The original Torchlight took most of its ideas from Blizzard’s Diablo 2 and Torchlight 2 follows the same pattern. It would have been interesting to see where Runic’s title splits apart from the craft of similar games, but barring really neat ideas, some mechanics and systems just don’t cut it to make a deep action RPG. Seeing the promises of mod tools makes me think that it would be possible to tweak Torchlight 2 and see if my ideas hold up.
The pet system was refined and improved
Being able to send your pet to town and sell all your junk loot in Torchlight 1 was already a great idea, Runic made it one notch better by allowing you to buy items using your pet. Potions, scrolls, dynamite (for quick fishing) are now buyable from anywhere in the game while your pet goes to make you money off the stuff you won’t use.
Pets now have specific equipment, tags and collars, that give them interesting abilities such as breaking shields and healing you when they hit. The fact that they can cast spells also returns, making pets effective at healing or summoning minions to help. All they need now is a way to enchant items, buy new equipment and the like through your pet and you’ll never have to go back to town again!
Great enemy variety, but...
Nomad robots with bionic arms, swarms of roaches, slimes that split up in multiple slimes, robots, zombies, goblins, beastmen, huge bosses, Torchlight 2 has a lot of different enemy styles to fit all the environments of the game. You constantly get swarmed by complex hordes of enemies and navigating around all of them can be an interesting challenge.
That being said, I’m always a bit bummed out when I encounter really familiar abilities from Diablo 2 (or 3) in there. Circles of ghostly hands on the ground that slows you down? A fan of knives? I just wished all the abilities were crazy like raising giant stone circles or pentagrams of electricity. Also on easier difficulties, some of these abilities don’t have the time to shine - you’re blasting through enemies way too fast.
Enemies that also totally negate your attacks can be frustrating if you’re not paying attention; Shield-bearing enemies can take a large number of hits before their shield breaks and you actually damage them - easy to fix, make the shields not block 100% of attacks, or only block a certain % of the damage dealt - enemies with big electrical shields that reflect damage back at you and enemies that become untargetable once they start flying.
Choosing where to put stat points is confusing
While leveling up in torchlight 2 - something that happens fairly often - you will need to assign 5 stat points between Strength, Dexterity, Focus and Vitality. These stats have clear uses, strength will increase weapon damage and critical hit damage, intelligence will increase mana, magic damage and execute chance (the chance to hit with two weapons at once) and so forth. You also need certain stats to equip items (or you’ll need to wait until a specific level).
However, choosing where to put them feels confusing and then almost inconsequential. Do I need two more points in strength per level if I’m a berserker? How about Focus? As a mage, do I put everything into Focus? Oh but some of your mage gear will require Vitality. How much? These questions should be easy to answer, or you shouldn’t ask them at all.
Diablo 2’s stat system was flawed in the way that either you ‘knew’ what you were doing (by following a guide, probably) or you spent points in a way that wouldn’t let your character able to clear the higher difficulties. Torchlight 2 is broken in a different way. You can just put points anyway you want, it will be fine, you wouldn’t be able to equip everything you’ll find anyways.
How I would fix it.
Give the player an obvious way to know how they should spec their character and streamline the items to match that progression. For instance, if you want a mage that uses wands, putting 3 points of focus per level would allow you to wear any wands you find, if you want staves, 2 points in strength and 2 in focus would be a way to go. Showing what the ‘sweet spot’ for your stats based on your class and skills would help tremendously. Then I’d know that if I’m a berserker and want to use two weapons, I actually need Focus for the execute chance bonus.
Another good way to fix this is remove the points allocation entirely. Mages get +3 focus and +1 everything else, outlanders +3 dexterity, engineers +3 vitality, etc.
Skill points are cool except if you need to hoard them
The skill system is fairly interesting, you have three branches of skills and nine passives, most of which unlock after 7-level increments. All skills have 3 tiers which unlock after you put 5-point increments into them. This is original and like I said, feels interesting. However in the way you play action rpgs, you aren’t going to have more than 2 or 3 attack abilities (Even then I mostly use one) this makes using low-level skills until they’re at 15/15 points kinda weird.
You need to get to certain levels to put a certain amount of points into a skill so you’ll get to your level 31 ability and won’t have even maxed the first skill, if you so choose to use it. First-level skills are often than not less useful (and statistically worse) than high-level skills, such as a skill that fires a single projectile versus an homing barrage of constantly shooting rockets. Of course, the tier bonuses are neat (except when they simply increase another value, such as a skill working over 10 seconds instead of 5) but I don’t think that getting +2% damage per level each 3-4 level to a skill that would numerically be outclassed anyway by a higher-level ability feels like a real choice to the player.
Another problem with that system is the fact that if you want to use a high-level skill as your main attack and dump all the points you can into it, you’ll need to hoard your skill points for most of the game (up to level 35) and that doesn’t motivate me to play up to that point. The in-game respec system is not quite useful, being able to roll back your last 3 skill points gives you a minimal margin of error, but not much else.
How I would fix it
Average the strength of the skills so they work on 9 (or 6) levels instead of 15, reduce the number of levels per tier, increase the gap between the skill levels (or stop giving one point per level) so that when you place a point, it boosts your skills in a significant way, but you also have enough points to get more skills at higher tiers.
Being geared in all-legendary loot is great, but...
You constantly get magical items in Torchlight 2, set items, orange items, blue items, rare items... It’s not uncommon to find your first set item in the first map of the game or get one for completing the first quest you do. Finding new and better stuff is always fun but if you drill down the numbers, it feels unnecessary.
Set bonuses that are 2% better than normal items of the same level, legendaries that have 5-6 stats on them, but the increases are minimal. The point of rare items is to be worth something more than normal items, but as I see them they are a small upgrade often linked to specific stats that you might not be even able to use (such as fire damage bonuses for instance)
How I would fix it
This is quite easy, increase the stats on the legendaries and set items, make them drop less often, that should do it. When you find a legendary/set item, it will be really good and you won’t get as many as often, so they will create a greater sense of excitement, not making most of the unique items vendor trash.
In conclusion, some one-liners
- Not a fan of the way fumbles work, having a chance to deal ridiculously low damage isn’t fun.
- Some of the passives are interesting but it’s not obvious if they work with all skills.
- Enchanting is great, being able to remove enchantments is also interesting, that said I’m not sure I’d ever keep an item so long that I really needed to re-roll enchants on it.
- The Mapworks is also a really great idea and is endlessly replayable.
- Ranged weapons have a very short range and enemies almost appear in your face, I wonder if the second part is a bug.
- Harder difficulties aren’t worth it if you don’t get anything in return. You’ll get the same items in casual than in elite.
- More checkpoints would be nice. The maps are big and having to walk through a big and empty map when you quit then come back isn’t the funniest.
- Mana was boring back then, it’s boring now, running out of mana means you can’t do anything until it recharges.
- The music is so good Matt Uelmen it hurts. If you close your eyes sometimes you’ll imagine yourself in Diablo 2.
- Buffs that behave like passives (can be on at all times because they have the same duration as their cooldowns) but that you have to recast all the times are dumb, they should be made into passives or really increase their duration.
- You know what I like? Cloud saves. You know what I hate? Having to redo a whole act because somehow my cloud saves didn't sync properly.