Thoughts on the game post launch

Game Feedback & Ideas
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Positives

  1. Bravo on the speed up animations option.

This was not something I cared much about, personally. Other people really wanted it. It didn’t seem like it was going to be possible. But you pulled it off. Nice work there.

  1. I like the new goals/achievements much better than the old ones.

Maybe not from a progression standpoint (more on that later), but just the goals themselves and the way they are organized and presented, feel like an improvement.

  1. The addition of a somewhat proper filter for minions on the chest screen is a plus.

It’s not perfect. It is however, an improvement over no ability to sort. So yay!

  1. Putting the map feel back into the story mode is a positive.

The animated dialogue is cute. Needed? No. Cute, yes. The map part is welcome return, however. It’s just a more PQ feel.

  1. Tweaks to eveline and the shop seem like a plus.

  2. The spirit of the balance changes are a positive

What I mean is that automatically winning everything, isn’t really all that much more fun than always losing. So tackling things like looping and zero turn now is actually going to be good for the game in the long run. The specifics of the implementation are not amazing. But that is for the next section…

Negatives

  1. Inventory space… still.

How can we even begin to figure things out when we are maxed on inventory and can’t try anything new? Seriously, this needs to get dealt with about 6 mos ago. It’s absolutely, ridiculous at this point. The good news is that this is the only “WTF is wrong with you people?!?!” category. Still. STILL! After a year. STILL! lol

  1. Scarcity of upgrade materials and randomness of acquiring them.

It has gotten better. So this is not a wtf issue for me. It’s still not amazing. Keep tweaking. I think a simple place to start would be to take the random out of real money (aka crown) purchases. More tweaking is necessary, but I think shop would attract more whale traffic without the randomness.

  1. The ham fisted attempts at balance.

I absolutely understand the need for nerfs. I also see the benefits to long term game health. Totally. But each patch in EA would just change everything at once with zero thought to what else was changed in the same patch and what was changed before. And this one is the grandaddy of those patches.

I realize that a lot of .39 and 1 were designed to slow our (EA players) roll. At the same time, you guys have to slow yours. Each change that was made has merit and is not terrible, individually. As I said above, winning everything is about as boring as losing everything. But, for the love of Dog, please start doing the math of these cumulative nerfs.

Just one example… barrier. You cut barrier from 100% mitigation to 50% . I think that’s actually not a terrible idea. Might need to dig into the specifics of things like terror, etc. But barrier loop was a thing and ultimately probably not the best thing for the game, long haul. However, adding on to that, sledge hammer nerfs to proc rates? What are you doing here? Maybe go 75% on the barrier and smaller hammer to the procs?

Again, its not a WTF. Just put down the chainsaw here and there and consider a scalpel. (Repeat this entire part with the spell nerfs. Something needed to be done. Not EVERYTHING needed to be done. Calm down?)

  1. Progression via citadel and goals

Meh. Probably my least negative, negative. The experience nerf is profound for those of us over 100 citadel. At the same time, I feel an experience nerf sorta helps newbies. So I’m torn on that.

Overall, I’m still determined to be optimistic long term. The ideas are still good. Covid stalled development. Release had to happen. Nerfs had to happen to make release not a runaway for EA players. Right now you still have my support. (BUT Cheese and rice… INVENTORY!!!)

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Excellently posted thoughts with well illustrated opinions. I agree 100%

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some good points and well presented. From my own stance as a longer term EA player I will add some feedback on these points.

  1. Bravo on the speed up animations option.

Definitely liking this. The animations, while nice to look at for new players, don’t really add much to the combat, so the option to toggle the speed on/off is good.

  1. I like the new goals/achievements much better than the old ones.

Losing 700 goals was not exactly high on my wish list, and along with the large reduction in overall bonuses this was just a reset of EA accounts and overall nerf. As far as the layout, I don’t feel we can see more this way. It is now four deep lists in alphabetical order. I think this could be improved with a sort order toggle - default A-Z as it is, but another to sort on % progress to completion. That would make it easier to see what your next completable goal could be.

  1. The addition of a somewhat proper filter for minions on the chest screen is a plus.

Good to have the most useful filter back.
Still not a fan of the horizontal scroll as it only lets you see 2-3 minions at a time, and the list can be very long. A vertical scroll, just like we have on the minions screen, would be preferable as you can both see more at once, and scroll through more minions faster.

  1. Putting the map feel back into the story mode is a positive.

As someone who hit 5 x L50 and Ch15 completed months ago I probably won’t experience this part of the game until new classes are added. Likely a plus for the new player experience, but this is an area of the game that is a once (per class) and done.

  1. Inventory space… still.

I mean what is there to add that hasn’t been said in the many previous threads? :disappointed:
Why haven’t they increased this yet?

Combined with the big nerf to most popular loadouts we are now sitting on a full inventory, nerfed gear, lacking space to try out new builds, and a drop rate that favours dropping garbage.

  1. Scarcity of upgrade materials and randomness of acquiring them.

The main, bordering on only, source of relic drops are the daily challenges. End game has devolved into opening the game, check the dailies and if there aren’t relics/follower crystals close and come back tomorrow. There is very little sense of progression due to very low drop rates of materials to reach higher rarities.

This gets compounded when you spend rare resources to upgrade something and get a bad extra attribute, or worse that an update comes in and nerfs the gear heavily, so now you wish you’d spent those rare glyphs on a different item. Devs shrug.

  1. Progression via citadel and goals

For months I’ve had very little sense of meaningful progression in this game. After the update that drops to virtually zero, combined with a push back in both gear and goals reset, and now wading through treacle with 75% XP reduction.

Prior to knowing the goals were resetting I was running dungeons 100 times with a weapon, part for the goal bonus, part to farm gear. From 100 runs of some dungeons I didn’t get even a single Rare item in a colour I wanted. I published my stats on Skirmish loot tickets, and the equipment is mostly instant salvage and not reflective of L100 max level difficulty.

Gaining one more citadel level isn’t going to give me any big boost, but where a really active week might have gained 3 levels, after the update if I could complete 100 x L100 Dungeons, I wouldn’t even gain half a level of XP.

Right now my overall attitude towards the game is one of weariness. There is a lot grind, that got slower, for very little progress, and nothing really new to do. 3 months wait for this :disappointed:

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The reality is though that everything throughout Early Access was ultimately geared towards arriving at a game for launch that was oriented towards a Launch Day 1 player. For the EA players, especially those that continued to play throughout EA in the “hope” of having something for them, it feels frustrating. Honestly, most EA players would have been better off just taking a break and then coming back to the game because this expectation of some major “end game” provisions was always wishful thinking. Having kept my expectations low, I am handling the changes, or lack thereof, pretty well :smile:

How about those 20,000+ gems though? I count that as a win.

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Good read @Tresk, lots of fair points on both sides of the ledger. I’m still processing all the changes but overall I’m positive about the update and where things stand because I made peace long ago that as an EA player with lots of play time, I had well outpaced the development of the game. Until the game launched, virtually nothing was likely to happen with “me” in mind.

What I have enjoyed the most this week is talking to new players and getting their impressions of the game. They are not weary, jaded, mad about pvp, upset about goals, etc. etc. Although there have been a lot of negative “reviews”, most of it is either some version of “I hate f2p, this is not Puzzle Quest!” or “I’ve played this game for a year and they don’t listen!”. Both of these are legitimate critiques but they aren’t really a comprehensive assessment of the game on Day 1 of the official launch. I definitely have plenty of criticisms still, but overall I think the game is in pretty good shape for the manner of game that it is.

Looking forward to putting up some more specific feedback later. Cheers!

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21K from goals, plus another few K from instant completion of new ones. All in probably 25K that is sitting on top of the 23K I had before the update. With few sources of gems after completing the story we tend to save them up for valuable purchases. Buying the weekly follower crystal, sometimes a glyph. Maybe some Eveline crystals for consuming in relics. Gear would be nice, but we’re back to inventory caps and scrapping another Rare/Epic to make room.

I don’t want to knee jerk response to the changes and say F it, which we have seen players leave after each rebalance, but my “give them the benefit of the doubt” meter is pretty well drained.

When a pretty valid, leave the game for a few months, is a decent recommendation, it’s not exactly a glowing review for the state of the game.

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Yep. EA is a testing phase and it’s easy to forget that, after a year, and under the best circumstances. I imagine, had there been more meaningful two-sided communication during EA, the testing hat would have stayed more firmly attached to more heads.

I’d add that, in a weird sort of way, the changes give at least a fleeting glance to the long-time, active player. It’s perhaps not the most elegant way to address late game stagnation, simply moving all of the goal-posts. But it does address the “log in, automatically win everything easily, log off” problem that was (personally) starting to bother me.

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Although the state of the game was early access and it was clearly a long development for various factors.

At the end of the day, it’s a game. It should entertain you. If you are continuing to play something that you don’t enjoy for months, then you have to reevaluate why you do it. I for one saw my continued participation as a way to keep contributing to improving the game for launch because I felt that the game had the ability to be engaging to many players over time. Many others saw it differently and are disappointed as a result.

Exactly. The failure here, such that it was, was the absence of realistic communication regularly during the process. This has always been the issue and sadly they still have not really figured that out for whatever reason. It is the most maddening thing to me about the whole process.

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-Trailer + character select animations are cool

-Goals/achievements: I like how each goal item is spelled out number-wise, as opposed to locked before the previous level is completed. It also feels more natural to reach through normal play, as opposed to running X dungeon Y times or specifically hunting down Z enemy.

-Higher level gear from rewards/chests: Makes shards and relics more available, great. I’m still shard starved, though I have a whole lotta leveled gear nowadays. Admittedly, I don’t play skirmishes, the supposedly shard source, since it feels low in rewarded quantity.

-Minion sort filter. Yay. The chance of extra key sort is probably what most people use, butaybe other options are needed.

-Specifically weapon balance. Longsword/mace were pretty much my go-tos. Now it feels like everything is more level, and don’t feel like I’m missing out if another weapon is used.

-High level/enemy balance. While high level stuff shouldn’t be trivial and actually interacting with the board should be needed, and gear armor/resistance means something, high level damage that’s unavoidable seems too high.

-Fast forward is cool board-wise, but kinda skips past the damage number a bit quick, which can be useful in figuring out next steps for spells or matches.

-Inventory: I’m maxed out at mythic northelm. Not enough to play around. Big portion for me is still keeping way too many weapons for the various elite tournaments.

-Story sound effects seem weird, grunts/yes seem too one sided and infrequent, I’m expecting more nonsensical sounds more frequently.

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I forgot to add two things to my first impressions list. I left them out because they are both under the umbrella of the balance changes, and I don’t want to hammer too hard on those. After playing more, it occurs to me that these two areas deserve a separate call out, because they are such a big part of advancing your gear and followers:

  1. Event balance

I do not feel much of a change here. This is likely due to difficulty being lowered prior to launch? Play-wise I feel a change, but result-wise it feels fine. I’m not sure how it plays for folks with one level 50 character and low citadel. Someone else would have to comment on that.

  1. Challenge balance

This one is pretty bad. When you take the balance changes as a whole, it’s pretty clear that the highest level battles are meant to be out of reach right now. That itself seems totally reasonable to me. The game just launched and I can see why the developers would not want anyone at the finish line today. Fine.

However, we get 6 challenges a day to hope we can perhaps get a needed relic or crystal to progress, so we can start working on more difficult content. It’s a little weird to have the materials we need to do more difficult content, locked behind the more difficult content.

I can’t come up with a solution for this problem, but it is a problem.

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Yeah. In addition to the player nerfs, the highest level enemies were restored to their brutal 0.34 levels, if not made even worse.

I had a 100 skirmish yesterday for a challenge. Enemies hit for around 30 to 35k per round.

Today, a 100 dungeon. Enemy stats were ludicrous…

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47k damage melee damage (non-crit). 10% chance to crit (standard rate), which would yield a ~71k hit. First spell hits for almost 40k + poison. All but max block chance and damage mitgation (max is 80%, or 800 block). ~125k Life + Armor/Resist to chew through.

I got by this, but only because of the potential of the Shaman ramp-up. It took quite a few tries to roll a board that didn’t screw me over in the first few turns. The increase in spell costs really hurt here.

Hilariously, in the past I posted screenshots about shaman damage ramping up to silly numbers given enough time. Now, the inverse is true. Enemies are so meaty (especially with high damage resistance), that if I can get the snowball rolling, I can get armor and resistance to reach even more ludicrous Dragonball Z numbers.

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I don’t know if I should be happy or if I should sigh loudly and shake my head.

Working exactly as designed, I’m afraid. It’s the chicken and the egg dilemma. Players need the power-ups that are being rewarded as prizes to become strong enough to farm those power-ups. The tactic is meant to drive players to the store to buy the needed power-ups to avoid missing out on desired loot drops.

Event are much harder now because of the very significant reduction of mana costs for enemy spells. Often, players now only have 2-3 turns before eating a potentially deadly enemy spell, especially at level 60. The leaderboards reflect this sharp increase in difficulty. Last I saw, at the end of day 2 of the current event, there were only two people remaining with perfect Tier 3 scores. A few more were close but took damage somewhere along the way likely because of the drastically shortened timer on the Auri’s dragon breath attack.

On overall events in general, I have many thoughts and feelings on the matter after having a morning epiphany on them and then running some spreadsheets that confirm some suspicions. Debating whether I should write a post on my findings later or not. Morally torn on the issue.

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I don’t have charts and graphs, but this feels like my experience too. I can do a level 100 skirmish with the “right enemies” (we know what I mean) and a revive. You are likely better geared and somewhat farther in citadel so maybe you get to skip the 50 gems? I haven’t seen a 100 dungeon challenge yet (thank you RNG!) but I did get through a 95. I probably used a revive, but don’t remember for sure.

This is a huge disconnect for me. I’m a person who will gladly throw some bucks at games. My husband and I both play games and we joke that our friends go on cruises and we play games. I say that to drive home the point that I fully understand that ftp is always going to be a much harder row to sow.

The disconnect is that even the store doesn’t solve the problem. Too…much…random… Random for game earned currency, I understand. Even if you can also purchase that game earned currency. But I’m not going to spend cash on some random thing that has a 99% chance of being something I don’t want. That would just be dumb. I hate using that word, but dumb is the only word that fits. When you add in the scheduling of certain random slot machine pulls, it becomes even dumber. The gaming community is largely over this slot machine mechanic.

I honestly have never bought more than one tier in. Largely due to the scoring bugs in EA. At one tier in, you don’t get to the higher levels. So I’m just going to assume you are correct.

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Would you be willing to share Shamon build for high level attempts, or have you done so already - here or somewhere?

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I haven’t as of yet, because I keep tweaking the build and the 1.0 changes threw some serious monkey wrenches into things.

A couple of thoughts:

On gear:

  • The shaman is a build-up class. As with before 1.0, if you can build up enough strength to overcome the initial power deficit with opponents, you can ultimately win. With 1.0 and the gear rework, there are many pieces of gear that build over time (aka "Increase stat by X% when you do Y). The idea is that by triggering these effects over and over gain many times, the player’s stats become strong enough to be competitive with opponents over time.

  • That said… the core problem is how to live long enough to get the snowball rolling. There’s not a easy answer to this. You need the raw stats to survive the initial hits. There’s no other answer to this than to level up gear to at least Legendary. Citadel perks in +Armor and +Resistance are huge, as well.

  • Look for low-hanging fruit set bonuses that yield solid rewards. A good example is the 2-piece Savior set, which yields +15% starting Resistance at Epic and 17% at Legendary.

  • Look for gear synergies. Shamans make Green gems and Big III gems. Look for gear that gives bonus effects for these conditions. Chaining Juju gems from the Ultimate (and resulting Big III green gems) into other gear effects goes a long way towards generating “free” actions when matched.

  • Shields: Legendary Shield is a must for the block score. Go all in on +Block in the citadel. Look for +Guard and +Solid Attributes on other pieces of gear to further boost block rates. Need to block as much as possible to minimize incoming damage.

On spells:

  • The new Poison Charm spell (previously Toxic Shock) is extremely good, as it is an on-primary color spell that not only restores armor but also grants Regen to restore life in a single cast. Big power bump for the Shaman Class.

  • Healing… Shamans love to heal, especially with the new Poison Charm spell. However, if you are going to pursue the healing route, you have to be “all in” on healing gear. There is no real middle ground on this and there are only a very few pieces of gear in the game currently that boost healing. Essgard Pauldrons are a must, and a second piece after that of choice for the 2-piece heal boost set bonus. Savior’s Locket is currently the only gear in the game that building up of healing power (see first bullet point). Try to roll gear that has +Heal for attributes to further boost healing power.

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Thanks for sharing
I must still be missing some piece of the puzzle for the growing of power that leads to the big numbers others have been able to get to - and with the “updated” power curve I feel I’m further back still

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Can you post screenshots of your current gear and spell loadouts? Perhaps it would be better if I could give you direct advice on your current setup on some possible ways to improve.

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Sure can and thanks
Gear

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Spells
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Couple of comments
My main hero was Paladin, then I worked on Berserker - so inventory space is, well, as you would expect - massively impacting my ability to have retained green gear
Spells - I heard Mojo was good, but when I tried it the boost was so low and the impact to their armor tiny, so went with mono green setup
It just seems to be missing a boost to Power to make everything else start to really ramp up

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So was missing a spell with wither, testing a new spell setup now and seems much better

IF ONLY I had more storage space I might have had some more green gear… :frowning:

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Thanks for posting your loadout.

First and foremost, your gear is way, way, way too weak to handle high-level content. This is reflected in your Gear Score of 1260. If you are looking at attempting to consistantly tackle high level content, you really need Gear Scores of 2000 and higher. 1260 is very weak for level 50 content (which is balanced around ~1800 Gear Scores). Your gear (and spells) need to be at least level 35 across the board, if not 45, to tackle high level content.

Version 1.0 doubled down on mono-color setups. There’s just too much advantage in going mono-color over dual color. You need a full green setup to raise green mana mastery as much as possible, as that is a primary component of spell damage.

So, if you like the types of gear you have currently equipped, you need to go hunting for green element versions of them ASAP.

Next, your weapon needs to maxed out also ASAP. That should be a top priority. With the slowdown in spells, more emphasis is being placed on skull damage between spell casts.

That’s because your healing boost is low. But, with the changes in 1.0, the new Poison Charm spell (previously Toxic Shock) is a vastly superior version of Mojo that is on-color being green instead of off-color yellow.

So, if I had to write a TL:DR on this, the short answer is obtain a full set of green gear and spells and then all of it needs to be leveled to at least 35, if not 45, before you can begin to seriously consider tackling high level content.

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Thank you for your detailed feedback - still heaps of work to go on this build then, which would be all good, if only there was more storage space…
So now I can choose between the heroes I have builds for and slowly working around the edges to maybe pickup a green gear piece or two - but in effect it will never get to optimized, which seems like bad game design

Weapon - I could level it up, but is there another alternative or better Shaman weapon I should consider?

Thanks again for your feedback and guidance