Because it’s a live-service game and that’s their business model.
EHG’s job literally is to keep people playing for as long as possible and getting them hooked onto the grind… and doing so better then the competition.
If you got nothing to grind for long-term with visible changes then you won’t do it.
If you reach your goal too swiftly you’ll stop.
The golden middle is their task to find and they’re getting - very slowly - closer for Blessings. Not quiiiite there yet but better then before at least, a start. Now next step
And yes, it’s a significant grind, would make that grind nonetheless easier as when you progress you get less and less options to actually be able to upgrade, maxed out ones should be removed from the choice after all. So overall you’ll be faster.
And it solely needs to uphold a long-term grinding goal for a single cycle and not one for the lifetime.
And I would play MUCH more with the model I suggested, because then I could play alts guilt-free instead of feeling like I gave up on my last 3 toons when it got too repetitive and deciding to just leave until next cycle since I’m not even finishing my builds.
There’s more than one viable strategy to getting more /time played than forcing focus on investing in a single character.
As a reminder, this game is marketed as more time intensive then D3 but less so then PoE.
Which means you can expect to need at least until corruption ~300 to get fully decent outcomes across the board before even starting to min-max beyond.
That’s the goal EHG wants to align things towards, which isn’t - yet - the case though.
And that’s also the expected time investment EHG asks of people to put into a singular character. Which is quite a bit less then PoE but also quite a bit more then D3, so it’s in their range at least.
Currently we haven’t gotten quite to the alignment with 300 corruption though for those things.
Actually, this is another problem.
ALL blessings should show up as options when you kill the boss. Honestly, I dont want to run a timeline more than 10 times to max my blessing. If you extrapolate this, across the 10ish timelines, that’s 100 timeline runs. And each boss fight takes what, 14 echos? So 1400 echos total? That to me is enough of a grind for every single blessing to be maxed.
I could not agree more. I feel like too many developers are afraid of players achieving meaningful character progression goals, believing that it will cause players to become less motivated to play their game. I cannot speak to other individuals’ experience, but for myself precisely the opposite is the case.
When the mechanics of a game tell me “grind forever because your time and effort should have no inherent value”, the message I receive is that it is time to move on and find something else to do. Sadly, this is still the state of the blessing grind. Yes, the new system is admirable in that it is a step forward; but it is a single step that does not go nearly far enough in terms of allowing players to see a meaningful end to having to farm blessings.
The way I see it, the following should be true when it comes to the blessing grind (and I am merely reiterating what others before me have already stated):
Upon defeating a boss for the first time, all blessings should be available to select, with a random roll for each.
Every time you defeat a boss after the first, each blessing’s roll should increase by at least the minimum value by which it is incremented.
All of your characters should have access to the highest level of each blessing that any character has achieved, and this value should be used as the new minimum when a boss is defeated.
As Gaming_With_Arzan stated, this is more than enough of a grind already. If the developers really believe that running roughly 1400 echoes should not be sufficient to max your blessings across all characters, then our metrics for what constitutes a remotely reasonable investment of player effort are so wildly different that it doesn’t even bear further discussion.
Besides ‘which’ measures are taken those words there basically describe the situation. You don’t know how long it might take and you often don’t see actual progress.
The further you go the less you’ll be rewarded even, leaving you with the choices of ‘No increase, no increase, no increase and ah… yes… no increase!’ and that feels shoddy.
