Hi all,
Hit 70 yesterday and while early on I found the game hard to get into, it's grown on me quite a bit. I've been on the forums a lot so some of the below you may have read before, but I figured I'd put everything in one place.
First and foremost, there's a lot to like about this game. If not, I wouldn't be here.
The overall quality of everything is excellent: great graphics, cool effects, interesting spells and abilities, some nice bosses and gear, unique spell UI, amazing seamless cross-platform support, lack of P2W, ability to pause or play offline, superb customer service, and a great community. I'm not going to expound on all of this in detail as you've heard it all before and I figure back-patting is less useful than constructive criticism. So I will focus on areas I think could use improvement and ideas for enhancement. I will try to avoid things that have already been mentioned as coming in updates in the near future.
Gameplay
1. More variety is greatly needed. Obviously making a new story mode act is an enormous amount of work and that takes time. But I'd like to see more variety in the trials. Make different objectives for completing different trials, for example, not just "kill everything as fast as possible and then kill the boss as fast as possible". This can be done more quickly and would make the game get stale much less quickly.
2. The game has an upside-down incentive system right now where you are rewarded not for challenging yourself on the toughest content but grinding away on easy content. As one example, I am a mage with poor gear and a low CL but was trying to continually go up the Trials ladder, doing #47 and then #48 which for me were quite difficult. This took a lot of time and involved many deaths, using up apples and potions, etc. If I was able to beat the boss I got typically three epic items. As an experiment, I dropped down to trial #35. This was super easy and I could blow through the level in 1/2 to 1/3 the time. I got the same rewards. Actually, I got more rewards because I could do the level faster. In fact I got more named pieces from two runs at #35 than #48. (I realize there's some RNG here but I wonder if time to complete matters more than level.) Suffice to say, I think players should be rewarded for stretching, not sitting in their comfort zones.
3. Same deal with Gorgona. I have overall gotten worse drops doing her on heroic (which can take me 15 or 20 minutes) than doing her on normal (which takes under 5).
4. More dungeons, please.
5. Too much gold/gemstones on some levels leads to the same grinding issue mentioned above.
6. Elban is unbalanced as a boss. On a high trial (for me) I can beat all the other bosses with some effort, which is fun, but Elban is impossible. I am at the point where I just abandon a high-end trial if he's the boss because I simply cannot survive a fight against him and it's not worth dying 20 times. The other bosses can kill me but eventually I can win with the right tactics. On lower trials it's the opposite: Elban is a beatable challenge, but the other bosses are a joke, I can just spam attacks at them until they die. Either Elban needs to be nerfed or the others buffed, something so that they are of roughly equivalent power. Doing most of a trial and having to quit is not fun. Killing a boss with auto-attack isn't either.
6. The blood spatter would be better if it came into effect only when taking hard hits. Right now sometimes my screen is all red even though my health is nearly full and sometimes there's hardly any spatter and suddenly I am dead.
7. The game bogs down sometimes when large numbers of enemies are on the field.
8. I'd prefer a wider zoom view or control over it. I often find myself fighting enemies I can't see, especially when using Singularity.
9. Please let us travel using the minimap?
Quests
These are unimaginative and too easy to complete. I don't even usually try to complete them, I just play and at the end of the day they are done. Some more variety would be good here, in terms of both objective and rewards. (Does 500 XP even matter after your first week?)
Jewelry
I've only started to dabble with this but so far I don't really like what I see. Grinding for gemstones, heavy reliance on RNG (having to make hundreds of random items to try to get good ones and combine them) and the whole system is so complicated that it requires math formulas to understand it. Simplification and greater control on the part of players would be an improvement.
Champion Points
Great concept but see above about complexity and math formulas. It's really hard to tell where you should use points.
Item Crafting
I can't even see what the point of this is. Every time I have tried it I have gotten nothing worthwhile and forum consensus seems to be pretty negative.
Abilities
Overall I think these are good, but there are balance issues leading to too many "standard builds" and not enough variety. I believe this is being worked on. I also hope some more are coming in the future.
Inventory Space
The number of items you can carry is less in this game than any RPG I have played in over 30 years. Given that a bunch of slots are nearly permanently occupied with gemstones and potions/apples, and this game is largely about killing stuff and getting drops, this makes no sense to me. It's also a major turnoff for new players to have to spend premium currency on inventory slots. Especially since it gets expensive so fast: I still haven't unlocked my last 6 slots.
I have to stop multiple times every run to shuffle inventory and sell junk items. This is not fun, not why people play games.
Specific suggestions:
1. Make all gemstone drops go right into the stash and stack there. You don't need them during a run and dealing with them is a nuisance.
2. Increase the stack size for potions/apples. You can buy them from the store mid-level anyway so limiting stack size isn't accomplishing anything.
3. Increase starting inventory by 6 slots.
4. Dramatically lower the cost of expansions -- this is IMO not a good place to try to get people to spend gems.
Companions
Some more control over these I think would improve them, as would the ability to equip them.
Also, I think that you should not be able to use more than one copy of any companion at a given time, this just makes any sort of balancing hard and doesn't contribute to immersion.
Store
Please turn off the flashing icon that comes on after every level. It's really annoying, to me at least.
There's potential here that is largely wasted. The companions are good, that's fine, and I can see that some people might want to buy gemstones. The chests don't seem like a good deal for random stuff given how much random stuff we already get.
The specific items are a total waste. Maybe this is left over from some previous version of the game, but I have never seen a single item here that even tempted me to spend on it. Why would I spend 20,000 gold on a blue weapon when I sell 50 of them a day? Even the epics are nothing to write home about. If you want people to spend gems it has to be on something special or worthwhile. All I really care about honestly are named and set items, and they are never in the store (and probably shouldn't be, but the random items have to be good enough to compete with them or why buy them?)
Monetization
The 99c items are what microtransactions should be. But I haven't had anything offered to me since my first day. (ETA: Forgot about the $19.99 archer deal. That IMO is not a good deal, probably why I forgot about it!) Obviously avoiding P2W is an important part of this game's success, but I'd love more offers of cosmetics or other minor enhancements that I could support the game with. You guys need to make money and I'm happy to spend it if you give me something worth spending on!
Miscellaneous
"Gem" and "gemstone" is a confusing choice of words for these two items. Changing one or the other to some synonym would be less confusing (though would require an adjustment period).
Okay I will shut up now.
Hit 70 yesterday and while early on I found the game hard to get into, it's grown on me quite a bit. I've been on the forums a lot so some of the below you may have read before, but I figured I'd put everything in one place.
First and foremost, there's a lot to like about this game. If not, I wouldn't be here.
The overall quality of everything is excellent: great graphics, cool effects, interesting spells and abilities, some nice bosses and gear, unique spell UI, amazing seamless cross-platform support, lack of P2W, ability to pause or play offline, superb customer service, and a great community. I'm not going to expound on all of this in detail as you've heard it all before and I figure back-patting is less useful than constructive criticism. So I will focus on areas I think could use improvement and ideas for enhancement. I will try to avoid things that have already been mentioned as coming in updates in the near future.Gameplay
1. More variety is greatly needed. Obviously making a new story mode act is an enormous amount of work and that takes time. But I'd like to see more variety in the trials. Make different objectives for completing different trials, for example, not just "kill everything as fast as possible and then kill the boss as fast as possible". This can be done more quickly and would make the game get stale much less quickly.
2. The game has an upside-down incentive system right now where you are rewarded not for challenging yourself on the toughest content but grinding away on easy content. As one example, I am a mage with poor gear and a low CL but was trying to continually go up the Trials ladder, doing #47 and then #48 which for me were quite difficult. This took a lot of time and involved many deaths, using up apples and potions, etc. If I was able to beat the boss I got typically three epic items. As an experiment, I dropped down to trial #35. This was super easy and I could blow through the level in 1/2 to 1/3 the time. I got the same rewards. Actually, I got more rewards because I could do the level faster. In fact I got more named pieces from two runs at #35 than #48. (I realize there's some RNG here but I wonder if time to complete matters more than level.) Suffice to say, I think players should be rewarded for stretching, not sitting in their comfort zones.
3. Same deal with Gorgona. I have overall gotten worse drops doing her on heroic (which can take me 15 or 20 minutes) than doing her on normal (which takes under 5).
4. More dungeons, please.
5. Too much gold/gemstones on some levels leads to the same grinding issue mentioned above.
6. Elban is unbalanced as a boss. On a high trial (for me) I can beat all the other bosses with some effort, which is fun, but Elban is impossible. I am at the point where I just abandon a high-end trial if he's the boss because I simply cannot survive a fight against him and it's not worth dying 20 times. The other bosses can kill me but eventually I can win with the right tactics. On lower trials it's the opposite: Elban is a beatable challenge, but the other bosses are a joke, I can just spam attacks at them until they die. Either Elban needs to be nerfed or the others buffed, something so that they are of roughly equivalent power. Doing most of a trial and having to quit is not fun. Killing a boss with auto-attack isn't either.
6. The blood spatter would be better if it came into effect only when taking hard hits. Right now sometimes my screen is all red even though my health is nearly full and sometimes there's hardly any spatter and suddenly I am dead.
7. The game bogs down sometimes when large numbers of enemies are on the field.
8. I'd prefer a wider zoom view or control over it. I often find myself fighting enemies I can't see, especially when using Singularity.
9. Please let us travel using the minimap?
Quests
These are unimaginative and too easy to complete. I don't even usually try to complete them, I just play and at the end of the day they are done. Some more variety would be good here, in terms of both objective and rewards. (Does 500 XP even matter after your first week?)
Jewelry
I've only started to dabble with this but so far I don't really like what I see. Grinding for gemstones, heavy reliance on RNG (having to make hundreds of random items to try to get good ones and combine them) and the whole system is so complicated that it requires math formulas to understand it. Simplification and greater control on the part of players would be an improvement.
Champion Points
Great concept but see above about complexity and math formulas. It's really hard to tell where you should use points.
Item Crafting
I can't even see what the point of this is. Every time I have tried it I have gotten nothing worthwhile and forum consensus seems to be pretty negative.
Abilities
Overall I think these are good, but there are balance issues leading to too many "standard builds" and not enough variety. I believe this is being worked on. I also hope some more are coming in the future.
Inventory Space
The number of items you can carry is less in this game than any RPG I have played in over 30 years. Given that a bunch of slots are nearly permanently occupied with gemstones and potions/apples, and this game is largely about killing stuff and getting drops, this makes no sense to me. It's also a major turnoff for new players to have to spend premium currency on inventory slots. Especially since it gets expensive so fast: I still haven't unlocked my last 6 slots.
I have to stop multiple times every run to shuffle inventory and sell junk items. This is not fun, not why people play games.
Specific suggestions:
1. Make all gemstone drops go right into the stash and stack there. You don't need them during a run and dealing with them is a nuisance.
2. Increase the stack size for potions/apples. You can buy them from the store mid-level anyway so limiting stack size isn't accomplishing anything.
3. Increase starting inventory by 6 slots.
4. Dramatically lower the cost of expansions -- this is IMO not a good place to try to get people to spend gems.
Companions
Some more control over these I think would improve them, as would the ability to equip them.
Also, I think that you should not be able to use more than one copy of any companion at a given time, this just makes any sort of balancing hard and doesn't contribute to immersion.
Store
Please turn off the flashing icon that comes on after every level. It's really annoying, to me at least.
There's potential here that is largely wasted. The companions are good, that's fine, and I can see that some people might want to buy gemstones. The chests don't seem like a good deal for random stuff given how much random stuff we already get.
The specific items are a total waste. Maybe this is left over from some previous version of the game, but I have never seen a single item here that even tempted me to spend on it. Why would I spend 20,000 gold on a blue weapon when I sell 50 of them a day? Even the epics are nothing to write home about. If you want people to spend gems it has to be on something special or worthwhile. All I really care about honestly are named and set items, and they are never in the store (and probably shouldn't be, but the random items have to be good enough to compete with them or why buy them?)
Monetization
The 99c items are what microtransactions should be. But I haven't had anything offered to me since my first day. (ETA: Forgot about the $19.99 archer deal. That IMO is not a good deal, probably why I forgot about it!) Obviously avoiding P2W is an important part of this game's success, but I'd love more offers of cosmetics or other minor enhancements that I could support the game with. You guys need to make money and I'm happy to spend it if you give me something worth spending on!
Miscellaneous
"Gem" and "gemstone" is a confusing choice of words for these two items. Changing one or the other to some synonym would be less confusing (though would require an adjustment period).
Okay I will shut up now.
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