Dear Moon, dear Cerim,
now after I spent a few hours with “The Breach Rifend” I would like to present some feedback on the changes and share my thoughts on the current version of the game.
Things to love
- New shop without loading screens: visiting those shops now feels more natural and does not interrupt the flow - great change! Also the interior looks really interesting and suits the setting well.
- Stackable runes. What a huge QoL change! This change alone cuts the number of chests in my house by half.
- Waypoint system is a great way to cut down on a lot of travel time.
- Info about the hostile factions on the map
Things to hate
- New Plagued Gear UI: this is just a terrible change overall. 2 shades of red on a red background with a dark underlay does not look good. Now the inventory is tiring for the eyes. The difference between positive enchantments and the plagued curse is just a shade of red. Please revert to the old UI.
Things to be confused about (what was the goal here?)
- Gathering. Gathering has a minigame now and provides XP; but it takes longer to gather a node; and even “PERFECT” hits do not yeld more materials, even though patch notes state otherwise. On several occasions I cleared a silver node with 2 perfect hits and got 1 silver ore as a result. Copper nodes can take 2 “poor” hits with silver tools to clear. Digging spots can take up to 4 attempts!
Overall this change is a downgrade to any character that is at max lvl and does not need the extra XP. - “Bounties and challages do not provide XP” yet at the same time XP is granted for quests, failed bosses and gathering.
What I would previously do, is park a new character at the Captain and collect all the finished bounties with that character. This was one of the reasons to do bounties in the first place, since more often than not the rewards are not worth it. - Nerf to gear drop lvl. T4 plagued zones in Woods & Meadows as well as Crucible drop lvl 12 gear at best. Before it was 16.
What is the reason for this? The loot drive was already fairly low; now we also require 50% of materials from a zone clear + more ingots to upgrade a weapon in order to test it. It already felt bad when you open a big chest and find a Red Bull & charcoal in it; now it feels even worse. - “Weapons past tier 2 will now all require special resources to upgrade”. Weapon upgrade from lvl 10 to lvl 11 require a Mallformed Skull. I have a total of 9 skulls on my account after over 100 hours in Breach. Most of those skulls come from vendors.
- Equalized enchantment values. This change makes plagued gear situational, only in rare cases better than magical.
Curses range from item killers, like extra Equip load and Stamina penalties; or are negated by another stat, like unrepearable/indestructable combo (which leaves 3 enchantment slots open, just like magical gear).
Conditional enchantments like “movementspeed on kill” or “5 seconds more damage after rune” are not worth the slot because the trigger condition is either non beneficial or the duration is just too short.
Final thoughts
Breach Refind introduces some really good and helpful QoL changes. Unfortunatelly, many loot related changes extinguish the already struggling loot spirel with additional busy work and/or worse loot quality.
New Plagued Gear UI gets an F in color theory and visual presentation.
Sorry for the long post; here is a potato