0.4 Feedback

Everything I note applies to SSF FotV across most/the entire game, not just specific sections, unless specified.

Combat
Reactivity
Reactively still feels like a problem, eg. Often your character won’t exit sprinting for a good 0.5-1 second after you press dodge roll or your next skill button.

Balance
Perhaps monsters could have higher resistances to specific damage types, and resistance reduction/penetration could be reduced, in order to reduce the effectiveness of spamming one skill/damage type, thus encouraging multiple more. Penetration could be changed to be “x% of monster resistance”, so 50% penetration would ignore 40/80 or 30/60 resistance, etc.

Build
Skill and Support Gems
There is still so much room to add Supports that are meaningful - ie. they have a unique interaction that, if built around properly, have a strong payoff - yet not incredibly strict. For example, where are all the Support Gems that allow expending Endurance Charges? As a Bear/Spell Druid that specialises in Rage, I very easily generate Endurance Charges but don’t have an obvious way to spend them. I keep looking for a Support that simply does something like “Spends an Endurance Charge for X% more damage”, but it doesn’t seem to exist.

Also, I understand that tying Skills to Weapons is very intentional, but imo there should be at least a little more wiggle room. Half the Mace Skills would work so well in Bear Form, and some Spells feel like they should be castable in Wyvern Form. And I’m sure upcoming Claw/Dagger/Sword skills would work well in Werewolf Form.

Passive tree
A lot of passives could still do with a massive buff. For example, the trade-offs for building a weapon/spell hybrid are incredibly high across multiple facets (gear acquisition, playstyle, skill slots required, etc) yet the passive bonuses are standard at best, or just bad/not worth it at worst. For example, Boon of the Beast makes sense; up to 80% increased spell damage for 8 seconds from a single node with the trade-off being the timing of your shapeshifts and spell casts - that’s great and makes sense. But Enhancing Attacks? Given how slow Bear is, you’ll maybe get 2-3 attacks off, and every attack reduces the time you get to cast with the bonus. Even the Attack and Spell Damage nodes near it just seem a bit off; I understand that you don’t want them to be too universal and taken by any build, but it ends up feeling like I’m being punished for hybridising, so why couldn’t they be doubled if you’ve done the opposite skill type recently or something (ie. 8% spell damage but boosted to 16% if you’ve attacked recently)?

Items
I think it should be easier to get more skill slots, but I understand they need to be meaningful. I believe the best way to do this, while also being more thematic, is to have each piece of gear provide 1 implicit skill slot by default, with plenty of ways to provide more. This does a few things:
- Introduces players to multiple skills slightly more gradually
- Teaches players to get more gear and look out for skill slots
- Thematically explains how skill slots exist in the world
- Allows for thematic “embedding of skill gems in your own body” like Gemling Legionnaire
- Adds another layer of item building without pushing the top-end in most cases

Another thing that some players don’t like is the focus on +skill affixes. Perhaps some of these affixes could be reduced/removed, and replaced with a +skill/+skill slot hybrid affix? In theory, this would encourage making use of more skills rather than just trying to buff a single skill or two as much as possible, especially if combined with the resistance and penetration changes listed above.

Lastly, I’d like to add a vote against removing IIR from gear. It could do with further numbers/balance changes, but I love how exciting it feels to find IIR on gear, especially when the rest of your gear is already good enough and you want to improve your drops. Additionally, it’s nice to be able to progress a little slower but have better drops as part of your entire build rather than it being map-specific.

Maps
Could Maps be made more consistent with monster type? And having specific mobs or randomised mobs could be affixes on Waystones. It just feels overly RNG-heavy and like there’s no actual meaning to locations in Maps; I miss the D2 days of farming areas and getting to know the monster types instead of everything just being purely randomised like a Roguelike.