Circle of Fortune feedback compilation after 800+ Hours

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hey folks,

Over the last couple months I’ve put an absolute mountain of hours into Last Epoch, specifically doing a deep dive into Circle of Fortune, creating content, tools, guides, spreadsheets, testing things, collecting data, etc. on the CoF faction and it’s mechanics.

After being asked quite a few times to make a feedback / suggestion compilation for Circle of Fortune in Last Epoch 1.0, I finally got around to it.

This is purely meant to be constructive feedback, and in no way are my opinions meant to be taken as anything more than just that. I love this game and have been having more fun playing LE than any other game I can recall playing.

With that said, I put my thoughts into video format to make it a bit easier to digest:

Below are the topics I touched on:

  • CIRCLE OF FORTUNE - MOST BRILLIANT ARPG SYSTEM EVER?
  • CIRCLE OF FORTUNE VS MERCHANT GUILD - BALANCED?
  • 1 - BOSS DROPS
  • BOSS DROP SUGGESTIONS
  • 2 - EXILED MAGE DROPS / EXPERIMENTALS
  • MAGE DROP SUGGESTIONS
  • 3 - EXALTED ITEMS
  • 4 - EXALTED ITEMS (DESIRABLE BASE TYPES)
  • EXALT ITEM SUGGESTIONS
  • 5 - RARE ITEM PROPHECIES
  • 6 - “EARLY GAME” PROPHECIES
  • 7 - LENSES - LIMITED VIABLE CHOICES
  • LENS SUGGESTIONS
  • 8 - FACTION VENDOR
  • 9 - LP PROPHECIES
  • 10 - SOME ITEMS HAVE MUCH WORSE PROPHECY REWARDS
  • 11 - PROPHECY PRICE INCONSISTENCIES
  • 12 - MORE EXPERIENCE = MORE FAVOR - TO WHAT END?
  • 13 - COF DEPENDS HEAVILY ON CORRUPTION
  • 14 - UI/UX - UNCLEAR PROPHECY EVENT REQUIREMENTS
  • 15 - UI/UX - PROPHECY SEARCHABILITY
  • 16 - UI/UX - PROPHECY ICON CLARITY
  • 17 - WEAVER ITEMS FROM PROPHECIES
  • PROPHECY ROLLING SUGGESTIONS
  • 18 - UI/UX - ISSUES RUNNING & FULFILLING PROPHECIES
  • PROPHECY FULFILLMENT SUGGESTIONS
  • 19 - UI/UX - PROPHECY SCREEN CLUTTER / PAINFUL LOOTING
  • PROPHECY CLUTTER SUGGESTIONS
  • NON PROPHECY LOOT PERSONALIZATION SUGGESTIONS
11 Likes
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Great friggin video. I’ve put a good 500-600 hours in CoF. Still formulating all my thoughts and ideas but it was great listening to this. Well put together and laid out.

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MERGE THE FACTIONS partially!!

1.You can wear items from each faction at the same time.

2.Everything that drops that wasn’t affected by cof is now tradeable. (CoF marked items= untradeable)

3.Commune favor well to choose on what you spend it on.

This would solve:

1.No more bickering between players for where is the grass greener.

2.CoF would get the core items necessary for empowered monoliths way earlier.

3.MG wouldn’t be OP in the first month for it to become unplayable later with diminishing player counts.

4.MG doesn’t scale with corruption anyway, so now you would have on what to spend favor.

5.The feeling of missing out when choosing a faction AND not being able to change it as it would reset tens and hundreds of hours of progress

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Thank you! Yea I’ve been working on this for quite some time, a lot of ideas are my own, but plenty also from the community :slight_smile:

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I feel that merging the factions in this way defeats the whole purpose of the faction system that has brought EHG much praise, and ignores the problem that it sought out to solve in the first place.

With the current system, there is a trade-off in deciding whether or not you want to engage in trade. For people who don’t enjoy trade (which is a large chunk of players), they aren’t strictly worse off in every capacity vs those who do.

By allowing you to equip items from both, we just go back to an ARPG where not engaging in trade stops being a strategic choice and once again becomes just a self imposed challenge mode, where players who use both systems just have straight up stronger characters.

7 Likes
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A good and well made video, my personal points for it:

Boss-drop items:
They need some mechanic directly interacting with the quantity of them dropping. Currently only LP chance is affected but not the baseline drop-rate. This is not good.

Experimental bases:
They actually don’t need any changes. Given the high increase in exalted drops and upgrading non-exalted drops into those the sole reason for a direct experimental drop is to have T6 and T7 experimental affixes on them. Outside of that making a exalted item into a experimental one is the solution to go with. This mechanic functions as it should and is balanced properly actually.

Exalted prophecies:
They are useless. Simple as that. The ranks from CoF already are there to take care of that. The existence of those is hence either to provide someone early on with a decent drop which can be needed or to dilute the pool. Which is fine for them to have that high price, it’s a ‘throwaway’ aspect of the mechanic, and even more so for the rare prophecies.
Making it into a correct base would cause the need to increase the favor cost heavily. The same goes with affix targeting. That increase would need to be fairly high though given the weighting of affixes/bases in general but would be good to implement.

Early game prophecies:
Utterly useless, they’re solely dilution and a measure to block lens slots. Hence favor usage higher for more targeted agency.

Lens system:
Yes, it needs some work. It doesn’t feel nice yet. Decent initial thought though.

Cost disparity:
Yes, basic EHG balancing. They seemingly have no proper baseline for a so called background ‘power level’ of items. That needs to be remedied. Some things can be more or less effective… but overall it needs to be more or less consistent.

Filtering:
Yes, it’s atrocious we can’t properly filter unique items by LP. This needs to be implemented. It’s nonsensical that it isn’t in the game currently.

Not merging… a proper fundamental rework of the limitations is enough and better.

Yes, mandatory, not even a question when you think about it. The gear usage limitation is one of the worst mechanics I’ve seen to date in any game. It’s baffling that they’re even existing.

No, this would allow double-dipping. All CoF dropped items should be barred from MG, otherwise running CoF becomes the norm, increasing your personal gains while also allowing to sell those non-tagged items. Should never happen.

Instead the following solutions are easier and simpler:

-Remove Faction tags.
-Leave only ‘non tradeable’ tag and highlight it better.
-Remove favor loss by switching factions.

Done. No double-dipping, better choice, doesn’t remove your rewards, only allows using the respective incentives given without denying the outcome provided from already invested time.

It does, more loot, more favor.

1 Like
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Oh, it’s you. My first reaction was that a 35min video isn’t the kind of forum post I like to “read”. But your content is great, so let’s get into details.

I’ll try to apply a modified Eisenhower method for varying degrees of importance. But instead of “urgent” matters, I would rather rate the degree to which a change is an improvement to the gameplay experience in relation to the effort required.

For example, the prophecy UI is really not that important, but using stars instead of ring icons for generic items would be a big W. Any prophecy that I can sort out without hovering over it, is a plus.

So, I’ll list your suggestions that I would like to see and group them as either important or nice to have.

Important:

  1. prophecy loot inbox for when you die
    You’re not the only one losing dozens of uniques to that :wink:

  2. twice the chance for boss uniques
    I have suggested this earlier in place of the rank 9 reward, but I wouldn’t mind having it added to another rank. I consider this important for as a CoF-player you have to do every piece of content. For me that meant making an entire new character to farm the Lightless Arbor, which was simply not feasible with my main. Your lucky roll suggestion is kinda niche for not every unique has relevant roll ranges and sometimes LP is the more relevant aspect, so I think just doubling the drop rate is the best idea here.

  3. experimental items default to exalted as a rank reward
    I think this is the most elegant solution of those you mentioned. I also only have one pair of t7 low life gloves and didn’t dare slam them on 1LP Frostbite Shackles. Technically, experimental items are the same as boss drops for us for no rank reward and no prophecy touches their drop rate.

  4. select base type for rare/exalted prophecies at extra favour cost
    Well this is a combination of your ideas, but this would solve the issue of targeting exalteds that are not slam-fodder.

  5. heavily reduce favour cost of exalted prophecies
    I have also experienced that slam-worthy exalteds become the bottle-neck eventually. I was looking for daggers with one of three prefixes as t7. This is already much easier than finding the one t7 affix on the one desired base type. But still I got way more 3LP daggers than slammable exalteds for most of them don’t survive the forge.

Bonus suggestion from me: please remove forging potential cost for the Rune of Removal.

  1. loot filter condition for LP
    It already takes me a while to sort through unique prophecy explosions. I can’t imagine clearing the amount you’ve shown.

Now to the second category of nice to have things that I consider to be easily implemented:

  1. Listing time lines for mob types like Siege Golem
    I have a physical piece of paper in front of me saying “Heorot: Siege Golem, Diamond Matron, Giant Scorpion…” to avoid picking prophecies that can’t be fulfilled in one of my time lines. So while I appreciate that players can go the extra mile, the game would be more approachable if a Siege Golem prophecy simply listed the time lines in which they can spawn.

  2. search bar for prophecies

  3. replace generic items with stars
    Also find a visual solution to separate one-handed from two-handed swords etc

That shall be it from me. I don’t disagree with the points that I haven’t touched on, but I think some number-tuning for lenses and prophecies in general isn’t that important. I like the idea of targeting specific base types outside of prophecies, but I wouldn’t know how. We could get a CoF-only toggle to have the weapon type and armor type blessings apply only to one base type of our choice but that feels complicated to do and not really impactful. I don’t notice these blessings at all as they are.

I mostly agree with what you say but not with this. Like I said, at a certain point in progression, exalteds become your bottleneck and only prophecies could remedy that. They are freaking expensive however.

I also have a slightly different opinion on experimental items - see above.

And your suggestions for faction swapping would imo encourage that which you want to prevent: swapping on the fly to sell unflagged items. EHG should prevent that at all cost - even though I considered doing just that to get easy gold.

1 Like
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I’m 50/50 on that, while true that some rare exalted mods are… well… very rare it’s usually the LP item which is the bottleneck over time. A 3 LP Wraithlord arbor is for example something nigh never seen… but given the unique helmet prophecies nonetheless something you can reasonably farm in absolute end-game with time investment.

In comparison the baseline function for the ranks already increases the exalted drops to a fairly ridiculous amount, making it possible to farm them up ‘on the side’ as a high corruption area with rares generally provides vastly more of them then the prophecy could. Favor better spent to get the other needed base which can only be provided reasonably through that mechanic, or thousands of hours play-time otherwise.

Once more, all CoF dropped items even without CoF-tag are already tagged ‘non tradeable’. So no, that’s factually wrong. You can’t trade an item now, you can’t trade them later.

The only difference is the CoF related tag, which is useless. MG tag is useless as well, the whole functionality is already in the ‘non tradeable’ tag and nothing more is or was ever needed, everything beyond is double-dipping into downsides without reason.

Currently if you run a lightless arbour you get tons of items tagged as ‘non tradeable’ and tons of items tagges as ‘CoF’. If you switch to MG you can sell a total of ‘0’ items, ever… and also not use a good chunk of the dropped items for no reason.

With my suggestion if you run a lightless arbour you get tons of items tagged as ‘non tradeable’. If you switch to MG you can sell a total of ‘0’ items, ever… but it allows you to switch over to MG without loosing the equipment on your current character.
That’s the whole difference.

You’re not the only one who doesn’t get that at all it seems, we already have three different tags currently… not two. What we need is a single tag and nothing more.

Or simpler said:

If neither MG or CoF tag exist but instead all items during CoF are ‘non tradeable’ and all bought items from MG are ‘non tradeable’ what would be the downside? Give me an example which actually holds true. I haven’t heard one yet simply said and I want to improve on the concept if I missed something.

9

great video, thanks. i got 600 hours in CoF and love the ideas for improvement.

2 Likes
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I’m sorry but this is simply not true - only if you extend it to these LP values, like 0,19% in your example. Exalteds drop a lot, but I can acquire 3LP Jelkhors much faster than suitable slam-fodder. Now I have never seen a 4LP one and you might call that the true bottleneck, but we should draw a line of sanity somewhere.

Please clarify. Is that an actual ingame function right now that I could not sell my items without a CoF-tag or is that part of your suggestion? Your wording doesn’t imply the latter, but if that’s what you mean, I’d be fine with that system.

2 Likes
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Thanks for the well thought out reply;

Boss-drop items:
They need some mechanic directly interacting with the quantity of them dropping.

I did make a point about CoF having some mechanic to impact the base drop chance of some items, which is essentially that. But quantity would be another angle you could approach the same issue.

I get a lot of comments on my videos and streams about being trying to farm the build enabling boss drop uniques for a build, just to farm boss X 15+ times without even dropping a 0 LP (which is basically 0 gold on MG), then trying boss Y 15+ times without dropping another unique we need.

I’m not talking about end game min-maxing here, I’m talking about players getting started and the wide range of outcomes that comes from low drop chance boss drop uniques where CoF doesn’t really get an edge to smooth out that RNG unlike for exalts, non boss uniques, etc.

Experimental bases:
They actually don’t need any changes. Given the high increase in exalted drops and upgrading non-exalted drops into those the sole reason for a direct experimental drop is to have T6 and T7 experimental affixes on them.

This I just can’t agree with. As I mentioned in the video, I have well over 2000 mage kills and have never dropped quite a few T7 versions of a few very interesting experimental affixes, and made only 1 or 2 T6 of them. With how much more I play than most players, it would take an EXTREME level of luck for them to ever find an exalted experimental for a build they want to play.

And since it’s only an affix, chances are it will be on a bad base, so this is already a drawback they must cope with, and even then, they still need to try to craft it. Chances are players still need to settle with a suboptimal base type, with MAYBE 50% of the affixes they want crafted on. After hitting the lottery of getting the affix they want.

I agree these affixes should be rarer than normal non experimental affixes, however I think they are a bit too rare in the current game. There is a lot of build experimentation that players could be engaging with, trying new things, etc. that just isn’t happening because of how rare they are.

And that’s not even talking about trying to slam that uber rare T7 experimental into a 1LP unique, obviously this is extremely end game gearing, but the level of RNG it would take to make that happen feels disproportionately high vs other similarly “game changing” RNG events.

Exalted prophecies:
They are useless. Simple as that.

Yea they aren’t in a great spot relative to Uniques and other useful stuff we can get from prophecies. Even with the absurd amounts of favor I farm, and actually running exalt prophecies, I’ve found it harder to find slam bases with something like T7 int than it is to find S tier Uniques with LP.

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100% agree with all of this, very well said!

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I’m 50/50 on that, while true that some rare exalted mods are… well… very rare it’s usually the LP item which is the bottleneck over time. A 3 LP Wraithlord arbor is for example something nigh never seen…

Bottleneck is all relative though, for me I just gauge it off “realistically achievable” amounts of LP for the items I’m target farming. Of course a 4LP of a desired unique will always be rarer than an exalt with a desired T7 affix and 3 other good T5 affixes, but you could also make the same type of argument and say items with multiple exalted affixes are “the bottleneck”. Surely a useful triple T7 exalt base is more of a bottleneck than your LP3 Wraithlord, but it isn’t something you “expect”.

When I say exalts become the bottleneck, I just say a generic T7 exalt with a desired affix vs an appropriate LP unique for your build.

Even when I was farming Twisted Heart, I dropped 25+ 1LP Twisted Hearts, and only 3 +4 Frost Claw exalt bases. That’s the same as the number of 2LP THs I dropped before moving to a different timeline. lol

It’s also important to note that 1LP items have a 1 in 4 chance to get the desired affix on a slam. 3LP items have a 1 in 4 to all 3 of your most desired affixes. However 2LP items have a 1 in 6 to get 2 of your most desired affixes. Items that have their powerlevel balanced around topping out at about 2LP for “realistic achievability” are significantly harder to perfect than items that are slightly rarer where 1LP is the upper realistic limit, or slightly less rare with 3LP is the upper realistic limit.

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Thank you! :slight_smile:

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Yes, because it’s a common unique… and also a fairly big example of an outlier. Most common uniques are either low-level stuff or very very specific in where they even apply, that causes them to often not be relevant in the end.

The most sought after uniques come from bosses… which aren’t influenced by the CoF mechanics at all outside of the increased LP chance… and then we have some of the rare uniques followed by very niche common ones.

So while some situations exist in which it’s turned around it can definitely not be said to be the ‘common situation’.
And the ‘line of sanity’ is vastly further down the road for personal drops in CoF compared to MG… it’s not without reason that those items have a high cost attached to them in MG, if they are even listed at all and not outpacing sheer demand.

It is an actual in-game function already.
You can’t sell a single item dropped while you use CoF, currently.
Even non-CoF tagged ones are already ‘non-tradeable’ tagged in the current state of the game. Which is the whole reason why the decision to add something on top of the already existing part baffles me so much.

16

Well, boss uniques are just a rare form of uniques and their availability has been adressed multiple times. Yes it takes longer to get a unique with a 2% 3LP chance when said item only drops off a singular boss. But even despite that, BigSmash seems to have had the same experience:

Okay thanks.

17

To me the prophecy stuff is what really holds back CoF.

I watched this video yesterday so im a bit foggy on some of the details, but you do cover lack of target farming base types.

I think in general the target farming options are just too weak. Blessings that let you target item types need to be buffed, the amulet drop blessing should make you rain in amulets if CoF.

But as for prophecies, I feel like they are greatly reducing the enjoyment of CoF as a whole for a large chunk of players ive communicated with personally. The prophecies are not strictly weak when it comes to uniques for example, its just way too annoying. And I really dont know if making them less annoying solves the issue, they really detract from the gameplay loop. And if you ignore them, you are frankly getting atleast 70% less loot.

Lets say you have infinite favor, you go to the observatory, roll prophecies get maxed out, then go seek out the condition “kill exiled mages” you proc 10 prophecies after killing 2, there is 100 items on the ground, you then go back to the observatory and get some more, clear more, and repeat. This is soooo much micromanaging of what is essentially spreadsheet numbers rather then actually killing monsters.

My feedback personally goes into buff things like blessings and giving more rank rewards that involve dropping items rather then having 90% of all your items simply come from prophecies.

When I signed up for CoF I was interested in self finding my items through the existing gameplay. Not getting what is essentially a brand new style of game which is mini missions…

3 Likes
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Your engaging in the factions is limited by favor/experience/time.
1You would have to level each faction
2If you have 300k favor and you choose to spend it all on prophecies you would get more items from CoF than someone who spent 150k on them and 150k on market. So there is still an advantage of not engaging in trading !

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But as for prophecies, I feel like they are greatly reducing the enjoyment of CoF as a whole for a large chunk of players ive communicated with personally. The prophecies are not strictly weak when it comes to uniques for example, its just way too annoying.

I hate to say it but this has been a major source of burnout for me the last bit. I am having so much fun min-maxing my character, but the dread of spending ages clicking reroll over and over to stack up prophecies, then mouse over hundreds of almost identical items looking for something good until my eyes start watering doesn’t feel great.

I also feel like it goes against the design philosophy EHG went for, and that is maximizing the time players spend actually blasting and minimizing tedious overhead.

Items don’t vendor for meaningful gold, you can “salvage” or craft on the go, you don’t need to “identify” items, etc. The game was designed with minimal interruptions to your gameplay such as returning to town to craft, bank, or salvage items like other ARPGs.

4 Likes
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This is a very good point that I haven’t thought about before. It’s true that at this stage I mostly pick up prophecy loot, which has already affected my mind: I think of drops in pairs. If I get a 4LP, I’ll have two of those. When I find a new exalted, I get two shots to craft it… singular drops have become the exception.

While I don’t dislike this as much as you do, we could use a slight shift from prophecies towards regular drop-rates - maybe best applied on bosses/mages.

And whatever our drop-rate blessings do, it should be more.

This should be solvable with the UI optimizations and an LP filter?

1 Like