Reposting the relevant feedback portion from a post I made in the bug forum as well as a few observations I’ve made since then. At this point I’m about a week into the game, I’ve previously played games like PoE, Diablo, etc, so the systems weren’t that new to me.
Crafting Shards/Items: Its not immediately clear or apparent that they are crafting items or that there is a separate area to store them other than general inventory. You end up having inventory issues instead of enjoying the campaign, a popup tutorial explaining or running through how the base system works, and how you send items to the craft bag would be useful. I didn’t see any popup and it took a bit to figure out that the transfer craft button actually shifted inventory to a craft bag.
A more sane default to putting crafts into general inventory would be to have craft items automatically moved to the craft material storage area with a popup notification saying so, and adjusting the button description to make it clear there is a craft material storage. (making these features self-discoverable). If you want to limit access to the craft bag while out farming you can do that and have that triggered by a hook upon entering a town or something like that. Depends on what you want.
Respeccing:
If you end up needing to respec your passives because of a mistake you made (being new) its very annoying to fix your build.
The issue that specifically arises from unspending points is if you have points invested that have a requirement that would no longer be met.
You can’t invest in points from the same screen as unspending those points. Also each unspend of skills you have to make 2 or 3 clicks for confirmation for each one point.
This creates a very frustrating dynamic of going back and forth between two similar but different screens to work ensure the minimal requirements are met at all times.
Its seems very brittle, frustrating, and unnecessary. It would be better to consolidate or eliminate one of those screens and then allow an apply option once you have the skills the way you want or require a hotkey to be pressed for confirmations. For skills, if you are reconnecting an entire branch down a different route there is no float points, and you end up having to completely respec the entire branch.
Note: The skill specializations and passive nodes as they currently work together are clunky when looking at this fresh. You have two similar (same) areas and as a new person you can’t easily make decisions because you keep mixing up the details. This went away after I got a handle on the mechanics, new people will find it confusing and won’t have that benefit potentially making their experience harder once you hit a roadblock (Lagon/Masaja).
Also There doesn’t seem to be a simple way to compare changes made in passives/skill specializations before you actually make them to try it out.
No in-game feedback/bug system
This seems like a huge low hanging fruit for on-demand pulling of needed client-side info; lots of tooling that can be developed to offload this type of time-consuming work to lower expertise (the documentation/route portion) allowing much more productive use of your expert level developers; its the equivalent of a ticket system for sysadmins. When set it up properly greatly decreases maintenance costs and improves productivity.
Also, it looks like you may be missing out on a big portion of constructive feedback because the issues were minor but non-net-zero in terms of overall gameplay experience, and the time needed for players to report it was too high.
An example of this was the screen scrunching I saw isn’t visible in any screenshots or video I recorded but it is onscreen. It only appears when Limit FPS is enabled, and Windows detects the monitor refresh rate incorrectly (setting to 30hz, instead of 60). I can go into the settings and change it, but as soon as it goes into power saving it changes back. (Bug Reported)
It is useful to have facilities that can collect, aggregate, and pull information as needed so it can be acknowledged and divided with a more effective division of labor.
Minor:
Some thing I found missing:
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New characters should have a popup to prevent tutorial popups (keep interface clean)
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Should be able to set hotkeys to Zoom Overlay Map
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There should be a prompt to specialize for each skill. There is for the first time, you can specialize the first skill, and then the popup screen which is identical to clicking the second skill auto-specializes whatever you click next; this isn’t expected behavior for someone coming to this new, and its error prone which detracts from the game.
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Move character skill doesn’t work/is interrupted when highlighting any item (annoying).
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Main Menu has Leave Game and Exit to Desktop. Its not visibly clear that Leave Game is actually Log Out to Character Selection.
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Double clicking the character name at the character selection screen doesn’t log you in.
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The hotkeys for options and menus are hard to discover. The 3 hamburger bar icon is so small it blends into the interface, it also doesn’t highlight in any way to draw the attention. New players keep asking the same questions about hotkeys because its not that discoverable.
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The minimap in the upper right corner is clunky, lots of places do it and you can’t change it, I don’t use it. Its a real pleasure when you can move it to where you want. Many people find the smaller minimap at the bottom right or upper left corner is much more effective because that is where they are normally looking. Looking up and to the right to orient yourself is at odds with how some people orient, and that dissonance can flavor experience. What I mean by that dissonance is there are involuntary responses when orienting (remembering) and imagining, for some people they look up and to the right, for others to the left, and vice versa (imagining/remembering). If your one of those people that remembers and looks up and to the right then you often have no problem with minimaps in the upper right corner, those that look up and to the left to orient have a bit of a blind spot on the right, and vice versa.
I’m about a week in now. I’ve reached endgame as a Rogue Marksman with a few hundred echos under my belt now. The slog to 100 seems really hard.
There were some modifiers on gear that I found very confusing when trying to figure out how to scale my damage.
- Increased Crit Chance vs. Crit Chance
- Increased physical damage vs. +# Bow Physical Added
- #Bow Lightning Added not applying to Bow Attacks, that don’t have Lightning & Bow tags.
- Bow Crit Chance Multiplier implicit on a quiver not adding the value to Crit Chance Multiplier on Character Screen.
- Its unclear if Barrage of Pain is applying, its bundled.
- Detonating Arrow Lightning Tendrils doesn’t have on-screen damage, it also doesn’t always proc on explosion, and its unclear if the Rapid Explosion impacts Beastslayer Arrow Damage. Rarely I will also occasionally get an instant lightning tendril from a single DA (without it exploding).
Overall its very difficult to get an idea about how much damage I am actually doing, or to evaluate changes to help progress to L100 Mono. I’m also still trying to figure out how your defensive layers work. I’ve settled on Crit Avoid/Dodge but I do die often. Endurance/Endurance Threshold was confusing.
Most of the loot that drops I don’t use. I’ve set up some filters but I had a hell of a time getting my resists ironed out because the main phys/necrotic pieces don’t start dropping until Mono, and I needed phys for Masaja. (Bone Amulet and Brigandine Armor)
I found the weapon upgrade path after Longbow very confusing. There’s no good way to measure DPS in any meaningful way with respect to Crit Chance, I found the tooltip bars to be of little help and very inaccurate. Some modifiers would add the damage but not adjust the character sheet.
I like the Monolith experience, but it has been a real grind. Sometimes you get certain modifiers and its not simple to have those modifiers removed when you can’t do them (repeatedly). If you die in a mono, the mod doesn’t drop.
It would be nice if after the first time completion we could replay the quest missions for blessing without having to repeat all three in a row. Its very time consuming especially when you have capped out your stability.
I’m endlessly capped out on stability while trying to find a bow upgrade, I think I’ve gone through something like 200 or 300 echoes. It would be nice if I can spend some to remove modifiers, or decrease the debuff a turn without any drops.
Ground Degen/Effects hit me while I’m outside them on stairs, they also sometimes do not show up at all (sudden damage).
Osprix Lightmages/Embermages need some balance tuning, I die to these more than anything else. their fireball/meteor/moonbeam cast time is so short, and they are often grouped together with 2-4 where 1 hit would do about 900 damage with max fire res (fire damage). I’ve been oneshotted by a group many times.
Certain Creatures that jump, or blink to their targets don’t take damage when they do it (invulnerable).
Profane Fleshes occasionally cancel their second attack making these really hard to deal with in groups. We only get a single ability as a rogue to fast-move /dodge.
Certain Ground Effect mechanics in fights are overlapped. Rayleigh Fight with the spiral in particular but there have been others where the effect extends beyond its displayed border (Lagon Phase 3 Waves that bounce around).
The popup for the Monolith Blessing Selection occurs before the area is safe (i.e. you can complete it, and die because the screen is up and you can’t move to dodge, i.e. Lagon).
I like the crafting system but there are some issues:
- Rune of Shattering uses Glyph of Hope despite it being greyed out
- Glyph of Chaos is clunky, I would think this would feel better as a Rune of Chaos instead.
- The gear bases that are upgrades for Rogue feel too rare, I’ve only seen 3 ancient coins this past week that I can recall, and I’ve been actively trying for a Dragonsong for about a week now without much luck despite it supposedly being a common drop.
- I’ve no interest in the Arena, it’d be nice if we could exchange these keys for a dungeon key, the dungeon keys have been dropping, its just usually not the dungeon I want to run.
- It would be nice if there were a crafting item that lets you recover a percentage of the FP lost to a previous level after failures.
- It would be nice if there was an upper bound or fallback for getting a unique you are after after a significant and proportional time investment (i.e. allow breaking uniques down into shards that can be traded to a vendor for a gamble at the unique you want).
The Global Map is hard to navigate, it would be nice if clicking the Era would toggle between the area you are zoomed into and the global Area maps.
A quick location menu for endgame areas would also be a nice QoL improvement.
Also, its unclear what the icons in the map actually mean. For example, the golden dot I always thought was the “You are here” but when you zoom out of the area the same dot is in most but not all areas that you have completed. There isn’t a map legend.
On-screen damage isn’t that useful, it would be nice if on-screen damage was a bit more consolidated. Current damage is per source, and if you have a lot of mobs the painted damage often becomes useless. It would be nice if it were clean, at set intervals with aggregated damage over the interval time, or customizable.
It would be nice if the lifebar above your character was a thick lifebar instead of a small thin one.
If the on-screen damage is a trying beast to tame, maybe have an un-lockable combat log (after you’ve beaten the campaign) that can be parsed?
Its also unclear when the vendor respawns its inventory. Its clearly not by completing an echo, or portal, seems to be time related. It would be nice to be able to force refresh an inventory.
It would also be a nice customization if we could set the default view for items to include Tier levels and ranges (Ctrl+Alt is clunky).
That’s my experience so far.
is always good…