Preface; I’m a returning player, came back about 2 months ago after dropping the game shortly after launch. I came back to a character who was at 501 item level across the board, so it’s pretty indicative of what a newly leveled character would be dealing with.
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Let me start with probably the broadest and most impactful topic; Expertise. This system is pretty well orchestrated on the nose, but when put in the hands of the players there are some… issues. The recent-ish change to expertise drops was indeed felt, however, I think there needs to be a bit more texture. I’ve been farming reasonably often to get my gypsum casts (rarely ever see the corruption groups running) and after 2 months I have 1 item slot at 600, a few higher, but most are around 550. World tours, topaz potion, obsidian farming (Ivan not dropping 12 kills in a row is not a good feel).
The sources are diverse enough, I don’t think they’re a problem. Each type alone doesn’t take very long to get the gypsum casts for the day. The problem is the expertise gain is so low you feel like you have to do them all, which takes a considerably long time. Even after the patch, the largest expertise gain I’ve gotten was +4. The grind being dragged out that long is rather harsh considering the bulk of the community doesn’t consider you to even be at end-game until you hit 600 in every slot. I honestly think like having 2-4 increases being a low roll, 5-10 being the average, and the +100 they added should stay very rare. -
Second topic; Expeditions. These dungeons are great! However, there was a recent change that has kind of killed this as a method to gain expertise drops. Introducing a hard cap of expeditions a week, means people who would otherwise spam dungeons well below their gear level are no longer free to do that. The game itself doesn’t have enough newer players to sustain expeditions being a source of expertise without those players.
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Third topic; Group Finder. This tool works extremely well for mutations I feel, but because of the previous topic, is virtually useless for normal modes. Today alone I attempted to use this tool for 4 hours to get into any later Expedition before a normal Laz finally popped up. (I was cycling through listing my own periodically). Honest suggestion; for normals add a dungeon finder with a random Expedition setting that gives a reward (possibly a Gypsum). I understand wanting to keep the interaction of the community alive, but if you’re going to alienate geared players away from having the freedom of helping lower geared players, you should provide an additional route through that barrier to entry.
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Fourth topic; Crafting. I originally targeted this as what would be my primary method of gearing after coming back. That was a miscalculation. The volume of time to gather everything to level myself, I’d be farming for weeks on end. The cost of buying materials to level my own crafting is far outside my price range. The cost of buying crafted from someone else is also astronomical, doesn’t affect my expertise, and is actively scaled down to be closer to my expertise. I’ve dumped 40k into leveling my armoring, it’s 187. At 185 the XP required scales up dramatically to a point where 10k of the money was spent on essentially 2 levels. I can hardly imagine how much worse the grind was >before< they reduced the required XP for leveling crafting.
The core system by itself is well done, albeit quite slow. The problems I have with it are the gates AGS have put into the delivery of it, as well as moving players into a position where they also have to put up gates to other players in order to get the most of their own time online.