Ashlands First Glance Balance Feedback

[⎛⎝Katharina⎠⎞]

New Armour Sets:
Given the fact there are no set bonuses for either the Flametal or Ask armour, and the Flametal Helmet has 10 more armour at the cost of a very low 2 extra weight, why would anyone use the Ask Hood?
The whole gimmick of "No movement speed penalty" can't work on a helmet, given the fact that no helmet decreases movement speed, so this seems like a very obvious oversight.
My suggestion would be to add a set bonus of weapon stamina usage reduction, even if it's by something small, incentivising using the Hood of Ask for Range/Physical DPS.

Feather Cape "Nerf":
The removal of the frost resistance on the feather cape seems incredibly arbitrary, and the lack of inclusion on the Askvin Cloak also seems odd, given the natural progression of the game. If it were testing that I had the required armour to get to the Mountains like the Wolf Cape does, that would be reasonable, but Valheim is more or less linear, I'm certain to have already obtained the Wolf Cape by the time I make the Feather and Askvin ones, meaning it only checks how much time I'm willing to waste either having less weight to work with or to go and change my Feather Cape/Askvin Cloak for my Wolf Cape.

Skill Levelling:
In general, Valheim's skill leveling feels fairly good to me, I was at about 80 or so in my main skills by the time I beat Mistlands, but leveling the magics, crossbows and blocking particularly feels pretty slow, the magics and crossbows are likely because they're so late in progression, but blocking, for such an impactful skill, is far too slow. I usually finish the game, as a main tank more or less, at about 40 block, and that's with a reasonable amount of farming.
If the rates for those skills were about tripled (Given the way leveling scales) I think that would be for the best. This isn't an Ashlands exclusive complaint, but just a good time to bring it up I think.

I'm looking forward to what Ashlands has in store when it's fully fleshed out, and I hope it stays as difficult as it seems to be.

[JP_Russell]

Strongly agree on the hood of ask. It would be a shame if it just became another linen cape that people only ever use for looks. Some small set bonus is needed for the hood to have any use cases.

I don't like the removal of frost resistance on the feather cape either, but I don't think they're going to turn back on that one. I do think the fire weakness is fine, as everywhere that it would be an issue is somewhere that either the root harnesk is meta and you already benefit from having barley wine on you, or you don't really need the feather cape, so it just makes barley wine even more important to keep up if you're going to use the cape.

Also strongly agree on the skill leveling, there's a number of skills in the game that level way, way too slowly, (blocking, swimming, fishing, etc.). But given that it's been this way for 3 years and nothing has been touched, I doubt they intend to ever change any of it.

[p3st|cIdE]

Yeah Hood of Ask should at least give bonus to Stealth, or something, as its description says, "knew how not to draw too much attention to himself". The lack of movement penalties on the armors is nice, but the trousers seem like they should give a small movement speed bonus or something.