Hey all,
I played all 3 classes to max in a mix of co-op and solo playing in a party of 3 for my first, solo for my 2nd, and duo for my 3rd character overall enjoyed the game a lot and appreciate all the work the team has done so far.
I wanted to share my thoughts on the class skills and synergy between the classes because I felt it was lacking and some improvement was needed.
Rogue:
Overall the rogue was great, and I wanted to start with this because this was the class I felt was done baseline the best. The great thing I found with the rogue is that the common theme with the rogue’s abilities was applying a vulnerable debuff to mobs. This worked out because other abilities would also apply vulnerably or have an additional effect that would provide a benefit to that skill if the mob was vulnerable. An example was the enhanced shadow imbue weapon If it hit a mob that was vulnerable energy would be returned or if a mob was affected by the shadow imbue debuff they would take 15% additional damage from nonphysical attacks which worked well with having poison traps down.
The downside with the rogue was the legendary I found while playing weren’t impactful. 3 or 4 of the legendary effects I found were focused on grenades and dealing damage with grenades. I don’t know if this was due to the beta but I only saw 1 ability which was a smoke bomb that was tagged as grenades, meaning I needed 2 or 3 other legendary effects to work with each other and I didn’t enhance my current abilities and felt disappointing getting an item with that benefit. I did find the effect that while in stealth you can drop 4 poison traps and this actually made me adjust my playstyle and try new abilities I wouldn’t have picked otherwise, same with X% ricochet chance with rapid fire.
Barb
Barb had a good synergy of skills working together for bleed builds but beyond that, it was rather lackluster. I started with using the old faithful whirlwind but ended up mixing it up more as it became repetitive and rather boring to use. The other abilities didn’t feel like they worked well together to make you want to get X or Y item and most of the time it felt I had to pick a basic ability, I core ability, and then 2 different shout abilities as I needed the utility from them to survive and do enough damage to be viable. This meant I had to pick between a gap closer to deal with the ranged mobs or my ultimate ability which didn’t feel great. Some of the animations need to be increased, such as upheaval and rupture. I tried a build that focused on upheaval but the animation/cast time for the ability was so slow and clunky it broke the fast pace of wanting to generate and spend fury, I was attacking so quickly with frenzy and then would do a slow attack with upheaval. Using rupture was the same, I enjoyed the bleed builds but I almost died multiple times trying to use rupture on an elite mob I was left open and unable to do anything I’d take significant damage because I was stuck doing a slow animation.
The legendary benefits of the barb were great since a majority of them focused on rage which worked with all abilities but abilities like whirlwind didn’t have many other skills that synergized with it could’ve had a few more legendary skill effects available to make it viable.
Sorc
The visual effects and early power level of the sorc were great fun, I ran around casting chain lighting and everything would die or on a single target it would bounce between my character and the boss and it was fun to watch. The lighting and fire skills lacked synergy from my experience. I loved Hydra and I wanted to use more fire spells but the basic spells were so underwhelming, fire bolt was pitiful as were incinerate and meteor, and even when I did have a significant amount of burn damage on a mob I had nothing I could do to speed the process up and this made me feel like direct damage was far better for the speed of the game. With the Barb as an example at least I could use rupture to expend the build-up burn I had generated on a mob and didn’t have this option. The lightning skills after chain lighting and spark felt underwhelming, the lightning spear was disappointing and I continued to use chain lightning over it, even while having the legendary. The static orbs you can have a drop from mobs if you have specific effects on should be baseline or need to drop more. Fire has burn, Cold has chill and frozen and the lightning skills have to spend more talent points on multiple skills to get benefit from the additional elemental effects associated. I swapped to frost near the end of my playtime in the beta this weekend and It was good to feel how well the different options synergized together since they all had added benefits if the mob was chilled or frozen. I combined this with all of the mana regen talents which felt to be lacking from the other elements’ skill tree and was able to cast many blizzards, freeze mobs that got close, and cast a number of frozen orbs while protecting myself with ice armor, it was fun. I did sometimes wish using ice or fire on the same mob would have additional benefit or interaction but I do understand the complexity that would take.
Overall I enjoyed the 3 characters and i’m looking forward to the druid and necro next weekend, the dungeons and mob variation did get a bit stale after the many hours i enjoyed over the weekend but I assume with my areas to explore in the full release i’d think this wouldn’t be as big of a problem. Feel free to comment or add your own opinions below, these were my thoughts and opinions.