There are a number of things that suck the fun out of the game that compound on each other making me really question if i want to keep playing this game because it is just starting to feel like it is wasting my time.
My first, and biggest, issue is that incoming damage is so spikey. You are only ever in one of two states, completely fine or dead. This has been a recurring problem with all of the ARPG’s i’ve played in recent memory. During the endgame there is never a time where you can look at your health bar and see that you are in trouble and do something about it. Damage is only ever completely inconsequential or going to outright kill you with no in between. This is caused by Healing/leech/ward being overtuned and any damage you take that doesn’t immediately kill you gets basically immediately and (worse yet) automatically fixed without any real conscious act of the player. This feels incredibly bad since it makes it feel like there is no counterplay and leads to many instances where I felt like there was nothing I could have done to prevent myself from dying. I honestly question why i even have potions most of the time since they almost never have a purpose… This seems to be the industry standard now-a-days when it comes to ARPGs. Yes it requires so much less balancing and still technically works but it is also so much less fun and engaging.
Secondly boss mechanics are usually not very intuitive, often times conflict with their other mechanics, or are just bad.
-Any mechanic that rotates around the enemy is just bad because of my first point. You are either completely fine, or dead. If you are dodging it correctly you are completely fine (but usually doing nothing else for an extended period of time which is just boring), but if another mechanic needs to be dodged or you just mess up a little, you end up out of sync with the pattern and take multiple hits from it basically guaranteeing your death. Like everything else it is overly punishing if you try to do it and mess up or something gets in the way. A great example of this is the Unraveling Decay attack by Julra in Temporal Sanctum. You not only have to dodge the spinning X, but also the boss’s cone attacks as well as any puddles on the ground. Especially with it being an X and how quickly it moves you have basically no margin for error to constantly be running in whatever size circle matches your current move speed which has its own problems when you have effects that give temporary speed increases and your speed can change in the middle of the attack. Not only that but with how fast it moves and how long it lasts you are basically doing nothing for a long period of time which is more punishing to builds that rely on damage leech or things like ward on attacks and makes it so you can’t afford to just soak the potentially smaller hits from the cone attack or puddles because you just don’t have your health sustain going.
Also the experimental affix mages, i’ve had them do their spinning attack with their back against a wall in maps that only have small corridors where it was literally impossible to avoid
Also in multiplayer the telegraph for where Lagon starts his beam is seriously bad if he was targeting one person for the previous attack, but then switches targets to someone on the other tentacle to start the beam.
-An example of a mechanic that is not intuitive is Reign of Dragons monolith boss Emperor of Corpses. His Soul Bomb attack has multiple mechanics in a single attack that are impossible to show to the player with the current ground circle system. It has a ground telegraph for the initial explosion, and then has a cloud summoned on the outside. The first time I fought it i got out of the circle for the explosion (which doesn’t really have any visual effect that there was actually an explosion) and then almost died to the gas cause there was no circle for it and wasn’t expecting it having ran too far out from the initial circle thinking i had as much time as i wanted to get back in. Because there was no obvious explosion effect I also thought there was no explosion and the gas being summoned was the only hting and the ground telegraph was just inconsistent with other uses and its purpose was to force ranged characters in close so when he did it the second time i stayed in the circle thinking it was safe and died.
In general i’m not opposed to bosses having intentional big/flashy one-shot attacks and/or being really challenging things. But if you are going to do that you need to make it easy to re-fight them with minimal or no cost. For monoliths there’s not really a problem, but there is a huge problem here for dungeons.
This is compounded by the fact that death is way too punishing. Every end-game system has its own way to adjust their difficulty (which is awesome), but then you do everything in your power to discourage us from doing anything difficult where we might die. Not only do dungeons require a dropped key to get in, but you lose the key and have to restart from the beginning if you die. Monoliths you lose the echo reward for completing it which is 99% of the reason to do it in the first place unless you are after a boss drop.
As far as solutions go:
One thing i suggested in the CT but never saw any official response on in any of the posts so i’m going to repeat it here, was to remove the penalty of losing the echo completion reward if you fail. Having to spend the time to re-do the echo from the start is enough penalty. Anything more and you are just discouraging people from playing the game how they want to play it (in this case doing difficult but slower content vs speedrunning easier content). I dont find speed running trivial content as quickly as possible fun (plus i’m playing a bleed build which is also inherently less useful/fun with lower health mobs), and i feel overly punished for wanting to run difficult content. In terms of loot there is inherently nothing unbalanced choosing between doing slower runs on higher corruption (with less loot/time but with higher chances of it rolling better) vs doing faster runs (with more loot/time but lower chances of rolling better). But losing the echo reward only punishes the slower more difficult runs that have a much greater chance of death and makes it strictly better to do the faster runs. Please let me play the game how i want to without being punished for it for seemingly no reason.
For the spikey damage, there is no easy fix and I know it would be a big in-between cycle change that probably wouldn’t happen til atleast Cycle 3. You need to give people bigger health bars and reduce the damage of most attacks. You then need to nerf the healing of everything by reducing drops of potions and the effectiveness of leech/ward/regen. The end goal is to find the right balance between having a long enough time-to-die from full health so that people have time to react to being in a bad position, and make healing limited enough that taking damage can’t always immediately be healed off and feels impactful.
I"m also so tired of resistances… its never been a fun system. It’s always required to max and is always incredibly tedious to manage, making end-game gear replacement particularly horrible. Yeah its thematic that void knights get more void resist, acolytes get more necrotic resist etc… etc… but i’m so over it. Just make one “all resistances” stat that is a fraction as powerful as the number of current resistances so you still have to dedicate the same number of gear affixes and talent points to it, but its so much less annoying/tedious since you no longer have to worry about getting just the right amount of just the right types of resistances. If you feel it affects the loot quality/acquisition rates just lower the minimums on the other affix ranges.
For the boss mechanics, I’m fine with empowered timeline or high tier dungeon bosses being particularly difficult, but it would feel a lot better learning boss fights if non-empowered timeline bosses and Tier 1 and 2 dungeon bosses get a damage reduction so you can survive the mechanics and learn them without necessarily having to die to everything. You can combine the damage reduction with other things so that they can still be deadly, just not immediately or on the first hit. Make lingering clouds/ground effects ramp up in damage the longer you are in them so they can’t just be ignored, it just gives you more time to get out of them before they kill you. One-shot attacks can give a debuff making future hits from it do more damage so that after being hit by 2 or 3 of them it will still kill. You can even just make them do a % of max/current health or something so it’s obvious that it has to be avoided
For the rotating attacks on all difficulties since i doubt they’d just be removed entirely, you can give some invulnerability to future hits from the same source for a small time to give the player time to get back in sync with the pattern. Or maybe reduce the damage taken if they are moving in the direction they should be.
For the punishing deaths in dungeons, just remove the key requirement outright. From what i’ve read in other topics it sounds like you end up with basically unlimited keys in the very late game anyways so why is it even a thing in the first place? It just feels bad when you have just finished the campaign and are in the early stages of the endgame and you don’t have a stockpile of keys, but then have a lot of reasons to do them between Prophecies and end-of-dungeon bonuses. These things already have limits put on them (prophecies require favor, legendary crafting require the base items to make, and lightless arbor chests require gold) so I just really see no balance reason why they need to be double limited. The only people it’s actually punishing is those who failed the dungeon and were already punished, just making it feel that much worse…
Also on the topic of keys if they are going to be kept, dear god why are they still non-stacking items that don’t get sent to limbo like the crafting materials? Please make them go in the materials section with the affix shards. If you really want them to remain items atleast make them stack… During early access and you added the first dungeon(s) i can understand why it started out this way… but it really should have happened before 1.0
Something that would help with all of the previous points is to just make it so that if you reach the boss of a dungeon, you should be able to just jump right back into retrying the boss fight like you can with monoliths. Having to waste the time to do the pre-boss stuff when you don’t even get the reward for finishing the dungeon is a complete waste of time for no reward and is bad.