So I’m going to throw this out as I’ve been playing it for a few hours and I have a good idea of where it was headed. I’m going to commenting on what I’m assuming are a few bugs because, well they might not be bugs, but I’ll also be submitting bug reports.
Let’s start with the good. I LOVE the direction this class has gone since I was last able to play. the previous reaper form changes really really tanked my interest in this class, but now I don’t even care about reaper form, don’t have it on my bar the base class feels pretty similar to what reaper form used to be. This is fantastic, and I love it. I like the inclusion of the new abilities drain life and spirit plague. Feels very flavorful as the poison/corruption lich. I’m also really digging death seal… In concept.
Now we take a quick detour to talk about death seal and its shortcomings.
Removed wall of text of the negatives of the skill, they were all based on a confirmed bug
That’s it for the negatives. Now for things that are neither positive nor negative but I think would be an improvement in gameplay.
I think that the counterbalance to Death Seal is such, that maybe it doesn’t need a max duration, and it should just be a toggle that people can toggle on and off at their individual level of comfort/risk reward. If you want to lock your character at 50% and just leave it on that’s how comfortable you feel. If you want to go ham and lock it at 33% with the skill, go for it. There is always the node which turns it off at 10% automatically if you’re scared you’ll mess up. Maybe make the permanent toggle aspect a node that isn’t in front of anything, Maybe also make that node disable all ward generation? So you can’t just leave it on and stack up ward. That’s actually kind of what I thought the ability would do, just turn off ward generation and make you play with a lesser amount of HP. I’m pretty ok playing with 66% of my HP missing. since you get a bunch of buffs like increased protections, damage reduction, damage etc. Feels like a fair trade off.
All that said, I feel like this is a really great playstyle for lich, and I’m excited to see what this will look like when/if these (maybe) bugs are fixed. And it’d be super neat to see death seal get that option.
Edit: Also Desperate shroud node doesn’t appear to be working either. I’m not seeing any additional protections from it.
2nd Edit: Removed some of the things about Death Seal as it was confirmed to be a bug related to one of the nodes that disabled all the other nodes.