Hey there,
Because you guys from EHG make a good progress (shown in the teasers of patch 0.7.8) I get a little bit nervous you might have nothing to do after the upcoming patch. So here’s my personal wishlist of things I’d like to see tuned a bit in case you get bored.
Again this is just biased feedback and personal flavour. I don’t have the attitude that “all these things have to change or LE will fail”. Maybe here’s something in for you that is usefull.
I tried to list topics that are not that frequently suggested on the forums. Here we go.
Introduction To Crafting Too Late
The Introduction comes with a quest at the Outcast Camp what usually is above character lvl 20 and after choosing the Mastery. Is it intended to be able to craft before this quest? It seems so because there are shards dropping at low levels everywhere. New players will have discovered the crafting mechanics prior to this because they heard about it (chat, forum,…) or accidentially opened the tab before. Else they will be a bit baffled that a mechanic this mighty is intrioduced that late and feel like thy have missed an opportunity to make better progress before.
Solution
- Start the quest when reaching the council chambers – New players don’t loose much when they aren’t aware of crafting prior to this point
- Start the quest right after you rescued the blacksmith in the Smelting Halls AND make crafting NOT available before completing this quest – this would also fit better into the story
- Add a hint to the “Info-Button” on the crafting tab
- Also add a tutorial hint to “stash crafting material” button
Choosing Mastery - Enemies Spawn Endless - Confusing
New players don’t realise that the enemies spawn endlessly and they just have to run through. What’s the point behind this? Imho these shadows aren’t a real thread so it is meaningless that they spawn. Solution:
a) Cap the number of enemies per plateau so they don’t spawn endlessly
b) Give the player a hint – a voiceline of the main char talking to himself like “This is meaningless, they don’t stop. I have to get past them somehow…”
Picking Up Quest Items (e.g. Ezra‘s Ledger) Feels Clunky
The item does not appear or is automatically looted. Your don’t really notice htat you pick it up. Solution:
- Make Quest items drop with a unique color and marker similar to unique/set items and let them make a unique sound when dropping
- Or handle it like interacting with a quest NPC. Give the Chest a “?” above and add a dialogue window saying “Pick up The Ledger” like the Quest at the Welryn College
Affixes Of Minor Impact/Usefullness
There are minor affixes that only increase the affix pool and so reduce chances to get the desired gear like a sort of “play-time-extenders” that lengthen the time you need to min-max. They are not bad but nothing anybody aims for:
- Stun Avoidance
- Chance To Blind
- Chance To Chill
- Chance To Shock
- Chance To Slow
- Increased Shock Effect
Maybe some people don’t agree with me and have found good use for these in their builds. In this case I would be glad to learn about it. I had complaints about the CC effects, too, and made a post about it. But many other people here think they are in a good spot. Maybe it’s the same with the affixes above.
Also I have to admit this are very few affixes considered “not that usefull” by me of a very huge list. It’s quite impessive there aren’t more.
One possibility to make these affixes mor meaningfull would be to add things like “Stun Chance increased by 200% against blinded targets” on skillnodes or passive tree nodes.
Attributes On Gear Not Important
When listening to the theorycrafting experts here, it is not recommended to put certain attribute affixes on your gear that support your skills. There are exceptions like int for ward builds. But str for sentinel / primalist is not recommended. The effects on your skills are weak compared to other affixes that also scale with your skills like direct “increased %firedamage” for fire related skills. Maybe attributes on gear should be removed completely (you could instead ad x%ward retention in exchange for int) or make them more meaningful and desirable.
Skillnodes Not Scaling With Main Class Attributes And Their Own Skilltags
One Example is the Sentinels Shield Throw. The skilltags are [base damage type] (could be physical, fire or void), throwing attack, Strengh and Dexterity (why dexterity?). The Skillnode “Eruption” adds a spell called “Lava Burst” on riccochet that scales with Spelldamage, Firedamage, and Attunement. The only synergy this skillnode has with the main skill is Firedamage. I don’t complain that there are no viable skill combinations. But they look weird. For Sentinel one would be a staff wielding Forge Guard in full plate armor scaling spelldamage to have most synergies with Devouring Orb, Smite, Sigils Of Hope and Shield Throw (without even wielding a shield…) that all use the “spell” tag. (There are so many spells in the Sentinel Masteries)
Another example is mana strike. Its tags are Lighning, Melee, Intelligence and Dexterity (again Dexterity). The “Mana Storm” adds a spell tag. So I am picking a nice weapon to add flat melee damage to my main attack skill, but nodes inside the tree of this melee skill don’t scale with the melee damage, but with a damage tag (spelldamage) I don’t use that much as a spellblade, which would be the common mastery for using a melee skill.
I am not saying this is all bullshit and doesn’t work. But it’s not very intuitive and catchy. I can’t decide if I like it or not. This requires thinking about your build what is a good thing in most cases. On the other side it limits the build diversity because some skillnodes require certain item setups with the tags these nodes scale with. Is this a bad thing or does it force structured character building even more? I don’t know. What do you think?
Character Screen Stats Not Very Catchy
What bothers me the most are the %values on the stats screen. There are some tooltips but you don’t get the meaning of many mechanics.
- Protections:
a. Mitigation % has no real meaning because it’s dependent on health and protections value. E.g. solely decreasing health points results in a higher Mitigation %. This implies that you have gotten better gear when it is not the case.
→ Show the sum of protection and HP for each element. Seeing this value increase = good, decrease = bad
- Some %values are the result of a formular based on a rating (e.g. dodge), some %values are the rating itself (e.g. critical strike avoidance, glancing blow) and some are the results of an invisible rating (critical strike chance). What I mean is:
- Dodge: +20% dodge means the dodge rating value is increased by 20%, it’s not the chance itself that is increased
- Glancing Blow: +20% means exactly this – your chance to receive a glancing blow is 20% higher than before
- Critical Strike Chance: Increased Critical Strike Chance by 20% means that your base value of 5% is increased by 20%. So instead of 5+20=25% you get 5+(5x0,2)=6%
→ Make it more obvious to the player. Perhaps replace the +X% critical strike chance with a multiplier like “critical strike chance x 0,X”
→ Add information how the ratings and %values are calculated. E.g. on moseover on dodge you could show
- Dodge Rating: 180
- From gear (Rating/Modifier): 50/100%
- From Passive stats (Rating/Modifier): (40/100%)
This “from gear” / “from passive” would be a cool info to be added to every value on the screen on mouseover
Respeccing Can Be Very Unconfortable
Respeccing skills and passives can be a pain. Taking skillpoints out of skilltrees requires to click the “respec 1 point” button for every skill.
Taking skill points out of the passive tree works better but can be a pain when you reach the point where you can’t take out more points because of the minimum requirement for other nodes. When you only have one point left this leaves you with putting one point into the new passive, clicking the npc to respec the next point so you get another point to spend, abort respecing, put 1 point in your tree, click the npc again to respec the next point,… and so on.
Solution
- Passive skills: When entering respec mode you should be able to respec as many points as you wish without confirmation. Beneath every skillnode the number of skillpoints you specced before is shown. Every right click removes one point. When you accidentally right clicked a skillnode left click adds the removed point again. Of course it is not allowed to have any node to have more skillpoints than before starting the respec. Maybe also highlight the nodes you took points out, make the numbers beneath the skills red and show the actual number it would have after respeccing. At the end you click “end respec”. There’s a confirmation popup where you are asked whether your choices are correct because it cannot be made undone. Click ok and it’s done.
- Respeccing passive trees: Same here. Enter respec mode and you can take out points with right click and add points with left click. Because you get all your points back there don’t need to be any other restrictions besides the minimum requirement. But the check if your skill choice meets the restrictions should be done at the very end when you click “end respec”. If you have made an invalid choice the respec cannot be confirmed and you stay in respec mode. You can abort to undo all changes or correct your mistake. Also highlight every skillnode you have taken points out where it is not allowed. This way you can temporarily have less skillpoints in a node than required, but you are able to rearrange your points without having to switch modes. For example you can take 4 points out of your base class tree leaving it with 16 points. On an info panel you get the message “requirements not met (-4)”. The number in the brackets shows the number of missing points in realtime. Now you put these 4 points into another skillnode in the same tree so you have 20 again what is the minimum requirement, if you have points in the other mastery trees. While you are in respec mode the gold amount you have to pay for respeccing is shown in the info panel in realtime. If the fee exceeds your current credit you cannot proceed. You can end respeccing at this point or abort. With clicking confirmation you are charged the fees
Crafting Tweaks
Crafting is relatively confortable I think. But I’d like to have three minor tweaks
- When I scroll down through my shards and decide to craft on an affix I already have on the item it would be nice to be able to click on the affix on the top window to jump directly to the affix on the top of the shards list
- The affix tooltip shows “adds X to…”. Would be awesome if it shows the exact value/min-max range. If it is an affix you don’t have crafted on the actual item (or no item is placed in the forge) show t1 range, else show the range of the next tier that will be applied when crafting.
- When you use rune of removal show the affix that has been removed for a few seconds
Make map exploration rewarding
Actually there’s no need for exploration. There are a few chests on every map and perhaps you can find a nice shrine, but nothing that makes people explore the whole map. And because the maps are fix and there’s a quest marker guiding you, you just run the straight way through. So I made up my mind what would me personally make exploring the map. There are two possible ways:
- Make exploring mandatory by hiding things that are needed for character progress (e.g. idol slots, passive points, XP boosts for char or skills) - The con is that people are forced to do this so for people who like rushing through the game it is an unpopular feature so I dirctly jump to…
- Hide “nice to have” things on maps that nobody really needs but are just cool. For example add customisable player banners and let the people collect the coolest symbols and artworks for them. Or emotes and/or cool character voice lines the player can trigger manually.
How this can be done:
There could be minor and major achievements that are tied to a certain area or timeline or even to the whole campaign.
Map related
- Kill 7 Wengari Patriarchs on map X
- Open 9 chests on Map Y
- …
Area related
- Kill 3 specific named mini bosses in the area around Welryn - These Named Bosses have several possible spawnpoints on each map that surrounds Welryn in a radius of 2 maps. Only 1 can spawn per map.
- Activate 7 shrines in the area around the temple of eterra
- …
Era related
- Kill X rare enemies in the Ruined Era
- Fully reveal all maps in the Ancient Era
- Activate all waypoints in the Imperial Era (also make waypoints have random spawnpoints on each map that are rolled when entering a map)
These achievements also could be interlaced. So for completing a map related achievement you get a bit of gold as a reward and!/or XP. For completing area related achievements you get crafting mats and/or a rare item (let the player even choose the crafting mats or the base item for the reward). For claiming era related achievement rewards you have to complete all map related and area related achievements. Rewards could be titles like “Voidwalker” for completing the era achievement.
Rewards in general could all revolve around prestige. Banner elements, badges (shown on ladders, perhaps even on forums), titles (shown in badges), pet skins, weapon/armor skins, capes (requires capes as an additional item that also can be customized like banners).
Achievements
Achievements and cool rewards for completing keep people playing even if they have max level and items. This could be things like described above as well as additional things that only can be completed with leveling several chars:
- Level 1 char to 100
- Level 5 chars to 100
- Level a char of every class at least to 80
- Kill Lagon 20 times
- Complete the story 10 times
- Reach Monolith lvl 100
- Craft 50 items to fully t5
- Gamble 200 items
- Complete the story without dying
- Collect 1.000.000 gold
- Collect 100 unique items
- …. (could go on endlessly)
As for rewards, simlar to the previous suggestion, this could be everything related to your planned MTX stuff, just not thas cool like the stuff you guys are gonna charge real money 
Everybody who got this far: Thanks for reading. I hope my post doesn’t contain that many things that are already answered on Discord or elsewhere.
Have a good time!
These are all off the cuff replies and I can’t guarantee any will be done.
just kidding great summary.
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