The changes to the spells and the time it takes to complete combat made the game extremely tedious to play.
I was enjoying the combat loop in 0.35, because I could either DESTROY the opponents or get DESTROYED depending on how smart I was with my matches. It feels good being rewarded (quick kill) for being smart, and it doesn’t feel bad being punished for matching gems of the opponent’s color.
The point is, combat felt fast and furious. 0.36 completely removed that aspect from the game.
Please note that this is the experience of a casual player (level ~30) and I never reached end game.
Yup, battles are slow now. Still no way to reliably get the shards or relics you need so you still can’t power up enough to fight the new difficulty they envision.
As a player who hadn’t completed the story before the 0.36 update I’d be keen to see how far you can get with the new difficulty scaling.
While those who had completed it before the update got a bunch of rebalancing items linked to our level - several L35 Epic pieces - this was far greater than anything I had found going through the story mode, which I had take slowly and hit the L50 cap several chapters before the end of the story.
I suspect new players without the bonus items will struggle / not be able to complete the story mode, and if grinding for better gear is required, then XP earned after L50, but before the Citadel
is unlocked needs to be re-thought and reserved for the player for when they finally do complete the story and not go to waste as it does now.
What I’ve noticed is ‘normal’ difficulty is much wider now. Easy on one spectrum and risky at the other.
In 0.35 I had no fear of tacking a mob of three monsters in story mode if the difficulty was ‘hard’ or ‘very hard’, because I still had a chance of winning if the color fell right and I could burn some spells off. It was appropriately difficult, but could be done. To do the same in 0.36 would be suicidal.
Now the monsters have a massive (understatement?) boost to health, while my spells do the same amount of damage but cost 3x to 5x more mana. Even in ‘normal’ difficulty battles drag on and on and I’m often at risk of running out of health from turn attrition.
This isn’t a complaint, mind you. I’m sure more balance changes will come - and more after that. That is the nature of these games and the good games adjust difficulty and balance constantly throughout the game’s life (and well-after early access). But they also make SMALLER adjustments, so as not to over-shoot and throw everything out of whack, which is a lesson I’d like to see PQ3 adopt.
Yeah, I hadn’t finished the story before the update, and now I can’t continue, level 21 character, but can’t progress the story anymore. I’ve given up on the story for now.
And the difficulty in dungeons go from too easy to impossible without anything in between, so it’s either grind too easy to try and get gear or just keep failing the too hard ones.
It’s a slog now in 0.36. If the intent was to keep players engaged in the game longer, they succeeded but I am seriously considering sidelining the game until its fixed.