Tl;dr rage quit post
Barely two weeks into this season, I’ve decided to bag it. I’d like to provide some feedback that I hope will be read / processed and considered / contextualized for future use. My reasons for this post:
The meta is beyond stale. The leaderboards say it all. There are countless items and mechanics that players can utilize to create an extraordinarily diverse spectrum of characters. This is not happening. This season’s gutting of the imprinting system has made it time prohibitive to see many niche classes come to fruition. Low effort and unbalanced is the new black.
I am disappointed by the aforementioned balancing. Arcane Ascendance and an entire class of mage builds were essentially deleted after three or four days into the season. This happened shortly after videos were posted of this game’s pinnacle boss’s 1 second shaming by the same class that saturates the corruption leaderboard.
Wasn’t warpath balanced? Can’t tell since they’re all at the threshold of eternity and I never see them. How’s that spellblade balancing? Can’t we just make Spellblade a Runemaster skill so it gets used? The same rogues are still suntanning themselves at 10k corruption, armor optional for them.
Is the item corruption mechanic intended to fill the void left by imprinting’s neutering? It’s an uncontrollable mess that only creates additional irritation by forcing players to farm duplicates or backups of every idol and piece of gear, lest they set themselves back by bricking something that Julra may have spared. This aspect of the game, at first fun during the campaign, wore out its novelty very quickly. It’s a gimmicky, risky supplement for something that wasn’t broken.
This season also introduced some new bugs. My least favorite is the progressively lengthening of time to open your stash or any item container. The longer the play, the more delay… It also broke how I could switch menus at an enchantment table or farsight turtle.
However, we were left with some classic favorites like party chat breaking when switching instances from another locale. Perhaps I’m bitter because I don’t have any friends. I mean, I might have friends … But I wouldn’t know since my friends list usually shows only the same one person when he’s online.
Speaking of chat, it really ought to be modernized. If the profanity filter is smart enough to catch crabs, certainly it’s smart enough to catch gold sellers, yes? Its ability to filter innocuous words could also be trained to filter out unnecessary prophecy spam and incessant Aberroth chatter, yes? If this game every wants to promote community, it should first promote communication. The chat window could benefit from additional, or even custom, communication channels, and custom filters.
So good luck, EHG. I hope you kill it next season. It’s been a fun 3200+ hours since last May.