Some feedback so far

I want to preface this feedback by saying I am playing SCSSF and I am having a good time 85% of the time I am playing. So this is supposed to be constructive criticisim to help the game improve.

General gameplay loop is great
The appearence of the game is very polished and many skills are satisfying to use.
The complexity of gear and crafting is pretty much in the sweetspot for me.


Points of criticism I have currently:

- Too many build archetypes fall flat. Builds should not need some obscure late game scaling tools to feel good. The current skill floor is way too low considering the challenges currently in the game.

- Trials are way too long and tedious. They feel like a chore. Considering these are forced elements of character progression, they should be less painful to do.

- Hitboxes are messed up.

- Defences are not sufficiently impactful. Except for some outliers defence is barely available to meaningfully scale.

- Bosses are balanced almost exclusively around oneshotting the player with their "gottcha" moves. Considering players constantly get stuck on terrain and weird hitboxes, this gets old very quickly. It feels like a lot of deaths are not the players fault.

- Arbiter is awfull. The mechanics overlap, almost all oneshot and require movement speed which seems hypocrite as it is a rare ressource not strictly mandatory for any other content. Plus his lifepool is low enough to make it seem like the intended way to fight him is to outdamage the fight. This makes makes weaker builds feel worse then they already do.

- The proportion of deaths due to weird hitboxes, getting stuck on terrain, suddenly being unable to attack and other "bullshit" "mechanic" is currently very high. This is annoying as the player typically has very little control on what he can do about this and the kill or be killed state of defence currently leaves no time for the player to react.

- There is a lack of access to midgame crafting. When entering maps you end up having bad gear until you have the materials to craft great gear. The modpool is so diluted and biaised towards bad gear that it is very unlikely to improve a piece of gear with methods (other then abyss) available at an early maping stage.

- The map "world" UI needs a lot of improvement. At least some sort of search function seems pretty obvious for longegevity.

- The atlas trees are very underwhelming. In many cases, the impact is barely noticeable.

Despite having more builds I would like to play, I think this is it for me for now.

The reason: gear progression in SSF is just atrocious. There is no way to work towards good gear. A tier 3 physical roll on a decent base can take days or weeks to get.

I have no idea why magic find gear is a stat on gear in this game. Gear is already difficult enough to roll as is, this further dilutes the mod pool and forces players to play builds which can afford to run magic find gear.

At this point I was just playing because I like the franchise, but Fate of the Vaal, as a step back from deterministic crafting, is a step back from players feeling like they can make incremental progress without having to hit a real jackpot.