Latest interview (with Ghazzy and DM) was pretty good.

This is where the important part is https://youtu.be/n89-vSIBbQ4?t=707

One of the things I was really glad to hear was Mark saying the following:

"The important thing that... um.. you know.. I would say the endgame not having goals is a fundamental problem and.. but I would go as far as the things like the balance go the like the basics the life the poise, all of that all that things that Jonathan was talking about we honestly haven't hit the fundamentals and this is why and in the monster density. And this is why it's really important between 0.5 and release um that we're not like adding, adding, adding, adding.. and we can actually go.. okay like we need to just make the baseline actually the quality it needs to be."

"But um I really just want to make sure yeah we're addressing all of these fundamentals now that we've got which hopefully will make you know I don't think Jonathan should have to change much. I think the balance is just wrong."

"So we have a bit of a plan and we're going to go a bit feral with it." - looking forward to that! There are a lot .. and I mean A LOT of fundamentals to address.. parry, block, evasion, etc.

This, alongside what Jonathan was saying about his experience testing the game with a less then optimal build, as well as his realization that there are situations where basically combat was invalidated and it became just a stat check (the Rare monster example with too many mods) gave me a bit of hope for the future of the game.

You might have noticed that I've described Jonathan's build as less then optimal and didn't use the word he used, aka bad build. If you listen to what Mark was saying, by all accounts his build should've been good enough... but aside from the game balance issue with freezing he was discussing earlier... the only thing he messed up was his support gems, which he did pick up via the recommendation page for that skill.

"But honestly, the the biggest flaw you had was just your support gems. That was the biggest actual issue. Um, but it's but it's like you didn't do the wrong thing there. You just didn't do necessarily the right thing. You just did what was intuitive. And so there's there's some highlighting there. And you know, it's like because you even you said you followed the recommended supports for for Shred. So that Yes. And I was like, you did, but you were also the developer that said what they were. And so you could have made there's a question of do you did you make a wrong decision as a player or did you make a wrong decision as a developer?"

Now, I think the takeaway for most people here on a first glance will be "well, the recommendation was bad" but I don't think that's really the issue here. Recommendations can only take you so far, since you can build skills in various different ways. I think the underlying problem here is why is the optimal choice so much better then the non-optimal choice to the point where the non-optimal choice becomes bad?


And I think this mostly goes back to the design of support gems themselves.



If you would've stuck to this idea you guys had many years ago, it would've also reduced player error variance significantly.. at least from the gem perspective.

A new player doesn't know how incredibly powerful more multipliers are in the game, because this is not something that is explained anywhere, despite of how incredibly important it is for scaling your character's damage. If you would've largely removed them like you said you would, this problem specifically wouldn't have existed en large.

Another thing I want to point out is about the mods on Rare mobs discussion. I've talked about this extensively in the past.. and I could just try to find my old post but I'll just summarize here.

I strongly believe mods on monsters should alter their own abilities or give them extra abilities that fit thematically rather then just adding generic effects/skills that have nothing to do with them and their design. In a way, this is also very similar to something they were talking about later on in the interview... which was league mechanics randomly popping in in starting areas feeling completely off and out of place... except this is not only impactful thematically, it also has a large impact from a gameplay perspective. It's basically the same as throwing bosses together in a room and asking players to beat them all at once even though they were never designed to be fought like that. (which was also an example Mark gave in the interview)

I would also like to highlight Jonathan's experience with being surrounded by monsters with his less then optimal build:

"Um, and like the monster density and the interludes when your build is bad is actually pretty damn terrible in terms of like the ability to clear through them. Like it was like it was oppressive. And at some point I realized like I was playing in the an area called the stones of sill which is like um that one with the standing stones and I was like at what point did we get it to the point in the interlude where you no longer have to move like you never use movement like all every single thing you're doing is just attacking and then because there's so many monsters like you're just attacking your way uh from one place to another and it just like never ever ends. And I'm like this is actually kind of like this is a grind. Like this is actually not good. Like campaign should not be like this. Um, and so then it sort of forced me to be like, okay, there's some serious issues here."

And I want to connect this with something else Mark has said later on:

"What I did see, and I've seen this with personal friends, um, even my brother and stuff, they got to endgame, he's like, I just ran a couple maps and now I'm done. I guess I'm finished. So, I'm hoping that they get there and stick it out and actually have that goal. don't get overwhelmed, don't run into immediately run into brick walls and can actually play through and finish the campaign uh finish the the end game as if it was just a continuation of the campaign. Honestly, um like there kind of doesn't necessarily need to be a like break in the story necessarily so much where they can just be perceived as the same thing ultimately."

I wish more people that ask for campaign skips would understand that last part.. but I digress. I could go on a lot of tangents here.

The main point I want to make is that it's not only players that feel overwhelmed that quickly gave up on endgame, neither was it only the lack of direction that caused that... there are quite a few games that give you little direction and still thrive. A lot of players simply don't have fun engaging with the endgame because of the lack of engaging combat in endgame.

Sure, a lot of players will be met with a brick wall, but there's not much more beyond that wall for those that surpass it either.

I hope that you guys will focus on fixing the fundamentals and refining the combat feeling moving forward towards 1.0. Forget about adding more stuff like you mentioned, for at least a while, and focus on that balancing too.