Leveling

No, there is a discard deck...all your stuff cycles though when youve gone through the unused card pool.

 

Its not random crap...most of the items have a theme. Low level items with a Gold or Silver level ability generally come with a black level ability. No peice of equipment in the game is random though, you get to see it all before you equip and use it. I will say though that early cards that dont seem so good, become good when you can stack many of those cards together. Early on, a single memory loss/wavering faith seems like crap...about lvl 9 or 10 though when you can stack 6 or 7 of those effects well...those cards become a lot more useful.

Your build strat will most def change over the leveling process...Early on, my cleric was a straight up healer with lots of heal cards and the skill that increased healing as well as drawing more heal cards on cast. Was great until i found the Items later on that had vampiric healing and huge damage....Now he heals a bit, but also deals some good damage.

 

The deckbuilding is a bit irksome. I already provided some feedback on the first impressions thread but I'll write something here to stir a bit of a conversation.
The problem I have is not that you have card suites instead of cards. I can dig that. It's just another strat level above and beyond what we're used to. And ANOTHER strat level to count for talents. Cool. It takes some getting used to, but it's ok.
However. The issue of low level deckbuilding being unfun is something I found too. You just don't have many options, your cards suck, you're stuck with a lot of slots that are even just empty. Having three Walks in your fighter deck at level 3-5, because your Human Skill slot is empty and you can't even afford to buy the crappy skill from the shop as it's cost is 75 gold (random shops suck) - that's not fun. It's not deckbuilding, it's being left without the option to deckbuild.
As I see it, deckbuilding is about choosing between an almost limitless set of options those that suit your needs. Perhaps you want to create a particular deck, perhaps you are evaluating the benefits and cons of each and every option to get exactly what you want, but the purpose is to choose and create from a list of options. The loot system makes it so that at first, these options just aren't there. You have no loot and are stuck with crappy cards. You can't make decisions or try to formulate a strategy, you just haven't got the options to do that. Not only that, but the crappy excuse of a loot at lower levels make it so that many "options" are much of an option at all. Look, I traded 3 Walks for a Run, a Shuffle and a Battlefield Training. Meh, I might have done better with just the Walks.
Now I'm personally not scared by the "difficulty" this provokes. I went through the campaign losing only two adventures (as in, running out of retries; losing a battle became common near the end, before evaluating the strat egy needed to overcome it). Damn monkeys they're too f***ing mobile. What I'm scared of is the impact this has on a new player. Me, I was hyped up about the game and I find it cool. But I would try to do something to ease this process.

An idea I had is to switch a bit how shops work. I would add a page on the shop (BM will figure out what the interface should look like, but it needs to be distinct so that new players immediately graps the concept) that stays present and never resets. This page would have some basic equipment for the various body parts, and it would be in addition to normal equipment. The equipment here would have common names like "Iron Axe" or "Cloth Armor" or whatever, because in universe these are things the merchant can just make on the spot. You wait a couple days in-universe and there you have it, the weaponsmith forged you a simple axe. No frills attached. These equipments should provide the basic options for each class and race. They should be sub-optimal (even at the level they become available) and streamlined. They should have a very accessible price point (the money in this game is ridiculously short!) and they should serve the purpose of making sure a new player can experiment with deckbuilding. A Zapping Staff to try poking with your wizard if you're short on sparks and long range attacks. A simple healing charm for the priest. An axe with only clumsy chops. Simple, efficient equipment that represents something really really basic.

Also, the problem comes again once you start deckbuilding for ranked MP. It wouldn't be so bad IF I could just BUY stuff from the shops. But I can't: the only loot drops that you should sell are treasure, because they aren't useful, and the equipment has a sell value that is abysmal compared to a common price. That means you need to go through some 20 or so battles before actually getting enough gold to buy something. That's terrible. Just really really terrible. I hate being forced to wait for random drops AND random shops, if I want a good staff I should know what it takes to get that good staff. The battles in this game are time-consuming, so if I can play like 2 hours a day, must I really grind for a week before finaly getting something I like? That sucks, it's like an MMO on steroids. I don't play MMOs.

Increasing the sell value of treasure would probably outset this. I should be able to buy a 25 gold piece of equipment after a single adventure, or a couple PvP matches. That's at least half an hour of gameplay, only for having the OPTION of a not-very-strong piece of equipment and try it out in my deck. I don't know, maybe I'm not making any sense, but I feel there is a problem here. Now this is Beta, I played through and had fun. But if the game launches I can't guarantee it would keep my interest for long if I'm not able to make decisive progress towards a certain goal in measurable amounts of time. I won't grind for hours only to buy a stupid piece of random trash that's not even the most powerful out there from the shop. :-/

 

I would definitely agree that the gold grind is way, way to low. Its extremely disheartening to find a rare treasure or worse, an epic treasure...What do they buy me? 10 gold, 50 gold? Thats nothing...there are items in the shop for 1k + and one epic sitting at 4500.....Yes....really. Pisses me off actually as i feel thats a wasted epic roll, and that really makes me turn to MWO or League for awhile.

3 SOLID days of grinding from 1 to 14 and i have 476 gold, fyi. Thats with only buying a few of the human racial skills that were less then 25 golds, due to the rarity of finding them as drops.

BM, until you get to Leadership or Forward thinking, the human racials are dreadful. Battlefield training would be useful if it were range 3


The basic unfilled slot skills are pretty bad. I try to fill them even with stuff i wouldnt normally use.

 

476+ gold in only three days? You must be playing a hell of a lot. If you hadn't bought one or two of those racial skills, you could have bought an Epic. Think about that - every three days you have enough money to buy an Epic item.

Personally, I think that's way too much.

 

Way too much? At about 1 gold per minute? Clearly we do not have the same expectations...
I don't want to play a game that needs that kind of grinding. It's not fun, it turns into a chore. The guaranteed epic chest requires at least 20 games in a single day, which is an enormous quantity of time consumed. So either you expect to grind a hell of a lot and play continuously for like 5 hours a day, or more likely you don't expect people to outfit theirselves with Epic and Legendary items. Which is strange, since the game allows you to do exactly that, rewards you for doing that, has based its whole reward system on looting. The point can be made that it should be a slow crawl to magnify the satisfaction of gaining that one item. Legendary items being truly legendary and all that jazz. However it's kind of a poor excuse in my opinion: if the PvP meta is balanced around the presence of Legendary items (and it probably is, as they are pretty much strictly better than non-legendaries), why should I waste tons of hours before accessing that game? It's an artificial barrier that only satisfies those who enjoy the collector aspect of looting. But if that's true, why put something that is clearly designed with PvP in mind (as no other challenge requires the use of legendaries - and yes, PvP does require them if you want to build your team in the best way possible) behind a barrier that is enjoyed by collectors? Perhaps a "hall of fame" where you can place Treasures and a slow grind plus plenty of rarity for those Treasures, while at the same time giving money to those who don't care about collecting them and want to play, alongside a rebalancing of the rarity shop, can satisfy everyone. Or rather, more people than are satisfied now.

I speak from experience when I say that games that require me to grind for hours just lose appeal very quickly. In order to catch me (and by extension, those like me - I think I'm not alone in the category) a game needs to stay fresh due to new content, not to forestall the true content by placing it behind hours and hours of repetitive and boring activity. And the sad part is that the "repetitive and boring activity" in question would actually be playing the game, something I enjoy and that I do not look forward to see turned into a chore.
Someone can try and turn the reasoning on its head and say that I'm supposed to enjoy the process of gaining those benefits, that they are relatively minor and therefore can be considered a reward while not being overwhelming in PvP. However that trail of thought has its flaws: first, I don't think they are "relatively minor"; second, if I'm supposed to enjoy the process I should be able to see progress, which doesn't happen unless you put a tremendous amount of time into the game, or are very lucky. The random aspect of progression means I am always as likely to progress as I am to not progress every time I play (rather, I'm much more likely to not progress, which is even more disheartening), I have no goal to reach except repeat the same actions over and over - a chore. I haven't got, like, a bar on the side of my screen that says "here, when you fill this, one goal is reached". Nay, I do have one, or even two: gold and the MP wins. And here we are again, to the same old problem. I find both ways incredibly time consuming, the MP way because it requires 3-5 hours in a single day, the gold way because it requires around 30 hours over the course of multiple days.

 

Way to much???

Ive been able to play that much because weve had a death in the family, and ive taken off work. CH has proven a good distraction. Anyone else would have taken 15 days of casual play, at about 2 hour a day if you regard THAT as being casual. Casual is regarding as being 30 mins to about an hour in between work, family and other social functions.

Currently, the only Epic item in the shop that is 500 is a Lvl FIVE arcane item with Path of Knives....its 500. There are a few rares at 500 as well, and most rares are still niche. And its completely random whats in there, meaning you may have to wait weeks for an item to cycle thats useable.

The other items are 1000 and 2500...and i did see a 4500

The first epic I found was Woodhomes Wound, a lvl 7 dagger type weapon and by lvl 14...yeah, theres not much reason to use it anymore. AND...i believe i had to buy the treasure hunts to find it. Ive spent $20.oo on the game so far, still have 180 slices after getting the treasure hunts, and even converting that 180 at a 5 to 1 ratio wouldnt give me enough gold to decently outfit a party.