Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
I'm someone who once played a lot of Diablo 2. It was a huge part of my late teenage years. This game gives me a lot of Diablo 2 vibes with how gearing is done, the hired allies and the whole transmute thing. Of course, it also has a lot of differences so I'm not saying it's a copy. It's just the vibes I get, which I consider a good thing.
However, its gameplay didn't make me feel the same way. I did ONE go at trying to control my character and promptly decided to not try again as I wasn't a fan of using your mouse to move and aim but using a keyboard button to attack. To go back to the whole Diablo 2 thing, the way it was set up there was if you left clicked on an opponent, you'd do whatever was your left click skill. If you didn't click on an enemy, you'd move. As such, the mouse became both the tool for moving and attacking. I think this is something this game could benefit from, allowing the player to bind to their left and right clicks first and THEN to different keys for extra stuff.
For the most part, I kept it on auto and let the game fight it out. This made it more of a gear management game, where I needed to keep up with gear, keep my spell upgrades going, etc etc. In this regard, it becomes a bit of a mixed bag. While leveling up and getting gear from fights is simple enough, it gets a lot more problematic when you get into the other systems. For example, I could not ever figure out how to do the binding gear crafts. The only ones I ever used were pacts and upgrading gear quality level, yet even these I wasn't a fan of the execution of either of these. In terms of pacts, you're only able to use one of each pact. I only learned this when I bought a second Summon Goblin to combine with an Isolated pact (as I assumed the non-hired help applied to the Goblin). However, I found out you could only use one at a time. If I was interpreting the Isolated pact correctly, this means you can only get the effect to apply once as Summon Goblin is the ONLY non-hired help. So not only can I not use two of the same pact, but the shop will even sell me pacts I can't use. As far as I'm concerned, the shop shouldn't even sell pacts.
As for upgrading items, my biggest issue was how completely random what you got out of it was. You could put any three items in and get any random item back. At least when you crafted an item in Diablo 2 via transmutation, you knew what item you were going to get back as the recipes were quite specific. I think an easy way to fix this would be to make it that the item that you get out of it will always be the same type as one of the items you put in. So say you put in gloves, a knife and an offhand orb. When it comes out, you'll always get some manner of gloves (even if not the same type of gloves), some type of knife/dagger weapon or some type of offhand orb as the output. This would then allow players to control the output by putting three of the same item in. Now if a player is trying to get an upgraded item for a specific slot (so that they can, say, test out the binding crafts), they can now do so.
From here, there are two more issues I had, after which I'm going to detail various things that I suspect are bugs. The first deals with the reroll function. When you use reroll, you lose the ability to choose from the static rewards - gold, combat points, shards and exp - and if you happen to hit continue on the next screen instead of choosing one of the new rewards, you lose the reward entirely. Rather than have this continue button, just keep the static rewards and force the player to choose a reward to get out.
The second has to do with endless mode. The way it's set up right now is that you just let it run until you're done, then you hit the X to exit. However, the X in question isn't a "let's just end endless mode after this fight" button but rather is a "run away from the fight" button. Not only does this mean you're running away in the middle of a fight (and thus any units who may have died are just gone now), but based on the code's design the player wouldn't even be eligible for rewards for all of the waves they DID clear. Obviously, I'm against this. The way I see it, there should be a button that just turns off endless mode and finished the current fight, then gives you rewards based on the number of waves you did. So say you let 9 waves be done and on the 10th wave you stop endless; you will then get 10 rewards. Since Endless mode is something made more for grinding, I'd argue that all but the last reward should just be the static rewards. You can even program it to be only one type (which I think would also fit this idea), so if you pick exp then you'll get whatever that level gives in exp from the static reward times the number of clears you did minus one; the last reward would be a full proper set.
Okay, onto the list of potential bugs I came across. First, there's an effect on items that reads "No translation found for '' in GrindingGuilds." I assume this is a missing text explanation for a specific magic effect. Next, while running a mage build I occasionally noticed a mysterious blank buff on me; its image was a white box and hovering over it provided no text. This may be related to the previous bug. Third, the buff that talks about giving mana regen per stack that gets consumed when you have 5 stacks spells the word "consumed" wrong. It instead says "consummed." The last bug I noticed was that at times, MURDo didn't seem to want to do any MURDering. He'd just stand there and take a beating. Sometimes he'd reset mid wave, but usually it wouldn't be until the wave fell that he reset.
That's all I got. I hope to see more!