Hello everyone.
After finishing available story (didn’t manage to finish Crucible run yet though) and doing dailies for a couple of days, i want to discuss a couple of things:
1. Craft stations, storage, housing.
Having crafting stations at home doesn’t really make much sense, since every craftsmen have those by default. And you’ll be going to craftsmen to repair/upgrade/enchant stuff anyway, so “you don’t need to run around the city if you have all stations at home” argument is weak.
I know that some improvements on storage are incoming, just wanted to bring attention to the way it is handled in Palia, where you can see all of your storage from any chest that you interact with. Drop some sorting on that and you have most comfortable solution of all.
If we don’t litter house with chests and crafting stations, there is no real reason to have them. I would suggest going Enshrouded way and making it so different decorations would give small additional bonuses for sleeping there. But then we go to first problem again, since it would make an the Inn useless.
2. Infusing VS Enchanting, Runes
Enchanting is fully random with too high of a chance to get you stats that you don’t want. Which would be alright if you could get any weapon that you want again fast and consistently. But it is not the case, 'cause most items drop randomly and if i ruin my favorite rapier with unfortunate enchant, i will not be able to find another copy for many hours or even days. There are craftable weapons which are able to alleviate that problem, but none of the receipts that i have are useful to my character. And even then, chance of getting 4 desirable stats at the same time and acceptable flaw (or none at all) feels abysmal, which smells like an awful amount of grind to craft and then enchant weapon again and again and again.
“Okay”, you’ll say, “for people like you we have totally predictable and stable gems”. Yay, that is cool. The only thing is… they are really underwhelming. There are regenerations, health on hit, indestructability and other cool stuff in enchantments, and gems give just a fraction of those things at best.
And yeah, i write “VS”, because you must choose one or the other, since enchantment blocks most of gem and skill slots. So either you ruin your favorite sword with bad enchantment, or put some sad gems in it and walk around with FOMO of what could have been.
I think that game needs one good streamlined solution instead two not so good solutions. I would left enchantments only, but gave players more control. For example, make enchantments a craftable (with gems and enemy parts as a resource) analog of runes. Now we still have a reason to play more game, but now we have a concrete goal to achieve (no wasted time, you consistently move forward) and not just random roulette of magic stuff (time feels wasted if you didn’t get enchantment that you wanted). And hell, if we have a system to craft enchantments, we can make some fun craftable runes too!
About runes - can we AT LEAST have the text description for what rune does, so i wouldn’t ruin my gear by blindly putting in some rune with a skill that i end up not liking?
3. Weapon scaling stat inconsistency
I play as a split INT/STR sword build. I chose it because Azure Blade and Buried Shamshir have those requirements, so i assumed that all swords with elemental skills will have that scaling. But later i found out that it is not really the truth, because later i acquired two magical weapons with INT only scaling: Siren Quenn’s Horn (i would understand DEX/INT split, but why full int?) and Risen Blade (it is a magical sable just like Buried Shamshir, why different scaling?).
So now i either start new character just to use new cool magic sword effectively, or forget that i got it and hope that there are some other INT/STR weapons waiting for me in the future with moveset that i would like more than rapier that plays cool but does twice less damage because of the strange choice in scaling.
In general that problem would be solved with respec (and i am glad that it will be added), but i bet it is gonna be too pricey to respec for every new cool weapon.
4. Dailies and time-gating
I like that “sleeping”, building and enemy respawn takes time and game tries to gently nudge you to not no-life it 24/7 and i want for it to stay that way despite cries of people who ask for everything to happen immediately.
But there ARE one problem that genuinely feels like time waster - searching for bounties. Most often than not i find myself running in circles around the map searching for that one last rat/crab or plague doctor, who is sitting somewhere in the nook that i don’t even know about. It is really frustrating. There is a need for markers on the map, name of a region is not enough. At least for singular targets (and maybe if you killed 9/10 group bounties too).
Also, i often get “Kill x with y weapon” challenges for weapon that i don’t and can’t use. Feels bad. Why would i waste precious attributes only to complete this challenge for a couple of silver coins?