Hey there,
I’ve bought this game on March 13 and will soon clock my first 100 hours. This means I’ve played from patch 0.8.1c and onwards. So far I am really enjoing my journey and would like to drop some feedback.
What I enjoyed
- Character progression and builds (passive trees, skill trees, unique items): There are a lot of ways to customize my character without the systems being overwhelming or restricting. Game lets me run a druid that invests almost no points into the druid tree - and it’s working just fine.
- Loot and crafting: Some uniques are interesting enough to make me want to build around them. For rares, while it is reasonably easy to craft a decent base from scratch, the best mods (t6 and t7) are drop only. Imo, this does a lot to keep the grind interesting, as the strongest items can’t just be crafted on a maxrolled blanked base but must be found.
- COMBAT: I LOVE the fact that mobs actually follow and chase you around instead of just turning into mindless zombies when you’re more than half a screen away, allowing for big pulls. Movement skills feel great and fast, I believe the charges allow for a bit of offscreen targeting - please don’t change that though. Also THANK YOU for having telegraphed attacks, this is such a big plus for me. Boss fights feel epic albeit being a bit easy for now (might be build dependand though).
- The setting: I like the great diversity in environments in the different timelines and believe the time travel setting in general allows a lot of creative freedom (from medieval era up to possibly steampunk-esque elements). I’m looking forward to what’s still to come out of this.
- Community interaction: This is not really feedback on the game, but I believe you go to great lengths to be “in touch” with your community. Saw a dev answer questions in general chat and announce a dev stream on twitch the other day, you also seem to be quite active on the games subreddit.
What I would love to see added or improved
Please note that some of these points are really minor nitpicks. After adding multiplayer and the rest of the masteries, game could probably be shipped as is and be fine enough.
- Multiplayer, of course
I know that it’s on the way and I’m really looking forward to it. So far it seems like classes will have some group support but none can be turned into some kind of “aurabot”, which is fine. Gonna have to see how the group dynamic plays out with the vast differences in movement speed and the need to stand still to dps for some builds, while others basically kill while running. - Visibility of buffs: This issue exists in basically every ARPG I have played. In general, you want to keep your eyes on your character at the center of the screen. Buffs are often displayed at the bottom or top of the screen. I would love to be able to move specific short-timed buffs around (like, place them under my character, or above the healthbar) and make them smaller. So I can keep my eyes where the action is. Also, I am using a relic that buffs me for 4 seconds after drinking a potion (Grimoire of Necrotic Elixirs). I believe there is no buff icon for this at all.
- Tooltip DPS: I would love to see more details in the tooltip dps, like attacks per second, crit and ailment chances for this specific skill, types/elements of damage it does. I probably forgot something.
- Consistency/tooltips: Maybe I just encountered a bug. If not, it feels like some tooltips are inconsistent or just not yet fully finished. Example: In most cases, when i procc some ability through a unique or another skill, I won’t lose the mana the procced skill would normally cost. For the primalists “Maelstrom” skill with the “Gathering Storms” node however, this is different. I don’t know if there are more cases of this and just trying it out by speccing into and later out of it wasn’t hard to do, but I believe this could be written in the tooltip.
- Detailed death recap: Just for the record, I love the fact that you implemented a death recap at all and my suggestion might be overkill for an ARPG. Anyway, I really like the death recap in Heroes of the Storm. It gives you a summary of what happened to you in the last few seconds instead of just stating the last hit that killed you. For example, you will see that deadly ultimate x took 90% of your health before some random autohit dealt the killing blow.
- Affinity stash tabs: PoE recently introduced those. Basically you can set a stash tab to hold a specific type of item. When putting items into your stash they automatically get sorted into their designated tab.
- Ward display: I play a “low life” build and I sometimes find it hard to understand how much of my ward is left looking at the health bar above my character. Also, when I use a potion it looks like I dropped to half ward despite having more (I convert potion health to ward). I understand why this happens but I do not know how I’d fix it.
- Autocasting: From what I’ve seen from several guides, people seem to be “autocasting” some abilites by using numlock. Maybe give an ingame option to do this?
- Duplicate keybinds: The ARPG Chronicon lets me use the same keybind for multiple abilites. This also enables some kind of autocasting on cooldown and allows for very relaxed gameplay. I understand if you may not want to implement this, but I think it’s neat.
- The goddamn trader in the monolith always closes my inventory when I walk to my chest. I want to kill her. (Just kidding.) (No I’m not.)
Random thoughts
- Trading: When multiplayer mode comes around we will probably have some kind of trading in this game. While it won’t make or break the game for me in which way this is implemented I think it will be an important aspect. In a purely solo self found mode the best way to upgrade your character is to go out and kill enemies. In a economy that is not regulated at all, imo there is a risk that trading (specifically flipping) will become the best source of income. I’m sure you have looked into this topic a good deal yourself, but I’d still like to give my thoughts. I read somewhere that Diablo 4 plans to introduce a system where an item can be traded only once before becoming bound to an account. This denies any kind of flipping and strongly encourages crafting an item for your build yourself, because that way it can still be traded away once you’re “finished” with that build.
- Arena and infinite scaling: I rarely if ever feel like playing arena. I can’t really put a finger on what is keeping me away from it. I don’t really feel like this is a problem though. Maybe it’s a good thing the infinitely scaling game mode is more of a “side attraction” instead of the main thing. I feel like infinite enemy scaling isn’t necessarily a good thing for an ARPG as it heavily hinders build diversity and I think it takes away from the feeling of your character growing stronger if there’s always just another difficulty where it will again take half a minute to kill a rare mob.
Thank you for reading if you’ve made it this far. I’m sorry, this post got way longer than I thought and I probably still forgot something.