Straight to the point

Active Skills / Skill Bar

There should be more than 5 for sure. At least 7. 5 just do not even do justice, considering how much auras/ movement skills / debuffs we have. Necromancer can’t even use a movement skill AT ALL because priorities are extremely, stupidly tight.

Passive /Active Skills Respec / Despec cost

Overall i see no problem with high costs of respeccing. It allows you think ahead more about your build. It will also exhaust the game potential slower. If you give people an option to respec cheaply they will quickly find that "one meta" skill tree and everyone would be following it for ages till major rebalance hits again.

It needs to be streamlined with lower costs though. Currently it’s going WAY TOO expensive if you respec a couple of times. Next to impossible to respec at certain point, cause prices are becoming ridiculous.

Needs to be cheaper to start with and have fixed, CAPPED costs after a certain amount of respec attempts.

What i propose is a free respec once every major patch. Just like PoE does.

For the active skills though, it needs a big fine-tuning. But i know you are already doing that. We should be able to despec little by little, not drop all 20 points entirely. Just not right. You are running naked with no damage or defense and it’s no fun.

Classes

Classes disparity is also huge for now. Some classes have no defense because they need to stretch out and stack damage as well, some classes are ridiculously overpowered in both defense and offense. Some have no movement skills because NO SPACE ON SKILL BAR. I know it’s very early for this, but never allow one class to be much stronger than the others. PoE fought this issue for years, and still does major ascendancy rebalance once in a while.

Skill Wording / Transparency

Wording and descriptions need to be fixed on a lot of skills, since it’s hard to tell what scales what. Like if this debuff affects all damage or it only for this skill… It’s very hard to tell what effects this or that. Literally we are walking blind in most cases.

You have damage numbers and tell us what kills us, it’s already HUGE thing. Thanx for that. Keep going.

Another thing is lazy wording: sometimes i noticed “regen” , sometimes “regeneration”. Just make it all unified. Don’t be lazy folks. I know you are super busy. But proofread your stuff.

Monsters & One-shots

PoE suffered from volatile for years, till it was reworked into a physically avoidable, more transparent thing.

Currently there are TOO MUCH unavoidable one-shots, where you literally can’t do anything, can’t see anything, and then you are dead. It does not matter how much toughness you have. You just die. So, literally it’s not really about the amount monsters and how much you have around them, or your mitigation. It’s about one attack that hits you and you are dead in an instant. Meteor Bear, Glacier Bear, Death Screech, Abyssal Sundering. It’s impossible to avoid it and toughness does not help at all. Not to mention some classes just don’t have Forge Guard toughness. Necromancer is squishy, so if he gets hit by anything he just dies. Fine-tune that stuff. 99% of deaths are one-shots from offscreen.

Unique Items

There should be unique items supporting every type of skill, hopefully. Currently there are some weird contradicting items like this: https://lastepoch.gamepedia.com/Reach_of_the_Grave

While it buffs skeleton archers and mages, it does nothing for skeleton warriors, making them entirely useless. If there is such an item, there should be another unique item buffing just the warriors instead. Otherwise it literally makes an entire part of that skill tree useless. Just an example.

Monolith

I think it’s a great idea with stacking mods and stacking rarity. Although RNG with the mods needs to be fine-tuned. Like for example sometimes you see 25% increased health and 90% increased health for same price.

There is one major problem though, once you stack a lot of mods it is becoming pointless to kill any monsters. Not only it takes too much times for some builds, but it is also incredibly dangerous to catch some Meteor Bear or VOID BROS to one-shot you from offscreen. A lot of fine-tuning needs to be done here. Some one-shot mechanics intensify on highly modded areas.

So, in general ,you just run to the boss as fast as possible to get your fat loots and chain 5+ more monoliths to get arena key. That’s it.

Arena

Always needs to start at your level. Simple as that. Nerds will still go high no matter what, but more casual bros need help to maintain sanity.

Ladder

Ladder wipes are mandatory after every patch. It allows you to inspect viability of different classes, balance, as well as observe and discover exploits. I’ve seen you did that already. GOOD!

Crafting

I honestly like crafting and i think it’s in a good spot. Simple and affective. While there’s a lot of rng it’s overall in good standing. Some bases are hard to get and some tiers are hard to reach. I think it would be good to see tier ranges though

Ward vs. Leech vs. Life Regen

Life Regen is in terrible state for both you and minions. Flat values on character and minions are ridiculously low, that’s why most classes can’t spec into regen as it’s worthless investment. Leech is working great and ward is just INSANELY powerful on some out-of-tune sorcerer teleport builds. Literally thousands of ward against hundreds for other classes. Balance needed, as disparity is dramatic.

There is life potion but no mana potion

At first i was bamboozled by this design idea and still i am. I know that you guys wanted to be original, but it does not really synergize well with the game flow. Running around like idiot for several seconds with minus mana, waiting for your mana to regenerate is just not how action rpg should be played. Don’t look at Diablo 3. They had to stack 90% less resource spent and buff resource generation through the roof on most skills to counteract that issue. It’s like they tried to “fix” flawed design with insane amount of numbers. For example , you give us skill that uses 50% of mana. And then you realize that in REAL situation people can’t use it as much as ythey want to, and then you start creating retarded uniques like “mana cost decrased by 90%”. This is just terrible design to start with. Don’t do this. Be smart.

And i am not saying that mana potion is needed. It’s not! But at the same time it’s a slippery road and currently a lot of skills need their mana costs rebalanced.

Like for example Shield Rush costs 50 mana and is pretty pointless in comparison to Lunge which costs 1.

PoE has mana potion, and while not many people use it in end-game, it still has some use for some intense skills and Mind Over Matter. So throwing away mana potion entirely was a brave decision from my point of view. And i really hope it was worth it in the long run. Cause it would be harder to implement later on, when things will be faster than they are now