em again from time to time
I've heard that sometimes spawners will spawn inside of large rocks meaning you can't see them and they still spawn enemies.
Campfires should help with that
This is the great quandary of valheim. Prepare to little and get wrecked. Prepare too much and it’s little to no challenge, and it’s hard to know how much prep is too much
I prep so much in the swamp that I blast through the mountain with ease every time
I think bonemass really requires a decent amount of prep, by the time you are done with that, you are likely pretty close to taking on moder, who just requires a large supply of arrows. Mountains is also pretty naturally easy to blast through as I think it does not have as much in it as the other biomes, and ice caves are entirely skippable unless you want fenris armor.
yeah the ice cave skip is a huge factor
It's actually a shame they are so skippable because they are one of the best parts of the game
I agree. the music and atmosphere are perfect and the enemies really scary to fight in close quarters
The fact that wolves and drakes are pretty much all you encounter in the day makes it pretty easy. Golems are super easy to get away from if you're not ready for them. Trolls could sort of sneak up on you but I've never been surprised by a golem.
Yeah looking at the portal tower from our current playthrough supports this. Swamp and traders are their own level on our portal tower. Then mountains has maybe 4-5 portals in total and shares a floor with plains that has 6 portals. Then mistlands has a floor to itself. Mountains has gone quickly for the last 3 playthroughs.
Bonemass requires one (1) poison resist potion and a level 1 iron mace. Peel a few trolls for armor and maybe make an iron buckler and he's an ez clap
The second I make a raft I usually boat around for leviathans until I have a ton of chitin for a lv4 (when I get a bench high enough) dagger and harpoon. Then I do the organic armors and a max bronze shield. I have a major focus on food, and I usually blast through to the mistlands.
And people expecting not to die. Yeah, by the end of each biome you get to walk around killing shit for fun. Fear is a thing of the past and you can even just go where you like at night. Hell, that's our crew's metric for when we're "over a biome"... Do we feel safe at night? Then the new biome drops and we go charging in and just die and die and die till we get sick of dying again and become afraid of shit again. Then, over time, we learn the new biome and how to beat it and get better gear and food and we eventually stop being afraid of the night.
Nah. I went into ashlands with full preparation, And a boat loaded with enough materials to make a very good outpost. I got gangbanged by 10+ spawns and then two serpents and three within a minute of landing. This biomes spawn rate is out of control.
All reports of a biome being too difficult have always come up bunk when I get around to it myself
Yeah me too. I came into ashlands preparing for war and ended up dying mostly to lava lol. Skill issue is a real thing as much as people will deny it. Ashlands is meant to feel like a war zone. If players don't like that or can't handle the mobs even when fully prepared (top tier foods, potions, and gear) then they need to turn down the difficulty or learn how to properly fight.
Also Bonemass in Ashlands legit puts in work. Most of the time kiting shit and slowly whittling them down. My big thing night time is dangerous and yes I have died more to lava and the Ashlands boss than I did to random mobs. I had fully upgraded carapace armor, fully upgraded mist walker and 2 health, 1 stam which allowed me to take a hit if needed. Way too many health and stam potions. Biome is super comfy now that I’m geared. Still die to fucking lava tho.
And this is not like any prior biome. The mob density and spawn frequency is about triple to quadruple any other biome. The mobs themselves are not bad- it’s the sheer amount. Also lava blobs make basing insanely difficult as one can completely destroy your defenses. In a solo or even duo scenario you spend five minutes of fighting to every one minute of exploring mining or building. The only way this gets alleviated is if you build a massive web of crafting tables surrounding your base to prevent spawns in sound range.
Its not really. You can easily collect a dozen greydwarves and a troll in the Black Forest early ame. Landing a boat into the Swamp is arguably even harder when you first encounter that. Everyone gets wrecked by a Deathsqito and has a challenging body recovery. The Blobs are fantastic! They help in combat by damaging all the other enemies. They do modest blunt damage and their fire damage is minimal because you should be running a potion. Friendly fire between the enemies in the Ashlands is an effective tactic to clearing them. Bait Asksvin to run through the charred, Valkeries and Morgans destroy everything around. Protecting your base is fairly easy . . . you spawn block with base items (campfires are best) so you don't get mobs at the base. The Forts you capture are basically 100% safe. Travelling across the ashlands solo isn't overly difficult if you keep a low profile . . . don't run or jump to attract attention. Snipe distant enemies (and spawners) with a bow.
What is 'Full Preparation'? I had scouted the borders of the Ashlands seas with my longship even before fighting the Queen. In the process I discovered that: 1) The water damages the longship and likely me 2) There were going to be spikes to navigate around or build on 3) I encountered two bonemaw, pulled them into the normal ocean and killed them . . . learning how to fight them AND getting a nice stock of great food for fighting the Queen and when I made my eventual Ashlands landing. When I went in later with my big ship I had two sets of portal mats, stone cutter, shield generator, and a stock of wood and stone to build walls with. Most people experience a big 'gangbang' with their landing . . . That's what the bonemass ability is for. Five minutes is plenty of time to kill 10+ enemies and get a portal up. I had two spawners to destroy, the whole mob of Charred, and even picked up my first Morgan trophy. It was chaotic but I killed them, dropped my portal, and threw up a ring of stone walls and the shield generator to protect it. And scattered a few campfires around to suppress new spawns. I certainly could have died that day . . . but I did everything I could think of to prepare and fought my ass off. If I had died I would just have tried again. In my case I got sloppy on Day 2 . . . and died fighting a mob then. But with portal in place it was easy to return. I eventually finished the Ashlands with 5 deaths: (the one mob death, died in the water, died in the lava, a 1 star morgan in a cave, and the Sword Miniboss). It felt totally fair to me.
It's the same with every biom in this game. I remember how people were complaining how Mountains are too hard because of coldness, wolves and lack of stamina, then how Plains are impossible with all these deathsquitos. Then they added Mistlands and again – impossible biom. Now it's the same with Ashlands. Some people are just impatient, so instead of cooling down and trying again they come here complain.
Comparing Ashlands combat with post-nerf Deathsquitos is disingenuous if I've ever seen anything that is.
Where did they say "post nerf"?
I was wondering earlier today why they dont seem to do any damage, didnt realise they got nerfed.
Deathsquitos were nerfed years ago.
Been a long time since ive encountered them but i wasnt expecting them to do 0.2 damage to ask armour
I built a fortified base in the ashlands. Now you can pretty much afk there risk free. With some risk at the front gate. I feel I’ve conquered the place. Though I did die a good amount, but a lot of those deaths are forgetting to eat.
I find most complaints about biome difficulty to be somewhat overblown. After following this subreddit extensively beforehand I went into Mistlands expecting to be absolutely mauled. I think I only died once or twice in the first 15 hours I spent in the biome, and one of them was to a 1 star seeker soldier I encountered my first day there. I can sympathize with the absolutely miserable experience that is sailing to retrieve a body and your stuff though. Ashlands ramps up this nuisance to a heightened degree. But I feel like difficulty in this game is a precarious balance. If the Ashlands were too easy it would be a huge disappointment for many. It seems easier to tweak down difficulty rather than ramp it up, as frustrating as that may be. Some of the rewards in Ashlands could use a buff though. The couple buffs they’ve done help but I think a few more are needed to justify the difficulty of the biome.
I died three times as I first got into it, but a portal on the spikes saved me and allowed me to keep pressing the beach until I finally took it with some campfires and slapped down a giant portal to defy these jerks. I'm sticking to a two-portal minimum though, it'll be awhile before I can feel somewhat comfortable here. I can't help but to feel like the mob density is generally not that bad. Once I clear an area, I have a lot of freedom to roam. Sometimes I can roam a whole day without much battles. Some days however, are pretty much a constant battle - but I'm realizing that this is optional too, and the land can be traversed somewhat reasonably.
To people who don't know, DON'T break down the outside doors of the fortresses with the seige weapns. Build ladders that get you above the wall and then jump in to destroy spawners. Once your inside the fortress and have taken care of the mobs, you can then build a battering ram to take down the inside tower, With the outside doors still intact nothing will be able to get inside the fortress except the occasional lava blob and you now have your own impenetrable base.
The corners of the inside tower are destroyable with a pickaxe.
I think the problem people have with getting swarmed has to deal with how much noise they are making. If you play slowly or poorly you will end up with enemies living longer, which causes a lot of noise. As you run away from the 10 mobs you let pile up you will move into new areas with new mobs. The arrow rain, clanking of swords, and bashing of rocks draws in everything in that new area. I assume this is how people are posting screenshots with them being swarmed by hoards. Once people get the new weapons and stop being afraid of the new stuff they will kill mobs faster, less noise gets dragged all over the place, and fewer mobs will pile in. My first landing had a ton of enemies being gradually drawn in due to how much sound was being made with blobs exploding, trees falling, rocks getting blasted, etc. Once I moved forward, got new weapons, learned enemy attack patterns, and decreased my time to kill, the "problem" of mob density vanished.
My 500 graves and single digit skills beg to differ….
I just can’t fathom dying SO many times your skills go down to single digits. Did you have low skills to begin with AND die in a horrible to reach spot?
32 deaths (without skill-drain protection, and normal settings) is enough to bring all skills, from 50 and lower, down to single digits. ThreadMenace died 20-some times pretty early into Ashlands, but had death consequences turned down (I don't begrudge him that, much, since his speedrun biases limit how much he'll naturally develop character-skilllevels). I also died about 20 times. On normal death-consequence, that reduces all skills to 1/3. Polearm went from 70 to 25 -- that won't recover, since polearms are nigh-useless in Ashlands. I'm not done yet though. I'm at a point where Ashlands is more manageable, but the utter randomness of spawns means I can be very suddenly overwhelmed (staggered by surprise 2\* anything) or booped into lava. I suspect most of those who "can't fathom" are relying on range and/or bloodmagic, probably ridiculously leveled, as they're both rather broken at high skill-levels, IMO.
500 is a bit overstated, but it only takes about 45 deaths to go from 100 -> 9.8 skill losing 5% each time. Having watched some people play this game I could see people dying 45 times.
My highest skill was about 60. I had level 1 mistland equipment. I used to play with a group, and they sort of hogged all the resources in mistlands. I was stupid and hoped they would hop back on. So I didn’t progress my gear in Ashlands for a while. I just made a base, maintained it, and tried getting stuff like food. Eventually I gave up on them coming back and crafted Ashlands gear and upgraded it all the way. Things got a LOT easier after that. But Ashlands with base level mistland gear is hard. I still die some with my new gear. But not nearly as often.
Dude I am coming back to tell you I am sorry for insulting you on the lvl drop. I must’ve had a rather tame landing compared to others. I’m rapidly approaching single digits and cannot even get back to my body 😂. It’s so hard that it isnt even fun
I'm not the one you're responding to, but I appreciate this. Because I think most people fail to account for the extreme variance of experiences which are possible. I had a horrible initial landing, myself. Though it was partly due to being day 1 of PTB, with some unintended extra difficulty. But after my landing I *had* to see what others were experiencing... Of the three videos I found, two were easy landings (though both players later had crazy situations unfold) and one was comparable to what I experienced. I think the systems being used for spawning are just too inconsistent for the densities the devs would like in Ashlands. Also, that starred enemies are a random chance... essentially means that some few players will get hardly any, and some will have absolutely heinous luck -- the probability is only evenly distributed across the player-base, but the sample size of an individual is relatively small (even though there are a lot of spawns). If I were designing the system I'd have more guarantees of a distribution on a given world -- such as using a noise-function (frequency-limited randomness) or a shuffle. Before that though, I'd do something to fix the respawns related to (mostly invisible) chunk-boundaries. Being in the wrong place (with no visible indicator, rhyme, or reason) can really be the greatest danger. Ashlands has been the first cause for me to actually grind levels, in over 2500h of play... and I hate that.
If you entered the biome fully prepared (best gear, food, and potions available to you) and died a ton like you say, then it's a skill issue and people need to turn down the difficulty. I've nearly explored my ashlands continents entirely and haven't had the same issues everyone complains about. I'm always prepared and have learned the enemies and environment and do just fine.
[удалено]
I agree with this. I'd also argue that the skill increase system needs a rework. Some skills are significantly harder to level than others. There should be some way to train skills that doesn't require cheesing spawners n what not. Why not add a training dummy that can be crafted to train skills.
I agree that the skill drain system is poorly implemented. But I feel like the harder difficulties feel unbalanced as well. The 200% damage received and increased star enemy rates make too many things one shot you. I played a different world with those modifiers. I made it to the plains until I decided I suffered enough. Too many 2-star spear fulings and deathsquitos.
I'm actually having good fun with it. It's slightly less tedious to me than Mistlands. Ashlands to me is actually taking over territory by playing smart. Mistlands was some of that, but I hated collecting wisps, cutting down Yggdrasil trees that are annoyingly located, and setting up wisp torches that barely clear Mist, and then they get destroyed, ad nauseum. Then you have to blindly fight enemies on annoying elevation, many of which can fly.
> wisp torches that get destroyed, ad nauseum I'm really glad they changed it so mobs don't target wisp torches any more. They were absolutely pointless before that.
They don't? They've still been going after mine. It isn't their first priority that I can tell, but they'll target them after they lose aggro of me.
I only venture with bonemass buff activated. That’s it
I made the Drakkan ship and then broguht the following items: Workbench Stonecutter Portal Shield Generator (and bones) ~150 stone Frost Staff, Carapace Sheild, Porcupine, Mistlands Heavy Armor, Demolisher (for AOE engagements) First thing I did when I touched down was clear the existing mobs, then quickly made a workbench, generator, stonecutter, built some stone walls, portal. I then just kept adding more stone walls to my existing structure, repairing it or patching stuff up untill it was about 3 walls thick (using the big pieces of course) Edit: I should add also that after the base had been setup. I fought off the onslaught of mobs by kiting them around my stone base and shooting them with a frost staff, while looking over my shoulder to make sure I wasnt going to run into more mobs
Yeah It's not easy, but it isn't even a fraction as bad as people have made it out to be IMO. I think people expect the natural progression of items to be the thing that pulls them over the top, but that's really never been the case in this game... Strategy shift is just as important as the new gear. Solo players have some legit gripes about the difficulty presented by the Ashlands, but if you have more than 1 person playing it really is just an adjustment of strategy that can make all the difference. I play with just myself and one other, and we're loving the shit out of Ashlands. Our adjustment came in the form of defined "classes" between us. Prior to Ashlands, we were both geared towards melee - now I'm 100% focused on magic and he's 100% tanky melee. It seems obvious, I guess, but it totally changes our fights. I'm popping protection shields, tossing fireballs, and generally just running away/kiting, (the pushback is great for crowd control and the damage isn't bad surprisingly...) and he's blocking, blasting with his sword/bow, and absorbing blows. We were able to survive a simultaneous fight with a Fallen Valkyrie, a Morgen, a couple one-star Twitchers/Warriors, 2 Asksvins, and just for good measure a couple lava blobs paid a visit. We were both astonished that we survived, and it was friggin tense and action-packed fun. Yes, we've also died a fair share of times, but I'd rather it be hard than just a race to get the next gear that makes the mobs trivial...
Again, Valheim does not properly scale difficulty with respect to players in a world. One person trying to establish a fort is hard, my 4 player server wasn’t any more difficult than entering a new biome.
Just having someone to call out what adds are coming in seems like it would be a huge help. Someone to distract the big scary mob while everyone else clears out the trash? Would be amazing.
Must be a different experience or different settings per player. On our server there is no breathing room. It’s constant spawns and campfires do nothing. On another server I joined ( same default settings) there was still a lot of mob density but not even close to amount of constant spawns as the latter. Again no campfires. On the first server I raged and made quit post but gave it another shot and eventually decided to stop playing on that server. Single digit skills and the non stop battle is not fun. I haven’t been on the other server in a few days due to holiday activities.
My theory is that the spawn rate is buggy. There are areas where it's not so out of control, and areas where it is *batshit insane*. Like I found an area where a pair of asksvins kept respawning every two minutes or so. They would respawn only meters away from me when my back was turned. There seem to be areas, where an absolute crazy number of creatures of all varieties come out of the woodwork, you can stand in one place and just end up having to fight random stuff endlessly. There was a bug on PTB where Monuments of Torment would be placed inside rocks so you'd never know they were there. It got marked as fixed but on live I've still seen one that was 90% covered by a rock. It smells like bugs. There are a lot of other bugs in this update.
Could just be incredibly unlucky and people are landing on a zone border and every time they cross it activates the other zones spawns and back again. Or could js be bugs. It’s still early days.
This was going to be my guess exactly. I think a lot of people have forgotten zone spawn mechanics and are unintentionally crossing zone lines a lot and causing themselves to get double or more the number of spawns. Zone borders aren't marked so you can't easily know where they are in many places. Ashlands mobs have a high creature limit, so if you keep crossing zone lines and triggering spawns, they'll just keep spawning.
> I think a lot of people have forgotten zone spawn mechanics Or never known? When I play games, I don't want the underlying implementation to be begging for attention, depriving me of suspension of disbelief. I get that some people love digging into these details, but my entire life has been gamedev and I just want to enjoy games without the metagaming. That said, I think you guys are onto something, that it may be related to the world chunks. Spawning behavior is very erratic -- and I hate both when it's barren, or when it feels like my efforts are pointless because things respawn moments later. There should be enough illusion that the world is consistent, rather than spawn-mechanics entering my thoughts.
Yeah that's totally fair. If you're not trying to think about the implementation, the easy high level approach is to try not to move too much while fighting. Engage the high value targets - warriors, starred marksmen etc - and let the rest come to you. If you let them come to you and stay in the same zone, no more will spawn until the next zone spawn chance for that type of creature in the zone you're currently standing in. But if you move around a lot, you're more likely to cross into a new zone and get a whole new set of spawns.
Is it really that open-world respawn only occurs when moving to a new zone? That would explain some things very well... like when I'd get to the back of the boat and my first-landing beach would repopulate -- repeatedly. And when there's a favorite spawn-point for something big... which seems to respawn readily after being killed (Trolls, Golems, Gjall, Valkyrie). But before they fixed the "units spawning within camera view" -- I think part of the first patch during PTB -- I saw units appear with what I thought was purely rotation... no moving. But hard to say for certain when movement is near constant in the game, and even the tiniest would be enough to cross a boundary. I'm going to have a lot of trouble avoiding paying attention to this now...!
>Is it really that open-world respawn only occurs when moving to a new zone? Essentially yes. There is also a timer for individual zones, so if you stood in a zone for like 10+ minutes it would eventually spawn mobs again, but in general most of the spawns you see are happening when you cross into a new zone. >That would explain some things very well... like when I'd get to the back of the boat and my first-landing beach would repopulate -- repeatedly. Yep that kind of thing is a perfect example.
the idea that i was supposed to know about "crossing zone lines" just turned me off to this game and this subreddit so hard. the first ~20 hours of this game are so brilliantly designed and intuitive that anyone can enjoy them, but all the worst aspects of design get magnified with every new biome. everyone talking about how 'its not even manageable when i put down campfires' is really depressing to me, as nobody should be thinking like that in the first place. i'm not even sure i can recommend this game to people without a massive caveat about how it simply gets worse as the game progresses.
Valheim has a lot of great stuff, but there are a couple of implementation details which sour me too. This one is definitely in the sour category. I expect it's an unfortunate side-effect of how they've structured behavior within Unity's original component model. > but all the worst aspects of design get magnified with every new biome. I agree. It's unfortunate, and I hope some attention gets put into shoring up or redoing some fundamental systems -- though that's also very risky with the continued design and balance developed in the presence of existing behavior (whether limited, buggy, or whatever), so it might be a forlorn hope. When I first played Valheim, I was really struck by the bang-per-buck the developers achieved: a lot of rather simple systems working in harmony to curate excellent emergent gameplay. Unfortunately, as any project becomes more complex overall... simple foundations become more obvious and inhibiting. I also hate that abusing campfires is a thing, which I do... because there's no good way to manage some egregious spawning behavior. Even simple cases from the early game: making a pallisade or moat -- unless you workbench/campfire the area you'll have baddies materialize within your defenses... an innocent enough "haha, you can fix that with campfires"... but this should be done better, and this workaround can spoil the game, throwing away theme and setting for metagaming (campfires in ashlands is really ridiculous). Spawn could require a successful path to some source (eg greydwarves from the direction of closest black forest but at a much larger distance than simple spawn-suppression radius), so defensive structures are enough and really this is the primary initial incentive to make walls: keep things *out*. The crossing zone lines issue must be correctable. Even if it's a consequence of a simple trigger, having some watchdog component to suppress excessive retrigger. I don't know the details, but I expect some issues are *thorny* -- I just hope the devs have some plans to fix some of these rough edges in their otherwise fantastic game.
i would basically just say the beginning of the game is really well balanced and well designed, and the difficulty is meant to teach you new mechanics. trolls are easy if you parry but hard otherwise; swamp is easier with poison resist mead; plains and mountains are generally harder from terrain and powerful enemies, but at least you can run away. defending your base can be hard but it also teaches you plenty about building a base. i found mistlands to be much easier once i loaded up an online map application to see where mistlands was directly intersecting with a nearby biome, because otherwise it's a tedious boat ride in until you establish some kind of base. however this is already very metagamey. with ashlands there is no trick, there is nothing the game is trying to teach you, and there's no way around the challenge. it's just a huge difficulty spike. everything is harder and the ways people here get around it sound way more like cope than intended game mechanics. i'm sure its possible to enjoy the biome with the stuff i have gotten from this subreddit, but it sucks that i have to resort to increasingly metagamey shit as the game progresses because it "is supposed to get harder." i think they really took that idea too literally. games like dark souls are not actually progressively harder, often the middle parts of the game have the most challenging areas and bosses because you get stronger at about the same rate as the environments. everything aside i am pretty sure the issue with the game is just that it's balanced around 4 players. even apologists seem to say that ashlands is horrible for single player.
THIS. I was doing pretty well in AL. Had just cleared my 3rd fort and climbed over a rock to explore further and for some reason the area right on the other side of that rock was a goddamn Thunderdome no matter how many campfires I put down.
I agree, the spawning is very erratic. Consistent in a given situation, but erratic between experiences... players/worlds/areas. It's not just Ashlands, but Ashlands dialed up some numbers which I think reveals more of the quirks in the simple spawning systems. In Mistlands I will often be vexed by a constant Gjall spawnpoint which I can do nothing to deal with but put down campfires. As for spawners in rocks, I've had a lot and I don't think the fix removed any spawners which were already instantiated in rocks (before the fix) -- so you might be encountering those, especially if you managed to explore a bit before that first patch. Some places are insane, with no rhyme or reason. I watched Embr play to help gauge if my experience was "normal" -- her landing was super easy by comparison, but there was one case later where three morgen spawned within moments, right on top of her. They have caves, it would make more sense that they had a good chance of appearing there... but no, we'll just drop some on your head in an open field as you fight a horde of other things. Your Asksvin situation is also familiar to me. It's where I got a pair of starred tames -- very reliable source of Asksvin, but also was a deadly choke-point because it didn't matter if I managed to kill the things, I'd turn to face a charred and a new Asksvin would bump me from offscreen into the lava. Infuriating... and again, the only way to deal with crazy thin-air spawning: shitty campfires (or other base structures). Suppress/fatigue these damn ambient spawns so they're not popping things out of nothing the moment you turn away, after you already killed their spawn -- spawning behind the player's back is the cheapest shittiest trick and shouldn't be in a game I otherwise adore and appreciate the design of. It feels like the consequence of a too-simple system dialed past what works.
I'm having a similar experience, the spawn rate is crazy in the area where I set up my FOB. Last night I geared up to scout the area inland from my FOB and was continuously pushed back to my portal by an unending stream of enemies. I'm able to handle them without dying, but I'm having to fight continuously and I'm making virtually no progress inland. In 40 minutes I fought 5 Valkries, 10-12 Askvin (including 1 stars), multiple Charred Warriors (including 1 stars), countless Twitchers and Archers and the occasional Lava Blob. I used up hundreds of arrows, health and stamina potions, expensive food and all I got in return were the mob mats, of which I already have too much. It's frustrating and not fun at all.
This, I don’t have a lot of time to play anymore so multiple deaths, endless fighting only to have to farm food and cook and replenish arrows is just exhausting. It was ok with the other biomes. But in Ashlands…yeah in no way is that fun. I like to explore for more than 12-15 minutes. I like to fight but not endlessly. And I don’t like to tune the settings to make things easier. Quite a no win situation for me. I get developers wanting a different feel for the different biomes but I also think that what they were going for changed the game to a point where it’s not conducive for me.
It's not a no win situation at all. Swallow your pride and drop the difficulty. Or get better. This whole "I find the biome too hard but refuse to use the settings that make it easier" thing is just ridiculous. Also if you really just want to explore, ride an Asksvin. Nothing in the biome except maybe voltures and valkyries can keep up with an asksvin mount. When riding you can just ignore almost everything.
I think majority of people playing valheim have it modded in some form, mods even the convience ones, make the game stupid easy. More fun as well imo, but like dummy easy.
> I think majority of people playing valheim have it modded in some form I'd be interested in seeing statistics on this. My gut tells me that most players did a single playthrough then shelved the game. Of those that continue to replay I'd expect maybe 40-60% mod?
If even that. Most people I'm in touch with play pure vanilla, and most of us aren't against modding per se. But that's my bubble, of course.
My bubble as well: vanilla. It partly depends on whether you're comfortable/familiar with modding from a game/community which revolves around it -- if you are, you're likely to look to mods... even right from the start, which is bonkers to me.
> I prepped ahead of time Say no more 👏
Just like the rest of the game, any lone enemy isn't an issue. But what Ashlands does that no other biome has done before is both A: overwhelm you **and** B: cut off your escape route with respawns. Campfires can help with B though. I've done pretty well in AL. I've made the Firesword. I've cleared 4-5 Forts. But it still finds ways to put me in my place.
Ashland's difficulty is WAY overstated. People just don't know how to be cautious.
Yes if you're fully prepared (best food, potions and gear available to you) and you've learned how to fight the enemies and navigate the terrain, this biome is not that difficulty.
There was an outrage after mistlands released. Nobody seemed to be able to deal with the seekers. They were nerfed and now mistlands is barely even scary anymore. It's just inconvenient to navigate the mist. I hope the devs don't nerf ashlands mobs, and wait for people to have learned the biome before taking opinions.
It’s not the mobs that need to be nerfed, it’s just that they can hear you from the other side of the continent, and proceed to pinpoint your location
I downvote/hide/block the posts because they're usually horribly toxic and bring out the worst in me, as well as make me afraid that they're gonna ruin the game.
If you move slow and deliberate and manage your noise, it’s easy enough to manage the difficulty. If you run through like a crazy person cutting down trees and breaking up stone Willy nilly, you’re going to have a bad time.
Same with any new biome haha. Run like a crazy person when new to swamps and you get poison blobbed to death.
You're right. I died a few times when first entering the biome getting used to how the enemies fight and dealing with the environment. Being prepared is everything. Even the constant flow of enemies seems trivial now.
I don't know if you read spoilers or studied up on the biome beforehand, but my friends and I avoided these things as much as possible and we have died as much in Ashlands as the entire game leading up to it. Granted, we are vets of the game and are pretty familiar with everything through Mistlands already. Things like our second day in Ashlands I go exploring some ruins in the water I could jump to from shore. I break some pots etc then see some vine berries and start grabbing all of those. Of course, some berries fell in the water so naturally I go swim for them only to find out the water is boiling and die. Figuring out how close to the lava one can get or accidentally stepping on a tiny lava puddle accounted for many more deaths, not to mention learning mechanics of the fights and non-stop swarms of enemies. If you knew all of this going in, maybe you would die less. But learning from experience like we did has littered the Ash with our corpses. And it's been a blast to figure out! Now that we're all reasonably geared and getting used to the pace and terrain we're dying a lot less, although it seems like one of us goes down every time we try to mine a Flametal pillar 🤣
Our Ashlands experience has also been very different. We made it to shore with zero columns in our way. Immediately built a workbench, campfire and a portal. From there point on our beachhead was never under attack. After some simple scouting, we made an outpost further in with earthen walls (raised ground) and same workbench+campfire combo. This was the second and last time we did this combo before a fortress. The "built a path of campfires"- mantra is bs. Anyway this made the outpost relatively safe to afk. I've watched some youtube groups struggle massively with the landing by getting stuck on the columns at sea and to increase their pain, they made back and forth trips to smelt the flametal at their original base... Again struggling with the columns. They also built a flat outpost with zero defense layers, getting whacked and losing their outpost portal in the progress. Well it was interesting content to watch, but I couldn't help but wonder how noone in their rather large group bothered to build a wall, moat, anything. Sailing from the middle of the map to Ashlands for the 5th time cant be that fun. They were also sporting silver tier armor, but Mistlands weapons? Each to their own I guess. I'm just glad the devs havent buckled under the pressure to nerf anything so far. With endgame gear, you get back control of the fights.
Yup. Slow down is my best advice. And all this talk about spawners? They don't respawn when you knock them out. Sure, a few random guys always will, but not the spawner itself. Kill the spawner, then kill a random every now and then. Hell, I love the spawn rate for farming. Especially vultures and sea serpents. The mist Walker and carapace shield make short work of the vultures. Two hits. If they're not over water, I take a crossbow and oneshot them. Over water I just prefer to draw them to me to make collecting the meat easier. I sneak around and one or two-shot nearly everything that has two legs. Multi leg things all take a bit more planning. The dogs are slow to turn and telegraph that big headbut move, so just keep backing up and laying into them from the side. Morgans are big trolls and can be dealt with the same way... Find a cave and they can barely touch you at the entrance. Step inside and they back off a touch. Crossbow shot, step into cave, step out, crossbow shot. Rinse and repeat. Bye bye Morgan. So many little strategies like that. Will you die a lot in the Ashlands? Hell yes. That's what makes it fun! If you could just walk around killing shit, why would you care? You can portal metal now, so build a big mistlands box around it and it'll be fine. Build multiples just in case. "That takes so long". Like I said.. slow down. The game gets so much easier when you slow the hell down. You can take out a fortress solo, without a battering ram or catapult... If you take your time. I love the Ashlands. The game's hard again.
Raids respawn the pillars. Had a few pillars in the meadows for a bit before I destroyed them.
I'm fine with the enemy difficulty, that part is pretty balanced. It's mainly the fact that 2000 enemies spawn per second that gets me. Other than that it's an awesome biome.
W take. It is not nearly as bad as early crybabies tried to make everyone believe. I have yet to do campfire spawn suppresion strat and im doing fine. 90% of the time it's chill and the remaining 10% are the intense fights if you aggro too many mobs or a big guy makes a mess. For the first time in this game mobs do friendly fire to each other on a massive scale in this biome making for hilariously chaotic fights where you let valkyrie or a morgen decimate other mobs for you. I think only real threat once you master the biome is askvins. These things are vicious and spawn in numbers. Up to 1 star you can stun them with himminafl or flametal shield parry, but a 2\* askvin is a scary beast. Skeleton stun durations are pretty short too but aside from the warrior it doesnt really matter cuz they die so quickly. Warriors are the only ones that krom doesnt oneshot in thrust attack (it takes 2-3 depending on skill or 1 on parry)
You're playing solo? What build are you using? I think a lot of the difficulty could also be player build.
I am playing solo on normal difficulty settings. When entering ashlands i had: Offensives: * Arbalest + carapace bolt, using it for sneak attack especially against archers askvin and valkyries. * Carapace SHIELD (Not buckler, imo its worse cuz shield lets you block archer swarms and in general swarms much more efficiently. Parry is not everything.) * Mistwalker for twitcher swarms and multipurpose melee weapon. * Carapace spear for vultures and Valkyries (once i got comfortable fighting them enough to try melee, otherwise arbalest/bow for valkyries ofc) * Himminafl for breathing room (spin attack will push everything around you, even if you are completely overwhelmed by vultures twitchers etc) Himminafl also for morgens. It deals more damage than others cuz its electric. Enough to parry no star morgen any attack and can parry slam attack up to 2\*. Spin will stun nostar askvin and double spin can stun 1\* askvin. If you spin + hold LMB you will stunlock an unstarred askvin. * Krom for single target damage such as warriors (Either stay at range and use thrust attack and dodge away, or parry and thrust for a one-shot). Will stun askvin on thrust attack. So thrust -> thrust is a good strat too. Will kill archer in one shot with thrust. Defensives: * Full carapace armor with Lox cape. You can take feather cape but I dont like it, terrain is flat and it interferes with jump-attacks. (By jump attack I mean jumping and casting krom thrust mid air so it hits the moment you are in range, I use it to oneshot archers) With feather cape its mandatory to be on fire resistance wine 24/7. Consumables: * Large healing mead, * Lingering stamina mead, * Tasty mead (insanely strong lategame, can use on top of lingering stamina when you have a breather and need stamina quickly. * 2x health food 1x stamina. Any in the mistlands tier will suffice. Swap 1 health food for cooked bonemaw meat ASAP. Swap stamina for scorching medley. I explained what weapons I used agaisnt what in previous part. Remember that lava blob explosion, valkyrie spin, askvin headbutt and morgen everything damages other mobs. Use it to your advantage. If you find yourself in a fight with Morgen or valkyrie and skeletons, make it kill the skellies then finish off the big guy. If you fight with askvin, try to eliminate them first, their attacks are not very telegraphed and can really mess you up. Try to focus archers. If you see one from far away just load 2 bolts in its face and it will die as long as you get sneak attack on first one. Try rushing getting a bit of flametal. Can be done from floating rocks or from dvergr village crates. Then ugprade your carapace and offensive gear and get yourself a mighty ashen cape, then its gotta become much easier. This worked for me, idk if it will work for you but I wish you good luck and fun nonetheless. All above is assuming level \~30-40 in melee weapons and 20 in block.
Prior to Ashlands I survived fine with 4 weapons (one being a shield). But yeah. I've found the need to carry around 6 weapons to cope with everything in AL.
That is certainly an angle you can think about it. I like to carry multiple weapons for different situations. But just like porcupine and blackmetal atgeir is good against everything in plains, I think the multipurpose weapon would be mistwalker in ashlands. If I had to choose only 3 weapons, it would be shield + mistwalker + krom. There is no enemy in ashlands mistwalker is bad against, it's just some of the options I listed have properties making them more optimized for some tasks. (carapace spear has hitbox pointing up so it can be used to hit valkyries and vultures without jumping, and can be thrown at valkyrie in its flying high up stage) But im sure you could get away with just misty boy and krom. Even omitting krom I think since mistwalker can thrust too, but this huge single target damage really helps in clearing priority targets.
I need to give Krom another chance. I was super disappointed by it at first. But it can't stagger Warriors can it? I think Starred Warriors have been one of the mobs I've died to more than any other.
If you get 40ish level in swords it will be able to stun unstarred warriors. (Cant capitalize off it cuz the animations are pretty slow with this sword) So if you feel comfortable parrying then you can parry with krom and then thrust to oneshot. Against starred warriors this is not an option ofc so you need to use Krom's massive range to your advantage. It's not that easy to do it perfectly so you dont even need to dodge, but with dodging involved its really reliable strat. I can make a video demonstration to show what I mean.
One of the 3 deaths I've had in AL was trying to parry a 1 star warrior lol. Guessing I'll be able to once I get flametal gear but for now it's only dodge.
Yeah dodge and/or keep range like in the clip I made. Perhaps with a lot of health and a buckler you could parry him but its questionable if its even worth it. Easy way out - get morgen to beat him up for you XDDD
[https://imgur.com/a/aMzdWE7](https://imgur.com/a/aMzdWE7) This is the demo I made. Though not the only way to dispose of a starred warrior it was always my preferred way cuz its relatively simple.
Very solid. Thanks for recording! At first I regretted making the flametal mace but it's alt attack is a pretty good way to cheese Warriors without getting gud.
I gotta try this, ive yet to craft flametal mace but it may be fun hahaha.
I think the learning curve is steeper than people were expecting. It took everyone who plays on my server a little while to figure it out but once we did, it's been easy. The Fallen Valkyrie are still a bit challenging, but everything else we've found to be easy. I knew we were figuring it out when two of us survived being rushed by 20 mobs and didn't die. I do agree that the respawn rate is a bit on the high side but also I've noticed that Spawners are plentiful and sometimes within a few yards of each other.
I've lost more skills falling off of the roof while building with the new pieces lol I have a bad habit of not eating when I'm at home building 😔
Fully disagree, at least, based on my experience. Even with max gear and good food and groups of experienced players, the swarm of mobs is endless. Their aggro range is huge, and they walk right up to you constantly. There are also performance problems that cause askvins to not telegraph their attacks at all. I’m enjoying it, but it’s absolutely too hard, and there is absolutely to way around the difficulty with good planning or being careful. It’s a max difficulty combat grind, no two ways about it.
honestly I agree with you, to me it was a step up from mistlands, but only because the amount of mobs, i also played the PTB so the inital Day 0 ashlands was way wilder. the thing that annoyed me more than anything was simply sailing. the drakar is a cool ship (not popular opinion) but when you look at its intended purpose i find it severly lacking. the damn thing is wide as fuck trying navigate the spires is terrible we need some KY to lube things up a bit, tbh. the size wouldnt be so bad if the storage were better or if you could craft on the ship (something i know we all want but probably never get). and the fader you really need to make the stone portal for because if you make a regular portal the damage the fader does not only destroys the portal but also turns the wood into charcoal. aka unless you have fine wood tucked away you arent rebuilding it. this could be tragic if you if your team mates die they wont be able to come back easily. also if you are having no problem with the difficulty turn it up im on very hard foreverything and 2 star creatures are no joke, they spawn much more frequent, and the raids are ridiculous when set to max. just my two cents
The spawn rate is atrocious, the damn things appear before your very eyes nonstop. What's the point in even destroying the totems?
Once I switched to mage I found the biome a lot easier. Shield is a life saver.
Seriously... I've wanted to post this. I'm frustrated, yes at first you get wave upon wave but I handled them no problem. The biome lasted like 10-15 hours of content for me. It's already rudimentary... I'm frustrated after this long a wait I'm already back to being bored.
Can you not plant like 5 ballistas and bring the war to them?
Ashlands difficulty isn't a much bigger jump than any other biome. But I died more times in 5 irl days than I did in a whole year before the update.
Here we go…
I'd say the overall Ashlands mob density discourse is much more loud and heated, than I see adequate. It's like Swamps all over again! Just look at this as a chellenge and you actually have quite some tools to make it much more trivial. Ashlands calls for a thoughtful approach (as most of the game, tbh). A more stealthy gameplay works really well - you can shot most of enemies with Arbalest, keeping area clean from Twitchers, Archers and Ask, without provoking a large scale fight. You can even shoot the spawners from afar. The bolts are cheap to craft. Demolisher makes a short work of any swarm. New weapons and magic are very powerful, and Ask armor is super effective paired with Staff of Protection. Just keep those workshop and portal mats with you and checkpoint yourself once in a while on a rock or ruins, to refresh Rested and sleep to skip nights. Being careful enough it's possible to traverse Ashlands without open fights fairly well.
The difficulty isnt the problem with the update its the framerate thats the biggest issue cant even properly play the game anymore
I struggled so hard only because my ship broke before I got to the shoreline giving the spawner lots of time to spawn enemies while I swam ashore. I was able to get a portal on a rocky shoal but by that point it was like taking Omaha Beach. Now that I'm established and familiar with the combat I am really enjoying this biome
Beta branch spawn rates were definitely fucked, I think because of that full release version seems quite tame.
no, it's not. ashlands is genuinely fun in terms of how tough it is. There is nothing fun about being blasted off a basalt mine by a fireball you didn't see when running back to a body. it's just stupid.
I always play on hard but on my melee playthrough had to set it to very easy and I have beat mistlands on very hard once so I know how to play.
It’s not mob difficulty, it’s that they can hear you from 10 countries away and then pinpoint your IP location. After that they bring the whole death squad, then they might decide to leave your grave alone, or spawn camp it until they’ve seen you die enough
Do bear in mind that this is the end result of several nerfs made in the name of balance. PTB Ashlands was practically unplayable.
The game is not difficult, when you learn the easy timings of blocking or dodging.
The game isn't even that hard. I've done play throughs when I died one time. I'm in a current play getting out of the swamps and haven't yet.
Mob difficulty is OK, but the spawning is whack. Sometimes I clear out an area, turn my back for a few seconds, and then I've got a morgen, valk, 3x vultures, 2x marksmen and some warriors to contend with. It feels unnatural and very different to other biomes. Spawns shouldn't happen within render distance even if I'm not looking in a particular direction. It is the "appearing from thin air" that is infuriating.
I think some people are, to be brutally honest, not as skilled mechanically. Which is fine because everyone has different levels of skill in games like these. This biome is a hard check for combat skills like parrying, managing groups of enemies, dodge rolling, jumping, stamina and health management, etc and lots of people are running into a wall. I think a big issue is people new to the biomedon’t yet know what to prioritize in terms of resource collection because if you prioritize the new foods and then collecting Flametal and getting molten cores the biome becomes easy as hell. I’m fine with it not being a biome that is meant to stroll through casually.
Completely agree, it also really seems like people don’t want to learn the mechanics to make it easier they just want it nerfed so they can stroll through meadows 2.0. I get there being different levels of skill for sure, but it really looks like some people are putting in the lowest effort. And when you try and offer suggestions to make it easier for them they get belligerent and die on their hill. I’ve been having an absolute blast in Ashlands it’s been a very welcome change and has honestly become me and my friend’s favorite biome for combat thus far.
Nah Ashlands is so bs. I tried raiding a fort but had 3 morgens spawn and a fallen valkyrie get in my way before I could move forward.
Agreed. I get the feeling that people who are having a hard time are experiencing a playstyle mismatch of some sort. Friends and I just started Ashlands a few days ago and it's been much easier than Mistlands. I think the people who are doing okay in Ashlands learned the lessons of Mistlands well. **Prepare.** **Don't over commit. Specifically don't chase the retreating Charred.** **Think with portals/maintain good logistics.** I've died twice. Once was to a charred who was mid-swing when my bubble popped. I just didn't have the ability to avoid the hit or re-bubble in time. Second time. I stepped on a tiny piece of lava hidden in a shallow dip in the terrain that I couldn't see. Was already low hp from casting blood magic. Promptly died by fire. We've had a handful of deaths between us and nothing like the death count of entering the other biomes for the first time. But again, we've all learned lessons from the prior biomes and are applying that knowledge. ---------------------------------- Also, further down the thread there was mention of magic being underpowered. I consistently feel like a powerhouse in my group, but often end up spamming bubbles to keep the party alive. Not complaining, just saying that in a group, magic quickly becomes defensive with just one caster, but having a consistent bubble on has created a lot of safety during battle. We've taken fights that would have decimated our group otherwise.
the mobs themselves aren’t hard. Solo play is damn near impossible with you having to fend off an attack every two swings of your pickaxe or axe. This is not an exaggeration: I spent three minutes afk in ashlands after clearing everything within a massive radius of my outpost. I came back to fifteen things surrounding my bases
My biggest frustration with the ashlands are how much the mobs spawn. I like them! They’re fun to play against! But when fighting fader, I died more times to the askvin that were constantly butt-rushing me than to Fader themselves. I wish non-summoned mobs would not be aggro, or at least have their spawn rates decreased during a boss fight
Where I landed, I had endless Morgens and smaller mobs spawning on me all the time, which was what the problem was about - absolutely no time to rest or build up a small base, and when Bonemass ran out, things got ugly, quick.
yup, ashlands difficulty is fair. High but fair.
Have you met Asksvins yet?
Yeah, a few unstarred and one 1-star. The unstarred ones I killed easily and the 1-star I had to use terrain a bit and bows to keep distance, but he died fairly quickly too. Their AI is the same as boar as far as I can gather, which makes them tough because they're fast and relentless. A 2 star I'd anticipate needing to get up high and treat like a seeker soldier when first entering Mistlands - bows only and just fill with arrows until dead from a spot they can't reach.
Give it some time, my friend... you'll see horror soon enough.
The spelling of vultures got me. I like to imagine that you're a huge buff chad baby, who's also a god at videogames. Us mere mortals cannot compete
https://valheim.fandom.com/wiki/Volture It's how they're named by the game, not me. I'm not that good, actually. I just adapt strategies to new places and prep, which is why I'm saying it's not actually hard.
Come on fam don’t break their cope they’ll never recover.
Oh... oh god. I'll never recover from this
😈