Finally my experience with 0.2.0 . I'd like to thank the devs.

I'm a new player. Etc. Etc.

Ever since I acquired the Early access around December I've been playing daily, usually co-op with my brother. Around a couple of weeks before 0.2.0 hit, we finally hit end game. It was kind of fun but losing the map and the waystone and really all of the enemies was very frustrating.

What really irked me about pre-0.2.0's endgame was really that I didn't get a chance to get payback against the monsters that killed me. Sure, the XP loss was a b. Losing the waystone and all the progress was annoying. But the real bitter was not having a second chance against that combination of monsters or whatever that killed you.

Now yesterday later at night we finally defeated Doryany in 0.2.0 and once again got to the endgame. Finally seeing the changes on the endgame. And I am actually kinda happy with being able to retry maps.

Specifically some minutes ago, I had my first map with a boss. I was doing rather well against the monsters so I didn't have any deaths. But with the bosses you don't really know what's going to happen. This time the boss ended up being the Necromancer boss from act 3 that is constantly summoning zombies and sending you some weird explosion projectiles using the corpses of the zombies you kill. This boss is usually easy for me, except that this is the endgame now and this version of the boss requires you to defeat it in a very small space. I actually really struggled against this evil mofo. It took me a couple of deaths to figure out a good strategy. Basically spamming comet while making sure to notice and avoid the bombs. I killed him on my last attempt. I lost a ton of XP. Basically everything I earned on the map. But at least I was able to kill this boss that I was experiencing for the first time.

Without the retries from 0.2.0. I would have diead to that boss on my first attempt and then get kicked out of the map. Having to hope to get a new chance eventually, but who knows if the RNG was going to be helpful. It would have been really frustrating not to be able to get a chance to kill this guy.

I can tell for a fact that the XP loss is going to get old really soon. But the retries are objectively an improvement of 0.2.0 over 0.1.0.

Nice!

It's almost as if one-portal maps were a mistake to begin with. Who knew?
( I did, I knew that shit was ass the second they said it )

I'm interested to see how you end up feeling about boss keys.
Because that's another huge design flaw. Sadly that one will not change.
It's not as bad, but that doesn't mean it's anything close to a good idea either.

My poor attitude aside, I'd also like to thank the dev's for finally giving some ground and actually putting in some good design into the game for once. Hopefully this is a trend that will continue, despite the GGG's best efforts and vision.