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.
Skulls and animal parts absolutely have abysmal drop rates and should not have been included in crafting upgrades unless vendors had direct stocks.
Right now the only stock is to trade in lower animal parts for higher tier ones at a miserable 3:1 ratio at Marin Village, because Grinnich and Finley may occasionally have a single skull or part for sale.
I also really dislike the change, because I DO NOT LIKE KILLING INNOCENT/PASSIVE CRITTERS. I want an alternative.
I do not want to kill the beautiful foxes or elks or deer in order to upgrade my gear. I do not enjoy it, I wish there was a toggle to make critters invincible and just give us vendors for the materials.
I am not even sure what enemy drops Mallformed Skulls as loot.
I have enough materials to trade with the old lady in Marin Village and thanks to the new waypoint system it does not take long to reach her. I allways could create new realms and bet on new vendors to expand my gains, however I do not think Moon envisions this as a solution for items that have such a frequent use now. Or do they?
I think this is a bug in the drop tables and Breach Refined put a light spot on it. If we are looking on propper loot drop rates, can somebody check Chipped Quartz? I have litteraly 10 times more other gems than quartz.
This change in particular is a tool to intuitively make players understand that cursed items are not “epic” items.
The expectations towards the color Purple = Epic is what led to this change and from this point of view it is a step forward.
I agree that it is visually uglier, they can do better, but I think new players will be less confused which from my point of view is more important than this aesthetic aspect.
I hate this thing, Thomas said that the system is the same for those who don’t want to click anything and just want to recover but it’s not true in reality it’s worse, then the fact that to get faster you have to hit two perfect shots makes the no sense because in 80% of the cases you will still have to hit 3 times, in my opinion a perfect shot should destroy the resource in one shot or at least leave it at such low health that a weak shot is enough to destroy it (with the same level between the resource and the tool)
They balanced the drops well for the mid and low levels, during the campaign I was always changing weapons because the drops were always much better than my weapon,but now I actually have to choose whether to take the new weapons or not.
But then they didn’t realize that it should have increased and not lowered the weapon levels in the end game
Bringing a weapon from level 1 to level 16 was always so brutal, I prefer to wait for the weapon to drop at a high level directly (which is a problem considering how many hours of gameplay (500+h) and consequently collected materials I have)
I love this change, I think it’s for the better, plagued gear is stronger if you decide to play around curses, while if you can’t do that you find a combo like combat focus regeneration/combat focus loss or unrepeatable/indestructable and you have an item that is equal to a magical item, this makes blue items no longer useless and you can enchant items that you like without worrying too much.
Also the game was very unbalanced with the optimized builds before and now it’s a lot more manageable because the values of the plagued gear have decreased, Even if there are some values that are too low in my opinion, like the attack speed that only reaches 10% and not 15%.
So, the gear progression is supposed to be like this? normal > plagued > magical
Or should there be a state that masterwork, magical and plagued gear offer something different, but operate roughly on the same power lvl?
Honestly, afrer spending more time with the update I see increased drop rates for rare materials. IMO those drop rates are still too low though.
I do not see the worth in playing around curses. Something like “Increased equip load” or “reduced stamina” requre to much investment to break even, so that one more enchantment slot (in comparison to magical gear) is instantly cannibalised.
I had an idea to play around “reduce max focus” curse and “reduced focus costs at full focus” on magical headgear. My idea was to math the right focus amount, where despite reduced total focus pool I could still cast 100F Runes if my focus bar is full. I was very disappointed to learn that max total focus cannot drop below 100. The curse just does not let you fill the focus bar and the obove mentioned enchantment condition cannot trigger.
This was a major letdown and a sign that current enchatment/curse system does not reward creativity.
The gear progression doesn’t exist! There are just Different options and that’s better because there’s more variety and there are no useless items,
(normal items are flexible and do not require embers to be optimized only gems, magic items are a bit stronger but you only have 3 slots you have to decide what to keep and what not, pestilential items can be stronger but you have to suffer the curse (but curses are not interesting and balanced I agree) if you decide to use pestilential items with a combo like … you get an item that has the same strength as a magic item but has some different enchantments that you can not find with magic items and at the same time magic items have some enchantments that pestilential items do not have)
This was the devs’ idea from the beginning but they completely screwed up the balance, and pestilential Items became the strongest Items regardless of the situation.
The game balance is better but there are still a lot of problems with this system, initial curses with uninteresting and unusable use, many curses do nothing significant to change the way you play, and are often either too strong or too weak.
The biggest problem is the RNG, I did a run where I only used normal items and gems, and it was awesome, I was happy to have to deal with the system and I wasn’t wasting time randomly but I was making decisions and I was actually building my build based on the resources I was given, and if I wanted to change the build I could do it without relying on chance,
in comparison the enchantments are a shit for the player experience
as far as I’m concerned we will only be able to have the gem system and unique items,
let’s make new gems with the spells that are missing like attack speed, health when you kill enemies, and all the other interesting spells so building is actually fun, is fine to sacrifice a tiny bit of variety to have one system that’s fun to play with.
