Wolcen Hype Release!

Okay. Mortarbeasts are actually fucking beast now. Damn. I kind of miss them being big, lumbering piñatas.

Skin transmogrification and dyeing is now entirely free (as opposed to a fair chunk of in-game gold). This means that I may or may not have spent several hours last night playing dress-up with my 40 or so remade level 1 characters.

Oh, and the three new earnable skin sets are really great. Ridiculous and overwrought as usual, but well done with the details, and quite interchangeable with the existing components. Especially fond of the dangling skulls from the early Republic armour.

So it never occurred to me that changing which items you have in your off-hand might change the core functionality of your main weapon. Surely a pistol is always a pistol, right? But I finally stumbled onto something I've seen in some videos but never tried out -- if you equip a shield while wielding a pistol, the pistol becomes a shotgun with its own basic attack combo chain. This makes absolutely no sense but it's surprisingly effective for clearing the crowds compared to a single target pistol.

To my knowledge, no other equipment combination changes a weapon's function so dramatically. A dagger and sword? Dual-wielding combo. Two daggers? Quick-Stabby combo. Dagger and shield? Basic melee+shield combo. Similarly, sword+shield, sword+pistol, sword+axe...all relatively the same function. There was really no indication that slapping a shield on with a pistol would completely change its class of weapon.

...But there was one tiny hint: the main shield+gun wielders in the game are the Republic's Justicars, and they do indeed use their guns as shotguns from behind their massive shields. So I suppose the player-character is, as with a lot of their gear setups, emulating an existing archetype in Wolcen. There's a lot to be gleaned from the reams of flavour text, which adorn not just unique items but all skills and their major modifiers, all basic weapon combo types, and most significant passive nodes. I have a stronger sense of the cultures, people and gods of Wolcen from the flavour text than I ever got from the scattershot, seemingly malleable lore of PoE.

Pistol as boomstick. Kind of cool. I'll definitely need to think up a few builds for shotgun-style massacre. Maybe a hobo. Or an S-Mart employee.

Wolcen almost back to sub 2k players (after peaking 8.1k in first Bloodtrail weekend) in less than two weeks.

Reason being old and new unresolved glitches/bugs and no real updates to endgame or new acts.

So two nodes in the Sentinel area (starting rogue) were granting 10% of maximum health as health regen, rather than the intended 10% increase to existing flat health regen (usually gained just from items). I was wondering why so many of my characters were getting chunky-ass health regen so early on from no discernible source. I'll miss it but if it's a bug, it's a bug, and their fixing of it is appropriate.

I love how much fun Wolcen Studio's incompetence can be. What a ridiculous fuck-up. Reminds me of some of the really weird shit you experience alpha testing, whacky stuff that prickly, high-strung live players just couldn't handle. Their galaxy-brain circuits wouldn't have a clue how to deal with it. DOES NOT COMPUTE. WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING AS INTENDED. FIX. FIX. FIX.

Broken games suck, but at least they're not boring. :)

My older character expedition progress keep getting reset. That kinda make it unplayable with older characters... This strangely doesn't seem to affect newly created characters in bloodtrail. I don't like where their priorities lie.

Given how quickly you can level if you stick to just one character and go through the story, and how the Chronicle feature adds quite a bit to both the story and expedition experience, I see no reason to play legacy characters at all. They were made on a build of the game that no longer exists. I knew some of my builds would be wrecked by Bloodtrail (especially those relying on ailment stacking), but it was easy enough to find others. It was a given that legacy was going to be a shitshow. Not saying that excuses the reset of expedition progress -- that's awful. But I'm far from surprised that legacy is somehow less stable than Bloodtrail.

As is well known, I hate how pew-pew shmuppy PoE has become. And yet I love it in Wolcen. Just discovered a build that's basically firing red (rend) Arctic Spears all over the shop exploding like some sort of rock candy nightmare. Fun stuff.

So why the seeming hypocrisy? Probably because it was never actually the presence of pew-pew in PoE that pissed me off; it was the supremacy of it. The feeling that this was absolutely the way to play the game, close quarters combat be damned. Wolcen, on the other hand, has given Close Quarters Combat (CQC) a massive fucking bump with Bloodtrail** and was already, thanks to a strong passive dodge defensive mechanism and built-in aoe to CQC attacks, quite viable in that regard. In other words, take my feeling of choice away and I'll resent whatever you force onto me. Especially if it's a style that seems divorced from the ARPG tradition. Give me a choice and I'll explore all the options eventually. Especially if they're viscerally satisfying.



**A node that gives every fourth basic attack combo hit a damage bonus went from +50% pre-Bloodtrail to +500% now. It's fucking insane as far as buffs go BUT it still doesn't make CQC even vaguely competitive with other, more obvious builds that tap multiple projectiles and damage splash (such as Havoc Orb). Which tells me Wolcen Studio figured something out that GGG never quite did: you can buff the shit out of CQC and still not break the game overall. Players who seek power will almost always stick with ranged/aoe spam, and those who choose CQC should be compensated for that riskier choice.

I should note that the damage buff node mentioned above is after one that turns every fourth hit from a one-handed basic combo (including dual wielding) into an automatic crit. Crrrrunch.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

Spoiler

As is well known, I hate how pew-pew shmuppy PoE has become. And yet I love it in Wolcen. Just discovered a build that's basically firing red (rend) Arctic Spears all over the shop exploding like some sort of rock candy nightmare. Fun stuff.

So why the seeming hypocrisy? Probably because it was never actually the presence of pew-pew in PoE that pissed me off; it was the supremacy of it. The feeling that this was absolutely the way to play the game, close quarters combat be damned. Wolcen, on the other hand, has given Close Quarters Combat (CQC) a massive fucking bump with Bloodtrail** and was already, thanks to a strong passive dodge defensive mechanism and built-in aoe to CQC attacks, quite viable in that regard. In other words, take my feeling of choice away and I'll resent whatever you force onto me. Especially if it's a style that seems divorced from the ARPG tradition. Give me a choice and I'll explore all the options eventually. Especially if they're viscerally satisfying.



**A node that gives every fourth basic attack combo hit a damage bonus went from +50% pre-Bloodtrail to +500% now. It's fucking insane as far as buffs go BUT it still doesn't make CQC even vaguely competitive with other, more obvious builds that tap multiple projectiles and damage splash (such as Havoc Orb). Which tells me Wolcen Studio figured something out that GGG never quite did: you can buff the shit out of CQC and still not break the game overall. Players who seek power will almost always stick with ranged/aoe spam, and those who choose CQC should be compensated for that riskier choice.

I should note that the damage buff node mentioned above is after one that turns every fourth hit from a one-handed basic combo (including dual wielding) into an automatic crit. Crrrrunch.

Try Darkest Dungeon, if not yet.

A nice rogue like experience which makes you feel the tension in every step.

PoE is an old game by now and evolved in a direction that some early backers / supporters would disagree. I as well, but i dont care anymore since there are no real contenders in this genre.

Maybe even Terraria ;)

"

gandhar0 wrote:

Try Darkest Dungeon, if not yet.

A nice rogue like experience which makes you feel the tension in every step.

Played the bejesus out of DD back in the day. Even double-dipped it onto ps4 for when playing at the PC wasn't an option. At one point, I was going through it with indefatigable purpose. But it's a whole different experience to Wolcen, so I'm not sure why you'd make that recommendation. A turn based side-scrolling party rogue-lite with a town base that uses characters like expendable resources...not exactly a short, logical step from a real-time, single character isometric power fantasy ARPG.