Here’s my list of all my suggestions for how Eleventh Hour Games can improve their game with small, relatively easy to make changes. There are no suggestions here that would be revamping entire systems, adding new game mechanics, or any large changes like that. Most of these suggestions are simple UI changes. All of these changes are for better quality of life for the player. Quality of life matters a lot to games like this, so I really hope EHG takes these suggestions into serious consideration. I believe with these small changes they can make a huge positive difference to their game.
All my suggestions are organized into categories for ease of viewing. The categories are arranged alphabetically. I chose the best category I thought something fit into, because some fit into multiple. I rank each suggestion with a number 1-10, signifying how important I view this change. 1 means lowest priority/significance, and 10 means highest. This is simply for helping the devs prioritize what changes to work on, if they can’t do them all. I list the suggestions with letters, starting with “a” for each category, so that people can easily reference them in their comments.
I will update this list when I discover or think of new suggestions. I’ll be putting new suggestions into this original post, and also in new posts below, so it’s easy both for new and old viewers to the topic. If you have anything to add, post your suggestion, and if I agree with it, I will add it to my post as well and give you credit. I’ll return to this thread regularly to do so.
Please comment with your thoughts! I tried to be as descriptive as possible. Let me know if something isn’t clear, and I can clarify what I mean. Maybe in the future I’ll add screenshots to some of the points. Hope you find this list useful.
The Arena
a) 2. The popup to enter the arena could be moved up or to the left some more because currently it blocks the top left of your inventory. So if you have a key there, you can’t actually use it. But the top left is where things go automatically when you shift-click from stash.
b) 2. Barrells in arena are hard to smash. Well, it’s easy if you have the right abilities, but for some builds it’s really annoying, like minion builds, which might not have any attacks at all, and have to swap out an ability just to smash barrells. Also it’s still annoying if your character just doesn’t have any aoe abilities and has to smash each barrell individually. I would make it so that you can just walk into the barrells to break them. If you can’t do that, then just have the items drop, but keep the icons in the minimap so the player knows where the items are.
Crafting
a) 5. When crafting and selecting an affix, and also when in your crafting inventory (outside of crafting), you should be able to see all available crafts in the game (not just shards you have), so that you can plan. Have a toggle button “show all unowned shards”. Have it stay at whatever setting you left it previously.
b) 5. When you shatter something, the results (especialy when 4 affixes are received) will block out parts of the screen for a short amount of time, causing you to have to wait for it to clear for you to do your next craft (it blocks other things, too, like if you go to a vendor immediately afterwards, it blocks part of their inventory). I would move the results somewhere else, where it won’t block any (or less) important information. My suggestion would be to move the big button (that says what action you are doing, like “shatter”, “refine”, upgrade affix”, “add item to craft”, etc) up, and post the results of the shatter below that.
Echoes/Monlith
a) 1. It should say on the echo select screen of monoliths what the lv of non-empowered monoliths are. I know you get to see the level when you first enter the monolith, but it would be nice to have a level indicator right next to the name, like “Ending the Storm Lv. 75”, in case you forget. Often you spend hours in a monolith at a time.
b) 10. Choosing a blessing is really frustrating. The popup for it blocks parts of your equipment and character screens. You definitely want to be able to check you resistances and other stats before making such a key decision. It’s stressfull that you have to choose right away and it blocks out such important info. I would make it so you have the leisure to choose your blessing whenever you please. You just go to the blessing screen and choose from there. Another huge benefit of this is it allows you to see what’s in your stash before making the decision. Because you might have an item in your stash that really synergizes with a blessing.
c) 8. For the map of the monolith of fate, would be super nice if you show at each location, what exclusive echo rewards are there. You shouldn’t have to either look it up online or slowly travel to each one to find out (and you’ll forget again soon anyways).
d) 7. In the map of the monolith of fate, show an icon at the monolith you were most recently at. It’s super easy to forget if you last session was a while ago, or you left monolith to do other things and came back awhile later.
e) 8. You should display echo corruption progress in the map of the monolith of fate. That way, players can easily keep track of their progress. Currently there is no good way of keeping track of this. The only way is to visit each monolith individually, and that takes ages, and you’d have to note down the corruption levels of each one. I suggest putting a number (or even two numbers if you want to track corruption on non-empowered) above where it currently says “100” for each monolith. If tracking both corruptions, just put the corruption numbers above both lv numbers.
f) 2. Another place where I’d display the corruption value is on the screen where you’re choosing to enter normal or empowered. Just display the corruption numbers here to allow players to make a more informed decision before entering. It just saves a bit of time. Won’t be as necessary if you implement the previous suggestion.
Loot Filter
a) 6. Include options in loot filter for gold, shards, and crafting items. In the ultra late game, most affix shards and crafting supplies aren’t worth picking up. Sometimes even gold is worthless. So it would be great to be able to filter these things to have a much less cluttered gameplay experience.
b) 3. There is a hotkey for “loot filter toggle”, which toggles your filter on/off. However, you have to hold the key. Please also give an option to toggle on/off loot filter instead of only having the option of holding the button. So have both options. Path of Exile does this. It’s also hard to both hold down your hotkey and press ctrl+alt at the same time (when you want to see advanced affix info).
c) 5. Loot filter. Ability to filter by number of affixes. e.g hide magic items with exactly 1 affix, or show items with exactly 2 affixes.
d) 4. Filtering for “level” in the item filter. There’s no option for “equal to”. You should include this. Also allow filtering for a range (like level 30-40 for example). This would make for easier filtering of uniques, among other things.
e) 8. Allow us to filter for specific uniques. I know this might be against the dev’s ideas about loot, but it’s no excuse because players can already kind of do this with a convoluted workaround, involving complicated filters with many variables including rarity, lv, type, and subtype. But these kinds of filters are hard and annoying to make, and are often imperfect (your rule will filter down to a couple uniques, not just 1). So please allow us to filter uniques, with a drop down checkbox list like you have for affixes or item subtypes. That way we can have 1 simple rule to find all the uniques important to us, instead of what we have now; which is having a convoluted and often imperfect rule for each and every unique we want.
Misc
a) 7. Ability to search your inventory and equipped items and idol. Just put a search bar in the inventory screen. No reason you should have to transfer stuff to your stash just to do a search.
b) 3. Give us the ability to teleport via the map to a waypoint in a location you are currently in. It sucks to have to teleport twice to do this (first to an outside waypoint, then back to the one you’re in). There are lots of scenarios you want to do this in. The most common in is in the Temple of Eterra after you collect the 2nd key, to get back to the middle much more quickly.
c) 5. Death Screen. When you die it should tell you if the damage killing you was hit or DOT. Also, tell us if the damage dealt was critical or not. This would help players greatly in determining if they need more crit avoidance. It would be nice if you could see a short timeline of your last moments (like last 5-10 seconds), showing like a chart or something of your health and the damage you’re taking.
d) 10. Give us the ability to make Solo Self Found Online characters. You can still keep the other option of Solo Account Found. But it’s annoying that you can’t make a completely self found character in online, like you can for offline. Some people want to be able to play with their friends online, and still give themselves the challenge of finding everything themselves. Forcing shared gold and crafting materials between characters feels really bad. Another big reason solo self found is great is that you have much cleaner, organized stashes.
e) 4. The ability to label items in your stash (with your own typed descriptions) would be really handy. Maybe this would’t be so easy to implement, though. I would make it so that you use some hotkey and a click on an item (for example shift+right click, but it can be whatever), and it brings up a text box that you can type into. Then whenever you hover over the item, you see the text in a tooltip (maybe over or under the regular tooltip. and I mean vertically, not depth wise) Would make it so much easier to remember what reason you were saving certain items for, what your plans for that item are, etc.
f) 7. Bring back the training dummies and the using of skills in the End of Time and the Council Chambers for solo characters, as it was before the multiplayer patch. It’s very handy to be able to do these things in these two areas, which the player spends so much time in. I also see no reason to not allow solo players to use skills in all “town” areas. It’s nice to be able to use your movement skills there to get around quicker. I would also introduce training dummies to the online characters sooner. Heoborea is pretty late in the game. I would put some somewhere in the ruined era.
Regular Game View
a) 7. Ability to enable/disable minimap (top right) with a shortkey. Sucks no way to remove it currently. It takes up a lot of real estate and a lot of the times you want to be able to focus entirely on combat.
b) 6. Add option to have mana bar over player’s head (like you are able to with HP).
c) 1. Ability to hover over xp bar (under your skills) to see what % to next level you are
d) 8. An ability to open/close the quest sidebar with a keypress. I’m talking about when you’re not in any menus. You always need to see what echo quest you get when you enter an echo, and it’s annoying to have to move your cursor to do so.
e) 7. Give us the ability to choose which quests show up on the right hand sidebar (when in normal view, not in map). A lot of quests clutter it up, especially in end game when you have a bunch of unfinished sidequests. You don’t want to keep seeing these, which clutter up the information you do want to see. My solution would be for a “track quest” checkbox in the Map UI beside each quest, and only the ones you select in the map screen will be in your sidebar in normal view.
f) 9. A way to turn off all loot. Have a hotkey. Include gold, shards, glyphs; everything. This is important because often loot makes it hard to see gameplay, even with a strict loot filter. The option to turn off just equipment drops isn’t good enough; too much gold and potions clutter the ground still (I often collect gold in battle just to be able to see what’s going on). The option to turn off entire UI (already in the game) is not a good solution either, because people still want to be able to see their map, HP & MP, skills, etc.
g) 1. Ability to turn off red highlight on enemies. Some players would like to better see the art.
h) 2. Ability to turn off new player messages (that you get with a new character) in the options
i) 5. Have an option in the options menu to not automatically pickup potions when you are at max potions and missing health. Often you want to wait till you are lower hp, or because your potions have other utility and you want to save them for the right moment. This often happens during boss fights where you need to move around and will run over potions accidentally but don’t want to waste them.
Shards
a) 3. Ability to sell shards freely. Would be nice to be able to sell directly from forge and en-masse
b) 5. Ability to move shards from forge to inventory and vice versa freely. Let us individually move shards from inventory instead of what we have now, only being able to transfer all. Some people use shards for other purposes than just crafting. I use them to help organize my stash.
c) 2. The tooltip for shards when hovering over one in your inventory blocks out your cursor and a lot of your inventory. It would be nice if it was moved to the left side of the screen (no matter where the shard is in inventory). Because it gets annoying when going back to town and trading in your haul. This won’t be much of an issue, though if you let us sell from forge (suggestion a)
d) 9. Shard info. It should say on the shard’s tooltip if it’s an affix or prefix. It also would be nice if it told us its rarity. Also would be nice if it showed us the affix’s range of values (for either first tier, or for lowest tier 1 to highest tier 7 value) beside where it lists the item types. Show us this info both on the shard tooltip and in the forge.
e) 2. An ability to move your shards from your stash directly into your crafting inventory would be nice.
Skill and Passive Trees
a) 6. Currently when you type a search word in a skill’s tree, then switch to another skill tree, it deletes your search. You often want to search for something in multiple trees, so don’t delete the text (make it like how it is when searching and switching passive trees, the text remains in the search bar)
b) 7. Highlighted skill and passive nodes for those you’ve searched aren’t highlighted well. They’re hard to see quickly, and don’t stand out much. Make it way more noticiable, like circle it bolded red. Who cares if it doesn’t look as aesthetic, a search is supposed to be all about functionality.
c) 6. Respeccing passive tree is very clunky and time consuming because of prerequisites and because you can’t respec and add points on the same screen. So it would be great if you could respec and add points on the same screen. Just be sure to make it clear to the player what mode he/she is in at all times (respeccing or adding).
d) 2. Make separate buttons for “despecialize skill” and “respec”. It’s annoying and unnessecary to have to click 2 buttons each time you respec. Have a confirmation popup for despecializing.
e) 10. When a skill loses skill points because you took off gear with +x level to that skill, the next time you enter the skill’s tree, a red outline briefly flashes around the nodes that automatically got points removed from them. It only flashes for a second or two. This doesn’t leave the player with enough time. Often you can’t even locate where they got removed from in time, because the flash is so faint and it happens too quickly. It’s especially bad when removing “+4 to a skill” gear. A simple solution would be as follows:
Have the nodes highlighted boldly and to remove the timer. Also have a number next to ones that lost multiple points. Have a togglable on/off button somewhere on the side to turn on/off the highlight around nodes and the numbers. This way, the player can turn it on and off at their leisure, even leaving and re-entering the screen and still having that information available. It will only reset the next time they remove a +level gear.
, interesting. This is no big deal to me but my playstyle isn’t necessarily the same as yours.
