I played D1-D4, POE, MU, Grim Dawn, Lost Ark and several other ARPGs, decided to play this before 1.0 came out. But I wanted to give my thoughts on post 1.0 as many issues were fixed post 1.0.
Impressions in normal font
Suggestions in bold
Campaign
- I liked the way the campaign flowed as well as the quests feeling rewarding when they unlocked the passive and idol slots.
- Respeccing your character early in the game was difficult to do because gold wasn’t as plentiful early in the campaign and low level skills take a long time to catch back up if you remove the points in them. Later on when gold is plentiful and your character level is high the respecced skills catch up SUPER fast.
- IMHO it would be great if the early game skill experimentation process were much quicker, just like how it is when you hit mid/endgame
- Nothing in the game teaches you to buy shattering runes from the NPC and start shattering your gear. Also since shattering runes cost 2000 gold each, they are unaffordable at the start thus most players never get into crafting. Meanwhile D3 and D4 can just have you dusting your inventory with a few clicks from the NPCs.
- I think shattering/removing affix shards need to be more streamlined.
- The end bosses for the campaign were fun.
Dungeons
- The way the dungeons are introduced to you is non-existant. I’m surprised the campaign didn’t try to weave them in somehow.
- I saved up these keys thinking they were super precious for endgame. I guess I was kinda right about them being endgame but not about them being precious lol.
- The dungeons are creating endgame solutions for problems that players mostly don’t know exist. For example, how are people supposed to know how the legendary system works without looking at a guide?
- The regular arena seems interesting to play, it just doesn’t feel rewarding.
- The endless arena needs a rework.
- Arena keys of memory should give you a few options (similar to removing corruption) where you can choose to enter -20 waves of your PB, -50 waves of your PB or wave 100.
- Endless arena should be locked until you can complete Tier 4 Arena.
- The soul gambler system doesn’t feel as rewarding as simply blowing up a few monoliths.
- Arbor seems like a way to offload your gold, although as a merchant, I have no incentive to.
- There isn’t a key that solves gold as a problem. So its better to just target gold monoliths and hunt down wealth shrines.
Monoliths
- When I played this pre 1.0, things did eventually get boring with time. I’m so glad that factions exist. They amplify the meaning behind doing the monoliths so much and I feel that factions are massively underrated for this reason.
- When progressing regular monoliths, even on your first character, it is still too slow. Later on in empowered monoliths you are able to clear 900 stability in like 8-12 echoes while your regular monoliths are taking 18-20 echoes. The fact I hit level 85 before I unlocked Empowered Monoliths, despite clearing optimally and ignoring the left side is absurdly slow.
- Please fix regular monoliths to be even faster for progressing stability. The stability gain per echo clear has no business being as low as it is that early on and the reduction of the stability needed for the echo quests was good but still leaves progression feeling slow. We shouldn’t have to wait until empowered echoes before progression speeds up.
- The big chest and exiled mages are nice features of the monoliths.
- I like blessings and the reduction of RNG that exists when you can choose 3 (and 4 and 5) possible options when they drop. Even though you can still get shafted, it feels a lot better than if it were just one choice.
- If Merchant’s didn’t exist, I’d have such a serious problem with the frequency of boss farming.
Factions
- This is a game changer. My luck is usually terrible and I loved the Diablo 3 auction house, so Merchant’s Guild just made this game my main ARPG hands down.
- I LOVE how the faction systems essentially boil down to “Merchant’s Guild = Diablo 3 auction house without the pay-to-win” and “Circle of Fortune = Diablo 2’s drop mod or Diablo Immortal’s loot explosions without the pay-to-win”
- The game needs to introduce and tie in the faction system to the player much better.
- Nothing showed me how to open the faction window so I had to look at my binds to find that it was Y. There are people who haven’t used the faction system at all 30-40+ hours into their playthrough. Asmongold for example played for 30+ hours and never used the faction system. This is a huge blunder on behalf of the dev team IMHO.
- Put the faction system into the inventory and character tab. You can see your blessings in the inventory sheet, you should have a link to the faction window in the character sheet (as the faction symbol) and a tab in the inventory sheet IMHO.
- I have a thread on adding potential gold farms via spending favor in Merchant’s via “Contracts through Work Orders” similar to prophecies but they wouldn’t have the added benefit of lenses and amplification since that’s a CoF exclusive just like buying and selling for MG.
- Being able to trade Favor to players for gold via an Exchange would be such a Merchant’s feature. I have this in my Merchant thread too…
- Please add a popup when you spend favor telling the player how much reputation they gained. This way when they list an item, it will show them tangibly that they gained reputation from it. If they BUY an item, it will show them how much reputation they gained.
- Remove the faction gambler or just make it a gold sink. It is baiting new players into wasting their precious favor.
- So many people think selling things are how you get favor, so people are wasting their precious favor by listing stuff for 0 gold in hopes that it sells. This is resulting in people having a terrible time with the game and its grind and its making the game way less fun for them and it shows when they specifically say this.
General Features
- I like most of the shrines. Although, the stun and reflect shrines definitely feel useless. Maybe the stun shrine can be an affliction shrine that just gives you a chance to inflict enemies with tons of different debuffs. Maybe the reflect shrine can give a large damage reduction buff too…
- The Loot Filter is a feature that is nice, but nothing in the game introduces you to this really and it can appear overwhelming when you are just playing the game and look at a system which has you nesting categories in your ruleset and then flipping through 50-60 different affixes to apply.
- I don’t have a suggestion for the loot filter, I think its a great system but a lot of people either won’t use it or look up a filter and download it to skip the effort. At least its nice that this option exists for some people.
- I took the time to learn the loot filter and it works for me in the way I made it. I even made a loot filter for ideal Merchant’s Guild sales items. It’s really great.
- The loot filter, sorting, storing and stash systems are the best in the ARPG industry. Nothing comes close to this and I can only see other ARPGs emulating it in the way that every ARPG emulates Diablo 3’s Smart Loot system.
TLDR - I love the game and it can get a lot better, the primary issues are that most players don’t know the features even exist.
