Aspirational content should always feel 100% optional. Uber Abby does not feel that way

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  • You should not feel the need to clear aspirational content. you should feel it is a final hurdle to challenge. The accomplishment in itself is a huge reason to try it.

  • Currently there are exclusive gear gatekept behind aspirational content. It makes sense as a good reward is required to push players to attempt and actually complete aspirational content. However, with exclusives gated behind aspirational content it no longer becomes “optional” it becomes compulsory. This introduces FOMO, which ends up forcing players to hyper optimize or just check whatever build is currently overperforming and follow an appropriate build guide.

  • Having to optimize simply takes away build diversity, as players may feel intense FOMO of wanting the exclusives.

  • The devs were happy to reveal the content as aspirational and saying how they don’t expect all players to be able to clear it. But since they put exclusives behind the even tho it might not be the devs intention but all it did is raise the bar significantly.

want the new OP relic? kill ubby. dont waste your time making a silly ass build that can’t work. do research and find out whats meta, whats the best builds. if you still suck ass and can’t kill ubby, then the next thing happens. player who can kill ubby become horrendously FAT. that brings me to my next point.

  • Players may feel compelled to play MG. one attractive aspect of CoF is you technically can farm “ANYTHING” by yourself. before Ubby was introduced, most of the content was gated around corruption 300? Abby was around 500? its a hard climb but i m guessing that its not too steep a climb. but how much time do players have to get all the way up there? why not just farm gold instead. using the gold you can just buy it off other players. weaker players exist. and when weaker players feel they’re significantly weak enough that it takes too long to even get to a point where they can even attempt Abby, they might as well just buy what they want from other players.

also i do want to emphasize how this will FATTEN the wallets of ubby killers.

My suggestion:

  • Make abby drop everything. including exclusives. BUT the caveat is all the “exclusive” drops that drop from regular abby is reduced by a tenth. it takes 10 times the effort to drop an exclusive but this way weaker players can grind upwards making progress without needing to fight ubby. Ubby on the other hand can behave as he currently is.

  • This suggestion will definitely hurt the wallets of players that can actually take down Ubby, but what EVERYONE ELSE gets in return is we are “freed from FOMO” to an extent. this freedom allows us to enjoy the game more and allow us to continue enjoying whatever build we’re trying out. we dont NEED to kill Ubby but he’s always there if we want a challenge. AND we will still be rewarded if we are able to do so.

Personal Sidenote:
I’ve played diablo likes for over a decade. I’ve actually learned what I actually want in a diablo like. Last Epoch is the closest game to perfectly fit what I am looking for in a diablo like.

Learning that Ubby gates some exclusives really saddens me. I really detest having to follow builds, and I detest freedom of expression. I really find it ironic when game devs like POE create an intricate game with a huge ass passive FOREST, and LE similarly has trees everywhere but then funnel players into hyper optimizing the game.

Going off on a tangent, 2 of my fav streamers, Asmon and Josh strife hayes mentions something similar. Paraphrasing here

“the more difficult/punishing a content is, the more players are forced to play a certain way”

“if players feel punished playing a certain way, they will stop playing that way”

I have very high hope for EHG. i see them surpassing GGG. theres a lot of wins that they did. but to me, this is a massive fail.

To quote squidgame 2 meme: “i’ve played these games before”

i’ve played poe for a decade. i’ve watched how the game started with players happily doing their own thing. i’ve watched how humongous of a gap there is between scrubs and highly optimized players. where does it stop? C1000? C2000? C5000?

actually there is another path. which is EHG could give players more power. with more power, build diversity can be preserved. tho i would say giving player power is a VERY sharp slope

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The devs said that for every 1000 players killing Aby, 9 would kill uber aby. I don’t know how close that is in reality, but that is their intent.
So it would be 10 times rarer, it would be 100 times rarer.

Also, your suggestion does nothing for the players that are CoF and that have trouble even killing Aby. Many people don’t handle the mechanical fights well and will likely never kill Aby. So things would still be gatelocked, it’s just at a lower threshold.

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Disagree, there is no FOMO for gear that is not build enabling, just build elevating.

Nobody needs the Uber Aberroth drops. If you plan around them, that is a fault on you, if you can’t defeat him.

I am totally down for not having to fancy build enabling uniques being exclusive for high tier endgame, but raw poweritems are fine.

7 Likes
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Uberroth is completely optional already. You get nothing from it that is needed in any way. I’m with @Heavy on this one 100%.

Sure the items dropped are nice and if you realy need them play a FOTM class and get them. There are even builds that can facetank the “aspirational” content because EHG can’t balance stuff for some reason. Don’t gt me wrong I love it that some classes get elevated but outliers from last season are still in the mix and I remember Mikes “If a build reaches 4 digits corruption we did something wrong” statement ^^.

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Not having exclusive gear behind the toughest boss in the game… is a game design decision i guess :rofl:

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Ideally, every class should have a build capable of beating him. With respecs you can swap to it when you are ready(and willing).

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I think this is a very unhealthy mindset.

Something like respec should not even be in the discussion if a class can defeat content or not.

Respec is not the emergency solution for endgame, it shouldn’t be that way and it should not even be taken into consideration.

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The alternative is what? Most builds can beat him in a game that will never be balanced that way. If they can manage to keep it aspirational then sure, but right now I’d be happy with a build per class so entire classes aren’t left out. I’d be curious what EHG’s stance is on it.

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Every class has a build to beat him afaik.

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I wish they had a leaderboard for uber kills. I’d love to see the data.

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Yeah would be a neat thing for sure.

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On one hand, I think power rewards for beating a final boss are kind of weird. Unless you’re crazy into optimizing your build to the extreme and pushing corruption, what is it even for at that point? I guess making your alts OP? I feel like just making cosmetics as a reward would make way more sense.

On the other hand, if they do want to give player power items… it’s not like these are required for any builds. They’re generic chase uniques. They improve any build that has a free slot for them but they don’t enable anything you couldn’t do otherwise. I think that’s fine. I wouldn’t be against letting you get them by farming regular Abberoth a lot, but I also don’t think it’s that big of a deal that you can’t get them easily either. If anything I think the drop pool from original Abberoth was a bit more annoying since he dropped Seeds of Ekidrasil, which is a fairly build specific/enabling item.

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Have a variety of builds per mastery to be able to defeat him.

Balancing is always tough, but a game doesn’t need to be perfectly balanced to have enough builds per mastery be able to defeat pinnacle content.

Perfect balance is a fool erand to begin with, but yet a good gauge to balance around like certain static difficulty content is very good to get thigns closer to each other.

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Uh, I’ve never of of this… You might be mixing things.

There is no aspirational content… there is pinnacle content.
On the other hand, there are aspirational items, which means they’re BiS items, but not build enablers.
So it’s completely fine for the aspirational items (the best ones in the game) to be gated behind pinnacle content (the hardest content in the game)

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With this mindset you surely stop after beating Majasa because the game is finished there right now and there is no reason to play further untill… you want to optimise your build and push further…

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I don’t think that’s right, its more like for every 1000 builds that can kill Aberroth 9 can kill Uberroth. The problem is that people will then gravitate to those 9 builds and more likely the 1-2 of them that kill him the easiest.

I saw Perrythepig was playing Void fissure VK and now he’s playing Erasing Strike that can kill Uberroth for example. Other players would prolly end up the same I think.

Anyway this is just my initial thoughts ofc.

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But the game literally doesn’t end. There is literally more difficult new content to take on. Once you kill Uber Abberoth there’s literally nothing but doing the same things with bigger numbers.

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That is not what Karv said in one of the interviews. He said players, not builds.
The fact that the numbers might not line up with their intentions is, to be blunt, kinda par for the course. Balance is a tricky thing to handle and they’re still struggling with it. Maybe in a couple of years they’ll get it close enough (it took PoE several years to get a handle on it as well).

As for builds, true, some builds will handle him more easily. But, as could be seen with Aby in the previous season, where you had builds that could one-shot him, most people still didn’t do Aby.
Now that Aby is nerfed, more people should be able to kill Aby, but very few people will push the build enough to handle uberroth.

1 Like
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Maybe noone told you yet but this is all H&S games are about. Kill faster, gobble up more loot even then when it makes 0 sense to play any longer just to get bigger and better.

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Nobody can stop you.