Hello, first of all this game has been absolutely fantastic, from the gameplay to the visuals but after a fair few hours of the game I’ve noticed some issues in my opinion, this post will have a large variety of points and possible suggestions that I could come up with. There might be some points that have been brought up many times but I thought I’d include then anyways, and of course some or most of these issues are only due to early access and or lack of content and might be fixed naturally with time. I don’t write forum posts often so sorry for strange formatting of typos.
-Multiplayer:
-Please let us open the same chests or talk to the same npc’s, even if it means the other players don’t get dialogue for it
-Let us link items in chat, it’s much easier to link items and let players read them instead of either reading out every mod in VC or trading with every individual player
-Equipment:
-Weapons are interesting because of the movesets and the scalings but I wish more weapons had built in passives, a few do but it’s mostly infusions, like the Tooth of the Ancient Beast should maybe do more damage against Beasts or allow Chronus to attach lightning spell runes to it for example to push it more into a caster sword
-Some of the enchantments being the same between equipment seems odd, there is somewhat of an attempt to diversify this with stuff like helmets being the primary focus slot but body armor which I would correlate with defence don’t actually give or allow more defences compared to other slots (except for the armor value)
-Unlike weapons, armor is very bland, there’s isn’t much to diversify them besides looks and I’m not a fan of set bonuses as they tend to be binary, either you get the whole set or none of it. I would propose an armor affinity system where certain armor allow +1/-1 certain modifier groups. For example the Reaper’s armor would maybe allow +1 crit mod/-1 damage mod and the egg armor which is tankier would maybe have +1 defence mod/-1 crit mod giving the armors a unique set of possibilities and further strengthen the identity of armors. Maybe shown next to facets.
-Facets are very cool and I love the current implementation, but in the current game the facets are the real end game grind and with transmogs in the game the endgame grind gets too short and easy. Currently enchantments are too easy to get with Radiant and Essence embers, I would much rather prefer it to be the other way around, facets are easier to get but the enchantments are much harder
-Please nerf Essence and Radiant embers, make them target randomly in either step or just make them extremely rare, currently build making is just getting enough essence embers and makes the late game too one-tone. If it doesn’t give embers it’s useless.
-Current uniques items are good but there’s no reason to collect more than one (besides facets), I would much prefer if we had more high variance uniques (Such as Wacher’s Eyes from poe), allowing uniques to roll a random modifer from the regular list of mods or a way to gamble on the uniques to make them better at a risk (Vaal orbs)
-Infusions:
-Infusion are often one of the most often misunderstood mechanics and I feel like they are currently very limiting to buildcrafting, you almost always want an infusion on your weapon and there’s too many easy ways to get it (Runes, Gems, Facets or Oils)
-Maybe if infusions are harder to obtain or have to be earnt in combat, facets should have a larger penalty if kept and the tier 1 gems should maybe either not give infusions at all or perhaps on a condition based on gem (Grants Plague for 10s on kill, lightning for 10s on backstab etc.)
-To diversify the build capabilities and allow dual elemental builds, infusions could convert 50% of the damage to the element instead of fully, this could both allow you to have more infusions at the cost of splitting damage types, even allowing 2+ infusions and squeezing the numbers so they all convert equal parts of the damage. If you want to deal 4 different elements you have to both find ways to apply 4 different infusions and now you’re also splitting your damage so each ailment is a quarter as effective.
-Ice infusion is in an odd state, you don’t really want to have it on your weapons by default, you really only want it on runes or other effects.
-Quivers make bow gems and infusion facets almost obsolete
-Movement:
-Neutral dodge should do something, I would expect a backstep or even a dodge in facing direction, even a crouch would be fine
-Run crouch should slide, It would just feel cool
-Stats, UI and QOL:
-I would prefer if the tooltips that pop up to explain certain mechanics are better explained, the worst offender is currently Recoverable Health, It give you a very brief description but it doesn’t state for how long the recoverable portion stays or how much you get back when hitting enemies. Life regen is bloated for some reason and Armor Pen isn’t explained at all.
-Ailments are poorly communicated and it’s hard to tell how to scale them, To my knowledge it’s based on damage dealt which makes them less interesting to build into as you build into them same as any other damage build. I would prefer if there are seperate stats for normal and status damage and they don’t overlap or double-dip.
-Allow us to clear burning by rolling, It’s a natural expectation in games at this point and it feels odd to not be included.
-Nameable chests where the name pops up as you walk up to the chest and a search bar for every menu (Inventory or Merchant)
-Tweakable allied particle effects, playing with a bow user in co-op makes the game unplayable
-Current defences are too shallow, there’s really only armor and elemental resists and of course health/barrier, I’d like more defensive stats we can specialise into.
-Allow us to favorite (or junk) items so we don’t sell by accident, or simply a buyback option at the same price for a while.
-More clear UI when crafting consumables that craft in multiples, I assumed the bomb crafting recipes are too expensive until I saw the un-intuitive “Crafts 10” text 100h in
-Let me disable the unlocked slots, if I want to swap between 2 weapons I don’t want to go to fists, I leveled a new character just so I don’t have to have the 3rd slot unlocked
-Highlight new items in inventory, this is especially annoying when crafting hunting for facets as you’ll craft in smaller multiples and it’s all the same looking item in your inventory so you end up not knowing which ones you just crafted.
-Lifesteal is too dominant in the game and invalidates most sources of healing and can quickly get out of hand when you consider you can cast runes with it. I would either propose to make it extremely rare with severe penalties attached or make it purely scale off of the extremly low base damage of the weapon and not the total damage dealt.
-Tier 2 elemental gems are currently weaker than tier 1 on weapons and are almost never worth it.
-It would be nice to have a placeable training dummy in the houses, preferably one that doesn’t hit back so we aren’t always in combat.
-Let us preview houses before buying, it’s not a big deal as later you’ll have all of them but it’s nice for the start of the game.
-Reading what runes do in the inventory, you can bring them to Eleanor but you can’t put uniques into her menus so it’s harder to tell what they actually do.
-I’ve seen the sentiment that damage resistance should have a hard-cap, I don’t believe that should be the case. A player should probably be able to reach 100% DR to one or maybe two damage types except Physical if they really invest hard into it or with certain conditions like DR while blocking. Or maybe the player should be able to reach 100% DR but enemies either have ways to penetrate resistances with certain moves or they should naturally penetrate resistances based on their level. Maybe 1% resistances per area level like Last Epoch does it, so even if you have 110% DR a level 30 enemy will see that as effective 80%.
-Show us the final value of enchantments when modified by enchantment effect gems, some aren’t affected and it makes it confusing at first without testing it.
-Gathering, Loot and Crafting:
-Fishing and Digging spots are very valuable because of embers, Mining and Woodcutting feel lackluster. Maybe up the rate at which Mining award Gems or allow us to get different beetles from chopping trees. The beetles could either be used in potions and food or maybe ground up into different dyes for furniture or armor (Outward style)
-Current secondary resources such as Coal and Saps feel very lackluster, the resource processing is so fast they feel unecessary. Perhaps they could be also used in upgrading weapons and armor or maybe something to do with facets, such as re-rolling them on gear.
-Maybe the scribe’s table shouldn’t allow you to craft literally everything, I’d like some armors to be farmable only, such as the Egg Armor or the Silence Set (from echo knight) to make them more exclusive and coveted.
-Im a big fan of daily shops and quests and I would like more of them, if we could accept a daily quest from vendors to temporarily expand their stock for the day effectively “re-rolling” the shop once daily while keeping previous stock. This could be integrated into the faction system as a Merchants Guild of sorts.
-More secrets in the overworld would be great, the Egg Champion is a great example that was fun and rewarding.
-It would be nice to have a chance to drop unique randomly from any source, not necessarily from the current pool but from a seperate pool of uniques that are world drops only to make loot more interesting.
-Give us more resource “hot-spots”, the two caves in the lowland meadows are a great example, areas we want to re-visit frequently. There’s a few good contenders in the game but I assume they are bugged as they don’t respawn.
-I assume it’s just for Early Access but I’d prefer if the pestilence was more interractive instead of it just being “Burn effigy, kill boss”. Make it spread and threathen Sacrament or bump up rewards and make it much more difficult and time-consuming to clear.
-Combat:
-Give us an indicator for unparryable attacks, right now it’s very inconsistent and doesn’t make much sense, I would assume I can’t parry shoves or jump attacks yet you can parry kicks, shoves and some jump attacks
-Allow us maybe to revive allies in Crucible at a hefty cost of allow them to spectate at the very least.
-Parry can also feel lackluster with heavier weapons, perhaps the immediate charge attack after a parry could instantly charge (Similar to how Secrets of Grindea does it)
-Damage fall-off for ranged and spells, either a flat falloff or a critical range like Monster Hunter
-A small indicator for where you need to stand for a backstab when behind enemies, a lot of enemies twist their bodies making it extremely difficult to tell where the backstab spot is and you end up just swinging normally and it’s frustrating.
-A lot of runes are very homogenised, it’s different flavours of “deal more damage or deal damage faster”, a few have interesting properties like Air Dodge giving I-frames or some knocking enemies and bypassing guard.
-More support of consumables such as bombs, maybe even some runes that facilitate that gameplay, Drone Trap rune for example could count as a bomb
That’s all I could think of, thanks again Moon Studios for the amazing game, truly revolutionary amazing and I can’t wait for more.