Well, as the game is pretty much out everywhere at this point,
The patch notes in the OP are the launch day patch notes, outside of a couple of currently known issues that are already planned to be fixed in the next update.
In the usual vague sense, the relevant patch note is this:
An option has been made available in-battle to increase the speed of animations during battle
Which is this button here…
Well, pigs flew.
This button literally enables the equivalent of GoW 4x speed in PQ3. To badly paraphrase a well-known comic book idiom, “With great speed comes great… nerfage.” Players that are GoW veterans know what this means all too well. As Kafka said, it’s about balance.
Ironically, the loot system in PQ3 is much more favorable to 4x speed than in GoW. Players get all of the speed, but almost none of the benefits. Players don’t receive 4x loot space or 4x faster chest opening timers. They only receive the benefits of 4x speed for as long as they have the ability to continually spend keys on chests. The only two resources that are not restricted in this way are Gold and XP. Gold is meaningless at the high-end of the game, but XP has great meaning. Thus, to keep the XP progression rate in balance, XP gains were heavily nerfed. No one that is used to playing on 4x speed is ever going back to 1x speed ever again.
I agree, I think this is a great conclusion and one that I share. My sense was the same: increase match speed, decrease xp. But at the end of the day, it always comes down to communication. Why not just simply offer that as an explanation. That’s what bothers me and despite bringing this up over and over and limit the frustration that they subject players with, instead they lazily persist with the mushroom method of information sharing.
Overall the patch was great for gameplay. The difficulty made gameplay much more exciting and challenging. It is still very much “make a monocolor rows or die” right now but thats something that can be addressed in the future.
The biggest problem with the game right now is with the economy. The salvage/drop rates from chests are abysmal. Since allowing marks to purchase rare crafting items, getting glyphs, crystals or relics from chests is virtually nonexistent. My inventory is bulging with worthless filler like runes, scrolls, food, and gold. Opening a bunch of chests and salvaging the contents is soul destroying. It makes keys worthless.
There needs to be a bigger gold shop or use of gold. We need to be able to trade runes and scrolls for rare items. We’d like the ability to trade up quality of shards. Please fix the economy or the game will not have longevity.
