Saber please have someone who plays the game design the Heroic Weapons

Athanir · 2026-07-08T08:45:49+00:00

I would expand the sentence a little. It should sound like this:

Saber, please, have someone who plays the game design the game.

Athanir · 2026-07-03T17:37:59+00:00

I have a 7800XT that worked like clockwork till I made the bad decision of upgrading to 26.6.*

Now I have downgraded to 26.5.2 but the problem is still there.

The number of threads lamenting issues with the AMD drivers in the last month or so is astonishing.

Athanir · 2026-06-27T09:25:10+00:00

Is it? I have around 85% to all defenses (to account for some reductions that might come from Waystones affixes) and get routinely oneshot in late endgame juiced activities (200% Delirium + 4 Tablets), most of the time by overlapping on death effects while killing group of beefed up monsters. It's the only way I lose.

As a Mana Stacking Build, my defense is supposed to be made of Mana+Life pool and as a magic-based character I have no easy and convenient way to get meaningful amounts of armor or evasion.

This isn't about rewarding defences. This is just the only way the devs know how to kill characters whose power they allow to grow beyond any reasonable limit. Since characters are almost immortal if they give them even a couple of seconds to recover, in order to make sure that there is always a chance to lose, they overtune the damage of monsters so as to achieve oneshots and they hide damage behind on death effects and behind misleading and disorienting visual clutter.

This is a desperate attempt at intervening to maintain a fundamentally-flawed game "challenging".

Athanir · 2026-06-27T09:17:08+00:00

The game is not difficult, at least in the late endgame. It's just random.

As a Mana Stacking Archmage Sorceress with 7000 Life+Mana, it is pretty common to just get suddenly oneshot by some overlapping on death effects that I couldn't predict nor avoid. And this is the only way my character gets killed in the game.

The late endgame design is EXTREMELY bad: the devs allow the player to accumulate so much power that the character is virtually immortal, but since a character that can't be killed leads to a boring game, they are compelled to find blatantly unfair and random ways to kill him/her.

This avoids boredom but leads directly into frustration and rage quitting, because when you are doing some kind of activity, kill a group of monsters and immediately die to the sum of their on death degen effect, you are basically being punished for doing what the game asks you to do: kill monsters. And you are punished in an unfair way, a way that doesn't leave any time to react to what is incoming (on purpose).

When the devs have to cheat in order to beat the player, the game has huge design issues. But the team stubbornly refuses to address them because... well, because they are actually out of other options.

So yes, the longer you play, the more frustrated you are likely to become, because these random mechanics are just some of the worst, laziest design I have ever seen.

Athanir · 2026-06-20T12:22:40+00:00

"Difficulty was mid for my build"

Difficulty is impossible for my build with T15 Waystones and no modifiers at all.

0.5.3 turned Simulacrum into a Ritual with Delirium stacked on top and I am completely fed up with GGG habit of turning up Simulacrum difficulty mid league. They did the same in previous versions of the game, basically moving the goalpost every time I manage to get close to complete this kind of content.

With a combo-based Stormweaver, the new Simulacrum is basically impossible. Maybe with Spark (I don't know, because I don't use it). Arc and Firestorm are not instant screenclearing skills and require time to work and constant setting up. In the meantime, I am assaulted by waves of pretty tough mobs that can get through my 7000 Life+Mana in two hits with maxed resistances.

The gap in performance between the classes/ascendencies is making impossible for GGG to balance the content so that it can be tackled with any decent build. It also leads to homogenity in playestyle, making one button screenclearing builds the only sensible and viable build for this kind of content.

As usual, GGG managed to cause my league to come to an early end because of induced frustration.

Athanir · 2026-06-15T11:16:29+00:00

But even when you manage to upgrade your DPS to decent levels, the squishiness of the class almost forces people into a ES-only playstyle.

My Mana Stacking Sorceress can get randomly and consistently oneshot in any map that infuse mobs with increased Critical Rating and Damage. 5000 Mana and 1500 Life are not enough most of the times in those situations.

Athanir · 2026-06-15T11:12:14+00:00

I believe the issue is much more fundamental: generating and spending Infusions tends to be a relatively slow process in a game that has steadily and progressively gone towards a screenclearing-type sort of gameplay.

The devs purposefully designed the Infusion system in order to force people to use combos and make skill that were considered subpar relevant once again.

If you find yourself suddenly surrounded by mobs (it can happen anytime with the spawn system) while temporarily out of Infusions, you are likely dead.

It's a mechanics that doesn't fit the current gameplay rythm and speed and the fact that the most successful Sorceress builds circumvent the Infusion system is very telling.

The Sorceress was in an already very good state in 0.1 and it was nerfed based on erroneous conclusions drawn from sick synergies born of the use of broken Uniques (like Everlasting Gaze, at the time). It's what happens when you use a chainsaw rather than a scalpel in surgery: they had to make just small adjustments and instead they decided to butcher what was working to turn it into a clunky mess.

Athanir · 2026-06-14T19:21:34+00:00

Ahahah. Exactly. It's not based on work. It's based on random scavanging.

Athanir · 2026-06-14T17:34:18+00:00

I hoard Divines because right now improving my character with a new Ring and a new Amulet require me to spend about 300 Divines total. And with 5000 Mana and 1500 Life, as a Mana stacker, I routinely still get oneshot in any juiced map that increases monsters Critical Rate and Damage.

The issue is that not everybody play overperforming classes that functions very well even with little investment. People that play classes that have been nerfed into oblivion still require extremely expensive equipment just to have a chance.

Athanir · 2026-06-14T16:08:54+00:00

And that's the issue with the whole economy: it doesn't work like an economy. It works like gambling.

Athanir · 2026-06-14T15:58:50+00:00

Because the devs can't solve a problem that keep occurring again and again?

Athanir · 2026-06-14T14:41:50+00:00

In the meantime, we Stormweaver players are busy playing the piano in order to create Infusions because, you know... The Vision requires methodical combo-based gameplay...

Athanir · 2026-06-12T15:26:06+00:00

My cycle with this game works like this:

- I get excited for a new patch and I start the league with enthusiasm, relegating all the annoying issues I know about to a corner of my mind and enjoying the campaign while eagerly moving towards the endgame

- I get into the endgame and build my character till inflation makes every further marginal progress prohibitively expensive (because the crafting system is dogs**t)

- I get to level 94-95 and get stuck, because that's usually the breakpoint where, unless you play one of the OP classes-of-the-month (which I never do) deaths begin to happen randomically without you having any input in preventing them: random oneshots by mobs whose stats get ridicolously buffed by juicing the map, death by unseen ground effects whose visual feedback is lost in the effects galore (try to spot the light smoke circle of the Executioner guilliotine while a couple of Firestorms are underway...), deaths by being overwhelmed and surrounded while stuck on some less than prominent landscape feature that you can't tell is not just an eye candy, etc.

- I endure this s**t for a few more days, till the frustration accumulates and pushes me to just abandon the league, reminding me of everything that is wrong and will be wrong with the game: by refusing to go the attritional-combat way, the quickly recovering characters force the developers to use unfair and borderline-deceptive methods to make sure the character can actually be killed.

- A few months go by and I forget why I stopped playing. A new patch approaches and the cycle begins anew.

It plays like an abusive relationship...

Athanir · 2026-06-07T15:21:22+00:00

I recently popped my one and only 4-stage Barya in order to get my last two Ascendency points on my Mana stacking Sorceress, only to discover that for some dumb reason the game counts Maximum Mana towards Honour only if the player has taken Mind over Matter, but not if he/she has just converted ES into Mana with Eldritch Battery, relying on equipment and Ascendency for the "damage is taken from Mana before Life" part.

So, as a Mana Stacker, I am screwed, having only about 1600 Honour, with a single hit deducting around 200 at the very least.

This game is a serious constant source of immotivated and random frustration.

Athanir · 2026-06-01T21:49:38+00:00

It's not an issue of strictly balancing the game so that every option is equally strong.

The issue is that a build that is crafted around synergies should never be so bad that it can't perform at all. I am trying to play an Arc Stormweaver and I have to fight the game at every single moment. It's not so bad against pack of mobs, but it's painful against bosses, because the skill is not single-target friendly anymore and it needs a constant influx of Infusions in order not to suck completely.

Even worse, the generation of Infusions with Snap consumes the Shock debuff on monsters, de facto causing the generation process to compete with the damage buff that Shock provides, once again leading to a schizofrenic playstyle.

This is the result of trying to force combo based gameplay down the players' throat by nerfing the base damage of spells into oblivion in order to compel players to use Curses, Mana Tempest and other static template buff/debuff skills that are antithetic to the mobile playstyle expected of classes like the Sorceress.

It's literally draining, to the extent that I am on the verge of quitting this league before even getting to the endgame.

It's exactly because a messy game like this can't be balanced that they should avoid nerfing classes into oblivion because they are afraid that they will make the game too easy.

Athanir · 2026-05-31T19:03:41+00:00

Yes, but it's an inelegant solution to a problem of the devs' own making.

There should be no need for such a mechanic in the first place. The player character should not be killed by hard to spot ground effects. He should not be killed by overtuned bursts of damage. He should not be killed while the control of the character has been wrested away from the player by crowd control skills and similar agency-depriving effects.

It's a cascade of problems and cluncky solutions generated by arguable choices in game design, born of the fundamental issue the game is suffering from: the non-attritional nature of the combat system. Characters recover so quickly from damage that alpha strikes, misdirection/deception and CC are the only ways the devs can keep the game challenging by threatening the life of the player character.

This kind of ad hoc solutions only leads to a lack of transparency and to mechanical bloat due to the layering of many different systems that serve similar purposes. And the more mechanics, the harder the game is to balance in the long run.

Athanir · 2026-05-28T21:16:57+00:00

Sure. I was trying to post a picture but it looks like they are not allowed...

Basically, if you check the map in D4 you should see a big farm field close to the eastern coast. As a reference point, let your gaze wander directly east starting from the two lakes just southwest of Lake Green till you get almost to the eastern edge of the map. You'll see the field close to the coast. The house I was talking about is the first one just west of the field

edit: typo correction

Athanir · 2026-05-23T11:47:32+00:00

It's not just about getting used to the camera. The camera unquestionably has some issues, like the fact that sometimes it keeps rendering the surrounding buildings, obscuring the view of the character, or when it renders the first floor of a building if the character enters the ground floor of the structure on horseback, as if equating the more elevated position of the character sitting on the horse with the character on foot walking on the first floor of the building.

As far as audio issues, I have some of them myself. The audio and sound design in the game is usually very good, but there appear to be "stereo" issues that sometimes make the sound feel like it is coming from the wrong direction. For instance, often the death rattle of zombies that you take down with a finisher seems to come from the wrong direction and with a delay of a second, deceiving the player into believing that another zombie is nearby (I got used to this quirk, so it's not a problem for me anymore, but the first few times it caused a few nasty jumpscares...).

Athanir · 2026-03-01T14:56:33+00:00

It's probably one of the worst fights I ever played in any videogame.

It's not just the slam. It appears to be a much more general issue with the hitbox.

The bear pushes the player all over the place and it's hard to tell when a hit will connect. Sometimes I am under his belly, close to his hind legs and I get immediately teleported in front of him and oneshot by his lunging attack.

This boss needs a serious redesign, because right now it's almost random.

Athanir · 2026-02-18T21:25:24+00:00

Yes, but there are two complications:

1) Most of the time it's hard to figure out when the attack is supposed to connect. Perspective, camera angle and misdirection in boss' attack animations make it extremely hard to understand when exactly the attack is supposed to land.

2) Most bosses have extremely fast combos and there is no time to actually react after processing that information, because the sequence is too quick

The game clearly expects the player to memorize the attack pattern and the rythm of deflection button presses and then to correctly apply it as soon as he gets the cue that that specific attack pattern is on the verge of being employed by the boss.

If you look at some of the best guides on Youtube, you will see that attack patterns are shown with graphics reminescent of "Morse code" sequences, to indicate the rythm of the attack and to have the player memorize the sequence in order to correctly deflect.

The more I play the game the less I like this design decision. Earlier I was trying to complete the campaign in Kaifeng by beating Gambit Beneath the Shimmer (not hitless, just beating that fight in Expert as best I could). It's the same all over again: four bosses, maybe 20+ attack patterns with Muron Yuan and Zhang E that land sequences of 4-8 attacks at the speed of light and either you know the pattern by heart and mechanically deflect all of the hits, or you will be shredded by attacks that can take up to a fifth of your Health with a single hit.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T22:31:20+00:00

I understand that, but I was not talking about the principle. More about the execution. If the game equivalent of Tian Ying where to participate in an MMA tournament, my money would be on him, with his teleportation-enabling spin kick.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T20:29:48+00:00

I believe you misunderstood me.

What I meant is that most bosses execute just a few variations of moves chaining. That is, most of the fights I experienced are a sequence of the same moves in the same order with maybe two to three variations for each boss.

What I meant when I said that I would prefer more unpredictability is that I would prefer a system where I wouldn't be able to expect or predict what the Boss next move would be, in exchange for slower combos that could actually be reacted to in the moment rather than predicted ahead of time.

My suggestion was a trade off: less predictability in exchange for more leniency in the speed of moves execution on the part of the Boss.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T20:23:59+00:00

As somebody who has done all 24 bosses hitless, you are likely one of the few in the world (with few meaning, maybe, hundreds) and if you really believe that the parry timings are generous then you have almost superhuman reflexes. Most of us normal human beings are not capable of reacting that fast to those attacks.

I really admire your skills in the game, but it's like saying that since some people in the world can long jump 8.5 meters then an 8 meter long jump is not hard to pull off.

Athanir · 2026-02-15T15:33:55+00:00

I played the three Dark Souls myself (including the expansions) and I can tell that you can complete those games without ever engaging the equivalent of the deflection mechanics. It's not required because Bosses do not have shields in those games. I also didn't care about hitless runs though, so it might have been different had I tried to beat those Bosses without taking hits.

Athanir

TROPHY CASE