Feedback for devs from longtime player

[Arawn]

This is intended to be a serious comment from someone who has played for about four years. My understanding is that the dev team are Diablo fans and created this game for like-minded fans. That being the case, I would hope that the dev team considers the opinions of the fans.

There are two main aspects that I have an issue with:

• The infrequency with which abilities can be cast. AR/ alacrity nerfs have turned this into a game of auto- attack.
• The pseudo- RNG. Others may disagree with me on this one, but the odds of rolling top- tier items are too rare. I have Celestial Transforms piling up in my stash because I have nothing to use them on.

I didn't mention stash space or a gem- farming alternative because they are not as fundamentally important to the game as the above aspects are and my understanding is that these are being addressed anyway. I also don't have any issue with the drop rate; I remember farming trial 205 for two pieces of epic gear and one piece of legendary gear, so no big deal.

Please consider the two points above and thank you for providing such an engaging game that can be enjoyed free of charge.

[TheExorcist]

for a PC player with a big screen
this this 2 new small/tiny health/apple potion buttons is sometime very difficult
many time fail/miss to press them correctly in trials
suddenly i'm dead
if we could have "the nice old and bigger buttons?" that would be great

[Benedicto]

Indeed. And not all are pc or tablet players, and not all mobile players have small fingers/thumb to press/click those tiny potion and apple buttons. When mobile players try to draw the " > " or " W " and the toon is still auto-attacking the monster that is on the very end part of the group, you'll die in no time.

[Ozymandius]

There are two main aspects that I have an issue with:

• The frequency with which abilities can be cast. This has turned into a game of auto- attack.
• The pseudo- RNG. Others may disagree with me on this one, but the odds of rolling top- tier items are too rare. I have Celestial Transforms piling up in my stash because I have nothing to use them on.

The Devs recently nerfed AR to slow down how quickly you can cast abilities, so they seem to be thinking like you on the first point.

I think that we would all like the odds of crafting a level 77 gear piece to be higher. On average, you get one Level 77 piece for every 64 crafts, which means that a player can typically craft one level 77 piece (and one level 76 piece) during a typical ANB. Some players use Legendary Crafter's crates to craft additional level 77 pieces, but you can only save two pieces from each event so I have never bothered to do that. It would be nice if you could count on crafting two Level 77 pieces during an ANB without having to spend gems for crafting materials. But given how quickly ANBs cycle these days, it seems that most experienced players on the leaderboards already have multiple Level 77 pieces on their main account heroes. I suspect your point would be to make it easier for new players to "catch up" to experienced players.

I would add that level 77 drops seem to be even rarer than you can achieve though crafting, and often they come with junk stats. The original version of Eternium completely depended on RNG and gear drops, but since the new crafting system was introduced, drops have become mostly irrelevant. It would be nice to see an occasional drop that has some utility at least within an ANB.

[Arawn]

The Devs recently nerfed AR to slow down how quickly you can cast abilities, so they seem to be thinking like you on the first point.

My issue is with how infrequently abilities are able to be cast now. My understanding is that AR was buffed but alacrity was nerfed, resulting in watching your toon auto- attack while waiting to be able to cast your abilities again. My opinion is that if a player invests in particular stats (power, haste, AR, etc.), then they should be able to make use of those stats. Just my opinion

[Ozymandius]

Sorry, I misread your original "auto attack" statement. I thought you were suggesting that players were just automatically spamming abilities without needing to apply any strategy. I mostly play BH, so you can never just sit back and "watch" anything; if you are not actively avoiding counterattacks you are dead.

You may be right on the AR/alacrity thing. All I know for sure is that heroes that once had 50% cooldown reductions now have only 30% cooldown reductions, to me that felt like an AR nerf. I can see how an Alacrity nerf would accomplish the same thing, though I do not remember alacrity showing up on sheet damage like this cooldown reduction did.

[Arawn]

Ozymandius Yes, thanks for pointing out that my original post was unclear!

[DethStrike]

I think as far as Celestials are concerned, maybe additional functionality could be added, if the original plea for greater crafting success is not going to happen. Even as a newer player of 5 months or so, I have way more Celestials than needed items. Perhaps new features could be added to them, providing new and interesting utility, such as:

-Allow the attaching of an additional Celestial to unbind the item to the character, while keeping the upgraded stats.

-Perhaps attaching an additional Celestial could reset the Reforge/rerolling button to reset, or even drop to a new base of 10 gems. In addition or instead, the ability to re-designate which stat is being rerolled could be an awesome feature of Celestials! This could allow reforging of these bound items, if the 50 gem per roll cost had outweighed your desire for the perfect stat. This would be doubly helpful for being able to address Meta changes and Nerfs, without making veterans who've invested 1,000s of hours feel like a Meta change ruined their whole game, and as nerfs do in any game, leading to many players just abandoning the game.

-Maybe using a large number Celestials on a current Bound item, could turn it into a "Living Item", giving you a single item per toon that would scale (Even very slightly would be so cool) with your Champion levels.

-Maybe combining 3+ Celestials, unlocks an optional Rainbow of different specialized, color coded Celestial Transforms. The color of the new CT would be tied to an essence type, and would have greater impact on stats of that color essence, while having diminished effect on specific opposing colors. Ie; Red CT's would enhance Crit Damage, Parry etc, by say 5-10% more, but reduce any water enhancements by some much larger number, say 25% (Or make it more difficult by having 2 color essences reduce stats by say 10-15% instead). These could even add simple cosmetic color modification to the items it is attached to, not to mention the variety it would create in builds, breeding discussion, experimenting and... engagement.

Even if the trade off is great, and the resource cost high, players would relish the opportunity to explore further customization and nuance to their own toons, adding life and variety and player enthusiasm. The cost to game balance could be appropriately measured with negative trade offs and resource commitment required. It would certainly cheer up and reinvest bored veterans, swimming in purposeless loot, and give Newbs yet another reason to take ANB's seriously, in lieu of just being happy grinding away story mode.

Hell you could have the achieving of level 70 in Story Mode, trigger a quest, where you must take this "Broken Celestial Augmenting Device" into the Capital City, and join the Tournament being held there on X date (next ANB date). Wow My IMMERSION LEVELS!!! And choose your class wisely, as this is a Once per Account Quest! Discover that if you can fill the Device with 2 CT's, you can unlock a powerful custom enhancement! And for 1 CT less than on future crafts! What a deal! Also, make sure you're prepared for the intense challenge ahead, by contacting one or two of the Capital City residents, if you have any questions regarding what this whole ANB thing is about.... FORUM LINK. A transitional, in-game/in-lore, link between Story and ANB, beyond a message after beating each Story difficulty, would have seriously upped immersion, and the Devs would have gotten a month's worth of additional gems out of me, instead of me completing legendary with 3 toons first lol.

Just some thoughts as I can clearly see the direction that my stash and characters are headed, falling inline with all of those players who've been at it for years.