Hello PQ3 community and PQ3 team! I left about 4 months ago. I thought it was longer, but upon review, it was only about 4 months.
Knowing that (about the time), I’m actually impressed with the improvements. I started very very early in EA for android. To see all of this change in a relatively short time span? Kudos. Even if its a change I don’t love or understand, it shows faster movement. I like that.
My initial reactions on my return are:
Good:
Added inventory (bless you!).
The love shown to kingdoms. (Needs more work but still good imho)
Interface. I’m lost half the time but it still feels better, somehow.
Seasons story. I like it. I can’t judge the rewards yet, but I like the idea and the story.
Neutral:
Mercenary. It might be awesome (or not) but I’m barely back and have just begun to tinker there.
Various shop changes. Same thing. Not enough time to really know what I think.
Events. Seems the same and it was ok when I left. More or less.
PVP. Don’t see a change here. Not great, but not terrible. Also not a priority for me.
Bad:
Daily Challenges. I can’t believe we still have impossible battles in this. This should never ever be a thing. Hard? OK sure. But daily implies a certain do-ability. IMHO no one should face a daily challenge that can’t be done. I’ve had two sets of challenges since my return and one was flat out full stop not possible. Another was theoretically possible if I could commit to doing it about 40 times. The rest were either obnoxiously easy, really easy, somewhat easy, or more or less easy.
This tells me there is still an issue with the difficulty curve here. Totally easy, super easy, really easy, easy, mostly easy, virtually impossible, impossible. This still needs some work.
To end I will say that things that have changed? I like. So yay! And flatten out that difficulty curve some!
That they are! Slowly, but surely, some of the major holes in the game are being patched up. This week’s bundle shop changes, including the weekly buyable glyph for gold, have been greatly needed and appreciated. The big follower revamp is ~4 weeks or so away.
Waaaaaay back in the day, did anyone assist you in a co-op battle with clearing a Difficulty X skirmish/dungeon so that you could use loot tickets for level 100 rewards?
If so, then the game considers you capable of clearing level 100 content, despite someone carrying you through that content in the past. The challenge board randomly generates challenges up to the highest difficutly level that a player has ever cleared in the past.
Devs are pretty much settled on the difficulty curve at this point as working as designed. The curve is quite steep at high difficulty ratings because the content is balanced against players wielding full legendary to full mythic gear. While max difficulty content can be cleared with lower quality gear, skill, and perhaps some luck, the content was not designed around players doing this regularly.
FYI, when running season skirmishes and dungeons, they hit harder what their difficulty rating states. General rule of thumb is that for season content, any content in the Difficulty __ range has stats 30% higher than normal for that difficulty, which translates into 2-3 difficulty tiers above that content’s difficulty rating (unless wearing that season’s set gear to neutralize the stat boost, which so far has been mostly meh).
Actually WAAAAAAY back in the day, I cleared level 100 content on my own. Then things changed. I’m ok with things changing. But don’t penalize me for being able to do things before the changes? Pretty simple.
They shouldn’t be. I am not concerned that there are impossible battles. (They shouldn’t be in the dailies, but they should definitely exist!) The concern is the curve. 99.99% of battles I face are some version of trivial/easy. .009% are virtually impossible and .001% are flat out impossible. There is still nothing between easy and almost not possible. There are no nail biters. Nothing close and exciting. It’s either I roll the enemy or they roll me.
That has always been the downside of the game for me. The fact that I know as soon as the battle loads, whether I will win or lose, and except for a handful of those “virtually impossibles” I’m never even close to wrong in my prediction. It’s always a route, for me or against. I would like to hope that the devs at least want that smoothed out. Even if they can’t smooth it, they should be wanting to smooth it.
But as I said in my original post, I like the changes that have happened since I took my break. While I see areas that could still use improvement, I’m still impressed by what HAS been improved, in a relatively short period of time. Things are better in several places and at least not worse in other places.
I completely agree. Because of the steep exponential difficulty curve, those are the outcomes that are expected to occur. Nearly 17 months since the start of Early Access, that genie is not going to be recorked back in to the bottle as the devs have chosen to work with that curve as the game is “live”.
Hindsight being 20/20, IMO, the devs should have never allowed stunlocks to be a thing from the very start of the game. Over time though, the devs have moved away from this being the meta mechanic by giving bosses either partial and the new spirit dragons full immunity to stuns. Perhaps if stuns were not so powerful, the exponential damage curve might have been lessened as players would have to survive more incoming damage.
For Season mode, the devs reset players back to level 50 dungeons and everyone has to re-work their way back to Difficulty X with every new season. However, the devs never applied this logic back to to the story mode skirmishes/dungeons/daily challenges. Unsure why that never occurred, at least as a one-time reset to address all of the past balancing changes.
I think the problem is that gear progression versus high level content, was so badly out of whack at the start of EA. It was understandable for that stage of development, but very unfortunate. It sort of amplified the reliance on stunlock.
The later decisions to nerf the meta by tinkering with spells, only made things worse. Then the gear progression part of the equation was greatly improved. So it is almost as if some things are “balanced” to offset things that no longer exist. And other things that do exist, are not really factored in. And since day one, I have not understood the strategy of changing several things at once, that all do essentially the same thing. (aka raise mana cost, lower mana gain, lower gem creation etc)
The weird balance is still something I do not like about the game. The good news, for me, is that now it is at the top of a much much MUCH shorter list of annoyances. That’s progress. haha