Pros:
-There is a noticeable increase to ore veins and embers. I’ve also had plenty of materials to upgrade weapons and armor.
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The 1/3 reduction to repair costs is much appreciated.
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Certain deadly enemies have been removed from areas in the beach, like the blade spinners. Good change, nobody likes exploring and bumping into a mob you are not in a power level to fight.
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Performance is improved, although occasionally my RTX 4090+Ryzen 7800X3D, 64 GB RAM 4TB SSD rig on DLAA max settings for quality dips from 100-120 fps down to 50-60 on combat with some stuttering and sometimes when transitioning an area.
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Blue/purple quality items are dropping more often, and gems seem plentiful enough, though I haven’t been lucky with focus regen ones.
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I feel like I can progress my projects at a good pace and the amount of herbs to craft healing food are now plentiful.
Cons:
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The ranged enemies on narrow ledges/beams you need to parkour over or fall to your death need to go. The player has literally no room to dodge while balancing on a wooden beam, and these ranged enemies are just constantly rapid firing staggering projectiles.
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Bounties still felt bad. Did the Deadly bruiser duo in Glades, supposedly labeled Danger Lv3, and was barely able to scrape a win at lv11 with double upgraded jute armor on every slot and double upgraded gnarled staff with 3-5% physical damage reduction gems slotted in and a 23% armor increase ring. I was still losing half my health to a single hit or shove attack when more than triple the level of the danger level of this bounty.
The hunger mechanic feels incredibly bad on any health spongy boss with huge reach, mobility, and damage. This bounty is most definitely not danger level 3.
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Parry on spear and shield enemies as well as quick slash multi-combo chain dagger humanoids or the fat bruiser overhead slam just feels off. I don’t know how much the window was extended, but if you wait to press the button right before the hit connects it’s too late but often it’s also too early.
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Inventory management is a nightmare on the food, gathering, and ingredient slots. Because healing is limited by food and the game is unforgiving, you want to gather as much for crafting food as you can, but you have so little inventory slots once the variety of ingredients start coming in. Please double the baseline gathering and crafting inventory slots.
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Multi-enemy fights still feel as bad as ever.
I think the single biggest pain point of the combat in this game is that your character is slow as molasses to do anything, animations take forever and you are animation locked and can’t cancel via dodge or parry, yet enemies are hyper aggressive and seem to move 50% faster than you do, both in movement and attack animations.
The AI aggression also seems to queue a retaliation only exactly when you have already committed to an attack animation. You just feel ragdolled by every single mob, every mob can send you sprawling through the floor.
I was revisiting the beach and did a dash attack on the grenade lobber as usual placed in a narrow corridor. Well, the grenadier promptly dodged my charge attack and while I was still in the animation lock of the missed charged attack, he promptly kicked me off the ledge to my death.
Why is it that enemies can immediately react after a dodge or block or attack but our character seems stuck for what feels like forever in an animation lock? I just feel like I’m playing the game at 0.75x playback speed while all the enemies are playing on 1.5x
Ranged mobs constantly dashing back and immediately firing a shot after you’ve burned half a stamina sprinting to them because your charge attack has 1/6 the reach of enemies’ charged attack lunges starts to get old quick.
- The heal runes are garbo. The focus to health conversion is horrible, basically this healing rune spell is for outside combat healing only, and then it’s just much more efficient to use a plate of food than eat an entire bar of precious focus to restore over half your health over a rather long, immobile, and vulnerable channel.
Healing Pulse is even worse because it seems to barely increase your health, but it heals for basically 10% of your health and eats up an entire focus bar. That was 2 silvers worth of money wasted.
Runes and recipes need tooltips. The amount of times you end up wasting money to find out that something is bad because there is no previewing the details doesn’t feel good.