I played on and off during the beta and generally held back on too much criticism assuming certain things would smooth out by launch, but now that launch is here i thought i’d just point out a few things i noticed. Most of these are things I assume can/will be adressed as the game grows, but I thought i’d organize my thoughts on it anyways.
Class specific feedback:
Acolyte:
Lich specialization feels really lackluster to just downright awful. It seems to want to support you doing a sort of melee build using harvest; but unlike spellblade they don’t get much option beyond that, and Reaper form seems very weak as well, mostly because the constantly decaying HP makes it not last very long in melee. I somewhat understand the goal is to ride in that “danger zone” of low HP, but the “lose X health gain X ward equal to missing health” stuff seems to be king right now anyways and supports that better; though even that mechanic seems at odds with their innate leech would keep their health (and by extension ward) very inconsistent. There seems to be a decent number of things late game that try to support it, but still never feels fully viable.
Acolyte otherwise feels fine; if I had to point out anything, transplant feels kind of weird as a movement skill, especially given their low selection of movement skills.
Mage:
Runemaster is in a weird place; they seem to have a really strong early game, a decent mid-game, an awful endgame, and then suddenly they complete their build and they go back to being great. It primarily feels like alot of the issue stems from them generating an ton of ward, but it not scaling very well, and by the endgame they’re getting 1shot through all their ward; up until they get the right items to help counter that. The only other issue being their build is very self-contained, as in most of their skills seem to have very little overlap with other skills and thus they seem to suffer a little when attempting to pivot at all into base mage skills or other ones. I feel like its hard to explain beyond it feels like runemaster’s skills are in its own island that doesn’t integrate well into anything else for wizard.
Sentinel:
The early game of the class feels awful if you chose anything besides hammer throw or rive early game (and even rive doesn’t feel that great).
I think its mostly just armor barely matters, your block chance isn’t good yet for your base defense side; and you’re both not firing at range (unless you’re using hammer throw) and your doing single target attacks that are barely better than a basic attack (with skills like Vengeance only doing anything unless you’re taking hits). Other classes usually have either a ranged, self heal, or minion option, or simply hit hard enough early on.
Alot of their base skills also suffer from the fact that they don’t really function without special items, like Multstrike only really doing something if you get the sword that makes it cast smite on the primary target.
It almost feels like the class baseline is a little gutted given how much paladins get; with paladin feeling like its way overrepresented on items and how much skills overlap with smite or something else, and paladin generally supporting whatever build you want to do.
Forge Guard seems to suffer from the fact that almost any build you could think of for them could be done better as a paladin, with a few passives grabbed from the early tree; with their main claim being a minion build, which I’m still uncertain how good that really is.
General Design:
I feel like “element conversion” or certain elemental synergies kind of get pushed to the point you don’t feel like you have a lot of option. A few examples:
- Smite builds getting forced into lightning just due to how many items only synergize with the lightning conversion, but none of the base element.
- Werebear eventually getting pushed into cold damage because of unique items and general skill overlaps having more synergy on cold damage than physical/bleed.
- Necromancer minion builds that aren’t wraithlord usually end up going fire because its for some reason a more synergized element than necrotic, and its more effective if all your minions are applying ignite then. (primarily thanks to skeleton archers being strongest and fire arrow being their main option with no damage conversion options)
Overall I generally don’t have a problem with this, but I would set out to build around a element/status/etc… (even if its just physical/bleed) and eventually I’m completely needing to pivot because I just can’t find enough uniques/skill nodes that support my build.
My biggest issue with this is on classes that might have a single skill that can element-convert to a specific type but the rest of the class can’t, making that option usually feel like a dead-end.
I could probably dive more into individual things, but I thought i’d just give a high-level over overall problems i’ve seen.