70 Hour In Depth Review

[shootpally]

Overview

Positives
It's quite fun, the game is refreshing and original. Kudos to the two devs who are very responsive and must be working 16 hour days.
Needs Improvement
The devs acknowledge the game is wildly out of balance three weeks into EA. I find myself fenced into overpowered builds that I will describe below. In addition, scaling damage seems much more powerful than frontloaded damage, so I'm fenced into scaling damage builds, which I will also describe.

Class Imbalance

Warrior
So it seems like you need a tank, which is fine. Magnus is serviceable. Grulki is not a tank. So I'm fenced into playing Heimer, who is a quite good tank. I know people put up big damage numbers with Grulki in the backline, but he's too much trouble in my opinion since I can't keep him alive.

Scout
Because scaling damage is king, I'm fenced into a poison build. I've tinkered with frontloaded damage and stanzas, but they don't compare to poison. Thuls has a killer level three poison talent and some opening poison cards, so I'm fenced into Thuls with a poison build.

Mage
Again because scaling damage is king, I'm fenced into a fire build. I've tinkered with lightning and cold, but they don't compare to fire. Cornelius has a killer third level fire talent and starts with fire cards, so I'm fenced into Cornelius with a fire build. On top of that, my Cornelius usually does about twice the damage as my Thuls, so he is doubly overpowered.

Healer
Reginald is serviceable. Mulakah is not a pure healer, which I need because my damage dealers do best as glass canons. Ottis has hands down the most wildly overpowered passive ability. Getting heal along with shield is wildly overpowered, especially when compared to crappy passives like Thuls opening stealth. So I'm fenced into Ottis slinging shields (and heals) for days.

Card Imbalance

It's not worth going into this. Obviously fire cards are overpowered because scaling damage is overpowered. You can't balance cards until the underlying mechanics are balanced.

Conclusion

I'm not a pro gamer, just an avid one. I'm sure some of my analysis is wrong, but a lot of it is probably right. Thank you to the devs for making an original game in a sea of retreaded games, and I look forward to seeing where you take it.

[an endless sea of memories]

Fire is really bad actually, Wet counters it 1 for 1, instantly dispels Burn, and you can turn Poison into Wet with Dilute which has massive synergy with the Scouts that you correctly identified will basically always go Poison.

With a properly coordinated team, Wet + Electricity will do over 100-150+ damage each turn. Most I've ever did was a 250 damage turn. Fire doesn't even come close.

[Daisuki-chan]

It also doesn't help that one of the acts is full of fire resistant enemies. Chill just doesn't do what spark does so it's also generally worse than lightning spells. Although sadly mages are better off with 9-14 (a yellow upgrade of Prismatic Field is good for powerful and insulate for the team) of their 15 card deck (ignoring boons thinning it more if you get them) being energy (and inspire) generation for the team.

I am trying running two mages but found that the shop doesn't have card limits per character, but per class (this probably doesn't affect the current healers so much, but damn does it suck for batteries...I mean mages). So you can't have one mage be a total battery while the other is a supplemental battery (to push the team to 10+ energy (+ from instant energy cards played on the respective characters' turns) on everyone every turn) that then casts grand spells (I wanted a proper mage to work on NG+ with corruption challenge spam), at least not very well from the very start. I guess I could do better if I had a few thousand more shards, but I wasn't shard-poor either (the chest had ~6500 shards). ;p

If someone experienced knows how to get two mages to work well with this 10+ energy on all characters every turn idea (I was thinking Replenishment (blue), Mana Surge (yellow) x2, Prismatic Field (yellow), and eventually Mana Gem (yellow) (sometimes necessary due to Mana Surge randomness) every turn (vanish the rest of the deck, which should be mainly Scrolls Of Intellect (yellow) and Transmissions (yellow)) if Evelyn was to be the battery; I wanted to give Cornelius his Replenishment (he also needs a Mana Surge) but the shop was cruel) tell me, although the point was something that works from the start (of course one might only be able to afford unupgraded cards in some cases), at least as a concept relying on cards you can reliably get with all town upgrades done.