Hey, I’ve been playing this game from pretty early on and overall I really love this game. My biggest problem, the one that kinda made me stop playing for a while is the crucible. I’m indifferent to the rogue like additions, I don’t love them but I don’t mind them either. My biggest issues with the newest iteration is that there are:
There are zero loot drops unless you make it past the echo knight.
Falling contributes to about 90% of my deaths and it feels really bad.
Falling was always an issue even in the first iteration of the crucible but it felt less punishing just because you had that potential to find something cool even if you died early. Now you could get almost to the end, which is a significant time sink, and get pushed off a ledge and you end up with nothing. Its so unsatisfying. If I had the choice of playing this Crucible or the old one, I’d take the old one in a heartbeat.
The easy change is to make the levels not have an abyss to fall to your death to.
Just make it water or acid for some ticking damage to get back.
But making people fight in tiny little platforms where a light dodge or two will send you rolling right off the edge or put you right on it for your attack animation or an enemy to punt you off is just really obnoxious level design.
I’ll also say that even on levels where there is no abyss to fall down into, some mob placement is outright silly.
How can you put Gloam Goliaths on narrow ass stairs going up? There is no place to fight the damn thing, these are supposed to be dangerous mobs with high poise and high knockdown damage, and you have no room whatsoever to maneuver around them because they sit on a narrow spiral stairs.
The answer is obviously kite them down the stairs, but this is such a ridiculous slog because the stairs are winding down quite a distance and waiting for a mob to catch up to the base floor before you can do anything is plain dumb.
Ditto for the constantly teleporting witches in the middle of narrow platforms. They are an absolutely miserable mob for melee builds to catch up to since so many enemies in this game seem capable of spamming dashbacks that span almost the entire screen.
Enemies in this game don’t follow the same rulebook the player does.
The player is sluggish and deliberately slow in movement, further weighed down by a super stingy stamina system where one attack chain eats up still an entire stamina bar at 18 points of stamina unless you eequip the crow ring.
But mobs seem to have immense mobility and the ability to spam it along their attacks.
Difficulty where you have to avoid getting knocked off a ledge is just lame and frustrating. I can understand one area where it can be risky, but when its half the levels…
So many times I had a great build, but got jump camp off a ledge. Or you dodge an attack and whoops off the ledge… I run a light armor build and you simply cant use the dodge button on a lot of areas… so I have to tank the damage with my face … on light armor
The design is incredibely lacking. Waiting 3 seconds to swing my 2h weapon only for it to miss by 1 pixel on the questionable hitboxes & controls is not fun. Combat is poop, loot is just very uninteresting.
The echoes are the only redeeming part. But really you get a great setup only to fall to your death. If you encounter a bug and restart the game, you lose your run.
Last time I was that frustrated playing a game was League of Legends.
Can you prevent dodging to your death from falling?
Could you make it so the player control the dodge distance up to a maximum?
Can you make it so that when you run around you dont randomly jump off a ledge from the questionable control direction and hitboxes?
Holding the same button for running and jump works well if you cant fall. In this current state its very dumb since you have to choose between walking at a terrible speed or risk falling off when you wander around a ledge.
Running and charging holding the run buttton will something climb random ass ledge/barrels when you are trying to attack. This is utterly stupid. I dont want to climb a ledge when I do a run attack.
Rolling into barrels will sometimes climb them rather than destroy them. Im not sure who thought 1 button for 2 different actions was a good idea, but it is not. It infuriates the player from this shitty design.
I’m totally with you. I just started playing the breach update and leveled 3 characters back to back. I enjoy the new content but the crucible is still not in a good place.
In the overworld Wicked sometimes feels more of a platformer than anything else with all the verticality going on. And falling damage is important in this aspect and I like it as part of the exploration aspect. But there simply is no need for falling deaths in the crucible. It is frustrating more than anything else!
I think falling to your death in the crucible should simply not instantly kill you, it could just deal damage and bring you back slightly staggered. Make it an exception to all the other areas in the game where it just sends you back at lower health, that way you can still have death pits as a frequent element without encouraging people to play in a way that is blander specifically for the crucible
Provided youre strong enough for the crucible enemies, it feels like youre far more likely to die from pits/fall damage than the actual enemies, and thats just uninteresting
If the enemies feel like a bland slog until echo knight, it sucks if someone dies to a death pit while bored out of their minds, trying to rush it faster. If its gonna be a fully combat focused place for people to go ham, might as well get the most out of the death pits by… Having them be an element you stay near more, interact with more, take more risks around it, rather than just avoid it to prevent wasting 10 minutes of your life
And as a bonus, nobody is accidentally running off and dying at the treasure room