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Torchlight is a dungeon crawling action RPG in the same vein as Diablo and the first two games are some of my favorites in the genre. Over the years, I think I’ve played more of Torchlight II but every now and again I like to revisit the first game. They were designed with modding in mind and I recently realized I’ve never checked out any mods for Torchlight. So I did some searching and came across Archanoth’s Torchlight Overhaul, a mod that rebalances the game. Due to the amount and nature of the changes, it is recommended to play it without any other mods installed except maybe cosmetic mods. Torchlight Overhaul doesn’t add a lot of new content but includes some other popular mods including respec potions and the Ferret pet.
Torchlight Overhaul focuses on rebalancing things. On the surface, it looks and feels exactly the same as the vanilla game. The mod’s description claims it was designed to make the gameplay more challenging and I’m guessing that means it applies to all difficulty levels because I didn’t find anything that says otherwise. I say this because in all honesty, I had basically no trouble getting through the dungeon. The last set of floors put up the most resistance. Granted, I did play on the Normal difficulty thinking it would be a good starting point for more challenging gameplay. But when compared to the Normal difficulty of the vanilla game, I plowed through most of the dungeon with little effort. So you may want to jump into this at a higher difficulty level.
The skill system has been redone. Skills are level-gated, most can be ranked up, and they come in three types or trees; active, passive, and shared. Active contains all class-exclusive skills, passive contains all shared passive skills, and shared skills are all the spells. Spells are no longer obtained from scrolls. The passive skills have been redesigned. There’s nine total, down from the original fifteen and each one has been made more useful according to the mod’s description.
One of my favorite things about the Overhaul mod is that it kind of streamlines things and speeds up the pacing. Health and mana potions and town portal, identify, and spell scrolls are gone. Instead, you’re given the heal and identify skills from the get-go and the heal skill does have a cooldown. There are all kinds of other potions that do different things and potions can stack up to fifty. Furthermore, mana’s regeneration rate has been significantly increased and all skills have been balanced around this. Another change is that the quality of the loot drops has been increased meaning good stuff drops more often. Plus, quest rewards are much better. Enchanting items is more expensive but the disenchantment chance has been removed. Gems have also seen some significant changes. All gems are now simply “Ember Gems” and come with one to eight affixes. And last but not least, Fish now drop as loot and are transmutable.
In my experience, a lot of the changes resulted in me acquiring powerful equipment frequently and consistently and because of the better equipment drops and numerous gem affixes, your character can become very powerful very quickly. In addition to the affixes or properties that improve damage and defense, I had multiple pieces of gear and gems not only increasing my resistances, speed, and boosting attributes but also my experience and fame gain.
The Overhaul mod does feature other changes including making gold more easily obtainable and the mod’s description claims weapon and armor stat balance has been improved. Now combine all these things without any significant changes to the monsters and I don’t see where the more challenging gameplay is coming from. Enchanting items is more expensive but with gold more easily obtainable and a good chance you’ll have items with affixes that decrease vendor prices and increase the amount of gold you find, it doesn’t really matter. Also, you can take a common item with no affixes, enchant it, and then insert a couple of gems, giving it fifteen plus affixes that are all beneficial. Do the same with a powerful unique item and you can get even more. Honestly, I really like the changes but I think the monsters should have received more attention. The mod’s description claims that the monster level of the main dungeon scales to the current floor level but I guess that’s not enough. Again, I did play on Normal so maybe higher difficulties offer more of a challenge and showcase better balancing.
Since the audiovisual presentation didn’t receive any changes compared to the vanilla game, I’m just going to get right into my overall thoughts. Despite being able to decimate everything in my path throughout most of the dungeon, I still really enjoyed the mod. I like all the changes. I just think the monsters should have received more attention to balance things out better. Other than that, I found the Overhaul to be more compelling than the vanilla game and that’s mainly because of the better loot drops. Great stuff dropped frequently and I ended up with more gems than I knew what to do with. I was swapping out gear often and cutting through monsters and elites like butter. Even in the final set of floors which put up the most resistance, I was still dropping foes like flies. And when I say resistance, I mean I would get overwhelmed by enemies and attacks forcing me to retreat every so often. But I can’t say it was difficult to push through or that I should respec anything. In the end I left this mod thinking it’s excellent but that players should probably play on a difficulty higher than Normal.
I do recommend the Overhaul mod because it is fun and does improve some things. Unless I missed something and this was designed to be played on a specific difficulty level, I would say my only complaint is that the monsters need to be tweaked further. Other than that, I feel it’s more rewarding and compelling thanks to the improved pacing and better loot drops. If you’re looking for a good reason to return to Torchlight, the Torchlight Overhaul mod is a good one. Definitely check it out.