[PTS] Devilian Update 7.0 – Castle of the Fallen

Short video of the soul vendors showing the comparison of gear sets

I didn’t think they (Bluehole Ginno) would tune it this way but Hellspawn is much better than Capricious in terms of base stats (the 5th property on Capricious does not make up the difference as this is unlike Slaughter where the 8/8 set bonus made a big difference which is why they had to introduce a new artifact tier in order to compel players to ditch Slaughter armor pieces). Hellspawn is the level 60 heroic gear set from the Fallen Castle hell mode dungeon. The dungeon itself is therefore tuned accordingly in order to give current geared characters on live a challenge.

The challenge part isn’t the issue. The issue is a huge progression spike for the average player that at current level 58 cap (if they aren’t at minimum at least full Bloodstained), is going to feel like a much larger wall to climb. That’s an excellent formula for attracting and retaining newer players to this game /sarcasm.

Previous level cap increases always provided a degree of overlap (I covered this in this thread by a player looking to possibly return where they explained why they quit in the first place):

Level 52 was essentially Falling Star -> Butchery (50 Hell) -> Tragedy (52 archdungeon)

Level 54 was Guardian -> Phantasm (53 Hell) -> Carnage (54 archdungeon) -> Slaughter (54 Raid)

Tragedy overlapped Phantasm (both allowed entry into the 54 archdungeons). Guardian rares were bind on pickup (character bound)

Level 56 was Blaze -> Dark Knowledge (55 Hell) -> Wicked (56 archdungeon)
Carnage overlapped Dark Knowledge (both allowed entry into the 56 archdungeons). Blaze rares were bind on pickup (character bound).

Level 58 is Moonlight -> Merciless (57 Hell) -> Bloodstained (58 archdungeons)
Wicked overlapped Merciless (both allow entry into the 58 archdungeons). Moonlight rares are bind on equip meaning they are tradable like Falling Star was.

This type of overlap is absent in the move from 58 to 60. Normally, the archdungeon from the previous level cap provided overlap with the hell dungeons from the level cap increase. The difference is that the level 58 cap saw two additional degrees of power creep (Morbid and Capricious).

Morbid should have technically been where the overlap occurred but they decided to make the new level 60 hell dungeon gear base stats better than Capricious instead. Thus there is that large numbers gap between level 58 and 60 which for everyone else besides the current best geared players, represents a chasm to overcome. Since this isn’t tuned like an archdungeon (which is balanced for 3 players), the scaling with additional players in a party is going to be interesting.

Testing solo with semi-refined (lacking artifact amplification) Hellspawn gear plus crappy talismans + non-awakened +9 Alvirs, the first trash mobs of Fallen Castle hell mode hit like a truck while your damage output sort of just tickles them. For already well geared players on live (that includes max level talismans and greater than +9 Alvirs in all sockets), they will easily get past this really lazy attempt at power creep just making the gap even wider. For most everyone else, they will need to be carried (while running this same dungeon for the next several months; rinse and repeat for the poorly named Dimensional Fortress Heroic which is still technically a transcendence difficulty level 60 arch dungeon).

Unsurprisingly, Bluehole Ginno did not address the previously reported lack of dailies for the level 58 dungeons (nor does this update contain dailies for the level 60 ones) nor addressed the (selected) reward structure many dailies. Again, the past structure allowed playing the game where you could at least chip away at getting the gear to take on the content. The half-assed 6.0 update effectively killed that and is only made worse in this update. The best soul tokens one can acquire from dailies is Bloodstained. And that full gear set isn’t going to make much of a dent in the level 60 hell mode dungeon.