After some consideration, I must say, I am very happy with the direction and with the latest (re)upload showcasing the Tank Archetype, and I wanted to provide some extra feedback for the team.
First of all, I'd like to say, on this last video
@StevenSharif definitely showed he is a decent player when he takes it a bit more seriously
I get it, he likes to do a persona to make the experience more fun and casual, and I think he still got to do that in this latest video, throughout the gameplay he cracked jokes and maintained the same charismatic approach, but at the beginning, they did a better job at explaining each skill and using it individually! This is what was missing and made the video a lot better, and while I didn't think it was too much of an issue, the community was upset with the first vid so I'm happy they were quick to take action and make it right.
I must also say, I am impressed and would like to give a shoutout to the art and environment team, the world is looking great, Riverlands is beautiful and I can't wait to get to testing, I noticed there has been some talk about the VFX but I must say, this does come down to personal preference and I hope intrepid don't tune it down but instead allow everyone to tune it in settings the way they want!
I found the vfx from the NPC attacks, the lighting, the vfx when hitting mobs and from player skills amazing, and I would love to record footage for content creation with ultra settings, but occasionally when I'm out doing some mass PvP I would turn in down a bit to help with visibility, so I hope we get both options.
I also hope you do a different type of Hit vfx for mobs, I'd like blood splatters or blood ground decals for creatures, Tera did this great, felt Really good I hope you can look at that.
As for the combat, this was a Great improvement from the last live stream, and I think one of the reasons was because they added hit animations for NPCs, and this made combat a lot more responsive - as this was a general complaint during past videos... but now I didn't see people talking about it and complaining - and
this is a big point I want to make....
People were no longer complaining about the hit reaction on mobs, but they also didn't say anything good about it.. why? because happy people
don't say they are happy, but whenever something bothers them even a tiny bit they are vocal about it,
I hope Intrepid keeps that in mind, the vocal minority that will always complain, and all the hundreds of thousands of players that aren't here on the forums and on Reddit complaining about stuff because they are happy with the progression and with what they are seeing even tho they don't say it.
The UI is looking good, loving the new Quest log, inventory, minimap, and especially the pop-up message when you change zones is great! I also love the new class icons, and can't wait to see the work they do with the nameplates, hopefully, target of target will be included.
I already gave feedback on the Tank specifically, but I'd like to say I enjoyed what I see, as a main tank I happy because it seems Grit and Courage will make the tank "tanky" enough, but I will have to get to testing to see about that, I did notice the tank had the same HP as other classes, this is a big no-no, tank needs higher base HP from passives and stats but I believe that will change.
Now, a concern I have, is in regards to NPC AI, the aggro is way too short, you can be standing sooo close and they don't aggro, this needs to change it is Wayyy to easy to just run pass mobs, I also think
every mob group needs to have some CC to prevent people from just running away, and if you don't want to do that or it's too much work for now, please look at how WoW does it and when you get hit from behind you should get slowed for a few seconds, allowing the mobs to catch up, consider either that or adding more CCs to mobs and making them aggro from twice as far.
The content we saw would be Perfect... if it was designed for 4 man groups, but it is for 8 man, it would be extremely easy to do as an 8 man group, and that's not good, it needs to be tuned up in difficulty, doing it as a 4 man should be extremely difficult even if played well, and during this second video, there was only 1 Death and the final boss was no challenge at all for 4 players, an 8 man group would melt through it.
And a Huge concern of mine, is TTK for PvP... it seems that a player with 750 HP would be killed in like 5 basic attacks or 3 skills, please, please, this is my biggest request,
please tune the damage dealt in players down by a LOT... if there is going to be PvP as early as level 5 or 10, we NEED a minimum of 30s to 60s TTK as said before, otherwise it will feel extremely bad to me melted by a mage and a ranger charging up their big damage attacks, this was terrible in Alpha 1, good PvP needs to have reaction time and good fights are long fights so please, take this into consideration, as early as level 1 do not let people kill each other in 3 to 5 seconds like it was in Alpha 1, do a basic balancing pass on this before Alpha testing starts, if I had to ask just one thing, this would be it (
and maybe ask for duels enabled at the beginning of Alpha 2 so we can do proper testing and content creation, if you can't do duels, at least have an open arena inside nodes like BDO has in the open world, that when you walk in players can kill each other with no penalties and insta rez to practice pvp)
Talking about PvP, something I was a bit disappointed there weren't any skills to initiate PvP combat, Shield assault has too much of short range to be useful, The Tank needs a longer charge like a jump and a stun or a jump and an AoE that pulled targets to him, I was hoping to see something like this.
I was also hoping to see a skill like the Grapple pull multiple targets together, or a skill that reflects inc damage, these are really important to make him viable in PvP, his kit right now makes him ignorable, maybe Taunt?
That's it
