During my months of play, I had 3 full playthroughs each on a different difficulty, I was only using a balanced crafting mod that made it so that unavailable recipes were fixed and there was some extra stuff for crafting/bs 5+ which I can't recall having used.
During these playthroughs I had great fun building and leveling the characters from 1-14 at that point most of the builds you created are well rounded and only require some finetuning and you require some blessings from the rng gods as far as loot goes. Even after level 14 I had great fun trying hoard all the arrows and different items making sure I bought essences and trying my best to grab rubies and making sure to say hello to some vendors in order to try and make some sword of the planets and grabbing some sextants and tormented souls.
During these playthroughs I have not been blind, I saw the strength of having talents like zombie/leech and grabbing a ton of resistances. I personally did not like the zombie talent (Even though there is no visual drawback I personally don't feel like playing an undead.) and as far as leech goes, I gave it to Madora on the 1st playthrough and it was rather overpowered. So overpowering that I stayed away from it during my other playthroughs. I am somewhat old school so I did not mind having my mages using healing spells on my melee characters. Although I am not judging anyone who took these talents. That is not the point I am trying to make in this post that will most likely be too long.
The point I am trying to make is, that I felt that it was up to me whether or not I would take some talents that would make the game a lot easier. On my normal playthrough I made a spellsword or battlemage w/e name you will prefer to give it, and I really made sure his fire resistance was allways 120%+ so he could make use of self immolate, phoenix dive and explode and as an added bonus it was great to heal him incidentally with fireballs. (although that was not the initial intention.)
I too have experienced the latest patch, and even though I was just horsing around, trying stuff out in what most likely would not have been my 4th playthrough I was pretty amazed to see that there were some game altering changes that in my opinion were not in the best interest of the game.
As I advocated earlier, I strongly feel that people that want to take full advantage to what the game offers may do so. (Especially in a single player game.) And the people who think it would be too easy or that just don't want to use those advantages can just ignore them. Therefore I am sad to say that I actually am surprised that you put in a hardcap on all resistances which hardcaps at 80%.
*Hardcap means that no matter what you do to increase the % it will never show as more then 80%. You can have 130% fire reistance which is shown as 80% and if you get a 50% resistance penalty you will still have 80%.
I ofcourse have no idea what you guys from development are thinking or what your gametesters are doing, however I do have some issues with this is in general.
The zombie talent is currenly broken because of this, it took me like 1 minute to realize this, how on earth did your gametesters miss that?
During the game you will be able to craft/find/buy a lot of resistance potions and with the introduction of the hardcap there usefulness will decline, especially the large resist all potion (that confers a +70% resistance) feels rather useless to make now as with or without cap the lowest potion will probably suffice in 9 out 10 situations. The search (and joy) from finding elemental essences and/or rubies went down in value aswell. With an enforced hardcap you probably have the basic 4 elemental types capped around level 11-12 with a melee character and that does not include any rubies/essences. The "ultimate" man at arms talent Weather the storm has become utterly useless because with a hardcap there is no reason to "pay" 1 talent point to get an extra 25% basic elemental resist. Not to mention ofcourse sword of the planets loses some of its value aswell.
Add to that, that I could not find the elemental resist 80% hardcap in the patch notes. (I might have overlooked it, so if it was there my apolagies.)
It saddens me to say that for me this last patch even though it has fixed some issues that needed to be fixed, namely actual bugs or performance issues due to technical issues did not really come through as progress.
This is what I expect to happen with games that are in BETA and the developers/testers are like... oops that was not intended. This is not what I expect from paid professionals. You guys have had a lot of time to test this game, and you had the funds to do it. The game picked up a lot of momentum and from there on you did great things and when you released the game, I expected a semi finished product where you *points* were going to polish up the game a bit, add some extra companions, maybe add some extra sidequests or a random dungeon. I did not expect you guys to adress "balance" issues. Those things should have been done in alpha, you had tons of time to test the stuff back then, the fact noone noticed that leech/zombie/glass cannon and or mechanics weren't working as you guys wanted or intended is something you should have noticed then. If you happen to have missed them I will work as free tester in the future to sort out all of this OP stuff for you in order to prevent stuff like this happening in the future.
I am aware that as a game company you can not make every customer a happy gamer. However if you really adress balance issues in a finished single player game that will heavily affect gamepeplay I am somewhat disappointed. I think so shortly after release dealing with balance issues should not be a high priority either.
There is a decent chance I will use this post in topics regarding the lastest patch, this is not because I'm suddenly starting to spam, but I feel strongly about this, so I really want to get my/the message across.
With kind regards,
Rashar.
*Edit: Tried to filter out most of the spelling errors and providing link for 200% resistance mod.
200% resistance mod (All credit goes to Rhidian):
http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=546666&gonew=1#UNREAD
