Feedback on PoE

[flamewavelight]

PoE is a great game with a great lineage. I have really enjoyed playing it (just reached a certain keep on PotD difficult - switching down to Hard for some fights without a shadow of a doubt)

 

Some feedback to make it even better (with my personal bias, of course......):

 

1. Encounter Design:

The Good: Monster encounters are nicely designed for variety. Different monsters have different HP, stats, and numbers. Monsters also fit the lore - i.e. different areas have different monsters.

 

The Improvement:

Monsters:

A. Monsters should have some abilities from classes: Constant Endurance, Savage Yell.

Eg: Just rename Constant Endurance to Nature's Gift for Trolls / Forest Lurkers, etc

 

B. Have more ranged monsters

 

C. Find a way to make shades, shadows and other spirit encounters more interesting and less un-fun for the regular player.

 

Humans:

Human encounters can be improved a *lot* by:

A. Having more rogues, corrupted / fallen clerics, monks or other classes rather than the generic Bandits and Looters will help increase the variety of encounters.

 

B. Give abilities based on their class, or just multi-class them and give them abilities across classes.

Dont give them CC abilities. Give them self-buff and enemy debuff abilities.

 

C. Have more ranged antagonists: both archers and casters.

Script the casters to buff their team, debuff the enemy, CC and hit from the back.

 

D. Have *more* human encounters. 

i. Create scenarios where you need to say (a) take out a village (b) defend a village © stealth attack the commander (d) poison the river etc

All this could be on one map, of course

 

Doing the above will let you reduce the base HP of the enemies, reduce their numbers and still make the encounters challenging since you can't just auto-attack.

 

2. Level Design:

I really loved the keep level where there are multiple ways to achieve things. One map of this type with four ways to achieve the final outcome is worth has so much replayability that it is worth four maps where all encounters are fight, rinse and repeat.

 

I would love to see more maps like the keep with its:

A. Three levels in a single level

B. Multiple approaches

 

More ideas to use:

A. Let the level be complex. Keep it in a side quest. Then you can make it as complex as you want.

B. Keep some more interactivity.

i. Go in and remove the warning bell OR kill the man in charge of the warning bell OR do something outside of the keep to lure people there to make taking out easier.

 

Please design more levels where the quests are multi-part, where your choices have meaning.

(Age of Decadence anyone)

 

3. Balance:

A. Shades, phantoms, shadows (based on general discussion and my experience) seem to be half a level of difficulty higher than all other encounters.

 

B. Considering that these are not boss fights, please nerf them - I got to the state where I hate them.

 

C. Please balance different classes so that picking them is more about my likes and dislikes than about how powerful the class. Currently, Ciphers are quite OP, while paladins are quite UP.

 

4. Difficulty Levels:

A. The stats increase in PotD reduces the fun a lot. It changes the focus to having a high enough accuracy - requiring a huge focus in that area. 

It would be better to have other ways to increase the difficulty level.

 

B. Separate the "Number of Enemies" slider from the "Stats" slider for difficulty.

(People are intelligent enough to use two sliders).

 

C. Introduce a "Abilities" slider. This will increase the abilities on enemies, and is much more likely to make encounter more than fun, than just not being able to hit them.

 

5. Manual and Strategy Guide:

I got the strategy guide. Some complaints here:

A. The spell descriptions should have been in the manual. I should not have to buy a guide separately for that.

 

B. The guide is not really comprehensive, nor does it address difficulty levels.

 

C. The lore in the guide is one of the best parts about it. The Collectors Book lore is unreadable graduate  school level stuff - I don't want a treatise or a Phd, I want fun lore.

 

6. Skills, tool-tips and communication:

A. There need to be tool-tips that give details on basic indicators:

Eg: My ranger has +12 accuracy for his melee weapon than for his ranged weapon, and I have NO IDEA where it comes from (feature, bug, what?).

A tool-tip on the accuracy stat can say, like so:

Base: 25

Marksman: 5

Zealous Focus: 6

etc

 

You need to add tool-tips in a lot of places. Seriously.

 

B. You need to make mechanics more clear. I keep reading discussions on whether numbers are absolute or percentage (take Marked Prey, for example, it is mentioned as +20, but is actually 20%).

 

You need to be more clear on whether buffs / de-buffs are additive or multiplicative.

(The other POE - Path of Exile with its nomenclature of "more" for multiplicative and "additional" for additive comes to mind.....)

 

C. The tooltips need to be updated to make things clear for damage, de-buffs and what components are (and are not) scaled by intelligence.

 

7. Patches and Bug-fixes

You guys have a great game - and your own IP. You can rock with it. Please patch, bug-fix and balance the hell out of PoE before moving your team to the expansions.

Hell, put everyone you can on the patches.

 

This will give you a rock-solid, stable engine to build the expansions on.

 

8. Add Modding Support

Upgrade to Unity 5, if that is what is required to have modding support.

Provide modding documentation.

This will really help create a modding community which will make PoE's expansions and PoE 2 shine.

Edited April 16, 2015 by flamewavelight

[flamewavelight]

Some more feedback on Readric's Hold:

 

The overall set of maps is really nicely designed, and was the most fun till date (killed Maerwald so far).

 

Some issues:

1. The front assault route needs to be much more difficult. I play on PotD, and:

A. The guards were a cakewalk

B. The first group inside took 2 tries

C. The second group inside is slightly harder, but still took only two tries.

D. The two groups (separate) in the hall were down on the first try.

 

Compare this to the fact that I tried to kill Raedric's, and got wiped by his archmages, and champions twice. Plus it feels much harder.

 

MAIN Issue: Raedric's fight seems to be get changed for PotD, but the other groups dont seem to get buffed / improved.

 

Given that there are multiple sneaky ways of getting in, plus the fact that its a frigging keep, it needs to be better guarded. 

 

Suggestions for Hard Difficulty:

1. Add one each of mage  / ranger / druid to each group in the central pathway.

2. Reduce a paladin in each group (where there are more than two).

3. Add an invisible / stealthed rogue to the groups.

 

The groups in the temple above also need more / difficult / varied opponents.

 

Note that I am not asking for the overall difficulty to go up: the sneaky route does not become more difficult. This is for those who want the frontal assualt option.