God Blessings and Stats

[ArcDragoon]

I like some changes to the blessings. And others not so much. I think the expansion of specific stats actually makes builds even more samey. Let me explain. In the previous build, Time had a blessing that applied an increase to Duration. it didn't matter if it was a strike duration or power duration, it was just a general duration. Now, it has been reworked into an only strike duration blessing. Time's Strike attack are magic missiles that have no duration. Why is it like this? For what synergy is there? Yeah, it is synergistic with other Strike attacks, but it is not with its own God. This is just an example, but a clear one that makes it so that players have to use Alterations, Rerolls, and Banishes to get the exact build that they want with each character. What is happening here is a clash of ideas between ARPG games and Survival games. In an ARPG, you build a character in a hyper specific way to bring out their maximum potential. In Survival games, you're looking to make the best build you can during that run. Because of the recent changes with the addition of the skill tree, each character now wants to build in a hyper specific manner. The only ones that don't are ones who have additional scaling that are generic stats. Like Knight or Barbarian, who scales with Armor and Life, respectively. Because they scale with generic stats, your character build can be flexible when playing. That is not the same for other classes. And when some God Blessings are now more specific, especially the passive ones, it makes it difficult to have flexible builds. So, players have to spend alterations to just get exactly what they want. Previously, Banishes, Rerolls, and Alterations felt like quality of life changes, they were stats to help you if you weren't happy with what you leveled up with. However, because builds are now hyper specific due to the Skill Tree, these have become necessities. If you don't get specific blessings for your build, it no longer is just a skill issue when the difficulty of things ramp up out of control.

Some God blessings that I do like changes in are like Winter's Path of Frost. This is an example of how some blessings should work. The old version of Path of Frost just created a trail of ice behind your character. But the new one gives additional movement speed. But this movement speed is less than Leigong's Haste blessing. I think there should be more blessings like these two, where you can find a powerful blessing that is hyper focused; and then a more minor blessing that offers the same stat or quality of life, but at a reduced increase that also has additional flavor on it. It should reward players who are able to get the double blessings, but also help players who could only get one out of the two.

What I don't like are class specific blessings. Yeah, there are hyper specific blessings that some classes get that others don't. For example, Moirai's Splinter blessing which gives attacks additional projectiles. This is only given to projectile based characters. And it also means that melee based characters lose out on a blessing. Moirai doesn't even offer anything in place of this. Anything that would've been given to melee characters before by Moirai, have now become blessings for other Gods; and even then these blessings are generic enough that they can be used by projectile characters too. Which is a difficult thing to assess, as Moirai is a God that doesn't show up often and doesn't offer much. I feel like additional luck or projectiles is just always the right answer. And that's disappointing. If you weren't tanky enough previously, getting additional health doesn't actually help, you're just prolonging the inevitable death. And using Moirai for more banishes, rerolls, and alterations just always feels bad when it is a common rarity. This blessing should just always show up as an Adept or higher, since it doesn't actually level up. I would always rather choose a stat increase over the Fortune blessing. You want to win over more chances to reroll RNG for a chance to win.