There are several quality of life changes that I feel are essential to both players understanding and enjoyment of the game going forward. In summary:
1. Make item comparison far faster and easier, that way players can get back to killing.
2. Some of the formulas seem unbalanced right off the bat.
3. Make it easier to understand how certain skill choices (namely passives) will affect a character.
4. Other smaller changes namely in how skills read.

Part 1 -
A cornerstone of ARPGs is gradually upgrading a character’s power through item acquisition. Wolcen does a nice job of sticking to this pattern, while being creative in inventing new systems for armor (heavy vs. bruiser, vs. rogue vs. sorcerer), affixes (by creating the damage classes of material, elemental and occult) and using unique items with unique bonuses. The problem comes when you get new items, it becomes rather difficult and slow to figure out whether a new item is an upgrade (unless it is definitively better). While some players might just guess (or make an educated guess based on the affixes present), I like to know which is mathematically best, which means doing a LOT of math just to figure out the value of a single item. Multiply that by the volume of items I get and it ends up being a LOT of time sitting in town doing math. Now there is always the pointless debate of stating that I can just guess, vendor and go, but it overlooks the point that it SHOULD be easier.

I can think of two ways to accomplish this:
1. Create a tooltip on items that automatically compares the offensive and defensive changes (possibly ignoring certain affixes like cooldown reduction). This could even just give an overall improvement percentage (negative if it isn’t an improvement). This way players can easily tell which items to wear, keep and vendor so they can get back to killing enemies. * The main benefit of this method is that it is the fastest and easiest comparison tool for a player. * The drawback is that the comparison for damage will really only work for auto-attacks (or maybe whatever skill is bound to the left mouse-button) and thus won’t be quite as accurate for attacks or spells that use different damage types (making it confusing for players who rotate through spells with different elements). This is primarily due to the fact that affixes for +% to material, elemental or occult damage commonly exist on items, but the tooltip would only compare the damage type of the weapon, not all of the various skills (some of which might benefit from occult for instance, while the auto-attacking weapon would not). Another problem is that it can only account for certain affixes, thus missing things like cooldown reduction which may be essential to some players or builds.
2. Using the character sheet with the pop-out details window open. You can have it so that when players hover over an item that isn’t equipped, it calculates when the new numbers would be and if they are higher, show them in green (since you already do this for attributes) and if they are lower, show them in a different color (red is the logical choice). * One of the huge benefits of this method over the first is that in the pop-out window, you can show ALL stats affected by the new item, and thus be able to prioritize an increase in occult damage if your main spells are occult, but your weapon itself doesn’t do occult damage. * The drawback of this method is that it just isn’t as quick and easy as the first method. You would likely also need to program the feature to work with ALT so that the comparison could be made with both should or both gloves.

I would think that the second option is the better one.

I would also change the character sheets to include some sort of summary about damage and defensive numbers on the character sheet itself, instead of only in the pop-out details window. As it stands now, players are required to use that pop-out to know how their damage (and usually defense) changes. I would probably try and place this information where the total bonus damage from attributes is currently listed and just place that information as “Total Bonus Damage” in a row below each attribute listed (maybe with a separation line above as if the rows were added: since they are). Another option is to just make the pop-out window open all the time, but I don’t think that would be much of an improvement. This leads me to my next suggestion.

Part 2 -
There are several places in the character sheet that state numbers as scores (ferocity, agility, wisdom, resistances, etc.). While I understand that you designed the formulas to be based on the scores and give diminishing returns as you pour more points into those scores, those scores basically mean nothing to the player. It is the percentages that matter. One thing that is really great about the character sheet is that you can hover over the scores to get the percentages, but if anything, I would swap which information is found on the sheet and which is in the hover tooltip. You could also just make two columns of the information and show both if you feel that showing the scores are important (thus removing the need for the tooltip).

In addition, I would add four more numbers to the pop-out details window: * Overall/average Material resist percentage (on the right side of the material row). * Overall/average Elemental resist percentage (on the right side of the elemental row). * Overall/average Occult resist percentage (on the right side of the occult row). * Overall/average resist percentage to all types (in it’s own row above material or below all of the others).
*This becomes less important if the scores are all swapped to percentages.

Now onto attributes and their scores. One of the first things that I noticed when trying to figure out which attributes to prioritize on my character is that while ferocity, agility and wisdom all use scores and are subjected to diminishing returns, toughness does not and thus seems to be the best choice to sink points into. This idea is furthered by the fact that the attributes don’t give the same benefit from equal investments, even early on.

I tested this on a character with no passive points spent by setting all attributes to 64 (thus accounting for the damage bonus to primary secondary and tertiary stats), then adding 50 points to ferocity and seeing the overall increase (in this case to only damage). I removed the 50 points and tested it again for each of the remaining three attributes, and found that wisdom gave the smallest damage increase (which mostly makes sense as the D.O.T. and crowd control bonuses make up for the lower damage). Agility had the largest damage increase, while ferocity was somewhere in the middle (I would have assumed that those two would be about equal to keep their value equal). The crazy part though was that none of the damage increases were as high as the health and force shield increase due to toughness AND it had a sizable damage increase itself (I think exclusively due to the way bonus damage from attributes are calculated. This shows me that there is no reason to put any points in any attribute other than toughness, since it yields the largest benefit, plus by placing all points into one attribute, I maximize the advantage of the damage bonus to the primary attribute.

There also seems to be another inconsistency with toughness: it benefits health more than force shield. I tested this out on a character with no passive points spent by removing all items from my character. Leaving me with 2733 health and 0 force shield. I placed an item with 150 health and 100 force shield on and while the force shield went up 177 (so toughness boosted it 77% extra), the health went up by 498 (232% extra). I even tried putting all of the items back on and comparing and while the numbers were far closer, each point of toughness seemed to increase my health by .219% and my force shield by .174%. This makes force shield seem inherently weaker, and while force shield numbers could be higher on items to account for this, they are in fact lower, making the problem worse. I would think that I should never choose sorcerer armor over rogue armor just for this reason.

Part 3 -
Another staple of ARPGs are making skill choices that affect not only your characters strength, but overall style of gameplay. Wolcen has done a nice job of both blending elements seen in earlier ARPGs and creating some new twists (literally in the case of the passive wheels). One of the nicest quality of life changes to the genre since the earlier days was to not lock players' choices about their characters forever (and thus requiring an entirely new character after any single mistake). Wolcen does an exceptional job of furthering this in the attributes (by showing what will happen to stats in green if you accept the spent points) and the active skills (by showing what will happen if a rune is chosen in green, and by allowing runes to be reset at any time without cost). The problem is that that function doesn’t exist in the passive skills, which is where it feels the most essential to me. As it stands, having the passive skill window open closes every other window and opening any other window closes the passive skill window. This means that you can’t actually see what the benefit you are getting, and since the formulas in game use lots of multiplicative bonuses to base numbers, it ends up rather misleading or confusing.

I can see two ways of making this work:
1. Embed a box in the bottom left corner of the passive skill window that lists damage and some overall defensive data (health, force shield, etc). This can actually be the same as the one I suggested for the character sheet if you go that route (it can even pull the same numbers from the same places to make things easier). * The main benefit is that now when someone selects a skill node like health, then they can see exactly how much their health would change with the node selected BEFORE locking in their choice. * The drawback is that I don’t think you could possibly display all of the useful information in a box like that, unless you just allow the pop-out details window from the character sheet itself to be visible, which might work.
2. You could also create a tooltip that finds the stat being affected by the node and compare it to its new value if the node is selected. * The main benefit is that it allows for any node to be compared to the character sheet numbers. It also doesn’t provide information that is not needed for those nodes, nor does it clog up the user interface or make it harder to view the passive wheels. * The only drawback I can think of is that it is probably harder to code that feature in that just using the existing details window.

I would think that the second option is the better one.

Part 4 -
A couple of other small things:
1. While the overwhelming majority of tooltips in the game have a plethora of information, there are a few key places that it is missing. * In the graphics settings, none of the checkboxes or sliders describe what the setting does or how it affects gameplay (like improving performance). A description on hover would be helpful. * The four icons for the types of skills (melee attack, ranged attack, spell or dagger attack) don’t have text to identify them as such, which should appear when hovering over the tab. * Certain active skills have missing information (usually numbers like percent chance for certain things to happen). One such example is on Sovereign Shout, Wine of War states that there is a chance for the shout to frenzy enemies, but doesn’t state the chance (even in the right pane where almost all information is always present). Similarly, multiple skills mention generating “more” threat, but don’t state how much more (then again threat isn’t an accessible statistic anywhere).
2. Certain passive skill nodes are labelled in a misleading way (particularly anything to do with blocking). * If I choose a +10% block chance node and I was at 15% on my character sheet, I would expect to be at 25% after choosing the node (especially because both places use % chance), but that isn’t what happens. If I am understanding the node correctly: it should say “+10% of base block chance). Similarly, the nodes that state “added block chance” should state “added to base block chance”. * Retaliator has a similar situation where I believe it should read “-50% of base critical chance” or “-50% of critical chance score”. I am assuming this because even after taking the skill, the base score on my character sheet isn’t set to 0. * Another would be Second Wind, where it mentions a “burst of health”, but how much is that numerically? * Unflagging Prayer (assuming that it is not bugged) seems to be written in a confusing way. Part of the description mentions “downed allies” which I am assuming means when they are kneeling and need to be touched to be brought back to the fight, while another part says that the skill “allies are resurrected” which should bring them back from death (which occurs if they remain downed for too long and thus normally cannot come back into the fight). This feels especially important being such a large focal node, but also because I feel VERY differently about the skill if it brings up kneeling allies than I do if it brings back dead allies who otherwise couldn’t rejoin the fight.

Thanks!