I think 70 hours is a good number to take pause until the next patch, having experienced every new bit of content and system iteration. The patch after hotfix 3 sees the game in a highly enjoyable state for anyone to pick up. The story content and cutscenes are next level amazing, I’d Patreon your writers and artists if I could; they’re that freaking good. Whoever wrote Irmgard’s lines needs a damn medal, especially that banger line about hope being older still. Same goes for Selene.
With that said, the balance and gearing are still not quite there, so I’ll touch on what I hope to see down the line:
Enchants
- Dividing elemental type boosts is not good. If you get any non-single element weapon or new cool rune or staff/wand that does not benefit from your “30% increased cold/fire/lightning/plague damage” enchant, or its specific buildup, the item is unusable as a result.
I don’t think making mages single element casters is the correct call here. A mage should want to mix and match elemental runes as they see fit, and if they want to RP a pure single element mage, that option is still there if you remove single element boosts.
Consider replacing single element bonuses to just bonuses affecting rune attacks, and not necessarily just flat % boosts but rather more fun effects like “after using a rune attack, or finishing an attack chain, your next rune spell will trigger an extra mini version of another rune attack like an ice nova for an ice spell or a fire nova for a fire spell”.
- 2H VS. 1h+offhand balance needs to be revised. There’s no reason to run a staff with 5 enchants when a wand+offhand can run 10 enchants. The same spell hits for just as much damage on the wand, and the wand gets the benefit of extra enchantments or a shield block.
2H need double the enchant slots to match 1H+offhand.
What’s more, with how slow staff attacks and how vulnerable with the long animation locks staff is, it’s at a distinct disadvantage to generating focus on safer, quicker wands.
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I think you’ve seen the combo of unrepairable+unbreakable with the “based on on durability” affixes, by that point the item might as well be a magic item. Consider that the drawback enchants for casters are crazy bad. No cloth caster is gonna play with 29% increased damage taken on taking damage, or losing stamina or focus when hit or have 10-20% less max health. Drain health and drain focus are also nonstarters.
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The inability to upgrade items to plague after being enchanted and landing on magic category completely bricks items and makes expensive crafting aggravating. If I spend 4 bear paws to craft a hat for it to end up stuck in magic category, that’s gonna piss off players.
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Which brings up the current major pain point of the patch: Gearing. It is simply too unreliable and slow to target farm for specific plagued armor types and weapons. The RNG is so bad that in 70 hours of play I am still running a mix of cloth and leather because a damned plagued cloth helmet has refused to drop, and similarly a physical plague quality staff to benefit from the shatter effect on frozen targets since you disallow infused weapons from benefiting.
It really feels like you have no control over what your character will become. Instead, you usually have to make a build of whatever does drop even if it’s not the character archetype you want to play.
- Why are so many weapons missing a charged attack altogether and this is not communicated on the item tooltip? This completely devalues the weapon against frozen targets for shatter bonuses, assuming it is even physical, and what’s worse is that there are many enchants like “on charged attack” that can roll on a weapon that has no charged attack.
Items, Crafting and Consumables
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Infusions need to stack instead of overriding an existing infusion. It makes the infusion vials totally worthless because if you run a weapon that has a native infusion effect like burning or freezing, applying an infusion oil replaces the infusion, same goes for echo powers.
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Chest rewards feel really bad, especially in the Crucible in the Seneschal room, but even for the final chest rewards in it. Most of what you get is just low tier fluff materials, when they should be accompanied by higher tier materials (bear paws, bear skulls, more fallen embers) and more gear drops.
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Crafting armor costs are wildly expensive materials wise. 4 bear paws for a single hat piece on top of rare wool drops (cloth material drops are rare and unlike the blacksmith, the tailors do not sell higher tier cloth components like the blacksmith sells ingots).
-Consider adding more set blueprints, or at least making them appear at the store once we acquire an item that’s part of a set. It’s really hard to control cosmetics in this game, the character looks like a patchwork clown and it’s really annoying that you feel like you have zero control over how your character looks. It’s impossible to have a cohesive and pleasing look for your character fantasy since you just have to take whatever little good loot piece that drops regardless of how it fits together.
Also, cloth armor sets need review, outside a nice birdman set or the blackhaven mage they’re mostly rags or hobo clothes or villager armor, not the robes you’d expect of a mage archetype. The seer set is more magey but the brown color palette is pretty damn ugly.
- Merchant restocking needs to happen significantly more frequently. Getting to buy 5 fish and tomatoes just per irl day makes the merchant upgrades feel like garbage. The idea behind merchants is that they allow you to convert surplus silver into valuable resources so you can bypass farming at the expense of silver, but because they restock so infrequently this loop is broken. Some prices are also strange, why would I buy a food plate for 1 whole silver when I can buy one critical component for 20-30 copper since herbs are not the limiting reagent? Most armors don’t even sell for 1 silver to a merchant, why would a single food plate cost 1 silver?
Combat Balance
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Telemetry will probably tell you what rune attacks are deleting bosses, and it sure is not Homing Frost even though that single spell took the brunt of the nerfs despite doing less damage and now being somewhat focus cost inefficient for how much damage it does. It’s actually better to channel Frost Stream now over casting Homing Frost because of how costly Homing Frost is while not doing significantly more damage.
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Freezing bosses is too effective. You can just stunlock them. I already submitted a separate thread with suggestions for a boss specific frost debuff that makes frost still feel powerful without making frost infusion worthless on bosses. Alternatively, the simpler solution is to halve the time a boss is stuck frozen, so that the uptime is more reasonable and bosses get to attack more, even if they do so more slowly.
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Lightning needs to have some better use case on single target and bosses, it can’t just be a cleave element or it will be discarded in favor of fire/frost build. Plague damage needs to be tuned according to the higher plague resistance enemies have, or it won’t be used as plague infusion.
-Parry still feels too unreliable and unrewarding for how risky it is to facetank big damage when it fails. Especially on bosses. Look at all your current streamers and content creators playing the game. They’re not even bothering to parry, 99% of them are still just defaulting to dodge roll.
- Armor balance. Everyone is using higher armors and there is no benefit to having cloth armor as medium dodge is now more than sufficient and with leather/mesh you end up taking 10%+ less damage than full cloth, even higher for plate.
What’s more, sturdier melee builds are still able to cast just as effectively, with rune attacks that do just as much damage as cloth caster builds. Caster builds lose meaning when they have crappier armor and crappier weapons that do less damage, but their spells and focus economy is no better than regular melee builds.
- Please have the focus bar display a numerical value. For controller players, unlike PC players, there is no UI that constantly shows when a spell is ready, you have to hold down the shoulder button to see if a rune is filled up enough to be used. We want more immediate feedback on how many attacks we’ll have to do for the next cast or how many back to back casts we can afford.