[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

I've been saying it since closed beta: maps should be used for treasure hunting. Not having maps shouldnt lock you out of being able to level up.

Glad to see the devs acknowledge this.



In regards to race events, instead of having so many race events that no one can do all of them, why not have sets of 3 race events where you're only allowed to participate in one of them?

Thanks for the awesome updates Chris; it's things like this that set GGG apart from other game designers.

Great feedback from devs!

its great that they are aware and addressing issues, unfortunately its not in the direction I d personally preffer, but I will be keeping tabs on the game even though I dont play anymore - this manifesto raises hopes that eventually game might change for the better.

main point of concerns:

-desync .Without going into technical details and specifics having visible to client desync issues in 2013 is bad design. This is not rocket science and been solved for much harder scenarios ( such as FPS with concurrent hundreds of players - planetside for example).

- iiq/iir/trading - game is not fun to play as solo self found player without trading. While increasing IIR for parties seems good it does nothing for solo players

Thanks for the detail and scale of the information u share with us about the problems and where u see the game in the future.

This is what other game designers could really learn from.

In my opinion, aside from melee taking hits more often, Melee already seems more powerful than ranged. (dps wise)

When it comes to making group play harder, specifically making more AoE damage will be detrimental to summoners and totem users! Please reconsider this, as any aoe damage at the moment absolutely obliterates summons and totems.

On that note, there should really be a way to increase totem health!

Ok. So the manifesto basicly is: "we know what the problems are, we will fix them". The problem with soloing is not only the regents needed to enchance maps but also the number of maps needed to level up. Also chars above lvl 80 dn't really want to do a3 merciless coz the xp and loot sucks there... (mostly xp). U wanna players do hard maps ? Make the mode IQ relevant to their difficulty... . Burning Ground gives about the same IIQ as -XX% max resists ? Thats ridicilous :P . Also i play a melee build, can't afford tons of IIQ or IIR like totem builds... . I need hp, dmg, armour, resists... . Is that gonna get balanced ? Seriously guys I love this game, it's great just really needs some tweaks. Plz tell me should i hold on to my high lvl chars or lvl up new build while waiting for more high lvl content? ALSO we need pants... . PANTS GOD DAMNIT ! :D

Sorry double post :S

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The only thing I found questionable was claiming the loot drop situation is fine for solo players. It is not. It's actually horrible, with very few currency and uniques dropping, especially compared to party play.

+1

It is virtually impossible for a solo player to reach lvl 75+ maps. They just don't drop often enough and you run out of lower level maps pretty quick.

Please, please fix this. We solo players are really bored by those 66-69 maps (not to mention almost no experience gain on them past 80 lvl)

Regarding melee vs ranged I would like to point out that passive tree and equipment requirements on successful melee builds are significantly higher than for ranged builds because melees do have to mitigate a lot of damage somehow that ranged does not. As such ranged often have more freedom to stack life and/or damage nodes. Furthermore stacking elemental damage thanks to item affixes and more powerful nodes actually is easier than stacking physical. And finally the plans to introduce a melee critical effect is going to be a lot less meaningful because stacking crit in addition to survivability and damage is difficult and ranged right now and always will have the ability to hit significantly more targets at the same time than melee does.
Quite frankly no arpg I know has managed to truly find a good risk/reward balance for melee compared to ranged. I'm curious what we will find in this game.