More enemies or less but tougher enemies with higher rewards?

[RMVNex]

Before answering I'll explain what my game is like.

The game play revolves around selecting 3 of 16 heroes (maybe more but this is all I have planned for now and this is how I plan to keep it) to form a team. There are warriors, mages, tanks and support characters. Only 1 will be able to directly recover an allies' HP with an ability which will cost TP, but some characters might be able to recover some through life steal or other abilities. It works with the overall story, which I might get into in a later post or when I publish the game.

Abilities will overwhelmingly use TP rather than MP (some mages and some supports will use TP which will generate them MP for abilities). I want to avoid players to simply use MP skills with mages constantly and use 1 tank to take most of the damage. I want players to have to fight in order to use abilities. Might seem strange for a plain game, but it works with my current game design overall.

There are 2 types of potions (with different tiers each of course). One recovers HP outside of battles, and plenty of it. There will be battle potions, however, that will recover a bit of HP (roughly 1/2 of a normal warrior/mage/support's HP or 1/3 of a tank's HP).

The game has plenty of linear dungeons in the story mode, however a portal that leads to different side-dungeons will be available at any town in the game.

Rewards in my game are usually given in tiny bits whilst progressing through it and then at the end of the dungeon players are rewarded with a random type of each type of rewards in the game: a random amount of blood gold, used to unlock new characters or unlock their higher tiers which unlock extra abilities and increase stats by 25% of their tier 1 stats (up to tier 10). 1 weapon, armour piece, consumable, gold, and ingots (used to craft weapons).

Now before you tell me, geez that sure sounds like a lot to do, it is but I've done a big part of all that, so it's within reach. All I want to know is should I make less encounters in dungeons which are more difficult and give more rewards or should I put just a normal amount of encounters in the dungeons?

 

[Ryzler]

Throughout the game change your pacing. Some dungeons should be normal difficulty with normal encounter rate. A few dungeons should be easy difficulty with a higher encounter rate (careful though as these can become tedious and annoying so don't overuse). While your more dramatic dungeons could have a harder difficulty with less encounters

 

[Applesaws]

I think this should go in the game mechanic design subform forum. More people there will be looking to discuss things like this.

Anyway I think if some dungeons are going to be harder than others, make them have less encounters or let the player choose their encounter rate in the settings since it's the best feature in any game I've ever played in my life and I rarely see it