Campaign: Tales of Maj'Eyal - The Age of Allure

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very fun campaign, i enjoyed it a lot. i beat Beta 3 after a few attempts with annihilator - i wasn't expecting to reach level 100 with 3 prodigies either, so i definitely made some mistakes with items/point investment, but it was still a fun experience. i'll definitely be playing this campaign again soon, it sparked my interest to play again after being kinda burned out from the base game for a while now...

Gearing

i enjoy the ability to enhance the gear you randomly find with various things in the late game, e.g. 30 flat damage reduction, +50 accuracy/powers, etc. rather than the base game where every item ends up feeling the same really thanks to the font, it makes some of the choices more interesting

most of the early game shops felt fine, except the lantern shop in reknor, maybe i just got unlucky but it felt like 90% of them had the zealot ego, so they were unusable

Difficulty

this campaign is definitely hard, harder than the Orcs campaign even imo. i know that's the intended design, so no complaints there. but after fighting the last boss i don't see the weaker classes having a reasonable chance at winning. i consider annihilator a pretty decent class, nothing top tier obviously, but better than half the classes i'd say. yet it was quite a struggle at times

the second half of the game has so many base types that disarm you/put you to sleep. tinkers get disarm immunity so it's fine, but i wasn't prepared for all the sleeps. also with the ridiculously high level enemies you fight, some of their passives become so annoying. like fighting archers/skirmishers with any projectile class, it's basically flipping a coin each time you want to hit them... the last 25% of the game is like high peak on steroids in that respect (spellcaster masterrace i suppose!)

some of the elite bosses definitely felt a bit easy. some of them were quite hard in the early game, but the later game ones (like the oozemancers, i forgot their names) were sooo much easier than anything you fought before then. going from fighting a 32k hp skirmisher/gunslinger randboss with 110 flat damage reduction, to a 15k hp elite boss oozemancer that barely does damage, was definitely quite the contrast

the last boss duo is very nasty, especially the cursed/mindslayer who hit me for well over 6k in a single turn. if my stormshield was down against him then it would be instant death. not having ghoul resillience made it a super sketchy encounter. my defenses felt pretty good throughout pretty much every part of the game, except the last boss who was an outlier, because i didn't have many close calls except for that. the mobility of the last bosses is also quite crazy, i would expect the bulwark/solipsist to be easier to kite while trying to single out the mindslayer, but both of them had exceptional mobility.

i feel like the custom inscription could be buffed as well in my opinion, the one that removes 5 physical/magical/mental effects or sustains. the range on it is quite small, and maybe i'm mistaken but i'm pretty sure i saw it remove negative effects from enemies too (if i'm wrong then please ignore this)

Enjoyment

overall i give it 9.5/10 so far

the deep space section where you control the ship in real time with your mouse cursor is a neat concept. in my personal opinion i felt it was a bit clunky, especially having to go through 5 levels of it. it didn't spoil the overall experience since it's still quite short, but still i feel like it could be a bit shorter or smoother somehow

when i do some more runs i might come back to this thread and leave more feedback now that i feel more prepared to do a second run