A little feedback about 8.2 and some of my experiences so far with it.
From the patch notes alone I knew that I had a lot to unpack and relearn from what I knew about the previous state of the game. To do this I wanted to start with a fresh level 1 character with no advantages from stored gear and see what was new from the start. Of course I had to go with the Acolyte so I could try out the puking, exploding zombies. Incredibly fun skill to play with!
The rework of the UI is well done. The map is gorgeous…just gorgeous. I did read in chat often that it was a bit bright for a lot of people, and I can see that. It’s not something that bothers me. But the detail in it, holy shit! I’ve been a map designer since the pen and paper D&D days so I know a few things about some game campaign maps. It makes me want to bring out my Ravenloft set and set them up across the map on my monitor lol. As I leveled on through the story I was noticing a lot of things added in. I noticed the ramp in difficulty more this time. I didn’t struggle, but it was pleasantly challenging.
That was until I got to monos and hit good ol Orobyss for the first time with my Acolyte and her puking flaming goons. He stomped me over and over and over lol. I didn’t even feel frustrated, I was having so much fun trying to figure out the mechanics and taking it all in. I was undergeared, so I wasn’t surprised. But, I’ll save that grind for gear for another dayl. At that point I switched over to a Druid Spriggan build I had already and used that character to explore into the Monolith system.
To those of us used to the old Monos, it’s a shock to take in for sure. It even took me a minute to tie together that you click on the Gold question mark on the left hand side of the screen to initiate your quest echo. I figured that out and then noticed how much better it feels that we can either do the quest right then or just keep going to keep exploring…What!? It feels really good. You can go back and do those quests whenever. And if you fail it, you don’t lose 4 echo runs now. You can dive right back in. Feels really good. Then with the added options to chase just about anything you want, I found myself finding it very hard to stop running Monos. Such a huge improvement in my opinion.
I found my first double tier 6 item in an exalted node way deep in a mono web. That felt so incredibly rewarding for the amount of time I put in to push that far. Performance has been stable for me, I have not had a single crash. I can run youtube and keep other sites open in the background and feel no impact on fps in game. I know this is different for everybody based on pc, but for me it’s been smooth. That’s even in the echoes with the grinders that usually tank most peoples play.
Thank you to the team for building this badass game!