I’m working on a game myself in Unity. I don’t consider myself an expert with it. I haven’t released anything yet. I’m still learning a lot. I am also not a master game designer, nor have I delusions of grandeur. That said, I have a few (a lot) questions and comments (and maybe a bug or two) based upon my time spent with Last Epoch. Of course, I’m unfairly holding Last Epoch to the standard of the Diablo series 
and in particular Diablo 3 for the robustness and feel of its combat system.
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What’s been your biggest problem with Unity?
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The frame rate is a little low for what I expect. I assume this is because this is just an alpha.
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I swear Unity has input lag but I think it might just be the spellcaster’s animations. He goes through a few frame startup before activating a spell or melee swing. This makes it feel awkward. (There may still be some input lag.)
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Remove the full item tooltip on mouse over in the world. It’s a little distracting.
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If I spam cast Static Orb, my mana goes negative. I can cast a spell so long as my mana is above 0.
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Blizzard gave a great talk at GDC a few years ago about the controls of Diablo 3. I recommend watching it but one topic was button prioritization, such as holding down one button and then pushing another. The second hit button is prioritized because “the player probably did this because this second button is probably really important”. In Last Epoch, if I’m holding down 1 to cast Lighting Blast, I may want to hit 2 to cast Elemental Nova just once, but it currently doesn’t do this.
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Are the levels built 1) completely by hand, 2) using the pre-built rooms of Diablo 3 or 3) completely random like Diablo 2?
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The environment art is pretty cool. To be perfectly honest I’m not as enthused about the spell effects because they don’t feel “weighty”. (Could I do better? Certainly not.)
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It’s an alpha but the animations and effects in this game sometimes feel make me wonder what just happened and don’t give a lot of feedback. I think that self-resurrecting scorpion’s “I’m back!” animation should slap me in the face.
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When changing gear, the tooltip shown doesn’t change.
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Item tooltips go below the bottom of the screen.
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Are you specifically trying to avoid the late-game gear problems Diablo 3 has or is it not even a consideration?
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So the rationale Blizzard gave behind the health orb system in Diablo 3 was: 1) buying an inventory full of potions boils combat down to “how fast can I click this button”, 2) combat becomes “how many potions does my ass have left” and 3) it’s not fun to buy potions, fighting is fun. Do you think the system Last Epoch has with refilling mana pots may not scale well late game? That is, you kill a single enemy and it refills completely. We’ve seen percentages scale poorly in the past and somehow I don’t think the end-game thinking is to make healing a solved problem by just stacking potion gear, and then it just becomes .
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I swear I saw a rock golem take a giant step back before he decided to lay down and die after his health ran out.
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Is it intentional that when I despecialize it remove all my skill points but 1?
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Having to click the “Specialize” button feels weird, since it becomes “Despecialize” afterwards. Muscle memory.
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The passives grid can probably use something to tell you how close you have to be to activate a node.
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There may be too many items dropping. I feel like I have to go to town a lot. (Hah.)
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I think the mana and health bars should be more prominent. Tracking my mana and health suddenly went south when I almost died fighting a mage but I almost didn’t even notice it.
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Volcanic Orb just kinda shits on everything.
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The Fireball spell feels great. Relatively quick startup, fast travel speed, feels chunky when it hits but its damage is so low compared to Volcanic Orb it’s just not worth casting.
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Meteor doesn’t appear to line up with its explosion particles. And it, too, feels nice and chunky but same problem as with Fireball. Also, Rapid Descent may become a “yep, get this always”.
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Ice Barrage also feels chunky but also clunky to use with those arcs, even for nearby enemies. It may help if those balls travel at different speeds, with one hitting almost instantly, but that still leaves them missing a lot. And then there’s Volcanic Orb.
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Because of the innate strength of some skills, maybe cooldowns? I know it feels weird but it would also add a damage rotation. Spamming Volcanic Orb feels mindless. It worked in Diablo 2 but that was 18 years ago.
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Not yet. Only got so far.
Don’t ask but for some reason I feel a slight kinship with this game. One of my first large Unity projects, that turned out to be way too fucking complicated for a first game, was a turn-based RPG with randomized loot. I built the item randomization system (based on roles, with 5 different item rarities, with the higher rarities getting more common and lower ones less common as monster level went up), a crap UI for inventory (hey, it was functional) and a crap UI for gemming “shards” (a hybrid of the Materia system from Final Fantasy 7) into your gear. It worked. And so to see an ARPG with randomized loot makes me picture all the code I wrote and the UI problems I had and realize I still had a long way to go to make it releasable.
And finally, thank you for this game. It gives me hope that a game in Unity can look and feel good. lol. And does reinforce that some of my complaints about my own project may just boil down to art problems. (Oh hell, did I learn a lot about the importance of artwork and animation in combat feel and UI presentation.)
[Edit]
Yes, I tend to make lots of edits.