I have the feeling, at some rare moments, that we have a very sarcastic llama! 
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Excited to see how the new monos changes feel
It is. If mobs that could be spawned in an unlimited number gave anything (loot, xp, bonus stability then they could be abused.
Randomization
- All regular monolith echoes now have multiple player spawn locations rather than a single fixed player spawn.
Is this just a temporary fix to add randomization to echoes and procedurally generated maps will be coming later down the line or is this the be all end all āsolutionā?
Bit worried about this. āAround doubleā seems a tad low if your goal is the remove people zooming past the enemies to the end. Is there more info on the monsters you kill? Is it a certain number? A certain percentage (thus accommodating echo density)? To get this bonus will players need to almost full-clear the echo? Will Arena echoes automatically give this full bonus?
I dont think this is the goal, Im pretty sure the idea is to reward people more who want to play the game in a clearing aspect, not to punish or remove the zoomy objective based gameplay.
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They have mentioned a few times that they donāt like the zoomy zoomy non-interactive āignore all enemiesā playstyle to finish echoes quickly and want to change it. I figured these were changes to start looking into this.
My bad. Guess Iām wrong again. Not surprising.
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Have to agree with this. It feels like they are trying to āencourageā a full-ish clear playstyle. Problem with that is that given how many echos you need to run when you are trying to grind up corruption/fill your web, the additional stability is just icing. It is not enough to stop me from zooming to the end and moving on. Much like how technically you get better chest rewards from your echo if you full clear, but given how drops work its just not worth the time investment.
It gets even more iffy when you think about using that stability to grind corruption via the Gaze but can loose all of that investment due to one unlucky placement because getting one tapped is still a very common thing.
Honestly, it feels like a change that was put in place by someone who had an āacademic knowledgeā of the system as opposed to a practical one.
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Keep up the great work!
General feed back for swarmblade,
I think the nerf to locust swarm is probably good.
The change to nerfing number of locusts to 12 is uhā¦ not so great. Sure getting 50 locusts for 1000% damage was dumb. but the duration is what made that skill playable, now you get 12 x 15 = 180% increased duration? thats back to being unplayable frankly. I get that now you can release locusts over time to then maybe recast it, but thats way more clunky.
Also locusts being capped at 12 really hurts the theme of a swarm of insects. And it really puts into question the node that allows you to summon locusts by hand, that node is now useless because the hives dump locusts way faster and you cap out way easier.
The swarmblade just isnt able to live up to its themes, or its themes are just too much. its the āSwarm fatherā but also the āBlade armed insect(Scyther)ā and it just does not live up to either of these themes because its attention is split.
The swarmblade is strong, and I enjoy playing it for some builds like tornado builds, and dot builds are kinda cool on it too. But I think druid forms should live up to their themes at the very least even if they are not THAT strong. Swarmblades largest issue has not been its power but rather its thematics just being all over the damn place.
5 Likes
Empowered Mono stability value should be high - thatās okay - they need more effort to reach but the normal ones that we no need to repeat so many times should have low valuse.
I didnāt expect changes to monoās OR the OP Broken Swarm build so soon.
When I saw the swarmblade build just running through echoes and everything dying, it really showed me how boring they are to run. Thereās really nothing along the way to explore or discover, itās simply point A to B as fast as possible. This also highlighted how much of a grind it is for each new character to get to empowered monoās.
Thereās been other builds where you just run through and everything dies but this particular swarmblade build just looked so OP and so boring. Clever abuse of mechanics.
So again, good changes, didnāt expect them so soon and hopefully we see some more improvements to monoliths and swarmblade in time!
Not everyone uses discord and we shouldnt have to loiter in a chat to ask a dev info when theres a public forum for this
3 Likes
True, and this hotix was meant to target this!
I think you have it spot on hereā¦ Was watching an old āhow to design gamesā video the other day and it was a sort of case study on what worked (and didnt) for some game developers trying to motivate certain styles of play in their gamesā¦
the TLDR of it is that the carrot ALWAYS worked vs the stick - the trick was balancing the reward sufficiently enough to motivate the playstyle they wantedā¦ Every time a developer specifically punished a particular playstyle, it backfired on them.
A lot of the best solutions were surprisingly much more psychological than technical.
I figure tooā¦ and I think they are testing the waters with these changes to see if it addresses all the feedback on 1) how long it takes to do monos, 2) promoting clearing of monos and 3) indirectly addressing the unlocking monos for alts by making them āfasterā.
Dont think they have hit on a perfect solution yet, but they are obviously aware of the issue and are trying things.
Iām with you on that. If you straight go to the quest marker an kill enemies in the way you get around 40-60% bonus already. So doing nothing different than before is now more rewarding.
Why should I spend more time to get the rest of the bonus? I can jump straight to the next echo and do the same again. And as I go deeper into the web, stability rewards increase. So why would I waste time in the current echo when I could get deeper into the web?
From my impression the bonus bar % doesnāt match the time investment the player has to clear. Getting 50% bonus while going straight to the objective is not equal to half the time investment I need to clear. The last 50% are spread in all different directions and to full clear it needs a lot of backtracking. So the last 50% of the bonus cost a lot more time than the first 50%.
Conclusion: Its not effective to clear. Go to the objective, kill mobs on the way and maybe go into one direction after completing the objective to slay some additional enemies and raise the bonus a bit. As soon as you reach a dead end, port out.
I like that mono progression is faster now. In general these are good changes. But this is not the final solution to the objective rushing meta.
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You arenāt wrong. As you say, they want to encourage/reward people for playing the game/killing mobs. Itās just that some people say that as punishing people who donāt and just want to zoom through. Itās a glass half full/empty thing.
Counter point: Why would you need to fix it in the first place? The rushing meta is a direct and predictable response to the grind. The rewards for a full clear are poor, the amount of echos you need to complete is long, and your drop rates are poor, what meta did they think would evolve given such a system?
Even if you assume that someone is attempting to farm stability for bossing, its not going to take them long to realize that spreading the web and picking up more echo nodes is going to be better in the long run then full clearing that exp echo for 20 more stability then rushing it.
Pick a game, farming is expressed as X/Hour, to me this is just more of: No, This Isnāt How Youāre Supposed to Play the Game.meme
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Discord isnāt the only place to ask, though it does seem to be the easiest with the ask the devs channel which seems a bit sad.