I have played the heck out of this update and have some feedback.
Quality of life / small things
Blacksmith (and some NPCs) talk too much:
When standing at the anvil, the blacksmith will repeat one of his lines approximately every 10 seconds. Additionally, outside one of the houses you can buy, an NPC repeats the same line every time you enter or exit.
Placement of furniture:
This has been a problem since release. It’s almost impossible to place chests next to each other, let alone make it look good.
Elevator upgrade blocks view:
The elevator project upgrade blocks the view (does not become transparent), making it difficult to see the ladder behind it leading up to the purchasable house.
Watcher and ichor upgrade
If you already have all the ichor upgrades and approach the watcher, you will see a menu where you can’t do anything other than exit, and then an ichor bottle is still consumed
Weapons and upgrades
It’s a great system but has two main problems:
1. Legendary/Golden gear is not the best gear 2. Enhancement system incentivizes buying tons of items, enchanting them, and throwing them away
It was disappointing to discover that legendary gear is not the best gear in the game, so it’s not exciting to see the golden/yellow color on item drops.
What is more troubling is the way to get the best gear. It’s through enchantment, and it requires doing A LOT of it. I wanted the best stats on my weapon, so I used epic/purple gear with a negative effect on experience since at max level this doesn’t matter. Then I had a preference for four specific stats. I kept crafting 35 weapons, enchanting them, looking, and throwing them out, and repeating. I did this for about 300 weapons until I got such a roll. I tried again; this time I had to craft almost 1500 weapons, which took 2 hours, to get such a roll. I was only able to do this because of a duplication exploit of materials. Players are willing to put in a lot of hours to get the best gear, but this method is tedious. If I had to craft all materials legitimately, it would take months.
Crucible
Fall off ledge:
The greatest threat in the crucibles is ledges. They will instantly end your run. No items or skill points can remedy this. When a run ends for me, there’s a 90% chance it was because of a ledge. Maybe bring the player back staggered and subtract some health.
Respec late game:
If you build a bad build, which most people do the first time they play, they are forced to play halfway through the crucible before they can respec.
Timers
There is a lot of discussion around the timers, and initially they didn’t bother me. 4 hours for a one-time upgrade in the town, okay, no big deal. 6 minutes for 8 ingots ~50 min, okay I can do some xp farm or crucible runs it’s fine. But as I play more, and spend a lot of time farming ore or a specific animal part, it feels like an extra punishment I have to wait now before I can craft the weapon(s). Maybe if you didn’t have to craft 100s of one weapon before you get a good roll on it, it wouldn’t be such a big problem
Performance
A lot is still to be desired, but I have to give a massive thumbs up for this update, the game plays much better now, less stutter/lag, more fluent experience, but still often in the 40-50fps. (All settings on low/performance, DLSS performance, laptop RTX 2060, i7) - No difference in quality setting
No matter what quality setting I use, I get the same FPS. I can see a difference from quality to performance, but game delivers the exact same fps. Also many optimizations this patch was CPU optimizations? I think the game still might be bottlenecked by CPU.
Parry is fixed ?(!)
Did you fix parry in this update? Because if you did not, I think the performance fixed it. I noticed that when I have 50fps+ the parry works perfectly, but as soon I go below 50fps the parry is inconsistent
Massive thanks to devs for making this wonderful game
Man everybody is complaining about those ledges in the crucible, i havent fell once, i just agro the bastards and run to the middle, just dont fight near the ledge.
Respec is great imo, everyone can enter the crucible and get those green thingies from the lowest level, you dont need to kill the echo for that, gives weight to your decisions also, since you know that it will be hard to respec, you think twice about those stats and if its worth it to go after that weapon.
I agree with the enchantment roulette, but do we have a way around that? I mean the exalted thing could help a lot, but still, if you want that ubber life stealing weapon it should be hard to get, right?
I think they are gonna change the ichor when the skill tree comes out, and yeah the blacksmith talks a lot hehehe, they did change the twins speak though she says that spider line very low key now, almost a whisper hehehe.
I don’t have a solution in mind, but giving the player a opportunity to do in-game activities that counts towards the perfect weapon, instead of having the player crafting 100s of the same weapon, enchanting them and throwing them out.
Also have it so legendary weapons is actually the best weapons.
I recall them saying Legendaries were never meant to be BiS in the interviews prior to Early Access launch. That being said, most don’t live up to enabling unique playstyles. If they leaned more into that, I’d be a happy camper.
I would ask you with the utmost insistence to implement a transmog option for armor in order to transfer enchantments from one piece of armor to another.
Players like being powerfull. But what do they like even more? Looking cool while being powerfull!
NRFTW has incredible armor sets, especially the newly introduced plagued gear looks very interesting. However, since there is no way to target farm specific gear and it takes many tries at enchantress to get desired affixes it is near impossible to look the way you want and be powerfull at the same time.
Cerim Fashion is an important aspect for players. Please do not underestimate its importance and effects on player satisfaction as well as retention.
At this point I would like to make a tangible suggestion:
Allow us to transfer enchantments from blue/lila items onto white items
No weapons, only armor.
Both armor pieces must be of the same type as well as class e.g. lether gloves to lether gloves; not mesh pants to cloth chest.
Seneschal, or even better Marcos the alchemist (because he is underused atm) could offer transmog services for a fee or with a recepie.
This would allow players to customise the appearance of thier characters without breaking any rules regarding gear restrictions.
I really hope my thoughts transformed into pixels could convince you and you will transform this idea into reality.
Didn’t want to start a new thread just to reiterate things that have been pointed out already, but i guess i just want to add my voice to others, because couple of aspects of the crucible rework i found baffling.
First of all, the loot. The way gear works in the game, having random and very potent affixes, naturally implies that you have to go through a ton of items before you can find a good one, so the game has to be pretty generous with the amount of loot that it gives. Which it was in the previous iteration of crucible, but now the runs are longer and you only get a handfull of items, if you win. Which is probably the most absurd part to me, because if you’re already struggling and can’t complete a run, you’re not making any progress during your attemps either.
Roguelike in my eyes is also a problem. First of all, it only has the most generic bonuses, so no synergies, no “builds”, the only difference between runs is how much +dmg you get. But, more importantly, it messes with the character progression. The disparity between runs can easily be five times damage difference, so it’s impossible to tell how much stronger the upgrade or exalt that you got in your last run made you, if at all.
All in all, i found the first iteration of crucible very satisfying in terms of character progression, as it was pretty generous with loot and xp. Now the progression is hurt in every way, while gameplay remains largely the same with no added replayability coming from roguelike elements that are overly simplistic.
