Classes in the Campaign, Melee Combat, Balancing for Player Skill, and Tutorials

It's been probably over a year since I gave feedback last, so here is a bit. Disregard the suggestions, you'll find your own solutions, but I give them anyways.

On classes in the campaign

Monk: The monk feels very squishy, but compensates with the ability to blow up packs early with herald of ice+frozen locus+glacial cascade. The unfortunate part is that you can't lock on to your frozen locus like it is an enemy and with enemies moving so quickly, you will target them and miss it. Perhaps turn this into a target with a health bar?

Druid: The druid was the smoothest campaign experience by far, the combination of armor and energy shield works great (even though you stated these players die 3x the amount), I had no issues. I played the Wyvern Rend+Devour and Oil Barrage to great effect.

Warrior: The warrior has some issues in both being purely armor based defensively (thus requiring a heavy investment on resistances) and having the slow attack times that require you trading damage. The biggest hurdle in the run was mid act 2 when you face the abyss in the mastadon badlands and the abyss monsters use lightning on you with likely very average lightning resistance. This creates a huge crafting hurdle to get through as you switch from rolling slam+bone shatter into shield wall and trying to fix your resists around the same time (levels 20-22). After that, the warrior plays fine, but it isn't exactly melee if you're just blowing up shield walls.


On Melee

The soulslike mechanics introduced are a great idea, but there are some things to consider. In 3rd person games the player has a much closer and clear view of their character model and the enemy, the control scheme is different, and there are fewer enemies on the screen than an ARPG. Let's take the rolling slam animation cancel into boneshatter as an example: When surrounded, it is very hard to tell when the slam has landed, and with the controls you aren't entirely sure if it will even go in the direction you're aiming all the time. Combine this with many smaller enemy models to track, it becomes pretty messy fast. My suggestion would be to add some light aim assist and some support gems or base armor applies to elemental while in the attack animation itself to give the player some more buffer.


On Balance

Overall for me with 500+ hours, following speedrun guides, the game feels a bit easy overall. After talking with new players, it is a stark contrast, where they find the game very challenging and confusing. They struggle with the un-tutorialized support gem system, damage equations, modifier lists, desert map travel, and frankly almost all the systems. For these issues I would propose lowering the ceiling of optimized builds and raising the floor of trap options (especially early). For the deep system tutorials, perhaps an in game compendium with the more esoteric information people have to go to third party websites like PoEDB and Craft of Exile to find (modifier lists and weights, damage taken and received equations, etc). This is a lot, and obviously you want to keep the player engaged in the fiction, so I would hide it somewhere like the settings, or introduce it in the fiction as a pages of a book of knowledge in the game. Not a very clean solution, but you all have done a ton of work moving third party sources into the game client already, and I think a bit more could still benefit the community.


That's all, thanks if you read. :)

Problem is things are not explained in game, you have to go to 3rd party websites etc to find the info. New players won't know about these sites and where to find the information. Their only source of info is what they see on the screen in the game while playing.

It should be obvious in game what what things are. The suggested support gems are a nice addition for those who don't want to read through the tooltip of 200 gems, most of which do not apply to your character..

Maybe they can ship the game with a bunch of build guides built in by default, so those who are new can just pick an archetype or theme build they like and get some handholding just following the build guide. When they feel more confident they could of course start changing things up or tweak their character to their own liking.

And FFS let us open the gem/skills menu without having to right click a gem!! And let us view the explanation videos of each skill without having to level to lvl18 gems before we can see what the skills are...

For some reason GGG doesn't like simple help text boxes.

They will pause your gameplay to tell you what the roll button is despite any gamer worth their salt having already look through the options menu before even starting the game. But a text box to describe more complex interactions, we don't need those.

I can't wait for the spread sheet on 100 runes.

I dunno what you mean about Warrior needed heavy resist investment. It's literally 5 nodes to gain 90% of Armor as Elemental DR. It's one of the dumbest things I've seen added so far.

Warrior feels awful but that's not one of the many problems.