@2ndchallenge my point on the killstealing wasn’t that I dislike teamwork in the game. As you said, one of the great appeals are intense back and forth duels. My point was that a game with slow time to kill and spammy skills doesn’t support back and forth duels, it supports randomly getting fired at from the side by a magical ability while in the middle of one of those great duals with another player. Faster time to kill means that the length of a duel is shorter/each hit is more important. That generally prevents something drawn out enough that other players randomly run in from the sides, but can be in depth enough still that there is back and forth in the time that is involved.

No matter what the win condition is, a large portion of the fun in the game comes from the individual instances of combat. I disagree that dancing around and keeping distance would actually slow the game down or make it less skill based. If the weapons sped up to some % of the movement options, it would still be very skill based. Both players can move faster, getting out of weapon range wouldn’t necessarily be easier.

@2ndchallenge I agree that cooldowns should be a bit longer, it feels pretty spammy right now.

I disagree that it should be this slow though. Just because something is faster paced doesn’t mean that it’s any less skill based. You have all the same depth in the gameplay mechanics and weapon combat, but all the action unfolds more quickly. That has the slight upside of it becoming a bit less killsteal-y, which the slower combat promotes (dueling someone for a while before their teammates come out of nowhere and jack the last hit).

Same thing goes for more fluid movement (the wallrunning etc that someone else mentioned). Almost adds more of a skill ceiling really, because you have more movement flexibility, it becomes an additional thing you’re managing / could be doing better than the opponent.

Right now the Alchemancer’s right click dodge only seems to go backwards. It’d be great and more intuitive if it just shifted you in whatever direction you were moving. You can simulate some control over it by looking in the opposite direction of where you’d like to go, but that feels really clunky.

Ideally it would shift based on the player’s input directions, not where they’re looking (vs teleport which felt pretty good, if a bit clunky when in a fight). This would open up some more gameplay options as well, allowing you to use it while running away or to shift towards a player/into a fight.

It also feels like with such a long cooldown (vs block) it should at least shift you out of range of a Taurant swing up close.

I don’t mind the leaflike menus all over, but the glowing shifting stuff in the main menu is really distracting/disorienting and makes a pretty cluttered menu more confusing initially. The more I play the more I’m getting used to it, but it was a shock initially.

You don’t need a gear icon and the text OPTIONS, especially if only the gear will actually open the menu. Stick with the gear to stay consistent with the X for exit, or use the text EXIT.

The X button at the top right of the main menu doesn’t seem as contextual as I’d expect it to be. If I go into options, select some new keybindings, and then click apply, the window doesn’t close. My first thought is to click the X button to close the options window, which closes the game instead. You also can’t use ESC to go back until you’ve clicked Apply. You can’t click the gear again to collapse the menu or anything, you can only click the home button (as far as the on screen control icons go).

The home button is off on it’s own on the left away from the other control icons. It glows purple when you’re on it, but I didn’t notice it for a while. When in other menus (where it is the button you need to escape), it’s grey and blends in to the wavy background.

Initial feedback :D