Disclaimer:
I have first played during 0.8 and returned with the release of 1.0, totaling 750h played so far and would like to give some feedback. Sorry for anything that the devs already confirmed to be coming - I try to stay informed for the most part, but I do not intensely follow every developer stream, their discord replies etc. Also, these won’t be in any particular order.
I am also omitting positive reinforcement, not because there is none to be given or because the devs don’t deserve it. I love this game and want it to be as good as possible. So I am pointing out the things I can think of that need some work.
New masteries and player expectations:
The latest masteries - ie Runemaster, Warlock and Falconer - are awesome. Visually, in terms of depth and wrt feel. But they severely outperform most other builds and completely trivialize the game. The game is not balanced around people blindly farming 1000C, and the difference to older builds is just too stark. I think you released them too strong and now people got used to their power, but that still should not stop you from nerfing them hard regardless, they will still be just fine. Runemaster needs to lose 30% DR on CFC, that is just too strong. Explosive Traps instantly capping your Glancing Blow and giving infinitely scaling Pen to your Falcon is busted. Add caps and iCDs to these kinds of nodes, as you usually do. Lightning Blast’s node ‘Closed Circuit’ is way too strong and should also be capped, singlehandedly fixing your Increased Damage and Crit Chance. These are just some examples. These masteries are just incredibly overtuned across the board.
The old builds aka left behinds:
Comparing masteries like Shaman, Forge Guard etc to newer stuff just makes you miserable. The difference in power and interesting mechanics is mindblowing - which speaks to how the team is doing a great job in terms of gameplay feel recently, but also how old stuff needs to be given that same love asap. Playing Swipe Werebear Druid vs anything new like Falconer feels like you are playing entirely different games. Please be faster about bringing old stuff a bit more up to par, the beauty of this game is experimentation, but a lot of the old stuff is not worth experimenting with, it is just too outdated and does not feel satisfying to play.
The priority of bugs:
The game is ridden with bugs and it completely invalidates one of LE’s biggest strengths; dropping something exciting and wanting to build around it. More often than not you will find that whatever you wanted to try was bugged, be it a particular node or item (Spine of Malatros, smth you marketed in the Warlock teasers, has to be the worst offender…) just not working at all.
The insignificance of pinnacle content:
I love that you are working on a pinnacle boss system right after launch, I really do. But my above points on balance and bugs really make me worry should you not address those immediately in the same patch, too. There is no point in pinnacle content if balance is all over the place. Either 1) they need to be quite easy such that any somewhat functioning build will have an easy to decent time clearing it or 2) they are actually difficult, which means only the absurdly imbalanced builds will be able to clear the content and playing anything else feels like you are shooting yourself in the foot. Both cases make adding pinnacle bosses pointless, so balance and bugs need to be addressed the very same patch.
Quality of MTX:
Your model of monetization is one of the most fair one could think of. Though your success is predicated entirely on the MTX being exciting enough for people to continuously buying them. And frankly, they just are not at the moment. Please work extensively on expanding your MTX team. I know it is still quite early and not unusual for the quality to improve a lot over time (see eg League of Legends), but if it does not, this model will not work.
Pace of development:
This ties in directly to the quality of MTX but also bugs, balance and pinnacle content. There is so much still to be done in this game. And having followed this game’s development for a few years now, the team just is not fast enough for me to have a lot of faith in them being able to do the required work in a manner timely enough to not lose the interest and good will of players. We are no longer in EA, people will judge you harshly. I hope expanding the team and speeding up development are the top priority for EHG as the pace up until this point will not be enough.
Performance:
It is baffling to me how very good systems still have performance issues. Especially memory leak, at least that is what I think is happening. Shards are making the game lag after a couple of hours of playing Monos. I am just not picking them up to avoid this issue. Multiplayer is unplayable, at least for me. Loadscreens take forever and often times end in me and my friends not being able to play together in one way or another. The game is not unplayable due to performance, so I would not consider it the highest priority, but it still needs some work in this regard - especially multiplayer.
Mobility skills and Sentinel:
Mobility skills bug out way too much, leaving you stuck and unable to move until you break out of it using a different animation. This can easily cost you your character because now your movement is on cooldown while you are exposed. Speaking of movement skills, Sentinel movement skills need a rework. It is best to just not specialize them at all and just use the last specialization slot for Smite or HH to proc those one way or another even if the build is not centered around them, as the payoff for stuff like Shield Rush or Lunge is nonexistent. How come Flame Rush gives you insane amounts of DR, on Mage of all things? Or Teleport indefinitely extending your haste and giving a ton of resistances etc? Why does Shift give an absurd amount of Dodge off Dex and cleanse ailments? The less agile classes should have more DR and defense attached to their mobility, while the others should have mobility with lower CD, more range, more damage increases etc.
Melee:
Melee feels significantly worse to play than ranged characters, if not to say horrendous. I played a lot of melee Paladin and it does fine, I am not too concerned about Melee power level, but it just does not feel good. It is clunky, there is way too many ground effects to dodge that stop you from dpsing on many builds, and there is no real payoff for getting in there. Most melee skills have way too little range and cleave/AoE, eg pressing skills like Multistrike and Vengeance feels horrible. Even if you spec into Area, pick some Area affixes and so on, any random Ranged skill will hit twice the area and not force you to go out of your way to clear packs. There are not enough affixes that reward the playstyle. Also, DR is ubiquitous for Ranged, eg a Mage gets Flame Rush, Flame Ward, CFC, … and hits the entire screen from afar; DR should be way more exclusive for Melee classes. Regardless of balance, it feels like there is no payoff for going Melee, it is all self-imposed suffering.
Ward:
Well not much to say, it is absurdly overpowered and trivializes the game without much effort at all - beyond the HH interaction and low-life builds, there are so many ways to trivialize the game with Ward. Runemaster equips Twisted Heart with any form of Leech and Cast Speed and turns invincible to just name one other offender. The low-life package needs to be way more specific, it just feels cheap and does not fit. Ward Retention is way too strong, there is no point in going Ward Threshold either. Make Ward per Second more of a primary way and get rid of most ways to generate Ward multiplicatively, like via Cast Speed w/ Ward on Hit or Twisted Heart etc, it is just busted. Make Retention taper off extremely quickly into the high 4-digit amounts of Ward and make it stronger up until the low 4-digits.
Attribute balance:
Strength is too strong. It is absurd that you get the same amount of Armor from Strength Prefixes as from Armor Suffixes and you get any additional Attribute scaling from it. Same for Intelligence, items like Mad Alch Ladle or Fragment of Enigma are just way too strong, now couple that with its Ward Retention; something needs to change there. Attunement is horribly bad and classes like Shaman don’t make it look much better either. Give it way more Mana per point or rework it.
Loot progression:
There is a gaping hole between getting into Monos and going from solid Rares to your first decent Exalteds, to getting even remotely close to BiS. I have spent so many days on so many characters not finding any upgrades, even with CoF making it so much easier on paper compared to before. As soon as you are looking for 1) the correct base with 2) a good T7 and 3) sniping the right affix with Removal or Chaos, your odds plummet straight to the depths. I am not talking T7 rare affixes like Hybrid Health with a sealed T3 and perfect rolls, that is a pipe dream. But even just the above 3 conditions make progression feel horrible. There also is never the feeling of basically having finished a character. EHG put stuff to chase in there but it feels so disheartening to try for some sweet Exalteds that you are better off just calling it quits early. And that in and of itself is not a problem necessarily, it is just that the state where you hit this brick wall comes way too early. An experienced player will rush through parts of the campaign, do Monos, find upgrades quickly, grab a Sanctum Key and finish the campaign in no time. Then give it 2-3 days and you have all Empowered Blessings with your first few solid Exalteds. Give it another 2-3 days and you are already very close to that point where trying to progress further feels pointless and any upgrade can easily take a week of farming. The excitement about gear progression just falls off a cliff.
CoF:
Rebalance the 1LP Prophecies, they are unclickably bad. Be more transparent about how Echo Corruption, Area Level, required Corruption thresholds etc influence the rewards. Make Runes of Creation less ubiquitous in Prophecies, they are handed out like candy which invalidates how good acquiring them used to/should feel. There is a ton of wasted space and time in the selection process, maybe make more information visible other than just the icon. There is no reason for us to have to hover over every single icon to see the any details, so include more criteria that let us decide whether it is a Prophecy we want to click without having to hover. Give us a way to, at a glance, discern which area currently involves the most of our currently active Prophecies. Eg a set of icons, one for each Monolith, Dungeon and campaign Boss, and upon hovering all Prophecies completable in that area are highlighted; or add that area icon to the Prophecy icon itself. Rework the Rank 9 reward and make Boss Uniques more farmable instead.
More variance in interaction with Monoliths:
Exiled Mages and the Caches are a good start, but we need way more. Also, mechanics that make you interact with the Web of Echoes would be great. Just a random idea, but maybe sections of Webs have a chance to be corrupted by the influence of a powerful Void creature or boss. You could fight your way straight through the center of the corruption and eliminate the threat, or weaken the source first by cleansing surrounding Echoes. Maybe the rewards depend on difficulty too, so you have to evaluate whether to take the risk for more rewards or play it safe at the cost of some rewards. Just a random example, but currently there is almost no thinking involved in Monoliths once you know the basic strategy of increasing corruption. Also the shortened duration of modifiers made them very negligible, I would prefer more variance in their duration so you could pick whether you want to stack them or not, at the moment is impossible to stack them at all.
Meta progression
Blessings are something, but way too little. Progression should be felt through more than just the gear on your character. Give us extra passive trees that affect aspects of the game like Monoliths. Add new mechanics in upcoming Cycles that provide more layers to progression other than just better/different equipment on our characters.
Layers of defense:
Defense could be more nuanced. Resistances or rather their absence are not punishing enough due to how they offset enemy Penetration. Going from 73 to 75 means taking 100/102 = 98% of damage instead of 25/27 = 92% of damage, ie actually capping your last few % of Resistance is almost irrelevant. After that you get Endurance, some Armor until diminishing returns kick in, Crit avoid/reduct, Block/Glancing and some DoT mitigation before just stacking Health. More affixes or effects that extend the scope of defenses would add a lot more depth to the process of insulating your character. Especially ones that are more niche and provide unique playstyles on their own; Damage Dealt to Mana before Health is a prime example of an interesting extra layer of defense. Please more of those! Also, more unique Mob or Echo modifiers that drastically challenge conventional defenses for you to take precautions against. It feels like any mob I encounter is basically the same in terms of dealing with it. Their moves differ a bit and the modifiers asking me to adapt my playstyle are few and far between; the ones asking me to improve/broaden my build basically nonexistent.
DoTs and Ailments:
While scaling offenses provides a good bit of options, DoTs and Ailments feel lackluster to scale. Ways to increase the tick rate or other (multiplicative) means to alter their damage, eg increases to base, would make those builds a lot more interesting to brew. Also, Leech from DoTs is inherently flawed. There is multiplicative delay in receiving the health from Leech, as not only do you need to cast and hit, but the damage itself is greatly delayed once applied. You notice this difference drastically when trying to build Twisted Heart DoT builds compared to Hit builds, you just can’t sustain any Health to feed Twisted Heart.
Dungeons:
Just feel frustrating to run for the most part. Adding randomly generated barricades is extremely lazy and infuriating. I would like to enjoy the unique mechanics but am busy being annoyed by walking into dead ends all the time. Also, we need more reasons to visit these dungeons. Soulfire Bastion needs way more exclusive rewards. The Arbor Vault is a waste of Gold on MG and CoF would rather spend the Gold on Stash Tabs, though with them being cheaper now the Vault becomes a bit more attractive again. Also, just more Dungeons in general would be neat. I am baffled how little has changed in the regard over the years.
Ease of testing:
Please give us a separate Specialization and Passives loadout at the training dummies that can be changed freely or smth. Trying to test interactions and whether stuff actually works (because you never know with all the bugs) could not be more tedious, having to gather the XP outside for every single node you change. I know you do not want players to minmax the fun out of the game and I agree (dps meters etc), but that won’t happen anyway if we are not able to inject more fun into the game first via being allowed to actually get a proof of concept for our ideas. Unless you do not even want that, in which case why have the dummies in the first place, would be better to just remove them entirely to not create the illusion of a testing ground.
Unequpping + to Skills and respeccing Passives:
Just need a complete rework. More transparency when you are floating unused Skill Points from reequipping items. Give us an option to freely respec Passives and only have to present a ‘legal’ set of Passives upon confirming all changes. Having to respec every point one by one is just tedious.
Mana:
Give us more options to sustain our Mana, like Mana Leech / on Hit / on Crit / … and make Regeneration more scalable by giving sources of flat Mana Regen, or even More Regen. Just % increased does not cut it all. This makes all mana hungry builds unplayable unless the class has a very specific source of absurd Mana sustain. The most efficient way is to play cheap Skills and reduce their cost further via Throwing Cost, Spell Cost from Wands etc., which is not enough diversity.
Health Regen and Overheal:
Make Regen more attractive. Vessel is one neat payoff for Health Regen but not enough. It should be an option that is competitive but Leech is just better in almost any scenario. Also, some form of Overheal would be an interesting extra layer of defense that could give Health builds a way to create a buffer that imitates Ward to some extent.
Endurance Threshold:
Is way too weak. You can easily get way above 100% increased Health when investing into it and 20% of your health is converted to Endurance Threshold automatically. Flat Health and Endurance Threshold are priced equally (eg +75 at T5 for both on Gloves), yet the latter only provides 112.5 more effective Health w/ capped Endurance, which Flat Health already beats once you hit 50% increased, which is incredibly easy.
Blessing viability:
Some builds struggle to find good Blessings and the Lagon Monolith provides very little at all unless you are going Lightning, Cold, Freeze or Mana, or are still in the early stages of fixing your Resistances (Lightning). Non-Ignite DoT builds will fail to find anything good in the Black Sun Blessings, the Flat Health is too weak.
Loot filter sound cues:
The point of the loot filter is to be spared from having to look at a majority of the drops as they will be useless to us. Though sound effects still play for items hidden via the filter, eg you still hear Exalteds dropping regardless of what your filter does. A huge part about LE and ARPGs in general is becoming more efficient in clearing and feeling like you are overpowering the game’s challenges. This includes becoming faster and clearing efficiently without slowing down much at all. Now the problem arises with how long it takes for items to drop in this game. The gap between a killing blow and the item dropping is way too large, especially for special mobs with a death animation that is nothing but frustrating and disruptive to the flow of the game. Please only play sound effects for items that are shown by the loot filter and preferably also make them drop more or less immediately upon kill. The dissonance of the visual indicators and audio indicators is just frustrating and slows you down, or at least makes you wonder and regret whether you should go back and check what kind of Exalteds just dropped while you were already flying past what you killed.
There is a lot more to talk about, but it goes in-depth about very specific details that might/should change anyway as part of addressing bugs, balance etc etc so I will stop here.
Again, I do not mean to come off negative, even if the entire post points out things I view as flawed. I care about the game and just want to see it become even better, so this is my attempt at getting some feedback out there. I really enjoy what you have built and am looking forward to what is to come.