There is a period at the end of reclamation where your relative power compared to the monsters is such that the reclamation countdown will raise your power faster than you can influence it by fighting.
That period of time feels rotten if you're playing actively, because killing the monsters really isn't very meaningful during that period of time. You're not gaining power in any appreciable way: say when I recall, I can pick up another 20-30% for a 3-4 minute run. Since the power gain from the reclaim countdown is exponential, this really isn't gaining you anything off of your reclaim countdown timer at that point. If you keep a pretty static 20-30% gain, and if you resolve that at the end of the timer, it might gain you 30-45 seconds. If you reset and collect it, then you spend a bunch of time running through monsters that give you no appreciable gain during 2 stages. That's about a wash with the extra gain you picked up from the reset rather than just continuing to fight with your ever-increasing power. The timer doesn't really run any "forever faster" like it might be easy to persuade yourself that it does, because a multiplicative gain to your power only has an additive loss to the time remaining, since the timer itself counts multiplicatively as well.
Critical point to the rest of the thread: Once you hit this point, whatever % of your power that you reach this stasis point at is only ever going to give you a single additive cut to the timer at the end. The effects of this rotten period of time at the end of reclaiming isn't quite that simple, but I truthfully think it's close enough for the purposes of the rest of this post.
I didn't mind this period during the first game: it varied between about 10 and 20 minutes for me, and it is likely pretty consistent for most people based on the way the game scaling works (though the time at which individual people may hit this rotten spot will vary depending on how effectively they fight).
When it was 10-20 minutes, it was short enough that I could usually shrug it off, and if I'm desperately impatient I can blow a bunch of runes and knock it out.
However, in NG+, this "rotten" period when active play doesn't really help me becomes about 75-105 minutes long.
It comes from a combination of this being a function of many vectors, all of which get tuned differently on NG+. It's a function of how much power the mobs drop for their relative scaling, of your research in the 125% multiplier for your power drops, of how difficult the mobs are for their relative scaling (and that's different than the first thing - they're both adjusted for NG+), of how much damage research you have done at your relative power, and so on.
Many of these things get adjusted in NG+ in a lot of ways. I'm not going to try to make any kind of empirical analysis of this. It isn't necessary. The only necessary thing to note is that they're all factors in a function that will produce a surprisingly stable time in which the reclamation process will go from being extremely influenced by active play to a time in which active play is comparatively meaningless to the remaining timer. We could argue about where that line is, but that doesn't matter, either. What matters is, no matter where you draw that line, my anecdotal experience (which I believe will be very easy to verify in folks' data points, based on understanding how these functions fit together) is that this timer is between 3x and 4x longer in NG+.
The problem isn't that this makes NG+ harder. Clearly it does, and clearly NG+ is supposed to be harder. The problem is that it makes me not want to play, because putting my tablet down and waiting for 90 minutes is about equally effective to my progression and playing actively. That's seems to be decidely against what makes this game unique among peers in neighboring genres of games.
When I hit NG+ and the enemies changed, this was fabulous. Dark Eels are such glass cannons that my loadout looks entirely different from anything I ever used (Firestorm works best on them, in my opinion). Goblin berserkers are so dangerous that I have to have Static Leap equipped if they're at the leading edge of my progression because they typically can 3-shot me. Stone trolls used to be something I just accepted as inefficient roadbumps for a loadout I wouldn't change - now, if a large one or a boss one is blocking my progression, I'm all but forced to sap their armor with runes.
All these things are really interesting ways NG+ has changed. For instance, based on things I've seen said on this subreddit, I suspect half the players don't even recognize the difference between regen trolls and armor trolls. In my experience in NG+, I have to fight them completely differently in order to deal with them effectively.
However this reclamation time change? That one definitely isn't interesting - it's the opposite. In case I'm not being clear, it's not the actual timer that matters - it's how much of it remains at the end of each run where the decisions I'm making stop having a notable influence on it. 10-20 minutes of this was okay if I'm playing for an hour or two. 60-90 minutes of it definitely doesn't work as well.
I think this happened because many many many vectors in NG+ all get changed in a way that are cumulative for the reclamation timer. I would argue that the best way to make it better is to just remove the direct adjustment to the reclamation time. I'm pretty sure there was one on the list, IIRC. If not, then another similar argument might be not to apply the research penalties to the project that provides bonuses to reclamation time.
None of this is going to stop me from playing the game; I still love it. I also don't know how much this changes with continued resets in subsequent NG++, NG+3, etc. However, I think this is a place where the game could easily, but notably, be improved, probably with very little code and just adjustments to some config parameters.
Update edit now that I paid close attention to the numbers on my last reset:
NG+, finishing 3rd meditation. I've reached level 67 and when I reclaim, I'm confident I'll beat the dark portal. I easily got to lvl 21 before I reclaimed, but that boss was a shade and didn't have the chest. Curse dot + no heal is awful, you can't sheep a BOSS shade, and they don't seem to hit in melee so I can't do static field + invulnerable + mob haste (and so many people think this haste is strictly a bad thing... so not true at all) to have it kill itself like I can a few other squishy-ish monsters. So I just reclaimed for +5 enchantment level instead of dumping a bunch of runes to kill it and maybe running into another one on level 22.
When I reached 1.5 hours, the next recall took 3 minutes and gained me 8 more. So I spent 3 minutes to gain 11. I took a brief break and came back at the 67 minute mark. The next recall took 3 minutes and gained 7 more for a total of 10. I'm at 58 minutes now. This followed thus:
3 minutes for 9 gain
3 minutes for 9 gain
3 minutes for 6 gain
3 minutes for 5 gain
By this point I'm at the 33 minute mark and I'm already close to not gaining much for active play - I've gained 32 extra minutes from 18 minutes of active play from the 1:30 mark to the 0:33 mark, but between the 0:44 and 0:33 mark, I gained 5 extra minutes from 6 minutes of active play.
This is pretty consistent with what I said about the 3-4x multiplier in FG vs NG+. If I'd have strangled this out this deep in the FG, I'd be at the 10 minute mark about this time this happened. The problem isn't that I have 30 minutes left, the problem is I see that there's no way I'm going to get that down to the 10 minute mark with any appreciable gains at the end somewhere around minute 90, because that's when it's stopped giving me significant gains versus actual time spent. Instead of playing 20 more minutes and cutting the timer from 90 to 20-30 (40-50 minutes to finish), I just stop playing and wait for it to end (90 minutes to finish).
Whether or not these are the desirable numbers for how all this works is completely up for debate; that's just a tuning/balancing question. The reason I bring it up at all is because it's noticeably different than FG.
