Greetings,
After leveling my first character (Bladedancer) to level ~80, I would like to share my opinion about the game and give some feedback. Maybe I didn’t fully understand some mechanics / concepts in the game, but since I won’t be playing the game in the near future anymore because of performance issues (explained below), I wanted to write this now.
Some random thoughts
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I really like the skill system and how intertwined everything is (shift with shurikens or acid flask, shadows, shadow daggers, shrouds in passive and skill trees, etc.). It made leveling and building up the character really fun and also very visible. It wasn’t just the numbers going up but the feeling that skills visibly getting stronger.
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Difficulty curve in campaign is not really a curve but step-wise. I only noticed difficulty increase in 3 spots: first ancient era rift, ice cave and lagon island. Maybe my resistances were not good enough at that time, but still. Other than that I didn’t really felt any change in difficulty at any point. I would have expected some build up in an act form the beginning of it to the boss fight, maybe bigger mobs or more rare enemies. Even if this is already the case, it wasn’t enough in my opinion.
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A big fan of the boss fights (expect the last one in campaign). I am really happy that they are not facetanking dps races. Maybe some of the mechanical / telegraphed attacks that are boss-only can be given to mobs / rare enemies. (The radial attack of Rahyeh in Black Sun comes to my mind, which gave me some trouble in my first couple of tries.)
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The crafting system allows you to have lower power-level versions of your endgame gear with the affix shard system, which I really like. It also makes the early grind meaningful as a new player (or as SSF). Even if I am not finding good gear, I can always shatter and fill my forge.
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I can see that the late game grind or leveling my 20th character could be underwhelming, because I won’t be needing any currencies anymore (gold, shards etc.). So, the late game is either grinding for a perfect roll; gear or blessing. Some shortcut mechanics might be meaningful since you get the good gear at higher echoes and the blessing at the end of a timeline.
Some random suggestions
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Better explanation of class-specific mechanics. I didn’t knew what a shadow does for a long time, until I accidentally pressed ALT on a skill node, even if it didn’t say on the tooltip that there was more information for it. I believe the tooltips are recently updated, so maybe this will be corrected later. My suggestion would be expanding the game guide with info about class specific (and other) mechanics. Just having the information about Mastery Bonuses, Shadows, Shadow Daggers, Shrouds (and even stuff like Haste and Frenzy) again in the guide to look it up, would have helped me.
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Remove the dialog window for the shop / gamble / respec NPC. I find it unnecessary to have an extra confirmation window to open the shop / gambling / respec. If I click on the NPC, then I already know what I want to do. Apart from the quest from the first gambler in the game, there is no dialog with them and they can be explained in game guide, if really needed.
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Show, for how many echoes the given modifier is still active. I don’t know if this is really relevant for late Timelines, but I once made the mistake of going into the quest boss fight with “+100% health” and & “enemies regen if not damaged recently” modifiers. The fight took way longer than it should have. Knowing how long the modifiers are going to be active would make it easier to plan ahead.
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Option to auto pick-up and/or auto stash crafting items. At least a hotkey to send crafting items to forge, so I don’t have to open my inventory every time and click it manually.
Smaller not-well-thought-out ideas about crafting / late game
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More runes, not to remove/modify but to add effects. A rune to add a random class-specific affix to an item. A rune to increase the item rarity with random affixes without adding instability (basically gambling with items and runes instead of gold, but would incentivize collecting normal/magic items)
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More glyphs effecting rune mechanics. A glyph to get more shards when shattering. Glyphs to increase the chance of removing a prefix/suffix with rune of removal, adding more instability than normal. Glyphs to increase the chance of rolling only prefixes/suffixes with rune of refinement, adding more instability than normal.
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Make the power-roll of a blessing slightly dependent of the level of echoes conquered before finishing the quest. So, more echoes finished, greater chance for a better blessing roll.
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Option to roll the power level of the blessing player have instead of choosing a new one, to reduce the endless blessing grinding.
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Option to roll (once) the offered blessings for three new ones for some expensive currency, also to reduce blessing grinding.
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Since there is already a critical success mechanic in crafting, allowing a critical success to create affixes >T5 can be considered. Maybe with a new glyph which increases critical success chance. But since you can’t use a Glyph of Guardian it would mean high fracture chance. A high risk-high reward craft.
Performance issues
- The optimization is really bad. I am not the only one with this complaint. There are enough threads about it in this forum. I am playing the game on a laptop (i7-9750, 16GB RAM, RTX2060). I had no problems with the campaign. 60 fps with medium settings, everything fine. Starting from echoes 20+ or arena waves 70+ I had constantly FPS drops (to 10-15). Lowest settings, v-sync on/of, streamer mode on/of, nothing helped. The real problem is, that my laptop was extremely hot after some time in arena waves 70+. I just stopped so my laptop doesn’t burst in flames. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I indeed stopped playing because it got uncomfortably hot.
Graphics are not the best out there. They are acceptable right now, which is fine for me. But there is no reason to have such a bad performance. I really hope the devs prioritize optimizing the game rather than improving the graphics / adding more effects and make things worse.
I really enjoyed the game so far and would very much like to come back. I might play the campaign with another class now. But I just can’t play the endgame content.
Thanks for reading!