Subjective Impressions (Various Items)

ATTENTION NEW THREAD PARTICIPANTS:

This thread is now a documentation thread for various small (and hopefully mostly non-controversial) suggestions or observations about the game. I will gladly extend the list with other items I feel satisfy the criteria (read: no "get rid of FFA" suggestions). Items that become controversial, if they occur, will be moved from out of the core list to a controversial section.

1. Incoming damage seems a bit too high (15% too high?)

1a. Consider analyzing peak incoming damage (e.g., crits) as opposed to average incoming damage (thank you, Lyralei).

2. The community is somewhat divided over difficulty. Consider having 2-3 difficulty levels to choose from. I don't mean this as in normal/cruel/merciless, but rather different leagues with different baseline assumptions or some other construct.

3. Starting around level 50, incoming XP seems to slow down too much. There appears to be a disparity of catering to high-time-investment players and players with less time to invest. Give this some design thought.

OBE (implementeD) 4. Consider extending the standoff timer bonus (for loot) just a bit more (15% or so?)

5. Consider toning down chaos damage; perhaps instead of bypassing shield, it can do a multiplier against shield, first.

6. Spells with longer animation times feel awkward to use

7. In multiplayer games, consider setting the opacity of other players effects to ~50%; better yet, make this a slider.

7a. Could we have an option to reduce the quality and increase the performance of particle effects?

8. In multiplayer games, consider adding a UI helper of some sort in order to better distinguish enemy mobs.

9. Starting around level 40-50, finding items appropriate to the content feels a bit more difficult than it ought to be

10. The various passives for weapon specialization could use a rethink.

11. While fire damage should probably not "stack," consider doing something akin to stacking, such as burn duration and intensity extension; perhaps in addition to the possibility of fear, some other debuff could apply.

12. Consider removing the pathing block on characters in the same party

13. Consider making it so that auto-attacks have a chance to trigger flask recharges (not the normal way, something additional, like a per-hit chance to trigger a flask recharge). This attends to a complaint of folks who are out of manna, out of flasks, and therefore complaining about total depletion. Auto-attacks are sucky mode, but this would be a way to soften the bottom out a bit.

14. Consider allowing the party creator to set a max party size < 6 for public games.

15. The experience penalties upon death, due to the ever-increasing amount of time
investment for levels, involve an increasing amount of actual time lost per death; consider normalizing to a fixed amount of time lost after a specific level (e.g., level 60). The actual % of experience lost would be normalized to an investemnt in hours/minutes to earn that XP at the current level.

16. For users who turn off screen-shake, consider adding some kind of visual cue when a user crits. The "old way" is to display "crit" or selectively display crit damage numbers in color, but an in-game immersive feedback like red glow around the critted mob would be okay too.

(OBE, implemented) 17. Consider adding more mechanisms to "twink" alts; this encourages players to rapidly level and try new class combinations as they establish a good inventory of twink gear. Plus it's fun. How powerful and how fast the alt leveling would be I leave to the imagination of the devs.

18. Consider changing the shift to stay in place function so that if the attack is a melee attack, the character actually takes the shortest step possible towards the target in order to get in range of the currently active attack. Leave as is for ranged attacks.

19. Could the Quicksilver flask benefit from a little longer duration, and perhaps a one more use per flask, ... or... recharge slightly more quickly?

(Withdrawn) 20. Could we consider an easier mechanism of exchange of currency items up to alchs? Such an exchange would be based on the drop probability delta, more or less.

21. Consider putting an isolated area on the skill tree where the bandit rewards go. The bandit rewards would be mutually exclusive, but refundable and reselectable using orbs of regret or passive refund points

22. Can we have item levels displayed on the items please?

23. When items drop from a boss kill, could we have the labels for the high value items gravitate towards the center of the label cluster?

24. When removing someone from a group, can we also eject them from all instances after a fixed amount of time? (15-30 seconds?)

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(OBE?) 27. Buying/selling stacks of currency to/from vendors. Need I say more?

28. Some players find the interactive behaviors of avoiding some mobs entertaining. Perhaps we could have better cues for recognize high damage output (e.g. charger) mobs, such as a visible windup, for example? (thank you, Winterz)

29. Should we re-examine the mana scaling of the various skills relative to their benefits at the scaled level? (thank you, Winterz, et al). Various build boards are recommending some skills never be leveled or never be leveled past a certain point. Is this intended as an outcome?

30. Quality modifiers on some skills seem pointless.

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I'm not sure what you're trying to do with this list, because it's difficult to tell (specifically) what you're saying.

For example:

"

Courageous wrote:

1. Incoming damage seems a bit too high (15%?)

Is this a suggestion or a comment? What is 15%? Is that how much "too high" the damage is? Or is damage too high whenever you lose that much life? Something else?

The reason things are not the way you envision them is because no one else has the benefit of your perspective. Your opinions are unique... and they will remain that way until you explain them adequately for others to comprehend them.

It was a subjective assessment, with a guess about a number. I don't want to be too specific, because such things are by nature somewhat vague.

As far as what I meant, I meant literally incoming damage is (modestly) too high. Incoming damage is the damage the mobs do to the chars. I.e., if a strike from a mob would do 1K damage, I am suggesting that maybe it should be reduced by 15% to 850 or so. The "or so" part is a deliberate dodge on the specific value reduced. But I have a strong feeling that damage that the mobs are doing against the players is (slightly) too high currently in the OB. As far as how much too high, I actually can't really tell. Games have a breaking point around numbers. A 15% reduction in incoming damage might make the game a face roll. Who can tell? Possibly only the devs.

The list is not attempting to accomplish any one thing, except to relay some subjective opinion and items of feedback.

I'm pretty sure the devs will understand the list pretty clearly. A long dissertation would be unlikely to be read.

If there is anything else that seems confusing to you, let me know. I'm happy to rephrase things.

Include defensive option diversity. Lower Incoming Critical Damage % is a good example.

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Courageous wrote:

15. The experience penalties upon death, due to the ever-increasing amount of time investement for levels, involve an increasing amount of actual time lost per death; consider normalizing to a fixed amount of time lost after a specific level (e.g., level 60). The actual % of experience lost would be normalized to an investemnt in hours/minutes to earn that XP at the current level.

While I agree with much of what you say, I disagree here. The higher you level the harsher the death penalty should be imo.

"

Courageous wrote:

16. Consider adding some kind of visual cue when a user crits. The "old way" is to display "crit" or selectively display crit damage numbers in color, but an in-game immersive feedback like a big blood splatter would be okay also.

There is a very noticeable on crit effect. When my ranger gets on a crit streak it feels like I am fighting in the middle of an earthquake!

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Courageous wrote:

17. Consider adding more mechanisms to "twink" alts; this encourages players to rapidly level and try new class combinations as they establish a good inventory of twink gear. Plus it's fun. How powerful and how fast the alt leveling would be I leave to the imagination of the devs.

Have you looked at many of the low level uniques? Lots of powerful stuff. Can basically ride the level 14 unique two handed sword into Cruel difficulty 1 hitting everything. I don't know that there is much for casters though.

Good feedback overall.

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While I agree with much of what you say, I disagree here. The higher you level the harsher the death penalty should be imo.

Yeah. That's why I recommended different "difficulties," by which I do not mean normal/cruel/merciless, but rather something along the lines of the D3 MP system (but not exactly like that, I just mean by metaphor: it could be different leagues, or some other thing; I am intentionally vague here).

The point being, is that the ever-increasing death penalty is likely to be one of those things upon which people remain hugely divided. What I am saying is that I know people like you exist, and can't object to what you want. Nor do I think you can really object to what I want, other than to say you and I don't want to play the same game. And that's okay. Why not acknowledge both perspectives?

As an aside if XP didn't slow down as much I'm not sure I'd complain about XP loss as much. Regardless, it doesn't personally feel quite right to me at the moment in the present, and hence the subjective comment.

Regarding crits, is it a screen shake? Should I turn that option on?

And yes, I am aware that the low level uniques somewhat do what I say.

very nice list, keep it up!

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