My total playtime atm is 84 hours, so I haven’t really fully explored everything this game has to offer but I thought I’d give my first impressions. I followed a build guide for Judgment Paladin and had a ton of fun with the build. I’ll try to separate my feedback into different sections.
The campaign:
It was pretty fun, not too long not too short, I like that I got a few extra permanent stat boosts for finishing all the acts, but you can choose to start endgame as soon as you unlock all your idol slots aswell, this makes it so the campaign’s length isn’t set in stone. More experienced veterans can quickly blast through it. I’m a completionist so I did all the side-quests just to remove their quest text on the tracker in the right side of the screen.
Some of the later zones in the last 2 acts felt a little bit too big, one that felt like it went on forever was the big outdoors garden area. Though maybe that’s also just me being a new player and not knowing exactly where I’m supposed to go to progress, I did have to explore most of the zones when going through the campaign to make sure I didn’t miss a sidequest.
The Crafting System:
Love it. The affix shards and upgrading/adding whatever modifier you choose and forging potential is really fun. I found myself upgrading and crafting gear even during the campaign, which is pretty amazing. In most other ARPGs I’d save up those kinds of resources or not bother because you can’t make very strong items early game. But I was able to make some really nice items during the campaign so that was cool.
Obviously I haven’t experienced everything the crafting system has to offer, but from what I dabbled in I enjoyed it even when I failed to make items and reduced their crafting potential down to 0. It didn’t feel like I wasted my time at all, because I can just farm up a new base and affix shards are abundant. So yeah its really fun, crafting in this game feels like I’m some mad scientist experimenting with stuff. Oh and the Nemesis system is really nice in the campaign too, just getting random uniques to power up your character with added modifiers to them is nice, and the egg that lets you put in a unique and maybe add Legendary Potential to it is nice too. Which I guess leads into the next topic.
Endgame and seasonal mechanics:
I got to around 360 corruption, killed normal Aberroth and stopped there. Though I only stopped playing because I was worried my mid-tier PC might not be able to handle the game too well. I’ll explain that a bit more near the end I guess.
Season 3 mechanic is really fun,upgrading the beasts then fighting them for huge loot explosions was satifsying. And the vendor NPC that let you buy stuff with the bones and other currencies was super useful, especially the bags with catchup reputation for the Weaver faction. Weaver tree is really cool, and I like that it has a low respec cost so you can experiment with it freely. Woven echoes are also really nice, my favorites are the nemesis tower and the turtle one that lets you gamble items with at least 1 Legendary Potential to maybe increase it.
The blessings you get from timeline bosses are a neat player power system, just gives you another axis to scale your character’s power after the campaign is done.(besides levels,gear,idols)
Oh and Legendary Potential is a great system. The fact that you can just choose 1 stat from an item and put it onto any matching unique with at least 1 LP is amazing to me, I legit went “Wait I can do that??” when I first noticed it lmao. I had assumed that if I tried it, it would just pick a random stat from the item to put onto the unique, or multiple random stats if it had more LP. Being able to deterministically pick 1 stat, then the other 1-3 stats being random is sooo much better. It meant that I could work towards so many meaningful gear upgrades for my character.
I felt really weak and squishy at first because I hadn’t prioritized switching to Vengeance(I had no clue that the different skill tree would give me so much more AoE,movement speed and tankyness) on top of me not realizing that LP 1 items with something like “200% elemental damage over time” would multiply my damage from Judgment greatly. That combined with that new amulet from Season 3 beasts which converts all Necrotic,Poison and Void(iirc) damage to physical made it possible for me to survive and do the last of my woven echoes for all the tree skill points. Farming that amulet was kinda fun, I got 2 of them at around 300 corruption. Knowing that its droprate increases with greater corruption while trying to get it motivated me even more. I like chase items like that. And my Aberroth fight was messy, I ran out of the big void explosion mechanic instead of staying in the circle, barely facetanked and survived but now I know I need to stay in there lol
Oh and the dungeons are a fun addition to the campaign, and its nice that you can do them to skip parts of it. I’m not sure if there is an option in the settings to hide certain quest text while in endgame, but that would definitely help players like me if I skip campaign but still see all the quests there.
That one dungeon where you can spend millions of gold giga-buffing a few chests to drop specific item types seems super fun, definitely gonna try it out at some point.
Circle of Fortune:
Actually fun SSF mode, farmed a lot of my items from prophecies. Don’t really have any complaints about it, its just fantastic. I may try out the other trading faction next time, but my only fear is that if I take too long to get to endgame and farm millions of gold, the items I want won’t be on the market anymore or they will be severely overpriced. But I have no clue, gonna just have to try it and see how it feels.
And that’s about it, overall I had lots of fun and definitely wanna play the game more. The reason I stopped after normal Aberroth and 360-ish corruption is because I’m worried my gtx 1050ti gpu might overheat. It reached 70-74 Celsius in the Aberroth bossfight(I suspect because my PC was loading all those assets for the very first time, and the fight was progressing kinda quickly through the phases), though in most endgame echoes it hovers around 60-65. I don’t know if that temperature is normal for a GPU. I do know that the GPU I have is just barely below the minimum requirements set on Steam, and I only have 4 GB of VRAM when it says you need 6.
The only reason I was able to play was because of all the optimization that was done for Season 3, RAM usage went down enough so that it wasn’t taking up all my memory, and a texture option for gpu’s with lower vram was added which I’m super thankful for.
So yeah, I’m definitely interested in trying Season 4 in March and hope the game gets some more optimization, I know they announced it will get some for the big expansion later on because a console release is planned. That’s all, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Oh and loot lizards are the cutest game mechanic I’ve ever seen in my life I want 50 of them in my room.