When I initially read the traits I thought “this doesn’t seem very build defining & interesting”, but it has started to grow on me as I give it more time.
Some thoughts:
This is all additional to what is already possible in the game (weapon types, runes, gear, gems, uniques) and I already feel there’s quite some customization possible.
Every individual trait seems rather meh, but being able to combine 6 of them does lead to a lot of possibilities to try out.
I do fear that it’ll just devolve into “pick the traits that amplify damage”. The QoL traits sound really nice, but ultimately more damage = best choice.
This is just a very small set of what we’re actually going to get, so while this set doesn’t really jive with my preferred playstyle, I do think that similar traits for classes that I have more affinity with will be interesting for me.
I wonder how it works if I want to have Tier 4 traits from various classes: I have to do the questline for each guild, so I can be part of multiple guilds at the same time? And if I want a tier 4 trait, do I need to buy tier 1-3 traits or can I save my points to only buy what I want?
From what level do we start getting these? I think that the game already needs to introduce quite a few things early on (controls, runes, food, town, gear, quests), it’ll be another thing to tutorialise.
I’m sure that some people will find completely broken combinations: do you have a plan what you’ll do in that case? Nerf, keep, delete? How fast?
I wonder if there’ll be respec or only “if you want something else you need to farm more points” (if I want to unlock completely different traits, not just if I want to respec my 6 traits from what I’ve already unlocked). I’m not sure if this will be necessary, that depends on how fast we get these points.
Overall I’m looking forward to this, and the examples made me more confident this will work well. But I also have a few questions about balance and how you’ll keep the community happy (eg what if a combo is as powerful as the hp-casting ring?)
yeah farming the points is probably their vision of longterm goals and playability haha.
and i think that there are too many traits, as you said, that don’t do very much, and compared to other traits, some are less than underwhelming.
and picking 6 out of 384+ traits? even half of that is probably too much (divided by 3 (melee/tanky, bow/agile, magic/summon) is still 64, so 10(!) sets of combinable and GOOD traits or 20 sub-class focuses. that is still more than enough for just those 3 main melee/agile/magic archetypes.
i was thinking about pushing the limit up to 8 so you can have 2 sub-classes (3 traits each, like guardian tankiness, and guardian thorns strike explode, when we are doing 2 GOOD traits/class/tier) so 6 plus 2 QoL traits.
I don’t really think that the Tier unlock quests will be super intricate, we are talking 37+ classes with 3 unlockable tiers each, so 111+ UNIQUE faction quests?! yeah not even GGG does pull that off.
There will be 24 classes at launch and some of them belong to the same faction, so if the faction quest will be one per faction, not one per class, there are substantially fewer quests than you anticipated.
I was also thinking whether 6 is enough or whether we should get 8 or 10 for more customization.
However, given the other methods of customization it’s probably ok. If you get too many then the outliers get more and more crazy.
I think it’d be awesome to get 10 traits, but perhaps they need some grouping system to limit damage scaling then. Eg you can only have up to 5 damage traits, but you could take 10 QoL traits if you take no damage traits. But this quickly gets too complex to manage
I’d agree with the fact that a choice 6 traits among hundreds of them can feel limited and that a bunch of them will be redundant.
Although having so many traits scattered across classes early on in the game can be more of an encouragement for the player to level up different classes and explore synergies to unlock the perfect combination. So from a progression point of view I understand this design.
Yet there’s still an issue with the feeling of having limited trait capacity. Maybe they could separate traits into 2 categories; 1 with main mechanics, and a second one with power ups for main mechanics or secondary effects; then they can have 4 main traits and 6-8 secondary traits(?).
That way we won’t have to choose between dozens of redundant traits, but rather choose main mechanics and then complement them with alternative effects or just different support/utility passives.
I imagine there’s a bunch that could fit each category, so the community might be a bit split on the allocation of them. But overall that sounds like a decent idea to provide more customization while keeping power in check.
Eg I would have 6-8 traits that let me get into stealth, distract enemies and reduce my falling damage, but only 4 that would increase my damage.
