Stream Legends is a newly released semi-idle RPG that runs in the panels underneath a Twitch stream, and features a Diablo-like loot system and the ability to play with the others in the stream to build up a town and take on raids. In my opinion, the best part of the game is that the combat system is actually fairly deep. While heavily RNG-based, it has a lot of nuance, and making a "perfect" gear set is something you are always working towards, going for synergy and robustness. Issues
Stream Legends has a few issues that I've noticed from a couple days of playing. These include clarity, usefulness of certain effects, prices, and bugs. First, clarity. The combat system is not terribly clear how it works. From my testing, all items have a cooldown that runs by hundredths of a second. However, the log and HP values only update every second (turn), and simply shows what happened in the previous second. On top of this, the log shows events in a particular order: armor buffs, armor debuffs, weapon damage, weapon effects. The player always comes before the enemy within each of those categories. Because of this ordering, it is unclear what the order is of the events happening at hundredths of a second. While the player could figure this out through calculating from the cooldowns, it adds a lot of work to determine, say, if an effect happened before an attack, and thus boosted that attack. Or maybe, each turn executes all previously recorded events in a specific order. This adds nuance to choosing your gear based on their cooldowns and specific effects, but since it's unclear how the game is processing the events, there's no real way to knowledgeably play around this. Another issue of clarity is a small one, and that is if a weapon is one or two handed. Since it doesn't say, purchasing weapons could be risky, and so my group has opted to basically never purchase weapons on the off-chance they'll be wasted. Clarity in other areas of the game would also be welcome. For example, what does leveling your town actually do? What causes you to get to a different tier of enemies, and the different avatar looks? Does the "watching" buff at the top ever change (having only played two games, but both gave the same buff)? How long does a raid last? These all could use some explanation, either in game or on a page that can be accessed through the game. A few of the effects in the game are near useless, while others are obviously very powerful. A prime example of a useless effect is reducing the enemy's chance to crit. Since there is no baseline chance to crit, and each enemy has its own gear with the possibility of having crit, owning a crit reducing item is almost always wasted space. Unless you're against an enemy who happens to crit often, you're better off using a different item entirely. Along the same lines are elemental resistances and self-reduction of miss chance. Maybe in raids at a later point, elemental damage becomes more of a problem, but the vast majority of damage in the game is physical, so elemental resistances are simply wasted except in very niche situations. Another type of uselessness happens when a weapons cooldown is too long to benefit from its own effect. I have a sniper rifle with a 3.72 cooldown and a 3 second duration crit buff, but the crit doesn't apply to the hit that causes the buff. Therefore, the effect does nothing. This is more of a case-by-case basis. On the other end of the spectrum, effects which provide armor shred seem exceedingly powerful. At my current level, using legs that give 300 armor shred for 3 turns causes my weapon to do roughly double damage on each attack. This is effectively a 100% chance to crit when the effect is up that stacks with crit effects. I'm sure this is weaker if the opponent has higher armor, but it's still extremely powerful compared to other effects that have similar chances at only 15-20% chance to crit. Prices of items from the shops seem like quite a lot. Even with constant playing, it takes multiple hours to earn the gold for some items from the smiths. However, the real issues lies in the fact that it pales in comparison to contributing to leveling the town and its buildings. Because the items will eventually get replaced, the gold effectively disappears. Compare this to applying this to a building and to a town, where the gold is never "lost," as your contribution is always saved. Finally, as with all applications, some bugs exist. I've only noticed two so far. Refreshing The Hunger from Exceptional Bloodthirsty Daggers will cause you to deal 40 damage regardless of the remaining duration of the debuff, which can yield more damage from a buff than expected (up to 50 instead of 30). A raid reset while a raid is up will cause none of the raids to reset. Suggestions The following are some suggestions that I feel would improve the game, addressing the above issues.
Thanks for reading. I do like the game, and I might make a post later about what I like about the game in detail (for example, the choice between weapon effect damage or weapon damage itself when also using damage boosts, or the ability to run different builds with different purposes). I hope to see this game get a little more fleshed out, as it stands as a neat and addictive game, perfect for low-cost/energy viewer interaction.
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Nicholas PorterMMO-Focused Archives
November 2018
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