G'day and WOW, I'm impressed how much play time and min maxed you got out of my small 1hourish demo! Appreciate all your feedback and I'll share some thoughts on a few but all of it's making it into my notes in some capacity.
Morale feels kind of wonky right now
This is mostly a symptom of the tiny vertical slice we have. Morale is to do a lot of things such as act as way to drive exiles into more challenging content (they lose morale when doing missions a few levels beneath them because they crave challenges), a way to encourage a diverse and dynamic roster, a way to give the planned events systems more consequence, and a way to trigger events related to specific exiles. It's just very early days for Morale and if you get past level 8 it stops working because there is no more content really.
Passives
One of the areas I'm least satisfied in. I bumped the impact of potentials up a lot and it's now between 2x to 6x or more likely to get passives based on them, but I want to develop this a lot more. It's just in a kind of "barely works acceptably" state right now. Proper respec system and the ability to train and adjust potentials will help but I think there's another key piece of this puzzle im missing.
crafting
My plan is for meta crafting currencies (think something like an essence that garuantees specific mods or "reroll into fire modifiers" . This would heavily reduce spam rolling. Some good UX suggestions in there though!
Initiator passive is too strong
agreed, and there's no reason to not get it? It probably needs to become a deeper keystone node that requires subtantial investment in crit passives. I have the code for passives that require other passives but only use it in a few places currently. It could also maybe go back to being on full life only now that healing is much stronger. Or better yet only crit bonus on enemies having full/high life.
be able to click each exile to open their respective gear panels, rather than having up to 10 separate stash buttons
You can double click an exile to open their windows and single click between them to auto swap. But this whole UX needs to be much better, agreed.
I have kills where to total timer at the bottom is 3.9s long but the kill text never appears
haha you might be the first person to report such a bug for uber contentus. But it suggests a deeper bug with the combat log ill look into thanks!
regen
I think Vit is doing a good job with this at the more balanced lower levels but regen has just been way too strong at higher ends. I think it's mostly a balance issue and not having enough pressures on your guild to prevent vitality recovery rest spamming. I personally love regen and recovery builds and love how the Twisted plays at low levels as a bright candle that burns out quickly so im excited to flesh this unique part of the game more. Vit is a bit like morale in that it's missing a lot of the bigger picture.
it seems more efficient to just focus on a single one of these pillars
To an extent one of my original dreams for making this was to have content and build making that really encouraged specialization. "Wow this crazy opportunity mission just came up, scouting reveals it's got a crap load of fire damage and the enemies are mostly weak to lightning so Barry the wander is a good fit... but oh, they are really fast he cant handled getting swarmed... hmm ill need some AoE chill and a blocker to two..."
Holy cow the potential this game has...
This is what keeps me up at night! (In a good way). It's seriously very exciting to think of all that could be done from defense missions to events to guild vs guild to pokemon pet catching monsters to deploy in battle.
Seriously, thanks so much for the long well thought out post and for playing so much. I look forward to doing some big updates after a bit of PoE 2 0.5!