First of all, the UI work is freaking fantastic, as are the new tutorials. Love the rune UI being ported from PC to controllers as well.
Here are my thoughts on the update:
1- Love the new cribs for the craftsmen, they are so pretty! Eleanor looks awesome. Hopefully you can spice up Illaria, Markos, and Grinnich’s stalls, maybe even Fillmore at rank 3.
Markos needs more glowy mushrooms in his stalls.
2- Love the utility runes. The heal rune is a huge upgrade, but that leaves us with heal aura. Heal Aura rune is frankly obsolete because it is a stationary channel that heals less than the heal rune. You can probably remove it or change it to be a 75-100 focus heal that applies an additional heal over time, instantly without some stationary channel. So it’s a more expensive option for more sustained healing.
Alternatively, heal aura can be a 3 minute buff that gives 20-30% increased healing and regainable health.
3- Bounty rewards are still pretty lame. Consider making their rewards plagued by default and better silver or material/rune payouts.
4- Staffs are worthless with the change of opening their runes up to wands. Wands with shield provide 8 affixes vs the 4 staff gets. Wands get the benefit of shield giving them massive poise and armor bonus as well as the ability to block.
Please just make 2H weapons have 8 affixes total.
You can then make the decision to make wands the defensive/mobile weapon loadout and staves the more offensively oriented loadout with somewhat better offensive stat scalings.
5- Please fix the consumable selection to be a radial menu for controller players and move the button from holding down the D-pad into some other button that does not conflict with movement and dodging. Controller users use left analog stick to move and X to dodge, with the current selection menu requiring to hold down D-pad you cannot practically move and dodge while selecting items in combat.
Enemies are not just gonna sit there and wait while you’re stationary selecting through items in combat, find a way for a proper radial menu item and food selection, or allow us to shortcut items and food to a radial menu.
6- I don’t like the amount of prebuffing currently in the game with the 3 minute buff system. You spend so much tedious time swapping weapons or utility rune load out, applying a rune, then channeling for more focus, then applying more buffs, then channeling again back to full, then healing, then consuming stamina, focus, and poise flask, then the buff food.
A lot of this could be significantly alleviated by giving buff effects longer durations, especially the item consumable effects.
7- Player poise is still awful. Especially on low poise damage weapons like gauntlets and daggers.
You buffed with this patch the poise of some mobs, including the plagued wolves, the risen bloater and the worms that spawn from him when he explodes, false remnants already had high poise and so do nith humanoids as well.
Which is fine so as to not staggerlock enemies too easily.
But in turn it feels like complete garbage that anyone who is not full plate with a shield and a poise flask is getting chain staggered by every single enemy hit.
You feel like toilet paper in a hurricane with how everything in the game ragdolls you. This is more avoidable against single mobs and bosses by dodging and parrying, but in multi-enemy fights just by the nature of animation commitals and asynchronous enemy attacks you will end up getting hit and put in a chain of stagger lock.
This is even more apparent with the stagger spam from ranged enemy attacks. Ranged enemies need to have poise/stagger damage removed, or their projectile frequency and tracking needs to be reduced.
Say you have a character at 7 poise with a cloth armor and mesh gloves. With the poise utility rune you go up to 21 poise, and the poise flask bumps you to 41.
Still at 41 poise, the majority of enemies are still staggering you with regular attacks. This feels wrong. This makes the poise utility rune pretty worthless.
8- Light armor and light dodge suck, especially in the crucible.
Light armor drops you to about 27% physical DR and caps you at 70% elemental DR at exalted. For being light, you gain 10% movement speed and quickstep, which is a terrible dodge in the narrow confines of the crucible and in platforming sections. In order to have quickstep, you still need to invest into equip load even in full cloth to stay light.
Physical damage is the most frequent and lethal type of damage in the game, it is pretty much 95%+ of the damage mobs do to you.
Meanwhile a mesh loadout with modest equip load leaves you at medium, with 50%+ physical DR and still at exalted 70% elemental resistance cap. It has medium dodge roll, which is just as good as quick step for most players, and is not an absolute liability in platforming or the crucible as you can manipulate the dodge roll trajectory as it rolls while quickstep is an immediate long linear dash.
You effectively take double the physical damage on cloth armor for an exchange of moving 10% faster and a few more equip load stats.
It is not remotely worth the exchange, cloth armor is significantly worse than a mesh/leather mix.
Please add ledge protection for quickstep, and consider for cloth and leather armor to have a 10-20% bonus to focus and stamina generation. If it’s gonna remain significantly more fragile, it needs to have a sizable offensive upside, or you need to make its survival different by making it increase healing received or having increased regainable health or giving cloth appreciably longer iframes and more generous parry windows.
9- The gathering minigame and timers are great, highly satisfying.
Thought with the the timing feedback came up.
What if the Early, Late, perfect pop up feedback also applied to Dodge and Parry in the easiest difficulty? It would be a ramp to teach your weaker players the timings so they can progressively go up in difficulty without hitting a wall as they come better prepared.
A lot of times when people fail dodges or parries they don’t know if it is because it was done too early or too late, especially with the nature of dodge working on button release rather than button press.
