After 300+ hours playing this game, many of which were after the Breach patch, I’d like to put all of my thoughts down on paper! I’m rarely on the forums, so if you’d like to reach out for anything, my username is “Snazzblaster” on the Discord channel. I have tons of experience playing almost every popular ARPG and Soulslike game on the market (participating in closed testing for some of these), so maybe that will give some context to my feedback.
Weapon/Enchantment Balance
Has gotten significantly better since pre-Breach, but there’s still a ways to go here. Ring of Determination and the Freeze status are both insanely strong, but I’m far from the first person to point this out, so I won’t spend time on those. After making 5 builds and taking them all the way to Max Pestilence endgame, Here are my thoughts:
The *Too* Good
Scythes
By far the strongest weapon type. For some reason, these have the speed and reach of a spear, the poise damage of a greathammer and the attack stamina cost of a 1-handed dagger.
Some Low Health/Low Focus enchants
I love that these take effect at <50% rather than at <30%, but the values are just a tad too high right now. 30% reduced focus cost at low health, for example, should probably be 15% reduced focus cost instead. 30% on a single enchantment is just too high, but I do love my low health build overall. The power of these enchants just need a bit of fine-tuning, but the activation condition of <50% is fine since it synergizes with the curses of plagued gear so well.
Focus gain on Fatality
Runes are quite strong, to the point that most runes are probably one-shotting most things, so “25 Focus Gain on Fatality” is essentially just at least 25 free focus when casting a rune (except in boss fights). I think that getting this enchant was the tipping point where my INT mage build started to feel too strong.
The Good
Greathammers
I have yet to use a Greathammer that didn’t feel good, but my current favorites are Spliced Hammer and Tooth of the Ancient One. These weapons fill the niche of a fast , stagger-centric playstyle (Spliced Hammer) and a tanky counterattack playstyle (Tooth) and they both feel extremely rewarding to play.
Wands
Aside from some overpowered runes, wands as a whole feel amazing to use, with some of them having projectiles and other unique attacks baked-in to their movesets. This is the exact type of uniqueness that I’ve always wanted from a base moveset. My current favorites are Molten Clutch due to the 2nd attack in its combo, and Broken Key due to how aggressive the moveset is.
Conditional damage enchants
“+X% damage for Y seconds after Stagger”, “+X% damage for Y seconds after Fatality”, and “+X% damage of charged attacks” are all amazing enchants that perfectly complement some weapons and playstyles, so I’m very glad to see that these are included.
Masterwork items
These are a viable option on some of the builds I’ve made that don’t rely on any specific rare enchants, so it’s nice to see that white items are usable, and quite strong, when you’re not exactly sure which enchants you’re aiming for.
Lifesteal
Contrary to popular opinion, I think that lifesteal is fine. The overpowering strength of rune attacks makes lifesteal feel too strong, but if you’re just using basic attacks, it feels relatively balanced. I think if lifesteal feels too strong, this is actually a rune attack strength issue rather than a lifesteal strength issue. Maybe there can be a way to limit lifesteal to basic attacks only? If this was the case, I think it would be in a perfect spot.
The Bad
One handed daggers
My one handed dagger build using Midnight Blade and an offhand bow was the only build that I had to put down and stop playing because it felt so unsatisfying. Even after building entirely around electric damage and shock buildup (and investing 36 points in each scaling stat), the damage was still extremely underwhelming. Daggers are about as fast as rapiers, but they have significantly worse range and apparently cause no enemy hit reactions, which means that I was trading blows with enemies extremely often and rarely coming out on top of the exchange. The only thing they’re decent at is generating focus, but even then, straight swords and rapiers do it just as well while doing more damage and having more range. Maybe the attack stamina cost should be reduced to be extremely cheap, so that these are the clear weapon choice for fast, cheap attacks despite their low power. Currently they’re just worse versions of straight swords.
Bows
You’re probably expecting me to think that the focus cost of the basic arrow shot is the issue here, but that’s actually the smallest issue with bows. The biggest issues are threefold: They’re weak, they’re slow, and you can’t queue their attacks after melee attacks. Most standard weapon runes can be queued up after finishing a melee attack with your weapon, after which the rune will be seamlessly cast. This is not the case for bows; for some reason, their rune attacks can’t be queued up after melee hits. This makes them feel extremely clunky, since you have to wait until your attack animation is clearly over before executing the bow rune attacks. Also, even the fully uncharged basic arrow shot takes more than a second to come out (even with +30% attack speed on my build), and when it finally does come out, it dealt a measly 30-ish damage with a fully geared character. The end result is a weapon that feels clunky, slow, and unsatisfying.
Runes and Focus
At the moment, rune attacks just feel too polarizing and one-dimensional. The vast majority of them are just big, slow nukes that blow the enemy up in a single cast. They seem balanced around focus being a more rare resource than it currently is. However, the Breach also introduced a few runes that I love because they don’t fit the one-dimensional nuke mold.
Runes I Like
Unique Buff Runes
Runes like Static and Firewalk (both wand runes) really changed the way that I approached the average combat encounter in ways that other runes haven’t, so I really enjoyed these.
Fire Wall
I’m not sure if this is the correct name of the rune, but it’s the one that creates a lingering wall of fire on the ground that does damage over time. Currently, it’s the only rune in the game that encourages you to keep an enemy in a certain spot for an extended period of time in order to get the full damage. Plus, the damage for multiple walls of fire can stack with each other! This is the perfect rune in my opinion: It does a reasonable amount of damage and rewards proper player positioning. More multi-dimensional runes like this please!
Runes that fill a moveset Gap
Runes like Breaker Thrust and Knockdown Swirl, which are cheap and fast runes that essentially allow you to patch your weapon’s moveset with a quick move that it doesn’t ordinarily have access to. For example, I use a Greathammer that has tons of wide swings but has very little forward reach, so Breaker Thrust is the perfect moveset patching rune that allows me to have a quick thrust to balance out its moveset.
Runes I Want
I’d like more conditional runes in the future, but it’s honestly hard to imagine why a player would click a weaker, more conditional rune when they could just click a different rune that kills enemies in a single cast, so more balancing might need to take place before more conditional runes are implemented. Ideally these conditional runes should be cheap (or maybe even free?) since they take up one of your valuable rune slots. Regardless, here are some ideas I have for conditional runes:
- A rune that acts like a backstab, but also grants a buff upon completion
- runes that can only be cast when a certain condition is met (after staggering an enemy, after causing a certain elemental buildup, after being hit, after being staggered, after a Fatality, etc.)
- buffing runes that are conditional and only trigger when that condition is met. For example, a rune that casts a buff that lasts a few minutes and has an effect like “the next time you are hit when below half health, cause an explosion of heat damage in an area around you”. Then after the condition is met and the trigger occurs, the buff expires.
- Debuff runes. These are an ARPG classic. I want to see runes that charm enemies, poison them, slow them, or root them in place.
The World, Enemies, Housing
I’ve read that the Alive system is still a work in progress, and I (in theory) like that certain factions move around the world after the storyline is complete. However, I find little reason to care about which faction is where besides the novelty of it. For example, what’s the benefit of having Harvesters in Mariner’s Keep rather than the Risen? It makes areas feel fresh I suppose, but killing one faction over the other doesn’t seem to provide any unique benefit.
I’d also like to see some rare events and encounters in the world. For example, maybe the player could encounter a waylaid merchant that we need to rescue. Upon rescue, they reward us with temporary access to their shop, which stocks items that are otherwise hard to come by (such as gems and recipes). Or there could be exceptionally rare enemies that drop much higher quality loot than usual to give players that dopamine rush that I feel is currently lacking in the game. While the world itself is neat, nothing exceptionally rewarding occurs in the world as-is.
And regarding housing, I’d like to see a Valheim-style “Comfort” mechanic that gives players a small buff depending on how many furniture items of each type you have in your house. It would reinforce the current gameplay loop that encourages you to return to your house to stash your loot anyways, and while doing so, you could refresh your “comfort” buffs.