Adding new content to monoliths doesn't fix the tedium

General
1

First off, I’m very happy with the additions that have been made to endgame with 1.2. Woven echoes are great, so is the new talent tree.

I’m 96 now, killed 6 harbingers so far. I want to do the endgame content and kill Abberoth, but “Make bar + corruption go up” isn’t enjoyable and I am getting bored because it feels like I am gaining absolutely nothing from all the killing that happens in between the harbinger / boss fights.

Again I am happy with where the game is going, but I feel like the fundamental design of monolith progression needs to be revisited. Just so that it doesn’t become a roadblock to all future content that’ll be gated behind it.

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2

Glyph of envy is your friend in this case and bringing one timeline to 300 is the fastest way I believe as you can quickly get there on the rest.

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I read about the glyphs of envy that can help, but you still have to farm those too as they have a random drop chance in empowered monos. Everything’s a random chance in this game. There’s so much RNG it makes my soul hurt. Hit lvl 97 last night though.

I only came back a couple days ago, but are the corruption levels shared across all the monos yet? That was a pain point for me previously.

I’d love some kind of test, like D3 has for the rifts, where perhaps you can face an ever increasing horde of mobs at different corruption levels, then your monos are set? That’d be cool.

4

Funny enough I have the exact opposite experience, apart from Glyphs of Envy drops I don’t get anything good from bosses and harbingers, but get tons of loot from echoes.

Like incredible amounts that I need to thift through and digest what to do with it, because of all the new crafting possibilities.

I made my loot filter stricter than ever (with the new crafting options in mind though) and I am getting showered in items.

Also pushing corruption is easier than ever. You really need to only push one timeline and bringing the other timelines ~90% on par is ONE ECHO (at the start of each timeline there is a guaranteed Shade that brings the timeline to ~90% of your highest corruption.

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Oh that’s cool. That’s one of the things that rubbed me the wrong way originally.

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You even have a woven echo now that will bring corruption to the max of your account, which is great for alts.

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The Glyphs of Envy and the new Woven echo are good, as well as the Shade catch-up mechanic.

But it feels like they have just been introducing more and more band-aid fixes to a fundamental progression issue that they should be addressing instead, especially considering the game isn’t even that old yet.

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I just checked all my timelines, none of them have a Shade echo right at the start. What am I missing?

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This only works in empowered and once you have a timeline pushed a bit in corruption already.

You also need to complete one echo in the timeline for this new Shade to appear.

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Agreed. They’ve added some things here and there to make the corruption/stability grind faster, but it still just is what it is. The new tombs and woven echoes add a little spice, but even then, the problem is the same we’ve always had: Anything that slows your mono progress is bad or at least feels bad. I’ve been seriously questioning whether or not I want to run tombs I find when I’m trying to push out to Orobyss and doing any kind of farming strategy related to the meta woven echoes seems like a side thing that maybe I’ll do once I’ve already pushed everything to 300 corruption for the Harbingers.

Perhaps a more relevant point: All of the things they’ve done to speed up the grind functionally just skip it. Glyphs of envy to spam bosses, harbinger needles to get more bonus corruption, corruption catch up, etc. So the new systems don’t exactly interact well with that. If you want to be fast getting to bosses/corruption, you miss out on all the cool new stuff in the monos. But if you spend your time doing the cool new stuff in the monos, it slows your progression down.

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I see, I was expecting it to happen right from the beginning, without having to push corruption in the first place. Thanks for the explanation.

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Yeah, how it works now is that you just push one timeline up in corruption (let’s say 300c for example), then when you go to another timeline that is at 100c, you fight one echo and a new shade echo emerges connected to it (sometimes you need to do 2 echoes, I think it depends on available space around it). You kill that shade and you’re around 290-295c in that timeline.

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Now it is working. The first time it wasn’t. No idea what I did differently, though. Thanks.

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Whats the progression issue? since your issue seems to stem less from the typical “empowered takes too long to get”

And is more about “Abby takes too long to unlock” it really is as simple as using envy to insantly get 3-4 gazes, then delete a shade and tada you are done with that timelines harbinger.

Now if you are just not rushing it, and casually doing it, it does take a while. But thats a choice, and choices are good. if you wanna fight abby, there is tools to rush the storyline down.

And for pushing corruption, content creators were at 1000c on day 2, with needles and envy you can farm so much gazes so fast you can easily jump 50-100c a shade vs the old school way of doing it 12 at a time.

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It needs a minimum difference to operate. That is, if you have 120c as highest and you try on an 100c, it won’t do anything.

Also, sometimes the catchup shade won’t spawn on the first echo. I assume it has something to do with available space in the web. It’s easier if you use an echo that only has 2 ways forward, rather than 3.

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