I ve so mixed feelings for LE…I really want to like the game, but there are some major issues (f.e. 85 % of all skills are crap, just look at the level leatherboard).
But THIS is an insult by you devs!!!
One of the Lizard is a Set Item Lizard?!?! Do you even play this game? NOBODY is using shitty set items. Since ages you did not improve them by adding Lp or so.
But now adding a Lizard like this??
I cant see a future for this game if you stuff like this.
How did this happen? One dev who never played this game came to his supervisor “I ve such a great and cool idea, lets implement a Lizard who drops set items!!!”
Supervisor dev was amazed by this idea and told all other devs to make that and nobody was telling them that this is absolute nonsense?
I assume this is designed to be evergreen content, so whenever set items do become useful, the code’s already there and the lizards will not be as useless. They have said that they will look into set items in the future, so there’s hope that they may be useful, and having this might be worth something.
The big green lizards also always drop at least one Glyph of Envy and several exalted items. The set items are meant to be a bonus that matches the colour, rather than the main reward of that lizard type.
Set items are in a bad place in terms of balance and design. They’re largely underpowered and are dead end items with no way to upgrade them. We have plans to add a system in future that allows you to do more with them. But until that’s in, set item rewards are relatively unexciting, and we’re aware of that.
Appreciate your answer and explanation.
Still i dont understand this choice from a gamers view. We have purple lizards for exalt. And the extra Envy Glyph…dunno.
Why use resources and time for such things. PoE is coming with big steps, I think you really need to focus on other things and adding item lizards and minor QoL stuff.
So many skill & skill nodes are 0 competetive to LE “meta” builds. And meta should not mean that 9 out of 10 players play the same 2 builds. Just look at level ladder. Top 100, there are like 50 who play same falconer build. To less diversity.
There is so much potential in your characterization and itemization system. Each skill can be played in like 9 different ways. Where 8 of them are useless, barely can do corr 100.
Example? Why should someone ever take the skyfall node from healing hands…
If i would be in charge i would people pay just to play the game, every single class and skill and evalute which skills are useless, heavily underpowered and what they need to be fix.
Im not a dev, but cant image that it is too difficult from a technical side to change a 100% increased node to a 100 % more through a hotfix
You could make a significant change do d4 and even poe with douzens of cool and playable builds.
Imo not the only concerns i have with LE, but on of the major ones
You really are clueless as to programming times.
Creating loot lizards was 100% way longer than that. Not only did you have to create the models/animations, you also had to program the behaviour, etc.
What you might say is that creating the set item lizards took less time because the loot lizards themselves were already created and that was just adding another in a different color.
First step: planning the feature, documenting the design decisions, delegating the different tasks to the different team members.
Not sure how long it takes an experienced 3D artist to create such a model, the textures, animations, and sound effects, but I am pretty sure it takes at least several hours overall. My petty amateurish dabbles in 3D design are painfully time-consuming, and I just create static models for 3D printing, not animated stuff.
One or two devs working on the coding side. AI behaviour, creating entries for the entities with all the values.
Testing stuff.
Creating a green texture instead of a blue one is easy. A couple of button presses, if you knew you would have more than one colour variant.
Creating an additional entity with a different colour, spawn chance and loot table is also quick work. Copy the blue entity, adjust the necessary values.
It’s possible that they used pre-existing ressources as a base, but I am not sure how many lizard models with treasure chests on their back are readily available. Maybe a kitbash job.
Even taking them as a base model and repurposing, rendering is the task that takes the longer in programming.
Not to mention that you need to program a new AI behaviour, since no mobs so far exclusively flee from you.
Not to mention that you need to program dropping loot on hit, rather than on death.
Not to mention everything else Horus mentioned.
Definitely way more than 1h and more likely more than 1 week as well.
I am very bad with blender, but it would take me around 1 hour to make a basic snake model. Assuming its not just a unity store model. Thats just a click and download.
Regarding running from player, the snake may just have a perma fear affect on it moment player spawns on it, or old blind.
Highly doubt this took long. I seen people on YT make entire games for gaming gams, we are talking here 1 snake within 1-2 hours
I would like to see this as well. I’m sure the balance would be good and the game challenging, but not too challenging, to a wide variety of playstyles & player skill levels.
There’s a lot of hyperbole in this thread. Is LE perfect? No. Yet people play it because it’s fun. For me it represents a nice balance between the dumbed down interface of Diablo and the over-the-top complexity of PoE. It’s the Goldilocks position (for me personally).
Not every build needs to be awesome. Some like variety. Yes you’re going to see the best builds at the top of the ladder, but that’s self selective as it’s not showing a random subsampling of the population. Just because a build is popular in the ladder doesn’t mean it’s popular overall with players either. Enriched maybe, but it’s not going to be 50% of players are all playing one falcon build.
You also massively underestimate the amount of time it takes devs to do things, and also naively assume they don’t actually care or play about the game. I’m pretty certain they’ll be playing it a lot.
The development process / time does not start with firing up blender, visual studio or other dev tools.
Everything goes faster if you are just one dude in a garage who does stuff as it comes to his mind. No real planning ahead, no meeting where you talk stuff through, no formal planning and documentation. No time required to explain and delegate tasks.
I think they no longer use stock models for LE. IIRC, they had some during beta, but phased them all out for the 1.0 launch. But perhaps I misremember things - happens at times. So I don’t think they just grabbed an existing lizard model from the unity store. It’s also not simply the gecko pet from the MTX store with a backpack.
Even if you do look for available assets - from experience, I can tell that you are often looking more than an hour until you find something that fits your needs. Research is also development time, as is planning, documenting, and testing.
I think it’s great, now add giant loot lizards and loot lizard bosses, in fact add a loot lizard level with a loot lizard village and a loot lizard rainbow pet mtx (maybe thats the special event mtx reward)
I also see LE between D4 and phd poe. But i have to disagree with you. Your “best” builds we see on the ladder are mostly only viable ones for each class. I dont consider a 150 corr build as viable. Not 50 % of all players play ballista build. But 95 % of all rouge players play this build.
And thats same for each class. 0 - 2 real viable builds, where 2 is the exception.
They made a foundation where each skill has so many skill nodes and can be played different in theory. And then they just stop balancing their own way of this system (which is basically great).
Warpath on its own could be played in like 5 different ways/builds.
Why not make every skill “awesome”? Or at least more than 0-1 for each mastery…
Yeah, but that depends on what you view as viable. If it can do 300 corruption the devs view it as viable/good. If it can do 1k or more it’s unbalanced & needs to be toned down.
There are more than just 1 skill awesome/viable/whatever for each mastery. But what constitutes “awesome” is very player-dependent. @Heavy has a very different view on what’s awesome than I do.
