Compilation of thoughts & suggestions after 4 different max level builds

Wicked Feedback
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This game has a fantastic foundation and, even despite the issues below, I’ve had a ton of fun.

For context, the builds I created were:

  • Str/dex hybrid dual daggers
  • Pure Str 2handers
  • Str/int hybrid [whatever weapons I could find]
  • Pure dex bow

General

  • Storage is awkward. This is known, the devs are aware and have already stated it’s on their radar. Awesome.
  • The realm backup system allows vendor scumming for unlimited items / materials. It’s probably WAY too much resource overhead to tie vendor inventories to characters and not realms, so I’m unsure what the solution is here. What is the purpose of the realm backups?
  • Ichor acquisition from early game should be tied to the character and not the realm, to prevent new characters from having maxed inventories before even getting to the 2nd boss.
  • Tooltips, tooltips, tooltips. I believe this is already on the roadmap, but Runes (and possibly affixes) need tooltips.

Weapon Acquisition

There are a couple of issues that are closely tied together, so I’ll present both before potential solutions:

  • Each boss kill “levels up” the realm tier. At “tier 2” you’ll rarely see tier 1 weapon drops. At “tier 3” you’ll rarely see tier 2 weapon drops. This becomes a problem as soon as you want or need a lower tier weapon for a build.
  • Enchanting weapons has a high probability of bricking a weapon, which feels REALLY bad when you finally get a T1 weapon you wanted to drop while your world is Tier 2 or Tier 3. As a result, the BEST weapons for any build are anything you can buy from the vendor or craft with easy to acquire materials, since you have unlimited chances to roll perfect affixes.

There are a few potential solutions to the above:

  1. Have equal drop weighting for ALL weapon tiers up to the current realm tier. Drastically increase weapon droprates across the board to compensate for both the diluted pool and the risk of enchantment bricking.
  2. Keep the the current droprate, but have dynamic tier chance weighting that increases each time a weapon doesn’t drop at that tier. This should result in roughly equal drops from each weapon tier over a large enough sample size.
  3. Borrow a system that already works from another game. In Destiny 2, you can create blueprints of weapons after you’ve dropped a certain number of these weapons. You can then craft these weapons using crafting materials you gain either from ‘dismantling’ weapons or, in the case of special weapons, as drops from PVE encounters. These materials could come from endgame activities (e.g. crucible), which would also then create a gameplay loop of farming materials, crafting the weapons you want, enchanting to try and get the affixes you want, repeat.

Combat / Weapon Effectiveness

  • % on damage dealt affixes need to be reworked to % OF damage dealt and scaled appropriately. My bow character can spam cone shot (does ~200 damage if all arrows hit) and GAIN more focus than he spends with each shot. This is the same case with any rune skill that does multiple hits (e.g. double daggers).
  • Small/normal humanoid enemy “push back distance” from 1handed weapons is too far. This results in your first hit with many 1handers pushing enemies out of the range of your next hit in the combo, leaving you sitting there swinging at the air awkwardly. As a result combat with many 1handers is literally you just run-poking them to death since your combos never connect.
  • Poise/stagger damage from 2handers needs to be increased. My first character loaded with a claymore from the beach, and since this is a souls-like I assumed I could combo my swings on little monsters because surely the first swing would stagger them. Nope.
  • The three points above are why…
  • Double daggers are currently miles above any other melee weapon in effectiveness. You sustain resources faster (due to health/focus on damage dealt). They deal stagger/poise damage faster (due to rune spam), and most of their combos lunge you towards your target, meaning they’re always connecting even through the weird push back distance smaller enemies seem to have.

Summary of suggestions:

  1. Reduce normal enemy push back distance when getting hit by 1handers
  2. Increase poise/stagger damage from 2handers
  3. Change % on damage dealt affixes to % OF damage dealt. This may take a few iterations to get the scaling correct