I like how the usefulness of the Mage is immediately made clear with those AoE packs. And thank you for stopping the timer while in a shop. These are nice little design elements.
It’s also nice that the timer running out is no longer that fatal. To my perception, this time pressure side: It should be encouraging you to play mana-efficient (then it would be about healing), but it’s rather encouraging you to deal damage on the side as much as you can?
I still don’t really vibe with the party selection and the meta progression system. Simply in comparison to e.g. Darkest Dungeon, I don’t feel like your system has any advantages yet. The boss fights I guess are OK. I was too stupid to beat them first try, killed boss1 on second attempt, then died at boss2. Third run I died to boss1 again, felt like lack of DPS, or idk what else to do in that fight other than focusing the adds.
In general the game feels more like a generic MMO-style dungeon simulator to me. The actual healing tasks are so simple they might be done by the AI just as well as it does tanking and dps. The real challenges are commanding your whole party in the boss fights, and navigating the maze efficiently to maximize farm. When I played healer in MMOs, I did it because I enjoyed the somewhat more calm style of game-play: It’s not about going all out all the time, it’s often about saving mana, pre-casting.. and just watching health-bars, of course. (Meanwhile everyone else being frantically pumping, interrupting, running from enemy to enemy, and so on.) In HtD I still don’t feel like I am getting this calm experience, rather, like I said, it feels like I could play tank or dps in this semi-solo control scheme and my game-play would be roughly the same. (Sometimes I feel my damage dealers are so dumb I could really pull out more impact if I mainly controlled one of those~)
Anyhow, the technology works quite fine (had some issues with clicking certain things, hope you can see it in the video wtf, video is broken, thanks Wayland), and there is certainly fun in the game!