With the upcoming difficulty sliders I do like the permanent death mode and immersive settings for no world map but the Spongier enemies is a bad idea and will add to the repetitive and tedious combat, its really a Band-Aid quick fix on a shark wound. I do not think I saw a slider to control the health of the enemies while keeping the damage of the enemy high to balance it out
Here are some ways to increase the difficulty of Valheim:
- Implement personal loot: Prevent players from scavenging items they did not contribute towards, such as mining ores or looting companions' chests for new recipes.
- Make enemies more intelligent: Add new behaviors to enemies like Dragur, who can become ghost-like and walk through the muddy piles. Consider introducing a ghost shader for visual effects similar to the skeleton crew in Pirates of the Caribbean. When they become aggro'd, they shouldn't run around like a chicken with its head cut off while the player uses a bow to kill them, because pieces of the muddy pile are preventing proper pathfinding
- Increase the danger of Trolls: Make Tree Log wielders throw their weapons at players or have Stone Throwers uproot trees to clear a path or throw them at the player, maybe they could catapult a near by greydwarf at the player that explodes with AOE damage killing the greydwarf in the process.
- Increase enemy pursuit: Make enemies chase players for longer periods and increase their speed and star count could be a multiplier for speed movement.
- Extend the night time duration and increase enemy spawns during the night, at night you could see increased star count of enemies including in the meadow biomes.
- Introduce environmental danger: Add hazards that take a toll on players, such as mountains that damage the player's stamina in cold temperatures or negate heat effects of a campfire when the player is wet.
- Add more bosses and mini-bosses with advanced mechanics, such as The Elder he could use an ability that would throw seeds onto the ground and spawn saplings and over the duration of the fight they would grow and become Treant's in aiding the Elder.
- Make Abomination more challenging by using its middle body to slam into the ground, shaking the screen and reducing player movement speed, maybe it could push the root extremities into the ground to grab the player and drag the player closer.
- Introduce new status effects like bleeding or movement impairment, player becomes ill with similar effects like puke-berries after being wet in cold weather.
- Make dungeons more complex with challenging enemies and puzzles. Consider adding Skeleton Mages or 2H welding variants, also implement the no-build rule outside of dungeon entrance in a radius to prevent exploiting.