Personally, from a point of view of someone who has just started doing monoliths and is somewhat new to the game I feel the other way around.
I think it’s too easy to pile on modifiers when you don’t feel very comfortable doing the echoes yet and if you want to experiment with your build a bit and respec you might lock yourself out.
I’m not sure if i’m just missing something, but as far as I can see the echoes get only more difficult as once you do the ones close to start the modifiers on later ones will last for more turns. Doing the shade resets the initial echoes, but also increases the difficulty. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stay at a level that is comfortable for you and farm. So if you decide to respec your build and need to relevel skills and i.e. are capable only doing first lvl 55 echoes, you might be bricked because you no longer are able to get those early ones anymore due to corruption and modifiers piling up?
Community Testers don’t have any additional knowledge that is kept secret from the other community members. If you have questions, feel free to ask on the forums or on the LE discord. But please quit spreading that nonsense!
In theory it may appear like that, but the Shade Echoes closes to the start have a much higher tendency to reduce corruption. You need to go out of you way most of the time to keep increasing your corruption after a few runs. Its very easy (imo) to bring it back down. There are several people on here arguing that the process to increase corruption should be easier.
As for ‘bricking’ a timeline, I’m not sure if in practice it is possible to render a timeline unplayable for a build that is unprepared for it, any more than getting past Lagon for example is a hurdle for many builds (most of mine!). But in a game like this you are never in a tunnel with nowhere else to go. If you can’t kill Lagon then you need to grind and refine until you can (or abandon that build). In this specific example, Lagon is neither bricked nor needs a nerf.
If someone has indeed gotten to their first timeline at 55ish and is having big problems because they rolled some combination of yucky mods for their build then I don’t see how them grinding out a few levels before going at it again is much different to getting temporarily blocked by some boss.
Personally I enjoiy, “you must be this high to ride” checkpoints as they force me to improve. I’m too bloody lazy to do it unless I have to and that’s what creates the feeling of challenge that brings me back to the problem again and again.
@Shrukn While Raw is wrong & wedo have information that the rest of the community doesn’t, it wasn’t given to us by the devs, we had to work it out ourselves & I have no doubt that everybody else will catch up soon enough.
This is true with a grown-up character when you redo some timelines. But with a new character, I like each timeline to have a fresh start, with nothing inherited from the previous ones except the blessings. You wrote “optional” so I agree with you, but I feel it’s really mandatory to have this as an option or at least tied to heroes that already completed the involved timelines.
I agree with most other elements, with the exception of Vessels: I think I still haven’t encounter some. Maybe it’s empowered only? I haven’t played empowered since the patch was released.
On a fresh timeline every single shade will increase you corruption, regardless of how deep it is into the web.
Once you gained corruption the shades that are very close to the center actually will reduce your corruption.
So there is a viable strategy to increase and reduce your corruption to stay at a even level of corruption.
I don’t think you can really lock yourself out.
If you did a mistake and took a especially nasty modifier, that you feel like you can’t comfortably run, you need to take a few echoes very slowly or carefully.
If you did respec or experiment you can always go back to lower timelines.
With my proposed system you would always start a new timeline “fresh”, you only would be able to increase corruption quicker if you want that.
If you don’t want to increase corruption too much in a particular timeline you can always do not so deep shades, that only give minor corruption increase.
What exactly do you disagree with regarding the vessels?
Vessels can always spawn, but their spawn rate is noticeably impacted by both corruption and depth within the echo web
It’s not that I disagree, it’s that I don’t know if I agree because I never found a Vessel.
I only found regular echoes, Beacons and Shades. No Vessel. So I have no opinion about them.
Yes, that would be perfect. As I said, it’s important to keep it optional, but having the possibility to chose between both (normal or faster corruption) would be good.
Hey, I just wanted to clear up a little misconception about the CTs. They don’t get a ton of extra information. We are attempting to get feedback from them that is relevant so the environment needs to be similar to what everyone would experience if we had launched that patch in the state we give it to them.
We answer questions from them with the same detail that we answer the general community. If we tell them something about how a mechanic works, we also tell the community at large.
I don’t really see this as an issue though. It allows players to feel like they’re manipulating the system in a way that improves their chances of successfully progressing further with their character(s). If they want to spend the additional time to set up their echo web in such a way to allow them to progress further with fewer rewards – item rarity & experience gained – then is it such a problem?
With the current system you could argue that players would feel rewarded for learning the mechanics of the echo web and using that knowledge to their advantage if there were one or more modifiers that they wanted to remove before fighting a big boss. In fact, Thyworm has a video detailing ways to reduce the amount of modifiers you have and he clearly likes the system because it gives players more options, in this regard. He also doesn’t even include the beacon or vessel options in that video, so his strategy has room for improvement.
But then i would like to have some extra rewards for not making the boss/shade super easy.
Because both experience and rarity currently does not have any significant impact on bosses.
EDIT: If item rarity would increase the chances of getting the mroe rare Shade Uniques, that would be cool. With that i could live with the system not changing.
But overall i still don’t like it.
A middleground between the two would be:
Vessel and Beacons still reduce modifer counts
But Quest Echoes do not
This would reward discovering the entire echo web and utilizing those special echoes.
But the guaranteed, very easily accessable quest echoes will not help you make your web easier.
Having thrown this into the room, i still would prefer if we change the system to my OP
I was actually going to propose the same thing in my post, but seeing as you did it appears we’ve found a favourable middle ground. This I could certainly live with – if it was changed to this.
I really like having the option to manipulate how i deal with mods and bosses by using the beacons/vessels/shades nodes to remove mods.
When doing so, one has to pay a price: investing time to set it up, getting other unwanted mods/rewards along the way to get to those special echoes and of course not using the beacons to scout, etc.
I really think that it offers more deph to the web where you now have “more options” and do not just race in a straith line to the boss.
THAT BEING SAID i also agree that having more modifiers should equal to higher rewards so there would be an interesting incentive to stack modifiers instead of trying to get rid of them. With such a system we would have both options as viable ways to run a timeline. And more choices are always good.
Agree on your arena comments. They need to be less common and then considering that they take much more time to finish than most other types of echoes the reward should be higher. And of course Wave Counter needed!
My concern with the Vessel and Beacon thing is that maybe some players want to do them but don’t want to lose modifiers.
Maybe add a rare one that refreshes the modifier stacks?
I have only had 1 arena node and it was crazy hard. A lot harder than the other Mono levels. I liked the change of pace, but the waves may have been coming too fast.
So with the recent changes (0.8.2G) to reduce the required timeline stability to enter the 3rd quest echo in conjunction with the new system, that your timeline instability does not get reset to 0 after killing the timeline boss…
Farming Quest Echoes/Timeliens bosses is way too fast… i really don’t like that change.
The initial decrease from 1350 to 1000 was “ok-ish” but not needed IMO.
Now from 1000 to 750 + the “not reset to 0 system” is too much.
I think they should increase it to 1000 again and keep the “not reset to 0 system”
i thought this was also the case before the update, i think i have noticed this some days ago.
i had another ‘shower thought’ today, what if:
echoes are bigger, with some more complex and nested tasks to complete
the echo- web would be smaller (and maybe with more possible paths to take after completing)
and rewards (items, stability, corruption) get reasonable adjusted in quantity
this is just some idea, not something i definitely want to see, but i think it is intresting.
but i found how it is atm also not really intresting. Just rushing to the oblective as fast as possible and then spending more than 2x the time needed to complete the echo with sorting loot and planning the path on the echo web.
or maybe a mix of both would already spice things up, some fast echoes, some more complex ones with possible higher reward quantity.
Edit: or maybe just some more time intensive objectives:
full clear the map
a plague evolved: kill all the rats on the map
stuff like that and with reasonable adjusted rewards
