I’ll start off by saying I’m having a lot of fun. Big props to all of the team that are developing this game. I’m taking time out of my life to type this up in hopes of making a better game rather than out of negativity.
Good:
Waypoints light up to show you’ve activated them
Skill system is a lot of fun
No item durability
I’ve found legendaries as I’ve leveled and it’s a lot of fun. Most games are not like this.
Chests being down wrong paths is great
Bad:
Early game time travel I have no idea why it’s happening half the time. Maybe it’s the lack of voice acting I’m not sure. Sometimes I find portals to 5 or 6000 bc with no real understanding of why or if there is a purpose. It’s confusing. I get that after a few playthroughs it probably makes more sense, but this is my first time and my experience has been confusion.
Monsters seem to die really fast causing many of the special effects the champion monsters have to never really be noticed. It seems to be getting better as I level, but for the first 30 levels as a necro everything just gets obliterated with no real challenge to it.
Mob density - related to point 2 most of the game so far has been running from one pack of a few monsters to the next pack of a few monsters. This rarely results in any real challenge.
Being one shot is not fun. I’m a big fan of having fun. And if something isn’t fun it needs to be changed. The only times I’ve died so far are when I’ve been 1 shot. Most of the time I don’t even know what happened.
Let me expand. The issue here is I can be running from place to place grinding through mob pack after mob pack with them barely able to do any damage at all to me and then all of a sudden a boss or some kind of monster with a special ability just 1 shots me. It’s only happened a few times, but when it does is it ever annoying. I would much rather regular monsters pose more of a threat and 1 shots be toned down. This is by far my biggest gripe with the game so far.
I haven’t used a single shard yet. There should be a tutorial or something on how they work. I have no idea about the mechanics of them to this point and no incentive to learn.
I touched on this earlier, but champion monsters aren’t significantly more challenging than normal monsters and they don’t stand out very well. My big ball of minions grinds through it all in no time regardless. Maybe that’s not fair - it might take a little longer, but not much longer.
The field of view is too zoomed in. It would be nice if it could come out further.
Suggestions:
Quest indicators on mini map/map. If there are multiple quests active, not knowing which one goes where is annoying. On the main map it would be nice if there was an icon to show that is where you need to go to do the quest - D3 style.
Skeletons dying need a death sound effect.
I mentioned this earlier, but a shard tutorial would be great.
Some way of seeing what damage type I’m receiving would be nice.
I too started an acolyte and recently started going down the lich route. Have to agree with the mobs being too easy and the mob leaders not being noticeably harder. One curse, one splash damage blood transfer, and one necrotic souls and an entire wave is dead. I’ve used maybe 5-10 health potions in my ~20 level playthrough so far. My bone golem can’t even do a single attack 90% of the time because everything is dead before his slow attack animation triggers. Still enjoying it.
I’d have more to say but the game starts hiccuping every time about an hour into launching the game and then hard crashes within the next 15 minutes. I actually kinda don’t mind it, cause when I restart I’m back at base selling a full inventory.
There are some balancing issues early to mid game regarding the different characters.
There was a post a while ago where somebody said that every story boss can be killed in under 10 seconds. I did not believe him because I had played Sentinel recently. Sentinel definitely lacks damage in early/mid game and you have to make the right skill choices to get through the story smoothly.
Playthroughs after that were Sorcerer and Spellblade, Beastmaster and Lich. Beastmaster was incredible easy. Lich was also very easy, but not that fast. Spellblade was slowest of these, slightly slower than Sorcerer but ind the end still way faster than Sentinel.
I agree that the difficulty could be increased a bit. For pet classes it’s a walk in the park. Sentinel definitely need a damage increase at early levels. It’s day and night compared to other classes.
I feel like its the abilities they get before mastery. Like you get vengeance, rebuke and and few others. Vengeance and rebuke are mostly defensive. Hammer throw is hard to build for without crafting and uniques. Warpath feels extremely undertuned early game and rive is fine just nothing amazing. I feel as though to much power comes from leveling mastery trees for your real abilities. Makes leveling a sentinel always come down to either a very slow pace early game build using rive and vengeance or a throw build that has trouble due to poor scaling. Not really sure how to fix that other than buffing warpath, hammer throw or rive. Sentinel definitely needs some help smoothing out their level 1-25 grind.
It should be noted I mostly play on masochist so difficulty when I come back to normal mode is very refreshing. Not entirely sure how much of a difficulty hike players would be fine with due to this. I feel it would be educational for players to do a full chapter 1-7 masochist play-through then see how they view difficulty, because it can get a lot harder. To the point where you will want to abandon characters if builds don’t pan out in the midgame. I don’t feel like most people would like that feeling in base game. I feel like the devs would need to be careful on a difficulty increase since builds already require a lot of defensive stats in the later portions of the game which can require gear knowledge and crafting knowledge. 2 things that new players lack in majorly.
I started to play recently as well, and play only hardcore, but I dont feel that one-shots are too often. You just need to remember, which hits can be deadly and, I think, get some elemental protection because many of elemental hits very bursty.
Also idk how players suppose to figure out whats chill do and how DoT effects works. I read somewhere that poison stack do more damage if there more stacks, but dont know whats exatly that mean.
Hovering over something & holding Alt, or combinations of Shift, Ctrl & Alt will reveal more info. This works on most things, especially the character screen (& either the damage tab or the right-most tab has info on the ailments).
Poison has a unique mechanic where each stack increases the damage mobs take from poison by 8%.
Rive is a very nice skill but it has the same issue like Sentinel: Its weak at the beginning and needs some points untill it gets good.
With hammerthrow and warpath early you are oom the whole time untill you get the mana efficiency nodes.
Shield throw is a very nice skill even at early stages. It offers some aoe potential and hits hard during story mode. This was my bread and butter skill during my first playthrough with my Sentinel.
Perhaps Warpath could use a damage boost for hit damage.
So the plan could be to bring Sentinel to a level he can compete with the other classes and then increase damage and hp/resistances on enemies flavoured with challenging boss fights with every boss having it’s own unique mechanics and character.
This also is something I miss: Character of enemy bosses. Right now they are just some unique looking big monsters at the end of a chapter. They don’t have a place in the story, yet.
i see a potential problem with playing the game with perma death then a random mob 1shots u for no good reason
just imo if ur going to have permadeath give like 1 proc of a small health boost to ignore the ohko function i know this sounds dumb probly but it makes it hard for me to enjoy if i get ohko by a rando mob cause it can do a special move and im just saying aginest ohko’s not every time ur life runs dry just like o this mob hit 99-100%hp heres 10 hp so ur not wiped and then give it like a 1 hr or 30min cooldown before it can proc again so if u notice it u know to take it easy for bit just my point of maybe a better option i get maschist does extra damage but still
I’ve made a number of early game characters and I strongly agree - the early game damage is very wide among the classes. One very early test on this is the worm monster that opens the first time portal. Yes, this is so early that characters don’t have more than a handful of skills and points. That being said, the mob quickly melts for an acolyte and takes FOREVER with a sentinel. (I mean FOREVER. One of my sentinels was fighting for his life against it and it was a sentinel I had twinked already!) Early game pets are disgustingly good. Early game sentinels are disgustingly bad. The only solid skill is shield throw with eruption and you don’t have access to that until around level 14. Eventually, with enough points, the other skills scale up and are great. Early on they don’t feel as good.
Part of this might be the damage/survival trade off. Early on, survival isn’t needed and pure damage carries. As the game goes on (or, more accurately, once you reach the endgame), survival become more important and glass cannons start paying for it. I suspect the base classes are inherently balanced around that, but that tradeoff is unnecessary at low levels.
Particularly because the lower levels don’t matter except as an introduction to the game, it might be a good idea to boost sentinel damage at low levels. There really isn’t any harm in this and it would give new players a better experience.
By the way, one-shots at early levels. My very first char was one-shot by a bee post-death lightning circle thingy. That’s when I learned to avoid the bad at all costs. Later chars were twinked well enough that a lightning circle doesn’t one-shot them. I’ll admit - that first one-shot felt really weird at the time, like that spell’s damage was overtuned. shrug
I wouldn’t go quite that far, Hammer Throw is decent and you get that earlier than Shield Throw & you can spam it (unlike Shield Throw until you’ve gone down south for the cooldown removal nodes).
I think the initial skills that the Sentinel could be given a bit more base damage at low levels to help with the initial levelling.
The thing is you don’t have to spam shield throw during story mode. It’s hitting hard enough to make 90-100% of a trashmob pack disappear with the initial throw.
It’s kind of sad its damage is falling of in lategame and it’s only viable as a shield throw staccato spam version to proc side effects.
I am with @AgtShadow. He describes exactly how it feels for me. Compared to other classes Sentinel is a pain to level. I avoid killing some types of enemies with high hp pool because it takes forever. Same with bossfights.
Yeah, I did make a suggestion some time ago to change Shield Throw to benefit from melee added damage (ie, make it a high damage nuke with a cooldown) but when you go for the cooldown reduction nodes that significantly reduces the added damage effectiveness it has so you can spam it but it does a lot less damage (& you have to put in quite a few points to get that).
I totally agree with actshadow, except one-shots - for my opinion, if one-shots easy to avoid, then its ok to be one-shot. A bit of danger, why not. New plareyrs will fill that their actions actually matters already, should be fun for them.
