Lets now discuss about this Trials update

As a former hardcore player, reaching above 750 ipwr on most toons prior to this update. I've decided to take my time with this update to form a proper consensus. I've seen many posts on day one complaining about the update, I for one knew better than to jump to conclusions with little playtime. Now that I have had a good bit of time, lets get into my opinion shall we.

Loot > I will start by saying, this is the update that would make or kill the game. Unfortunately, this is the latter. Prior to this update, there were many legendary items to be sought after & getting that one lucky drop made it that more precious. It's the same strive for gear that both Borderlands & Diablo had. As of now, there is no cool item/weapon/armor piece. It is now these shards, gear feels absolutely obsolete. Loot drops as of now are overly unnecessarily complex. Ipwr was a great system & now it just feels like a jumbled mess.

Shards/Passives > I shouldnt touch on these too much, as there are still many to be discovered. As of now however, shards are quite lackluster. It almost feels lazy, rather than going through & making a cool item with a neat passive on it, you've just replaced it with rune-like items that feels utterly meaningless & is still left up to RNG. Even then the shards thus far have been rather basic. Defense range/Defense power are essentially the go to for towers. Although, there could be much more extraordinary shards in chaos 5. Haven't seen anything truly unique in chaos 4. 

Progression/Ascension > This is something I felt was done right, Ascension sounds like a great idea! Albeit given enough time there will be a power creep. So far however, I think its terrific! Love the thought of essentially endless progression through a leveling system. No more do I feel i'm literally doing nothing but wasting my time spending a few hours for a certain item to drop & not getting anything. (throwback to the good ol' armored cleanser days) 

Mobs/Special enemies > Now, what made DD1 so great was how well the difficulty was managed. The special nightmare minions (sharken, djinn, goblin copter, spiders) all had something truly unique about them & had to be met with a slightly different approach that would often times require a dps toon or a switch up of a build. DD2 special chaos minions however are not on par with the special enemies DD1 had. Not to say they're terrible & should be removed, just needs some tweaking. The biggest issue with the chaos mobs is that geode. I've seen several posts pointing out the flaws it introduces. Essentially, Many towers are rendered obsolete, along side the siege roller, there is not much option in terms of towers. We have a plethora of heroes with unique defenses, however, we cant use most of them when pushing higher difficulties. This shouldnt be the case & really makes the game stale with few towers to use. Geode & siege roller need to be looked at. 

Conclusion > I covered what I felt was the more important focal point of this update, don't want to go into the meta as that always changes with each update. This game no longer has anything extraordinary for me to look forward to, It was the elusive gear pieces that had me coming back for more. No more do we have any real item to treasure & be proud of. It has withered down to these shards. Lately I've been farming greystone plaza chaos 4 & I realized that's all i'm going to be doing with this update, using nimbus clouds since most towers are rendered pointless. Making micro stat improvements to my gear, praying to RNG for a unique shard to drop. All of this for what? So I can continue to farm the map up until chaos 5? There are no other maps that offer anything unique anymore, no elusive armored cleanser, no whaling monk polearm. Just repeating this map over & over for a decent shard. . . So I can continue to do the same thing. 

I want to hear the communities opinion, now that its the weekend & the update has been out for a while. Would love to hear a consensus from others & what they think  

It definitely isnt fun farming for shards when the ONLY ones that drop are for heroes you don't own .~. And I'm not the only ones experiencing this! a LOT of people are rarely getting shards for the heros they own! Got a Dryad? Well instead have 20 shards for a Gunwitch you DONT HAVE.

Also some SERIOUS work on the monster spawning. Ramsters, Blockades, and Flamethrowers are the only towers NOT negated by these new special monsters, and if they plan to add more Chaos Levels with more guys like this, what's going to be left? Are we all going to be stuff DPSing Chaos 7 cuz there's nothing we can do? :/

Someone's suggestion I really like that they should do, is limit ONE type of them to a lane, and you plan how to handle each rather than go "Dang, They're all coming from every lane. Guess Ill spam Ramsters and hope for the best." And it could be randomized so each go through a map isn't the same! More replayabilty to the limited 5 maps we can play per level, which could also change cuz that's kinda annoying...

With everyone saying (Rather loudly) how unbalanced and unfun the update feels, I hope they tweak everything soon. It's just that small milestone away from being an amazing game!

tl;dr: Good concept, but feels like they threw all their ideas at a wall and are hoping they stick. ._. Probably needed more playtesting before launch

@Xavian's Ghost quote:

tl;dr: Good concept, but feels like they threw all their ideas at a wall and are hoping they stick. ._. Probably needed more playtesting before launch

That is exactly the purpose of an early access. The player is here to help iterating by giving feedback.

There would be no point going in EA for years if they just decide to test things internally. 

@NeedtoDie quote:

@Xavian's Ghost quote:

tl;dr: Good concept, but feels like they threw all their ideas at a wall and are hoping they stick. ._. Probably needed more playtesting before launch

That is exactly the purpose of an early access. The player is here to help iterating by giving feedback.

There would be no point going in EA for years if they just decide to test things internally. 

But...they claim to have been testing THIS update for MONTHS! So SURELY there shouldn't be THIS MUCH of a problem if they did more than make sure the game still ran. Right now, it feels like thats exactly what they did. Now, if they implemented all this SLOWLY into the main game, then that applies, we work on the little bits while adding more, working towards what is here now.

@Xavian's Ghost quote:

But...they claim to have been testing THIS update for MONTHS! So SURELY there shouldn't be THIS MUCH of a problem if they did more than make sure the game still ran. Right now, it feels like thats exactly what they did. Now, if they implemented all this SLOWLY into the main game, then that applies, we work on the little bits while adding more, working towards what is here now.

That depends entirely on who is doing the testing.  Mind you, I'm not trying to diss the remote testing group at all, but you have to consider that the overwhelming majority of those who are able to dedicate that kind of time are going to lean towards the hardcore playerbase, and that playerbase got exactly what they wanted from this patch.  The game is now heavily grindy with a massive difficulty spike, which is what these players have been asking for.  I'm not trying to imply that everyone in the group is of that mentality, far from it, but it does stand to reason that there is a very subjective outlook on feedback that will come from there.

If we think of it as more of fiercely internal testing, and then "release" is the actual play testing (considering this is still early access,) then there really isn't much of a problem.  We're giving our feedback now, and Trendy will respond accordingly.  It's just a matter of waiting and seeing what that response is.

@Valthejean quote:

If we think of it as more of fiercely internal testing, and then "release" is the actual play testing (considering this is still early access,) then there really isn't much of a problem.  We're giving our feedback now, and Trendy will respond accordingly.  It's just a matter of waiting and seeing what that response is.

Hmm, I see where you're coming from, yeah owo 

That definitely makes sense XD So lets hope that Trendy can Balance things out a bit more for us filthy casuals !

One thing Im really hoping for, that more likely wasn't influenced by the testing group, is that loot you earn and is dropped is catered towards the heros in your deck. that way you can focus on making certain heroes what you want them to be, instead of shifting through trash you dont need, or can use for that matter.

Also, if the special monsters like Ogres and Siege Rollers had a small chance to drop shards, that would be pretty nice too

@Dewkin quote:

Ipwr was a great system

Wait what?  I mean, the rest of your post seemed pretty solid...but I had a lot of trouble taking it seriously after this in the opening.  Ipwr was a horrific mess that has done more than its fair share to ruin the game.  It would take a truly ingenious system to somehow worsen the gear situation.  From your post, it sounds like they might have actually pulled that miracle off.  But to claim the starting point was remotely good is...

Dont forget Cyborcs and shield gobs. They also render most towers useless. Cyborcs are nearly same isses as Siege Roller ,disabling floor traps for ages though instead of destroying. Woo we keep mana but the tower still isnt doing anything for us, wasting our very limited DU space.

Shields Gobs are nearly the same as Geodes, nothing can pass their shields, sure you can hurt them from behind, but you can also hurt the geode from inside, but you still cant pass that shield. Launch a Huntress Piercing shot at it from behind? cool you did dmg, but now your big epic move stops cause it hit the back of the dang things shield and cant hit the other guys in front of it x.x

@Shinnyshin quote:

@Dewkin quote:

Ipwr was a great system

Wait what?  I mean, the rest of your post seemed pretty solid...but I had a lot of trouble taking it seriously after this in the opening.  Ipwr was a horrific mess that has done more than its fair share to ruin the game.  It would take a truly ingenious system to somehow worsen the gear situation.  From your post, it sounds like they might have actually pulled that miracle off.  But to claim the starting point was remotely good is...

As of now, what we have is absurd. So much so, even the hardcore players werent sure what the hell was going on with the loot. After finding out that the loot scales off of all your heroes in your deck stats, many have come to a common consensus that its rather dumb. To the casual player, many will have no clue what is going on or how to properly progress & get better gear drops. 

IPWR was a simple made way to see instantaneously if the gear piece is better stat wise. Was nothing more than a simple number identification signifying how well a player was equipped. Prior to this update, yes you can argue that a player that is 750ipwr is better than someone who is 788ipwr due to 750ipwr player having better passives. Regardless of that, what we have now is a pretty awkward system where you dont know if the fully upgraded item you have is worse based off its starting stats compared to a newly found item.  

Just copy everything from DD1 please. I secretly really want a DD1.5 (Not DDE!)

Although I am definitely enjoying this update, I quite like the excitement of seeing new shards when they do drop (I know this excitement will wear off eventually). And the Ascension system, although may need some ironing out, it makes me feel maps where new shards don't drop, aren't completely wasting my time.

I really think shards should drop from certain maps, not certain difficulties, or kinda both. I just miss going to a map for a goal, a target piece of gear specific to that map/difficulty combo. Trials is a cool idea, especially if they eventually change the rotations. But I really miss specific loot. I hope eventually they will create more weapons with locked shards, and we can farm them specifically, but who knows when we can expect that.

This update is 100% a step in the right direction where we look at where the game was and has been prior. It needs a lot of ironing out and I really hope Trendy are watching the forums like a hawk. Because there are a hell of a lot of good posts and threads discussing the game and voicing real concerns and a lot of good solutions - you just have to sift through the complaining and trolling posts first xD

The biggest problem with shards is that early shards seem very boring and dont really alter the way towers act.  

Things would be a lot more interesting if shards had more extreme effects.  

It might be helpful finding a shard that gives extra tower health, but It's rarely ever going to be as exciting as finding a shard that makes projectiles bounce around or something wacky in that direction.  

i do agree this is a step in the general right direction, but dang does it need some serious ironing out and re-balancing, re-toning, etc so forth

@Jojozityjo quote:

i do agree this is a step in the general right direction, but dang does it need some serious ironing out and re-balancing, re-toning, etc so forth

Yeah I was being polite haha. Some areas need to be smashed to *** with a 2h warhammer, as well as ironed out.
Glass half full though, all is writing on the kinds of hotfixes and patches we get in the coming weeks/months imo