As an avid arpg and diablo 1 and 2 fan your take of it feels quite enjoyable. I decided to start off as a summoner as I felt that would probably be able to clear most if not all content, she is currently level 70 (druid/classic necromancer) and I thought i’d give my input to improve the game if possible.
Bugs/possible oversights:
-Levels above 20 on ‘Summon Spirit Wolf’ don’t increase base damage/energy/life, but increase the damage its ability does, unlike ‘Raise Skeleton’ and ‘Skeleton Mage’ which both get scaling base damage/energy/life on levels above 20. ‘Summon Spirit Wolf’ also gets +1 summon limit on levels 5/10/20, unlike both skeleton summons 5/10/15/20 (not sure if you intended this or not).
-‘Blood Golem’ and ‘Iron Golem’ while summoning them it does show the updated golem model graphics i’m not sure if the upgrade is actually applying to the golem. With other summon passives it updates the numbers directly on the skill but it doesn’t do that with this, it still shows the base ‘Clay Golem’ stats.
-While not a bug per se, when I tried to play with a more zoomed out UI because I had so many summons that they wouldn’t fit on the left side of my screen (couldn’t see if they died) I seemed to crash very often during area transitions and when I reverted back I didn’t crash at all, thought i’d just share this in case it helps.
-Underground Passage: Sometimes both ways through the center of the map are blocked by rocks and you just have to restart (unless there is a hidden 3rd way I don’t know about).
Problems I had:
-Early game: Early game had serious issues, especially on trying a paladin until like level 10. Gargantuan beasts are way stronger than anything else during those low levels and I actually had to kite them or I would die and considering you don’t really have options to start with that seems bad. Might aura was ok, but sacrifice felt terrible to use and that was really all I could do early. I think the damage enemies deal early is fine, but the hp scaling early made it a slog especially once I was in the den.
-Rune drops: I entered hell at level 37 and until my current level, 70 and my only runes that are above Dol (14) are 1 Fal (19) and 1 Pul (21). This is low, very low. I noticed that you wanted to solve this issue with adding in treasure goblins, but that is my next issue.
-Treasure Goblins: I don’t know about anyone else but I can’t kill treasure goblins, I barely get them to half life before they disappear and I don’t think my damage is actually bad either. My pet damage average added together is ~31,000 (573% pet damage/32 attack speed) and this doesn’t factor in merc might aura/guile aura/heart of wolverine/amp curse so this ends up at least 1.5x damage. For the record, I kill Andariel faster than it takes a treasure goblin to leave… meaning they are at least 2x tougher than one of lesser evils.
-Smith/Witch: I lump these in together because they both have mechanic I dislike, one-shot mechanics. The smith in hell with his charge ability deals 10430 (with 3% pdr) physical damage ~level 60. While I can understand wanting to give an ability to him to be able to deal with ranged characters, but this is actually a much worse thing for melee than ranged to deal with. It comes out fast and unless you are moving away from him he will hit you with it, if you’re melee you can’t react to it and unless you have a massive life pool or have high physical DR you will just die. The uber witch has a similar problem with a move of hers, she throws?shoots? a red orb and it kills you if it hits you. I checked my ‘highest damage taken’ after dying to it with 12k hp in one shot and my highest is still 10430 from the smith, so unless its bugged the attack just kills you. This is the anti-melee issue with smith but even worse, you can’t even defend against it, you just have to be ranged. If that wasn’t bad she has the same root spell that countess has so she can just kill you at pretty much any time (that being said I cheesed her with summons after my 2nd death - she got stuck on them and they killed her over like 5 mins, she also dropped pretty much nothing).
Possible Suggestions:
-Lower early monster hp.
-Utilize side areas more, I would suggest adding ‘super chests’ similar to the way D2 has in the pits and other areas and add a rune drop table to them. This would also help to diversify farming locations.
-Remove the cost or change the scaling of upgrading runes to be exponential scaling rather than linear (starting at a much lower starting point and ending around the same amount for high runes).
-Look into Paladins early game, it seemed way weaker than my summoner early, so much so that I felt like it would be better to farm gear for him on my summoner to play him at level 10.
This list might look overly negative or critical, but if I didn’t like the game I wouldn’t even bother going into this, I really did enjoy it. I just want it to be the best it can be.
