As it stands, there are only a select number of meta builds which consistently handle high corruption in the echoes at the ‘end of time’.
This is to be expected as by definition, meta builds are optimized to have the highest damage possible while being quick and with decent defenses.
In general, such builds typically follow a pattern, 1 traversal skill, 1 main hitter skill and 3 support skills for the support/boosting the 1 main hitter skill.
The typical pattern for High level Corruption usually devolves into a 1 shot kill or die situation. Either kill so fast that the enemy AI has no time to respond or attack or take enemy damage and die.
In general, off meta builds are not that efficient, they do not deal this much damage, tend to move more slowly, or require a long time to set up. So below is a proposal on how to make High Corruption more accessible to off meta builds without impacting meta builds. The below is applicable to echoes themselves and not the Harbingers/Boss Encounters faced at 900 stability.
Currently, Corruption affects player experience and item rarity, and enemy health and damage.
The proposed change is like this. On a static basis, Corruption scales directly with enemy health but not with enemy damage, and only with 50% of player experience and 50% item rarity. (Part 0)
In the echoes, whenever an enemy dies, the player gets a Corruption Stack (CS) which does the following things.
-
Whenever an enemy deals damage to the player, it takes X% more damage. this stacks with other Corruption Stacks.
-
Whenever an enemy dies the player gains additional experience and item rarity drops scaling directly with the number of Corruption Stacks. This (both experience and item rarity) scaled proportionally to the other 50% amount mentioned earlier in Part 0.
-
While out of combat, Corruption Stacks will disappear after X seconds (say 10).
-
Whenever a new Corruption Stack is added or player reenters combat, all other Corruption Stacks have their duration refreshed to the maximum.
-
Number of Corruption Stacks a player can obtain is capped at the Corruption level the player started the echo with. At high Corruption levels, more Corruption Stacks are obtained per enemy death.
Melee attacks on enemies gains player a Melee Stack (MS) which function like this below.
-
1 Melee Stack negates 0.5 to 1 Corruption Stack’s enemy damage bonus but NOT the Experience gained/Item Rarity.
-
Melee Stacks lasts X (say 10) seconds out of combat and refreshes all stack duration whenever player enters combat or gain a new Melee Stack. Melee Skills add more (X) Melee Stacks, more so for Melee Skills with cooldown.
-
Players may not gain more Melee Stacks than the number of Corruption Stacks present on the player.
Based on the changes above, how would it affect players?
For meta builds, nothing changes, by definition, meta builds are high damage, high tempo builds which kill fast. Nothing essentially changes.
For off meta builds, this allows a slow down, and for breaks in between bouts. This changes allows for such builds to clear High Corruptions but it takes significantly more time to clear each echo and with lower rewards.
The only problem is the loot that drops, which players might have to backtrack to collect. Of which I propose a solution to that. Any loot uncollected after the player leaves the echo instead appear within a white color Loot lizard in the intermission area (Where you go to sell loot).
