What We're Working On

Thanks for the feedback and the great work.

But please be carefull with the balancing of Heist. I think the balancing is the keypoint for the fun of Heist.
I love that you DON´T get all the loot and that you have to plan which chests to grab and which not.
After the alarm goes off you always have the struggle which chest you can grab before lockdown and sometimes you fail to get the artefact because of that.
I love it! Thats the best part of Heist. So please don´t make it to easy!
More easy loot is not equal to more fun.

Also consider that we later have better NPCs with better equipment. That has to be the mainpoint of balance.
I´m a bit worried that it will be easy to just open all the chests in every Heist, that would be terrible in my opinion.
I think POE needs real challenges even if they will be sometimes frustrating.

I hope you will make good decisions, it won´t be easy, but I have trust in you.

"

If you have feedback about the new skills, please reply to this post so we can review it. Including specifics is great.

Alright, let me try to sum up my thoughts.

I league-started Hexblast, as that looked like the most interesting skill that was previewed. I was considering 4 variants of the build:

- Trickster, using ignite
- Pathfinder, using poison
- Assassin, self-casting and going crit (I had what I thought was a clever plan to use Unleash with a hex and the Doomsday node and Unleash with Hexblast so I could, with a bit of timing, fire off a sequence of hex areas followed by a sequence of max-Doom Hexblasts as the hex areas turn into max-doom hexes)
- Assassin, cast on crit, maybe poison (ignoring the Doom mechanic entirely)

I wound up going Trickster with ignite, with the addition of Archmage: I haven't found weird off-meta Pathfinder poison prolif builds great for league-starting, I wanted to incorporate the Doom mechanic into the build in some way, and some testing in standard revealed that Doomsday is limited to 1 hex area at any given time so there goes my "clever" plan for high damage Unleash+Hexblast action.

I quit that build part way through Act 10. I'm probably going to return to it later, when I have more gear, and ignoring certain mechanics isn't as much of a drawback as it is early on in the league, but my observations from that time:

- The damage is respectable, even on terrible league-starter gear (and even with Archmage, which wants very specific gear to shine).
- The area coverage leaves much to be desired, given the setup time the skill has. I don't know if I could recommend playing this build without some secondary source of AoE: ignite proliferation, maybe Pathfinder's poison proliferation, possibly Herald of Ice explosions, etc. I was hoping Impending Doom might work, but the limit of 3 explosions per cooldown is very limiting. I admit that I haven't experimented with Punishment aside from a tiny bit on standard, although looking at the numbers, I don't think it is (or is intended to be) the one-stop-shop solution for room-clearing.
- The skill feels really nice in certain ideal scenarios (wide-open zones, preferably with enemies that don't move around too fast)
- The skill feels kind of rough in most other situations; this includes any cramped indoor areas (where an enemy can be 10 feet from you but around two corners, so you can't curse it before you're right on top of it)
- The skill feels really bad in specific rare situations where enemies suddenly show up: this includes things like strongboxes, Deliriums, Betrayal, Abysses, etc.

Some notes on the mechanics:

- Hexblast follows in the footsteps of a lot of "setup -> payoff" 2-button skill combinations: Frostbolt + Ice Nova, Bladefall + Blade Blast, any mine skill, etc. The key difference is that here, the setup skill can whiff: I can't just preemptively fire off a curse in the direction where I know enemies will be and then Hexblast them when they show up. I can only react once the enemies show up, and that's, in some situations, a very significant delay.
- The exception to the above is Essence Drain and Contagion, but the payoff to landing Essence Drain and Contagion is a LOT more area coverage than Hexblast can offer, giving it a lot more room for error.
- Since Hexblast rewards having a lot of Doom, it feels very heavily encouraged to run more than one curse, and then rotate through them while casting on enemies (so whenever the oldest curse is consumed, the other curses are still stacking up Doom independently). Cool; that's a neat interaction the skill has.
- Unfortunately, Hexblast also really punishes casting on non-hexed enemies. Fast-moving enemies, enemies around corners, enemies that spawn when you get close to them, enemies that were just out of range of your hex are all the bane of your existence in Hexblast builds. I've died more than once because I accidentally Hexblasted the one enemy of a pack that my hex missed. There are ways to solve that, but...
- Blasphemy can passively make sure all nearby enemies are hexed, but it's a bit awkward to fit into the build. Hexblast encourages stacking one type of elemental resistance reduction (so you probably want one "main" damage curse), but you can't use the same curse for both Blasphemy and self-cast, as the Blasphemy version will overwrite the self-cast version. This also means you need an extra +1 curse to be able to rotate through multiple self-cast curses, and 35% reservation REALLY hurts on Archmage builds.
- Doomsday could help you by letting you preemptively lay down an area where everything will be hexed for the next second, and even provides an advantage in how fast it reaches max Doom, but the limit of 1 hex area is rough. Not only does that limit how practical it is for preemptively cursing areas, but it also makes it completely impossible to rotate through multiple self-cast hexes.

Personally, I think the #1 change that would improve Hexblast mechanically would be to uncap the number of hex areas that Hexblast can create. Generally, I think this would allow characters heavily specced into hexes to use those hexes more proactively rather than reactively, and for Hexblast specifically, I think this would give players a lot more control in making sure enemies get hexed, with a lot more consistency across different layouts and specific mechanics where it currently struggles.

Heist monsters as specters?!!
Thank you so much ggg!!!

Skill feedback - I wish decoy totem alternate quality exploded like it was supposed to. Right now they just die and do nothing.

New skill feedback: Call of Steel Feels clunky and bad in fast melee gameplay.

Been playing the new steel skills and I have no issues with the steel skills themselves, however it really sucks when you start running out of steel shards because the game does not register your button press for call of steel because you are mid way through an attack animation & you press a movement skill cancelling any skills pressed in between.

You basically want to press call of steel instantly after attacks to ensure you reach the required amount of shards by the time you get to the next pack, if you have to mentally train to wait for your attack animation to finish first, to ensure your call of steel press registers, it feels horrible. Especially when you consider some of the steel skills have a 0.8 attack speed modifier (for reference 2-h weapon is 1.68 APS so not the slowest).

I am already using the jewel that gives call of steel 100% increased use speed, however, the speed doesn't matter if your press never registers.

I tried swapping to fast weapon duel weilding to see if it would fix the problem, but no its still incredibly easy to accidentally cancel call of steel from ever registering.

I honestly would rather call of steel did no damage and just made shards if that meant it could be instant (perhaps it could be a jewel?) , alternatively, they could give us a way to make shards without having to use the skill at all which would be amazing as well.

I get that the developers want us pressing more than one button but if its clunky I'd rather not or at least have the option not to.

This is what good communication looks like. Thanks GGG for the transparency.

Blazing Salvo very underwhelming, faster casting please, would make it far more viable for build paths. thanks love the new heist :)

Heist is a cakewalk now. the complaints were all valid, but GGG may have swung the pendulum too far to the other side with this one. the chests behind locked doors still feel underwhelming while you can smash 20 smaller ones that drop currency, etc.

You did pretty well with this league GGG.

I am having TONS OF FUN, something I dont have since metamorph ( I kinda skipped delirium and harvest, not my game thing).

Yes there is some bugs but people should not be that salt, honestly.

Looking at EVERYTHING Heist added to the game, contracts, blueprints, rogue harbour, 900 gems, 13 NPC and everything else contratulations to you for your job. Its a incredible thing to create in 90 days.

I know you need us to test the league cause you dont have 1009853845 players to test it. Makes sense. Keep the good work and the 3 month league schedule. We aprecciate it.

Let the haters hate or quit to dota2. I don't care.

guards giving xp would be lovely :3