What is the solo difficulty for platinum now?

[Majin-Pablito]

I would like to get into the game for platinum solo. What is the difficulty now?

[JohnCenaSong-]

It has been getting consistently easier and easier as time goes on.

 

The first thing to note is the community as a whole coming up with so many strategies and broken deck builds which can make short work of some of the biggest hurdles. Along with updates to the game nerfing difficulty a LOT.

 

Here's a general list of some things changed or discovered that make it easier since launch (when people appeared to have given it an alleged 10/10, though I'd argue it had outright never been a 10 to begin with). This is all off the top of my head and I'm probably going to miss out A LOT:

 

- To be able to do it offline where objective difficulty gets reduced (for example, destroy less nests or gather less items etc.)

 

- Nightmare difficulty on the whole significantly reduced in order to spread out the difficulties across 4 modes instead of 3 (No Hope tries to act more as a replacement for OG Nightmare, new Nightmare now only acts as a more gradual increase).

 

- AI significantly improved over time. They can almost carry you by themselves, they'll prioritise enemies better, avoid damage/survive better, generally be good crowd control and they focus fire and melt the bosses found in certain stages/corruptions. Hags and Breakers really don't stand a chance, Ogres can take a little more of a beating but are easy to manage anyway.

 

- AI got decks! Very helpful team oriented decks to boot. Some of the cards they have are commonplace online because they're considered pretty OP generally and benefit the whole team.

 

- Can start acts with your full deck instead of drawing a card per level. This makes short work of some earlier levels in Acts by having all your builds tools available to you right out the gate.

 

- Exploit was discovered to quit out before the game declares a game over to prevent restarting from the beginning of that act. (I still don't think this has been patched, I haven't used it myself so I'm unsure, but with no patch after so much time means it's doubtful it ever would be).

 

- Even without the above exploit, additional checkpoints were added to Nightmare. Also possible to farm 'burn cards' which can allow you to recover lives (among other powerful perks), though these would require some additional grinding from a fresh start.

 

- New very powerful cards added over time and some other cards buffed significantly (some get nerfed, but overall it's trended towards a net gain in making the game easier).

 

- Big adjustment came to the final boss at one point, it was probably the biggest hurdle for solo because the AI would do nothing and routinely die. The AI now knows how to actually avoid this bosses attacks and the hoards that spawn during it are no longer infinite so you have more room to focus on fighting the boss itself. 

 

- Generally OP decks became pretty common knowledge, there's ones focused on borderline invulnerable melee tanking, powerful accessory hoarding, shotgun tanks, fire builds etc. Speedrun decks are quite common too with well established routes for an easy time. So many other powerful deck options people have found to make it all a cakewalk if you're willing to just search for one. Whilst some more recent incredibly broken and exploitable cards have been patched, these particular powerful decks have remained constant for many many updates and are very unlikely to be nerfed at this point (and even if they are, it likely won't be significant enough to make their strategies redundant).

 

I remember replying on another thread a while back about difficulty, I think someone suggested 3/10 back then and whilst I admitted it was maybe a bit over the top and suggested that at that time it maybe maxed out at a 6/10 (at the most). Since then, I really don't think I could justify anything higher than even a 5/10 anymore in its current state. Even doing No Hope (especially if you opted to do things the easiest possible way) would not pose too much of a threat. So... whilst maybe still not a 3/10 quite yet, it's definitely feeling like a 4/10 could be a perfectly valid justified conclusion for someone to make 

 

The funny thing is, playing it solo at launch was probably the 'hard' way to do it. But nowadays, outside of getting a carry from someone who's really good, it's solo that is the easy-mode of the two. If you just want a quick clear on Nightmare difficulty just whack it on solo, stick a strong deck on and plough on through. You'll just have to spend a little time as a newcomer unlocking the cards first, but they'll come along whilst you do everything else leading up to Nightmare.

 

All you'll have left by that point is the grind for ridden kills trophy. Whilst it's not a great deal quicker, there's a lot of cheese spots discovered with infinite spawns you can use to grind up loads of kills. Just kill your AI companions so they don't steal any kills, hunker down and use a melee weapon to avoid worrying about any ammo issues.

 

All in all, a pretty easy time for newcomers to jump on board. The expansions (so far, new one incoming) are also fairly easy too. Whilst one of them does require you play through it on No Hope difficulty it's arguably an easier Act than some of the base game generally so it kinda balances out to being about the same if not marginally more difficult to do despite the higher difficulty setting. Time will tell what the next expansion will look like, I kinda expect another No Hope achievement so if they decide to ramp up the difficulty on the new Act maybe maintaining a 100% could creep up a difficulty rating or two but otherwise it'll be more of the same.

[JunkSkelington]

^not sure if this guy is trolling or not but hes massively under exaggerating the difficulty, or he's giving an opinion under the assumption the infinite grenade glitch still exists (it doesn't, it was patched).  Act 5 no hope solo is absolutely not a 3 or 4 out of 10.  Also a lot of the extremely broken cards were nerfed into the ground like expired T5.  The game is definitely not as hard as it was at launch but it is still a significant challenge. 

Edited November 14, 2022 by JunkSkelington

[Darling Baphomet]

20 minutes ago, JunkSkelington said:

^not sure if this guy is trolling or not but hes massively under exaggerating the difficulty, or he's giving an opinion under the assumption the infinite grenade glitch still exists (it doesn't, it was patched).  Act 5 no hope solo is absolutely not a 3 or 4 out of 10.  Also a lot of the extremely broken cards were nerfed into the ground like expired T5.  The game is definitely not as hard as it was at launch but it is still a significant challenge. 

 

I haven't played No Hope yet, but Nightmare was a cakewalk with all the buffs the bots have gotten, save for some tricky parts, like Act 5, as you mention. It's also worth noting that playing No Hope isn't required for the platinum. So the platinum itself I'd agree isn't all that hard these days.

 

The biggest thing with Nightmare solo is that you're essentially the protagonist of the run. Your bots' decks will support you and give you a ton of survivability, however the trade off is also that you have to manage everything yourself, so a jack of all trades build is a necessity. You want some use speed (depending on the act, some acts need it less), some run speed (run like hell is far better than I initially thought), stamina, grenade damage and slots for bosses, survivability cards (an extra healing card or two should do it), economy cards (healing & offensive item upgrades are a must), and the rest I'd invest into gun damage ups.

 

It's also worth noting that the Ridden hives from the first DLC, while admittedly a challenge, can trivialize runs because they give you time to stockpile large amounts of gold and offer high quality accessories and weapons early into the game. At worst you get cost of avarice and you rush the first exit you can find. Playing as Sharice or having her on your team can be a huge boon since armor plating is OP. Rerolling until you get good combinations of bots can also be a good idea, e.g. I'm not a huge fan of Hoffman's team ability, especially since bots will drop ammo consistently whenever you get low anyway. Melee builds are very good, as the other person said, however I found it harder to make space for all the cards I needed to set up a melee build, especially if I was trying to run a jack of all trades build. I also can't overstate how useful blue or purple grenades with one or two explosive damage up are against bosses. Also, unless they've finally added the feature that lets bots use lockpicks, always carry a lockpick for the stash room.

 

You really don't have to exploit anything. Just play it steady. If you're starting Nightmare with no knowledge of the game mechanics you might find it hard, but it really isn't anywhere near as hard as it was at launch. At worst you can just farm and try to get the Hell Can Wait burn cards for extra continues, which have the advantage of giving you extra gold and health to help with buffing your build.

[JohnCenaSong-]

2 hours ago, Darling Baphomet said:

It's also worth noting that the Ridden hives from the first DLC, while admittedly a challenge, can trivialize runs because they give you time to stockpile large amounts of gold and offer high quality accessories and weapons early into the game

I forgot to mention this, though it may feel like a bit of a difficulty spike for a newcomer going into it. But, absolutely that's a good shout. Going into one early into the act and pulling some strong stuff to carry your through later can make the acts even easier to handle.

 

3 hours ago, JunkSkelington said:

^not sure if this guy is trolling or not but hes massively under exaggerating the difficulty, or he's giving an opinion under the assumption the infinite grenade glitch still exists (it doesn't, it was patched).  Act 5 no hope solo is absolutely not a 3 or 4 out of 10.  Also a lot of the extremely broken cards were nerfed into the ground like expired T5.  The game is definitely not as hard as it was at launch but it is still a significant challenge. 

No, just giving some honest truth to not discourage new players. I listed my reasons and not once did I mention the exploit you stated so clearly that wasn't a factor. Also, I did reference those broken cards and said in my post they were nerfed so again... that was not a factor in my rating either. It's quite clear in my post the reasons for my conclusion. Don't put words I've never said into my mouth.

 

I also never said 3/10, I said I replied to someone who said 3 in another thread in the past. I also didn't say the DLC Act was a 3 or 4 either, I said that because it's an easier Act generally than some of the base game people may not be met with a sharp difficulty spike by going up from Nightmare to No Hope for the achievement there. It'll likely feel about the same to most people or marginally harder after clearing the game on Nightmare. 

 

I gave an approximate estimate of 5/10, stating there's no way I could justify anything higher than that in the games current state. I did say that 4/10 could be a perfectly valid opinion to have as well but that was not my rating for the platinum nor the DLC.

[Majin-Pablito]

Thank you both for your complete explanations. 

[Andre3K1823]

On 11/13/2022 at 9:56 PM, JohnCenaSong- said:

I forgot to mention this, though it may feel like a bit of a difficulty spike for a newcomer going into it. But, absolutely that's a good shout. Going into one early into the act and pulling some strong stuff to carry your through later can make the acts even easier to handle.

 

No, just giving some honest truth to not discourage new players. I listed my reasons and not once did I mention the exploit you stated so clearly that wasn't a factor. Also, I did reference those broken cards and said in my post they were nerfed so again... that was not a factor in my rating either. It's quite clear in my post the reasons for my conclusion. Don't put words I've never said into my mouth.

 

I also never said 3/10, I said I replied to someone who said 3 in another thread in the past. I also didn't say the DLC Act was a 3 or 4 either, I said that because it's an easier Act generally than some of the base game people may not be met with a sharp difficulty spike by going up from Nightmare to No Hope for the achievement there. It'll likely feel about the same to most people or marginally harder after clearing the game on Nightmare. 

 

I gave an approximate estimate of 5/10, stating there's no way I could justify anything higher than that in the games current state. I did say that 4/10 could be a perfectly valid opinion to have as well but that was not my rating for the platinum nor the DLC.

I haven't played in over a year, I just re-installed it. I hoping it's noticeable easier. Trying to get the platinum seems like it's not gonna happen for me unless people carry me and that's unfair so I don't think I'll get it. 

[JohnCenaSong-]

1 hour ago, Andre3K1823 said:

I haven't played in over a year, I just re-installed it. I hoping it's noticeable easier. Trying to get the platinum seems like it's not gonna happen for me unless people carry me and that's unfair so I don't think I'll get it. 

 

Bots got another buff of sorts in the last update just recently too so if you play offline solo you'll have a really manageable time. Bots are borderline a carry. You can even utilise the bots to just take it slow with a simple survivability deck if you'd rather avoid any of the other easy specialist decks like melee etc.

[bethharmon]

2 hours ago, Andre3K1823 said:

I haven't played in over a year, I just re-installed it. I hoping it's noticeable easier. Trying to get the platinum seems like it's not gonna happen for me unless people carry me and that's unfair so I don't think I'll get it. 

Pick the right deck and play offline with bots and Nightmare is honestly very easy (other than a couple of tricky spots). Bots are even better since the update too 

[schwarzparker1]

On 13.11.2022 at 0:01 PM, Majin-Pablito said:

I would like to get into the game for platinum solo. What is the difficulty now?

If you have all the cards and you know the game mechanics well enough then its a 3/10 with bots 

[Knispel_1940]

On 13. 11. 2022 at 7:41 PM, JohnCenaSong- said:

It has been getting consistently easier and easier as time goes on.

 

The first thing to note is the community as a whole coming up with so many strategies and broken deck builds which can make short work of some of the biggest hurdles. Along with updates to the game nerfing difficulty a LOT.

 

Here's a general list of some things changed or discovered that make it easier since launch (when people appeared to have given it an alleged 10/10, though I'd argue it had outright never been a 10 to begin with). This is all off the top of my head and I'm probably going to miss out A LOT:

 

- To be able to do it offline where objective difficulty gets reduced (for example, destroy less nests or gather less items etc.)

 

- Nightmare difficulty on the whole significantly reduced in order to spread out the difficulties across 4 modes instead of 3 (No Hope tries to act more as a replacement for OG Nightmare, new Nightmare now only acts as a more gradual increase).

 

- AI significantly improved over time. They can almost carry you by themselves, they'll prioritise enemies better, avoid damage/survive better, generally be good crowd control and they focus fire and melt the bosses found in certain stages/corruptions. Hags and Breakers really don't stand a chance, Ogres can take a little more of a beating but are easy to manage anyway.

 

- AI got decks! Very helpful team oriented decks to boot. Some of the cards they have are commonplace online because they're considered pretty OP generally and benefit the whole team.

 

- Can start acts with your full deck instead of drawing a card per level. This makes short work of some earlier levels in Acts by having all your builds tools available to you right out the gate.

 

- Exploit was discovered to quit out before the game declares a game over to prevent restarting from the beginning of that act. (I still don't think this has been patched, I haven't used it myself so I'm unsure, but with no patch after so much time means it's doubtful it ever would be).

 

- Even without the above exploit, additional checkpoints were added to Nightmare. Also possible to farm 'burn cards' which can allow you to recover lives (among other powerful perks), though these would require some additional grinding from a fresh start.

 

- New very powerful cards added over time and some other cards buffed significantly (some get nerfed, but overall it's trended towards a net gain in making the game easier).

 

- Big adjustment came to the final boss at one point, it was probably the biggest hurdle for solo because the AI would do nothing and routinely die. The AI now knows how to actually avoid this bosses attacks and the hoards that spawn during it are no longer infinite so you have more room to focus on fighting the boss itself. 

 

- Generally OP decks became pretty common knowledge, there's ones focused on borderline invulnerable melee tanking, powerful accessory hoarding, shotgun tanks, fire builds etc. Speedrun decks are quite common too with well established routes for an easy time. So many other powerful deck options people have found to make it all a cakewalk if you're willing to just search for one. Whilst some more recent incredibly broken and exploitable cards have been patched, these particular powerful decks have remained constant for many many updates and are very unlikely to be nerfed at this point (and even if they are, it likely won't be significant enough to make their strategies redundant).

 

I remember replying on another thread a while back about difficulty, I think someone suggested 3/10 back then and whilst I admitted it was maybe a bit over the top and suggested that at that time it maybe maxed out at a 6/10 (at the most). Since then, I really don't think I could justify anything higher than even a 5/10 anymore in its current state. Even doing No Hope (especially if you opted to do things the easiest possible way) would not pose too much of a threat. So... whilst maybe still not a 3/10 quite yet, it's definitely feeling like a 4/10 could be a perfectly valid justified conclusion for someone to make 

 

The funny thing is, playing it solo at launch was probably the 'hard' way to do it. But nowadays, outside of getting a carry from someone who's really good, it's solo that is the easy-mode of the two. If you just want a quick clear on Nightmare difficulty just whack it on solo, stick a strong deck on and plough on through. You'll just have to spend a little time as a newcomer unlocking the cards first, but they'll come along whilst you do everything else leading up to Nightmare.

 

All you'll have left by that point is the grind for ridden kills trophy. Whilst it's not a great deal quicker, there's a lot of cheese spots discovered with infinite spawns you can use to grind up loads of kills. Just kill your AI companions so they don't steal any kills, hunker down and use a melee weapon to avoid worrying about any ammo issues.

 

All in all, a pretty easy time for newcomers to jump on board. The expansions (so far, new one incoming) are also fairly easy too. Whilst one of them does require you play through it on No Hope difficulty it's arguably an easier Act than some of the base game generally so it kinda balances out to being about the same if not marginally more difficult to do despite the higher difficulty setting. Time will tell what the next expansion will look like, I kinda expect another No Hope achievement so if they decide to ramp up the difficulty on the new Act maybe maintaining a 100% could creep up a difficulty rating or two but otherwise it'll be more of the same.

The exploit to leave the game after death is for offline only? I left the game and returned to menu while playing with friends and we had 0 continues remaning.

[JohnCenaSong-]

6 hours ago, Knispel_1940 said:

The exploit to leave the game after death is for offline only? I left the game and returned to menu while playing with friends and we had 0 continues remaning.

Yes, it's an offline only exploit, assuming it hasn't been patched at some point. Though I haven't heard any news of it having been patched but I've never used it myself so I can't confirm whether it still works.

[PeachyJacobs]

7 hours ago, Knispel_1940 said:

The exploit to leave the game after death is for offline only? I left the game and returned to menu while playing with friends and we had 0 continues remaning.

 

One of you can just use a burn card (Hell Can Wait) to grant an extra continue.

[MANU1950]

When i platinum this game was 11 of 10.

 

Now is very hard but possible I considered a joke the people thath says low of 7. There is a lot of dangerous things in this game to put a low difficult.

 

3 of 10 are god Ragnarok   for example not back4blood.

[Knispel_1940]

16 hours ago, JohnCenaSong- said:

Yes, it's an offline only exploit, assuming it hasn't been patched at some point. Though I haven't heard any news of it having been patched but I've never used it myself so I can't confirm whether it still works.

It still works. Playing with bots is like 1000 times easier compared to online with friends. I just press L1 to tag one enemy and they just no scope everyone. I just crouch behind them with melee build and check our back lol 

[SERGITRON123]

To put my experience on this topic, I started playing Back 4 Blood one or two days before the first big update to the AI bots. It was a total different experience. Once you have a good amount of cards to do a powerful deck, you can simply play in Solo and go without issues for most of the game. I remember struggling with one mission when you need to recollect fuel in a mansion. Other than that, I can agree that playing solo is the easy mode to do it. Once you only have the Ridden kills left, find a good spot on infinite zombies (Probably there are a lot of new ones with the newest expansions) and you are set to go.

Just keep in mind that in might seem that is a struggle at the beginning, this is fault of the deck system being too noticeable of a change to the difficultly of the game. This is the reason as coop is a no go if you cant find people that have good decks, as 100% of the times, the bots will have a better deck than most of your teammates, specially if they are new to the game.

Good luck!!

[schwarzparker1]

On 27.12.2022 at 0:35 PM, MANU1950 said:

When i platinum this game was 11 of 10.

 

Now is very hard but possible I considered a joke the people thath says low of 7. There is a lot of dangerous things in this game to put a low difficult.

 

3 of 10 are god Ragnarok   for example not back4blood.

Did you ever play meele before? You cant fail nightmare the platinum is extremely easy everyone with a meele deck can just run trough it with bots no continues needed i recently did the campaign 4 more times for my last ZWAT skins used every character with meele deck doesn’t matter and always no deaths no issues also doing hives etc the game is 3/10 if you know the mechanics if you say 7/10 i assume you play damage or doc and relying on randoms but you can simply play meele and go with bots for a solo 3/10 experience but no hope is like 7/10 unless you get the best meele attachments then its a 4/10 but since luck is required i wouldn’t count on it 

[MANU1950]

3 of 10 is Gow Ragnarok be serious.

Is a joke.

 

I am a melé player and nighmare is very hard with bots.

Is not hard than the past but Is hard.

 

 

Edited December 29, 2022 by MANU1950

[ITALUKE]

Do you guys believe that the game could get easier than now? Maybe with a new dlc in the future? 

[MANU1950]

I would be satisfied that the developer trolls do not make another difficulty even more hard