[2024] Feedback after 60 hours - Merchant's Guild POV (lvl 100, rank 12 MG, 1000 corruption, ~200 Abberoth kills)

Hey everyone,

We finished our Cycle 2 start blasting session and I figured I'd collect my thoughts and type out a feedback post like last time. Some of that feedback was definitely listened to and implemented into the game which was nice to see.
We played in a 4-player group for 60 hours, pushed corruption to 1000, got to level 100, killed the pinnacle boss ~200 times and got rank 12 Merchant's Guild.

• The new boss fight is really cool, took us 7-8 wipes to learn all the mechanics before we killed it. (and then figured out you can interrupt most of his abilities and then eventually had good enough gear to one-phase it.)
  
• Glyphs of Envy are amazing for rerolling / upgrading your Blessings, before what was a 30+ minute grind to get a try can just be 10 second crafting session and you get another chance at your blessing
  
• Harbinger needles are nice, but eventually become unnecessary because of rank 10 Harbinger, maybe they could just be baked into the UI, doesn't feel like they need to be an item
  
• Nemesis is a welcome addition to early crafting shard gain, and a nice way to gamble LP on uniques you put in. Even has a risk element, you could technically die to it (or something else) after it dies and lose your item
  
• Favor gain is pretty rough. The grind to buying LP uniques and good exalteds (rank 8-9) is still steep, the whole point of MG is to be able to do that. The amount favor you get and the amount of favor it takes to list items is very limiting. I have tabs upon tabs
  
  of good T7 exalteds but I can't list them because I don't have the favor. Of course I'm not the only one in this boat so this just means a ton of good items that people have just never get listed and no one can use them. What ends up happening is people just dump all their idols for 30-50k on the market because it's the best favor-to-gold ratio items to list, flooding the idol market (& - until the Bazaar changes coming later this cycle - making it almost impossible to find the idol you're looking for)
  
• Temporal Sanctum is tedious. Running through the maze a bunch of times, hitting dead ends, having to backtrack feels bad. My hope is the legendary slamming gets other alternatives (ends of other dungeons? rare mono node? arena reward after X waves? very rare key that ports you straight to the slammer machine? literally anything but Temporal Sanctum)
  

Things I hope to see added / looked at

• Option to increase cursor size / increase visibility
• Adding up the gold you pick up recently into 1 number
• Adding an option to lock your equipped items so you dont accidentally vendor / shatter / dump them
• Your on-top-of-character HP bar disappears behind some game textures, probably should be highest priority (especially bad for HC)
• When there is an mini boss on the screen (that has a boss health bar on the top of the screen) certain UI elements stop working, for example you can't warp to your teammates
• DOTs are still too strong. It's the most dangerous incoming damage BY FAR, Gorgon poison tornadoes, Matron ION cannon beams, Wengari cold dot spires example 1 example 2, poison pools on the ground from the flower spitting mobs. Even specifically gearing for dot mitigation gloves and amulet, these things hurt way more than anything else in the game.
  
• Stats on some base types of items are wildly mismatched meaning in the endgame you only have one real option. eg. Eternal gauntlets , Opal amulet
• Waiting for Bazaar improvements but EHG already said those are coming later this cycle so not going to add those here, I'm sure by this point they understand what people want out of it
  EDIT: Obsidian Resonances are incredibly rare. I know what their goal is with limiting gifting but after 60 hours I did not find an obsidian resonance with one of my teammates, and only 1-2 with the other teammates. Casual players will not play enough together to gift eachother any good item.

OPINION BASED FEEDBACK:

• Corruption scaling slowing down significantly past 1000 is sad, with the current speed of progression, a good build can reach that in ~12-15 hours of empower mono pushing and then there is no incentive to push further. I hope that number gets increased in the future (maybe something like 3-5k) so there is aspirational content besides pushing arena for leaderboard's sake. This also ties into the favor issue, Cycle 1 you could just push to really high corruption which alleviated the issue of not having enough favor to list most of the items you find. I know we played Merchant guild and 4LP items are rare, but we haven't found a single 4 LP item across our 4 player party in 60 hours, last cycle we found a couple between 2-3k corruption
  
• Aspirational trade idea: I like how not being able to re-sell items completely eliminates flipping. However maybe it would be cool if you could buy a unique and an exalted, do the slam, and be able to sell resulting legendary back to the market. You would basically eat the cost of the gamble, while providing the guaranteed result for other people who don't want to do the gamble. (Currently you can only do this if you personally found the unique base)
  
• Wengari leaders probably shouldn't have ward bars. Sometimes the end-mono gate events spawns in 4-6 of them and you have to kill all of them with 4 extra ward bars :D
  
• Something about spawning the harbinger feels off. You are forced to do 10 different monoliths with each resetting back to 100 corruption, when you just proved your character is strong enough to handle the boss of a higher corruption level. i think after completing 1 harbinger boss on a monolith it should set the other monoliths to match the corruption of the monolith that you just completed. This way it makes it a smoother progression curve instead of constantly jumping up and down in corruption
  
• Mana sustain is a really hard problem to solve for, with not many options available for many builds. Flat mana regen mods? More mana-related stuff on trees? New bases?
  

All in all it was a really fun 60 hours, honestly if I feel like every cycle can bring me back for at least that much, the game is on a nice improving trajectory. Of course we played pretty efficiently so it might take someone 80-100 hours to get to where we were, and depending on how much you play a day that might be weeks or months. We like rushing stuff and minmaxing early, I know not everyone likes to play that way. Of course one could just reroll and do it all over again on another build or on ssf / hc. Looking forwards to more in the next cycle!
Thanks for reading <3