0.3.1 Feedback

Here's my thoughts after playing several shield wall warrior builds up to ~lvl 94 in ssf hc.

Overall I really enjoyed the league, crafting feels great, the removal of towers feels like a step in the right direction.

Some specific pain points for me:

Early campaign
- abyss is incredibly unforgiving, monsters, especially strider, still feel over tuned, even after nerfs.

- many skills are still unviable for leveling. The emphasis on combos railroads you in to playing very specific two-skill combinations. Some of those have good clear speed and single target, many just don't. I would love to play a phys spell witch for example, but bonestorm wants you to play minions, unearth does not scale well, bonecage does not clear fast enough. I wish reap was accessible before act iv, etc. Incinerate was another fun leveling skill that now requires way too much setup. Contagion is a good example of a skill that has synergies with many different skills, it cares about chaos dot, but can also work with poison for example.

To promote interesting synergies you need skills that care about a variety of different things, so you have multiple avenues for scaling damage. Otherwise you end up with these skill pairs that are basically forced on the player because there are no other interactions available.

- I didn't play with infusions much, but from what I saw they feel similarly heavy handed. They force players in to a prescribed playstyle for a combo pay-off that seems fairly unrewarding. Instead of some spells generating infusions that other spells consume, I would rather see spells that care about different ailments. Then you would have more options available to you, which skill are you using to apply ailments, which skills are you using to consume them, etc.

- If you want to promote infusions then I would rather do that through the spirit support that grants infusions on ailment, with that skill providing a more generic effect for having infusions, similar to charge infusion. That could mean gaining %dmg as fire/cold/lightning, or it could scale in other ways, like aoe, cast speed, etc. Then infusions would feel like one option for scaling damage, rather than feeling like you need to use infusions to get the full functionality out of your skills.

- Some campaign areas continue to feel tedious, even with sprint. Freythorn and venom crypts are the first ones that come to mind. Chokepoints and mazelike layouts combine for a lot of unpleasant movement. I don't mind chokepoints if its linear, and I don't mind mazes/scavenger hunts if you have more room to maneuver.


Endgame
- Endgame still lacks a sense of progression. Not much difference between waystone tiers, moving around the atlas feels aimless, since any direction you move in is effectively the same. I would rather feel like we were progressing through the atlas by giving players a starting point and moving in a single direction that expands in breadth, maybe with more distinct biomes that you actually felt like you were traversing? Maybe with more unique maps. Maybe there is a clearer path of progression from one corrupted nexus to the next, with citadels along the way. Or diverging paths that you follow to different rewarding end points?

- The chance at additional breaches is an example of a random variation that you can come across in your maps that feels really good to me. Its rewarding and very noticeable. The chance at extra strongboxes, or essences, or rogue exiles, on the other hand, feels very granular. Their presence doesn't really change your experience in that map much one way or another. You might not even find them if you don't full clear the area. I think these random variations could add more feeling of excitement/discovery as you're moving from one map to the next, but they need to be macro changes that impact your experience in that map. If there's boxes make them rare, or have a much higher chance of them being unique, or maybe every once in a while all the boxes are researchers, for example. These are things that you immediately notice when you enter the area and make it feel fun to move through the map because its distinct from the last map you ran, and you know the next one could be just as rewarding in its own way.

Basically there are alot of ways that I can imagine the endgame being more fun, but right now it feels like an open world map with a bunch of glorified fetch quests.

Player Defense
- Changes to armour in this patch have felt great, it feels strong and viable. On the otherhand, armour/life feels underpowered compared to eva/es but I think thats because es is likely just too easy to scale.

- I still do not understand the thought process behind balancing the different defences. ES and Life accomplish the same task, they let you tank big hits and you need to solve the problem of chip damage/recovery. Life is very demanding to scale and requires a lot of investment. ES is seemingly trivial to scale, while requiring slightly more investment to recover. Evasion and Armour accomplish the same task, they mitigate small hits but still leave you vulnerable to chunk damage and slams. Both of them become much less effective without significant investment. Splitting your defense between evasion and armour just makes both of them worse, I don't see the synergy, or I'm too stupid to figure it out. The nodes that grant stun/ailment threshold based on the lesser value of your hybrid defense are an interesting strategy for offering a pay-off for layering those two defenses, but the pay-off is not significant enough. If, for example, you were to gain life or ms based on the lesser value, that would be a worthwhile pay-off, and one which directly addresses the weakness of that defensive pairing.

Those are my thoughts after this last patch. If you read this far thanks for your time!