Personal observations of a non-elite player

Feedback and Suggestions
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This post is just my personal feedback on the game so far……I will not go into great detail but focus more on underlying issues I see as potential shortcomings. This is after all BETA and this is meant to offer basic constructive criticism.

First of all I will start off by saying I AM NOT AN ELITE PLAYER. Actually I am probably turning into a grumpy old man as a long-time player of the genre. I do not need to see how high I can “widdle” up the wall to prove anything….levelling per se for its own sake is not attractive nor and a driving incentive. I play purely as a past time for enjoyment…trying to “nut-out” and try out the game’s mechanics….not in some race for “elitism”. Let me explain:
Rewards
once you reach the 70’s or thereabouts there is little to offer the “dopamine” hit
• you have maxed out your speciality skills…no reward there
• the paltry one passive point you gain per level is gated by:
◦ huge and exponentially increasing XP for each level….the inevitable grind but it seems a bit too steep and far in excess of the reward
◦ at this stage of your progress of one passive point per level is almost meaningless as a progress reward
Useless Penalty
• I cannot see any reason that a player is penalised for respeccing specially points by losing them and having to “re-earn” them. I cannot fathom any meaningful logic for this imposition other than prolonging the grind……and for what purpose? I cannot see ANY. It just seems like someone thought “this will be a good control” without there being any underlying meaningful reason at all for it.
Skills Gating
• Some of the skills available, especially in the speciality trees, are great EXCEPT they are gated out of usefulness by resource budget (damage/defence/resources) and/or prerequisite skills and/or severe over-limitation to other skills and/or cooldown/timing. The worst is when several of these gates are used simultaneously. This makes these skills extremely difficult to balance (you basically have to cater for extreme outlier adoptions on each variable…making the skill overall useless for the average player) and for players to fully understand….there are several “sucker” options in some trees.
Drops
• gear drops are atrocious….any purples/green/browns are rarely relevant or even useful ….this is the usual loot whinge……but loot is not offering me any real incentive to keep going.
Fight Balance/fairness
• As mentioned by others elsewhere and picked by by the devs is that there are some balancing/fairness issues surround boss fights with deaths from off-screen untelegraphed hits.
Cursor Display
• As is prevalent with a lot of ARPG…more so with LE because of the propensity of “wave” echoes, we have the basic and essential cursor becoming invisible……there is an add-on…why not incorporate that in the game as part of its base to clearly display the cursor in all circumstances. If an add=on can do it why can’t the devs? How can a game seriously submit itself where the basic control metric is flakey?

Please accept these as CONSTRUCTIVE points. Feel free to ignore any or all as you desire.

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Would you share which skills you feel have this? Skills feedback is always very valuable, and often, a standard skill setup becomes commonly used and renders the other options, well “sucker” options is a good way to phrase it.

The “spend XP to respec skills” is there effectively to prevent people from gaming the system and constantly respeccing skills to optimize them for each individual battle / every time there’s a boss. Once you get through monoliths, getting the points back can be done by running only a few waves in the Arena (10-15 waves is usually sufficient to get the skill points back). I much prefer this system over wondering if I have to constantly respec just to feel a certain threshold of power.

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Because the ability to respec your skills to new ones at full power at any time with no drawback would be abused and damage the health of the game, which is far more important than the minor inconvenience of running 2-3 echoes to bring a new skill up from partial to full strength.

This isn’t actionable feedback for the devs unless you are way more specific. Which skills? What, specifically, “gates [each of them] out of usefulness”? Which skills are the worst offenders for which “several of these gates are used simultaneously”?

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Firstly my comments are offered as a personal opinion…take them or leave them…your opinions may be different.
On the matter of the penalty for respeccing…it is a penalty…for no valid reason…I cant even change the latest point if I “accidentally” put it in the wrong spot… and why is being able to change specs for particular fights such a NO NO??? How will they “abused and damage the health of the game”…I cannot see it…sounds like a “straw man” argument to me without detail.

On the gating of skills…I can only comment of some of the Accolyte skills…the devs DO KNOW how their gating structure is organised for each class/specialisation (or they damnwell should) before implementing any precondition to a skill… they DO NOT need me to get bogged down in detailing each one individually…that is their job… and I am not going to nitpick individual skills. I know people like to argue detail…but as I said the comments are more about the underlying factors. If you want to you can look at the Skeleton trees in the Accolyte class. Follow some of the branches…there are several WTF nodes in there that negate points spent earlier (which you can’t change without penalty of having to re-earn them).

Like I said, these issues are raised as consructive criticism and are my personal opinion…If I don’t tell them here about them then how can they be addressed if at all?

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When you’ve said, in your own words, that you don’t know or understand the reason, how is it possible for you to declare that the reason is not valid?

Being able to swap full power skills with total freedom necessitates that players do it, because heavy specialization for a given task will always be the most powerful way to play. “Swap to X for Y Task” would be a part of every build guide. It would dictate the meta-game in a way that mandates a response from EHG, and their choices are limited to balancing around it so that it’s even more of a requirement, or prevent it entirely.

I know that what you’re going to do next is to act like you don’t understand why that matters because you, a “non-elite player”, don’t care about being the most powerful, but that will be utterly disingenuous, so please skip it. It is not up for debate that most players care about character power and success, and will pay for those things with tedium and frustration if given the option.

Then comment on them.

No. It is your job as someone giving feedback to provide enough detail for your feedback to be actionable. “Evaluate every skill by the metric of my vague, angry rambling” is not actionable feedback.

Necro is my primary. I’m very familiar with the Skeleton tree. There are no such nodes that I would give that description to.

The devs now have two people telling them completely opposite things. One person says a bunch of nodes are bad but refuses to say which or why. One says they’re fine. Who should they listen to?

What exactly is constructive about:

Some skills are totally useless because of something something gated something something, but despite that I know exactly which ones I’m talking about, I’m not going to tell you which ones or why because you should know and it’s not my job to tell you.

Regale me with the story of how the word “constructive” belongs anywhere near that. You could have saved yourself a lot of time by simply writing “I’m mad, it’s your fault, do something about it” instead. You would have communicated the same thing.

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Usually I’ll pop in anywhere to defend somebody’s right to criticize and give feedback on things they don’t like in LE no matter how many white knights I must face to do so and whether I agree with the criticism or not.

That being said,

This was brilliantly written and completely accurate. I can’t even add anything to make it better, so I’m just gonna tell @BroncoCollider thank you.

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What part of “personal opinion” do you not understand…I simply raised these matters to let the devs know what I feel…right or wrong. I do not have to justify that…it is how I feel.
If simply expressing personal opinion is so fractious or offends the elite so badly…simple solution…game uninstalled

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Tbf, even if it helps the devs when players can articulate their issue clearly, they dont expect every player to be able to do that, or even want to do that. That OP thinks it doesnt feel good is still a data point for the devs (even if I disagree with OP like you do :stuck_out_tongue: ).

I’m pretty sure the devs have said such feeling input is useful to them and is encouraged even if it doesnt pinpoint to any specific thing they can do atm.

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Guys, could we more often talk about the game, instead of talking about how we write? Please! :wink:

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When I made the original post I thought there would be “a few more adults” in the room who accepted, as adults, people have different personal opinions. It is disengenuous to ask for people’s opinions, especially in BETA, and let them be criticised for having a different view… Originally I did not want any response from anyone…it was merely and expression of personal feeling. The “feral attack dog” mentality totally squashes that. As an ex governance/ethics/systems auditor I have seen this professionally many times. You need to address this culture that shuns and ridicules different opinions…they are after all how we all grow.
Anyway what about the other issues…
I have uninstalled the game
I saw potential here but the elitism, holier than thou community need to be put into perspective. I wish you all well…take care and stay safe.

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You’re right, but…

It kinda is.

Isn’t particularly helpful either.

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Which is fair enough, and that is useful feedback. But not all feedback is created equal. Telling someone “X sucks/feels bad” is less useful to promote the change that you desire than “X sucks because A, B & C” and that could be further improved by saying “X sucks because A, B & C, what if Y or Z?”.

Bronco wasn’t criticising your opinion, he was criticising the relative lack of detail. As I said above, feelings are absolutely valid feedback, but more details as to why the feelings is more helpful than just the feelings.

Yes, but you put something out on the internet you’ll get a response, negative or positive…

This is true.

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Why has this post disappeared?

Bronco’s last para sums it up…hope your customers enjoy that attitude…because that is what you are promoting

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I wasn’t going to do this but>>>>>
Who do you want the game to be played by in the longer term? Is it time to change the focus to actual normal players rather than “elites”. Is the time of the the “Elites” or the “Masses”? The elites are great during the development stage…they provide all sorts on analysis and feedback…but who is your target long term players? Is it skilled and motivated players or is it the wider community? I know this will draw the crabs but it must be considered by EHG.
I don’t have to spend hours specifying the issues I raised…the devs are paid many $$$$ to do that…I am capable of that but it is wrong to stifle criticism because i wont do that sound analysis freely…and I do NOT want money…the devs must stand up.
Sure I paid my money for the “pre-release”…but that does NOT absolve the devs of their responsibility to provide a “best performance” product and rely on the community to resolve issues.

Good bye

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Just because there are a small number of … “forum mains” (I am aware of the irony), doesn’t mean the devs are focussed on solely pleasing the “elite”. They have made numerous changes over the years (most recently to Majasa) to make things easier & less catered for the high end players/builds. Don’t mistake the viewpoint of a small section of the community for the viewpoint of the devs.

Entirely your prerogative & I’ve already commented on that earlier.

It’s not about stifling criticism, it’s about making the criticism as constructive as possible to help the devs. If you don’t want to do that, for whatever reason, that’s entirely up to you.

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I don’t think it is right for people to be attacked for not giving their reasonings in detail since it is after all not a “job”, but at the same time the feedback should not be deemed as important as others that do give their reasoning. OP does mention to ignore his opinion in his opening but I won’t say that his feedback is exactly as “CONSTRUCTIVE” as indicated in bold.

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I don’t even want to participate in this whole discussion that was completely de-railing from the OP.

I rather focus on some points brought up from OP.

I don’t want to devalue them, but still want to give my thoughts about them.
This is not to criticism the feedback, but just to give OP a different view on some things.

I agree that the pure level rewards get heavily dimished after lvl 70.
Each individual passive point will become less impactful, reaching lvl 20 on skills feels like losing a profession layer entirely.

But there are still other progression layers left, like Blessings and finishing all MoF timelines.
Once you enter empower this profession layer will become more impactful and exciting IMO.

I personally don’t think that pure character level should give that much power. I’m fine with the current system.
Most builds have all super strong passive nodes by the time they hit 70/80 and that’s good.

Everything after that is just for the min maxing.
Reaching lvl 70 is really easy and achieveable, but beyond that takes alot of time but is also not mandatory.

I prefer this and would actually make reaching lvl 100 even harder.

If you could freely respect on the fly the main thing that this would lead to, would be strategies revolving around swapping skills and skill nodes between different content.

This would lead to meta tactics that would revolve around swapping skills constantly and that is something that should be avoided at all cost.
The best way of playing a video game should never be spending half of your playtime fiddling around in menues and changing stuff every few minutes, this is not fun.

Secondly, re leveling skills past lvl 75 is incredibly fast. We are talking 5-10 minutes. If you are even higher, like lvl 80/85+ this will become faster and faster, to the point where it takes you one echo to relevel all of your skills.

During the campaign there is still this minimum respec level and exp catchup system in place, which makes skills catching up super fast.
These systems are relatively new and before you lost All progress in a skill, when you unspecced it.
I personally really liked the old system, where it was super impactful, to respec a skill.

Now it’s much more forgiving and you can still regain like 80% of the old power within minutes, even during the campaign.

Experimenting and trying out stuff is super doable and easy and you really don’t need 100% of the power of a skill, to test stuff during the campaign.

The main opportunity cost for skill in LE is high mana cost.
There are several skill that have medium to high cooldown, those are usually cc or defensive skills.

It would be really useful if you bring up some more specific examples.
I think most skills in LE are very well balanced in terms of ressources/cooldown.

If you have a decent loot filter setup, loot is a lot more exciting.

It would be really helpful to provide more details, with the exception of some chapter 9 mobs, I think LE is the best game in terms of visual clarity and fairness, by a landslide.

I don’t think, there are any skills in LE that are deadly and completely untelegraphed.
There might be some, that are not telegraphed well enough, but I can’t think of any “off-screen untelegraphed” ability.

I think Summon Skeletons is one of the worse examples you could choose here, but alot of those bigger nodes that “negate” previous nodes are mandatory for proper balancing.

One example would be Fireballs Channeled Branch.
You need to invest 4 points into cast speed, before turning Fireball into a 7 Fireballs/Second channeled ability.

But as soon as you take that, cast speed will no longer affect Fireball.
Does it make those points “wasted”?

No because you invested some skill points into spewing out an incredible amount of fireballs per second.

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That’s a good example of how the power of the later nodes is balanced around the cost of having to invest in the earlier ones. If the changed it so that the channelling node only required 1 point in the cast speed node then they’d have to reduce the number of fireballs per second to compensate (since you’d then have an additional 3 skill points to invest in other nodes for more damage).

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Being an “ordinary” player such as yourself (or filthy casual as some like to call us), I’ve only got my characters to late 70’s/early 80s and am now bored stiff, and not playing. The mind bending lack of “feel good” moments and futility of the monoliths eventually won out, I had to move to playing another game for some excitement and meaningful content. That said, LE is a lovely game and I dare say will appeal to the min maxers more than the “play for fun” players.

Every game has their “white knights” on their forums, which is great that there are people so ready to support/defend the game, but not so great when new players are attacked for their views. or how those views are presented, or even their suggestions. These folks need to realise that actually new players’ views are more important than theirs, because it’s new players to the game that are needed rather than a few diehards if a game wants to succeed. After all…everyone has been a new player, and it was a pleasure to read the OP and have my same feelings expressed so lucidly.

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The feedback is valid. And it’s not something particularly unique. Many points are discussed regularly on this forum.

I do not agree with everything, but with many of the points OP raises.

One thing that bothers me a lot (not only here, but in many forums/social media) is that everytime somebody defends something he likes, he’s a “White Knight”. People that criticize things are called trolls. Controversial topics derail into a tournament of devaluation of the “other side” by nitpicking phrases, quote out of context and trying to make the others look bad. Every day we see this in the news because politicians have mastered this style of debating.

I’m aware that this is not new, especially on the internet. And it won’t change. Also I, myself, am guilty of doing this sometimes, too. I try not to, but it is not that easy.

The LE community is one of the nicest communities I took part in the past few years. In general the feedback and discussions here are very constructive. I hope it stays this way.

Just a note to new players that want to provide feedback:

Do it. Every bit is welcome. Good and bad. And please don’t take comments on your feedback negatively. It’s natural that people tend to “defend” things they like when they get criticised. But that doesn’t mean that the defenders are brainless sheeps that just follow every dev decision like a zombie.

Of course sometimes people get used to “bad features” the longer they play a game. And there are issues a 2000h player will be blind to.

The best way to address this is by having a nice conversation. Nobody needs to change their opinions. Nobody needs to understand the position of the other. Only thing that is important is that theres acceptance, no matter how well the standpoints are articulated.

It’s important to address issues. It’s ok to comment on feedback if somebody disagrees.

Be nice.
Be fair.

Peace!

the :v::rainbow::nerd_face:

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