Act4 Beta Thoughts

[lama75]

To start, because it's the main point of the release, I want to say that Act4 is fantastic. By far the most fun world to explore and work through. The are tons of new monsters, new mini-bosses and 2 new bosses with new and interesting mechanics. The artwork is beautful, imo, far more ambitious than anything in the 1st 3 acts. I actual found myself a bit disappointed upon completion of Act 4, not because of the game but because I was done with that Act with nothing more to do. Kudo's to the dev team for creating something like this- job well done.

I created a new test account for my beta runs. I chose to create a warrior. Starting from ground 0, completing all 4 acts at normal, heroic and legendary modes and completing 50 trials netted me a level 70 warrior with about 250CL's. There is a TON of experience to gain in Act 4 in a number of the levels because of the sheer volume of monsters and elites. All gameplay was done on my S8. I did experience some lag on a couple of the Act4 levels where monster aggro got up into the 30+ range.

What follows are some of my thoughts regarding the story mode. I'm avoiding bugs because those have been documented elsewhere. These are just things that I think could be improved upon, or ideas to improve what's been done.

1- The story is not as rich as in the 1st 3 acts. There are no letters to be found, no books to read, no diary entries from the new antagonists. I hope these are in the works- I thought they made the original story more interesting and could certainly provide more exposition.

2- The story summaries lead to a bit of confusion. One of the early levels speaks of 5 crystals, yet we only ever end up finding 2 of them? I've re-read all the summaries and can't see where I am misunderstanding something.

3- Minotaur Skirmishers- YIKES!

4- There does appear to be buff's to various monsters, contra the beta announcement. I'm looking at the summoners on trials, which spawn skellies much quicker, I believe, and those skellies now count towards the boss summon. My personal opinion is this is a very exploitable mechanic for trial advancement and, assuming these were deliberate changes, should be dealt with in a balancing patch if not sooner.

5- Being able to touch certain drops like gemstones, potions and apples is nice although I feel like the touch areas are a bit small.

6- The portal into and out of levels is nice. The game snapshots level progress, so I can actually shutdown the game entirely and then re-enter where I left off, this is nice on some of the longer levels. I feel like it will negatively impact gemstone farming, costing time at the end of levels. But I could be mistaken- I haven't actually tested it yet.

Continuing in the next comment...

[lama75]

Now, I want to move on to the Hometown, the other major introduction from this release. Overall, the hometown will be seen as a step backward by many, if not all. It makes the UI much less efficient. I think, unfortunately, this will be the focus of much of the early feedback. Since the hometown is here to stay, I wanted to offer some thoughts on ways to improve it. Granted, I don't know the overall roadmap for the game, so some of this might not fit with the future of the game.

1- Various touch areas can be difficult to find. The mailbox, particularly, gives the old "hunt and peck" aphorism new life. But the jeweler and crafter are also a bit diffcult to pin down. I think all these areas should be spread out more and their touch areas increased in size.

2- The fonts labeling everything are colored poorly. Why not incorporate the building names into the artwork and remove the text entirely?

3- I feel like there are too many ways to do the same thing. The mailbox can be accessed from the mailbox in the hometown, but also from the character screen. I don't see an advantage for one over the other, so pick one and make that the way. I would recommend the mailbox, personally.

4- Similarly, there is Dervis, Asterion and Slinky- all of whom you can sell inventory items too. Why not have a "Traders Post" to sell inventory items to? At the least, you'll eliminate a touch area, Dervis, by doing this which can then be used to enlarge the other areas.

5- I think it would be a nice bit of polish to change the Adventurer's Inn to work as follows. Upon entry, it's basically a "level" your character navigates. In this "level" are tables with each of the various companions sitting at a table- so Norgrim, Maggie, Endar and Xagan all sitting at their own table. Instead of purchasing them, you walk up to a table and engage in some kind of trivial conversation and are then afforded the option to hire them. Along these lines, there could be a bar area where Marcus, Eileen and Robin hang out once you've rescued them in the story mode and if they aren't one of your selected minions. This change would eliminate Asterion.

6- To access your heroes inventory, there is still the blue hero button in the lower right corner of the screen. This REALLY doesn't square with the hometown, imo. I suggest creating a "Heroes Guild" or "Hero Hut" building and, upon entering the building, you have access to the character screen AS WELL AS tabbed access to your hero's stash. This would eliminate the stash chest and the blue button.

7- When at the jewelry crafting area, inspecting a piece of jewelry should also allow for a "Return" button. This would help greatly with jewelry crafting since you would now only have to leave to stash the jewelry you want to keep. Rather than leaving to sell it to Dervis and then putting it in the stash.

8- Why not get Daily Quests from Alarion? Rather than going to the character screen. The reward calendar could, similarly, be a daily mail received in the mail box. Achievements could probably also be moved elsewhere- another mail, perhaps? The net effect being to gain more screen space to apply to inventory.

The idea behind all these is to try and reduce clutter in the hometown UI, while also streamlining various common tasks.

A final idea in the next comment...

[lama75]

Last thing I wanted to mention is the equipment crafting. There's been no changes made here but I thought I would mention some changes that would greatly improve it and still fit within the current framework.

1- Crafted items are made instantaneously, like jewelry. Now, there's more incentive to craft something since time wise there is a fraction of the investment.

2- Allow crafting with a set item and make the odds of the result being a set item related to the number of set items used. If multiple different set items are used, for instance, Arcanist and Apprentice pieces, then there is a chance of the result being either of these.

3- Allow crafting with a named item. Doing so affects the odds of the result becoming that named item.

I'd note that the odds for results being a set item or a named item don't have to be particularly high. And they should be 0, effectively, if no set or named items are used in the ingredients.

I think these 3 changes would make crafting relevant at higher levels while still fitting comfortably within the current framework.

[Suzy.Bae]

+1 on Crafting upgrades. Although I'd say crafting named items should require all items to be named as well as combining them with unnamed stuff will be quite the RNG and I don't know.. maybe not that easy to balance out or make work. At least, keeping named items will now be a thing. I hope they already have leads in the weapon craft/reroll/upgrade department, too.

Also, about crafting, and since we already have a smith.. then upgrading should be a thing. So specifically, something like Diamonds can be used to upgrade the weapon damage of Named weapons in specific. We all have those good stats from lboxes but trash weapon damage items. I keep them in hopes that we'll get upgrade mechanics in the future.

[SoulGaming2]

Definitely agree with the lack of story parts.

[PeterK]

Copy & paste from Nhat link to Dev comment:

~~~~~~~~~~~
Crafting System

We have a new crafting system under development, based on recipes and crafting ingredients. You will be able to shard (sic) items you don’t plan to use into crafting materials and reagents, and use those to craft brand new items. You’ll also have greater agency in terms of choosing the final crafting result. Jewel(ry) crafting will also be included into the new crafting system, and revamped to greatly reduce the grinding involved.

Some uncritical muses:

• Awesome would be to be able to push beyond the current limits even if statistics get weaker and some stronger depending how hard the fusion is pushed.
• Awesome would be to able to do the similar for named items even if only with the same set item to get the same name item.
• Awesome would be to able fuse three different gems to get those special effects found on named items and in various abilities. Even if the effect is either limited to probabilistic.

[Jage]

I really like the idea of Crafting with set items to yield set Items makes sense, Once youve progressed to using and farming for set items.., unnamed item crafting becomes an excercise in futility

[Vwdriver]

Keep in mind, this is just the BETA.

Overall, I really enjoyed Act 4. I love the bigger more maze like maps.
The new monsters are cool, and the graphics are pretty sweet.
Yes, the game does crash now whereas I didn't have any crashes in the past, but I'm sure the Devs are aware of all that.

Now if you really wanted to make it more interesting, make it so that you have to kill Kara's minions during trials before taking Kara out.....