Another round of Feedback.

Merry Christmas to all readers!

As per the title I am once again sitting down and will try to relay my thoughts to you GGG. I am still playing a mercenary, witchhunter. Now level 84 and slowly pushing T15. My fun in general has not waned. The core feeling of the game still holds up even all these weeks later.

In the last two Thought piece's I already touched on the differing mindsets the game seems to be split in, the punishment for mapping in general being fine but the exp loss being that pebble to break the camel's back and missing transmog in a stat based game. As well as missing build variety.

By now it seems like the community has entered the ES - Meta as a reaction to your oneshot design decision. Gemling legionair's are traveling around the whole tree to spec into chaos inoculation, mind over matter and eternal youth, using caged god and hand of wisdom and action to one button t18 maps.
We are also seeing more of these one button builds emerge from the fog of release. I guess this might be fine considering its inevitability associated to complexity. Still I would much prefer the power gap to not be so incredibly drastic. I specc into the tree seemingly how the devs intended and I seem to lose power for it.

Is it impossible to balance it in a way, in which one button clearing invites one shot vulnarbility, while more buttons might enable more survivability for less clearing speed? Something along this line of thought at least. By now all builds seem to try to converge into the same endpoint. I don't think complexity should lead to simplicity.

I have stayed a galvanic shard hybrid with scattered explosive shot. Using two different crossbows to make it viable. Especially trying to integrate out of lightning and include explosive shot is very hard. Items and weapons sets make it barely doable. Also using voltaic mark of the ranger and the galvanic, shock to shockburst round combo. It barely works because I was able to capitalize on the early wild west of the trade site, before hyperinflation hit.

By now, in T12, with capped res on elemental and chaos, 135 item drop rate and decent weaponry, in spirit, I am back at the methodical gameplay of the beginning of the game. I am slowly learning to recognize mobs and the danger they pose and adjust my gameplay to match the challenge. It is an enjoyable experience, which I would hope more people get to experience. This is what it is actually about, not the currency or the items, or even the exp per hour.
To, at the end of the road, arrive at the earlier mentioned one button convergence might be fine, as a testiment of final power at the end of endgame. But it seems like that curve happens for some at t1 because of ES, tri atribute stacking and items.

Now anyway, class balance in detail I cannot speak on, but Armour should definetly not be this useless. ES should have some downsides and There should be more complexity to danger, not just oneshot packs with oneshot mechanics. This has become better with res, and getting ascendency shield, also item es, but again my class is an armour evasion hybrid and armour feels like the most useless spec. At least after trying iron reflexes and halving my survivability I wont touch pure armour nodes again.

Then onto some concrete pointers:
-Mob spawning causes an incredible amount of lag, which causes unfair deaths
-Spawn camping mobs should not happen
-My first pack after loading a map is always tied to about a 15 frame per second framerate and visuals loading in, then i can start playing.
If the spawn camping occurs, its hold left click, and pray the screen freeze stops without a death screen.
-Why are special maps so rare? Does it have to be 20:1?
-Insert Transmog argument here.
-Reduce Exp loss, or scale it with power. Remove it from the trial's.
-Let us downgrade skillgems. Investment into skills can become a stat lock, thusly no testing of differing tree nodes.
-Let us remove runes. Maybe not soul cores, but definetly runes.

I dislike the notion of destroying power to balance, but it is sometimes necessary. I would wonder though if the ES chaos inoculation + mind over matter etc. combo mentioned above needs to actually be made weaker or if its fine to just add similar synergetic power down at the opposite end of the tree. Something with health and armour perhabs.

Ok so onto the Endnote:

I really love your game GGG. I thank you for this incredible christmas gift and look forward to have a new game accompaning me for the next few years. I wish your staff the best of times during these holidays. Might you all be getting your well deserved rest. Merry christmas GGG and a good start to your new year!