This is fairly surprising, as this was my second character to get to the Far East, and the first to do any of the prides. The goal of this run was to dual-wield mindstars, and, while the game was not kind to me in terms of mindstar drops, I think I achieved my goal. I have to assume there are tier 4 and 5 mindstar artifacts...
Random stream of consciousness time!
The last half of the game felt like kind of a grind. The areas were huge, the enemies were numerous, and there just wasn't much to it. On the other hand, the Charred Scar event and the final boss were pretty great. I loved fighting with Aeryn.
This was my first game where I got prodigies, and they were fairly useful. I'm of the opinion that magic is a broken and distinctly unfun mechanic as it exists in tome, and so I built to negate it as much as possible. I had to rely on Ancestral Life and mindstars' when-hit effects to keep my equilibrium low, which mostly worked.
Sticking the points into Harmony was a mistake. Grim Resolve is more than enough.
Unnatural Body is garbage. It's a stepping stone in the early game but is useless middle and late. It should be changed to something that isn't such a trap.
Thick Skin shouldn't be in the game. Either make the 15% All resistance acquirable elsewhere, or just remove it. It's too good to not get, and it's not an exciting or satisfying use of generic points. I would've loved to have gone deeper into Mindstar Mastery, but I just didn't have the points. You could make a similar argument about the other Combat Training skills, but at least they have some decision-making involved.
Rampage was, of course, the keystone tree of the game, and yet it ended up falling off in usefulness in the latter half. It ended up mostly being used as a movespeed boost with a movement infusion for escapes. This is because Dominate and Harass Prey (the two best actives in the Cursed repertoire other than "start Rampage") take "1 turn" and not "1 attack turn", even though they're both attacks. Since talents also reduce rampage's duration inherently, tons of rampage was lost to those two skills, which are just too good to pass up. I would like to see moves with speeds of "1 attack turn" to help make this flow better.
While I did love the final fight, the, well, ceremony of it all could've been a bit more grandiose. It didn't really feel like a final fight.
I would like to see more controlled ways of getting desired truarts. Something like trading in X tier Y truarts for 1 chosen tier Y one. It would be nice to know that if you did enough dungeons you could guarantee, for example, Serpent's Glare and Bloomsoul in the first half of the game.
I feel too reliant on good escorts. In particular: Nature's Touch is just so important for people without burst heals (and even those that do).
To reiterate on what I said above, the prides were long and boring. Just heaps and heaps of enemies. The only pride I had trouble with was the necromancer one. Of course that also had a lot to do with me forgetting I had Aura of Silence.
It's disappointing that the Oozemancer dungeon only randomly appears, since you have to play for so long in order to see if you were lucky. It's unlikely you'll hit 30 before going to the Far East (unless probably as a Yeek), so you have to do quite a bit before you can even see if it exists.
Light Radius is a bad stat. You should be like +4 naturally and just always keep it there. It sucks playing in the dark.
Tons of items don't list their usage speeds--this is bad.
Please give a special message when you pick up the one artifact gem that has negative effects until you imbue it. I could not figure out why my autoexplore wasn't working until I asked in chat. It was super frustrating.
Please give a special message when you can pick a prodigy! It's very easy to miss the button in the bottom right.
The game hard-crashed twice during the run. It feels like a memory leak issue, as the game chugs more and more as you play for longer. In addition, I had to delete my sandworm lair zone file because the big burrower wouldn't respawn.
Anyway...
All in all, it's a pretty fun game, but it has a long way to go before it's really good, I think. That's probably not a very popular opinion, but well...
