You asked and shall receive a long post.
Campaign
Finish it. Not only because it should have been part of the 1.0 release but also because I would like to see the campaign in the endgame.
Items
Leveling itemisation and more uniques
LE needs more unique items. The base game of Grim Dawn had roughly 700 uniques (sets are not counted in this). The first expansion (what Orobyss will be) added 317 uniques to GD, the second 181.
Compared to that unique items in LE feel repetitive. Even when playing a fresh start you very quickly reach the point where you have seen like every single unique and set. With CoF it’s even faster.
But more importantly there needs to be more variety at almost every game stage. There needs to be like 3 or 4 build defining uniques for each skill at end game. And then there needs to be a comparable amount of uniques supporting each skill during the leveling phase. And then there should be a need to switch from those early leveling items to a comparable amount of mid game items (for me this is like level 30-60) before finally switching to end game items.
I know that low level uniques can be BIS for end game builds, but I’m not talking about legendaries. I also don’t like “general” uniques that are so “fit all” that they always work. Like the new beast amulet with it’s +1 Skills. Too strong, too general and too early. These feel like a band aid fix because you did not have the ressources to make so many items.
I just ran a sorc from 0 to 64. The only “real” items I used till I hit level 60 something were the Firestarter Torch (still using it lol), the quest unique gloves that leech elemental damage, the rift beast amulet and the Calamity helmet for increased fire damage. No LP on anything, no legendaries. This carried me without worry or the need to change a single slot to the level 60 Monos in a single evening of just throwing a fireball and then evading + teleporting ignoring most enemies. Everything died to spreading flames from the torch and fireball.
That makes the campaign very stale item wise. You get the one item that can carry you and you are set till midgame or even endgame. No further interaction needed. When your class has fire support build in you don’t even need any legendaries.
This is due to limited amount of items and balancing. For item choices to matter however the game needs to provide an appropriate increase in difficulty. If everything dies with level 5 uniques and makes you able to throw a single skill and watch the whole screen die without you needing to care about what’s happening at all, then new items won’t matter because even if they improve the numbers everything still “just” dies.
So balancing pass for the campaign + leveling items + more items for each area of the pre-endgame parts of the game.
Mid game itemisation
First time around in a new season with a fresh start it’s fine. Provided you don’t get any of the broken leveling items from a nemesis. Then it’s stale again because mid game itemisation does not exist anymore. A good nemesis drops means you don’t need to bother with it till early endgame (start of monos).
Late Game itemisation
Fine till the point where you have 1 to 2 lp on the more rare stuff or 3 to 4lp on the common stuff. Personally I’m not one of those mega endgame players. I kill regular Abberoth, push to like 700 to 1k corruption, get all my factions leveld up, get lvl 100, get my build enabling gear as good as I can reasonably get, get a few extra 1lp red rings and call a build finished. If I’m motivated I may attempt doing Ueberroth (haven’t done so yet).
I can’t be arsed to farm for the ultra rare stuff like good double T7s with almost perfectly rolled 2lp+ uniques. The time investment for this is such a major turn off for me that I quit before attempting it. I don’t play enough to get those.
And for me this is fine. However this leads to several “feels bad” moments.
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Getting good 2+ T7 exalted affixes on a shitty base means I got an item I probably won’t ever use because I probably won’t get the unique that is good enough to be slammed with the exalt.
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The other way around getting a rare item with very high lp means that I probably got an item that I won’t be using because I won’t get a fitting exalted item.
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As a CoF player I won’t be able to trade those even if I get one.
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I’m an altaholic. I love playing a lot of different characters. Pushing really high corruption to increase the chance for the really good stuff dropping does not fit into my playstyle. It was made easier thanks to the echo that makes corruption shared but I still need to equip/level up my alts and those are hours that “wasted” (they are not because I’m having fun during them) for finding those really good items.
Personally I would also love to see more Uniques with damage type conversions and more items with strong added skills. I love building builds around triggered equipment spells. I’m missing this in LE.
Dungeons
I’m not talking about them in their capacity as campaign skips but in their function for the endgame.
I know you are already planning on changing how they work. That is why I made an extra section for these. Later in the post I come back to them again but more in the context of my own vision for the endgame. The following is just feedback for the current version and design. For me I dislike running them because of several factors.
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The dungeon mechanics do not make the dungeon fun. However they work well in the boss fights. Lightless Arbor and … lich dungeon (what was it called again?) I ignore the mechanic during the dungeon anyway. No need to interact with it most of the time.
In the Temporal Sanctum the mechanic is just actively annoying. It makes the random nature of the barricades even more annoying.
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Random barricades. I know you want to but please work hard on replacing these annoying little shits with a decent random generation like with the tombs. Currently these barricades just feel like artificial game time increases. The reason why these random barricades work in Grim Dawns dungeons is that those dungeons are handcrafted and have points of interest besides the boss fight. Also the amount of random barricade locations is limited so after a few runs you simply know which layout you get and thus can navigate it fine without annoying surprises.
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No unique or rare rewards for actually running the dungeons. Even with the lizard charm I’m not running the dungeons for as long as I have a single portal charm. The drops don’t scale or can measure up with corruption/weaver tree loot. In Grim Dawn they made static dungeons that have unique enemies in certain areas of the dungeon that drop their own special monster infrequent (like a special rare with a champion affix). Dungeons need such things as well. Loot that mostly drops from within the dungeons.
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Difficulty and reward scaling. This also ties into rewards point. We have 4 difficulties. Which is fine. But we need outside ways of scaling these up to whatever we want. Either through the weaver tree or it’s own little mechanic. The PoE formula of “Choose your challenge, we increase the rewards accordingly” should work very well here.
I like the boss fights however. The mechanics are fun during these fights, just not during the dungeon.
Suggestions that hopefully fit into whatever work you’ve already done for the rework:
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Add more interactive stuff during the dungeon runs that relies on the specific mechanic. For temporal dungeon instead of maybe despawning a barricade let Julra fire her clock move at you and you need to evade it using the mechanic just like in her fight.
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Add a “branch” to the dungeon that makes the use of the mechanic absolutely necessary and has a challenge area. If the player manages to beat it he gets a dungeon specific reward like rare crafting materials (havocs, set shards, skill shards, maybe some kind of special crafting station, generally useful stuff).
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Extend the weaver tree with a section to make dungeons more rewarding but harder.
Crafting
Personally I think crafting is in a weird spot. I like most of the things you added into the game to shape the way I craft my items… But I don’t really get to “craft much”.
Example: I’m currently trying to build a Lightning Cast on crit Meteor Sorc. For that I want to utilise the new mana primordial unique (Bluefeather Band I think it’s called). So I want my trigger skill (I want to try lightning fireball) to cost 0 mana. To have that with the nodes I want to have I need as much flat -mana cost as possible. And flat mana generation on gear. I also need to use the set. So I need to get to set crafting. Alright. Getting the set shards is no problem. Just imprinting, a few prophecies and within a day and a single Great Bridge I had enough set shards for like 30 staffs and helmets.
Now I need my base. There is only a single staff that gives -5 flat mana. I think it’s the temple staff. So I imprinted that bad boy and spent like 100k favour on prophecies. My luck was okay and within the same day I got like 10 usable staffs to get my build going in theory.
Now I need an open prefix to put in the shard prefix. So either Rune of Removal and/or sealing. Half of the staffs did not survive that.
Now I need that max roll on the implicit. So I used the rune to reroll implicits. So far that always put the forging potential under 15. Most of the items are dead before the actual crafting begins.
Now I put in the set shard (with Hopium of course). So far out of the 10 tries I have 2 or 3 staffs with a tier 1 or 2 set shard, 1 single build fitting (but not optimal) exalted affix and otherwise useless shit because the FP was done before I could get to increase or roll the other affixes. I didn’t even get to sealing or havocing. And that is what I mean by “not getting to crafting”. Out of 10 or so tries I got around a 20 to 30% success rate for a barely usable staff with 2 or 3 tier 1 to 3 affixes.
The same process is still waiting for me for the helmet. Though that should be easier since more bases are usable for my build. Though then again I want that mage specific prefix “Chance to gain 20 mana when you directly cast fireball”. This conflicts with the prefix for the set. So probably will need to remove a prefix, get the set shard in, get it sealed, and then add in the Mana prefix, all while having decent defensive stats on the suffixes. This is going to be an incredible headache.
And all of that for two items that are a lot weaker than most easy to get legendary items. Either I’m not getting something or it is just SO MUCH HARDER to get a decent set craft without 50% useless stats than a lucky 2lp slam.
The amount of time investment/payoff is totally out of whack here in my opinion.
Edit: So after like 30 crafting attempts (been a while since I wrote this part of the post) I now have a T7 Casting speed and a T6 mana helmet on a decent base (that was one hell of a lucky find) both with a sealed affix and overall okay stats. This was way too hard.
I suggest the following additions in some kind:
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Some kind of determinstic but really expensive crafting tied to endgame content. I think Julra is a good example. A random reward (and a rare one at that) could be a crafting station allowing you to remove a single affix of your choosing. Maybe a rune drop that allows Hopium (Glyph of Hope) to be used. Another one could be for Sealing. Another one could be for Havocing (chose one affix to get one of the highest Tiers). This can and should be expensive. Let us use all those hundreds of shards or runes of shattering or runes of removal in builk for something more guaranteed.
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Even if this kind of deterministic crafting is not on the table you need to take a look at regular crafting, especially set crafting, but I suspect T8 crafting and Havocs are in the same boat. There are too many steps that rely on two+ RNG layers at once. For example Rune of Removal needs to hit the right type of affix, it needs to avoid the right affix and it needs to not remove too much FP. Sealing needs to seal, not consume too much FP, and not critical (or was that changed?). There are too many instances where one bad roll on any of that kills an item. That is very frustrating. Especially when you do all that for a build that isn’t even that strong but needs all of that to even work at all (lightning meteor coc as an example). Somehow remove the amount of instances of rng needed for a successful craft or make fails less impactful.
Endgame Systems
I wrote it before but I still stand by it. I think LE needs 3 different endgame systems for the sake of variety.
Personally I would like:
- Something handcrafted.
- Something endless.
- Something whack.
What do I mean by that?
Handcrafted: A designed experience that guides the player through the start of the endgame, gradually opens up it’s own mechanics, leads (quickly) into the other modes and then gets increasingly difficult with some kind of endgame boss at the end.
Endless: An endless game mode with increasing difficulty and rewards.
Something whack: A system you don’t expect in an ARPG made fit for the genre. A good way to try new stuff and drive the genre forward.
Currently I see Monos as a weird mix of 1 and 2 with a heavy emphasis on the endless aspect. And that is fine. It kinda does it’s job for me and I like that you are working on adding more content and variety to the game mode.
But due to the weird difficulty spikes (and drops for the first monos!) it does not feel handcrafted and intended at all. There is also not really a story element that ties the progression through the monos together. The alternate storyline with the quests are a nice idea but boring in their execution. The blessings then again give the impression that it is supposed to be a good guided experience because you get stronger as you are going through the monos. But it frankly isn’t.
My suggestions for the three pillars would be as follows:
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Finish the campaign (!) and reuse it. There is a lot of value here! Make us backtrack through the ages with objectives/quests that get increasingly difficult and that we can engage in on our own terms. Make each age/timeline unique in their difficulty/gameplay. It does not need to be incredible long or complicated. The quests/objectives are just there to guide and give direction. Stuff like “The bee stole a fragment of the epoch, search for it in the Divine Age before it is too late!” is totally fine. The add “invaders” from the void or other factions that all are chasing the bee and the campaign can get interesting once again.
I imagine an “endgame version” of the map with pings on the map where events are happening (kinda like the Guild Wars 2 events) like “defend the settlement”, “a group of osprix were seen chasing after a bee”, etc.
The difficulty increases by a set amount after finishing an age. Then comes the boss. After defeating it the first time it unlocks a weaver tree section to scale it’s difficulty/rewards account wide. Or they give campaign specific ressources you can invest to “distort” reality and thus adjusting the difficulity to your own needs. Having a mode with a static difficulty that you suggest (not force) to play to the player after the campaign is done also makes it possible to take that difficulty as a baseline for balance. And the game needs that. The gaps between builds are just too big.
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The endless mode are monos. I honestly think they are kinda fine. You absolutely need to rework the scaling in the beginning and I personally don’t like a randomized endless mode as the main endgame loop. My suggestion would be to take out regular monos, replace that with the handcrafted experience and make empowered monos the start. Besides that just adding more variety (what you are already doing) is the way to go. No real complains here on my side. However any contend added to monos will be framed within the context of monos and thus has a high chance of being perceived as “more of the same”. That is why I absolutely think you need to have more game mods with their own distinct identities and feel.
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The whack stuff would be great in dungeons. The dungeon skills are a great basis for it. But not enough. Make them even weirder, make them have more impact. I hate to take an example from PoE but I love Blight. Do a Tower Defense dungeon, do a Maven Memory game dungeon (plz don’t everyone is gonna hate you), do a survivor style dungeon, etc. There are a ton of possibilities. And I think these could be a good way to judge how a certain mechanic is received and if it would be worth it to add it to the other game modes.
Balance
Well… Much has been said already from others. And I will agree mostly. The balance gaps between builds is too big. Way, way too big.
Difficulty is on the easier side (if you know what you are doing) which is fine. But the difficulty curve is completely whack. Especially campaign into monos and monos into empowered monos.
QOL
Honestly you are great in this. I would love more filters for my stash. And more ways to increase the amount of characters we currently can have online. There was no slot increase during the last few seasons and I almost ran out of characters I would not mind to delete. 
Skills
Balance them. It’s more important than anything new in my opinion. A good, new and usable in different ways Disintegrate is just as good if not better than a brand new skill (cause of already existing item support).
Skill Trees
So I play a lot with skill trees and they always have the same problem. You need to stuff you don’t want to be able to take the stuff you do want. Yes, I know this is a way to balance stuff. Yes, I know that restrictions enable creativity and variety. But it still feels bad. Thus I would suggest a limited way to circumvent parts of this system.
Add some kind of progression system that allows you to chose one or two skills as “signature” skills. With these skills you get an expanded skill tree. These new nodes are in an “outer ring”. You can also level the signature skill up to like 25 or something. But you also get the option to chose a node in the “outer ring” as a new starting point (maybe through a skill sigil?) from where you can choose surrounding nodes as if they were connected to your regular starting node.
This opens up a lot of builds, gives players more agency but due to the increased amount of choices through additional nodes you preserve the need to make a choice. Well provided stuff is somewhat balanced.
And then maybe the “outer ring” nodes are depended on the kind of “skill sigil” you used on your signature skill. Like a frost sigil on fireball gives nodes that scale cold damage, or for a more usable example a void sigil to be used for volcano orb in conjuction with the unique that converts it to void damage.
Well, thanks for reading this wall of text.
