Stuff I've learnt in 65 hrs, plus things I wish the game did.

[hollow jasper]

Context, I have 4 classes at or above 25 and every class at 10 to 15, so all ascensions. I've played through NG+1 but +2 is psychotic so I can't be bothered to go further.

Deterministic farming and crafting are really cool in this game. Being able to do trinket runs to citadel entrance skip to get crafting materials is cool and allows for pretty flexible crafting. The prefix/suffix crafting also feels really good, and allows turning and good base type into the desired gear.

Getting blueprints is kind of troublesome, and the best method is running Forest 1/2/3 with the farsight architect modifer. Blueprints spawn in the same location as resource caches, and these 3 floors have no hidden side areas and most spawns are along the run. Took about 4 or 5 hours to get 75% or more of the blueprints. This is a bit too excessive for most people playing, so it would be nice if we had an architect modifier that increased the reliability in getting blueprints during normal runs. Perhaps like material mania where instead of getting resources they're replaced with blueprints. No one else I've played with is willing to be spastic and farming forest 1/2/3 for 5 hours so they can craft gear.

The attunement system for trinkets is kind of neat, but it has two major problems. The first being that trinkets are shared with your class points and weapon mastery points. The second being that there is no way to start with said trinket so spending guaranteed sources of power on theoretical pickups feels really bad. If either of these things was different they would feel a lot better. My personal suggestion would be to allow us to tune to the trinket an additional time to start with it on a run, or let us pick a few of each to start with. Perhaps make trinket attunements take the same blue/red shards that crafting and some town upgrades require instead of class points. As it is now, the attunement system is mostly ignored by everyone except for 2 or 3 extremely powerful ones, but it just feels miserable investing in them to never see them.

Another system is the skill perks from the skill orbs as well as the starting perks you can select in town. Some classes and promotions are extremely dependent on these to have a successful or good feeling run. Like the Summoner Warlock where Harvest to get essence stacks on kill is extremely important. Most of Summoner Warlock's potential is in the followers, and as soon as you have no followers and no essences to spawn more, you're forced into corner camping easy fights while the gargoyle kills things or you can melee something to get enough stacks to start going again. This can be extremely difficult to do later in runs and on higher difficulty. Trying to melee something in NG+1 Courts to get essence stacks is a death sentence.

In tandem with the previous is that skips generally give you better and more trinkets at the cost of skill orbs, and this is substantially more punishing on skill perk reliant classes to the point where it just isn't feasible to take a skip on NG+1/2 on a class like Summoner Necro, Warden Ranger, Assassin Rogue, etc. Extra trinkets never makes up for the loss in power from missing skill pickups.

Another suggestion is to make skill pickups weighted towards skills that you have levels in. Similar to how you've weighted equipment pickups and merchants based on what attributes the player has allocated. If summoner Warlock has maxed essence, gargoyle and fiends, I most likely never want to see the whip perks. Ever. I'll never take them. This would give players more agency in fleshing out their builds and make the perk reliant classes a bit more consistent in runs.

Everyone is complaining about melee falling off in higher difficulty and they're not wrong. It can be extremely difficult to push with weapon builds, especially melee weapon builds past NG+1. A simple fix that would help some of the weaker classes struggling with this would be to give us a Dex based shield. Spending 40+ strength attributes to equip a 50 block shield is a massive penalty to rogue/ranger/warlock and the option of having a shield swap would go a long way towards increasing their capabilities in endgame.

While speaking of offhands, tomes are probably the worst equipment item in the game. At the very best they're a stat stick for casters, but their actual abilities are not useful past early in the game and it's almost never the right thing to spend mana or cast time on at endgame. Casters need an offhand that gives them some sort of defensive capabilities like shields give Str builds. Right now shields are almost mandatory at high difficulties because of the touhou projectile spam bullet hell that starts in Barracks.

Last thing I'd like to mention is New Game Plus. Enemies are faster. They deal more damage. They have more health. They now curse to reduce armour/resists. Bosses gained mechanics, speed, and stats. Yet, you still give us a massive armour/resistance penalty for even stepping into NG+. Shadow curse does this already but we can play around it. We can't play around a massive reduction to armour and resists for just being in NG+. You can't even craft your way out of it because the affixes for resists and armour share an opportunity cost with any form of damage output. This especially affects Str and melee builds the most, and is part of the reason they fall off a cliff as soon as they hit NG+. Paladin goes from being one of the strongest and highest DPS options in NG0 to being frustrating and ineffective in NG+1 entirely because of this. Remove the armour and resistance penalties or add another tier of equipment to the game and add basic resistances to equipment that doesn't share an affix with damage or QoL.