Hi Crate/random forum dwellers! I’ve been lurking on the forums for a while now and I’m happy to see how the devs listen to the community and constantly update the game for free. Nothing is more representative of a dedicated dev team than free patches imo. I thought I’d try to be helpful and offer my two cents on some things. The suggestions are for the devs, but I invite anyone in the community is free to explain why something I said isn’t a good idea or why something works the way it does and we shouldn’t change it (be constructive tho!). That way we can maybe trim down a lot of the dumb stuff I say before Zantai has to try and dignify it with a response. 
I’ve been compiling notes over a couple months so sorry for the walls of text…
Treat every - as if it said “Maybe” or “Would it be a good idea to,” since this is more just me asking aloud if these are good ideas or not rather than what I think should definitely be in the game.
Enemy balance:
-Give Rotting Soldiers 100% stun/knockdown resist and 90% freeze reduction, and do something similar for one non-elite mob in most factions so that certain trash mobs can actually make it past aoe cc and make you pay attention. Currently it feels like DPS chars can ignore trash mobs even though they don’t have high armour just because of skills like OFF and RoS.
-Trash mobs in general seem to be really weak to freeze, it comes in the biggest aoe usually and often make trash mobs irrelevant. (I get that they’re not meant to be a constant danger but I feel bad for the little guys, esp. since they’re the most common enemy class.)
-Add a cooldown (or lengthen the current one) to Herald of Stars flesh hulk summons. His flesh hulk spam punishes some chars hard 'cus they can’t tank the hulks and fight the Herald at the same time. Alternatively, if he would wait 6 seconds after you killed the flesh hulks to spawn new ones that would reward the player with a damage opportunity for killing the hulks. Currently it feels like you’re being rewarded for killing one and letting the other chase you so he doesn’t spawn two again right away.
-Scale down Zarthuzellan/Alkamos on Normal. Players on Normal aren’t looking for hard areas that will test their skills, and while its cool to teach them about challenge dungeons/areas, the bosses are on a completely different level from the mobs leading up to them, especially on Normal, which makes it really jarring when the area doesn’t seem hard and then the boss suddenly one-shots them. Maybe just Zarthuzellan, since there’s a quest that tells people to go fight him and new players might not be ready for him, whereas with Alkamos there’s no quest, and instead just a warning that the area through the door will be really tough.
-Raise the direct damage on Eldritch Swarmers. Their projectiles are really slow-moving so they give you plenty of time to dodge, plus they fire four in rapid succession, which make it seem like you don’t want to get hit by all those attacks, but all of my chars can simply eat the initial hits and then just move out of the damage field afterwards (Used my trickster with 80 Acid res and about 1200 armour on ultimate as a test for standing in the middle of their hits. Was fine until 6+ started were standing around me.). I think making their projectiles scarier would make the game a bit more active as you have more to watch out for, especially as a melee char since they usually just facetank stuff and don’t have much kiting to do.
-Increase the weight on ragdolls. It’s empowering to watch them go flying, but pretty immersion breaking when I kill a reanimator and the zombies nearby suddenly leap into the air. Alternatively, reworking the way summons are killed when the summoner dies so that they just fall over would be cool.
-Make it so that hero spawns/all spawns don’t heal off of Sentinel crystals. It’s already one of the harder bosses in the game and one time I ran in and three heroes spawned. I thought I could kite them and kill them but they all kept healing to full as I ran around. I get that RNG is a part of the difficulty but it kinda sucks to have to reload and run through East Marsh + temple again (I like fighting all the mobs rather than skipping past) because my char didn’t have enough dps to kill the heroes quickly or enough tankiness to ignore the Sentinel while I fought the heroes (it’s a hybrid dps/tank build).
-Increase the drop rate on Kilrian’s Shattered Soul. He doesn’t drop any rare mats afaik and his Monster Infrequent doesn’t do anything particularly unique, so the only reason to farm him is for the Shattered Soul. Since he’s not very profitable in other ways and you are required to get shattered soul for some relics, it’d be nice if it was a bit more consistent. That being said, undercity’s a fun dungeon and I don’t mind running it a bunch.
Skill Balance:
-Panetti’s Replicating Missile could use more single target damage. I get that it’s boss at AoE damage, but it requires one of the highest skill point investments of any active skill in the game and most classes already have some other strong way of clearing mobs that require minimal investment. Maybe if one of the modifiers caused missiles to have a chance to “boomerang” and turn back to their spawn point after a couple meters, that would cause it to do more damage to bosses once all the mobs have been cleared from the room, as well as reward players for keeping the boss away from walls or holding them in one spot. Also, elemental damage is already demanding, requiring you to build up three damage types. Maybe make the Aether more secondary to the elemental so that the skill can be more focused while maintaining its own identity. There are already a lot of fire/aether skills in Arcanist, esp. Devastation which already has strong aoe, further diminishing the benefit of going Panetti’s.
-Elemental damage could use a bit of a rework. The idea is that it gets bonuses from three different damage types, but each of them only give 1/3 the bonus so it’s not really a benefit. Elemental damage tends to be lower than single damage bonuses but it helps just as much in terms of elemental skills (while being really strong for others).
-Widen the aoe on Thermite Mines so that getting enemies to stand on them is more feasible and the skill is more consistent. If that’s too strong, you could nerf the dot to make up for it.
-Increase the travel speed on Mortar Trap projectiles or add some tracking to them. The mortar attack speed should also scale with casting speed (if it doesn’t already). Also, add a screen shake and a wider aoe to “The Big One.” Those mobs want to die in the coolest way possible, we should oblige them.
Game Features/Interface:
-Add a warning sound/visual effect for resistances down beyond just a debuff icon above the mana bar. It’s the most dangerous status effect in the game on Ultimate, but unless you just know which moves apply it, it’s really tough to watch out for it. Especially since you don’t have a lot of time to mouse over the icon when you have reduced resistances and need to run, so it can be tough to even learn to recognize the icon. (Furthermore, do all bosses that reduce resistances have a debuff icon to go with it? I didn’t see it on Valdaran, and I think the Sentinel might only have one 'cus his stomp also does internal trauma damage in addition to lowering your resistances.)
-Please make a noticeable effect for standing on a damage floor. Sound effect, screen effect, player character glowing bright orange, all of those things. Currently your health bar just depletes, and it can be hard to notice why it’s going down so fast when you’re in a tough fight or even if I’m just walking around if I’m in Hargate’s Lab (it can be hard to tell where the damage floors start and where they stop when everything is green). If I’m surrounded by enemies, I can’t see floor and tell whether my char is standing on a safe spot or not. One example where its confusing even if I am watching everything like a hawk is the Temple of the Three, where the some of same floor textures are used for places that are damage floors and places you can walk over just fine.
-Add an option to make damage floors glow (in addition to everything mentioned above). If they glowed bright green, that would make them less frustrating and more visible, as well as potentially adding to the menace. Walking into the Warden’s Laboratory and seeing entire rooms full of glowing liquid adds to the eeriness, and walking into the Conflagration to be met by a sea of glowing green can make the whole area menacing and uninviting.
-Add a loading screen tip telling players to raise their resistances for Elite via components. The warning about negatives to resists is cool and helpful, but many new players don’t use components 'cus they’re not necessary for Normal and you don’t really have to pay attention to resists either, so they might not understand why they’re getting rekt when they move to Elite.
-Add an option to put a small healthbar above your char’s head/under their feet. I know it looks ugly, but players can turn it on or off at their will in options. Too many fights are spent staring at the healthbar instead of at the main screen, taking away from the cool animations and making it harder to watch for certain moves to dodge away from.
-Add an option to show potion cooldowns as buffs so that we don’t need to keep them in our hotbar if we wanna see the cooldowns.
-Add a “hide items” button (basically the opposite of holding alt), sometimes when I kill a lot of enemies in a small room my screen fills with loot and I can’t everything that’s going on anymore. (My Trickster already fills the screen with tons of lightning procs so there’s a lot of visual noise already.)
-Make it so that right-clicking the rarity filter lowers the rarity.
-Add an option to go backwards on bounty tables, or rework the quest selection into a list that displays a one-line summary of each available quest and we can click on a quest for more info. This way we could select more than one bounty at a time. If we increase the reward for bounties on ultimate, this could add another end-game activity.
-Make it possible to cancel quests. If you accidentally misclick when going through bounty quests you have to do the quest or it’s there forever.
-Add a “components” tab to the shared stash that we can auto-magically transfer components to with one button. Its not really a choice to hang on to components or not, you just kind of have to do it, so it doesn’t make sense to have them hogging inventory space imo. At the least, a “transfer all components” button at the top of the stash would be nice.
-Make in-game windows re-positionable. That way we could drag/resize the map and have it up while we run around, which would make running to a specific location easier.
-Show + levels from items when you hover over skills, currently you have to go through your items and look at all the bonuses if you want to remember exactly what you have something leveled to.
-Add a “total retaliation damage” tooltip below the retaliation damage summaries so you can see how much an enemy is taking when they hit you, kind of the equivalent of the DPS tooltip on char page I. A separate tooltip for direct retaliation damage and dot retaliation could be cool too.
-Have a button to sort components by armour slot (esp. in the crafting page). It’s hard to figure out all my options for shield components. The highlighting is helpful (ty for that!) but it can be tough to see where the shield specific components are.
-Warn players as to what damage types they can expect from different challenge bosses. Maybe have Kalderos mention that Zarthuzellan is a flame mage, and that Alkamos is a cold-hearted executioner or something along those lines. Color-coding on aoe attacks is helpful and veteran players immediately know, but I’ve seen a lot of posts on reddit and here complaining about how Alkamos one-shot them and I realized it’s not very obvious that his tele-strike is cold based. Similar things apply to a lot of other enemies/bosses.
-Add a bestiary that shows monster stats when you’ve killed enough of them, done certain quests for Kasparov, or beaten the game. They don’t necessarily need flavor text, and even just listing their damage types would be good enough. It can be tough to tell which enemies are dealing vitality and which are doing chaos damage, for example, since they’re both red. Listing the number of enemies you’ve killed of each type would be a cool stat that keep track of your progression too.
-Add a tooltip to belts that says they add armour to all slots so new players understand where they fit in to the defense calculations.
-Make the icon that indicates an NPC has a quest available at higher rep bigger or more noticeable. I was really surprised the first time Spellbreaker Moira offered me a quest, and thought it was only available after I beat Log.
-Set an option to autoloot components. Most people always want them. Maybe differentiate between picking up common mats and rare mats (Ancient Armor Plate and stuff, purple mats should always have to be picked up) in the options as well.
-Make the character list on the main menu organizable by class alphabetical order (I have too many chars to remember all of their names.)
-When the “display damage” option is turned off, but the “display crit multipliers” is turned on, make it so that crit multipliers still show (So we can see just crits if we choose, currently if you don’t have damage numbers on, there is no way to tell how often you’re getting crits. The tooltip on the char page is helpful, but if I wanna see vs. specific enemies I have to hit them and run away to check, and it’s hard to tell how much Defensive Ability reduction is helping). Maybe you could have it so that only the multiplier shows up, as in it’ll just say x1.17 if you have “display damage” off and crit damage “on.”
-Add an option to let the edges of the screen flash red when you’re hit by a critical. I had no idea my DA was too low until I got two-shot by Ilgorr, esp. since the “chance for enemies to hit” tooltip usually shows trash mobs.
-Would it be possible to make it so that Amarasta’s Blade Burst adds your auto-attack damage to its DPS calculation? Currently you have to switch your right-click (or left-click) to auto-attack and then trigger Lethal Assault to get a ballpark as to where your DPS is at.
Miscellaneous:
-Make more armours use cunning and spirit as stat requirements, since currently all builds have to make a high physique investment for the sake of armour requirements. If only heavy armour needed physique, this would create more build flexibility I think, where physique would still be important for making sure you don’t get one-shot but not a must-have for builds that wanna focus more on DPS.
-All of the Act 1 ruined shrines take an Aether Crystal to be restored (not counting the one in East Marsh), misleading new players into believing this is the standard. I’ve met several players who were carrying around Aether Crystals to the end of Normal or even into Elite when they actually don’t need to be taken out of the stash except to respec. (It might seem small, but I found out 'cus each of these players were complaining about running out of inventory space on long runs.)
-At some point maybe add a central hub of sorts to the game. It could be a new city in the expansion, or the ability to eventually find and recruit each type of NPC to Devil’s Crossing (like a quest that adds a spot for faction representatives). It can be really satisfying to start up the game and have all the services available right where your characters spawns that you can browse through while you plan what to do this session. It can also be really anchoring to return to such a spot after each dungeon run to sell/store your loot. The way Devil’s Crossing upgrades/fills up as you complete quests is really cool and goes a ways towards giving the player a place to think of as home, but it never really becomes more than a struggling band of survivors with a blacksmith and an NPC, so you don’t have a reason to go back once you’ve gotten to Homestead. I miss Bourbon’s terrible breath sometimes.
-Wrathmourne casts Devastation when you’re hit by a critical, but it doesn’t really make sense that a two-handed weapon or Callidor’s Tempest build would have low Defensive Ability and thus the proc wouldn’t actually come in very handy.
-Fix the Broken Hills.
Ty for all the hard work Crate. I’m looking forward to what you guys have in store for us in future patches and the expansion, and especially the necrobloodpsycook class. Doesn’t sound like they make any food I wanna eat, but I can still dig it.
Edit: Mixed up Zarthuzellan with Rolderathis
Edit 2: Duck_King’s feedback
Edit 3: Red crit effect, armour requirement, and ABB suggestions
