(Not necessarily another “I’m quitting” post, but definitely a “Quitting for now” post…)
So here we are, a month since launch, 410 hours in (about half of which were from the beta period) and currently sitting on a roster of:
Lvl 86 - Warlock
Lvl 86 - Falconer
Lvl 85 - Forge guard
Lvl 84 - Necromancer
Lvl 83 - Sorcerer
Lvl 81 - Paladin
Lvl 67 - Runemaster
Lvl 59 - Beastmaster
Lvl 26 - Bladedancer
Lvl 26 - Shaman
Lvl 26 - Void knight
Lvl 12 - Acolyte (intended to be a lich, but I… I just couldn’t do it again…)
Now i could give concise and overarching feedback as to what i didn’t like and what has driven me away, but basically every point on that has either already been posted about by myself, or by someone else on the forum, so instead I’m going to give a few words to each character and why i stopped playing them. i expect there to be a trend.
Warlock: unfun mana issues which i could fix at the cost of basically all of my survivability (chaos bolt specifically is the issue here, the passive that trades most of it’s mana cost for health cost ALSO consumes ward, making it unusable in the current state of things, and without it, i’m just sitting at 0 mana all day.)
Falconer: the obvious favorite of the devs as far as minion classes go, stopped playing due to salt over how much better it was than my necromancer, whom i preferred thematically. (like for real, when you have one class that’s so much better in every way than the other similarly focused classes that i stopped playing it over salt, you done goofed up hard somewhere…)
Forge guard: maintaining maximum forged weapons is too difficult against bosses, smelters wrath needs a complete overhaul as the game doesn’t allow you to stand still and channel for 4 seconds without dying. general flow was unfun.
Necromancer: once my overloaded minions with 800% increased health and 600% increased damage started dying to normal trash it became unplayable. meanwhile my falconer has immortal minions that hit 1,000 times harder, just an absolute mess of outdated scaling.
Paladin: was tired of being one shot for not being a ward class, so went the “comically tanky” paladin. it was nice to a point, but clears so slowly on it’s own that i can’t stomach playing it without a dedicated DPS to support, so his play time is limited to when i’m with a friend who doesn’t want to play a class with high mobility so i can keep up.
Sorcerer: wasn’t able to play how i wanted to play since the core thematic of the sorcerer is stack mana + big spells, but the big spells don’t really do more damage and you’ll spend 90% of your time channeling focus to fund their cost when you could just run ice barrage and walk through echoes with one hand blindfolded.
Runemaster: sorta an outlier, it doesn’t deal much damage with the ignite themed build I’ve been using, but it doesn’t die, which i appreciate. i figure a respec could probably get the damage up to snuff, but it seems pretty obvious that this is “just” the best class for the current state of the game. stopped playing because a friend wanted to run our runemasters together and hasn’t been on in a while.
Beastmaster: could barely get through the campaign, died constantly in the base level monolith, respecced to complete tank so that i could survive one single hit, no longer did any amount of damage, dropped like a sack of rancid potatoes. very sad because this was one of my favorites during the beta.
(All level 26 or below classes) Not my cup of tea.
I thought about logging in earlier, but i was like “why, you’ll only start a new character and drop them at level 26, or when you complete the first empowered monolith…” since that seems to be the two timeframes i can tolerate. (for reference, level 26 is when you return to the end of time after completing the temple of Etera questline in the ruined era, it forms a naturally good stopping point)
as for why i tend to drop characters after (or during) the completion of their first empowered monolith, it’s because that’s when the game stops being fun and in order to continue you have to dump 90% of your damage stats into capping resistances, getting 4k hp minimum, stacking armor up to 75%, capping endurance and getting as much of your hp covered by threshold as possible, and if you made the mistake of using a shield, stacking block chance… there just aren’t enough stats in the game, and getting them to such a technical degree isn’t fun, especially when you’ll have everything you need and still be one shot by poorly balanced mob density or tuning or a brief latency spike or… (this list could go on for a while) now of course, this doesn’t matter if you are one of the ward abusing classes, but even those have issues that suck the will to play out of me when it comes to the “end game” here.
and if you ever try to complain about it here on the forums, you get gatekept by the same 4 accounts that for all i know are run by the same person, telling you how wrong you are for having a bad time and how the game is perfect, and any issues you find are a “you” issue, and how getting one shot means you “just havn’t tried hard enough, you aren’t using the best build, your stats could be better, everything is a you problem.”
and i’ve put up with toxic communities before, this is nothing new, and these people aren’t even close to being the worst offenders, but what really sucks out my will to play this game is the fear that the Devs are listening to them.
This concludes my meandering thoughts on why i’m quitting (for now)