I've gone through it on hard difficulty with a human warden, minotaur fighter, insectoid wizard and ratling alchemist. Overall it's a great mod, with various parts that need polish. The bugs are obviously a big problem but at least we've hopefully found and fixed most of those. The size of this mod is pretty huge, with probably at least as much content as the base game. I'll list various thoughts I had, regardless of how realistic it would be to change the mod. Some things will be shortcomings in the base game, but if changing a few stats can balance the game better, why not fix that in a mod? Pointing out flaws is what I do better than finding things to praise, so that is what I'll be focusing on. I should also mention that I have no experience with doing the modding, just playing them.

To begin with, I think the mod starts out in a way that really discourages players. This seems to be reflected in the rating here on steam, just 3 out of 5 stars. The crypt(ic) makes it feel like you're stumbling around in the dark, being teleported around in and out of water. Once you get out, you'll probably wander into the ratling nest and wonder what's up with all the levers and buttons everywhere. More on that later. Not long after you'll wander into the rutted moor and get stuck there. I think you've gotten a lot of complaints about that place seeing as you've posted a guide for it.

There is a lot of darkness, water and disorientation going at the beginning. The water is particularly bad. When I started, I missed the note that tells you about the water breathing spell and only found it much later. IIRC it's found underwater, in a dark room that is barred, and opened in a way I don't even know because I just stumbled upon it when wandering around solving a puzzle I had remembered. This is really something that you should put right in the player's path, and as early as possible, so they know to build for it. Water breathing isn't a spell in the base game so players won't know if it even exists. There is a ton of water near the start of the mod, and much of it is an unavoidable death trap unless you know exactly what to do. Some of it is particularly unfair. For example, near the crystal by the windgate to the player's base, there is a small lake. There is a ladder visible on the other side. The player will jump in and find that the bottom half of the ladder is actually broken and then drown because they can't figure out how to find the invisible windgate. There are also various other things down there that will distract you from looking for it, so you'll naturally be drawn away from a way up as you're looking for it. Saving, jumping into water and then having to reload is a common occurrence early in the game, especially if you don't have water breathing. And for some reason loading is really slow in Grimrock 2 custom dungeons. A player will naturally want to check every body of water for secrets or the way forward, and you have no idea of knowing if each puddle is a death trap.

There are many levers, buttons and plates to confuse you. Obviously that's part of figuring out the many puzzles, but I think you went overboard in some areas. To go back to the ratling hideout as an example, the area west (IIRC) of where you fought the ogre. There are levers and buttons all over the place, especially once you get to the southern (IIRC) ledge. In the floor there's a spear gate which I couldn't figure out how to lower for the longest time. Later I was reading one of your posts somewhere and found out that it was actually just to stop the boss-spawning projectile from reaching its receptor again. This entire time I had thought that it was a puzzle to solve, but it was actually (I assume) a band-aid fix to prevent people from spawning the boss again. Again, I don't know much about the modding process, but I think that one is worth smoothing out. Then there is the bugged gate in the hideout - obviously that's not by design, but it made the myriad of toggles down there even more annoying because I could never figure it out (because it was broken).

More about levers and buttons: I think you should drop the idea of having to toggle one multiple times. It significantly increases the complexity of many puzzles. In the base game, things always, unless I'm mistaken, work the following way: you press a button. It either stays pressed, and you know something has happened, or it can be pressed again. If it can be pressed again, you know that it either toggles something or causes a timed event. If you have to press a button several times, you never know if what you did actually had any effect at all. Say you encounter a button deep in some ruins. You press it once and nothing happens that you can immediately detect, a fairly common scenario. Do you keep pressing it? If the button toggled something, especially something outside your range of vision and hearing, you may be toggling it off if you press a few times. Because this applies to almost every button or lever, you can rarely be sure about what a button does. Got stuck and don't know what to do? Now almost every button in the area, maybe more, needs to be tested. Press it once to see if it was a toggle or timed event. Didn't notice anything? Press it a few more times to check if it's a multi-press one. Maybe it was but it did something you didn't notice, possibly because of the noise of pressing the button again. Maybe you just closed that secret door that you originally opened on the other side of the area. Multi-press buttons exponentially increase the possible solutions to something, and it doesn't mix well with how toggles relatively often affect something outside the immediate area. Every time you find a button you become uncertain about how many times you have to press it, once you're aware of the existence of multi-press buttons. Another example is the bridge in the moor that takes multiple lever flicks - I would never have figured that one out if I hadn't happened to read one of your posts discussing how it's supposed to be rusted and take some work. I just flicked it, saw that it spawned half a bridge and started looking for another lever to spawn the other half. I think this, along with making toggles stay activated if they do something that isn't immediately visible, are the biggest improvements you can make that also appear to be realistically viable from an outsider's perspective.

It should perhaps be clearer what the crystal that teleports the player to the intended player base does. When I first found one and saw the description I basically decided not to use any of them because I had no idea what the "doomed world" stuff was about. Much later I was messing around and found out that it takes you to a base full of stuff and storage space, that you can only unlock for regular use through the use of the crystal. The message about the doomed world appears to be a band-aid fix to stop players from locking themselves in, so that should probably be clearer. I have two other ideas for these crystals. One, make it spawn a temporary windgate where you use it that you can return to, if that's even possible. That would make it unlikelier to lock you out of somewhere. Two, if it's a fast travel thing, make it infinite use or have another one spawn at base when you use it/after a cooldown. I can see how implementing both of these could lead to abuse though.

Speaking of the storage at the base, more of it would be nice. Particularly more bags or crates, so that you can put away all those glowing items that turn the area into a rave party or miniature sun. Alternatively, making glowing items like meteorites stackable. You never know what you will need in a future puzzle so I, and no doubt many other players, will grab anything they find to bring it back to base. Being able to sort it better would be nice. Also, it took me a long time to find that armory key. I don't know if I missed it in the dark, murky waters the first time or if I made it appear later somehow.

There's a lot of RNG that wasn't present in the base game. It encourages you to reload often. Those mushrooms that increase vitality and sometimes strength and dexterity, for example. Would it be possible to make them, say, cycle between strength or dexterity each time a character eats one? Guy 1 eats a mushroom and gets vitality and strength. Next time he eats one he gets vitality and dexterity. Third one just gives vitality. The fourth one starts the cycle over. Or something like that. Same with food that randomly gives bonuses, like warg meat giving strength to minotaurs. Instead of it being random, why not make it so that every second or third piece they eat gives one strength? I'm not sure how you would balance the crystal flowers. Alternating between all stats and petrification for each piece? Giving all stats AND petrification? I kind of like that idea. The rocks that you can mine for crystal shards or an explosion is another of these kind of pointless RNG mechanics, and most of those rocks appear fairly early on, causing more early frustration. If players get to choose between finding a rare, finite and powerful crystal and getting a blinding explosion to the face, I think I know which they will choose.

I like that you can disarm some traps by placing items on them or digging where they are. I think you should extend that to all traps. The idea that a careful player can disarm any trap without having to step on it sounds nice to me. Some traps that need to be dug up are in areas where you can't dig and some traps just never disappear even if you step on them.

Some item placements could be improved. Adding to the frustrations of the early game, I spend the first seven hours not placing my alchemist's skill points anywhere because she was intended to partially be a support mage and I wanted to make sure that she actually had some way to cast spells before I invested the points. Then I found out that I had missed a secret in the early crypt that required you to throw an item into the darkness over water. Easy to miss, especially if you want to avoid that long load time as much as possible. When I finally gave in and invested five points in alchemy I found the skill book that gives a point in alchemy almost immediately after. Obviously not something you could have predicted, but it sure added to the annoyance. Aside from a spellcasting item, heavy weapons are really rare at the start. After leaving the crypt I found a few heavy branches that wisdom-based damage, which my minotaur fighter had little use for. A while later I found the first half decent one, a pickaxe. Unfortunately its special move requires points in light weapons instead, which turned out to be a bug. Too bad for the special moves-focused fighter class. After that I think it took a fairly significant amount of time until I found another decent heavy weapon.

Some puzzles require overly specific items. The ice rod is an obvious example, though you said you're making that clearer. The elemental shield potions one is another. Would it be possible to just Ctrl F for the other kinds of shield potions and replace them with the kind that you can craft? Same thing with health potions, could you swap the ones found in the wild with the ones that you can craft? At one point I think I had three versions of a type of health potion.

Turns out Steam forums have a character limit. I didn't know that.

There was no party chatter or other poorly written dialogue. I liked that. Other mods that I've tried have had that, and often with unfunny jokes or references that take me out of the game. Forcing a personality onto the character I created from scratch will probably not end well.

There weren't many new environments to see. The snow area someone made was nice, and seeing and hearing the undead soldiers marching around was really cool. A few other types of areas would have been nice, but at the same time the ones that I've seen in other mods have had poor performance on my aging graphics card. More new monsters would have been nice too. I don't know anything about the processes involved but I'm guessing that retexturing, modelling, animating etc. areas and creatures is a time consuming task.


Now for various balance-related thoughts.
Do you like anime? I assume you do considering how powerful the katana is. That weapon completely makes heavy weapons obsolete. It's powerful, does pure damage and has a three second cooldown. A while after finding the first one I just gave up on heavy weapons and dumped five points into the minotaur's light weapons skill. Why bother with a heavy weapon that does similar damage on a six or seven second cooldown? Regarding that, it's not just the katana that is too powerful - heavy weapons are just way too weak. This is a problem in the base game too, but if it can be fixed by just raising a few numbers in a mod, then that sounds good to me. Aside from having much longer cooldowns, heavy weapons can't get backstab bonus damage. That's a huge disadvantage. They underperform in reliability (missing with a heavy weapon is much more punishing), DPS and damage spikes under ideal conditions. You could probably double the damage numbers on all heavy weapons and they wouldn't be overpowered. Don't take this as meaning that you need to drop a nuke on the katana, by the way. Heavy weapons would be bad even if you did that. I would suggest small nerfs to it, major buffs to heavy weapons and maybe minor buffs to other light weapons.

While I'm talking about weapons, wisdom-based spears are a nice addition. The other mage weapons too, like the reaper scythe. Give those backliners something to do when they aren't casting spells.

You made the different classes have proficiency with different weapon types. The bonus is pretty significant, but you may want to look over which weapons they apply to. For example, the fighter class gets a large strength bonus and critical chance when holding large swords. The ancient claymore doesn't get a critical bonus, but the katana does. I made the fighter thinking that large swords would be heavy weapons and the warden thinking that it would use maces or similar paladin-type, one-handed (to go with a shield) light weapons. Most swords until late in the game turned out to be light weapons and most maces and the like turned out to be heavy weapons, though. Of course, I ended up giving the warden the second katana once I had the skill points in heavy weapons to one-hand it.

Evasion vs. protection is a bit wonky. For most of the game, what generally happens is an enemy attacks you, and the frontliner wearing heavy armor takes damage. I've never really looked into it, but I get the impression that it either works by making attacks targeted at the first character target the one next to them if it misses, or enemies simply don't target the evasive character to begin with. The result is that the armored character takes almost all the damage being directed at your front line. Not sure if you can do anything about that, just throwing it out there. It's happened in all the Grimrocks.

There are some difficulty spikes, in particular the ice spider ambushes in the northen caves. They're fast, fairly powerful and surround you very quickly. You can't freeze them for some breathing room or kite them. The best way to deal with them that I could find was to use magic barriers to protect all sides except your front and try to kill them before they wear you down. Still, that usually required reloading so you could know when and where they would show up.

Magic is unbalanced, much like in the base game. Ice is powerful since it turns most enemies that can be frozen into a joke if fought alone. I'd rather have that than making it useless again though. Poison is pretty useless because it acts slow and there are a ton of enemies that it doesn't affect. There are a lot of status ailments that can't be cured with the cure spell, so it wasn't really worth the five point investment. I didn't find much use for the various pure air spells. Fire is still fire, the only element that can output half decent damage at range with some help from air. Dark was sometimes useful for its blind, but I don't think I ever managed to put anything to sleep with the new short-range dark spell and its damage wasn't impressive either. I'm assuming that you took most or all new spells from that magic library mod. I'm fairly sure because the ice spell icon is misaligned in the spell preview just like in another mod that had it. Consider adding a few more ranged damage spells, especially earth type.

I'm sure you noticed that I didn't use any new races. Most of them had large drawbacks that didn't seem worth it at a glance. A few of them had pretty high food consumption and at first I thought the mod had hunger death, probably because I had been looking at another mod that had it. The exp modifiers seem unnecessary. Didn't use many new classes either, though the monk seems like a fun one. I'll probably try some of them when I get around to another run. An idea: what if you make a garden or something like that where you can grow one or more types of herb? It does get a bit boring to have to bring an alchemist with you unless you want to miss out on several skill points.

Armor set balance is off. When I found the archmage set I had already found the novice set long ago and a crown or conjurer's hat or whatever it was called, which outperformed it. The priest set, a very lategame one, wasn't that much better than the archmage set. Set bonuses were pretty bad in the base game too, so if you feel like it I think you should buff them. The meteor shield, necessary for the meteor set bonus, is found extremely late (unless I missed one elsewhere) and by that time my warden had 89 or 99 fire resist entirely from stats.

The power gem buff has a really short duration to the point where it's kind of useless in fights.

That's all I can think of right now. I'm sure it wasn't too little feedback for you. Despite the flaws, I quite liked it because it was exactly what I want from a Grimrock mod: a huge new world to explore, new stuff and no poor attempts at telling a story. Since I've playtested Grimrock 3, do I get a discount on Grimrock 4?

Thank you again for the tons of reports and this final feedback.

You have brought up several very good aspects that I was not aware of and I have already begun altering the mod accordingly. I won't address every single point, but be assured that each of them has been recognized and will be improved and polished if possible.

Concering the rating of the mod...unfortunately, rivalry is a thing as are secondary accounts and innovations are often asked for but hardly ever really wanted. Rating things requires you to go back, so you have to put some effort into it. Apparently only 4% of the subs feel like going the extra mile and just take it for granted, a disgrace. It used to have 89% positive and was still a 3 out of 5 only, this seems a bit off. Also, feedback and a request for help should always be the first step in my opinion. But then again, we know the downvote culture as it is "cool to hate" as The Offspring once put it. :P

If that was the final feedback, then I suppose this is Final Feedback 2.
Light. I know it was a deliberate choice to not have a proper light spell, but it's worth talking about. You've said that there are more than enough torches etc. to use, but I think you've underestimated how long it will take people to get through the mod. I read 40 hours somewhere, but it took me over 60. That was with some backtracking, not knowing where to go and of course bug hunting, but I suspect that the average player will easily go over 40. Then again, I'm the kind of player that always takes a long time in any game because I like to stop and smell the flowers. To get back to the point, I think it's easy to run out of the finite light sources. Gamers are conditioned to not use finite resources because there's always some game that will punish them for it down the line.
The two early light spells, the stationary one and staff-powered one, were ok. Would have been nice with a longer duration, maybe. Once I found the magic lantern though, I did not miss spending most of the game in the dark. The staff was useful to keep around in case I needed to see what was on the other side of a pit. I've got an idea for a light source that stays true to the idea of not having a proper light spell until you find the magic lantern, though. It would be some kind of item that always provides light, but only underwater. You can't use spells or torches underwater, and it's dark and murky down there. I missed quite a few items, and since you're always on a timer down there you don't want to spend too much time looking around. This water-powered magic light item would have to be pretty early in the game though, to be useful where you need it the most.

As for the imp, I felt that it was kind of unreliable. It often got left behind because I moved faster than it did. Most of the times I summoned it, it got killed by me or a monster not long after. The frequency of its light shots seemed to be random, so a few times I just stood around for a while, waiting for it to illuminate the area for me. Not sure how to make it better. Can it be toggled on and off with the same spell, maybe? Made to always emit some light in addition to its projectiles? Actually, the light imp was responsible for almost all the jumpscares I got from this mod. Usually when I returned to an area where it has been left behind earlier and it snuck up on me. Funny that.

The part of the puzzle to enter the pyramid that involves circling the guardians would be better without a timer. The guardians are a one-time spawn and the timer is too strict to defeat them at the same time. Nothing in the hint suggests that it's dependant on time. If anything, it gave me the opposite impression. Just figuring out what the guardians are and defeating the summon stones would be a good enough trigger to make the next step activate when you step on the plate.

Real life permitting, I'm interested in another run once the next version is done. Would you want to supply me with a list of all the secrets, both for curiosity's sake and for testing purposes? Solution hints would be up to you.