michaelleung: Das Bump.
Has the hype died or something, nobody's playing it anymore?
I'm in the middle of my third playthrough, and I'm still trying out new mods. However, I don't think I see myself playing non-stop for months on end unless/until the fix and patch a few things.
For one, I'm deeply disappointed in the "random" dungeons, which use rather LARGE map chunks and not enough of them. Even in my first playthrough I saw rooms repeating, especially start and end chunks to each floor.
Furthermore, the skill balance is completely borked. Some things scale well, others scale terribly, some are excellent with just 1 point but hardly improve, others are always useless. I know its early on and it took months and months of patches and iterations before, say, Diablo 2 got its classes balanced, but as an early adopter I find Torchlight just a little too unbalanced. This makes it less interesting because their are fewer viable character builds to try.
At the moment, for example, traps are practically useless (so "Trapper" builds are out). Embershock, a promising Alchemist melee skill, has HUGE cast time and not enough of his other skills synergize and help him survive close combat (Ember Shield scales terribly, for instance). So no "Shockadin" builds. Vanquisher has weaksause melee skills and nothing to help her survive those encounters. So no "Assassin" builds.
The only builds viable atm as far as I can tell are:
Summoner Alchemist (EXTREMELY powerful).
Caster Alchemist (potent, but doesn't quite scale that well. Can use Lance, Bolt or Lightning, all are viable)
Marksman Vanquisher (Ricochet and Explosive Shot are both equally broken, Seeking Shot and Pilum are viable)
Melee Destroyer (based on Slash or Echo, uses Chains in combat, pretty much all his builds use the same skillset and only differ in main attack, like Vanquisher)
Some skills are too damn useful like Web (makes being a marksman or summoner trivial), Critical is far to potent, etc etc. All builds converge on too small a set of skills in general imo.
