Hey everyone! Since the dev team is still inviting feedback on the beta, I thought I would share mine. I had the opportunity to play most of every day during early access and open beta, and I had an absolute blast during that time. Four characters made it to level 25, and most of my time was spent playing a chain lightning / crackling energy sorc build and pushing the build as far as possible during beta.
Sorcerer Skills (The Good)
- Chain lightning (CL) feels really good. The 2nd tier node to spawn crackling energy (CE) on crits is great, and it gives a clear direction for the build.
- Arc Lash - I recognize that some folks found the balance here to be a bit off, but it felt pretty strong in my experience. The double cast on crit frequently had me one shotting medium strength mobs in world tier II dungeons. Well, as long as they were frost nova’d.
- Crackling Energy - very fun mechanic. I’m looking forward to making an end game build around CE/CL, and I just hope it’s competitive with other meta builds.
- Unstable Currents - extremely fun ultimate
- Ball lightning enchantment felt like a good way to get lots of ball lightning on screen.
Sorcerer Skills (The Disappointing)
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Lightning Spear (LS) - I really want to like this skill but it honestly felt so weak compared to basically everything else. The base damage is 15%/hit, compared with hydra’s 30%/hit. The summon duration is 6 seconds compared with hydra’s 12 seconds. Hydra has no cooldown and a negligible mana cost, meanwhile LS has 0 mana cost and a 20 second cooldown. The legendary modifier for LS gives a mild chance to spawn a second one, meanwhile hydra’s legendary power gives a 100% option to summon multiple. The attack speeds for a single target dramatically favor hydra. Although crackling energy is common, the 10% chance from the enchantment of LS didn’t feel that great, especially because a lot of CE gets picked up after things are already dead.
- As a result, this felt like wasted skill points, and absolutely a waste of space on the limited skill bar. PLEASE, if you take nothing else from this feedback, please look into the balance of this skill.
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Unstable Currents, 2nd modifier - The modifier makes crackling energy not use up any charges, so it’s firing for the duration of UC. CE spawns were frequent enough with a crit-centric build in beta that this didn’t feel like it added much. Maybe that’ll change in high tier dungeons when things don’t fall over as quickly, but overall this felt like an underwhelming addition to an otherwise great ultimate.
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Ball lightning (BL) - I mentioned already that the enchantment felt good, but the skill itself does not. I realize part of this is just the limited power we get in beta, but the range was extremely small, and if cast directly, it moved too fast to actually do much damage to anything.
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Chain lightning - the enchantment scales inversely proportional to gear. As you collect gear with mana cost reduction, the number of free CL casts actually goes down. A more rewarding approach would be to have it cast automatically have 3 CL casts, which is roughly 100 mana. This could even be made into 3 Core Skill Casts to retain the generality of the original mana spend mechanic.
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Crackling Energy - I love this mechanic, and I see that there’s a ton in paragon and legendaries to buff this skill. However, there’s no way to see what the base damage of it is, and what those effects will actually mean in practice. For instance, does CE deal 10% damage? Unclear. When powers talk about increasing CE damage by x%, does that mean 10% + x * 10 or 10% + x%? Please give us some insight on how the damage numbers work.
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Legendary Powers (LS + BL) - I really hope that legendary powers like LS free cast chance and BL orbiting interact with the enchantment effects of these skills. It’s super unclear if this is the case, and I regret I did not test the interaction with LS during beta.
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Legendary Powers (+% damage) - these just feel bad. They feel bad because they are so strong that they are effectively required over the more interesting powers. I’ll admit to looking at the datamined powers, and I have to say that there are so many interesting powers that I want to use, but ultimately a few pieces of my gear will be stuck with these more bland +% damage in situation skills (specifically, talking about %damage based on primary resource, %damage with a barrier, %damage vs CC’d, %damage vs vulnerable). Many of those powers are easy to get high up time on, and they seem to be multiplicative with one another. That’s 4 slots that feel required, and that ultimately will reduce player choice.
UI Pain Points
Item Management
I think the most frequent touch point players will have with the UI during regular play is reviewing item drops from dungeon clears. As it stands right now, there’s a lot of toil that goes into this that could be alleviated with some small tweaks.
- The “mark as junk” ended up feeling backwards and tedious. I would much rather mark the 1 or 2 items I need as a “keeper”, and then be able to quickly vendor/salvage the rest. Right now as I go through gear, I’ll move my keepers to the bottom right, then mark everything else as junk which means quickly moving mouse and spamming spacebar. Does not feel good.
- Vendoring - we really need a “vendor all” button similar to “salvage all”
- There’s no way to mark junk in the stash; pressing spacebar in this ui causes the character to dodge and the stash to close. I found this extremely annoying and suprising since in a similar context, the spacebar marks as junk. (vendors, character sheet without stash)
- Gems - we really need a gems tab. I stopped picking them up because they were annoying. This felt bad because I like to pick up loot
- Item filters - This would be a very welcome improvement; I was often looking for specific high ilvl variants of certain items, and it was rather tedious and overwhelming having to constantly filter through all the noise.
Item Detail View
- Lack of good information hierarchy makes these difficult to scan quickly, a core activity in the game.
- Lack of contrast makes it difficult to pick out the important bits (eg, numbers)
- The font size was way too large and often forced a scroll bar to appear. I didn’t even have the comparison view turned on, and this still showed up frequently. Please either make these more compact or give us a bit more control to do it ourselves.
- Scroll bars on items and character stats feel bad
Character Stats
- Detailed character stats are buried beneath a couple of clicks - first the details button, then the stats tab.
- It would be nice if there was a separate button for the “materials” pane.
- Detailed stats has redundant information displayed prominently at the top which almost guarantees the player will then need to scroll down to see the parts they actually care about
- The line height of stats in the detailed stats view is very tall and makes it impossible to get an overview of all the stats we care about.
Skill Bar
- After 2 minutes of playing the game, I have internalized what all the keys are for the skill bar actions. Please provide an option to hide the key hints and flush the bar with the screen.
Chat
- Chat was way too small, and it was often obscured by the inventory. This made it really hard to link items that were in your bag.
- linking items - there seems to be a bug with linking fully upgraded / socketed items. Sometimes you’d shift click into chat but nothing happened.
Minimap
- I’d really like to see a D2-like version of this that’s translucent and centered on the screen
- FOV - the minimap FOV is so small it’s hard to get any useful information from it
Camera
- Max zoom feels too close. I would like to have a little bit more zoomed out because it currently feels claustrophobic.
- Bug - there’s a way to get the camera stuck zoomed in on world bosses. This happens when you join a friend’s layer mid fight.
Misc Bugs
- Teleporting across zone boundaries causes things in that zone not to load. That might be mobs, world structures like lilith statues, or the “press spacebar to traverse” things. This will probably be much less prominent once we have mounts, but still it’s a pretty bad bug.
Events
- A longer timer for events like Kor Dragan would be really nice QoL. I hate having to compulsively check the map as it takes away from the immersion.
- Come to think of it, some sort of notification system would be amazing. Have it show up in chat when an event is going to be in X minutes.
- A calendar would also be nice.
Skill tree
- It would be nice to have an “edit then commit” workflow that would make it a bit easier to move points around. As it stands right now, we need to play tetris with the skill points if we want to move a point at the start of the tree. This sort of workflow would have a secondary benefit of being able to be gold efficient with respec costs.
Dungeons
- The animus dungeons felt very satisfying. Plenty of elites and good mob density. Also the most challenging as you could end up in a situation with a lot of dangerous enemies on screen.
- Dungeon bosses did not feel rewarding whatsoever. They took a long time and didn’t provide in return.
- Bug? Anica’s Claim boss didn’t drop any items whatsoever, ever.
- Other dungeons really did not feel good. I couldn’t justify doing anything besides Anica’s Claim and Dead Man’s Dredge because all the others were so inefficient. All of the backtracking required was boring. It felt like a slog that I had to do before I got back to actually playing the game.
On the topic of improving the other dungeons, I had a couple thoughts
- The ability to set a portal location in the dungeon and go back to it gives the player more agency. Oh you found the pedastals for the crystals? Scribble a portal sigil on the ground then you can return there after finding a crystal. Backtracking solved in that case.
- “Den of evil” - might be nice if this was “kill all the elites” rather than “kill all the mobs”. I’ve also seen some other suggestions around making it like 90%, or ringing a gong at the boss door to have them all come to you. The gong mechanic in particular sounds like a ton of fun.