A Once promising game

Feedback and Suggestions
41

Exactly.
The case is though that the majority of power is behind T7 currently, which… by itself it would be fine, if we could only get 1 T7 on an item as an example. That means the choice of base + affix becomes important, and hence creating a T5 sealed item with that. Still nigh impossible but at least doable.

Then as the game progresses opening up to dual exalted items and so on… hence increasing the ceiling, having a plan behind it all… but not throwing it preemptively into the mix (as we currently have).

The alternative is to flip the exponential curve on the head, hence creating the initial tiers with more power then the later ones (like a good chunk of diablo-clones do, for a reason mind you) which will cause T6 and T7 to be a bonus but not a substantial improvement, hence allowing to reduce the needed rarity to drop substantially and gradually work towards a sort of ‘equipment equilibrium’ in power-scale… which would then cause the natural implementation of parallel itemization options (like influence for example, or new affixes) to dilute the pool and gradually cause a rise in power which feels fairly ‘natural’ and ‘gradual’.

In the current case EHG can only improve on their system upwards by making things even less likely to be obtained, by a vast margin even, which causes upgrades to become less and less likely vastly beyond the general probability of even producing a T7 affix, it multiplies after all with each other.

Actually… yes, to a degree.
Because it makes the ‘ceiling’ visible. Hence having a clear-cut goal.
Albeit I would say that 2 T7 currently is a feasable upper ceiling level for the limitation rather then opening it up fully, that’s still a viable outcome to happen for CoF which should be the marker for balancing.

Once more… magnitudes here.
It would mean we would need a completely different level of scaling, vastly so. Which would pose to be even more detrimental then it already is.

Corruption by design causes issues as to get gear to progress you need to have a way to farm it… for that you need high corruption though… but without gear you can’t progress well. Hence builds which scale late or badly are stuck with no gear and nigh no way to get it… and the further along you go the more pronounced it becomes.

Not to speak that the rarity would need to exponentially increase if it should allow to reach that state at 65k should the content ever increase to a level where we could theoretically reach that. Which in itself is unlikely as rather adjustments to the game in vast balance changes happen as it would cause time-investment needed to reach that simply be nonsensical… or there being a massive change in how much corruption we can increase at once, by 10-20 times likely over time.

Ok, a corruption gain of 100% would cause gear to be roughly - not quite - double as easy to obtain given that rarity works in directly upgrading tiers of affixes on items after deciding if it becomes a unique or a exalted item.

And how would you say that 50% easier should then be done? 50% easier acquisition would mean double the increase in power as well.
Which means instead of 1 T7 rare affix item we would see 4.

That would intrinsically de-value all items to 25% of what they currently are worth time-investment wise, which is a substantial amount as it’s not individually done or in a small amount but for everyone.

That’s how you kill a game with excessive power-creep, so no, won’t happen, unrealistic number :slight_smile:

I’m not making up numbers here… 50000% rarity increase is a low end number and doesn’t even achieve what I’m asking for if the same system is kept by as it is currently.

You can’t. Not without de-valuing the currently existing gear.
That is done via power-creep and gradually.
To reach the proclaimed end-state without utterly ruining Legacy in a single cycle and hence the promised saving of value from our play-time it can’t exceed a certain amount. If the amount is exceeded then we got ‘rampant power creep’ which is proven to be detrimental to a game, as would be stagnation. Neither is good.

42

Yes, but this is a personal preference thing, not a problem with the design. As can be seen in this thread, and many others like it, there are plenty of players that don’t have an issue with this.

Which is why I keep saying it’s a perception issue. Most players have a perception that a 4LP red ring is way outside possiblity and have no issue with it theoretically existing, knowing that eventually, one day, it will.

You’re like an olympic pole vaulter that gets offended by the moon existing because he can’t reach it.

You can currently reach 1k corruption on many builds. A few broken ones can reach 2k or even 3k. This means that if you allow power creep to give you 10x the current power, you’re still only halfway there.
Magnitudes will be required to reach it. There’s no getting around that.

They always have a way to get it. Even ignoring that future mechanics will almost certainly provide you with alternative ways to do that, currently corruption just increases your chances. But you can still get the same things at lower corruption, it just takes a bit longer.

Or, you know, the whole game adjusts globally, rather than just changing corruption. Why do you keep insisting on changing things in a void when a game is a complex layer of interconnecting systems? You can change more than one thing at once.
You can make a mechanic that doubles your chance to get good gear, and also improve drop rates globally by 100% and also improve the corruption formula all at once.

So? Why would that be bad? Maybe you should try to pick a BiS item from Prophecy league, for example, and see how much easier you can currently make the exact same item. I’ll bet you it’s a lot easier than 25%. And that that item is mostly useless as well.

If you maintain everything else static, sure. But you don’t have to maintain everything static. Much like 1.0 saw a buff to corruption and 1.1 saw a cap to the same, you can keep changing it around. 2 out of 3 endgame activities in LE are scaling ones (monos and arena) and the other activity (dungeons) can still be scaled further.

I mean, power creep in PoE was so big that they needed to create a new map tier and mechanics to introduce an effective T19 map tier. And yet PoE seems to be doing just fine.

So? This will always happen. And not always gradually. Harvest devalued most of standard gear. Standard survived it just fine. So did PoE. In fact, GGG suffered more from not letting Harvest go core than anything else they did that league.

Not to mention when they decided to change the whole passive tree and overnight every single standard character was unplayable until you fixed it.

Not to mention that every single major patch kills a few builds. So you could have had a build that was dominating the game and suddenly it wasn’t even viable anymore, like when they killed archmage.

You seem to have a very rosy idea of legacy/standard that doesn’t conform to reality.

43

With improve, do you mean powercreep?

The first step of improvement in this case could be the introduction of mechanics that make multi-exalted items more likely, maybe with crafting options.

One idea what could be designed:
New crafting runes, e.g. Rune of lightning - changes the selected affix into a random affix of the lightning category. This more deterministic approach to a rune of chaos could counter ‘diluted’ pools, as you call it.

Let’s say, they do this and T26 to T28 + sealed affix items are achievable for dedicated players at some point.

Then there are still options to add more powercreep to items, if so desired. It’s easy to come up with other ideas. Engraving items with runes, adding something. Transferring affixes from one base item to another. Living items that gather experience as you do and have small ‘skilltrees’.

And for all of this, you don’t need to completely revamp the current item system.

It is really that you would like to have a clearly defined ceiling. One that you can reach. Perhaps you should ask EHG to limit corruption to 300. Add a ‘the end’ screen.

44

I use it a lot for my regen based Bear builds. They are pretty powerful.

45

Yes, exactly, that would be a feasable solution, to increase the capability of the crafting mechanic.

Though that would also necessitate to increase FP… as already FP is extremely limiting and outright removing a vast amount of items from the pool.
We currently have a base-scarcity and then a system which removes the majority of the already scarce bases as an extra.

I think it would be vastly better for the longevity of the game if crafting itself would be far more limitless - and obviously reworked to function that way - compared to now.

Generally there’s some form of scarcity happening to ensure no masses of perfectly crafted items flood a market or get into the hands of players… but also a clear-cut way to improve upon items.

In Torchlight Infinite for example we have the different ‘stages’ of progression. We can upgrade items more or less randomly as well as improve one affix beyond the maximum (the T6/7 stage in LE)… but then the ability to craft onto it beyond that is still possible. The base is important but the progress after as well, and can become extremely expensive.

In Path of Exile bases are basically worthless… less so since this league since quality bases are drop-only now… or available on corrupted items with specific currency (but then you can’t mirror it anymore, hence it looses substantial amounts of value economically but not for yourself). The limitation is in the sheer quantity of crafting currency you need.

The system of Torchlight Infinite is definitely more limiting then PoE’s free-form crafting, but not overly stifling. It’s quite realistic to get a ‘great’ base-item after some grinding. It’s effort-based rather then pure luck.

LE is quite the outlier actually from the ‘more sweaty then modern Diablo’ diablo-clones. It utterly and entirely limits crafting and base acquisition both, making it basically a heavy gamble. Which is usually left to Blizzard’s games as it’s they focus on the drop-based acquisition mostly, with fairly few crafting mechanics.

Grim-Dawn is also heavy on the drop-based loot as the outlier of the more intensive diablo-clones, though they alleviate that entirely with the location-based drops of bases, hence allowing distinct target farming of specific items with specific affixes… not to speak of them having a 1/1 split unlike any other diablo-clone… though a vast variety of affixes on the other hand to cause it not to become stifling for the game.

Yes, something like this would also be very good. Partially targeted crafts would definitely be a big upside to the current system. With such an approach the scarcity in base-drops wouldn’t be so severe.
Such tag targeted crafting methods would help the game a ton.

Also all fine, powercreep is inherent and natural to games. Without alleviating the current massive space upwards though it’s fairly hard to sensibly provide those and give players a reasonable chance to progress towards the potential end-goal, which… while not everyone sees eye-to-eye with it… is a decent motivator for a good chunk of people… which the majority obviously isn’t saying something since this game doesn’t provide it, the majority left after 1.0, they’re gone.

But all in all good ideas, absolutely! It’s a good direction there what you’re proclaiming.

And especially that:

Not ‘me’, I’m not such a fervent player that I’ll reliably reach those end states.
Put the potential for it should be available. Which currently simply isn’t.

Easily reached? Nah. Excessive time investment even for people putting in excessive amounts of time? Absolutely! Not below that.

46

Here’s an old 32 sec T4 Julra kill, current char is at ~500 corruption in Reign of Dragons but I wanna farm some better gear and maybe slam some Vessel of Strife before pushing further.

4 Likes
47

Ba0ss wsnt inastanteley dealeated, g0arbage biudl!!!1

3 Likes
48

For what it’s worth, I was able to get a 2x T7 + 1x T6 via Nemesis in 1.1, having barely played at empowered+ so far. They were a shitty combination, so not BiS at all, but it was a triple exalted item.
So I guess it is not so unlikely as a 3LP Red Ring (or even a 0LP, which I’ve never seen XD)

1 Like
49

Disagree I cant even progress through the story that horrible deving

50

This topic ended up being a lot about COF, COF it`s not that bad, it was more of a throw
away line, the core about the issue for me is that devs seem to give much more love to Merchants Guild, that’s it for me, COF needs more love, minor issue compared with other things i talked about.
About what i’ve seen discussed about nemesis appearances, tier 7 affix RNG all of this stuff.
I just have one core commentary on that.
In this kind of games what developers need to figure out is how to make the game require time and effort (we all won’t be happy if getting a quad tier 7 item was easy or fast) WITHOUT doing it seem arbitraty, frustrating or live spending.
My argument is that in the core issue of the game EHG is failing.
I agree with some posts that said: most people don’t notive because the main content its 600 hours and that’s ok, they do it then go to other games.
Its correct! people that play casually to last epoch will never understand this thread, but is the game made for them? ¿are online arpgs for people that play 150 hours per game?

So going back to the core issue. The grind, the arbitraty limitations, the LP frustrations they dont seem organic, they seem arbitrary. So monoliths are grindy and endless and repetitive, they want to fix them, ?what do they do? they add things like chests, and nemesis and mages in cages, it solves nothing, it’s still pointless repetition. Add to that the builds that say F*** you this wont work here is an arbitraty cap… its disencouraging.
Repetition its not the main issue of course i am an arpg player (its part of the deal) its the arbitraty pointlessness.
So that is the question i have for you guys, this main core question:

  • ¿Do you think the way Last Epoch manages growth (keeping players from getting everything they want inmediatly and without effort) is organic? meaningful? goalfulfilling? or its nihilist and pointless and grindy?

I think if players want to spend 3000 hours on this kind of games and they play it good, they should get what they want (make his weird personal build work, become powerful, get the item they want), not get into a frikin arbitrary wall.
I think this games need to let the player go, let it go, let it go free, if you spend this time and effort in the game, there, you deserve the win, now you can rest and go play other game XD.
No matter how many hours i spend on a staff caster gathering storm build, it will never work.

51

Yeah, obviously so… because MG is utterly and entirely broken :stuck_out_tongue:

CoF at least functions long-term and does what it’s supposed to do, obviously with issues… but nothing utterly breaking it apart. It’s just a priority situation hence.
At least that part’s understandable from the developer side.

Mostly grindy, not meaningful to the degree one would expect with their lofty goals we can decipher from the way they talk about their game. They’re clearly missing the mark, substantially so.
To note… it gets gradually better, but the speed at which it does with the size the company has and the already provided methods given by the competition is just not ‘up to par’ of what could be expected. It’s functioning… but it’s not ‘great’ despite the core direction EHG wants (not entirely does) to go is a decent one.