Played alot, currently around day 700 with some exiles exceeding 2000dps.
Feedback
Negatives
1. Exile Dismiss or G-Kick feature needed <- Addressed in another thread.
2. Morale feels kind of wonky right now, but this could just be a symptom of me endlessly grinding low level content, I'm not entirely sure what the mechanic's purpose really is gameplay wise.
3. I feel like when new passive options are generated for level up the weighting from potential should be heavier, I find it frustratingly common to have high (lets say 3+) potential in some areas and then not get a single related passive option for multiple levels. Often feeling like that exiles build is therefore kind of scuffed as a result. (Potentially adding 1. would solve this by just allowing for more easy rerolling of exiles)
4. The crafting feels good early on in the game, but when you amass a large amount of crafting mats and really want to craft some well rolled gear, the process starts to feel incredibly long, this could be solved by allowing the previously rolled mod (when chaos spamming) to remain selected after the slam is done, allowing you to repeatedly press the slam button instead of having to reselect the desired mod each time, or by cutting/removing the animation (flash effect) that plays each time you slam, potentially this animation could also not lock you out of doing further crafts, as currently you must wait for the animation to finish before you may continue. (Admittedly, this might also be down to my current wonky playstyle of spamming the available content)
5. Initiator passive is too strong in my opinion. (This could be already solved in 0.1.5 as wands now have lower range leading to higher likelihood of taking damage and losing the passive effect) But this can still be readily abused by bow exiles to allow very inflated DPS.
6. I think it would be much cleaner to have a single stash button at the top of the screen that auto opens the first exiles gear and stash, and then just be able to click each exile to open their respective gear panels, rather than having up to 10 separate stash buttons that all largely do serve the same function. Potentially clicking an exile without the stash open could just open their "sheet" page to remove another 10 UI elements also.
7. I guess this is more of a bug report really: The above Uber Endof Contentus kill is the fastest I have been able to screenshot, but not the fastest I have been able to kill him, seemingly whenever I kill him faster than this time, the red kill text is not displayed, I have kills where to total timer at the bottom is 3.9s long but the kill text never appears, I have repeated this probably 50+ times at this point. This doesn't matter at all really, unless you're like me trying to track how fast you can kill him.
Positives
1. This list is shorter, but I want to stress, I think this is an incredible idea and as is probably evidenced by my playtime thus far, I really enjoy the current game even in its early state, I think I could have sunk another 10 hours into 0.1.4, and with 0.1.5 now out it will be even more for sure.
2. Monster Infrequents. Wow, PoE 2 needs this. I've played Grim Dawn and other ARPGs in the past that use this system also and sure it was neat (even build defining) but never felt that impactful. Seeing it in this context, surrounded by the standard PoE fare makes it stand out to me. Having cool and funky base types (or uniques!), dropping from specific monsters adds value to content that could easily lack it without these unique, thematically world building items. I think its the world building part that is helped so immensely by this.
3. Holy cow the potential this game has... Skill gems for exiles? Supports? Ascendancy? or essentially any PoE league / ARPG feature ported here? I understand its been a huge effort to get this far, but I could really see a fleshed out version (almost certainly less PoE aligned) of this being something id happily buy.
4. This game scratches the itch that playing PoE does for me, allowing me to create and min/max builds in that RPG space without the time investment that those games can demand, this is the reason I'm playing so much already, I just want to keep experimenting as though this is a gamified Path Of Building fork.
Random Thoughts
1. I like the addition of vitality, I think something like this is necessary in order to tone down the power level of life regen, but I do wonder if a better option would be to just not have life regen exist at all. In the current iteration I have found it most efficient to have a full tank melee fighter beeline to the highest hp enemy to tank them and regen really does nullify their dps output, forcing the use of life leech or life gain on hit for sustain (or other mechanics to be added) would push more well rounded builds to be created.
2. Leading on from the above, right now it doesn't feel necessary to make builds that are well rounded (ie have a good measure of damage, survivability and utility) and instead it seems more efficient to just focus on a single one of these pillars to get the maximum benefit. I don't even really feel like this is an issue, as its quite fun in its own right, but I just thought it was an interesting emergent character building pattern that arises from the current combat system.
Thanks for reading this wall and creating such a fun little game!