My initial feedback for .36

Early Access Archive Early Access Game Feedback
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I want to start with the positives.

I love the little interface improvements. Little things add up and I appreciate them. Big hugs for holding our last filters, too.

My graphics became 1000% better. I’m using an emulator so that might less of a thing for others. But I’m loving it.

The little events are nice. Nothing amazing yet. But that’s ok! I’m GLAD that you are starting simple here. I applaud the restraint shown. It’s new and different, but yet not some whiplash thing. :+1: Room to grow. Perfect.

Relics exist! Yay. Bravo!

Challenges are nice if we ignore the difficulty issue. That’s a thing. But I still think I can separate it and just say I like the challenges.

Finally, I dig the pity rewards mailed for the difficulty issue. I really wish you guys could just stick the landing. But that’s apparently not going to be a thing. But I think this was a very good job of trying to make it less painful. Honestly.

Now the negative… :eyes:

The “balance” changes. 100% YES balance needed work. Yes yes, yes! But I wish you would have entertained the restraint you showed with the new modes. Instead we get crazy rando increases to stats and to mana costs.

Before you say it isn’t crazy and rando, and is somehow well thought out… Please look at things like gear and dungeon altars and then try to say it. Example: When I I have 7k armor, how should I be excited to be offered 120 armor in a dungeon altar? Also, how should I be excited by getting 20 armor for matching a big gem whatever? Also, maybe revert the previous changes to things like bone ring. I’m not going to say its bad. I’m going to just say nobody thought it through in terms of the rest of the game.

The spell changes are just a flat out whiff. Yes, again this needed to be dialed in. But it also feels like numbers were picked out of a hat. I’m fine. But holy heck if I was on my first play through! Please consider thinking things through and sticking with measured adjustments.

5 Likes
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I came here to mention this. I like the new changes in the fact that the fights are more drawn out to allow for strategy in battles and call for the use of other spells (and maybe this calls for an increase in the spell vault limits). As to difficulty level, it has bumped me down some but I am guessing that is to encourage partying and guild raid type things. I also love the new challenges section. I do think pvp tournaments are a bit drawn out now in comparison with all the tokens especially since quick battle pvp is always an option for those who have farmed all their honor (and still gives gold and xp) and maybe it would help to explore diminishing pvp token count a bit but expanding the quick battle portion of pvp in light of the added event tokens and challenges.

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Tresk, I was thinking of posting something similar, so I figured I would bump your thread instead of creating a new one.

The Good

  • Making melee more relevant
  • Extending End Game
  • Free giveaways
  • Quality of Life improvements and polish
  • Events
  • Dungeon/Skirmish layout

The Bad

  • Need mORE ORE! The ore production is so crazy slow now, it’s basically made my followers irrelevant. Where I used to be able to do a couple crafts per day and buy and ore deal in the Kingdom Bazaar, now it takes me 8 hours just to save up for the ore deal. I went from being excited about the potential my followers presented to just being frustrated I never get to use them.
  • I desperately wanted to put Relics in the “Good” category, but so far, I don’t see any good. Granted, I’m only 2 days into the upgrade, but 4500 gems for 1 relic is a horrible exchange rate. I haven’t seen anything in events that isn’t locked behind crazy hard levels that gets me beyond Rare. Rare items can easily be gotten from chests. We need access to relics for Epic, Legendary, and Mythic. That still does not appear to be possible… at least in my limited play so far.
  • While I like the effort to make melee more relevant, I think you still need to revisit some of the balance adjustments on spells. I don’t think they scale as well as the melee does at higher levels.
  • Dungeon midpoint bonuses like 120 armor or 300 health. Those are pretty pointless when the enemy is dealing out 5000+ damage. You need to change the flat values to percentages so they scale with my armor, health, and resistance. Also, the 50 mana thing used to be amazing… it’s now pretty weak.
  • STORAGE!!! Storage is still an issue. I had to delete a ton of good gear just to accept the free giveaways. A lack of storage is my single greatest frustration and waste of time managing it. Please fix this problem with more space or easier access to improving it.
  • PvP is no longer compelling. I used to use all my battles everyday. Now it feels like such a chore. It takes soooo long and it just doesn’t feel worth it. Didn’t use all my battles yesterday for the first time and probably won’t today either.
  • Most activities take longer. Quality of life improvements usually focus on making the user experience better, more efficient, or more enjoyable. Many games offer notable offerings to save significant time from the grinding nature of RPGs. This new update requires significantly more time to accomplish the same tasks I was doing before with no increase in what is received (at least that I can tell). Time-sink is one of the greatest causes of burnout for games.

Suggestions

  • Please add a Gold store where we can spend gold on food, ore, and other items.
  • Scale PvP rewards up to align with the massive increase in time it takes… or do something else to improve it.
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I’ve only been playing for a week or so, still early days. But the spell nerf definitely seems to have been a bit heavy handed, I agree that they were probably overpowered initially, but going from 50 to 225 is a huge jump and now spells that were going off in turn 2 on a good board are taking closer to 10 turns to be able to use.

2 Likes
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I have to say I agree with everything here.

PvP used to be the activity I looked forward to every day. Yes the 50 mana auto win needed adjustment, but PvP is no fun at all anymore. All the spell changes have done is drop the top score from 25000 to 24750. High level players will still continue to dominate, but it will take longer and be less rewarding.

Inventory has always been a problem but I feel like it is now to the point of game breakingly bad. With the much greater need for good gear than ever before, a player has to dedicate all of their space to a single class. Also, a player still needs a full set of uncommon weapons to participate in elite pvp, but needs a good set of epic or above weapons to compete in the harder dungeons now.

A big problem with the difficulty curve at the moment, is I don’t feel it’s more difficult just takes longer and less rewarding. I have enough gear to compete at a high enough level, but understand I am an exception. Difficulty x dungeons taking 25-30 minutes resulting in a wooden crate is just not fun. Before when it took 5 to 10 minutes max it was not that bad.

So on the opposite end I really like the events and challenges. They add a fun activity to complete each day and really appreciate the work that went into them.

One point I hope to have looked into though is the dungeon event being able to 100% pay to win by purchasing additional tokens with gems. With pvp being tied to a follower, it felt more fair.

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I knew I was forgetting something! This goes in my bad column, also. Everyone was drowning in food and gold in .35. But AFAIK ore in .35 was either fine, or hard to keep enough (depending on where you were with followers.) You are correct in that nerfing ore makes little sense and also makes followers much less fun.

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None of the negatives are mentioning the lag/chop in the new update? I can live with the rest but the game just sux now, used to be smooth. I literally played games before the update and fine, downloaded the update and full yuck chop. It has stayed that way ever since. I have not seen the devs address this

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Can you check to see if in your graphics setttings, that your framerate cap was changed with the update to 30 FPS? If you were playing at 60 FPS in 0.35, 30 FPS will definitely make the game appear to be slow and laggy.

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seriously. not sure why we needed less ore. now I barely have enough to use on crafting keys. making every other crafter useless. so why have followers that can craft if you arent going to give players access to resources to use them?

small change I wish they implemented is having equipped gear not count towards your storage total.

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Battles now take much longer, many more rounds to complete, but doesn’t seem to be any upside to that - it just takes longer.

Spells - mana costs increased across the board, but seems to penalise certain spells that are really meant to start combos rather than be a high cost finishing move.

While the mana requirement for spells went up, the rewards from gear remained unchanged. Getting 10 mana on a match is much more useful when your spells cost 50, but when the costs are raised to 100/150/200 and the gear remains the same it is of much less use.

The mid-dungeon awards clearly do not reflect the rest of the update changes as others have already commented +100 armour and resistance when the enemy is now hitting in the thousands.

Food - while halving production reduces how much we have it doesn’t address the main issue of food in .35 which was there is nothing for players to spend it on besides levelling followers (finite) and the bazaar. The lower rate should be fine, but still needs something else to spend it on.

Ore - I don’t recall anyone complaining they had too much ore. With multiple followers able to craft I couldn’t keep mine supplied with enough ore on .35, and most of mine are still lower levels. Unlike food, with ore we do have multiple followers who can constantly make use of ore to produce other things beside the offers in the bazaar.

It is nice to see relics finally obtainable - I only started since EA launch, so v0.35 and hadn’t seen a single one in 1.5 character playthroughs. I didn’t keep track of how many items I’ve had to scrap so far, but 0.1% seems an incredibly low chance for something so essential to evolving. My experience so far has been that evolving is not part of this game and that if you want higher rarity gear you simply have to find better gear from battles.

Equipment storage - still desperately needs increasing. Micro managing equipment isn’t fun, and with the tournaments putting in additional restrictions to only use one colour, or even a specific colour weapon - I’m not even close to having space to accommodate that.

Being able to unequip an item is a welcome change - in scrapping an uncommon ring on Monday I inadvertently blocked myself from the Restricted tournament since I didn’t have another valid ring to unequip my second ring.

The new events are a nice addition, but on Skirmish and Dungeon perhaps the final tier could be linked to something achievable. Before the update I had beaten the story on my Assassin, started my citadel and beaten a Difficulty 1 dungeon, but not a 2 - I was lucky to survive the first hit and respond with 50 mana spells. Now without 50 mana spells, the game offered me a Difficulty X skirmish and dungeon - I got splatted with a 10K opening strike.

PVP tournament boards should probably have been reset for the week along with the update - I’m thinking 2,500 point wins are now not possible, but those who managed to play day 1 and 2 without taking the update snuck through.

PVP matching could still do with a lot of improvement. While progressing with my first character as a L20ish player I got matches with L45+ characters purely because they had low (300-500) gear score. The health difference is huge and their greater power means spells can easily one shot a player less than half their level.

4 Likes
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THANKS! This 100% fix it. I guess the update changed it to 30 FPS, I would have never thought to check there.

Game is smooth again. I hope other players know about this.

Thx again

1 Like
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Updated my comments above based on more play time in the new update:
Marked changes with "(Update)" followed by thoughts.

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Add the following to my list above:

The Bad

  • No Access to Glyphs
  • No legitimate FTP path for item progression

NOTE: Those 2 things are related. If they solved the Glyph problem, I would probably feel like I have a path forward for progression even though the Relic supply appears to be entirely based on luck with no known rotation of offerings for them in events or the store.

With so much of my focus on Relics, somehow I missed the fact that I’ve only ever seen 1 Glyph available in the shop in the last month and I couldn’t afford it (I don’t remember what the price was, but it was either Gems or Crowns). Now that I have access to at least a trickle of random Relics, it’s become obvious that Glyphs are making it impossible for me to progress.

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My ~week feedback:

Best:
Gear slot increases. We can have all the spells now, and get appropriate gear for each character, tournaments, etc. Gear wise I’m only up +10 items from before, but that gives so much more freedom.

Good:
I like the events. The “daily” nature is good for encouraging a log in once a day play session. Leveling up the tiers is slow, and low tiers is just blitzing through and ignoring the special restrictions/buffs/powers is easy enough. I expect at higher levels, that will eventually change. At some high enough tier, the daily event shop purchase may be needed if one loses a fight. We’ll see…

Skirmish/dungeon challenges have reasonable rewards. Relics, gems, keys, epic runes, follower crystals. Always feel like at least half of them are worth doing. Also a good daily thing. On a daily basis, I look forward to this the most.

Relics available. Progression possible. Yay.

Gold is somewhat usable now, with some shop refreshes, not maxing out anymore at my play speed. Buyable relics is good. Some gem prices I do feel are a bit high.

Chest/minion mission filters staying and additional filter of only available is awesome.

Mixed:
Revamped power of weapons feels too critical. In one PVP fight, the normal enemy attack OHKO’d me with a 4k+ hit.

Character progression story wise, mono-coloring my shaman through 40’s is doable, but I have reasonably leveled gear. A lot slower than before though, and not particularly keen on slogging through story for that new longer time.

Dislike:
Charging spells is way harder. The added HP/armor/resistance in PVP makes the game way slower as well. I dont LIKE it, I can see the reasoning in not having PVP be 0/1 turn 1 shot competitions, but its too slow.

Enemy HP/armor/resistance buffs make high level content 10+ minutes, and if you make one mistake, all that time is wasted.

Relics still feel non targetable, so upgrading is at the whim of random daily deals, challenge rewards. If there is a defined rate for relics from dungeons, I would like to know it, but did a admittedly only a few, nothing popped out, so doesn’t feel worth it.

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…

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Screenshot_20210728-014624_Puzzle Quest 3
Screenshot_20210728-014624_Puzzle Quest 31280×720 116 KB

This seems to happen way more than statistics would allow logically.

Also, I have a question for the devs. What is the purpose of spells when I fight 6 pvp battles and cant generate enough mana to cast a spell even once in 6 fights? Should just be a “try and match enough skulls before the ai kills you” game mode.

1 Like
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Hey @Vangor, sorry for the delayed reply!

Which Spell(s) specifically have you not been able to fill up during your PVP battles at all?
Do you find this specifically when you’re playing a short pvp battle, or also when you’re playing one that takes longer?

Also, thanks for the feedback everyone, we’ve been passing it on to the team.

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See above screenshot. I use the same four spells always.

Do these even exist?

I think 8 days is well past the realm of “delay”.

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@Kafka , I can’t speak for Vangor. I can say, however, that I virtually always fill my ultimate before filling my spells. Since a strong weapon is now THE thing in pvp, and I have a strong weapon, and my ultimate creates skulls, I very often win the battle before casting a spell. Even if I use one of my other heroes, I often kill the enemy with just skull matches + elemental matches.

In the restricted and elite tourneys, I usually do not have a strong weapon. In those, I am often 2-shot killed by the people who do. So also… never cast a spell.

Imho, too many variables were changed at one time. Raising mana costs, and reducing the rate of mana generation, while buffing physical damage, made us swing 180 from only spells matter to only weapons matter. This is primarily evident in PvP, but it is also true in the other modes.

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Also the new gameplay means players lucky enough to already have a legendary weapon are destroying most players in pvp which was never the case.

The longest I have had a pvp battle go is 5 rounds and it was due to a bad board and another player barely chipping away at my armor. For any real completion I need to win in a max of 2 rounds. This means I need either fill spells with a savior helm and bone rings, or get a ton of skulls

2 Likes