First I’d like to say that this is not an overly indepth feedback coming from me. It is feedback based on the things that I tried (and by definition, the ones I was interested in, not the ones I didn’t cared about since they are not relevant to my playstyle). It is also going to talk about things that were not addressed which in my opinion need to be addressed.
In first place. It’s good to see that minion are being improved in a direction which I previously reported as being an issue, however I feel that the changes din’t actually help. Let me elaborate.
What I had said previously (and I’m paraphrasing from memory rather than go look at my exact words) was that the idea that minions have to constantly die and having to support an active minion build was bad. One of the major attractive points of minions are after all, you standing back and doing support and letting your minions do all the dirty work. For this, it was a problem that so many summons were temporary and the the only abillity that makes minion builds viable, dread shade, was not only mandatory, but it also kills minions. This seems to have been heard, but was either not understood or taken to heart.
Starting off with Dread Shade losing power and minion gain power. This was a general loss all around. Minions at best do 4% more damage and even then it’s only at level 100. the multiplicative power lost in dread shade is definitly going to lower the damage output of minions significantly. While I wanted dread shade not to be a mandatory skill, nothing was done to not make it mandatory at all. Again, all that was done was remove player power.
Now why is dread shade still mandatory? Because minion damage is ridiculously low. If there isn’t a dread shade making all your minions do auto-crit, then your minions don’t deal enough damage.
What was needed here was for minion damage to at least triple and remove the auto crits from them. Make minion damage viable. Just nerfing the skill a bit won’t make it any less mandatory and if auto-crits were to simply be removed, then minions wouldn’t even be viable at all!
Continuing on the topic of dread shade. Nothing was done to prevent minion death. This was a pretend change. In order for dread shade to give the minions auto-crit, we move from a health loss per turn to a poison stack applied per second. The fact that the poison is still applied and makes minions die means nothing was done about this skill at all. Following that, while it is understandable that “lone watcher” reduces the number of dread shades to 1, “congregation of shades” should still apply to it. especially when you consider that minions move around and won’t always stack so having 2 of them would not be the end of the world. It also should lose the cooldown once you get “lone watcher” since you are limited in how many you can have.
In other words. Assuming we are not getting rid of the idea that you cannot play without dread shade at all, then “lone watcher” must 3 things. It must remove casting cooldown, it must still allow to be affected by “congregation of shades” and it must make minions immune to dots caused by itself like poison or fire. On top of that the skill needs to get it’s damage back because as it is, it only made minion builds weaker.
Second, about the wraiths. “twin spirits” is a good idea, however, a limit of 2 shades, even if a little bit buffed is still on the very weak side of the skill. When a skill is measured against another, what matters the most is how much damage increase does it represents. When i used shades in the past I rarely saw an appriciable damage increase if I had any less than 10 of them at any time. Limiting to 2 makes the skill pretty much worthless, even more so now that it has a hard cap on max wraiths.
I also didn’t have the time to test because I don’t have the skill curently unlocked at 20, but considering the previous problems with dread shade, I’m almost willing to bet that “twin spirits” and “covenant of souls” does not combo together for a max of 4 wraiths (I could be wrong since i didn’t test). They should definitly combo, not that 4 wraiths still make this worth taking because it doesn’t, not unless their damage was massively boosted by x3 or x4.
Lastly, about abomination and this is where I have the bigger doubts on whether or not it works. “Age of undeath” looks good if the player wishes to have an abomination that stays in game, however, in order to have it, he’ll be saying no to all skeleton archers and some skeleton mages (he can only keep 5 mages after all) just to keep this minion in play, in fact the player will even have to spec into skeleton archers just to get extra numbers for the abomination. However all the damage loss from over 10 archers and a few mages is probably not going to justify the abomination. I have no doubt it can be a hard hitter, but I doubt it’s DPS output is worth the trade. Again, players must weight the cost of trading A for B and almost always the weight is, which does more damage. The minion survivabillity is also weighted in, but at the end of the day, there must be suficient DPS going out or the player will get nowhere.
To sumarise it all. While there may have been an interest to give players what they wanted, a more passive playstyle for minions which is the bigger draw for people who play minion builds. This patch accomplished none of it’s goals in this area, in fact not only does the playstyle remains exactly the same in order to even be viable, it also lost power making minion builds even less attractive. EHG needs to go back to the drawing board on this one.
Now, for the 2 things that weren’t addressed. The first I’ll talk about is the least important one, but it is important to think about for the future of the game once the game is fully released. Leveling up. Getting to level 100 simply takes too much time. Builds are planned for level 100 when all points are taken and the build is working at full potential (or close since full potential also includes gear). Currently it doesn’t makes much of a difference since there are no temporary leagues, but since these are planned to come after release which is after all, the better way to have player retention, then you need to think about people who don’t have as much time. Don’t do the mistake that GGG is doing in making a game that is meant only for the people who have no life or whose life is streaming. Your most important customer is the one who works 8 hours a day, spends a couple hours in transite to work and back home + all other things required in a normal life. That is to say, they have a couple hours to play at best each day and maybe a bit more on the weekends if they aren’t spending most of it on family. These people must be able to reach level 100 in a league within a reasonable amount of time, like 2 or 3 weeks of playing. Level 100 isn’t the end goal, that’s merely one of the archievements for any character build.
Second and this is important even now. It is the one thing that keeps me away from the game in conjunction with the current state of minion builds. Gear.
There are 4 steps in the gearing system.
Leveling gear. This isn’t gear that is that good, but for the purposes of doing the campaign, it is servicable.
Low level cap gear. This is having all your non unique pieces with 4 t5 enchantments. Essencialy, a so called t20 piece. You can also consider having a single enchantment at tier 6 or 7 (essencially making it a t21/22) still part of the low cap.
Mid level gear - This is the gear with T23+ enchantments. Meaning, a gear that has 2 or 3 enchantments above 5. This is what you call the mid range chase gear. It’s hard to find the right combination of high tier enchantments but they are worth getting of course.
End level gear. - This is the gear that is bare minim t24 but has all 4 enchantment slots with T6 gear. While not craftable, this are the real dream gear and the reason to continuing to play a character past the mid level gear.
As of right now, characters only really go somewhere between low level cap and leveling gear. This is incredibly disapointing. Gambling never pays off, good pieces of gear to craft rarely drop and when they do, they rarely even get to t16 before breaking. It is just disheartening for me (and I’m sure I am not the only one feeling this) to just not be able to properly progress the gear on my character. While grinding is an important part of ARPGs, grinding does gets to a point where people lose the will to continue because it just feels like it’s in vain and their characters are just never going to get any better.
To this effect a few changes are necessary, maybe not strictly as I will sugest just now, but these are the simplest changes that will make the game much more enjoyable to play in my view from a gearing point.
Let’s reduce the shards droped for crafting by half. Then remove any breaking, this means that players can always max out any piece. You can also add a gold cost to crafting gear and remove gambling at all so as to keep gold as a valuable currency but the costs must not be so high that players spend several days farming just to craft a single piece.
The expected result here is that crafting t20/21 pieces will not be that hard, but that’s really not a problem, then it’s when the grinding for the really good drops begins.
Another way to keep gambling is by having it offer idols instead. Chasing those perfect idols (by perfect think with the 2 enchantments you want and not at the bottom of the RNG rolls) can take way too much time so this would be a way to throw away the money.
And that is it from me. I wanted to try out 8.3 but I’ll refrain as nothing that I wanted to see improved was improved and i’ve grown tired of grinds that feel pointless and minion skills that require me to be constantly resummoning.