Some thoughts from 1.6k hours player.
Loving the game. Both vanilla and Siptah.
Some quick points on Siptah.
Delving Bench: it’s okay with a % - chance here. But let it be some sort of a comfort price if you don’t get any recipes. So it don’t feels like its all for nothing. If you don’t get any recipes you will instead get f.ex: extracted essences from humans for your selected god or random god. Its special, its time consuming.
As anybody, of course, hope for greater version in the animalpen.
But at least you get the normal one.
Rotbranch & Rockslide: these are too powerful for just a skeleton key and some base mats.
Drops should include f.ex: shadebloom (10-15 or so) or eldarium (10-15 or so) or more skeletonkeys 2-4 or so).
Worldbosses and 1-skull bosses: make trophies for the completionists + reward when completing all.
This, I think a lot of people will love. Rewards: f.eks: tablet of power / journey step
Also Storm trophies!
Aloe leaves: stacks should be 500.
Melee/ranged: the archer doesn’t come close to a melee build. For balancing this issue I don’t have any good recommendations. To be a kick-ass archer you have to build very specific.
In melee you can build a lot more versatile and still deal a lot of damage.
This goes for thralls and player.
I agree that Rockslide is a huge jerk, but has Rotbranch been changed lately? I haven’t had trouble slaying it with a decent thrall (one with plenty of hitpoints, as the thrall does take a lot of damage in the fight, and healing a thrall during combat is not easy these days). Of course, you need to take care not to get hit yourself, but Rotbranch broadcasts its attacks and is pretty predictable to dodge. As long as Rotbranch attacks your thrall you should have time to withdraw a little and heal yourself if you do get hit.
But I haven’t fought a Rotbranch lately, so if it has been changed, please correct me.
For me Rotbranch fits about where you say - but I must admit I’ve never taken one on without a thrall the way I have, for example, the giant crocs. The size problem with Rotbranch (and Rockslide) just makes them very difficult to dodge if you do get all their attention, which makes them a harder fight unless you rely on a follower (which I mostly do, but I like to have the option to ‘go it alone’ as well).
As for @TorBaklund’s suggestions
I like the ‘consolation prize’ idea for the delving bench - even if it’s just something like the religious essences (useless for my current ‘Crom’ playthrough, but that’s not the point since that’s a choice) - getting something back might help reduce the punishing RNG feel of it.
World bosses - yes more heads for the wall! (More seriously, boar heads, elk heads etc look nice on the wall, but don;'t generally feel much like an achievement - I’d much rather be able to decorate with the heads of the strongest enemies I’ve defeated, and currently that mostly just means dragon heads…)
Some sort of acknowledgement that you’ve killed all the world bosses would also be great - be it a journey step or whatever - just something that says ‘well done, you’ve faced and defeated all of the strongest beasts in the Exiled Lands/Siptah’ - adding another fun target for people to go after if they feel like it. Definitely shouldn’t give anything particularly special that couldn’t be obtained another way, but maybe some little placeable or something that could go inside your base.
Aloe stacks - yep, some sort of increase would be good here (and for others like Yellow Lotus etc) - it wouldn’t change anything about amounts that could be carried, but would help a bit with amounts of storage space required.
Definitely agree with the increase to aloe stacks. It seems like aloe stacks were nerfed recently. I’ve still got a couple of stacks of 1,000 aloe from when Siptah was released. I was surprised they only stack to 100 now.
I’m pretty sure they always stacked to only 100. The only time I’ve ever had them stacking to 1000 was when i was using a mod that changed that (Emberlight in my case I think). Not that that changes the point being made, of course.
@DanQuixote Emberlight was nerfed towards the end of October and all the stacking changes were removed from the mod according to their Discord. The reasons given were that it was an old feature of the mod that other mods also handle now. Removing it fixed an issue with current release of CE.