My mage is level 71 and on level 103 in the rift thing and I’ve been finding it extremely easy mode using Fireball/Anomaly/Tear/Healyport/Golem. I’ve messed around with virtually every other skill in the fireball slot, but I think it works the best. The rune that empowers all your other spells with fire damage really adds a ton of dps.
The Temporal Mage passive that makes you do a second hit for 120% damage, 1.5 seconds later on enemies with Stasis is just completely busted, so I’d go for that first.
Nope. offline is actually more convenient because if you get stuck somehow (like a quest objective doesn’t update properly or the like) you can edit your character file.
It’s not, it’s just new and shiny and ARPG fans like trying new things.
It’s very pretty and it’s fun to play and at this stage my 14 hours have been well worth it, but I suspect it will need some ongoing support to maintain a playerbase. There are some interesting mechanics, but it will need tweaking/tuning/balancing.
The current popularity is good, as it should fund the devs and it could turn into something quite special.
POE and GD diehards at this stage will probably fall back to those, but D3 players I think will find a lot to like in Wolcen.
I’m about to rage quit over this stupid ass Act 1 boss. There is nothing I can do that saves me from his invulnerable instant kill ring of fire and I never have enough lives to get through it, despite not dying a single time during the first two fights. There is a tiny tiny tiny window of invulnerability if you roll during it but its never enough to save you, and you have to do it goddamn 20 times in this fight.
And it would cost all the gold I have gotten to this point to respec my skills and tree, but if you gotta go full fucking tank thats what i would do if anyone on the goddamn internet had built any kind of recommended specs before you hit goddamn level 50.
And should note I’m level 21, have all yellows with offensive and defensive gems, and have double common health pots.
Dodge does the trick. It works similar to a Dark Souls game in that dodge roll isn’t just movement, you’re invulnerable during the animation. So when the ring goes outward, just dodge through it.
The core combat in this game is drastically better than Grim Dawn or Path of Exile. But it is buggy. Especially if you play online, which I’m regretting sticking with. I spent a couple hours on the Act 2 boss, frustrated I was getting killed by seemingly unavoidable, disjoint, or outright invisible attacks only to eventually figure out that after you fail once it gets completely desynched and none of the attacks or level elements visually match what’s actually happening anymore. Even going back to main menu wasn’t good enough, I had to exit the whole game and come back to try again. Fortunately, when I could actually see the damn attacks I got it on the second try.
I could have done without a mimic of Baal, the worst fight in Diablo 3 but it was still fairly fun when it was working. Really though, did they even test some of this stuff at all?
Interesting review. I had not heard of people having issues running the game in the first place, and the online issues mentioned were so prevalent I just played offline with no feeling of loss. As to the game’s tortured development, I wasn’t involved with the Kickstarter so I purchased it as it stands now, not as it was promised so I don’t have any issues with what happened there.
I agree that the storyline is pretty cliche, but honestly am not really expecting more from an ARPG. The graphics and sound are excellent though.
I find the gameplay engaging, even though as it turns out the devs have a bit to do to work on scaling all the abilities - to me this feels similar to what Path of Exile went through, so if the Wolcen devs support the game after-the-fact it’ll be great, and if they don’t it will die a deserved death.
I did experience the same graphic glitch he saw at the end and I was amused by it also.
I’ve seen a couple of Youtube influencers streaming it and whether or not you should believe them is up to you. I did notice that they sponsored CohhCarnage for a 3 hour stream and he played the game for about 30 more hours as unsponsored - so I assume he liked it!
Bottom line is I think Wolcen is a pretty good ARPG with the potential to be top tier. I disagree that it’s unfinished and felt it was a good value for me. It seems perfectly playable to me but I certainly understand someone wanting to wait for a few patches.
Most ARPGs, for that matter. How many massive rescaling/rebalancing patches has Diablo 3 had? I remember when a bunch of skills used to do stuff like 70% of weapon damage and stuff like that, and due to that a whole bunch of skills felt completely underwhelming. Most of those do 200-750% now. Itemization received a total overhaul as did the game structure with the release of the expansion and Adventure Mode.
Par for the course when it comes to games with a lot of moving parts, IMO. The issues are there, they just aren’t unexpected.
Yep it’s got a ton of potential but it basically screams beta to me. Weird bugs, tooltips that are either uselessly vague or outright incorrect, a missing final act, and an endgame that is essentially diablo rifts but like… how they were when diablo 3 released them, before they figured out how to do map generation that didn’t trail off into a million dead ends that have more running aimlessly than fighting. Itemization and balance also don’t feel right at all.
Despite all that, I actually am really looking forward to checking back in 6 months, but this completely feels like early access to me.
Right? D3 was a shitshow at launch, and while the connection errors got sorted fairly quickly, the game itself was vastly different from the state it in now.
I think Grim Dawn had the smoothest launch out of these titles.
I agree on Grim Dawn. I had originally typed “All ARPGs”, thought about Grim Dawn, then changed it to “Most ARPGs”, since it definitely seemed to be the exception. You can see the TQ experience in that game’s release.
One issue that Wolcen is facing is they had to do a major revamp of the core game when they went from Alpha->Beta. Their original vision (open world, player housing, etc) sounds awesome, but they clearly bit off way more than they could chew. So they had to break the game apart and glue it back together in something they could reasonably achieve for a 1.0 release. I feel for them, as the project I worked on for the last 2 years just went through something similar. We had big plans but problems arose that made it clear we could never have it ready in time, so we had to shift our targets and call an audible in order to get it out the door.
I still really like the core that’s there, they have a terrific foundation to build on and it seems like the game sold pretty well. They have their work cut out for them in terms of general cleanup and polish, bugfixing, and balancing, but as long as they stay on top of it I think this game could have some real legs.
I have enjoyed this MUCH more than I did D3 at launch. But if anyone asks if Grim Dawn or PoE are better games, of course they are. They’ve both been out for years. With any luck, Wolcen will have a similar trajectory, since I think it is currently a better game than any of those at launch.
The campaign was just the right length as far as I’m concerned. I did have to jump through some hoops to avoid soft-locking on the final boss, but got through it. The T-pose in the endgame cutscene that followed was a hilarious bug. Only done one bounty thing, so can’t comment much being that wrt endgame.
