A Once promising game

Feedback and Suggestions
21

Yes, I indeed expect the ability to get a fantastic item of that type when I put in excessive amounts of play-time :slight_smile:

If that’s not a reasonable expectation basis then I don’t know what is… and mind you, I love Path of Exile for giving players a hard time to achieve great gear, not even BiS items.

Last Epoch has no BiS rares (or rather exalts) in existence and won’t ever have them in the lifetime of the game likely if it stays in the current state. They’re a nigh impossibility.
Every single BiS item is currently a ‘perfect Ventor’s Gamble’ in comparison in Path of Exile. Years upon years people dropped hundreds of thousands of those and not a single one turned out to be perfect, or even extremely close to perfect as much as I know.

And I’m not even comparing CoF or MG to each other directly.
I’m solely saying that the faction which makes acquiring top-tier items even a possibility (if everyone is taken together) has no chance to even get them anyway.

So yes, that’s a problem for CoF since CoF is set up to specifically give that possibility but fails to achieve it. MG is generally useless in that matter unless you’re the 0,0001% player (the single one hence) which manages to snatch it from the market should one ever appear, so no difference there.

22

Perhaps people should just try to manage their expectations.

Wanting 4 times perfectly rolled t7 affixes on the perfect base with the perfect implicit rolls is delusional, and people complaining about not getting them is like a child throwing a tantrum because mum didn’t buy a chocolate bar.

How many perfectly rolled rare items are there in PoE? 6 times the desired tier 1 affix, all of them max rolled, perfectly double corrupted, perfect base?

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23

Again, this is just about expectations. It’s a system that will keep expanding into the future of the game.
Much like when delve started (or mono corruption, which is exactly the same thing, and no, I won’t rehash our discussion on it) you had no chance at all of getting to the end (which most players weren’t even aware existed). But as the game kept introducing new things and power creep happened, reaching the end of delve became a routine thing.

So yeah, right now it’s impossible to get a 4xT7 (although actualy BiS now is 5xT7, since Nemesis lets you have sealed T7 affixes). But as the game goes on and new stuff gets introduced it will become easier and easier to get until you reach the point where it’s so easy that you need to introduce a new tier to take its place.

24

A lot of what you’re saying here is accurate, the problem is just that the game is not finished. The devs bit off a little more than they could chew in terms of how much they were going to have to fill in and bug fix later and there’s lots of content that just isn’t getting updated until the manpower allows it.

But the reason why a lot of people are still going to look at this post and say “What is he talking about?” is because of the amount of content in the game that actually works and works well. There’s still plenty of things that are finished and do work just fine in LE. Hundreds and hundreds of hours worth, even if you only level and theory-craft builds partially to see if they’re fun to play or not. It took me about 600 hours to exhaust the content I was interested in, and I certainly didn’t play every build or beat every boss, even. (Yeah I was too lazy to do all the key dungeons.)

What I’m getting at is, people are going to enjoy the game. I don’t personally look at it this way but you could argue the incomplete parts just mean there will be more things to do in the future. A lot of people here probably do look at it that way.

I would have preferred if it came out a finished game also, but that’s getting harder and harder to do these days, for whatever reason. Probably game engines being overwrought and good devs getting promoted out as soon as their resume starts to sparkle. I dunno.

25

No, because thematics.

2 & 3, yes. 4, kinda no.

26

‘In the current state’
And that would be fine as well.

The common premise is that the top of the top gear is not accessible in the current version, though becoming accessible in 1-2 years of time since power-creep is a mandatory necessity to happen.

Anything beyond is - as I said it before - so called ‘dead design space’, implementing things for the vast future which won’t see the light of day in any way, an actual hindrance to proper game design as it limits what the devs can actually implement as extra mechanics to provide a higher variety in gearing.

Because if there’s ‘space to fill’ still how can EHG reasonably provide extra mechanics like… for example influence items like in PoE?
That would make it harder to acquire any reasonable item since the pool is more diluted, by design, so those items become even more rare rather then less so.

There’s 2 options hence to alleviate that, rarity and quantity.
Quantity poses a problem in terms of being a resource hog, more items means more renderings means even less FPS then we currently get (the game has some serious leaks still after all, as well as missing optimizations as we can see with the micro-stutters and freezes happening for a good variety of people).

So that only leaves rarity.
To achieve such an item with the current pool we would need a good 50000% increase in rarity though… which is absolutely bonkers, so why does it even exist if nobody in the world will even get it, ever?
With a bigger pool that number rises substantially though… which hinders those implementations in the first place.

A T5 sealed with 3 T7 would be around a billion times (roughly) harder to achieve then your example.

Nigh none, a few. They exist nowadays.
When we talk about roll-ranges then in LE we’re talking about quintillion times harder… rough ballpark.

Impossible.
I’m not even talking about roll-ranges here, your example is so utterly far away it’s laughable sadly. I wish it were different, but go ahead and actually put it into math for the chances, we don’t have the distinct ones for LE… we got rough ones for PoE. Those items are achieveable with excessive investment.

I’m saying that the setup of the system actively hinders expanding it for the future, it’s - much like MG - inherently faulty from a setup basis and needs change.

It’s not as severe as the MG faults though since it at least ‘works’.

The reasonable amount of power-creep won’t let us see this end result in the next 20-40 years with the current pace, without adding any dilution at all, which would be nonsensical to do from EHGs side.

Any addition to the system will cause it to become less achievable, we’ve already seen that with the implementation of new bases causing severe drawbacks as rarity isn’t making up for it and quantity - for good reason - isn’t majorly touched in common situations, the factions being an exception since it’s… a very good reason :stuck_out_tongue:

27

How do you figure? Nemesis alone made it much closer than before, especially with the added ability of having T7 sealed affixes. And that was a simple “small” change which wasn’t even part of the big mechanic they introduced.
So after a few months, it’s already possible to have much better gear than you did on launch. Which means that eventually it will become possible to have actual BiS 5xT7 gear.

Not to mention primordial uniques, which are coming, and that we still have no idea how they will fit in all this.

28

Because people want to get to the top, that’s inherent in those games, screw ‘tamper the expectations’ and that all… the possibility of it needs to exist as a basis, which it doesn’t. Thinking it does with the numerical representation known is called nothing else then ‘delusion’ sadly, it’s that severe.

And Nemesis didn’t make it ‘closer’, absolutely not! The quantity of Nemesis encounters is fixed, as is the outcome variance, it’s not affected by corruption. So in basic empowered Monoliths you’ve reached your ceiling for that mechanic, nothing more will happen.
Hence the state there is the maximum reliable amount of rewards provided… while having high corruption + CoF outpaces that mechanic by several magnitudes of efficiency, basically making it worthless outside of the specific bases it can provide… for ‘base’ gear and not uniques mind you.

And well… CoF is not even remotely closer to reaching that ‘ceiling’ then before, there’s so… sooooo much space leftover it’s laughable. They might see double T7 drops of common T7 affixes if they’re lucky, but a T7 rare + T7 common is already a unicorn. Then what about 3 T7? 4T7? Rare affixes to boot? Those are all beyond that current amount and cumulative in rarity.

Yes, and I would expect to be able to get the ceiling of ‘release gear’ after 5 years at least… but alas… we’re off 20 or so :stuck_out_tongue: That’s a problem, if I can’t theoretically achieve the top-end build then there’s no fixed end-goal available now, is it? So I need to set it myself somewhere in the middle… as a long-term player based on getting ‘perfection’ (achieving it or not is of no matter) then I’m out of luck now, am I?
And obtaining ‘perfection’ is a fairly big goal people try to achieve, even if it’s only for a singular item, which is utterly and entirely impossible currently, BiS doesn’t exist.

I don’t know any other diablo-clone where BiS doesn’t exist, at least for one piece of equipment (not secondary mechanics like idols)

As for the primordial uniques… that’s diluting the pool further, it’s making it harder, we have a rarity issue, not a issue with the pool itself.

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29

This is actually wrong. According to Mike on discord, rolls aren’t affected by corruption, but higher corruption means you encounter Nemesis more often.

How is that different from delve, though? People want to get to the top (or bottom in this case) and in the first year or 2 it wasn’t even a possibility.

How do you know when no one outside EHG knows what primordial uniques will be?

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30

But the way the loot generation is designed is not ‘dead design space’.

If I understood it correctly, it is just that each affix is rolled independently. Therefore, each of the four affixes could roll as a T7 theoretically.

Now, programming an artificial limit into the loot generation that limits the maximum number of tiers or exalted affixes that can roll on an item serves no practical function.
Instead, it increases the number of operations necessary to create a piece of loot.

If you think that rolling 3xt7 is already so unlikely that it will never happen, a function that reduces the 3rd T7 affix to T5 will never be needed. THAT is dead design space.

I won’t waste my time with that. I can live with the fact that a chain of unlikely events reaches probabilities that will not happen.

I don’t understand how you came to that conclusion, honestly.

Why should the current way of loot generation hinder an expansion on how loot will be generated in the future?

Let’s go with influenced items, which - afaik - just throw in a set of additional affixes that can roll on that item.
Well, that can be easily integrated into LE as well.

Or I could imagine a system called engravings, where players can ‘slot’ special affixes fitting the socket.

That premise is wrong. You want this, it doesn’t need to be.

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31

Ok… so our theoretical limit is 100% encounter rate.

Not even remotely close to CoF levels of loot in high corruption.

Maybe if we get 5… or 10 Nemesis encounters per map, otherwise it’s just a drop on a hot stone :stuck_out_tongue:

The major limit in delve commonly was time, and still is. Also it’s not itemization but content.
You didn’t ‘gain’ anything from delving deeper after a while, it affects rarity of nodes mostly, not the explicit outcome from those nodes after a while, they put a limit on that if I remember right.

So it’s nice to push… but it has no inherent upside.
Much like corruption pushing… but that’s vastly better the delve in terms of practical upsides, higher corruption means higher rewards after all.

For gear though? That’s our core progression in a diablo-clone, isn’t it? If my gear can’t be upgraded regularly what am I playing for? Doesn’t mean it has to be a substantial upgrade… but a upgrade nonetheless.
Which is why T6 and T7 affixes are such a baffling experience, having the majority of power hidden behind them (they scale exponentially, not linear after all) meaning that each of them provides a substantial boost… and obviously hence has to be severely limited in acquisition.
Once more, comparison to other games? The highest tiers are definitely better… but unless it’s a sort of ‘special’ tier (like exalted tiers, drop-only… or a special mechanic providing it) then it’s usually inverted with the exponential curve. The first levels providing the most to give a reasonable start… and the last levels doing ever less so since the multiplicative measures are doing the hard work already, scaling up highly.
Not the case in LE though.

Because it’s either new content where new uniques drop → Time dilution, you can’t spend it on ‘core’ areas while doing that.
Or it’s in the core pool through some means → Pool dilution, you get less items otherwise.

It’s inherent, so we obviously know.
Unless rarity or quantity is increased the pool is the place to discern how long stuff takes. More items means it takes longer to get a specific one. Obviously so.

Yes? Nothing against that?
A obvious choice after all!

Hence you set the ‘expected item level’ to a degree which causes people to have a chance to get that juicy 4T7 item… with vast luck… or through crafting with tons of effort. Either/or, mostly a bit of a combination, depends on the focus.

That’s not the case though, out top-tier expectation would be a 2T7 item (with a rare T7 in the mix) for that, 3T7 is simply non-existent and 4T7 we don’t even need to talk about.

Like this when power creep sets in you can ‘branch out’ to the side and dilute the pool, be it more affixes, more base types, more ‘special states’ of gear and so on. You still get ‘really few’ community-wise as a result, but you get them at least.
Like this? Nobody ever gets them hence ‘dead design space’. Why have it if nobody will ever possibly see it? Why not design it with the respective numbers in mind to work in the ‘right’ range but instead create ‘unused’ range?

As mentioned before, specific singular unique items based on that premise are fine and fun, they provide a variety to the experience. Having it as the core concept and some items being the ones with guarantee ‘done’ on the other hand is the opposite, EHG made their system backwards :stuck_out_tongue:

Obviously so! Never said anything against that.

But for that you need to understand what it does to the pool.

We currently have a problem with the pool being too big, hence the vast majority of possible options not existing in the first place.
So if you add something more to it you need to make by a increase in rarity and/or quantity accordingly to counteract that. Likely rarity as mentioned.
So… that leads to the question… why not balance according to the existing possible pool in the first place? That would not only give people which have the ‘perfectionist’ goal-set in mind something to strive for and theoretically achieve… but also showcase the ability to properly balance (which EHG doesn’t have it seems).
It provides no downsides but only upsides.

In comparison you can’t easily discern how much adjustment needs to be made when you add something in the middle of a system which has no realistically achievable ceiling, it makes adjusting numbers vastly harder, hence the chance for EHG to ‘mess it up’ is a lot higher. Which is the danger of such design-space existing… if your players are never supposed to drop those items in the first place then why have em and not make the limit lower… or the numbers for enemies accordingly higher?

So with a pool dilution the balancing becomes ever harder since you can’t math it out reliably anymore, your 1 in 50 quintillion chance to get a top-tier item is no good baseline… but 5-10 top-tier items per cycle dropped for players before and after adjustments (for rarity with the new pool) is a good basis to use.

Yeah, I want more then a storeroom to live in… but it’s not needed either! :slight_smile:

32

And it still all comes down to “I want this because it exists as a theoretical item. It is not allowed that there is something out of my reach. It’s bad design because it doesn’t give me what I want. Everything that does not fit my narrow world view sucks. Nothing is allowed to deviate from what I consider good design.”

Then don’t sell your desires as ‘need to be’.
The problem with your metaphor is that you ask for Neuschwanstein, because your manor is not fancy enough.

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33

It wasn’t. Initially builds simply didn’t have enough power (via mechanics or itemization) to reach the limit. It wasn’t a time issue, just that at a certain point you couldn’t outgear and outdamage mobs.

After all, the builds that reached the end of delve did it by having so much damage that they killed everything before they were hit, since at that depth any hit is instant death no matter your build.
So the initial bottleneck for delve was simply how much damage you could output, which initially wasn’t sufficient to reach the end. You didn’t have enough skill power nor enough gear power for it.
Only as the power creep went on (most notably in Harvest which is when the limit was reached) was it made possible to actually reach the end.

Not quite true. They implemented a diminishing returns formula (much like EHG did for corruption in 1.1). There is still some benefit. Also, not only do you get better nodes, but the monster level also scales and you get better rewards from them.

Any new content means that, though. Should EHG then not add anymore endgame mechanics because it will dilute the pool or dilute the time? That doesn’t make sense.

Also, you can easily make a new mechanic that drops primordials but also drops everything you can get in monos, effectively replacing it as endgame activity, so those aren’t the only 2 options.

Lastly, new mechanics introduced also usually provide you with ways to get older things more easily, as can be seen in PoE. Almost every mechanic make getting better gear easier (and crafting leagues make it way way way much easier, but that’s another issue).

So introducing a new mechanic for primordial uniques doesn’t mean you have less chance of getting better gear. Quite the opposite.

It’s not dead design space. If now you can say “Ooh, I can get a 1LP red ring” and a year from now you can say “Ooh, I can get a 3LP red ring”, there was clearly an evolution and the design space wasn’t dead.

And it’s much easier to explain to someone that a 4LP red ring is so rare that it will never happen for now, than to explain why lots of uniques have a 4LP limit but red rings have a 1LP limit, which is what you would need to ensure that everything in the game was achievable.

By the time you can reliably get 4LP red rings, most 4LP uniques will be obsolete and new types/tiers/rarities/whatever will be available to replace them.

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34

Well, for now nobody answered ‘Why does that whole space there exist when we won’t get to use it… ever?’

I also stated how it’s different from content-related endless systems as well as how it would draw in a specific group of people easier.

It was, there were 2 leagues which had basically ‘invincible’ builds with insane DPS and beyond screen clear.
The currency to go through was limited enough though that playing it up to that depth was simply not easily possible.
It became possible as the amount was increased and the scarabs finally led to magnitudes of those to be given per map, and reliably every map.
The first time it became easier was with the implementation of the Atlas passive tree since instead of 10% chance to have Niko you could force him to be there 85% of the time if I remember right, which was the first major ‘jump’ in depth… despite no ‘invincible’ build being available at the time but formerly there were a few.

No, monster level doesn’t scale. Never did in the whole history of PoE, otherwise you would get ilvl 100 items repeatedly from those depths, which you don’t.

A miniscule amount of rarity is added with depth though, which means you see a bit of a increase in high rarity currency and more uniques, which is ‘ok-ish’.
The major reason is the increase in node-rarity though, always was (but nerfed) and still is.

The point is that usually developers create the pool with the content in mind, not randomly.
LE doesn’t do that, we’re basically ‘randomly’ thrown into the middle of the pool of items. It’s likely a decent reason as to why balancing is all over the place, it’s extremely hard to discern how likely specific item combinations at the middle of a pool happen as the variance is enormous… but at the lowest level and the higherst level variance is comparatively small.

That’s the mentioned rarity increase.

Which as stated… 50000% roughly to reach reasonable end-lines. Likely more, I chose a ‘small’ number because the actual number is nonsensical and I’m too lazy to math it out.

A year from now states it decently well.

As said, the sheer amount of open space to the top is ridiculous currently.

You could literally drop every single item as exalted and wouldn’t reach it with the current state of itemization.
That’s my gripe with it. It’s nonsensically huge the number. ‘Not having something’ is fine. ‘Unable to ever get something’ is reality though, and I’m not playing a game to be disappointed, I’m playing a game to be challenged, which gives me fun. If I can’t ever reach something since it’s so utterly impossible and everything is stacked against me then I don’t quite derive enjoyment from that. Do you?

35

That is because the “…ever” is only in your head. For some reason you decided that this was something that will never happen although I can’t really fathom why.

Each new addition to the game will make it easier and easier to get this, until eventually we’ll get there. And eventually we’ll even get some cycles that will push it a lot closer. You know, like PoE did with Harvest? Or Necropolis?

Unable to ever get something for now. You keep hammering on this “It will never be possible to get” when it’s clearly easy to see that this is not the case.
Corruption has a likely limit of 65k, just like delve. What makes you think that the game will never ever reach it?
You could have all the best possible theoretical BiS gear currently in the game, including 5xT7, and you still wouldn’t get close to that limit, so the amount of power creep still available in LE is huge.

Depends on what you mean by this.
If you simply mean that you can’t get a 4LP red ring this cycle and that makes it so that you can’t enjoy the game, then I don’t agree with you because those are not my expectations and it’s not what I consider BiS currently.
If you simply mean that you will never in your life get a 4LP red ring, then I also don’t agree with you, because I’m pretty certain that this will eventually happen, when red ring and ravenous void are no longer the top of the BiS gear.

I think your problem are simply expecting to be able to get everything currently in the game when it clearly wasn’t designed for that but as a way to have something to expand your power creep into without having to constantly coming up with different things to justify it.

You know, like PoE did with jewels, alternate gems, replica uniques, tattos, etc.

LE can currently expand their power creep simply by creating mechanics that make the currently existing gear more easy to get and, consequently, previously impossible gear to get becomes possible.

36

Math. Common power-creep level to not become ‘ridiculously high’ and hence detrimental by design as anything from one cycle to another becomes utterly worthless.

Sure, PoE had new bases… new crafting methods… new types of influences for items, new affixes… all great!
The magnitude of those changes was substantial but not de-valuing everything happening before. Normal belts became rather worthless through Stygian Belts… but that’s basically it, the only ‘major’ change which caused older equipment to fall out of favor, and it was a big mistake from GGG actually.

In LE to do that they would literally need to make T7 rare affix items common by Act 5 to even start coming close to the end result. Or… have 5-10 times the content beyond the current top-end corruption level available in some way through mechanics.

So yes… that’s faaaaaaar off.

Yes, it’s clearly possible to see that we might have a chance in 10-20 years, screw that :slight_smile:
And even with 65k corruption… that gear is not even remotely likely to drop. Start with… 1 million… 1 billion. Then the rarity level should start to kick in gradually, without soft-caps taken into consideration.

That’s how far out the numbers currently are

As said, math if out.
You seem to not understand the sheer magnitude there.

Ok, what about 4T7? :slight_smile:
Also 4 LP red ring will be unlikely to be obtainable in the next… 5-10 years at least. So also not a good example, for LP to cause a BiS the base needs to be BiS too.

37

Then your math is wrong. As I mentioned (and you decided to ignore), even if 4LP red rings and 5xT7 gear dropped like candy, you still wouldn’t have enough power to even get close to half the limit of corruption.
So there is still a LOT of room to expand and a lot of power creep will indeed be required.

No, that is just in your head.

You got this backwards. It’s not getting higher corruption that will give you the items. It’s other mechanics giving you the items that will get you to 65k corruption.

38

Not what I’m talking about.

I’m solely talking about the required rarity levels to even drop them in the first place.

Not about content itself, once more.
It’s a general misconception you seem to fall in regularly, me discerning between itemization and between content is quite a clear thing I try to do, seemingly repeatedly getting misunderstood.

Obviously we have no content to allow dropping those. But any content dropping those BiS items by design would need to have severe amounts of rarity boosts so 65k corruption in itself is worthless to even look at.

So it’s a inherent issue currently which won’t be resolved in years unless the whole base-system is reworked. Which it won’t, which means we won’t see BiS, which means it’ll stay quite long-term unobtainable. Hence not something to even think about, hence why I deem it as a mistake from EHG and dub it ‘empty design space’ still.

Go ahead, say something else then ‘no, you!’ please, because that’s all the reasoning you provided for now.

Give examples, I at least have rough numbers available which I’ve intentionally reduced compared to the real numbers to represent my case.

Which would mean 65k corruption becomes worthless to even go to as it gives the comparison to doing stages 1-10 in arena for loot compared to current top corruption levels reached.

So nah, not this way either.

Still a inherent rarity issue with the current pool.

39

I did answer it, in a way. It’s a side-effect of the item generation. You have rare T7 affixes. 4 times rare is nigh impossible.

T7 are designed as outliers, with one or in lucky cases two existing on an item, which are the super outliers. If you make them so common that 4xT7 drops a couple of times per cycle, they aren’t outliers anymore.

It’s a space that statistically doesn’t exist, as you pointed out, as it would be a miracle if such an item ever drops.

Would you be happier if an item would be limited to a maximum of 1 exalted affix? If so, why?

40

Why? Is the only possibility that you can only introduce stuff that will increase item rarity and never change anything in how corruption works? Isn’t it possible to also introduce a mechanic that will boost corruption and its rewards? You know, something similar to corrupted maps?

You seem to be under the impression that you can only boost a single aspect of a game ever, rather than expanding multiple ones.

Sure, I can make up numbers as well as you can. I’ll say that the next mono revamp will increase corruption gains by 100% and make the next tier of BiS gear 50% easier to get.

Making up numbers in your head doesn’t prove your point. It just shows what your bias currently is.

Again, no. You can also buff corruption. It’s a dynamic system. By the time you have gear that lets you do 65k corruption, 65k corruption will give you more than it currently does.
Why would you assume it’s forever static when it’s been changed in almost every major patch so far?