Hi all.
Lots of feedback here, basically an essay so I don’t expect many people to read it which is fine.
Notes: Old ARPG player - including the somehow controversial PoE - thus comparisons come naturally. If anything that I talk about here is already mentioned or addressed elsewhere, I apologize.
Stash Tabs
Amazing, great job with this. Now if only I could use my mousewheel or ctrl+arrow key to scroll (unless there is a way to do this and I haven’t figured it out…)
Ice Beetles
Yes, Ice Beetle Shrines. They’re cool. Where my fire and lightning and void and poison and physical beetle-bros at though?
Monolith System
It’s great! More of this please!
Loot Drops
Still too many imo, but as a die hard uber-strict+ “if it drops it means I pick it up” loot filter kinda guy, doesn’t bother me that much.
Affix Shards on walkover+aoe pickup would be nice though. Believe me, the idea that players need to have a visceral feeling of picking up shards it’s misguided or plainly incorrect. I don’t care what I pickup when it comes to shard during the run - I might look at it after, but usually only when it comes for crafting time. That’s because I pickup every shard I see, and I think many if not most do the same. Wishful thinking probably, but there it is.
Idols
Love 'em! The Idol Inventory is fine after 8.2 if you ask me. My only complaint are idols that roll with two mods that just cannot (currently) work with each other - A dagger prefix and a bow suffix, for example. Yuck.
Crafting
I like the current crafting system very much. It does feel bad fracturing 4-5 decent implicit bases after only a few rolls though, but considering how often bases drop, I’m a subscriber of the unpopular opinion that “it’s fiiiine dude, relax”.
Rune of Shaping
Or the “Unblessed Orb” as I like to call it. Maybe I don’t understand the purpose of this item, but currently it seems to be utterly useless to me. It’s fairly easy to drop a few bases of one type in just a couple of monolith runs, and generally their roles are already moderate. Far easier than adding instability in the hope of a (seemingly impossible) high implicit re-roll.
Leveling
Leveling is in a decent spot, however I have found extremely odd gaps and jumps in area-level - in one area I am 4 levels below the content, and two areas’ worth of progression later, I am 2 levels above the content without going out of my way to kill or skip more or less enemies. Doesn’t really matter but smoothing it out is a part of polish I think.
Spires
Delete them. Being constantly offscreened means I can never AFK or look away for whatever reason without risk of death. No. Delete them or rework them.
Runes of Shattering
Yeah so you can logout and login and continuously buy Runes of Shattering. So I reckon having their stock set as infinite or removing this “feature” need to happen - hopefully the former.
Loot Filter Colours
Pretty sure everyone understands this but I’ll mention it anyway - give us custom colours or far more options for colouring please! I understand general filter customization is being improved constantly, but this should be a priority imo.
Gameplay Pacing
I like my zoomy PoE builds - a lot. So much so that my first 20 hours of LE consisted of whining to my friends about how slow the game is, much to their annoyance.
However, 150 hours later, my eyes have opened. You can go slower in a game and have fun! All of this is to say I think the pacing is very good right now. Good job. I’m no game dev/designer but I imagine this must be a very tricky thing to balance correctly.
Multiplayer and Trading
Right, saved the most tender topic for last. Firstly, I tried to be unbiased in my opinion but it’s difficult. I play from South Africa, so we generally accept playing games with 200 ping (PoE for example). This sucks. 200 ping means 200 deaths in difficult end-game content.
I mention this because there is only one thing in Multiplayer I am looking forward to - the trading. I haven’t thought about the actual party-based gameplay at all, because it doesn’t matter to me. Clarification here is important I think, because my thoughts are skewed by 200 ping, etc… For this reason I will talk only about trading.
Trading - for the love of Eterra, if you make me alt-tab 20 times to trade 5 Glyphs for 10 Runes I will have to seek very expensive therapy and I swear I’ll joke about making you pay for it, EHG! Please, please, don’t do this. The completely ridiculous notion that trading is a “social interaction” in PoE is a complete fallacy: Best case is this: Alt-tab, click the copy/whisper button, alt-tab, push enter, push ctrl-v, push enter, wait for response, fast invite, fast tp, fast trade, scan items, click accept, tp back to hideout. You may get a “t4t” and send one yourself, you may get some automated 3rd party app’s trading response - but this doesn’t matter. This is not a social interaction, AT ALL! And this is “best case” - often it’s 20 alt-tabs and 2 scam attempts later.
I am all for a “Restricted Auction House” and/or bloody phone verification, whatever it takes to not have this ludicrous “player-driven trading” experience with 3 and a half 3rd party apps in the background simply to even enable trading… I could rant about this for hours. My friends will hate me for saying this. I am being selfish. But I don’t care about that. I care about the time I save by not going through the aforementioned rigmarole. My time on this planet is finite - do certain developers know this? Hm? Are they going to refund the literal hours wasted on alt-tab-trades? No, I think very much not!
Phew. Man that felt good.
Closing Thoughts
All-in-all, so far LE is one of the best ARPGs I’ve ever played, and as far as I can tell it’s only in it’s infancy. You guys are gonna grow a fantastic game if you keep going with this vision and in this direction. Thank you so much for 180 hours of very fun gameplay - here’s to the next 180 (1800 at this rate) hours!
