Reduced Reliance on RNG (from the perspective of a game maker)

Most of the time if you Wait, so does your opponent. If they're bleeding but you aren't, they take a damage tick for 0 energy. They CAN attack you while you wait, but it's like 1 in 4. So once you make them bleed, you just Wait it out to save energy.

@Mossfoot, if you bite or latch and attack and injure(cause the enemy to bleed) the enemy in a lot of cases you can wait while they bleed out with little to no injuries.

I'm only at 400 something stats and level 15 but I can fairly regularly win battles against level 15-19 enemies. And lucky foots are an option that exist to help in game as well. I usually use them against higher level enemies. The issue with latching (especially without a lucky foot) is that while you can do more damage if it lands it can be prone to failure so the enemy attacks you and does higher damage while you failed to attack them.

When I've been fighting lower level enemies like around 5 and below in the mountains I've just been biting them until they die to a decent amount of success. I also think the specific stats your wolf has may play a role in which attacks are effective or changes which enemies are easier or more difficult to battle. Not sure how exactly that works. But I would be interested to see how well people with 900 stat wolves are doing in battle.

@Magpie Rest and Wait do absolutely nothing for me 😕 It doesn't matter what lvl the enemy is, If I choose either one they still attack me and end up taking a huge chunk of my hp. Now I pretty much just mash bite over and over and hope for the best

@Gypsy, do you make sure they're bleeding before you wait? Lucky feet are also easy to find and seem to balance the RNG more

@Magpie. Yep. I tried Lucky feet one and it did jack s***

We have data from testing that shows wolves with 2000+ stat totals regularly failing Medium and Large hunts. While many of these hunts were in the Difficult and Challenging biomes, and this could very well have changed since it was tested, I see this as evidence that even very high stat wolves are prey to the RNG, and raising their stats this high does not guarantee success for you unless you stick to the easy biomes. So, while stats do play at least some part in your success in both hunting and battling, the system is so much so based on RNG that the work you put into raising those stats isn't super worth it, since you could just as well fail as many times as you succeed.

I wonder if I've just had good rng luck then or if the game was designed for stats even higher than 2000 stat total. Were the 2K stat wolves also at 100% proficiency and synergy?

@ Mapgie

Most of them seemed to be about mid-proficiency, but there were a few parties with high proficiency and high synergy that were still failing quite a bit! I guess that's the thing about RNG haha! It's inconsistent enough that two people with the same hunting party could experience vastly different results! ^^

@Magpie

Adding onto @Maddie's explanation:

While I was not part of the game for beta testing, I was here from the initial release of EA just like you. However, my wolf is level 15 with 625 stats, the highest being strength and smarts. Yesterday, I got myself a new butthole ripped by a level 7 enemy in the mountains. The Mountains. My 100% synergy wolves with 500+ stats each fail 8/10 hunts, even if they're critter trails. Granted, I live in the Swamp, which is a Challenging biome, however, this happens far too often. Wolves at 100% synergy and proficiency, regardless of the biome's level, should NOT be failing hunts that are primarily critter trails (as, by now, they're very capable of catching critters and small prey, realistically speaking, which is something this game sways on just a bit. It is a semi-realistic game).

All enemies are randomly rolled, and yes, they have a +# modifier depending on what species they are. HOWEVER, a level 15 wolf with well over the average stats for a second generation wolf, should not be getting crushed to hell and back by enemies of significantly lower level (and, by correlation, STATS). The rng is absolutely atrocious, and this game (if you can call it that right now) relies far too heavily on it.

Do not get my words skewed, I adore Wolvden and Lioden respectively, however there is far too wide a margin for improvement in systems that were well-established back in beta testing right now, and at this stage of public release, people are going to be critical of what they were given. Especially when they likely had high hopes for the game being exciting, because it is a separate entity from Lioden altogether (I know I did, and I am admittedly a little disappointed in what I spent money for). This will not stop me from enjoying Wolvden as it is, we simply ask that more strategy be implemented as opposed to relying on an rng system that is much too randomized to make battling anything more than a bad game of Dungeons & Dragons because your Dungeon Master likes to make the odds far too varied for any genuine experience to be gained.

In my experience the proficiency and synergy has made a huge difference in how successful or not I have been. I was having terrible luck at the beginning but things seemed pretty consistent once my hunting team got better. Even in the glacier they're pretty consistent based off of 3 hunting teams. One does terrible, one does good, one does so-so which matches proficiency, stats, and synergy levels of the teams.

Also I will still say you are living in one of the highest biomes. If they have a stat minimum a 500 stat is pretty dang low game mechanic wise. My Older NBWs are already 500-600 stats so I assume the game is set up for much higher stats.