Difficulty levels above Veteran

[pianistamoeba]

Is there anybody, who's beat the game in Hero or Legend? Or at least made any decent progress (getting over early game)?

I find Veteran as the optimal "middle" difficulty, where the challenge is brutal enough to force you to play carefully until the end. Agent and below seems to be too easy, you get powerful too quickly and the overall challenge levels are too low (at least in the mansion levels), making you just "collect" and click through all the encounters and not think of overall strategy on how to progress.
The levels above Veteran though, my God. I've got to mid-game (getting enough resources to start forming up a concrete character build) only once in Hero, but that character ended up dead before heading in to the basement. Legend seems like pure madness, where the greatest achievement for me this far has been surviving 3 random encounters without going Insane

[pianistamoeba]

De-zombifying this thread to make an observation.. I'm past about 100 tries of slowly trying to beat the game on Hero without much success. Has anybody actually beat the game on Hero/Legend or am I just that bad at the game?

The observation being: I think the implementation of the difficulty levels (as does the difficulty curve overall) might need some serious tweaking. As I said earlier, I think Agent becomes too easy too quick after you get past the first steps, Veteran feels better balanced until late mid-game where you usually become too powerful in the end. The leap in difficulty at Hero feels too harsh and mostly concerns the luck factor. You practically have to max one stat and hope for decent supporting edges/items from the character creation RNG (and leave the others stats gimped) at the beginning to have at least decent odds of beating one type of challenge for good rewards and get the character creation going. The fact that your other stats are gimped makes 1-2 random unwanted challenges (ones you can't tactically avoid) usually kill you. Interestingly enough, my most successful characters on Hero have been swords/cups-centered builds by rolling a soldier or mercenary, getting lucky synergistic combination of edges & weapon & heroic feats and farming the brainbots in the Tesslarati operating room until the 4th or 5th story token (now that it's possible in 1.07 without the repeating horror checks).

Anyway, Hero is good (although a bit masochistic) fun, but I don't think it's actually possible to beat the game unless you get really lucky.
Not sure what to comprehensively suggest in order to fix the issue, but I think the difficulty level at least should only affect either the character creation points or the overall challenge levels, but NOT both of them.

Damn, even after dozens of rage-quits I still keep coming back to the game all the time - a mark of a great game.
I hope Vic's still going to keep actively polishing it.

[EvilDastard]

I have a hard enough time beating the game on Agent, because I like playing with less-than-optimal builds. So I've never even tried any of the harder difficulty levels.