izigame.me

Torchlight is NOT a good game. This is a game heavily inspired by a previous ARPG known as 'Fate' where you dove into a town dungeon with a pet companion. The huge difference is that while Fate was random generation, Torchlight decided to make a standardized experience for Players with non-randomized Bosses, Floors, and Quests. Overall I'm still fond of starting the game and going through the first couple of floors however it's as the game continues that it starts to become a chore. This is a game I've quit multiple times and just never brought myself to finish, and here I am again not finishing the game for one final time.

On level up the Player is given three stat points to distribute between Strength, Dexterity, Magic, and Block. Strength is exclusive to Melee Damage, Dexterity to Ranged Damage, Magic to Elemental Damage, and Block to Physical Damage Absorption. The only way to obtain Elemental Damage Absorption is through item resistances. Also on leveling either by XP or FAME (Earned by killing Champions), the player is given a Talent point. Of the three classes in Torchlight there are MANY overlapping skills in the Talent Tree as any Passive is shared between Classes. There are 15 Passive Skills out of 30-33 Skills and Passives ultimately being skills you are forced to take like +Critical Chance. The Talent Tree is level locked and each Talent can be upgraded 10 times each. A majority of these skill points are regulated to the Passive Skills as you'll only use 1-2 Actives. Outside of this there are General Skills that any class can learn such as: Summons, Heals, Fireball/Ice Shard, and Offensive/Defensive Buffs. Concerning builds this results in most people running the same General Skills + Passives with the only flavor being whichever Active Talent Skill you choose to spam.

As this is an ARPG of course there are items with multiple rarities and sets. You'll find that Legendary Items do no massive change to any playstyle, simply being a stronger item. Items can be enchanted with a ~2% debuff chance (increasing on success) that purges the item, not including the %chance of failure without debuff. I take issue with this feature as I've had multiple items be purged on the first attempt, the very FIRST one. There are also consumables like Fish and Potions. Fish have temporary effects like increasing resistances or experience gain. Potions are the age-old heal or restore mana.

As the game proceeds the levels begin to grow in size but the layouts and enemies are becoming more and more annoying. Playing on Very Hard it became a chore as enemies with instant abilities hiding in corners results in Player passivity and makes each floor take even longer to complete. The Dark Zealot is a game ruining enemy that plagues the late-game but it's best if we just go to the list of complaints:

- Enemy abilities are ridiculous to the nth degree as they can instantly trigger their abilities which make them unavoidable for the player. This is especially bad on certain spawns where you can have LOTS of these enemies in a closed location that you have to walk into. Which means you walk into a room, or over a bridge, or upstairs and die instantly.

- Dark Zealots are absolutely busted with three spells: poison bolts, summon skeletons, and the most important: lightning bolt aka goodbye world of the living. There doesn't seem to be a CD on these abilities and they can use them more than once in a row. The issue is that the lightning bolt does around 1-2k damage but they can also CRIT on this ability and do ~3.5k. My character had 1.6k HP and for reference there is NO health scaling through Talents or Attributes, only Items that CAN have +### HP.

So okay we need Lightning Resistances to survive right? Well wait! Elemental Resistances are a FLAT amount and to try and cover for the crit damage... it'd require that we have ~2k Lightning Resistance. So okay I'm just being a moron right? Surely? Well let me look at my legendary equipment: +30 Lightning Resistance. Let's suppose I manage to get +30 Lightning Resistance on ALL of my items (10), which means 300 total. Okay we're nowhere close. Well let's say I manage to Socket all 10 item slots with 2 gems (20) AND I manage to get the best quality/rarity of gem (Eternal: +28 Resist) AND I use the Elemental Resistance Skill at max level (+47): I'd have a grand total of 907. Do you get it yet? Sure at this amount I'd manage to survive the normal Lightning Bolt, but IF the enemy ever crits it's a insta-kill. Which I have to reiterate that obtaining ANY of the items or gems like I'd suggested is near impossible. At the point of fighting Ordrak (Final Boss) I STILL did not have a single Eternal gem of any type. So getting 20 of those gems of a specific type or let alone getting 2 sockets on all the armor pieces (with the highest lightning resist roll + having health increases) is complete insanity. But wait wait wait, I still haven't gotten to the best part:

THESE DARK ZEALOTS ARE A NORMAL SPAWN.

Just let that sink in for a bit. They can spawn in groups and do more damage on average than the Champion version of the same type. The only advice I saw in years of this game being released is to either pray for a projectile deflect% or silence them before they can cast (which again they can be off-screen and cast as soon as they're in range). What an absolute shit enemy that ruins the game. The best argument is to go into Health and try to out-scale the damage but again you can only find health gains through Item Stats which is entirely RNG.

- Bosses are agonizing (Very Hard Difficulty) as their health is bloated. Ordrak for example can infinitely spawn enemies for ever and ever and after fighting the boss for ~10-15 minutes, I'd only done around 4-5% of his total health-bar. This is coming immediately after Alric (who can ALSO spawn infinite enemies) that I was forced to kill with a melee weapon because for some godforsaken reason, the Devs decided to give him a skill that gave him and all of his minions immunity to any ranged attack. So I was able to easily kill Alric with a trashy merchant item and the boss in the immediate next floor is practically un-killable WITH my proper legendary weapon because of his health being 20x bigger? I don't get it. I thought maybe Ordrak had a special mechanic I was missing but it's just a straight slog. Going off the Torchlight Wiki, a majority of the bosses don't even have weaknesses with most having ~120% to all resistance and armor.

- Ranged Mechanics don't function properly with the Z-Axis and there's a LOT of bridges/stairs. If an enemy is on the stairs right in front of you, you WILL shoot over them. If you try shooting UP the stairs you will instead simply hit the stairs. The only solution is to stand ON the bridge/stairs or try and lure the enemy away. Considering that approaching certain enemies will cause them to use their ability, neither one are practical. Even AoE abilities have a seemingly random chance of being successful on the Z-Axis, as it feels much more minimal in Z-Axis scaling than the X and Y.

- Bad level design on the bridge maps + lava and onward. The start of the game in the caverns then to castle type isn't so bad with straightforward hallways and rooms with clutter. Then you get to the infinite bridges... and thousands upon thousands of staircases. Let me reiterate again that any amount of Z-Axis if using ranged attacks. Not only that but your pet and summons will also get stuck or lost somewhere in the labyrinth. It's not fun or fair and I've never wanted levels to end so quickly. I think in nearly EVERY play-through I've done, these maps are the so to speak 'run killers'. Where I stop playing because the level just kept going and going and there's like 5 more floors of this trash and the fun is just bottoming out.

- Enemies can sometimes be invisible because their model didn't load in.