Sortie is AMAZING but has a few major flaws.
I love Sortie to death, this is EXACTLY what I wanted feom this game.
That being said, I think Sortie has a few major problems
- Energy
It shouldn't cost energy to enter at all. It discourages people from ever trying more challenging content. If some ding dong wants to play for 23 hours farming 900 black balls so be it. If they want to be stingy, just put a limit on the amount of "free" black balls you can get per day
- The highest difficulty is unfair (all risk modifiers, Level 80, hardcore mode)
DPS combatants are not made equally at this difficulty; this is coming from someone who's cleared it 30+ times and has all the combatants and every single upgrade (aside from HP increase). Only Rin, Heide, and Nine can pump it out consistently from my experience and I've tried E6 Luke, E4 Mei Lin, E6 Sereniel.
You can argue it's supposed to be hard but when it's difficult to the point where half the roster need the grace of God to clear, even with ALL the upgrades, it's presented as more of a flaw than a feature. In Slay the Spire terms, it's be like if Ironclad had a 87% win rate at Ascension 10 vs The Silent at 3%; something's wrong here.
- Augments (Tactical Authority Skill Tree)
There needs to be defense% increasing modifiers. The HP does very little at higher difficulties (they two tap your ass anyway) and the defense-scaling characters struggle to keep up in damage for later floor bosses/elites.
It would also help newer players as characters like Khalipe, Magna, and Nine can carry higher risks and difficulties so they can get currency faster and have a fighting chance at clearing the higher risks/levels.
- Lack of Player Agency
There aren't too many cases of this but when they do happen, it's terrible.
One brutal example is what I call the infinite tsukuyomi (see image).
- You fight some variant of the booger thrower elites (the Gloomy Godmother)
- They throw high cost curse cards into your hand
- Their modifier (Forceful?) forces you to play a random card in your hand
- Against your will, you use 3 AP to play a booger
- You end your turn
- More boogers enter your hand, making it more likely to get griefed and perpetuating the loop
- Die
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Again, Sortie is a huge step forward for this game, but the deeper you go, the less creative you get to be with your builds and you end up spamming the same cookie cutter units with the same cards, which is counterintiuite to the spirit of the mode.
It did just come out so I hope they do retroactive, PERMANENT buffs to characters like Luke in Sortie, as right now he just shoots jelly beans at people and dies on the first elite.