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I guess I'll start by saying I think this game is really great. It hits just the right spot for me on the complexity curve, where the game is rich enough that learning the systems and how to optimize is challenging and rewarding, but not being so ridiculous that you could write a dissertation or make an hour long YouTube video on how to best optimize monolith farming (I'm thinking back to when the Atlas first came about in PoE.) The combat feels great and smooth, the difficulty curve feels like it ramps really well, the corruption mechanic is well done, there are a huge variety of builds, and overall I'm just really glad I purchased the game. That said, I think there are some real pain points and warts. In some cases, I may have suggestions, and in other cases I might not have a great idea for a solution; I'm also fine hearing that I'm an idiot or wrong. It's like, just my opinion, man.
- Bugs
There are a lot of issues with bugs, ranging from nodes in skill trees just not working to the UI not accurately reflecting what's happening. Things like Ravenous Void sometimes going up to 6 stacks, but not really and actually you only have 3 stacks, skill effects not actually putting debuffs on targets even though they're working, gaining buffs but not having any sort of UI showing you that they're active (things like Shifting Power and Warped Time and Harbinger of Dust in Volatile Reversal just showing "Acceleration" and nothing else.) If there were just one or two of these things, well, hey, nothing is perfect, but there are a ton of things floating around like this and it really ends up feeling like a lack of polish. To the teams' credit, they've actually been squashing a ton of bugs, but I would continue to say this should be among the higher priorities as things just not doing what they say they do, not working, or not displaying to the player any relevant information on when they're active or if they're even working definitely doesn't hit right.
- Faction Balance
So, I agree with everyone who says, "CoF will never be as good as MG is since MG is like having a hundred thousand people farming for you." What I don't agree with is the sentiment that some have that means that because of that, the magnitude of the difference in power between the two is irrelevant. I don't think we should let good be the enemy of perfect here. There exists a huge continuum between where CoF is now and where MG is, and even closing that gap a little would go a long way to having players like myself not feel compelled to go MG next cycle. I didn't want the most powerful thing when I signed up for CoF. I wanted to spend my time farming and not sniping the marketplace--and I don't mean this as any kind of attack on players who enjoy the trade aspect of ARPG's; there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not what I personally wanted to do, and presumably not what most of the CoF players wanted to do. That said, the current power level difference between the two is so vast that at this point I just feel like I've really made a terrible mistake by not going MG.
Specifically, farming bosses, and trying to get specific T7 affixes on exalts is extremely painful for CoF players. There are no prophecies to help me farm boss specific drops and after having run like 400 Arbors I can't help but start to feel a little annoyed at the state of CoF. I've gotten several 4 LP Peak of the Mountains (some without the CoF tag), countless 3 LP peaks, but all I really want is a 3 LP Foot of the Mountain. At this point, I've earned more than enough gear that if I could sell it (talking specifically the non-CoF tagged pieces), I could easily buy the item I want, but that's not an option for me, so I just keep throwing myself into a brick wall.
Similarly, farming T7 +skill helms and chests is extremely awful as CoF. I get that it's hard for everyone, but the difference here is that while CoF has double the chance of hitting T7 exalts, there are way more than double the number of T7 +skill exalts that are functionally useless for me but are amazing for other players. This means that an MG player who might want say T7 healing hands on helmet might have twice as hard a time getting that to drop than a CoF player, but since they can pick up any T7 +skill helm and sell it, it is tremendously easier for them to acquire the exalts they need. This problem is even worse for players choosing to play something less than an S-tier build.
Consider someone playing, I don't know, some kind of Warpath build. They really need a T7 +warpath helm. If they are CoF and they find a T7 frost claw relic, that does nothing for them, whereas if they are MG they can sell that relic and buy 10+ T7 +warpath skill helms to slam.
My suggestion: Scrap CoF T9 since it's useless, replace it with something that boosts boss drops. Add prophecies or some other system or passive reward for CoF which increases the drop rate of class specific exalts.
Lastly, the "1 LP" prophecies are priced astronomically high and are a complete and total waste of favor currently. Spending 59000 favor to get 4 guaranteed at least 1 LP glove is a truly trash deal considering the odds those gloves aren't Keeper's Gloves or similar is basically still close to 0. I don't have a great suggestion here, as unless it was only like 10-20% more favor cost than the lootsplosion option, players chasing after choice uniques will probably still always go for the lootsplosion. You can get something like 25:1 on lootsplosion vs guaranteed at least 1 LP which makes the guaranteed 1 LP prophecy trash.
- Loot
So overall I do think the LP system is novel and interesting. Crafting in this game is similarly really well done. There are however, some areas where I think the LP system and the current item pool really fall short.
Set items are garbage. This is pretty well-known at this point, so really no point in beating a dead horse here.
I feel like there are too many uniques which can only ever be utilized by a specific class compared to the number of uniques usable by anyone. If I had to guess, something like 80% of uniques have something on them that refers to some class specific ability. Let's just look at gloves as an example. There are 24 unique gloves in the game. Of those 24 gloves, more than half of them reference some specific skill which means the item is functionally useless for anyone not of that class. Of the remaining unique gloves, many of them are highly specific and only useful if your build is pure melee, or elemental, or bleed based, etc. Weaver's Will gloves and Ravenous Void are about the only generically useful glove uniques, the latter being obviously incredible, but I just feel like there should be more uniques which are just really solid items even if they're not S-tier like Ravenous Void.
We need rarer chase uniques that are amazing even at 0 LP. There are very few uniques that are strong endgame at 0 LP. Ravenous Void, Red Rings, Orian's Eye, etc. This creates a situation where even when getting something extremely rare like a 1 LP Omnis isn't even something for the player to get excited about, because 75% of the time that 1 LP Omnis is going to turn into junk. The first time someone gets a Headhunter in PoE, even if it's not rolled that well, it's a moment of jubilation, and it's a chase item that's just extremely good for almost any build. There's really nothing like that in LE. The LP system works great for common uniques, and even for like, rare'ish uniques, but it really falls short on the very rare uniques. No one is ever going to get say a 4 LP Omnis (alright, maybe one person in the world will eventually), but a 0 LP omnis is significantly worse than any exalted amulet with a T7 prefix. My suggestion: Add some ultra-rare uniques (rarer than anything in game currently) which are really strong even at 0 LP.
Lows can be a bit too low to make up for the highs. Hitting that 1/4 and slamming your 1 LP item and hitting that T7 prefix feels fantastic. Missing them is a real bummer, but, yaknow, it's a 75% chance to miss, so it is what it is. What feels tremendously gut-wrenching is bricking a 3 LP item. You go from feeling like you won the lottery finding some ultra-rare 3 LP item, and then working your ass off to get some amazing T7/T5 prefix double solid T5 suffix exalted. Then you go and pull the lever on the slot machine knowing you have a 75% chance to get a gg item. Then you miss. Now you have an item that is significantly worse than a 2 LP double prefix item and you've lost your godly exalt. It's just too much of a gut punch. My suggestion: Add some ultra-rare item (rarer than Rune of Creation) which allows you to guarantee a single affix on a 3 LP item. Additionally, I think it would be great if runes of creation worked on 0 FP items and just added a "mirrored" tag to both items such that they can't be re-duplicated--at least this would slightly lesson the sting since you could still have your godly exalt.
- Balance
I don't want to spend too much time talking about balance because it's really complicated and I'm quite ignorant in that I haven't personally played literally every mastery. From what I have seen though, it does seem like Sentinel was maybe like an early stage of character development and maybe Sorc came later? Forge guard is pretty awful, and it seems weird to me that Sentinel only has a +1 sentinel skill relic whereas lots of other classes get weapons or gloves that have like multiple +4 skills on them. Again, I don't know everything about every mastery, but from what I've seen, the itemization available to some seems wildly different to others, and certainly there's some huge disparities in potential between various masteries. It's impossible to ever achieve anything like perfect balance, but if some masteries are ez-mode in 2k corruption and others struggle at 400, then I think that really ought to be addressed.
- Odds and ends
What happens when you switch out +skill gear currently really sucks. I've read the developer reasoning here that they didn't want people swapping gear in and out for bosses, but the current system doesn't actually prevent that from happening in the stage of the game where players spend 99% of their total time played. If I have a boss set of gear and an echo set of gear, I can just go port into some other echo right before I fight Shade, kill 3 packs of mobs and then go fight Shade. Given the current system doesn't actually prevent what it is ostensibly designed to prevent, but instead just causes needless friction when a player wants to test things out at a target dummy, can we just change it? Hell just make me re-do the entire tree if it's that hard to figure out something better, or even better, how about, "While inside a town you can freely move points around in your skills." Lock it behind having entered empowered monoliths or something if you want, but anything to make this less painful would be really appreciated.
Can we just get rid of the walls in Arbor? When you get really unlucky they can turn a 5 minute run into a 15 minute run. Is there really that much harm in if the player gets lucky and guesses the direction of the door they get out a little early?
There's lots of room for UI improvements around the monolith map. It'd be nice to be able to easily see the corruption level of each empowered monolith.
Having an icon for actual rings vs "any unique item" would be nice.
Empowering monoliths once is fine. If someone enjoys alts, making them do it a second time in the same cycle is just kinda torture. There should be some kind of mechanism to speed this up for alts.
Can we just get a way to easily port to the area you go to when you portal out of a monolith? That little "hideout" is perfect. You've got your stash, a vendor, and the crafting table, all right next to each other, there's never any huge lag like there is in the End of Time town. It's just a great little spot. But it's really annoying to have to port into an echo and then immediately port out in order to get there. Similarly, why when I port out of a monolith boss echo do I not get sent to this wonderful area, but instead get kicked out into the actual monolith web? No one ever wants to be in that area, so why send me there?
I'd like to be able to fight like... I dunno 10-20% more monolith bosses for gazes than I currently do? Currently rushing to Shade probably gets you 1 boss per web. I think it'd be nice if it gave like 1.25 or 1.5 or so. Those bosses are typically what players are after and only being able to kill 1 or 2 a night instead of 2 or 3 doesn't feel super-awesome.
Arenas in general just feel like a drag. I wish there were like a switch I could go click on inside of them that would triple spawn rates and enemy movement speed or something. They just really don't feel paced well compared to the rest of the game.
For CoF, any prophecy that currently says, "Soulfire Bastion T2" should instead become, "Soulfire Bastion, at least T2." You end up picking up these T2-T3 prophecies, never run them, and then get to the point where you're like, "I'm never going to run a T2 dungeon at this point." And so they just sit there.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton of other things, and I really don't mean for the overall sentiment of this post to be a negative one. Overall, I think the game is fantastic and I feel like everyone at EHG should be super-proud of what they've created. I just want to see the game be as awesome as it can possibly be.
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