My insanely awesome runemaster was finally done in by double Wengari Spire slammy. Surprisingly I wasn’t too bothered by it, probably because I learned so much more on this playthrough and was able to farm some pretty awesome gear for future HC SAF playthroughs.
I have a few takeaways from this playthrough. On the 1-shot, even though I had 5000-6000+ health+ward at the time and my character is pretty tanky (max resistance, max crit avoidance, etc.) it still seemed pretty reasonable considering the corruption level I was running, the +% dmg modifiers that were active, and the fact I got slammed by 2 spires at once. The one thing that bugs me though is how some of the spires have relatively short telegraphing, and if the server decides to lag right at the start of the telegraph I would sometimes have little to no warning to escape the hit.
On lag, the servers are quite laggy right now. I purposely decided to stay away from certain areas because I felt like the lag was going to be a death sentence. And I was not wrong, on quite a few occasions a lag spike nearly lead to my death, even in relatively “safe” areas. I probably wouldn’t encourage playing HC online with the current state of the servers.
On visual bugs, I saw a large number of these. Missing textures that were replaced by large white boxes or just large blurry blocks. Also lots of cases where my frost wall would appear in the sky or out of reach(e.g. casting on a bridge would make it show up underneath the bridge.
On skill bugs, this was the other most deadly issue I faced next to the lag. My runemaster relied on flame rush. The problem is flame rush itself has all sorts of issues. In the more mild cases my character would just get stuck in the fireball animation which would sometimes keep me stuck in the danger zone rather than allowing me to escape. In the far worst cases my screen would show my character running away after casting, but then 2-3 seconds later I would suddenly appear in the complete opposite direction and just be coming out of the flame rush animation, smack dab inside of a mob. It’s like my computer and the server completely desynced and one thought I was running away while the other thought I was in the flame rush animation. That very nearly got me killed as when I resynced my health/ward suddenly went from full to almost gone and I was in a completely different part of the map. Slamming pots and running away saved my tail, but it was a major problem. Overall I’m continuing to experience bugs with a number of different builds and skills.
While I’m very excited for 1.0, I do hope the most critical of these are addressed either during or shortly after 1.0 release. Some of these issues are minor and not too big of a deal, but some of them are close to game breaking. Either way, my next build is probably going to be even more tanky just to hedge my survival. Primalist anyone? 