by Kinsman on Sat Feb 18, 2012 4:59 pm
Finally compelled to register having been playing since alpha and the start of the beta. So hello.
Firstly, had tons of fun with the game so thanks for that, its coming along very well, mostly. However, I have a few issues with this update, firstly I'm struggling to see the point of ever playing the Paladin, I mean 25% physical resist and a helpmah glyph, isn't horrible, but its not exactly amazing since even more magical attack creatures are in AND there are now resist reducing creatures in quite a lot of dungeons. On top of that is the increase in mana cost of helpmah. The lack of switching deities and no piety loss was an interesting thing however, as it let the paladin use unique approches, perhaps some were too powerful, I don't know I'm not that good at the game to find great exploitative tactics much. Anyway, the replacement for that means he has two average bonuses and one pretty huge drawback, no god switching AND health loss? Why bother? I know I won't.
Secondly, the new interface is horrible, it breaks several golden rules of interface design, not least by reordering the mana and health bars and moving lots of others things to different places, the backgrounds make text *very* hard to read and quite jarringly ugly as a result and worst of all the monster health bar is barely readable for me, I literally can't tell without looking very hard how many hits I need to kill a monster etc. All this information *needs* to be very clear as its of paramount importance to the game, whilst the UI is very pretty (in some ways, I find the inventory part to be very messy and visually cluttered), its pure form over function in its new state and in a game which relise so much on detailed information to be clearly visible, it fails miserably.
Sorry for the negatives.