What We're Working On

lightning arrow hits 2 additional enemies doesnt show on tooltip. just gem itself 3 additional enemies. so it means it doesnt work. . if ggg says use pob. id say. fu. play the game in game not some thirdparty bs site. i dont need to have open ten tabs and more. im sick of it

I'm late to the party here, but I'll add my thoughts.

1) I found the launch to be non-buggy in general, after 50+ heists, I've had 3 incompletes. One was from getting stuck in a large vault door while opening. One was from clicking on the allies skill on the last door in a grand heist, and it disappeared, the ally was running around and doing whatever, but never opened the door and the icon never came back. And the third was from accidently clicking immediately on the exit portal that was weirdly positioned right when portaling into the pre-heist wing area. No re-entry allowed.

2) I started the league planning to run a Skeleton Archer / Fire wall build. Well, after a lot of heists and not enough Grand Heists, I've retired that character until I can trade for or get a Skeleton Archer gem on another more viable character.

3) I am having a blast with, well, Hexblast. My current experiment is a Ignite Hexblast variant, and it's fun melting enemies! Doomsday is REQUIRED to make most Hexblast builds work.

4) Right when the league dropped, I found Heist to be perfect. Heists were hard -if you didn't pay attention- and an acceptable level of challenge if you took your time and didn't just ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM.

5) I do NOT agree with dumbing down the pile-of-door-guards. It was a great mechanic! I got a chuckle from all the people complaining about "great game GGG, open a door and get shotgunned!" Its like.... hrm, there is a large pile of guards just on the other side of this door with spells charged and bows drawn. I know, I'll stand right in the doorway! What could go wrong?!" How about not standing in the door? Let them fire their volley and then run in through the gap. SMH

I feel like you guys finally tried to do something different than the perpetual GOTTA GO FAST meta that has been king for so long, and I found the slightly slower pace to be a pleasant change. Now, the alarm management is gone, heists feel empty and they are starting to feel more and more boring just a week into the league.

Heists went from a mechanic that you had to think about the approach, decide how many enemies to kill (and how many to blitz past) and balance that with how many chests you could open. Sometimes I had enough alarm currency left to double back for another chest just before the final goal. I got pretty good at gauging how much alarm I could spend and have just that little sliver at the end of the line.

Now they are just thoughtless slaughter corridors that I have to run through twice. Once with pretty red spinning lights.

Some late notes of my own now that I've spent some time doing higher tier red maps playing a lancing steel build:

- I think the balance between shard consumption and production is skewed a little too heavily in favor of consumption, particularly on boss fights. At the very least, I'd like to see call of steel return 2-3x as many shards from unique monsters. Otherwise the rhythm of boss fights is really awkward (basically spamming lancing x 3 -> call of steel x 3 -> repeat). I also think lancing steel should consume 3 shards for the same effect, possibly with the help of one of the support jewels reducing shard consumption by 1 with a minimum of 1 instead of giving area to call.

- I don't like having to blow 4 passive points just to make call of steel feel usable for such a central component of the skill. It's so slow without the support jewels that it's just not fun and it seems really forced that attack/casting speed doesn't seem to affect it. If anything it should start out with something like 50% faster cast speed and the jewel should make it instant (maybe with a short cooldown?).

- I *HATE* how fiddly targeting marks is. If my cursor isn't spot on with the monster's name at the top of my screen, nothing happens, which make it almost impossible to target when I'm dodging around. I'd like to see it select the closest enemy within 5-10 units if not directly on top of one. Aside from that, I do like the marks, particularly with the gloves that make them transfer. Again, I'd like to see a way to spec into mark being instant + cooldown and some more unique adding different kinds of utility to them.

- I'd really like to see a way of using the steel skills without impale just for some variety (impale is too dominant in general). Some kind of optional conversion from impale to bleed/poison maybe, and if you do that conversion, call of steel would remove those stacks instead.

- The removal of alert level from killing monsters really killed a lot of the tension of heists. There needs to be a little uncertainty of "can I make it to the end" and the occasion where the timer pops in the final stretch and you have to rush. After alert from monsters was removed, there's no risk at all, you just bring the bar up to a pixel before full and there's really no danger of going over.

Please fix intensify with crackling lance. It straight up doesn’t work. Or atleast the tooltip does not show it.

Please don't listen to all the geniuses who rolled a melee class and are complaining about not being able to scale their projectile steel skill. There's literally an entire class and ascendancy devoted to projectile skills. If you're too dense to leave the melee area of the tree that's on you, not the devs. There's also a unique jewel that basically fixes all of the new steel skills "problems".
[Removed by Support]

Censored by GGG for talking about loot boxes. "Make hateful or needlessly negative comments"? Not even close to hateful or needlessly negative. Just read any replies to your news posts and it's pages of "hateful and needlessly negative" comments. Literally people saying 'league sucks' 'we're beta testing your league again', etc. for PAGES AND PAGES. One of the most toxic forums I've ever been on.

Man you guys are really doing everything in your power to alienate your player base recently. Cyberpunk can't get here soon enough.

Some thoughts on Crackling Lance from someone who league-started with it and eventually dropped it:

Starting with the Pros, it looks great and it does solid damage throughout leveling and into maps. The long AoE is pretty nice.

However, I have a few concerns with it, some of which have already been stated.

Many have mentioned that it appears to interact strangely with Unleash and Spell Echo in relationship to building Intensity, so I won't spend too much time on that.

One I have not seen frequently mentioned is the AoE tag. Linking Crackling Lance to Concentrated Effect vs. Increased AoE seems to result in very little difference. I'm not sure how this is intended to work, as the gem clearly states "long area in front of you," but the length of the spell is not an issue. The issue is targeting enemies within close or medium range. I think it would be better for AoE increases to widen the initial branch of the spell or create more branches for smoother clearing. I don't think this is simply related to the gem links, either. Passive nodes and item modifiers to AoE also seem to contribute very little to the spell's branching area, which I found disappointing.

I found the targeting of the spell very inconsistent. Unlike multiple projectile abilities in the game, aiming far away or close up does not seem to effect the spread of the branches. I found myself missing nearby enemies with my initial cast due to weird branching of the spell, needing to cast again, and having to target an increasingly smaller AoE beam (due to Intensity built into the gem) on a white mob just to finish clearing. In this way, I found the best approach was to purposely move my character in between casts in order to prevent the spell from gaining its inherent Intensity while clearing. Then, against bosses, the intensity seemed to build far too slowly, and each time I would move to avoid a boss mechanic I would have to reset building Intensity.

Overall, Crackling Lance felt too clunky to clear with and too slow to safely boss with. There are better functioning spells in the game for this playstyle.

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Overall, Crackling Lance felt too clunky to clear with and too slow to safely boss with. There are better functioning spells in the game for this playstyle

I totally agree with you! I had similar experience while playing

Thoughts on call of steel: it is create for clear but on single target it is better to just hit the impales for DPS. it would be cool if there was a more damage/AoE multiplier based on how many impales are ripped out of a creature. that would reward the two-button playstyle and make for some tasty payoffs

Assassin's mark should give chance to gain PC on hit base. Without this, Ass Mark on hit effects weird weird and redundant for most builds.

I feel like I'm spamming now but I had a hair brained idea for crackling lance... what if it was a projectile skill?

hear me out: make every branch a projectile with smart targeting, 100% pierce chance. one projectile (the center one) always fires in a straight line. instead of just intensity, give it a built in Pinpoint, removing secondary projectiles but adding more damage and more width to the central beam.

This would allow you to build it for clear by adding more projectiles and would fix some targeting annoyances.

cool