I just killed Abberoth with the first character I was playing. I may or may not try to push for Uber Abberoth, but I do have quite a few builds I want to try, so maybe not. Anyway, here is some feedback for the patch so far:
Good
- New crafting is awesome. So many more items are potentially useful and I’ve been making more use of runes of removal and glyphs of chaos and despair than I was before.
- Set crafting in particular has opened up some pretty cool build opportunities.
- Forgemaster’s Might has inspired a lot of build idea for me, but I haven’t tried them yet. That’s probably next.
- In general this patch has made me want to try to make my own builds a lot more than in the past.
- Portal Charms + 1 guaranteed affix on legendaries has made it a lot more painless to just go craft something I need. Before I kind of groaned knowing how much time I’d spend to potentially just fail anyway.
- The new content is nice. Just in general there being more to do in echoes than just stability and corruption pushing is good.
Bad (Nothing here is fun ruining, they’re just things I think could be improved.)
- The background color for Reforged set items looks too much like a rare item. Maybe use the same style as items with experimental mods and do half green half yellow/purple?
- I think all the random echo stuff might actually be happening too much. It’s good that it’s there, but if there are multiple things every single echo it starts to just become noise. These should ideally feel like special surprises to break up your normal play. So maybe reduce the frequency of the various echo events, but proportionally increase their rewards to compensate.
- The idol crafting being the reward for the tombs is kind of weird. It’s surprisingly specific for content everyone is going to do regularly. Not all builds make good use of class idols and even if they do, it might take you a while to find a class idol you care enough about to enchant. After the first day or so I’ve just been skipping the reward because it was just wasting my time. It seems like woven echoes already offer a better avenue for delivering that kind of reward since players can choose to specifically do them or not. idk what should replace the idol enchant at the end of the tombs though. Maybe just a random woven echo? idk.
- In general I dislike having to do crafting in woven echoes. Even with stash access, it just feels… wrong. I’d just prefer if they gave some material that let you do it anywhere or something. I just don’t like having to go through the hassle of finding a cemetery then placing and running the echo every time I have something I want to do special crafting with. It’s like it’s replacing the tedious bit of temporal sanctum after they just made that better. It’s not a huge deal though.
- Similarly, I don’t like needing to place woven echoes from the end of a cemetery. If I want to run them I just want to do it whenever rather than finding a cemetery and when I do a cemetery just because it’s in my path through the mono, I don’t like the feeling of wasting it if I don’t want to place woven echoes at the moment.
- I think the difficulty of the new woven echo bosses could be tuned up. I didn’t need to pay attention to any of their mechanics even for the ones I needed to be at 200/300 corruption to do.
- That said… the gauntlet of 10 harbingers in a row… why? I know this is sort of a build issue with being kind of low damage, but my god it just takes ages to do that woven echo and because it’s one at a time it isn’t any more difficult than any of them are individually. Like this would make more sense in a game with limited healing resources, but that is not this game. Or maybe make them spawn on a set timer regardless of if you’ve killed the last one so it becomes either a DPS check or a check for how many of them you can tank at the same time.
- I’m personally not a fan of mechanics like the weaver tree. It add another layer of setup you need to do in order to just play the game. I get that PoE also has this and it’s a thing people like and I do get the value it offers in tailoring content. I just don’t like having to make all those choices about the content ahead of time.
Random wishlist
- Weaver Tree node that makes shrines more frequent or otherwise give some bonus.
- More sets. We do have effectively a lot of new content to explore by virtue of the sets being playable now, but I do think it was a missed opportunity to not add at least one new set with the system update.
- I really hope you do another pass on some of the bad uniques. There are so many potentially cool uniques that are just unplayable because of needless restrictions or just having numbers that are too low to be worth building around.
- I’d love to see Uber versions of the timeline bosses. I know you can keep scaling them up with corruption, but I just mean a version that has harder mechanics along with the big numbers. I think there’s space to make these fights a bit more interesting and woven echoes in general just provide an easy way to add new content that may or may not be for everyone.