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Ok then, here we go again, Public Test Server got its latest update and there are some new things to test out, including their second take on their Legendary Perk Card System... Which still needs A LOT of polishing and reworking before it will become really viable and user-friendly.
Here's an initial post of the legendary perk thread of the PTS forum.
The thread itself contains lots of good feedback on why this is still a badly designed system and I will make some points about it. (Yes, I also posted the following thoughts on that forum thread after lots of playing around their anti-spam bullcr*p... Again.)
Anyone can download the PTS client and try everything out for themselves btw.
Now, to a point of my post.
So here we are again, stuck with the legendary perk upgrade system, that is not only tedious as hell, but also punishes players who played a lot with their builds switching stats AND players who lost lots of perk cards due to having duplicates.
I already made a huge post about what's wrong with that perk coin system and why it must go away in its entirety. The post that got a lot of backing from the community (and even a reply from Beth about how many good suggestions were there) and more than a thousand of upvotes. Here it is for your reference.
As we currently see, lots of issues that I wrote about haven't been addressed in the current iteration of PTS. The only thing they thought was really important for players is that scrapping animated perk cards was not a good idea, that really went against the CCG nature of current regular perk system. But they seem to completely ignore lots of much more important issues with it some of which I will reiterate on once more. Many people on reddit and on PTS forums pointed some of these issues out already but it seems like it's never too late to reiterate on some to draw additional devs' attention:
- Making coins as a middle step to upgrade legendary perks is tedious and totally uncalled for. Remove it and make the total amount of character levels account-wide be a pool of points (only counting currently created characters so it won't be exploited by creating lots of alts in a rapid succession), that can be spent to upgrade perk cards directly. Without the need to press two buttons hundreds of times just to get even one perk upgraded to the max. In current state it's the definition of tedium itself and is a nightmare for anyone who has more than 20 levels on a character, God forbid 300-500-1000+ levels...
This would help to level up alts, giving them the possibility to reap rewards from us playing a lot with other characters, like some other games do (looking at you, Diablo 3's paragon level system). Right now the system only further alienates people from playing with other characters, each of which needs to grind yet another round of hundreds of levels to be at least on par with main characters. Time spent in game must be rewarded regardlessly of how many characters we have.
- Having a pool of points does not really cut it if all you can do is spend all these points once and then you'll find yourself in the situation that no meaningful upgrades/respec are possible within the next 100-300 levels. What if you found out after playing with the perk that you don't like it anymore or it's completely broken because of the bug that came with a recent patch? Right, you want to refund the points and switch to another one you find fitting to your current playstyle. But you can't, you don't have any more points to do so. This must be addressed asap since it will pigeonhole people in their builds without any possibility to recover/respec in a lifetime. It's a mild exaggeration of course, but who in their right minds will spend time to level up 250-500 times just to switch one or two perks that they didn't like to something they do at the moment?
Solution: Make legendary perk points refundable as in the current regular perk system. (I described the way it could've been within my reddit post I linked above)
Also, the costs to upgrade legendary perks are outrageous. Spending 25-35 level ups flat for a rank of a legendary perk seems reasonable (and will somehow support the sense of progression, at least for lower level characters), but 250 levels per a fully upgraded perk is quite a lot to ask for, considering you can play perfectly fine and steamroll everything this game has to offer without any of the the legendary abilities currently introduced. And it's especially true for veteran players who already have lots of good gear and don't level up as fast as they used to hundreds of levels ago.
To be honest most of these perks still do not sound legendary enough to warrant the grind the devs put them behind. Especially the ones that offer only a chance to trigger for highly questionable "benefits" like recharging fusion cores while taking damage (is it their definition of fun gameplay?) or making things explode, sending corpses flying around making it much harder to loot 'em (is it yet another definition of fun and rewarding gameplay for them? Well then I guess they chose the wrong profession, game design is simply not their thing)
Right now I won't say anything else about the legendary perks themselves except that now at least there are couple I'd actually consider having in my builds. But still, it'll take another quite large post to point out all the issues there are in their current implementation. The issues, that persisted from the previous iterations, and some new ones that people here already pointed out.
EDIT: My second gold award! Thanks a lot for your support, kind stranger!
EDIT 2: Well, waddaya know! The post exploded with comments, like the last time. I want to apologize in advance but I won't be able to answer to everyone from this point. But the main thing is to draw devs' attention to this so we can finally be heard. So every piece of support in the comments is greatly appreciated! Thanks everyone, you're amazing! :D
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