I’ve just beaten the Crucible after upgrading most of the town and hitting level 30 and had some general comments and suggestions based off my experience:
First off, extended character stats and stat ui / tooltips:
Show extended character stats like movement speed, attack speed etc. Its impossible to really know what half the stats on gear is actually doing for you right now.
Buff and rune tooltips, user should see values on generic buffs like health regen / stat boosts given by rune buff abilities, weapon oils, etc.
Food tooltip in quick menu, can be annoying to have to remind myself what food does what esspecially during a fight. Add a quick description in the quick menu.
Next is the stats themselves:
Armor: its way too oppresive right now, with healing items being set values and having a very long cooldown, Armor dictates your efective survivability more than health. Echo Knight is laughably easier with an armor stacked build as opposed to a light or high health build.
I think armor should be nerfed and some sort of benefit given to light loadouts (perhaps a flat x% damage buff for light / normal).
Make healing items have a percentage element (good ref would be Diablo 4 healing pots, they heal static values but also have a lingering percentage based heal over time).
Stamina: nothing wrong with the stamina system from what I can tell so far but there is currently a plagued affix that can completely invalidate it: ‘% chance to fill stamina on damage dealt’, I rolled this on daggers and now have infinite stamina / dodges so long as I’m aggresive.
Focus: I feel focus runs into some similar issues to Stamina but less so, the Focus regen stat ‘feels’ mandatory at times and I wonder if the game would benefit from a slight regen by default as occasionaly I just use Focus to keep a buff up as I travel and its a pain to have to find something random to hit to get some.
Moving over to the plagued affixes / items in general:
Enchanting: I feel its a little too RNG right now, only because its possible to completey invalidate an item because its affixes conflict, eg: Health regen and No heal over time can roll on the same item. Some sort of priority system that prevents contradicting rolls would at least allow you to make choices on an item to item basis and not just brick something outright.
Some affixes like exp loss on death / exp loss on hit feel redundant, I feel most players generally wont even consider them while leveling / learning and then at level cap these become OP because they have no downside.
Similar vein is the healing reduction affixes, I feel these shouldnt go higher than 25% per item, 55%+ on a single roll bricks anything that could compensate.
Perhaps some other tuning would be nice, having rolls like ‘overall speed’ hitting anything less than 5% also feels redundant.
An obvious suggestion would be allowing re-rolls or a way to improve your rolls after enchanting but this would be a significant change to item philosophy.
On to gameplay elements, starting with map layout / teaversal:
Overall, really like the open feeling and am so glad to not see yellow paint everywhere (if you know, you know).
However, I noticed with light builds esspecially that it can become very easy to blunder some of the more narrow / platforming segments, theres an ‘uncomfortable’ ammount of delay on how long to hold sprint without it dashing you off a cliff.
Also, for some very delicate sections, it seems the platforms are too small to allow the game time to register it should jump at the end of the tile? I had a few times in the quarry where trying to jump off the smaller bricks would just have me run down like it was a ramp instead of jump at the edge. I had like 40% movement speed so maybe that affects it?
Theres also an issue with attack lock on just plumenting you off an edge too, most noteable with the warping witch mobs, if you go to attack and she warps mid animation its not uncommon for that attack to carry you off an edge if you’re near one.
I think thats all for maps, combat now:
Shield mobs: I find these in general to be quite annoying, most are fine and you can bait a move for parry / backstab but in general they seems to ‘snap’ to their blocking stance way too fast and in senarios where you have to fight multiple it can be a huge pain to bounce off them repeatedly when the usual windows are not possible.
Additional note on backstabs, if the enemy survives one they ‘snap’ to an attack almost immediately once its over, 2h Axe mobs especially will nearly always do their hilt shove animation making them more dangerous to backstab than fight normally.
Speaking of Axe mobs, they seem to be a little overtuned? In general they seem to do a solid 2x damage compared to anything else in their ‘range’ (Echo 2h Axe mobs still hit me harder than the boss does)
Thats all that I can remember right now, hope this doesnt paint a negative picture at all, I’ve been enjoying it massively and will be trying out different weapons on new characters to see what else I can discover. Thanks if you read the whole thing!
