Sharing some feedback on the game

[thedrop]

Hey all, I just felt like sharing some of my feedback for the game, so here it goes:

I have enjoyed most of the changes to the game and the latest addition is no exception. I really love how the developers listen to feedback and keep giving us something new and interesting to try and enjoy with each update.

The idea of Ultimates is awesome and I really do love the spells, even if it feels like you don’t really need them at the moment and that you have to sacrifice too much for what they offer (spells are visually cool but their effect in combat is really meh)-you either have to lose a slot for +skill artifact (which is a wasted main artifact slot just to use an ultimate spell) or you have to use only one school of magic, which in turn makes you choose between the other awesome new addition – having two schools of magic on one mage.
Having a second school of magic that mages can cast is really awesome, I love it! The first thing that I thought when I saw it was that it would allow for merging the different schools of magic into new and exciting ones (but I do realize now that it would require a tremendous amount of work to balance and find use for those). I hoped that it might be the stepping stone for higher tiers of magic wands – mb something like magma wands (earth + fire) or blight wands (dark+ water) or storm wands (lightning + air) and so on, that would be 4th and 5th tier but what we got so far is also really awesome.

The combat update is really interesting and adds a lot of tactical elements to the combat, but I feel like it also adds a lot of additional restrictions to combinations of wands + races that are extremely restrictive. Let’s take the new earth wand rework for example: Because of the HP% rework and the increased mana requirements for casting, now it is just impossible to have wolfkin or shattered as front raw earth wand combatants in early and mid game. You really can’t also use vivified because of how slow they are (I still personally don’t use vivified for combat at all because of how slow they are) and you are left with either a human or a raven cultist. To top that, when raven cultists have the debuff to perform worse in combat, they take the same amount of damage for the mana they spend. Earth armor 2 costs 80 mana now… sooo, realistically, you can only reliably use humans for earth wands on high difficulties. Mana usage overall has become a real problem for most wands after the update.

Taking HP damage in this game is very punishing, because your mages do not naturally regenerate HP over time and if you send them to the clinic during sleep time they will definitely take some heavy conviction punishment. So you are forced to send the mage to recover during work hours which just wastes their work day and messes up their sleep schedule. Imagine having only four or five mages and having two of them constantly in infirmary and with messed up schedules. This is annoying more than anything else. The new addition of health cost to cast spells just adds more frustration to that situation. It makes the dark wand off limits for combat use in early and some extends - mid game (until you can reliably make health potions) and the dark wand is currently the most important wand in the entire game because of quilting. I don’t feel like adding health cost to casting makes things more tactical or interesting but rather makes the player avoid using those wands and spells in combat altogether.

As a result of the changes, right now for combat I would go with mostly humans on almost all wands (except for air and lightning wands) just because they are balanced enough to have reliable HP/mana/speed ratio. I would just pick a wolfkin/shattered for air/lightning and not bother with anything else because of how bad it scales. You can, of course, compensate these drawbacks with increased infirmary time for your mages or some powerful artifacts, but if you get unlucky with those then your game just becomes dull, tedious, and honestly - annoying.

Which brings me to my next topic: Artifacts. Those are pretty awesome as well and I love the idea, but why are they random? Hoping for a nice +HP artifact and getting a lame + conviction makes me stop playing. I put in all the work (for example I make a mage with tier 3 wand and train them through apprenticeship and fulfil all their 5 wishes) only to get a random undesirable lvl 24 artifact that 9/10 times I just immediately pulverize. That in my opinion is a horrible gaming experience.
Instead of artifacts, on graduation/hiring students could drop essences(earth, fire, water, human wolfkin, etc.) that could be forged (skill by a wand) into artifacts with specific bonuses that the player choses. I think the existing structure and scaling of artifacts is actually really well balanced. It could be made that the more bonuses and the higher the potential max level of the artifact, the higher the cost of forging it is. You could even make it upgradable in different tiers, just like the wands!
And while talking about upgrading wands… I really like how now you can upgrade the wand level on all your mages, instead of having to teach and hire a new mage if you wanted a higher tier wand. But why is it so slow? Why do I have to micromanage each student individually to undergo a 3 hour ritual? Twice. It makes teaching a lot of students at the same time prolonged and tedious. I think it would be much more enjoyable if you could use multiple students for a specific ritual, like for example with a single 3 hour ritual upgrade the wands of up to 6 same-wanded students from tier one to tier two and from tier two to tier three. Right now, if I want to get 6 students from wand 1 to wand 3 I have to schedule 12 separate rituals for a total of 36 hours. If you do that 2-3 times it becomes repetitive and annoying.
I think that the new scouting mechanic is awesome, because it allows you to better prepare for the combat ahead. Big thumbs up on that one!
I think that is all for now 😊, thanks for reading!

[01]

Just noticed the health cost wands and sharing the sentiment. I'd be all for some sort of blood magic where having health costs at least make sense, but having it on earth mage... C'mon.

[CADUCTO]

It's a terrible idea to make protection from loading in a single-player game. I want to get a non-garbage artifact through loading. It spoils all the fun of the game...