GGG: Loving the game. Feedback, suggestions, balance, bugs

Warning, contains spoilers. Intended for GGG.

## Background and build

I'm a 40 year old software engineer; played POE 1 since closed beta, then quite for many years (gaming in general), then came back and played for some 200 or 500 more hours but never really got good. Love the old D2 style, the early POE1 style, and POE1 ruthless mode. Played a bit (some 200 hours?) of D3 and D4 too. Aside from ARPG's, also like games like Hades, and games like Halls of Torment.

I just finished the campaign (normal and cruel), so before starting the endgame, already a brief feedback round.

Playing solo self found. My build is a mercenary switching between Glacial Bolt and Fragmentation Rounds, with Herald of Ice, with a nicely crafted (advanced) Dyad crossbow with tons of physical damage; turning whole screens of enemies into white powder, good fun. We'll see how it holds up in maps. Haven't really had to care about defence much so far.

Probably picked the wrong ascendancy. Went Witch Hunter, should have gone Gemling Legionnaire, mostly to benefit more from the inherent bonuses from str dex and int.

## General feedback

- Holy shit so far this game is ridiculously good, beautiful, detailed, addictive,... better than I even dared hope. The grim atmosphere, the humor (lol'd several times at the mercenary's lines), the story, the characters,... all amazing.

- I guess enough has been written about it already, but clearly I'm in the camp of people who love the difficulty. Absolutely love how impactful drops, currency, gold,... feels; how you really see your character grow in power hour after hour (I really pitty those who didn't even give it a try).

- About the difficulty: for me this is perfect. Grind a bit, get a good build, and/or get good gear and it's easy. Try to rush it and suffer through it.

- So far, I feel like the balance is absolutely amazing. Like, really, how did you guys manage to do this. With a super good crafted weapon, everything is easy, bosses aren't too much of a challenge, but again, I feel like that's OK. I think I carefully crafted a good synergizing build and that pays off. I can imagine that for most people the game stays more challenging for longer, and that'd be perfectly ok.

## Ideas and suggesions

- Do we still need skill *gems*? You probably have given this a lot of thought already, and I'm probably missing some issues, but it really feels like the fact that skills come as *gems* is contrived. What am I supposed to do with those dozens of uncut skill gems? Instead they could just be rewarded periodically, e.g. on level up (choosing a new normal skill, choosing one to level up, choosing a support skill, choosing a spirit skill). I think that allows you to keep all aspects about it (moving support gems around, adding quality,...) while making it less contrived, easier to use and understand,...

- Clarify that book of weapon specialization also grants 2 regular passive skill points!

- Dividing weapon specialization points is really not easy to understand. Heck, I still don't understand it at this point. What do all the numbers mean? How can I somtimes add a specialization point (in slot 1) after getting 2 more, and sometimes not? At least explain it in a tooltip, or make it intuitively clearer.

- What's with the 'Advanced' and 'Expert' base item types, is this just a quick fix for early access? In that case, maybe pick something shorter, or otherwise indicate that it's an 'upgraded' version (a 'star' icon or something, explained somewhere). Then, make a simplified item filter, where, per type (Regular, Advanced, Expert), with a dropdown, allow us to hide item types of a certain quality (Normal, Magic, Rare), with a checkbox to make exceptions for quality and socketed verions.

- Related question: I've only found 'regular' unique items, no Advanced or Expert versions. Is that by chance, or some weird consequence of these advanced and expert items being EA-only?

- Open the 'Map legend' when the map is opened for the first time. I missed what the icons meant and that caused some confusion and frustration. Similarly

- In general, for these mechanics, maybe guide the user through it, in some step-by-step explainer dialog, like how new mechanics are introduced in D4. Other things to explain: the way checkpoints work (remove loot, respawn monsters,...); endgame map system; weapon specialization system; item recombinator;...

## EA suggestions

- Remove quests which aren't yet implemented, such as "Tinkerer's Tools", "Titans' Treasure", "Shrine of Bones",...

- Explain how the ascendency trials work beyond the second one... I have no clue... Cruel A2 makes it seem like you have to do that gain, but doesn't work...

## Balance

- Herald of Ice did make my build like literally a couple of *times* better (at clearing, at least)... not sure if that's really intended...

- I felt like I was starved on transmutes. Yet we're incentivised to use them a lot, which is cool. I always had way more augments. Sure, we can get transmutes by disenchanting magic gear, but that's really tedious. Some options: require only 3 or 5 shards; just drop transmutes more often; allow us to buy them, like scrolls of identification?

- In general, I feel like disenchanting and especially salvaging items at the forge should be more rewarding. We're finding quite few artificer's orbs or chizels and whatnot; which is fine, but that means we have to haul stuff just to break it; but 10 shards feels like a lot.

## Aesthetics

- Overwhelming Presense: please remove or change the visual effect. The game looks absolutely stunning; but this effect of this one skill makes it impossible to see/admire any monster art. Imo, this skill doesn't need an effect at all -- we don't see other visual effects of monsters 'nearby' or 'far away' either? Another option, but much more work, is to add a toggle per skill which has a visual effect to display it or not.

- Pretty sure frozen things should fall to the ground :')

- In A2, when the caravan is stopped thematically, returning to it should also show it as stopped (like when you arrive at a destination). Also, when stopped, jugs at the wall of the desert map room shouldn't move.

- Mercenary (maybe also other classes): sometimes (!) the animation dealing with soul cores is not properly aligned with objects on ground or in door.

- On the map, make the difference between todo & done (boss) encounters clearer; e.g. much darker, or by adding a small green checkmark?

- The general tooltip windows, e.g. when hovering over gear or skill gems, really need an update. Why not use the style of e.g. the tooltips used when hovering over skills? Or the 'Map legend' (but transparent)? This would be such a huge upgrade for little (or am I mistaken?) effort. All other UI artwork is so extremely high quality; this really contrasts. If players are attached to it, maybe add an option to switch between styles.

## World building / emersion

- In The Molten Vault: other action to start endless stream of lava. Both the huge bowl as well as the stream are *really* cool, but it's really a bit silly that it just endlessly keeps on pooring... :)

- Categorize and appropriately use character speech lines after killing rare monsters: quick, difficult (a lot of life lost), long (measured in 'enemy around'). Is it possible to add more? There is *so* much speech in the game which is probably barely ever listened to; yet these which are heard again and again, are quite sparce... Sorry for whining, it's already better than any other game, but still, it feels like this would be a big improvement relative to the effort.

## QoL

- Often when and shooting by holding the button, it won't keep shoot. To avoid this, I often find myself spamming the fire button instead of just holding it. Not just annoying but can actually be dangerous -- so people will often just spam, but that's really so much less enjoyable. I think it's because when you start holding the shoot button over an enemy, and it dies, you stop shooting. Just continue to shoot in the direction you're facing?

- Could you make it so that we can run through our own ice walls (using movement keys), like the one from Glacial bolt (I imagine the same for sorceress ice wall)? Maybe just slow us down a bit; like the way elite monsters run through them. Or at least have us dodge roll 'over' it.

- Allow dodge roll to let us go up and down small elavations, acting as 'jump/climb up or down' instead (like in BG3). Would also help with emersion; it's really silly that our characters can't do this.

## Bugs

- Lots of flickering in A3 town, much more so once the portal is open. Most terrain textures go white for one frame; irregularly, about 1-5 times a second?

- At once point, don't know how, Viper Napuatzi was outside of her wall (screenshot).

- After being abducted and after the Viper Napuatzi fight, 'Alva' was still marked on the map (not sure if this was only in Cruel).

- Even after the Viper Napuatzi fight, her men are still shouting 'around' the area.

## Cheezes

- As a mercenary, I could 'corner' Viper Napuazi against her wall using frost walls (Glacial Bolt), I could just finish her off from afar.

## EA bugs

- In Cruel, some quests don't seem to get removed from the map once completed, e.g. "Bubbling Respite", or "Travel east", "Chaos Statue".

- In A1 Cruel, "Candlemass" is marked as a boss giving an upgrade, but he doesn't seem to give anything.

- Clicking the quest info icon in-game while in Cruel opens the Normal map related to that quest instead of the Cruel map.

- On Cruel in A3, when opening the sluice valve, I didn't see the water get drained on the world map. The map still needed to load; when it appeared, it was already drained.

Some updates after playing a bit of the endgame and starting a second character.

## General endgame impressions

- Holy shit. Those rare monster explosions :'). Those tower activations :').

- So far looking REALLY cool. And I thought the campaign would be the coolest part.

## Suggestions

- Also for the endgame map, open the Legend by default, maybe do a small step-by-step guide. E.g. I thought that when I failed a map, the node was lost, didn't know I could do it again!

- Character screen: In the hover tooltips, show where stats originate from (tree, items, other): both for str/dex/int; life, energy shield, mana, spirit; as well as for resistances.

- Explain what 'Maraketh Shrine' means during the Trial of Sekhemas. Also, some Sekhema trials don't have an explanation of what to do, like "disrupt ritual".

- Please make it so that you can waypoint to the Ziggurath refuge by clicking on it in the 'Endgame' map; rather than having to click on it in the 'Act 3' map -- without having read that on Reddit I wouldn't have found this...

- Display the level of all types of skill gems on the ground, so you don't have to hover over it

- Endgame tower gameplay meta at least for ranged characters is currently: nuke chambers without even seeing what's in there until all is quiet. Unless it's up stairs; then pray you don't get cornered sticking your head in. Not sure how to solve this though. There's super cool/beautiful, but is this worth it? Maybe just broader pathways/ramparts? Guess those would be entirely new tilesets... Just revealing a room slightly faster would also help a bit.

- A big one, I know... but I'm not sure mercenary and monk are in the right place on the stat spectrum. Wouldn't it make more sense to switch them? As a monk you're doing meelee all the time, monks are strong. str/dex seems to make a lot more sense. And as a mercenary, you're doing ranged, and you're quite the smart cookie. You don't need to be strong to press the button of a crossbow or throw a grenade. int/dex would make more sense. I use es/ev as defences, so traversed the whole passive tree to get those nodes... but that kind of gimps the character, that's a lot of 'filler' nodes...

- Please let us change ascendency (e.g. requiring us to complete the last ascendancy trial we completed). When we pick our ascendency, we're not really sure which way our build will go. I know, it's thematically cringy and not easy to explain, but so is just respeccing any point...

- Allow us to reforge 3 Lesser/Medium Jeweller's Orbs into a Medium/Large one?

- I know this is another wild one, but... how about revealing endgame level layout from the start? I feel like now a big part of the endgame meta is how quickly you can navigate your way through maps. Sure, you could argue that you just have to learn the layout of the maps... but seriously, learning the layout of some 100 different map types? Do you really want that to be a significant part of the meta game experience?

## QoL

- Always allow us to walk away from any menu using movement keys. Currently you can't while you're in the Buy or Sell menu; possibly also in other screens.

- The 'disappearing' monsters, like those Vaal ghosts, are really tedious, especially when they're magic or rare. They take like 10 or 50 times longer than other monsters to kill; making them effectively much more difficult than bosses. I can't seem to freeze them most of the time either either. Can you do something about them?

- In endgame refuge, move salvaging bench closer to waypoints? =D So we can, in one go, 1. identify items, 2. salvage stuff, 3. sell stuff, 4. put stuff in stash.

## QoL with dangerous side effect

- Allow us to cancel out of any long animation, like pushing a lever. Really, this can result in the most silly death ever. Cause of death: killed while pushing a lever. Note: this would probably mean having a 'rollback' animation for all levers.

- Using movement keys, allow us to run through jugs. Cause of death: foot stuck in jug.

- Make it so that starting an ultimatum requires multiple clicks, like essence monsters. If you click this accidently, it could easily kill you.

- When hitting Glacial Bolt walls with Fragmentation rounds, most of the time (?) they are still visually displayed, even though they no longer actually exist. This is super confusing and sloppy; and, at times, dangerous.

## Bugs

- When a map is complete, it says so on the right when you open the overlay map; yet on the world map it's still (sometimes?) marked as being 'in progress' -- really confusing. Would it still fail if I die even after completing it? Then why does it say 'completed' on the ingame map overlay? Consistency + explanation would be nice.

- Opening a breach on a map suddenly 'stopped time' after about a second (could have been a coincidence it was at that moment, ofc, esp. since it happened only a second in). I could take absolutely no action, monsters were standing still, but everything remains responsive? (screenshot). All I could do was quit. This caused the map to fail.

- Delirium not starting? Happened to me twice now. Map changes and reward meter appears; but no monsters spawn, no timer starts, and kills don't add to the reward meter. Note: I can 'exit' delirium mode.

- Herald of ice upgrade tooltip always show it starting from 0, so you never see the actual improvement.

"

Nobody is ever going to read all of this are they :p.

You're not going to believe this, but I did. Only to get a better perspective on how I should maybe write my notes, next time I do a more detail log and summary of my game time and hear, hopefully non-spoilry, things about the rest of the campaign and endgame. I'm still in Act 2 myself, but I'm taking my time and loving it. I too am a long time Path fan, Ambush being my first league. I'm just excited for this game and have faith that this game can be polished even further into best ARPG of the genre.

My only gripe is Sanctum's first boss demoralized me, despite having more patience on other bosses.

(moved to second post in this thread)

(GGG, if you read and processed this, could you let me know, so I stop updating the posts, avoiding you not seeing my updates?)

Another small batch :)

## Suggestions

- Have us upgrade support gems too, up to level 3? Not like it really has to, but we can upgrade regular and spirit gems, which otherwise have exactly the same system, so it would just make a lot of sense... These kinds of seemingly random inconsistencies feel confusing. Just provide small upgrades, and rebalance around it, so that lvl 2 is the current power, lvl 1 is a bit weaker and lvl 3 stronger.

## Bugs

- When you put a waystone in one of those little map waystone inventories to traverse them; then remove the waystone and close the little inventory; then go to the recombinator and ctrl+click the waystone to put it in the recombinator, it will still go to the little map waystone inventory. You must have remembered where you put them, or the map is lost forever...

- Killing rares doesn't always immediately remove the icon from the minimap

- Why is the maximum number of Wind Dancer stacks shown in the skill tooltip (never seen it go higher than the initial 3 though); but not in the Ghost Shround skill tooltip (whereas I've seen this increase from 3 to 4)?

- Sometimes I can't start a map even if it's connected (screenshot)

These are still pretty much all relevant... would be nice to see some of them solved, especially the (dangerous) QoL ones. Or a response on which ones are being addressed, or why not.

Some more:

- Make trees and walls which block the view of your character transparent, e.g. trees in 'Mire' map and walls in 'Crypt' (I think)

- On the world map, when inventories are open, pressing escape should first close the inventories, not the map

- Put the 'Invite to party' button on a higher 'z-level' than the chat bar >.> There's only a few pixels of that button you can actually click when inviting someone over for a trade if you right-click their name to open the menu to invite them.

A software engineer that hasn't touched the game designed flaws and only wrote a post about everything we already know and was documented...

What do you mean? Documented where? A database of issues with status 'acknowledged' would be really cool, but I haven't seen a link to such a thing in any official communication -- only this forum thread is mentioned?

Note that I wrote this feedback on december 9th and 10th, 3 and 4 days after launch.

Now, a week later, when content creators are making review videos, I'm hearing many of these points repeated/confirmed.

I'm quite positive that many of the other issues and suggestions are also widely shared. Almost all of them still hold up after 10 days of playing.

So yea, excuse me for thinking these posts could be of some valuable to GGG. Isn't this the entire the point of EA?

- Fix shooting bolts with two different crossbows, either by using the same Crossbow Shot (which will de facto always be bound to left mouse button) for both crossbows or by allowing to bind the 2 different Crossbow Shot to different weapon slots... surely this must be a bug that you currently can't? Mercenary/Witchhunter is even supposed to be the signatory class to use switching weapons... yet it can't fire different kinds of bolts with different crossbows?

- A step further, wouldn't it make sense to be able to use the same weapon for 2 setups? So, rename the concept of 'Weapon specialization' to something like 'Loadouts'. Maybe even allow switching gem & support gem configurations while switching between them.

Some thoughts on 'endgame mechanics':

- Because of the way dying in maps works, it makes sense to first, safely, finish the map (killing all rares and boss), and only then take on the (more risky) endgame mechanic -- so as to not lose out on all of the map's rewards (most importantly waystones) in case you die.
- What this means is that you just 'leave them there' until you finish the map. However, if you've done some trading in the mean time, sometimes you risk forgetting which endgame mechanics you still need to do. Also, you might forget where they were exactly, and thus have to run around the complete (now empty) map.
- Both issues could be largely mitigated by, once discovered, marking the location of the endgame mechanic on the map, just in the way you mark remaining rares and the boss. Remove the marker again once finished.
- This way a) you have a visual reminder that you still need to do this mechanic at the end of the map, and b) you don't have to look for it too long.

Of course, the question is whether this is desirable. It's a 'meta-level' consequence of 'losing the map on death'. Given how important and central that is, and thus that players are really driven to skip the endgame mechanics until after having completed the map, I think it makes sense to facilitate this.