Intro
During my whole time playing, i have had this feeling like pretty much the entire game is like an experiment.
The way people experiment with different builds, its the same feeling with most of the game mechanics.
The mini-stun that every enemy has, is by far the worst idea i have ever seen in a game.
multiple enemies have aoe or some form of barrage and i have died so many times because 1 hits you and the stun from that makes it so the next kills you, because i couldnt get away.
Classes
All of my time has been playing rogue, mainly marksman because i like range and monolith progress is not shared between characters.
I have tried so many different builds and i ALWAYS go back to flurry+multishot.
the reason for this mainly comes from 3 things, universal (single target and multi target), fast animations and stun immunity during channel.
Almost every skill has a delay on the attack animation but flurry doesnt or its at least the lowest.
That delay is extremely important and only reduced by attack speed, but the longer the delay, the more attack speed you need to have, for it to not be as much of a problem.
Explosive traps with detonating arrow was fun, I managed to make some single arrow explosions fill my entire screen by stacking aoe increases, but the mana cost is too high for the bow version, yet melee has up to +218 flat damage, +6 skill points AND 0 mana cost, thats just the weapons before any buffs from anything else… basically removing ANY balance between them.
I tried melee bladedancer and it was a fun idea, but thats about as far as it got in terms of fun.
You try killing a boss with a forced 0.7 second cooldown between attacks or not having enough mana because skills cost too much.
I also tried falconer, the bird is nice.
The lack of shared progress has put me off experimenting that much on other masteries.
Dungeons
Problem:
Not giving people some sort of guide on how to defeat the boss is a problem, especially with Temporal Sanctum.
Solution:
Each dungeon needs a page in the in-game guide explaining how it works and the boss mechanics, then a BIG button on the gate (where it asks you for the key) linking to the guide. (for now you can just send people to a youtube video, until someone gets around to the in-game guide).
I know some of these things can all be avoided in various ways, just like they can be changed to give people a better experience in the first place, rather than the feeling like everything is working against them.
Suggestions
Shared monolith progress between characters.
I already started a new character for 1 skill and 50% more of a passive tree, i have the gear, let me try it out without spending so much more time grinding corruption.
All bow skills need faster animations.
All bow skills need better tracking because arrows have such small hit boxes, enemies dont even need dodge to avoid them.
The Master Archer node on Marksman passives needs to be 3 levels and instead of just multishot it should be all bow attacks gain +1, +2, +3 projectiles (possibly a 3 point bonus where projectiles gain enemy tracking or 20/40/60% reduced width between projectiles).
Hail of Arrows skill needs reduced mana cost to 15-20 and to be changed to a hit skill or at least the channel node ‘Endless Barrage’ needs to apply the ‘Skystrike’ node every 1/0.5 seconds scaling from attack speed.
The reason for this is mainly because most things are ‘on hit’, which automatically throws any Hail of Arrows ideas out.
Puncture bow skill needs a 30-50% increase in range and it is also probably the worst when it comes to actually hitting enemies.
Remove the cooldown on Dancing Strikes or make the cooldown scale with attack speed, it already has a long animation and doesnt do enough damage with how long it is.
This is just my experience and ideas.
Thanks for reading if you managed to get through it and any feedback is welcome.