Suggestions after a nostalgic Titan Quest playthrough

Feedback and Suggestions
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Hey everyone.

After seeing the recent trailer teaser for the next TQ, I was feeling nostalgic enough to fire it up and have a quick run through for old times sake. Its obviously somewhat dated right now and LE is leaps and bounds ahead of the venerable old favourite but I did notice a few things that I had not realised I actually liked in the old game and which LE doesnt quite have or doesnt do as well imho.

So here are some suggestions in no particular order:

Chests, Loot piles & Mysterious Tombs everywhere

Unlike LE, there are plenty of container items in game that hide loot or areas that have no bearing on any side quests etc to explore. Chests and random “piles” of bones etc that provide an additional potential little spike of joy when opening. The various levels of chests are also a great way to lure you into aggro range and engage monsters you could otherwise sneak around. Majestic chest in the distance guarded by a hero boss? Hell lets go! I havent been as interested to do full clears in LE as much as I realised I was doing in TQ because of this incentive to “loot” around.

Weapon Loadout Swapping

This one has been asked / suggested before, but was not really something I had placed much value in until this replay. The ability to swap weapons (not skills etc) when facing a particular mob type or to err on the side of offence or defence for a particular encounter was incredibly useful. I realise that EHG has said numerous times that they dont want reskilling of characters between clearing & boss fights but I must admit, the ability to change weapons was pretty good in TQ and wouldnt violate EHGs reskilling policy necessarily.

Impactful Animations & Combat

This is another that has been suggested and commented on quite regularly - be it animations or sound effects or death animations but I realised that LE is most definitely still lagging behind on this front. Combat in TQ isnt all that great (very dated), but there are obvious levels of combat animations - especially death animation sequences that are related to the damage done - I realised this after a while of being overpowered in certain maps and literally one shot hitting mobs so that they would fly “out of the screen” towards you or across the “room”, crash into a wall and slump to the ground. I hadnt realised how cool this was and that LE is missing it. Perhaps its a little testosterone spike but it “feels” really good to actually see your char whack the stuffing out of a mob rather than just give them a noogie till they die.

Scrolls & Temporary buffs

Not sure about this entirely but I liked the fact that there is the option to “buff up” for 90 seconds etc before tough battles using things like Scrolls. It adds a temporary extra level of customisation to a char and enabled (for me at least) additional strategies when struggling with a specific boss etc. After playing LE for so long, I didnt even consider the Scroll options and then I realised how good it was.

Face Tanking

Another one of those that I hadnt realised that I liked or missed. This is probably unlikely to get any real consideration given EHGs view that all bosses have one-hit skills but I kinda liked walking up to a Telkine and just face tanking the bastard with my Conqueror char. Its just something nostalgic I suppose. Perhaps I am just tired of kiting around and want to plant my feet and swing something heavy and hard at my nightmares.

EDIT: an additional one:

Terrain Height in maps

Noticed this in the Oriental section but forgot about it - like the Great Wall and the mountainous paths. The height difference in maps in TQ is far superior to LE (imho). Your character actually feels like its walking up or down with the change in visual scale and the foggy effects and light changes all contribute to a far more believeable difference in terrain height in the various maps. Hell, even going from dungeon level to dungeon level gives the impression you are actually moving deeper. By comparison, I get none of this from LE graphics - even the few maps that try just seem flat after playing TQ.

Thats about all I found worth suggesting… so far

Cheers

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Well, it should be a valid playstyle. I almost made a post on this a few days ago – the lack of a true hack and slash melee character in LE. Every so-called melee build seems to have some gimmick attached to it – bleed, poison, cast-on-hit, etc. Very few, if any, builds are centered around standing in front of monsters and just beating on them until they die. Other than perhaps a bear build, but even those are gimmicked around transformation and the benefits granted.

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Personally, I’m happy LE does not offer these (thus far). I absolutely hated buying, organizing, and then right-clicking half a dozen Elixers or more before a big boss fight in Grim Dawn…and if that fight lasted more time than the Elixers offered…oh, I hated it with a passion. To each their own, but I’d rather not have to do the same in this game. However, I imagine over the entire lifespan of this game it’ll eventually get added and I will hate that day. Haha, this just brings up a sore spot for me, sorry. :sweat_smile:

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I’m with you on that. I hate micromanaging temp buffs. I forget which game did it (I know WoW has them), but it allowed for 1 scroll and 1 potion “buff” at a time. And each consumable had a 1 hour buff timer. There also weren’t a million different options – just simple “increased resistances”, “increased damage”, “increased attack/cast speed”, etc. Not “increased fire dot damage” or anything so nuanced.

That was more than doable for me…

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We don’t have a melee char. Each and every class is build arround some kind of gimmic while good old “in your face!” classes are missing. No Barbarian, no Knight, no Warrior, no Fighter or Berserker or [insert more Names here]. Every toon is able to do everything while we have some conversions for this and that and all the way arround. There is simply no purist class ingame anymore.

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I think LE shrines kinda give this buff stuff a bit. And I like this implementation. I remember during CT shrines were overly present (some sort of bug) and I don’t feel like it ever got fixed. I hope it never does get fixed because with the current population of them it’s actually fun going slightly out of your way to pick them up on Mono runs and definitely arenas.

The only thing I would change is the number of types. Right now we’ve got like ~5. We could easily have triple that.

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Well, technically the best example is the belt slot with many affixes that provide a variety of temporary buffs on potion use, whether those be on a unique item or added via crafting. This has been LE’s version of this mechanic and the dev’s have thus far not strayed away from it, nor have they stated any plans to do so.

Personally, I prefer this solution to having several discrete items you have to either pick up or buy and then consume in order to provide a temporary buff. This is something I would prefer not to have to do in LE, but that’s just my opinion.

There’s more than ~5 types of shrines, but yes more variety certainly wouldn’t hurt. When I was documenting them I found the following shrines (though this may not be a complete list):

  • Critical Shrine - Grants 100% critical strike chance.
  • Experience Shrine - Increases experience gained on kill.
  • Haste Shrine - Increases movement, attack, and cast speed.
  • Reflective Shrine - Grants 300% damage reflection.
  • Shrine of Scorpions - Summons Golden Scorpions that drop rare items.
  • Shrine of Shards - Drops affix shards.
  • Shrine of the Frozen Hive - Summons several allied Ice Beetles.
  • Shrine of the Ice Beetle - Summons an allied Ice Beetle.
  • Shrine of the Legends - Drops a Unique item.
  • Shrine of Wealth - Drops gold.
  • Shrine of Worship - Drops idols.
  • Stunning Shrine - Grants 200% increased stun chance and stun duration.
  • Water Shrine - Grants 100% increased mana regen and cooldown recovery speed.
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I will say that my hc limit test character is a full tank and spank vengeance vk, no gimmicks, just stand there, hold down vengeance, move out of one shots. It works pretty well, it’s just exceptionally low dps compared to any good builds, in exchange for stupid dr and sustain. So it is possible, it’s just not really good, and maybe not designed around as like, an intentional thing.

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Added another observation regarding Terrain Height to the original post.

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I wasn’t meaning technically. I never liked GDs numerous potion types either. The only time I actually used them was the agonizing journey of Hardcore Classless. I meant more in the spirit of having ‘buffs’ out there and not having to manage them.

Wolcen sort of has different potions you can slot in on your potion allocation. (they have two slots). I just don’t want dozens of different potion types dropping. A handful of different potion types might be okay but if it gets into GD level it becomes more tedious.

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I was primarily thinking of the buff ones, probably should’ve been more clear, than the ones that drop items or gold and stuff.

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Yeah, this one is actually kinda a sore spot for me right now. There are numerous skills that still have issues with terrain height changes. I’d like to see them get this completely cleared up before they tackle making the changes even MORE noticeable. :smiley:

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