I personally enjoy the mechanical exploration in ARPG games the most and Monoliths are a good way to do that.
I’m aware that this differs for every individual player but to me the campaign feels more like a chore, I don’t care much for the story and the quests demand just enough attention that I have to worry about going to the right zones while the monsters at some point stop posing any challenge whatsoever. This turns the whole process into a matter of just walking from one place to another, spam clicking NPC dialogue while trying to not miss anything instead of doing what I enjoy the most, blasting Monos and getting stronger.
That said, this could be solved by adding idol slot, passive point and the final campaign rewards to monoliths on first completion. This would ideally mean you level through the campaign until you’re strong enough to tackle Monoliths and then proceed according to which content you prefer.
I’d consider this an alternative or extension to the dungeon campaign skip that is already in the game. Those who enjoy the campaign, be it fast track through dungeons or normal can still do it.
One concern might be feeling forced to transition into Monoliths as soon as possible due to it being the optimal path if your character can handle that.
My suggestion here would be to backload some of the rewards into higher level Monoliths, that way completing the campaign would give a nice boost in your early progression rewarding players that choose to do so.
To give an alternative to that, add some lower level Monoliths into the progression that are automatically skipped on certain points in the campaign. This way people like me can transition even sooner, doing the content we enjoy while not being so efficient that it’s considered the optimal way to play.
I’d prefer a combination of both approaches.
Another point of contention I’d like to address is how this differs from the dungeon path. The dungeons lack fallback content. If your character is not capable of doing the dungeons, especially the first two all you have left is going back through the campaign which either loops back into the original problem or makes you progress a bit and then “backtrack” to the dungeon to skip a little bit. Monoliths offer a nice loop of running echoes and try the boss until you can beat it. This is compounded by the fact that the difficulty of the echoes is a lot closer to the corresponding boss than the campaign content around the dungeons.
Since this turned into an essay, let me also say this: I’m not asking for a way to level or progress faster in terms of power. What I’d like is more ways to control the type and difficulty of content I want to to run.
I’m well aware that I’m just one of many player types in the ARPG genre so I’d appreciate any constructive feedback from people with a different perspective especially. I’m the kind of player that gets to endgame and a majority of my characters playtime will be spent there. What I see as a purely positive change may infringe on aspects other people enjoy that I failed to notice.
And lastly, if this is against the vision the developers have for early progression I will gladly accept that I’m shit outa luck and just thank them for the amazing game they made.