Get rid of the whole "while moving" aspect of bleed. Make it a dot whose damage per second value starts really high and decays along some curve. Make keystones that mess with that curve or are conditional on whatever. It's even slightly thematic with bleeding eventually stopping.
Conflagration looks so interesting it's just...what's with these bow skills that need you to move somewhere specific to work? I get wanting skill design to be interesting but it seems we're starting to lose a bit of practicality lately
If I had to nitpick the design of Mirage a little bit, I don't see what the general incentive is to break the Astral Chain, outside of occasional cases where a Wish reward is triggered. You could argue that it's because Mirages have no time pressure, I suppose, but idk.
Little constructive criticism for the POE audio guys- the newer sound effects and voices are awesome, but please look at normalizing dialogue volume balance. NPCs' dialogue volume from past 3 leagues is way louder than for past content, and it makes it tough to set volume levels.
@SimonMcKinney I very much do! I have to say you have a really unique ability to speak very clearly at very low pitch, must make for some really interesting voiceover jobs
The volatile homing plants in ritual is some of the lamest "rocks fall everyone dies haha lol" bullshit ever. Make them apply a strong dot debuff or something, jfc
Mercenaries remove everything interesting about POE's item system, especially the navigating around downsides of items that grant niche but powerful benefits.
My take: fine enough to play around with for one league, but if it goes core, remove hiring completely. Duels only.
@kanethesoundguy@bexsayswords I'm picturing you picking the next letter in the current voiceline by reaching into a bag of Scrabble pieces... "Ah, another U! So far we have U, n, d, e, g, u... hmm maybe just one more?"
My headcanon for the dimwit mercs is that the voice actor was reading his lines, stumbled a couple words, and went "blabloloblo blaboluwoblolo, my bad let me do that one again"
And the GGG producer outside the booth went "wait! hang on, do that again..."