Good feedback:
- UI is interesting
- Most heroes are interesting/fun
- Lots of item diversity
- Interesting bosses
- Set bonuses are great
- Jules is great
- Potions are balanced
Criticism:
- Game is very short. If you "luck out" and get a good team comp with great items, you just steam roll the game and all the bosses fall over. It's fun but at the same time not very challenging, and also, by the time you get to boss 10, this feels like when your character is really coming online, but then the game ends and it's kind of meh. Why not cycle the bosses endlessly with infinite scaling after Boss 10?
- Some heroes are absolutely shit and boring compared to others. Having a hero be called "hard" because of this doesn't really justify it. Hero balance is a bit precarious also; the Monk for example has (in my experience) the best healing output in the game, and some of the best AoE. The adventurer (the eskimo dude) on the other hand is absolute garbage tier; 0 effectiveness, 0 fun.
- The Item system whilst great and truly reminiscent of rogue-likes, can be quite frustrating. In rogue-likes, items you get often change the way you "build" or play your hero, but in the majority of cases this is not true for this map. Either an item compliments your hero, or doesn't. Many items are simply stat sticks which are quite boring (nothing wrong with stat sticks per se as they offer a low-stress low-thought choice for newbies). I'll use the Panda as an example; anything with attack speed increase or spell power is great, if you didn't get those, then survival stats are good too, but anything else (90% of the item pool) is pointless. There are some great items that are really fun though, like the 2000% mana regeneration one, that make game play very exciting.
- There's not many proc based effects which I would have thought would have been well suited for a map like this. When they are they very simplistic (e.g. % chance to dodge, bash, extra damage).
- Some bosses are just overpowered compared to others. I get this is a roguelike so RNG is acceptable, but the success or failure of the run can simple rely on what bosses you get. The flying dragon with all the glaive throwers is the biggest offender, it's a damage race with no interesting mechanics to it other than "kill all these auto-attacking units asap before we die".
- Other bosses just go ape-shit when they hit their ~25% mechanic and do tons of unavoidable damage, like the Banshee, which punishes low-damage compositions and encourages people to build glass cannons, which makes the game a bit stale.
- The Luck stat is a bit untuitive, does 100% more luck means all my procs have 100% chance to work, or does it double the proc rate? (e.g. 1% becomes 2%). I've found that stacking luck on heroes that like it (such as the Tinker) is a complete waste of time as it scales so slowly.
- Targeting restrictions on wards and mechanicals makes some heroes unviable. Why bother risking your spell caster not being able to hit the Golem's wards when you can just bring an auto-attacker who's 100% consistent? There's no monsters with 100% evasion so why did you create caster heroes and then penalize them with target restrictions on their abilities?
[Google Translate] Thanks for the tip!
Regarding criticism:
1) There are 7 difficulty modes on the map that can diversify the gameplay. I'm still thinking about implementing an endless game, maybe it will appear in the future.
2) With heroes, this is not entirely true. The monk, although showing the best treatment indicators, is poorly adapted for a bad situation. A monk cannot cure a critical amount of health, and he cannot cure if he has little health. On the other hand, The adventurer feels good like a semi-tank and you need to know some good game tactics on it (for example, through an endless passive ability).
3) I try to experiment with specific items and change them if they are not in great demand. The Weapon and Runes sets are just designed to collect items with boring effects so that they feel more unique. Also, I no longer just create items with stats. If it's just a stats item, it surely has some kind of unusual effect to emphasize it.
4) I heard a lot of criticism about the dragon: someone likes him, someone doesn't. I try not to make dummy bosses. In addition, you can try the battle mode with two bosses at once! He will be more interesting than usual!
5) -
6) On older versions, luck was more in demand. I will try to do something with this in the future. Tinker, although tied to luck, can be used as support for accumulating luck by other players.
7) Mages have strong spells. They are easier to succeed, but also easier to lose everything in a bad situation. In general, the fifth-level boss pool for the most part is made as counter to various tactics: the spirit of the knight - legions of creatures, the banshee - one strong hero, the golem - magicians, the faceless - main players.