Hello everyone. To try out the update, I intentionally created a new character and replayed the entire current storyline to see if there were many changes in this part of the game. I wanted to check if any complaints about scarce item drops and their limited variety at the beginning of the game had been addressed. My first character was strength-based, the second focused on magic, and this time I decided to create an agility-based character. One of the first drops I received was a pair of daggers (and the smith sells them too). However, it’s worth noting that the next dex-based weapon only dropped after several hours of playing, beyond the available story content. The wait felt quite lengthy. I found a katana in a random pit and, at some point (I can’t recall exactly where), looted a scimitar. Overall, items drop very infrequently, and in my opinion, the most sensible strategy is to upgrade vendors in the city, buy weapons from vendors and enchant them. Once a player obtains affixes close to a godroll, they can upgrade that weapon and take on the Echo Knight. Finding weapons is challenging, and enchanting them can easily render them irrelevant or even ruin them. It is more reliable to have a virtually infinite pool of items for affix rolls through vendors. So, currently, the focus is on buying and rerolling weapons rather than depending on rare world drops, which, in my opinion, isn’t ideal.
A few more words about efficiency - ideally, I shouldn’t raise stats immediately upon leveling up. It’s reasonable to slightly increase health and equip load at the beginning of the game, as the current story content can be completed with the starting upgraded weapons. Therefore, there is no particular point in raising strength/dexterity/intelligence/faith. These attributes should only be invested in if you already have a very good rolls on a weapon demanding high stats. But this is somewhat counterintuitive, as most players are unlikely to hold onto points for several levels. The only exception, perhaps, would be intelligence - all the staves available from the vendor require it in one way or another.
In general, the attribute requirements on items look rather strange. A quick blade that requires intelligence and faith? Even though faith was previously only required for hammers and maces? I understand the desire to give different build options a variety of choices and a larger pool of items to choose from, but still. However, this is a minor issue. A much bigger problem to me seems to be the very high requirements for weapons. In datamined materials, I’ve seen tier-six weapons that might require 127 strength and 118 dexterity. I don’t know what the maximum level will be in the final game, but these are very high numbers. Will there even be enough fallen embers in the game to respec characters properly if needed? Considering that strength/dexterity/intelligence/faith are much less useful compared to health and equip load, it’s simply not very desirable to level them up without already having some cool item that benefits from the scaling.
It’s worth saying a few words about this problem as well - in the current version of the game, the affixes for gaining health/focus/stamina when dealing damage are too good; they literally outshine all other affixes in terms of usefulness. And they work best on fast weapons. You might envision the dexterity archetype as a character dressed in leather or light armor, one who forgoes equip load in favor of higher damage from stats that influence weapon scaling, so to speak. But in reality, the benefit of very heavy armor in the game is greater than the additional damage from scaling. Light armor isn’t really good at all, it has too few pros in general. As a result, one of the strongest builds is a plate-armored guy with twin blades who can facetank all boss hits, simply pressing the attack button and replenishing health/focus/stamina. No other playstyle is nearly as effective. For example, parrying - despite being a high-risk action, the reward for a successful parry is not great. You can only land one charged / a couple of simple hits while the enemy is staggered from the parry. There’s no opportunity to deal critical damage like with a backstab, for instance. And to start getting any benefits from parrying, you need to roll specific affixes, and even then, the playstyle is still riskier than just spamming runic attacks / twin blades, both of which also require specific effects on the equipment. Speaking of spamming runic attacks - the desire to deal with the Echo Knight as quickly as possible is completely understandable - the price of a mistake in a fight with him is too high. You don’t get any experience or items, only lose time and consumables. And to face him again, you need to go through several rooms, which hinders learning his patterns and winning through so-called skill. Although thanks for cutting his damage, it’s now much easier to deal with him with characters that have unfinished builds. However, I’m not sure his current health is adequate. Of course, it’s easier to spam him with runic attacks than to poke at him for more than 5 minutes.
Speaking of the Crucible - I liked the redesign of the rooms and the new balance of the enemies in them. The new boons are quite interesting, the only thing is that I see the same ones too often, even after rerolling them. And of course, I see it as a problem that there is no experience or loot in the mode unless the run ends defeating Echo Knight. This places very high demands on the player. Additionally, I’m not a fan of extensive metaprogression. Slay the Spire didn’t need to slow down players with metaprogression for people to spend hundreds of hours in it. I understand why Hades relies so heavily on metaprogression - to deliver the story in portions, but I still don’t believe it makes the game better for it. When the Crucible doesn’t bring experience nor items, playing it just for upgrading the Seneschal doesn’t bring much fun. It might make sense to lower the costs of metaprogression in the mode. Do I really need to make a hundred runs to unlock respec and new boons? I’m not sure. (EDIT: after playing with gloomseeds properly gathering now, and after simply playing more Crucible i’d say you can unlock everything fairly quickly. So im taking back my “lowering cost” proposal. Still don’t really like those things being locked, if I can unlock them in no time they could have been unlocked from the start.)
A few remarks on unrelated topics. It’s unclear how this will look in the future, but as of now, obtaining resources is a big problem. Third-tier weapons require third-tier components, and there’s no way to get them in the game except by hoping for a random drop or a random roll from the merchant. This feels frustrating. Sometimes you can encounter deer and foxes in the game, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a deer drop antlers or hooves, for example. The situation with wolves is slightly better, but I don’t know of any 100% guaranteed place where they reside, where I could go in search of wolf components. As a result, I just buy all the third-tier resources from the merchant every time his shop refreshes. There are also at least two silver veins and two birch trees in the game - but both birch trees are in the city and they never seem to regenerate like other resources. This leads to creating new realms, running through them to the city, cutting down those two trees, and then abandoning that realms. Also, killing the first boss and getting ichor to quickly unlock all the character slots. By the way, this doesn’t seem like a good system overall - it feels like an exploit to create new realms just to bypass an artificial slowdown, and the unlocks themselves aren’t that interesting. You quickly unlock all the slots and then only spend ichor on challenges/dailies in exchange for coins. Not very appealing for defeating epic monsters.
I’ve enchanted white Falling Sky and it became golden, but it lost the last two runes and the slots for stones. Meanwhile, same golden staff I looted retained all four runes. Is it working as intended? Also, they have the same affixes - maximum damage at full focus and another one i can’t recall now - is this how it’s supposed to be? Do legendary items always have the same affixes?
Another small note - when viewing crafting recipes, all items display as first-tier, and you can only tell their tier by looking at the quality of the components required to craft them.
I still believe the game could benefit from more detailed descriptions of rune effects, including numbers and possibly even videos. For example, Damage Surge - how much damage does it add? It’s unclear. Also, what effects do the elements have? Fire deals damage over time, frost seems to slow and freeze, ok, but electricity? Does it cause additional stagger? It’s unclear. I hope the game will have a wiki by the time it comes out.