8 months for 1.4....and this is it?

General
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Playing since 6 years, mostly for season releases for 2 weeks and then I am bored again as 90% of all players. (just look at player numbers shortly after season release)

Following critics is just my personal opinion after playing thousands of hours such games:

  1. ------------Adding new skills, reworking existing skills is so important.--------------------

It refreshes gameplay so much, just have a look on PoE.
What ehg is doing I cant understand. Adding every season like max 1,2 new skills. All their “rework” of existing skills is mostly completly useless.
All this changing of 30% instead of 25% is just completely useless and makes skills not perform somehow really better or worse.
85% of all skills and subskills arent used by anybody…

Examples:
Bees in 1.4. adding/changing new items. Nobody using it.
Black hole in 1.4. Still, noboy using.
Disintegrate in 1.3 I think, nobody using.

Why not make significant changes every season for skills and subskills (f.e.: skyfall within healing hands) ?
There is so much potential for such workarounds in this games and you dont use it.

2. -------------------------------- Itemization----------------------------------

So weird what new items come into that game every season. For me it seems ehg is not even testing them before. Also completely useless with weird effects like winter of bane nobody uses.

Aparist Set, corrupted dropped exalted items, natural wrath, bane of winter and douzens of others.

If you dont utelize them somehow please remove them from game.

3.----------------------------- Monoliths----------------------------------

Not such a pain in the *** anymore, bust still boring. Not much variety, for me personnaly the maps look all the same, except one is more redish, another more violetish and so on…

4.----------------------------------------Arena--------------------------------------

This is kind of affront for the players. How can you not have changed that system?!
How long does it take to get to wave 1000. 5 hours?

Next one you start at 500, if you die immediately you start at 250.

Just a Joke. Why not make it just -150 waves or so for every start.

4.----------------------------- Crafting----------------------------------

System itself I like, and I know it is rng yes. But whats the point for players who dont play 8 hours a day if they find a suitable double T7 item they need after days of farming and then it gets destroyed/useless after 2 seconds of crafting.

I was expecting way too much for this season, ehg is not an indie dev anymore, they sold more than 3 mil. copies. But with above mention points i really doubt their decision making. Problems I personally have with that game are the same like last season.

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PoE treats skills very differently. If you’re not aware, in PoE, any new skill can be used by any class, while in LE, skills are locked to classes/masteries, have their own skill trees & there is only room for a certain amount of skills in each class/mastery.

PoE does that as well, it’s not like D3 where they add a few several hundred % more multipliers for a skill to shift the meta.

Yeah, this is an issue (& not a “rooftop” issue).

Because they want to slowly achieve something called balance. Is it too slow? Probably.

Yeah, personally I’d like it to be closer to D3’s grater rifts, you choose a wave that you’ve previously exceeded by, say 5-10%.

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7 month and 1 day but yeah …

Given the pace of development I think tweaking all skill and item numbers will take less time and make a more fun season than whatever can be cooked in a few months by EHG new content-wise.

Vast majority of uniques and set items are completely useless. Same goes for like half of the active skills, most of the skill nodes, most of the passives…

I never understood this trend in all ARPGs that they make those fancy themed uniques that don’t synergize with anything.

Also we hear that they consistently work on optimizations and build variety, yet falconer still kills uber in 3 seconds, the game runs like shit and nobody seems to care, it’s been like that for years.

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We should stop comparing the game to PoE and Diablo every single post.

“Other games are bad, so we’re fine with ours being bad too.”

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Think it is not bad to compare games with each other, in a positive and negative way.

But yes as you said about these fancy themed uniques nobody uses. Seems sometimes people are working on that who did not play this game for 1 hour.

Like this hippster D4 devs who thought it is super cool & funny to farm these I dont know, 100 statues in a map every time :wink:

“ahh bees are sooo coool, lets make just a bee set, people will love that!!!”

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What is even much more important then to really change them significantly every now and then. And not letting a useless skill be useless for 2 years

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Actually, it has been requested repeatedly by players for quite some time now.

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which is fine, my thing is that it gets implemented so poor and useless

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By what metric are you determining this “nobody”?

I saw tons of people use and talk about both the Bee Set and Black Hole.

Disintegrate I could agree with, but that is basically the case for any channeled skill that doesn’t let you move.

I think Black Hole is in a great spot now, you can even use it as MAIN skill, which is crazy to say for a cooldown skill. I pushed far beyond empowered monolith with only black hole doing all the clearing on my first character and it feels great. Putting Black Hole down and literally the whole screen just dying feels amazing.

I don’t think useless is the right word. They are jsut unpopular.
There are a lot of uniques in LE and I rather have them keep making so many items, of which some end up not being popular, but still give people some weird hipster and different ways to build their characters.

Some of these unpopular items are some of my personal favorites, because they are so weird and force you to think outside the box and do something weird with it.

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Just like in every single ARPG ever lol. Poe season had 190k and now its 40k, 20% are still playing it.

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It’s a people thing though, that’s why we have anything competitive…

Kinda, yeah, I agree with the spirit.

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Good Input, sure there is the subjectiv determining which is conten you see on youtube. Which is only kind of true, but not fully.

The objective determination is just looking at the ladder.

Atm in 1.4. out of 10.000 shown ranked chars…TWO… have black hole in their skillset.
and…TWO…have disintegrate in their skillset.
There are 67 skills which each have only 1 % or less of 10.000 players have in their skillset

So imo this is a good metric determination for any player and ehg to have an overview about their game.

Sure, there s always kind of meta in such games which is fine, but at least try to buff/push 85 % of the other mentioned skills. And maybe also unpopular/useless items also get a use then.

I m not a dev, but cant be that hard to change an added damage effectivness of a skill for example Elemental Nova from 120 % to 700 %. Propably not even then it is meta…

I also agree with you that channeled skills in general are bad implementet. Either you move to not get hit and make no dmg or you stand still, doing dmg and die.

Also agree with you in a way. I also love to try non meta builds to make work and theory crafting.
But it is not fun when such builds with unpopular items hardly make you build to corr 200 and thats it…

Also easy solution, lot of these subskills on items have a cooldown. Just remove these cooldowns and most of the items get a use…

I really love this basic system of LE of that possibility having so many skills and builds. But sadly they dont use that potential at all.

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Why would this be a good “objective” determination? The majority of players don’t play arena at all. It’s only competitive players that do.

So all you can take from that is that Black Hole isn’t a competitive build. Which is vastly different from not being viable or even not being used.

In the corruption ladder there are only 2 on LETools as well, but the 10000th entry is 626c, so there are lots of people not in it playing at lower corruption. Unknown number of them.

In the level ladder there are 7 entries. But again, limited to 10k.

Not to mention that ladders are only for seasonal characters. There is a very sizable portion of the playerbase that only play legacy, since the content is the same for both.

The only thing we can take from the ladders is that Black Hole isn’t competitive with other stronger builds. Not how popular it is.

1 Like
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Today has been a 15.000 (including legacy) player peak. Why should 10.000 (maybe bit less who have quitted already) not be representative?

Speaking of player numbers, what in the end counts for every company. 150k at season 3, half now. Showing also it is not the right way ehg is going to.

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That says nothing. Firstly you are talking about corruption pushing ladder. That only starts showing at 676 corruption, that is a corruption that is absolutely unncessary to even reach to play the game. So only people who really want to push that much will even attempt to do that.

Secondly, that is one a part of the game. Same as Arena Ladders, they are just one section of the game. Some people, probably even the vast majority don’t evne care for ladders and don’t even try. Corruption might be it bit more useful than arena, but arena for example is totally useless as a metric. I personally probably could have pushed a few builds of mine in the past enough to get into these ladders, but I don’t even bother, because I simply don’t care.

Thirdly it is a Sorcerer exclusive skill, so this narrows down even more how many people could even use it.

Anything that shows a ladder or X# of people never really shows the cross-section of the community. It also shows multiple characters of the same player/account.

Well I think I personally always could make any build do way more than 200 corruption without weeks of grinding. So 200 corr is very low for that as a threshold I think.

BUT

The problem with this is: This is incredibly subjective to begin with anyway. When a skill/build starts to not do very well at 200 or 300 or 400 corruption at which point is it no fun for you anymore? This is insanely subjective. This threshold will be different for literally everybody.

It is also a fool’s errand to even try and “balance” everything to a equal level. Some skills or items will always be weaker and there is no way that the devs will make every single niche item “really good”, as logn as they are good enough to play the game and have some fun I am good with it. And in this regard I think LE already is the forerunner of any ARPG beating even PoE in terms of number of viable builds and how many different builds you can really do.

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1- There were way more players than 16k playing today. What you’re talking about is 16k playing at the same time. It’s not the same thing. Likewise, this season had a peak of 45k players. This is 45k players playing at the same time. The actual number of total individual players is much much higher.

2- Even if we take the number of 45k players as total, arena ladder is still ignored by most. The bottom entries of the ladder are at wave 40. Most players are probably at 0. This means you can easily have a 0.002% usage rate for arena players and a 50% usage rate for non-arena players.

3- The corruption ladder would be much more useful for this, since everyone has to play monos. But the bottom entries end at 676c, so there are still lots of players below that. In fact, it’s the vast majority.

What the ladder can tell us is that Black Hole is very unpopular among the competitive players. The grinders and min-maxxers.
It tells us nothing about the popularity of Black Hole among the rest of the playerbase, including casuals.

2 Likes
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That is only online players at the same time (not total player). Also among the 10000 from the ladder are multipe chars from the same player/account.

By that definition any ARPG is “not the right way to go”. Even the top games of the gerne have these massive falls offs every season/league.

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No, steamdb also counts the offline players. Steam still reports game count, unless you have no internet connection. Otherwise SP games would always have a 0 player count.

It’s also just one entry per account.

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I am talking about the mobile/handheld players or players that legitimately have no internet connection all the time, they do not count retroavtively or if you play in steam offline mode.

That is incorrect.

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If you play on steam deck with no net, then yes, it doesn’t count. But if you play on PC in offline mode (LE true offline) with Steam connected, it will still count.

I’d imagine the amount of people that aren’t counted in steamdb is pretty low for LE.

True, that was my bad. I was under the impression it was, for some reason, but I can see it’s not.

Either way, ladder is just for seasonal characters, which I’d estimate being about 50-60% of the playerbase at this point (mostly gut feeling, no real data to estimate accurately, but definitely higher in other games like PoE)…