RAWR!
I shall continue on, then… Must just be bad luck on my part.
I hit level 20 with my engineer. Wound up going full bore two-handers, and have been using an awesome greataxe for the past five levels. I’ve found lots of cool shoulders, boots, gloves, and hats, but hilariously am using level three stuff because it’s the Ghastly set which reduces all damage you take by 10%. I haven’t found any decent pants or torso armor, not even for sale yet. I do however have some awesome unique stuff that I thought I might aim for using until I noticed it was for other classes.
The passive skills are awesome and Forcefield is probably my most used spell, but sometimes even with Aegis and a 5-charge Forcefield I still suddenly get both shields blown out and lose 1000 health before I can scream “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MY WORLD?” I can barely imagine how the other classes deal with it, which means it’s time to start making new characters!
Overall I am loving this, and it feels completely different from Diablo 3 which means I will certainly have room for both when it finally comes out. A big thank you to Pogo for the key!
Is Mordok the boss at the end of the dungeon where all of the enemies have the “shadow” enchantment or whatever it was? Because if so, I completely agree. I’m playing on Veteran and it was practically impossible to take him down as a Berserker. The Berserker is weak on mana and nearly hopeless at range, yet close up he was getting killed almost instantly if I wasn’t gobbling up potions. The skills were fairly ineffective too.
On “Shadow” enemies in general, it was also difficult to tell how to hurt them. Was it only magical attacks that hurt them? It seemed like sometimes physical attacks worked, most of the time they didn’t, and overall it was very unclear. Some of the regular enemies also killed me surprisingly quickly.
I threw Modrok around like a doll as an Engineer. I’ve got to try the Berserker out now that I’ve finished with my Engineer.
Is there some difference in how claws and hammers work? I saw some videos of a guy using a hammer/mallet/whatever and in just that one video they seemed far more effective than the claws I’m currently using.
I saw one tooltip on a loading screen about the difference between them, but the game loaded too fast to read the entire thing :-P
Hammers have a chance to stun.
Axes have a flat damage number to provide steady DPS.
Those two, plus swords, have an innate “cleave” effect where you do damage to enemies that are close to your target.
Claws are pure single-target damage, and I think the trade-off is that they have high damage values and very fast attack speeds.
Claws are much faster and have armor penetration - and of course if you dual wield, there’s execute.
In our mainline build they’ve also gotten a damage boost I believe ( not in beta right now )
Swords, maces, axes, hammers, staves, polearms, greatweapons(2h hammer, sword, and axe), shotguns, and cannons all have multi-target damage. Wands, crossbows, Pistols, Claws, and Bows are all single-target.
All multi-target weapons have different damage cones, ranges, and secondary damage percentages ( how much of the primary is applied to the ‘splash targets’ )
We are still looking into a clean way to message the innate weapon differences that are more fiddly.
I believe all blunt weapons have a stun chance.
Cannons have heavy stun and knockback.
Shotguns have some knockback
Each weapon has SOMETHING to recommend it, hopefully.
As far as balance tweaks -
There are frankly a ton of changes done in the mainline that we haven’t pushed over ( we maintain two branches, development and beta )
Most of our changes over the last week have been solely focused on connectivity, multiplayer, and stability, because this is our primary chance to address those issues and receive feedback on whether the fixes worked, and cramming too many content changes into each patch makes 'em take longer.
We may try to lob a lot of them over this week after we sit down and go over the weeklong plan on monday, but I’m not positive on what we will decide to move for now. There will be scads of changes that are never publicly seen in the beta that will end up in the final, I imagine.
Thanks for the info - completely understood about two branches like that. The game’s coming together really nicely, good luck with the rest!
I love this game and need to stop playing or else I’ll risk getting burnt out on my final purchase. Plus I need to get work done and uh, pack for my move.
I’ve been loving this game all day, brilliant work Travis! I only have two quibbles about the game so far:
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Claws appear to be the red-headed stepchild of the weapons choices, and I feel like even if they had completely overpowering single target damage compared to every other weapon I would never use them. The fact that I have yet to see any with dps better than other weapons of the same level makes me shun them that much more.
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Dear lord, on veteran the boss battles have so many other infinitely spawning creatures that I can’t even get in range to attack the boss through the horde. Infintely spawning ranged monsters are the worst! This is also why claws are terrible weapons in comparison to everything else: they would be decent backup weapons for 1 on 1 boss fights, but there are no 1 on 1 fights in this game.
With further play:
I really like the execution of the Augmented Weapons. I like that there’s a mini-quest to unlock more power.
Charge just seems to decay too quickly for my liking. Maybe it’s the way I play, but I hardly ever see that bar full.
Outlander seems like a really fragile class. I picked up a fantastic bow for my level, and I’ve been playing with my stats to try and pull out the best of my shared equipment early, but still, I find myself kiting every boss fight. It doesn’t matter how fast I slam arrows into the boss, how much knockback I put into it, or even if I glave him a few times and slow him down, he’s still going to run up to me and chew my face off if he gets into melee range.
I’ve been trying Outlander for my first class and I feel the same way (though to be honest, I’m got used to constant kiting from playing GW2!). I also thought that hand cannons were for Outlanders, and I was pleased I got a very good one, so I equipped it and then I couldn’t figure out why none of my abilities were any good (and from reading here and looking around, I now see those are Engineer weapons!). I’m also a bit confused as to what I should dump my points into, since I figured at first I should be dodgy, but now that I’ve gotten some good skills, I run out of mana like nobody’s business.
Of course you kite bosses, you’re a ranged class! :) Seriously though, invest in the… what’s it called, Vault or something like that? It leaps you backwards, it’s cheap on mana, and most importantly it blinds the foes that are chasing you - including bosses. On top of that, it’s faster than running backwards which means you’re shooting more and running away less.
It does wonders for your survivability, I use it all the time.
Unfortunately the game simply crashes upon hitting for Play for me. It worked fine the other night, but now that I have time to play…nothing! Oh well, I submitted a crash report and emailed their support address.
Hmm. Try going to my documents/my games/runic games/torchlight 2 beta and deleting all settings files, then try again.
This worked! Thanks, I played for a while just fine. But it crashes again unless I repeat these steps. Good to be able to play at least.
Yeah, I’ve found it mandatory for any boss or champion that has decent movement speed. There are a lot of bosses you can just kite normally, but for the quick ones you really need to be able to vault out of their melee swings and any other short-range abilities they may have.
Would you mind sending me your local-settings.txt file, and also tell me what your desktop resolution is? If you would also check the ingame settings and see what they say about resolution? Email me at [email protected] - thanks!
What’s the proper channel for reporting stuff? Mostly an “inquiring minds want to know” question as so far all I’ve run into is the arcane info pane seeming to not report elemental damage from sockets, but I would hope that’s already a known issue!