Pardoxic Gameplay Design and other stuff

So far I've played 375h of this game according to my steam profile. I wanted to wait untill I had a decent understanding of the endgame before posting my thoughts on the things I feel need adjusting or that don't make sense to me.

My top problem is the seemingly paradoxic game design I'm encountering in the endgame. Through the campaign you are incentivised to try things and learn from them when it comes to fighting a boss or completing an area. You are not heavily penalised for dying and it works well with the more methodical and "slow" combat.But as soon as you reach the endgame, all this changes completely, and that is a huge problem imo.

If you die mapping, you lose the map, and any loot you didn't pickup, in addition to the time you spent mapping. Many people in the community think this is great, that there needs to be a punishment for failure, but I would argue the punishment for failure itself is the time wasted trying to complete the map. This problem becomes less of a problem as you juice up your character/build, but many players will simply not reach that point due to the frustration they'll experience on early mapping.

An early mapping system that, may I add, is terribly explained. At no point you're told you need to juice your maps in order to get enough waystone drops to sustain them, or that you NEED specific atlas perks to be able to sustain them.

In general, the "tutorial" stuff is lacking big time, and any new player (which I kind of am one) is forced to go on youtube to figure out how many in-game systems and synergies work, and that is a failure in terms of communication.

But I would say the biggest problem with how the game is currently structured, during most of the game you are given an adequate punishment for failing, but when it comes to maps, and worse still, pinnacle bosses, the punishment becomes exponential and deincentivises experimenting or even trying out the content without previously watching a guide on how to kill the boss, or worse still, forcing you to use an overpowered build in order to straight up phase skip the boss to death, because you don't want to risk the ONE try you have at the boss. A boss you've never seen before, full of complicated mechanics, that you somehow have to first try or lose another 100 hours trying to find another citadel in order to try again. This is terrible design. It makes any player that wants to try their own thing immediately rennounce and go for the meta unless they want to waste hours and hours of their life for no real reward.

You guys neeed to figure out what you want. As it stands the game has a great variety in terms of builds you can make and things you can try out, but that variety is completely shot in the foot due to punishing the player heavily for doing these things, thus the paradoxic game design I mention, to me this is the biggest problem the game has currently, and it really needs adressing. Difficulty is great, but when you have to waste tens of hours between each boss encounter you don't even learn anything becauses you forgot how the fight was long before you fight him again. This is artificial difficulty, not engaging one.

I have other issues with map design aswell. Places like Decay are a complete mess in terms of visual design. You have effects on the ground like green puddles that look super similar to on death effects all over the place,giving 0 visual feedback as to wether the player is standing on an on death effect or a cosmetic one. You also do the map with visually unclear collisions forcing the player to overlay the map 100% of the time if they want to know where they're going, since many of theses obstacles with collision are the same mushroom models than decorative ones through the map that have no collision, extremely confusing design, very unfun to play it.

There are other issues in terms of game design. Ascending your character feels like an extremely annoying chore past the first 2 sets of points, and ironically enough, both trials become trivial as soon as your character can delete the bosses without having to engage with the mechanics and/or have enough honor resistance. So it simply drives away less comitted players and rewards people who designed their character to not engage with the mechanics by having very high DPS.

I'm not going to expand on balance issues because I'm pretty sure those will be addressed, but the points made previously are core game design principles that need to be addressed as soon as possible, since they will drive out a large percentagee of new players, with good reason.

One last design issue that I find extremely problematic is on death effects. They are not vissually clear at all for the most part (except the big guys that explode) , when you're being attacked by 25 monsters at the same time, and the ground is already dotted by your firewall, or your grenade explosions, or your herald of ice effects, it is very hard to see subtle little effects on the ground before you get one-shot. This problem compounds itself in poorly designed maps like Decay. And it punishes melee most of all, because if you're exploding enemies from 9 meters away, you will hardly ever die to these, but if you're melee they will be the bane of your existence, and I feel that's unfair. Ranged classes are already advantaged by the nature of ranged combat, but they also avoid most of the problems melee classes have to del with constantly.

Overall I think the game is great, but these design problems are very major and I don't see myself playing this game for years if this is the design principles that are gonna be adhered to. That's my two cents, hope it helps.