I'm playing the DLC on Dream of the Strong, using weapons around 160-170+6 or +7 and armour 170+9 or so (looted from early Dream of the Demon missions), so maybe I'm missing something that's more useful for later difficulties, but I'm struggling to find much use in the Stone of Penance mechanism.
I tried it quite a fair bit and all I ever get is a solid, sometimes brutal difficulty buff, for a significant amount of time before I get a measly +1 stat to an accessory, which gives me maybe 3 points of defense. Like, what?
For instance, the Raiko rematch (in that "Four Fists" post-game sub-mission, the one in the flooded castle map from the main game) was insanely brutal with a Stone of Penance at +2. I decided to remove it, and suddenly she was way more manageable, borderline easy, even. I set the Stone's difficulty to be Dream of the Strong, btw, not Demon, but the difference was still staggering. All that for ultimately +3 defense or so on an accessory??
Can anyone give me a reason to keep bothering with this mechanic?
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Unrelated question: does anyone use HDR in this game? I just installed my new OLED TV (finally!), but when I tried enabling HDR for this game, I felt like the saturation was way over the top, at least on the defaults, and it honestly looked better without it, so I turned it off. If you do use HDR, did you have to do some calibration from in-game?
I have an LG 55CX, btw