Are we really happy with the loot? 2x T7 affix farming

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1

Hi,

I wanted to share a quick reflection on the frustration that building a character brings.

This topic is born after the 10th hour I spent farming conquered towers and unclaimed troves just to get nothing, zilch, nada. Just a handful of double T7 items that got clearly wasted on crafting.

I’m currently trying to improve a build (this one):

And I’m currently farming at 1k corruption for double T7 items, because, except for the meta builds that seem to go smoothly everywhere, i think double T7 is the minimum you need to get anything else going.

There’s a lot of people that got excited about the imprinting system, how to squeeze it the most. And that’s cool, giving us nerds some problems to solve it’s definitely the way to go.

But let’s walk for a moment in our shoes: we love Last Epoch, and we want to continue to play it. So what is our experience?

  1. We finish the campaign

  2. We start running monoliths

  3. We kill Aberroth.

This can take 50 hours the first time, 6 hours if you know the game.

And then what?

Nothing, zilch, nada.

Except Uber Aberroth.

Because, let’s face it, Uber is the only objective we have for endgame, apart from masochistically engage in hundreds of hours of repetitive monolith runs just to increase that corruption number above and beyond 2k. But I think this is something for few people.

So now, Uber Aberroth is viable for a limited number of ultraplayed and gigatested builds.

Either way, it is still the only thing that makes us improve the build, the one and only end goal.

SO WHAT WE DO?
We push corruption and start farming double T7, because everything else is relatively easy.

And here is my point.

Is it possible that the only useful and gratifying thing to drop, which is not even a unique or legendary, takes so much grind?
Is it possible that after hundreds of hours among all my characters of grinding troves and tower and maximizing the imprint I still get all those 50 decent items I found wasted due to bad havoc rolls or temporal sanctum not collaborating on the slams?

Is it possible that there are so many layers with the only purpose of frustrating players?

Is it possible that I always need to go back to the same meta character and farm at not-mentally-sane corruption to get those items, while between 300 and 1500 corruption I get absolutely nothing, zilch, nada?

Let’s be honest, we are not playing to kill Aberroth and finish the campaign, if we are still here after all this time.

So yes, we grind, but EHG, you need to respect our time more. Otherwise we burnout, and when we leave the game, we are going to be so burned by it we are never going to come back.

I summarized this sad line of thoughts in this video here, if you guys prefer a voiceover.

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Maybe this would help you?

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3

Thank you my friend, but I already CONSUMED Frozensentinels videos.
This is not about not knowing how to do it. It’s about DESPITE knowing what to do, and using the best strats that people like frozen develop, it’s still frustrating and more time consuming than rewarding. Farming items is a job, not a rewarding experience, and it shoulnt feel this way.
Sure we can create the perfect imprint and get the best drop chances, but still my point is valid. Even farming that imprint is frustrating. For example, and I think you can relate: have you ever farmed 50 towers in a row without getting a single 2 x T7 sword or whatever is you need? I did, multiple times. And then you gotta go back farming memory ambers, and there goes more time.
What i mean is that everything sums up a little too much.

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A list of the actual layers:

  1. farming ambers
  2. dropping a 2T7 from nemesis in conquered towers
  3. Crafting it in a way that it makes it a good imprint with some FP left
  4. repeat because of course never works the first 15 times
  5. farm embers again
  6. run infinite unclaimed trove to get a bunch of those items
  7. add the affix you need and havoc runes with whatever FP you have left until success and creation it
  8. Bring it to temporal sanctum and hope.
  9. In the meantime, you had to farm your 2LP + uniques.
  10. Redo for each item you need.

Total time? your guess. Total frustration? your guess.

5

This would be related to something in your OP. Namely:

We don’t have to push corruption and farm double T7s. We can simply make a new build and have fun pushing that up.
I know that not everyone likes doing that, but I feel like the game caters more to altoholics than min-maxxers. Altoholics will simply make a new build (usually off-meta, so everything isn’t easy) rather than spend dozens of hours grinding.

But yes, for min-maxxers there are way too many RNG layers making it almost impossible to reach your goal.

As for the T7s themselves, I’ve always felt that the best way to get them is through Nemesis. So spamming Nemesis tower should help you get more of them. With the added bonus that corruption level doesn’t matter for Nemesis, other than having higher chances of spawning, so you can farm at whatever corruption you feel comfortable with.

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I get your point!
And i feek you on this:

And don’t get me wrong, I understand it. This is my 6th characters i bring to endgame and i appreciated the journey so far.

But at some point you understand that is not much of an achievement to just finish the storyline and kill normal Aberroth, as even a fart on mine can seriously damage the guy.
And while it is true that a lot of players are almost casual, i believe that those that stay, those that create content that supports the community and keep it alive… those are grinders. Don’t we deserve some love too?

The corruption doesn’t influence the legendary potential of items empowered by it, but, if I’m not mistaken, it does influence the chances of an item on it being exalted. Which is quite important for getting double exalted. Now, how much it matters i do not know. Still, even at a corruption number where it’s easy, it still takes the same time and still brings the same amount of failures.
Which i think you recognize:

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It doesn’t. Only area level affects Nemesis and everything empowered is always level 100, no matter the corruption. Mike himself confirmed this more than once on discord. Corruption only changes how often Nemesis shows up.

Not all. There are plenty of players that are altoholics and even content creators. Dread and Heavy are just 2 examples of content creators that keep hopping from alt to alt to showcase new builds. And while Heavy does tend to optimize his builds more, Dread doesn’t do this as often.
And there are players like Houlala that also have this mindset and they still support LE and are constantly around.
As I said, LE does tend to cater more to these types of players than to min-maxxers.

That being said, they have been introducing tools to reduce this and make things easier for grinders. Havocs, several of the crafting echoes, the change to insights this season, those were all introduced to address this issue for them.
Before 1.2, you had to drop the 2xT7 (or even just 1xT7) with the affixes you wanted. There was no way around that. With Havocs, you now have more tools to get the item you want.

And yes, it’s still RNG and it’s another RNG layer that was added. But it’s a layer that will cut out a different layer. You need to get lucky with your havocs/redemptions, but you don’t need to be lucky with your drops anymore, as any 2xT7 can potentially give you what you want.
And imprints add another layer.

So now you have concurrent layers, where each one can give you what you want. They’re not on top of the other. Some are side-by-side and can each potentially give you what you’re looking for.

So yes, the grind is huge for min-maxxers. But it’s better now than it was pre-1.2. You have more options. It’s bound to get better in the future as well, if EHG keeps their current trend.

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What? double t7 isn’t required for anything at all.

Not true. Uber Aberoth has been beaten thousands of times, by hundreds of builds. EHG released stats about how many people killed him, and which classes. Every single mastery was represented.

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They didn’t say how many people killed them. Just how many time Uby was killed, which is not the same thing. The same person chain farming Uby will count several times for that.

And also, to be fair, it’s quite likely that many masteries have a single build being used.
So the numbers they released don’t say how many builds were used. And I doubt it was hundreds of builds, going by youtube videos.
The variety is quite small, in fact.

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10

It’s the absolute massive and vast majority of cases though.

The exception is not the norm.

And as I stated repeatedly already… while LE is between D3/D4 and PoE to be settled it should also apply to the mechanics of the game, overall.
The time for grind itself to reach the max needs to adhere to the same overall formula as seen otherwise in the genre for a good reason.
It wasn’t without reason why people playing D4 were absolutely and utterly outraged at the atrocious drop-rates for the chase item uniques like Shako, needing roughly 50k hours of effort to drop personally. That’s just not in relation to the overall presentation and positioning of the game, it’s nonsensical and vastly beyond levels of what PoE enforces players to go through to get the rarest items in the game.

The reality is that the vast majority which would stay simply doesn’t because the game is not providing anything for them. There are barely any visible examples because EHG drove those examples away by now, causing a ‘this game is fun, but it has nothing to do for me’ mentality.

And it’s around 5% of the total way it should be, if even.
I’m still of the mind that after 1k hours active farming in LE on a single character you’re supposed to have - at a 50% chance - a 4T7 item with the right base and right affixes in your posession. Not the perfect rolls… but at least the 4T7 being ‘done’ for you, allowing min-max people to push beyond that for years but having a reasonable chance for the top-end acquisition of the existing itemization system.

How EHG handles that? Nobody cares… just that it is handled.

Oh? Can you somehow provide that? I never saw that!
The reality is that the majority of builds (yes, there is mostly 1 to 2 relatively strong outliers per mastery in some way) actually do need more then 2T7 to reliably kill Uberroth. Not because of personal skill levels but simply because the defenses won’t uphold otherwise to survive the fight and not take 30+ minutes to finish it.

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Good to know, thanks. And thanks for the insights and for giving time to answer, by the way! really appreciated.
Still, of all the layers, i don’t think killing the nemesis in the tower is ever the hardest part… Now that i think about it, maybe it’s even worse, because it means we cannot “gain” better chances with corruption that reward who grinded.
For the second part, I agree the content has been updated for the better… it’s also true that as the content helped, the bar was set higher. Most of the builds were created, most of the main content were consumed. So now a viable build needs to clear 1000c easily, needs to be uberaberroth viable. Because most of us are in the situation where we already finished the campaign/monolith part multiple times, whats the point of now creating a build that reaches the same point?
I feel, and that’s just my opinion, that the casual player who just needs to reach 300 corruption and thats it, just for fun, just plays the game once and then goodbye. Unless he does it as a “creator” job. So the point here is: we have infinite scaling potential with corruption, but min-maxing doesn’t follow and so many builds are cut out of that part of the content - which is actually the whole endgame. And we define it here as min-max but what i’m actually referring here is a medium level, like 2xT7, not something crazy like 4xT7 - which some people are out there grinding, by the way.

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This is exactly my point.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/1kdnft7/uber_abberoth_kill_stats_across_all_modes/

this is the infamous data… which actually shows the opposite of what Makszi was saying, in my opinion. And as was pointed out:

It is probably one or two build per mastery spec.

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That was posted half a year ago.

Builds vary by player.
Two people could both be playing ‘smite void knight’ with completely different ‘builds’.

You can’t rely on the few people who post on youtube to be representative of the entire player base.

These stats are super old, so the numbers today are WAY larger than that post showed, half a year ago.

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then show us the data, because it is you who brought them up.

Sure. For kill Uby in hardcore, tho, I don’t really think so.
Plus, half a year ago player count peaked at 250k. Now its roughly 3k active players connected on average.

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As for the stats after they were provided:

I dug a little bit into it and found a direct link to the dev-stream itself with the timestamp attached where it was spoken about.

The kills are not cummulative, they’re ‘per character’. Hence by the time of release (May 2) which was a 2 week timeline this was the full representation.
This included also Legacy characters!!!

So by the time this was released I would argue any class below 100 is simply ‘non-viable’ for Uberroth. The needed amount of skill and gear is so substantially above the norm to pull it off in any reliable way that it can be removed entirely.

Which means in 1.2 we had Void Knight, Falconer and Paladin as viable choices for Uberroth… with Beastmaker baaaaaarely making the cut.
All others are a general ‘don’t even try’ for any reasonable player. Beyond is solely the top-end players in skill and time investment at best, so far away from the normative reach that it’s not remotely sensible to even tackle.

The mention of:

Is utter nonsense hence. Unless you say ‘yeah, they exist’, at which point you need to be smacked for disapproriating reasonable argumentations anyway.
Just because the world’s best people managed to do it once or are at the brink of doing it repeatedly it doesn’t mean any half-way skilled player can pull it off.
It’s like comparing someone playing Counterstrike professionally in the world championship with a half-way decent player. It’s just unreasonable. ‘But that guy in the championship could pull it off, why can’t you?’

Not even going further into that.

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I don’t know how higher they are. It’s true that this season allowed new builds to be able to kill Uby. But it also nerfed plenty. Especially because almost half of the builds that were killing Uby in 1.2 were abusing snapshot.
So BM, for example, gained Bear that can kill Uby, but lost snapshotted crows.

When Mike did a similar count this season about 2 weeks in, there were still masteries that hadn’t killed Uby, like Warlock.

And it should be noted that if there are 3 bladedancer kills, that doesn’t mean bladedancer is viable for Uby kills. It just means someone has a lot of skill and patience to grind and gear their character and still do the fight with a sub-optimal build.

Just because someone did it doesn’t mean it’s viable for the average Joe.

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18

So i think most of us agree that the number of builds that can successfully engage in the “unlimited scaling potential” that corruption offers and Uby is quite limited.
The actual point of this topic is that, if godly items where made more accessible, not easy, but at least not cost 10 hours of grind per (medium tier, just with 2x T7)) item, maybe a lot more builds would be more enjoyable, for longer, and could access the endgame features. And maybe we wouldn’t feel like grinding corruption is futile.

My frustration didn’t come from: “OMG GETTING 2T7 IS TOO HARD; MOM HELP”. It was more like: “ok, I was excited about this new build idea, but after all this hours, I’m still spending my evening not getting shite from this game”. And from “I’m gonna do it”, it easily becomes “do I really want to?”

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19

That’s such a goal post shifting discussion. The second people get double T7 reliably in a casually achievable timeframe, people will complain the same for triple T7.

Mark my words.

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Yes, as they should :stuck_out_tongue:

Because the goal for a min-maxer is to reach the top-end available. This is solely a design-issue created by EHG by providing exalted items and not setting up their itemization core systems to support it long-term.

The second they went into ‘drop only’ territory the whole system they set up crumbled, pulling power away from their - back then - very powerful and enjoyable crafting mechanic into pure RNG.
EHG provided tons of options to counter this RNG since then and we’re still not even remotely close to ‘acceptable’ for the target-audience of this game.
We’re nearing PoE levels of itemization slowly (and PoE has easier itemization, just worse explanation, which the difference people seem not to get) and that’s the game with the absolute harshest itemization route on the market.