1: Game stability, general changes. (TL:DR - Bugs repaired, things implemented, keep up the good work.)
2: Items (TL;DR - Rares could be tweaked, recipies start to drop too late, staves are obsolete. Apart from that: Itemization is almost perfect.)As far as my experiance goes: perfect. Game didn't crashed a single time for me on whatever occason. FPS change is solid, and the sprite animations don't glitch due to it. One second delay on skipping intro and logos is irritating, but nothing more. Definitely not a priority. Some people are having mouse-lag issues, but as I stated in another topic: It can be their OS problem, not the game itself. Need some tests with build-in Windows "enchance pointer precision" option, MarC mouse fix and v-synch. I've heard Belzebub's has sound problems on WINE, but they can be somehow fixed by forcing the usage of specific drivers in some way or another. The game also seems to have no problem with dual GPU's of laptops, which I was worried about. Good work.
While I feel waypoints were not entirely necessarily, I like that I don't have to run to the Cave/Catacombs entrance every time. I've noticed quite the number of bugs you fixed, especially the wretched chain lightning missing tiles and projectile not hitting targets. Kudos for that especially.
3: Spells (TL;DR - mostly fine, some desperately need tweaking. Magic requirements are over-the-top.)Item Sets: Found (or provided by other charactar) on appropriate level give huge advantage, especially on lower difficulty. While single set items are generally less usefull that a good craft/rare, the effectiveness of two or more items are sky rocketing. It was also a good idea do limit most sets to 3-4 items at best. Not only does this allow the rest of character's gear to compliment, but also actually allows players to complete sets. All in all: I think Belzebub is the second game/mod in which Item sets are done RIGHT, first one being MedianXL.
Unique Items: Solid. New or recovered uniques are awesome, usefull, and they carry on the legacy of D1: They have bad sides as well as good sides. I also like the way old uniques were tweaked a bit (namely thinking cap not having one durability). The idea of introducing "alternate" version of certain unique items is also interesting (The Undead Crown / Helm of Spirits, Tarnhelm / Thinking cap).
Rare items: Potentially the best items one can carry. Fishing for Rare items in Gheed's item pool is suprisingly good money sink, as I personally drowned A LOT of gold already, and got few items that are insanely good on various character classes. One thing is: They seem to be unable to roll negative values. I personally think that allowing them to roll one negative stat would add some flavour.
Magic items: Those on the other hand suffer from a bit too much negative values, and the effect of this has big impact in the start of the game. It helps control the amount of gold, and well as crafting materials, but it is a bit of a overkill.
Crafted items / Crafting system: First thing is I do not understand the reason of high prices for selling recipies. Not that it matters much, but selling a single recipe for 35k+ gold is insane. Second thing is the difference between player level and recipies level. Once the players starts to find his first recipies for crafted items: they are already rendered obsolete by items directly found by the player. An easy fix to this is allowing the recipies to drop earlier. "second tier" recipies also suffer a bit from this problem, but they are still good. About the crafted items themselves: Provided the player has luck for rolls and patience for farming: They are the best items player can get. I also fail to see reasoning behind not being able to put crafting mats into trade stash.
Staves problem:
Sheer amount of stat and bonuses from shield and weapon usually renders two-handers useless. This is especially visible with Sorcerer and his staves, as without INSANELY good roll on staff (and only rare and craft that is) it's suicide to not use weapon&shield. Perhaps building-in permament bonus spell power in all staves would fix the problem.
Relevancy of properties:
I like the way many classes are suppose to use many different bonuses from weapons instead of going only, for example - Magic/Mana/Spell lvl. Faster Hit Recovery, Bonus Crit, Bonus Crit damage, Faster casting, Magic Find: It all suplements characters instead of being useless addon to single, most valuable stat.
4: Enemies (TL:DR - instant hitlocks and teleport haste needs to go.)Fire Bolt, Firewall, Guardian, Lightning, Chain Lightning, Lightning wall, Frost Shard, Circle of Ice, Healing, Heal Other, Holy Bolt, Warp, Telekinesis, Phasing, Mind Mace, Flash - All fine. Magic requirement, Mana coefficiency, damage and cooldowns are exactly the way they are supposed to be.
Nova, Immolation, Frozen orb and Flame Wave's damage are too low considering (especially the last one's RIDICULOUS ) mana cost. On paper the damage and effect seems fine for AoE spells like those, but in practice those spells are rendered useless by every other counterpart. Nova and Immolation one-second cooldown also seems misplaced due of the former defects.
Golem spell is severely underpowered. His damage is fine (none), but his endurance is non-existant, his cooldown is three times longer than his effective life-span. Heal Other does little-to-no help here. Due to the amount of charge damage he isn't usefull as a distraction, and in terms of scouting Guardian spell is simply better.
Apocalypse needs to have it's mana cost adjusted, perhaps the cooldown could also be increased to 3-5 seconds. But those nerfes can't take place without adressing the issues with Flame Wave and Immolation.
Fireball and Ice Blast have tendencies to either deal severely reduced damage, or to somehow MISS completely the target they directly hit, even with Magic to-hit value of over 360%. Ice Blast's description could use some info about the spell push-back effect. Both spells also suffer from Higher Magic requirements because of the projectile speed on lower levels.
Stone curse is useless. Literally. Every monster on which this spell could be a viable tactic is virtually immune to it, either by design or resist chance. You could add small AoE to it to make it usefull on normal monsters, or add cooldown to it and make it usefull on champion-type monsters. Right now I fail to see the reason for this spell to exist.
Inferno could use some more spell damage, especially given it's lightning-style damage spread and limited range.
Charged bolt's mana cost should be increased, as in it's current state is several times more powerfull than other spells on low levels. Be it multi or single target.
Blizzard and Meteor Cluster are generally weak early on, and they are becoming usefull only when leveled up a bit. Could use some bigger damage on earlier spell levels.
Sentinel, Dark Pact - both suffer from far to long cooldowns.
You could return the options to read spellbooks of spells already maxed out. They don't have to return mana
One last thing to adress while talking about spells is the value of Magic stat required for learning higher levels of spells. Tier (spellbook page) III and IV magic requirement is WAY over-the top. I understand this could have been introduced to make Sorcerer more gear-dependant, and to limit spellcasting of warriors and rogues. But in practice it feels that from level 26-28 Sorcerer's progress is crippled, especially that higher tier offensive spellsbooks can't be bought, or can be bought on level 36+.
5: Cooldowns (TL:DR - too long.)Normal monsters are fine, at least on Normal and Nightmare difficulty. Amount of resists and immunes are fine, Health and Damage could be toned down a bit on higher levels, but is still good and makes the player feel he really is in a hostile lapirynth rather than a theme park.
I like the idea of implementing champion monster groups, though they shouldn't roll triple immunities on higher difficulties. Elemental Drain skill has too long cooldown for such enemies, and items lowering resists usually don't help much then, making the enemy suffer invisible amounts of damage.
Unique monsters and Boss monsters can sometime have too big effective healthpool due to the combination of their abilties. This can make the fight longer, A LOT longer (I fought Horazon for half an hour) or basically a brick wall. Those are usually effects of monsters having haste+teleport/charge (Risen Hero, One of Horazon's pets, Bloodlord), or just teleport/haste (Horazon) with high defense/resists. Being instantly hit-locked (unable to move, run, cast or attack)or being unable to damage target (constantly teleporting before projectile / attack hits) isn't really a good design. Think Duriel in D2 classic. This is especially true due the fact that some theoretically-reliable strategies, such as using Stone Curse or Golem, are rendered ineffective due to those spell's properties. This in the end forces players to use exploits instead of tactics.
6: Quests (TL:DR - Yup, that's a cow alright...)As Belzebub stands today, I've seen basically three kinds of cooldown: One second cooldowns on spell, which are meant to block the spell from being spammed. They do their job perfectly, but the spell choice is arguable.
Second type are long-tine cooldowns on crucial skills or spells. Those ones are problematic: The cooldowns are a bit too long. I'm talkng mainly about Elemental Drain, Etheralize, Temporal Slowdown and Dark Pact spell. Elemental Drain's cooldown is a bit too much on higher difficulty levels, as many times it forces the escape from the fight just to stand in place and do nothing for some time. Temportal Slowdown and Etheralize effects last too short in corelation with their cooldown. While agree that adjusting their single-use uptime could be a problem, lowering their cooldown shouldn't be. The cooldown on Dark Pact is especially long, and while I understand the cooldown is there to stop melee classes from having infinite mana and health due to Life Drain, it's too much.
Life Drain should have 10-20 second cooldown, while the class-specific skills (and not only those of a Sorceer) should be reduced to 60 second TOP (Imho some should be lowered to 35-45 seconds).
To sum it up: Kawa? zajebistej roboty.Good implementation, good rewards. From what we can see in the forum some people can have problems with completing them(by finding the objective), but in the end they can always ask on the forum. It also won't be long before uncle google will be able to help them out. My only "but" would take the form of one of previous arguments: Some boss-type enemies in quests can take forever to kill, or they can even became an obstacle impossible to deal with untill the player over-levels the content.
This is one of the best mods I've ever played (and I've played quite a lot of them), and I can honestly say it's equal to legends like The Dark Mod or MedianXL. I still kind of miss Hellfire's Crypt levels and music, but I MOST DEFINITELY DO NOT MISS the retarded Hive levels. Thank you, and keep up the good work when you'll have the time.