I read through some but not all of this thread, as it started getting a little too heavy (pun intended) in parts. From my cursory read, I’d say while the OP does have some legitimate points, it also seems like he may be missing some things, or maybe this is just not his style of game.
I’m not certain of this, but it almost sounds like he just wants the exact same mechanics literally covered with a makeover (a la D2 hydra or GW Mesmer). Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t know if the game would be “better” if instead of a scorpion shooting poison, I could summon a pangolin that shoots coronavirus. Would it be more “unique”? I guess so, but I don’t know if that is what the OP really wants? If so, maybe that can all be satisfied with future cosmetics.
When it comes to the gameplay, I don’t think you really see the specialness (I won’t say unique) until you’ve tried out some of the “endgame” builds that people have come up with. Especially ones that blend skills and passives from all 3 specialties. The overall game system allows for some combinations that result in truly different feeling and fun gameplay. I’ve played a crazy polar bear, a summoner who lets his tree dude machine gun everything down, a shaman that freezes everything on screen, a guy that just walks around and lets everything die of poison around him while his own health plummets to 0, and a necro spamming 50+ wraiths on the screen at once. Yes, the core mechanics and concepts are fairly “traditional” but again, I’m not sure how much is added to the gameplay (particularly at this stage) if I were to say, replace the wraiths with pink butterflies, or the spriggan with a watermelon spitting seeds.
So I guess I’m wondering if the OP wants brand new mechanics, or just improved dressing on the existing mechanics? I also wonder if he hasn’t more or less missed out on what the devs have done with the game in terms of providing a playground for interesting build concepts, or perhaps that wasn’t what he was interested in.
Rittchard, you’re pretty much on the mark there. I would like to see new mechanics and new visuals yeah, not every single thing needs to be changed obviously.
All these games go thru cycles of nerf/buff, its a well known fact. The reason being that nothing can ever truly be balanced in the way people think they should be. Ok ill concede that theres lots of endgame builds that look and feel entirely different to each other, but at some point every single player falls into the same routine - find the strongest build available, use it, spread it around on forums etc until it gets nerfed, then the cycle repeats. It might seem to keep the game fresh on paper, but in reality its just replacing one thing for another thing that was already there generally, not counting full skill reworks.
If a lot of different mechanics are introduced, it makes it a lot easier to make truly unique builds and a lot harder to get stuck in the cycle where once every 3 months a bunch of players QQ on the forums about how their fave toon is now useless after putting in months of work.
Guild Wars didn’t have the problem because the gear system was incredibly simple rather than overly complex. Obviously thats not a fix for arpgs, you can’t diminish whats already there, so all you can really do is add more systems/mechanics. Guild Wars accomplished this by providing massive amounts of skills and a lot of classes.
I think that would be the best choice for LE. Adding in more skills, that would make the classes seem far more interesting.
This is a big point, especially in the PoE community. It’s really more about the mindset of players, than how balanced the game is. Alot of PoE’s content is finite and can literally be done with every single skill. Same applies to LE.
But people always want “the best” or “the most efficient”. And i can understand that to a certain degree.
LE in it’s current state is already pretty balanced in most regard and literally every skill is viable. Only thing that forces you to play “meta” is arena. And there comes the issue, with this infinite scaling content, that kind of content brings out all the super strong or sometimes even broken builds.
I never expect or want a aRPG to be balanced perfectly, as you said. It’s basically not realstic to have a perfectly balanced game, that is as complex as LE or PoE.
All we need is enough diverse content to cater to all kind of different people.
If we get more masteries and more skills in the future (and also reworks/overhaul of older skills), that will be great for even more diverse build. But i think LE already is in a very good place, where you really can do what ever you want and you are really not forced to play “the best” builds.
Coming back on the topic of the danger of clone syndrome and “originals did it better”, problem to put a couple quotes I found while browsing steam reviews.
These are from another unrelated game that sprinkled from the brief “revival” moment done by Legends of Grimlock.
2nd review same “others did it better”:
This stuff does happen (reviews are from 2019 and january this year)
So yea to truly leave a mark, and get out of “ah yea that Poe clone something”, imo you gotta show first the unique perks of your game, and then push them to the max.
Actually imo they should even try to hide the homework/copycats or add them later, for example D3 necro was added way later and same in GD the “cyclone” was added in the 2nd expansion (as an “extra skill” of an otherwise very unique new class) ← this shows that the crowd that wants “always the same” is not the one that will make your game and can be made happy at a later stage, maybe.
What does it mean in LE? Well something like it’s been kinda talked about in this thread.
From my side I could talk about Sentinel: make all unique skills more visible, give them more emphasis to make them become “the LE skill”, make them work from lv0
Make all branches of Vengeance work: make dark blades work, give emphasis to its effects rather than “yea just an autoattack with more autoattacks and some temp buffs”
Rive same, make all branches work, make a new pass to the 1212 branches, get rid of weird stuff (unimpressive flat dmg at the cost of losing all aspd why exactly?)
Erasing strike, Manifest Armor, Forge Strike, Rebuke, Smelter Wrath…
Pretty much every single element in Sentinel has unusable branches, get rid of onkill stuff in all trees and skills, FG minions stuff, forge strike procs vs single target, channeling like Smelter wrath and Rebuke with a longass 2s cast time, Erasing Strike ancient mechanics (done before rive/veng/smite gave mana regen) that drains 100% mana for piss dmg etc
Plus every unique skill (not copied from diablo) needs a lot more emphasis in a build and needs to be more interesting/signature.
Also please DO rebalance the damage distribution and get rid of those chest/helm mods that require a 1-2k farm (truly rotfl) and enable like x2-10 dmg ← 99% of all these “such cool much dmg” builds are all about any skill done using 2k h farmed mods in chest and helm (to be real frank 2k hours is such a waste of time the thought makes me die inside)
Not saying that it is 100% bad, but at least for me there’s a pending queue and it is marked as needs to be addressed, before unblocking the game for me. The list is so long I’ll just stick by quoting OP’s general idea
This is actually what I always feared was going to happen. It being made later than the others means that they had more experience and were able to make it much better than the earlier classes and now they don’t hold up.
Yeah, as I said above, I think the creativity evident in the skill trees for the Rogue needs to be reflected in the other classes skill trees as well to allow for a smiliar level of synergies & stuff.
One Rogue skill tree that I can’t really find any creativity at all with is Shurikens. The skill itself just has zero imagination and the more I look at it’s skill tree, the copies from other games jump out at you.
All of the skill altering nodes are directly ripped from other games. PoE Ethereal Knives + Sire of Shards for the Throwing Star node. Blade Shield is an obvious poor mans PoE Blade Vortex but with the added disadvantage that it doesn’t actually function without using an extra four skill points to make it pierce. Chakram is from D2/3. Deadly Aim node is just the same as the Embers node for the Mages Fireball spell. Ricochet is just like any Shield throw skill. The other skill nodes are just generic damage or effect/proc upgrades.
To be totally honest I failed to get very far with her at all as every skill tree feels like a ‘seen that done that’ and I just got bored. Perhaps I’m just becoming a miserable old git and need to take a break but I keep hearing that her skills are creative but so far I fail to see it.
While the rogue definitely has alot of those skills “that you would expect”, which sometimes seems a bit lacking in the creative department, i think EHG did a fantastic job of making even the most basic skill FEEL very good.
Skills like Puncture, Multishot or Shift are not mindblowing or have fancy VFX, but the animations, sounds and responsiveness are astonishing IMO.
It just feels good to play with them.
I agree, that some of the nodes individually are not super creative, but the beauty of LE’s skill tree system is, that you can mix and match alot of those nodes, which then makes them a bit more uniques.
And then we have some skills that are already baseline pretty unique.
Like Dancing Strikes, Lethal Mirage and Dark Quiver.
I personally don’t mind it that much, if stuff seems copied from other games, as long as they implemented it well and it feels good, which it definitely does.
i think they could do more for the combination attack. they should just make flow a skill, add it to the skills list and let you link the 4-5 skills so that when you press the button it goes through those skills. any skill not linked say you put acid flask in slot 2 should not count or boost or use the charge.
i respeced out of the flow line because im not just going to constantly be spamming 4-5 different skills when i can just use flurry, acid flask, and that ring of steel clone and get the desired feel.
Your suggestion with a “design your own combo” skill is cool, but i don’t think we have enough skill at this point to make that happen, maybe in the future.
The good thing with stuff like the Flow Passive is, it’s a “passive” node, that does change your playstyle/rotation drastically. I do like when passive skills do that much in terms of actual gameplay.
I’m all about innovation and risk taking and pushing boundaries, but I think you asking for it in areas that there is not so much space anymore. No matter how you treat a throwing hammer or a fireball, its function will look as something you have seen before. And if you mask it as something else, like a skull or a rock so that it doesnt look like a copy, the result will be the same. You dont have to reinvent the wheel to bring innovation. What arpgs can do, is change how those functions interact with the enviroment maybe or with other elements of the game etc. There will always be a projectile that can pierce/chain/explode, there will always be a ground aoe, there will always be a firestorm/avalanche/rain of arrows, there will always be a whirlwind/cyclone casue they simply work. What you do with them is where there is still room for innovation.
The only thing it wouldn’t work with is channelled skills, and skills with cooldown would make it feel janky. Plus there’s the question of what to do if you interrupt the sequence.
And that is the most basic stuff…
Why do they all go boring necromancer over and over?
And then as OP even points out, have all these monsters, and what do you summon? human skeletons/zombies.
the “ghosts” necro summoner option here is at least something. Ill give them that. Although, shame they didn’t lean harder into that. As the ghosts are more offensive spells for the Lich, then actual summons for the Necro.
Read halfway through. Think most were covered. I’ll try recommend a few “unique” skills that may have been in other games, but certainly not "cookie cutter::
Acolyte:
Death seal
Wandering spirit
Bone curse
Aura of decay
Mage:
Static
Primalist:
Tempest strike
If you want to compare sub level 20 base skills to end game builds in Grim Dawn and POE, then not much people can do to convince you otherwise. If you’re willing to put down your biases and try end game, you’ll realize there’s a lot of variations that will keep you busy and fresh. And the game is still in beta. I find the interactions between skills pretty interesting and well done in LE compared to other games. Flurry to multishot, shurikens with shadows, flame brand and flame reave, static and lightning blast, transplant and rip blood, shield throw and smite and the list goes on. If there’s something to take from the OP’s post is the early levels can be a little stale. I’d like to see the pace picked up a bit for the earlier levels. Skill interactions introduced more explicitly earlier on and more skill points to play with so builds can be defined a bit more earlier on.
This I can totally agree with. Some classes are a chore to level up and skills can feel extremely dull until you have enough points to invest in them. Perhaps that is the main reason I cannot get into the game lately, as the first 20-30 levels on a new character can be a bit boring.
I’ve played a lot if rogue recently and was thinking the exact same when I got my first impression. “I’ll never play another class!”
Actually I’m mixing in sessions with my other characters just to not get burned out on the rogue. And I appreciate that other classes feel different. Ok, I missed mobility in my Paladin so I switched a teleport into my loadout in addition to lunge. Now I have 2 mobility skills that let me play way faster than before.
Also I’ve gotten a different view on some builds and some ideas to adjust existing builds or even make new one.
So playstyle wise its absolutely ok that there are these differences. If the first hype is over, classes will be mixed up again.
The skill interactions defenitely is superb on rogue and lackluster on other chars. Certainly the devs are aware and overhauls and adjustments are incoming.
I would agree the Rogue is superior in terms of design and synergy to the existing classes. But overall I like the other classes just as much. They just need some love visually (all look a bit wooden compared to Rogue) and some more visual flare to their skills. Sentinel particularly lacks oomph in terms of its visuals.
I would say though I think the mix of standard genre tropes and weird out there stuff is about right. 20 levels is not enough to judge the classes. I was very underwhelmed by primalist until I hit level 55 then I’ve started to quite enjoy it.
