Costructive Ideas

[Maradeus]

I’ll try to be as short as possible for easy reading, here are some points that need to be addressed in the game:
Edit: i have added one more point as stated in my post below:

I have a serious issue with stash space, especially with the current iteration of the game, where almost every item could in theory be used in a build along with the fact that all characters share the same stash, 6 tabs are really just too few. I suggest one of the two:

• Either have a separate stash of each character AND an account stash next to each other, or

• After hitting lvl100, 2 or 3 stash slots unlock with every character you make.

• Music, its constantly out of place of what im doing, as a YT video vividly said: “Im fighting 150 monsters and in the background im listening to a melancholic piano playing - it doesnt make any sense”, also with the quarantine and all, the music played in the Lost Era is just depressing. Suggestion: Make the music much more engaging and thrilling.

• Sub-class lock and skill leveling, it is obviously ONLY there to make the game have a longer lifespan. This is all good and dandy BUT in a game where to actually build a viable character for end-game you need a hell ton of miss and match of skills, passives and items, not being able to do it on the fly is pretty restraining, also the fact that i need to lvl 10 characters just to try all the class combinations makes no sense, ESPECIALLY if you implement a ladder system. Suggestion: Subclasses are not permanent choices, costing gold to change (or speciall drops maybe?), Skill respecs only cost 1/3rd of the current points (ie max skill of 20, full respec or skill change goes to 13 and RETAINS the points if re-equipped)

• Auto-cast implemented properly and not via key + Num-lock or in fact make skills be able generally to be auto-cast when off cooldown.

• PLEASE for the love of god, make the materials (affixes -prefixes -runes) be automatically picked up, be stackable and auto-arranged in the forge screen, there is absolutely no reason not to do this and it takes half the fun of killing if after every encounter i have to manually sort out of 10 drops the mats and pick them up!

• Make the boss fights more skill based and not just a more spongy mob. This has immense value for multiplayer as well especially if u add more adds the more players there are in a party (weird sentence, sorry) and will definitely increase the skill requirement rather that solely relying on gear-checks.

• Has been stated before, please add a loot filter.

Thats my 50 cents for now, I wont delve into bugs, balancing, lack of items and general issues atm since being in BETA everything is understandable. My goal is to share my thoughts on guidelines that would probably improve the game in the future.

Thanx for reading - prease upvote!

[ManiaCCC]

Mostly agree, not big fun of music either, bringing more skill based boss fights is good, auto picking and stacking craftables is IMHO necessary evil, loot filter is also must these days.

However for respecing and auto-casting i would be caution. I am strongly against easy respec and I think it’s good for the game, if subclasses are locked after mastering one. For auto-cast part, there is definitely issue, but I don’t think “auto-casting” is good solution. There should be either skills, which needs right timing and some decision making, or if there are some “fire and forget” skills, just remove duration altogether and make them toggle.

[Thyworm]

hey there,

that’s my video

Mostly agree. But not with all your points.

Locking a class also makes this a meaningful choice. It makes you invest in the character and locks the subclass that way. It’s also a way of evloving your protagonist. It wouldn’t make sense for a shaman to become a beastmaster either. You can get different flavors of a beastmaster, but you’re limited to that, once you’ve progressed. If everything can be respecced, at relatively little cost as gold is abundant currently, a choice for a subclass loses its meaning as it can be changed on the fly.

The same applies to auto picking up things. The fact you need to loot, whether you like it or not, provides some meaning to looting and if for example different drops combined make one unique item, then picking up those pieces provides meaning and a sense of achievement when creating that item. This is one of the reasons why developers are usually hesitant with implementing auto-loot functionality in loot-driven games. It’s one of the reasons why PoE doesn’t have this either for currency items and has very sparingly introduced it into their game (the organs, for example, in Metamorph)

I’d love a loot filter too. That would right now be my biggest improvement to the game to be honest.

[mcmagic]

I disagree on the being able to respec your mastery. I want my choices to feel permanent and important. I also think the music in the ruined era is very fitting for an ‘end of the world’ feel. The other things I agree with and the devs have been working on implementing.

[Heavy]

Some thought on your Points:

Music:
I think in most places Music is very fittign and cool, except for the example that you have given. So i agree when you are in any Combat Scenario the Music should Change to somewhat more engangin/thrilling. (but iguess this is not top priority atm)

Masteries(Sub-Classes):
I really enjoy meaningfull(permanent) decisions. So locking masteries should stay imo. It gives all your characters some sort of “thematic/feel”.

The only thing that i agree is that especialyl as a newer player you maybe need to test and mix skills to see whats good for you. So respeccing skills should be a little bit easier without losing all progress. But there are already plenty of discussions out there in the forums regarding this topic.

Auto-casting:
While i agree some some skills might feel tedious when you need to re-cast them every x seconds, while they don’t have any meaningful cooldown i don’t think auto-cast would be the best solutions.
As @ManiaCCC stated

@ManiaCCC

just remove duration altogether and make them toggle.

While this would be an easy solutions for some skills it would take away one of your very few valuable skills slots and toggles/permanent buffs don’t feel very statisfying most of the time(except they do some gamechanging stuff to the rest of your kit)

My suggestiosn is that each and every tempoary skill/buff should have enough options in their skill tree for following things:

1. Cooldown reduction(ALL tempoary skills should be BASELINE impactfull and meaningfull with some sort of cooldown, otherwise they don’t add much fun to the Gameplay i think)
2. Increased Duration(together with cooldown reduction players could choose if they want a long lasting skill or a low cooldown skill and they could even combine that if they wish)

Auto-Loot:
I do not agree with autolooting ALL crafting mats. It feels more rewarding and controlled if you see what you looted, especially when you hunting after certain affix shards for your next big craft.

I could agree on auto-looting the generic shards like Guardian and Stability.

Boss Fights(and even some of the bigger elites):
Absolutly agree. And devs already stated that they intend to introduce more mechanically interesting fights, especially for multiplayer(for example mechanics that does nto just scale in X mroe damage or Y more health per player but maybe add additional mechanics for more Players.
Here is the post form a dev i was referign to, but feel free to read the whole thread, it’s really interesting.

Multiplayer

@GingerNation and @kiss_me_quick I’m not sure where you read that. I think you might have not quite understood Kyle’s intended post. We don’t have plans for bosses which are only doable in group play. We do have plans for bosses to maybe change in group play to have more mechanics to keep things interesting instead of just increasing the numbers. We do want it to be possible to play through the end game content and get the gear you want in a solo self found mode.

Loot Filter: Well, the devs already confirmed loot filter for Phase 4, so it’s coming

[EHG_Mike]

Hi there, I’m just going to touch briefly on the music thing. We agree. We think the music is great but frequently plays music that is out of place. We have some sweet new tech that we just finished which will let us have way more control over what music is playing when. We have completely changed our entire music design process to go with this new toy. I don’t want to go into too much detail on it but it’s gonna be great!

Edit: couldn’t resist but the class locks extending the game lifespan never came up in the discussion to do that. I actually never even considered it until reading your post.

[XLVI_carpo]

According to the fix professions:
For my part I also level a new toon when I could change my passives.

For example I have played a Lightning sorc. I specced him into ice recently. Now wanna try fire. But I don’t want to respec again, because I like the ice sorc. Changing all items and changing passives as well as releveling skills everytime I wanna switch is not viable for me. So I level a fire sorc actually.

Take a bit longer. But I can better learn and test the different skills, their synergies and play style. And when I am finished, I can switch between fire and ice just by switching chars.

[Deadduck]

I don’t mind the music, the ruin era is depressing but thats how it should be, gives contrast to the moments you step out of it.
I am pleased to hear of any upgrades to tech sounds promising Mike.

back to the OP:
Sub-class: I enjoy what we have I think the system needs only refinement not overhaul.
minor pev: if the acolyte is female only the warlock subclass should be renamed witch as a warlock is by definition a male witch.

Materials: I think are a bit of a drag, if the materials auto went to crafting inventory but you could retrieve them to transfer to another character would be a solution.

Bosses: you are right most bosses are sponges you kite all day, but then some will 1 shot you with a leap attack need a happy medium but I think this is something that will be improved going forward.

Loot filter: everybody wants, only really an issue for me when I hit a chest with alot of items.

[Llama8]

@Maradeus

• Sub-class lock and skill leveling, it is obviously ONLY there to make the game have a longer lifespan. This is all good and dandy BUT in a game where to actually build a viable character for end-game you need a hell ton of miss and match of skills, passives and items, not being able to do it on the fly is pretty restraining, also the fact that i need to lvl 10 characters just to try all the class combinations makes no sense, ESPECIALLY if you implement a ladder system. Suggestion: Subclasses are not permanent choices, costing gold to change (or speciall drops maybe?), Skill respecs only cost 1/3rd of the current points (ie max skill of 20, full respec or skill change goes to 13 and RETAINS the points if re-equipped)

There’s a fairly sizeable thread here discussing respecs & the other viewpoint is that respecs (& making the masteries not a permanent choice) lead to builds being more of a loadout (like they are in D3).

[victordma]

@Maradeus

Music, its constantly out of place of what im doing, as a YT video vividly said: “Im fighting 150 monsters and in the background im listening to a melancholic piano playing - it doesnt make any sense”, also with the quarantine and all, the music played in the Lost Era is just depressing. Suggestion: Make the music much more engaging and thrilling.

i love this kind of music… it’s oldschool~~~~~

@Maradeus

Sub-class lock and skill leveling, it is obviously ONLY there to make the game have a longer lifespan. This is all good and dandy BUT in a game where to actually build a viable character for end-game you need a hell ton of miss and match of skills, passives and items, not being able to do it on the fly is pretty restraining, also the fact that i need to lvl 10 characters just to try all the class combinations makes no sense, ESPECIALLY if you implement a ladder system. Suggestion: Subclasses are not permanent choices, costing gold to change (or speciall drops maybe?), Skill respecs only cost 1/3rd of the current points (ie max skill of 20, full respec or skill change goes to 13 and RETAINS the points if re-equipped)

i’ve wanted to say this for a while… i even told the DEVs, a single player is not supposed to bust my ass, ESPECIALLY when it’s in beta!!! how do i give feedback regarding balance and fun if my equip/characters r bad/low level??? i’ve went through campaign 3 times, i’m not interested in the story that i didn’t bother to learn about no more!!! i wanna test-play and find broken builds for christ’s sake, i’m gonna go back to my feedback thread and ask them to add a “cheating option” in the game

@Maradeus

Auto-cast implemented properly and not via key + Num-lock or in fact make skills be able generally to be auto-cast when off cooldown.

Amen, i had to choose the auto-cast node for enchant weapon becuz i don’t want to click on it every 10something secs

@Maradeus

PLEASE for the love of god, make the materials (affixes -prefixes -runes) be automatically picked up, be stackable and auto-arranged in the forge screen, there is absolutely no reason not to do this and it takes half the fun of killing if after every encounter i have to manually sort out of 10 drops the mats and pick them up!

some people r lovin this, can u believe it???

@Maradeus

Has been stated before, please add a loot filter.

love the manual labor…

[XLVI_carpo]

@victordma

some people r lovin this, can u believe it???

That’s not true. You suggested to pick up everything on the entire map automatically without the need to click. And this is over the top for many people.

There was a post on reddit that they are working on a mechanic to loot all crafting material in a radius around your character when picking up one.

[nayR]

I think lifespan and replayability is the most important aspect of making respeccing “possible but difficult”. POE strikes the balance here very well here I feel.

[ManiaCCC]

@victordma

i’ve wanted to say this for a while… i even told the DEVs, a single player is not supposed to bust my ass, ESPECIALLY when it’s in beta!!! how do i give feedback regarding balance and fun if my equip/characters r bad/low level??? i’ve went through campaign 3 times, i’m not interested in the story that i didn’t bother to learn about no more!!! i wanna test-play and find broken builds for christ’s sake, i’m gonna go back to my feedback thread and ask them to add a “cheating option” in the game

You have to understand they also have their own QA and they can test a tons of builds because they have access to dev tools There is always a value testing game how it is supposed to be play.ed Yes, you could approach it like “Here have sandbox client, go crazy, test everything you want” but you wont have feedback about “real game”.

[Llama8]

@XLVI_carpo

There was a post on reddit that they are working on a mechanic to loot all crafting material in a radius around your character when picking up one.

Sacred 2 did that, it picked up everything within a radius with 1 button press. That said, it had a much larger inventory so picking up all the gear as well wasn’t really a problem. Maybe combining it with a loot filter as well so it picked up everything you could see, but you only see things that you might want to pick up.

[XLVI_carpo]

Ah… Sacred 2…

What a great game. Very unique skill system. Can’t remember anymore why it flopped back in the days…

[EHG_Mike]

There is a fine line between convenient and arcade-y. We know it’s not at convenient yet. We are adding features to make it more convenient. If we swing too far all at once, it will feel arcade-y and once you add convenience features, it’s very difficult to roll them back. We welcome feedback as we progress with these systems.

[Heavy]

Yeah, very well formulated, couldn’t say it any better.

I do agree 100%, some convenience is always welcome but don’t make it too much.

[ManiaCCC]

performance issue, devs focused too much on fancy updates, Sacred 2 was example game for new PhysX features, they went completely overboard, it completely killed performance for most players while added tons of bugs… It got quite bad rep because of that. After that point they were working on expansion, while performance and bugs were kept in the game for very long time.

[Llama8]

It was always a bit niche-y, but it didn’t flop per se, Ascaron invested quite a lot (~€20m) in various projects, only one of which did any well (Sacred 2) & I think only Sacred 2 & Darkstar One even got to market.

Edit: I don’t think it helped with the move to the different engine (can’t remember if it was internally developed, but I think so), then they added the consoles which would have added a lot of effort.

[AndrewTilley]

As an avid Grim Dawn player, it took them nearly 5-6 years before implementing the ability to auto-loot the materials dropped in that game. It’s also an option and not on by default. A substantial portion of the community basically jumped for joy and issued a sigh of relief (at least the ones not already using third-party utilities to do this).

I feel like a small subset of the ARPG community will always be up in arms about wanting to click the mouse a few more times. I just feel differently about it and I know the vast majority enjoy taking out the tedious things in these games. The loot filter is another example of this and I know that’s something that’s coming to this game. Again, that took years to come to Grim Dawn.

I’m just glad you guys are looking at ways to alleviate these concerns much earlier in the product lifecycle.