We welcome First Impression posts! Please be nice to those posts.

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ravenconspiracy wrote:

How unhelpful.

Noobtraps are bad design. They should be removed.

Also, please explain "simple threshold system" because I'm certain it is neither a system nor simple - and it certainly isn't forthrightly shown to the player via normal play.

Constantly going to the wiki to figure out that a skill or a passive or a keystone is actually garbage is incredibly clunky and disappointing.

The game is incredibly front-loaded with meta-baggage and if you want to call so much garbage and noobtrapping a learning curve I suppose that is accurate but I think it is far more accurate to call it unintuitive, clunky, imbalanced, and downright deceptive.

Look, if you want me to help you start having fun with the creative aspect of the game you only need to say so, but I won't help you complain - that's bad karma.

Anyway, that's how things sometimes work, you need to dig through the mud and filth to find gold and if you aren't ready to do that, there's no helping it, you can only wait for the day they make the game more straightforward and accessible. Though you should keep in mind that there are apparently still plenty of the more stubborn sort around that are willing to get their hands dirty, so though it might happen one day, I don't expect it to be anytime soon.

Mind you, I'm not against presenting some of the game elements better, they do make a piss poor job out of it. But you know, like that giant said in that tale 'I see you're a great champion, human, and I don't take well the touch of iron, but there's a lot of me here', I don't think it's even possible to distill the game to the point where you can absorb it all in a few days. It might even require sacrificing some of what makes it good.

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ravenconspiracy wrote:

How unhelpful.

Noobtraps are bad design. They should be removed.

How narrow minded ( not saying that all in game information are perfect and enough though ).
You want your hand holded through Wraeclast ?
Not happening.

So you are trying to say that misleading in-game info on keystones which LITERALLY do your character more harm than good is good design?

You think a request to remove misleading info is a call for hand holding?

Entire wings of mechanics are (after research) blatantly terrible (e.g. evasion, melee)... stuff it seems they are still band-aiding with skills like blade flurry (seems like melee really needed an overloaded skill which is somehow melee but also ranged and does your dishes afterwards). One overloaded skill only highlights that there is severe balance problems with the core mechanics. Is that good design?

If you really think those things, then you have no credibility WITHIN THE CONTEXT of new player experience.

Yes, I could have done a bunch of prior research on a wiki.
Yeah, I could have just copied a build.
I preferred to explore it on my own and I even assumed and was fine with the likelihood that my blind-play choices could very well be sub-optimal - but I never suspected that keystones like vaal pact and blood magic would actually be, not just sub-optimal, but worse than nothing, literally worse than taking that passive point and flushing it down a toilet. Traps like this shouldn't be in the game.

Then after doing research I learned just how much my time was wasted investing in melee, and evasion, and life leech... traps and disappointment!

Some people, at this point, would re-roll a new character, follow a build - they see it as learning the game. Instead I see poor design choices on the part of the devs, misleading content, a sneering and cowed player-base, and ultimately a game in need of one or two things: a retool of some of the major mechanics, or to jettison said mechanics.

If you just want to fiddle with proven recipes and ignore the fact that an entire thematic and mechanical wing of the game is an imbalanced wasteland in the long game and a disappointing trap for new players, then yeah, ignore me.

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but I never suspected that keystones like vaal pact and blood magic would actually be, not just sub-optimal, but worse than nothing, literally worse than taking that passive point and flushing it down a toilet.

Wait what?

It's possible they were not good for your specific build but those keystones are really good when used properly.

I made a duelist with a balance of physical melee damage and max life, all of the life leech to the south and west of the starting nodes (of which there are many in that area), blood magic and vaal pact, and using a life leech support gem.

After taking vaal pact it was very very clear that my life regen while dealing damage in combat had taken a major hit. Passive life regen must be extremely strong and instant life leech must not be that much more expedient than life leeched per second - so much so that it was very very noticeable.

So was vaal pact worth it in my case: no - I had failed to research exactly how potent passive life regen is - I would later learn how important auras are and how crippling blood magic is to using those auras.

I would go on to look at the overall state of melee, and physical damage source, and the overall state of evasion as mechanics in the game and each in turn revealed long-standing imbalance in the game.

I find all this deceptive and disappointing and I felt my desire to explore the passive tree to be an utterly disappointing venture and the game text for the passives to be misleading and the underlying mechanics clunky, opaque and imbalanced and heavily biased against melee physical damage. For a game full of swords and melee attacks, I guess I must just be the asshole who thinks this is a problem.

Anyway; super disappointed with this game so far.

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ravenconspiracy wrote:

So was vaal pact worth it in my case: no - I had failed to research exactly how potent passive life regen is - I would later learn how important auras are and how crippling blood magic is to using those auras.

So, what exactly is it that you want them to do? Make every item and keystone good for every build, or tell you upfront what's good for your build and what isn't, which game does that?

My problem is that the cool-looking keystone IMPLIES that life leech rate is something which holds back life leech and that by removing that limit you will leech more rapidly and therefore outpace not only life leech per second but also inherent life regen.

Not only is that not the case, it is actually (after even casual testing) very visibly worse than the passive life regen characters start with - despite speccing a build to grab all of the available life leech passives and a mid level life leech gem.

What part of that do you find hard to grasp as disappointing, misleading, and opaque???

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ravenconspiracy wrote:

My problem is that the cool-looking keystone IMPLIES that life leech rate is something which holds back life leech and that by removing that limit you will leech more rapidly and therefore outpace not only life leech per second but also inherent life regen.

That's true, you know, vaal pact is one of the strongest keystones in the game.

Yeah, Vaal Pact is mostly an end-game Keystone. You're not going to get great results with it while leveling. At the very highest level of end-game play, it far outstrips any Regeneration or Leech-over-time builds in the current game version.

Different builds make use of different passives differently, which is probably a good thing for this game.

Most Keystones come with some inherent cost - they're designed to change the way you play, potentially offering huge power, but at an almost-equally-huge cost. It takes some time and experience to know when a stat is overpowered and when that very same stat is absolute garbage.

A quick google of the topics "is vaal pact worth it" reveals that it is and has been a contentious keystone, which means you are at best over simplifying and at worst just lying.

I see a lot of comments which essentially amount to "generally not worth it except in a few specific cases" and even specifically making note of passive life regen.

Vaal Pact + Lots of Life Leech Passives + Life Leech gem on a mid-level character IS STRICTLY WORSE THAN lots of the life leech passives + life leech gem on a mid-level character.

I think that is a shame, unsatisfying, misleading, and a design problem - I think it is revealing of a trend in the mechanical design of this game - I think I see design choices like this in many other aspects of the game - I think design like this slaps people unnecessarily for exploration of the passive system - I'm certain I don't like this.

I see you disagree.