In Between Season Event 9: 24 Hour Open Descent

My recommendations/ideas for future Descent-style races:

- Take better care of choosing the skill gems available to each class in the chests. Raise Zombie? Really? That is a worthless skill at early levels. Think of the actual usability of the gems at the time they're given to the player, which was obviously an afterthought in several cases.

- Give us more options. Why not one extra gem on the starting chest? Why not 2 gems instead of one in some of the later chests?

- Try to put a bit more effort on class balance. No, I don't expect every class to do nearly as well as the other, but I would like it to be possible to at least see the lowest levels on all of them. Witch literally had 0 chance of ever seeing the later levels in an hour. I'm not even sure any of them ever reached the Merciless levels, what with their anemic and mismatched gem selection putting them far behind right from the start.

- Party Descent should be a consideration in the future. It would definitely be a lot of fun playing a race of this style with friends, and it might help aleviate the class balance issues. Simply have the chests be instanced to each player separately.

Just a couple of bits of feedback about running as a Witch:

- I thought going through the first area as a witch was easier than Ranger and Templar. I found that Fireball was great against multiple targets as a PBAoE, but it wasn't too good against single targets. In particular, I killed statues a lot faster than most of the other characters I've played. Unfortunately, it is weak against fire-resistant enemies, which includes the entire last level. It got a little tedious working my way through that level, and I was unable to kill Piety. I also had to skip the Exiles, as the game decided to be ridiculously anti-caster.

- Zombies are almost completely worthless. They die in one or two hits for most of the race. They're especially worthless in any map with AoE mobs, such as the final map, because all of your minions die almost instantly. I had no Minion Life support or passives, but I guess they might have lasted another half a second at best. Zombies and Skeletons might be useful if you manage to make it to Minion Instability and have some passives. The final boss chamber contains no corpses to use, so zombies are completely worthless in the final fight regardless.

- Spectres were only slightly more useful than zombies, but were still useless until the last few maps. Most spectres didn't do much damage and died quickly, but some of the enemy types were useful. Elite Blackguards and Cinder Elementals were decent defensively in comparison with the other monsters, lasting about 5 seconds. Blackguard Arcmages were useful for damage. Again, the final boss chamber contains no corpses to use, so spectres are worthless after the first one dies in about 2 seconds.

- The Witch's area ran out of useful passives around level 25 for me. Witch is unique in that she doesn't get a single Dexterity or Strength node in her main starting area. Every other class has keystone nodes that give some of the other stats. Her area is difficult to exit as well, because you have to spend 3-4 levels on stat points no matter which way you want to exit. I actually hope this is the next starting area to get a makeover.

- As a result of the above lack of stats, I never managed to get the Str to use Fire Penetration or the Dex to use Fork or LMP.

I actually wish I'd thought of doing a Minion Instability build before the race ended.