Beta Game Design Feedback

massacre

Overall I would rate this game a 7/10 even with the flaws it has. I think it has the potential to become something truly great, possibly one of the best games I've ever played. I just wanted to give my thoughts on the current game design and areas where I think it could be made better.

In my opinion there are 5 main areas where the game could be improved or that need tweaking.

1. You can only have one copy of each creature in play, so creature spells become worse than useless when you already have that creature in play

In the current state, creature spells become useless when you have that creature on the board, which is a very common occurrence. The problem is that your hand can only hold 4 cards, so you are forced to play these cards for no benefit just so that you can open up the slot to draw another card. You will very often even end up with 4 creatures in your hand, all of which do nothing for you because they are already in play. This makes discard effects way stronger, in fact it changes discard from being a drawback into being a purely positive effect, because not only are they clearing the spell slot of a useless card, they are doing it at no cost. This effectively means you are "gaining" the mana cost of all the useless creature spells you discarded, which you would have been forced to spend in order to cycle them otherwise. For example, Tolarian winds, Suppose you discarded three 12 mana creatures, you just "gained" 36 mana and drew 3 cards!

In my opinion the best solution to this problem is to make EVERY creature spell have an activated ability, so that they never become a dead card in your hand. This would improve gameplay by a great deal, as there is nothing more frustrating than ending up with a hand full of creature spells which do nothing.

Another option is to make creatures spells be passive summons, i.e. the moment you put them in your deck they get summoned, and they won't get drawn during gameplay. This way the creatures that have an activated ability would just shuffle a bonus spell into your deck that you can cast when it gets drawn. This seems like a less attractive option to me in comparison because it makes the gameplay seem less dynamic.

2.Reflect enemies are unbalanced, reflect deals too much damage and can one-shot you very easily

Enemies with reflect are by far the most frustrating enemy to play against, they are multiple times more difficult than any other enemy with the same stats. Against a champion or elite with reflect the only way to kill them is to whittle them down with primary attacks or using your creatures, and god help you if you encounter a group of enemies with reflect. If you meet a group of reflect enemies then even using your primary attack will one-shot you. The damage that is reflected back at you seems way too high, like 10-20 times what it should be, Conversely, your own reflect spells seem really lackluster, because they scale with the enemies damage, which tends to be really weak compared to their health. Reflect abilities should really all be replaced with retaliate, such that the damage returned scales with the attack value of the creature being damaged.

3. WASD movement has a very clunky primary attack which fires in the direction you are moving rather than where your mouse is aiming

Very simple fix, just make the primary attack go where your mouse is aiming, the way it is now is very difficult to aim. Every other ability and spell in the game is aimed based on the mouse, so why not the primary attack?

4. The way the game decides whether you are in combat is bad

From what I understand, basically you are "in combat" if "A creature you have dealt damage to isn't dead yet". This is very clunky because mana regeneration only works in combat. Even if you are taking damage from an enemy, you will not be considered "in combat" until you damage them back!

This setup encourages a kiting style of play where you poke an enemy and then run away so that you can regenerate mana and cast abilities while the enemies chase you around. I think the in-combat designation should be decided based on your proximity to enemies instead. The exact range you could be considered in combat could be tweaked to whatever the devs consider reasonable.

5. Mana regeneration doesn't work outside of combat.

This makes certain cards like rampant growth and dark gamble much much worse, because you might cast the spell just before combat ends and then you gain no benefit from it. Ironically dark gamble usually gives more mana to you by discarding a useless creature spell than it does from the mana regeneration effect, but I digress. The obstacle here is obviously that if you allow mana regeneration out of combat, that would allow people to infinitely summon creatures and cast healing spells outside of combat, right?

In my opinion, there are four possible solutions to this. The first option is to make creatures disappear when combat ends, which I don't think is a good solution, especially considering how clunky the in-combat recognition in this game is.

The second option is to make all spells unplayable outside of combat, or to make just creature and healing spells unplayable outside of combat (meaning that you can still open with a damaging spell against an enemy to initiate combat).

The third option is to just not care about this aspect, and allow people to heal and summon as they see fit outside of combat. People usually end up having all of their creatures out after a minute or two anyways and carrying them around the map, and all summoned creatures get cleared when you enter a boss area or travel to a new zone as well.

The fourth option is one that I mentioned earlier, making creatures be passive summons, if that were the case this would no longer be an issue since creatures are already out all the time anyways.

Bonus- Unclear stats, spell descriptions and AOE indicators

Another thing, which is more of a minor issue, is that a lot of the stats and attributes in the game are unclear and spell text is often very vague. Minion attributes in particular are very unclear in how they affect your dps. There are times when it seems like my minions are doing tons of damage and times when it feels like spells are doing all the work. The card text on the creature spells is clearly innaccurate because a 7/7 and a 1/1 both say they are doing 90-100 dps. It would also be nice if cards showed what the cooldowns of creatures' special abilities were. Some creatures also appear to attack more often than others, and this difference in attack speed is also not reflected in the card text either. Another thing which really bothers me is that a lot of the spell cards have inaccurate AOE indicators, in other words the actual hitbox of the spell does not match the indicator when you are casting it. This applies to a lot of enemy abilities as well, where I am clearly outside the indicated area and I still take damage.

zenraij

Going to say 3) WASD does not feel bad for me. The only issue I have with it is I lose my mouse when I need to cast because I use the right mouse button to look.