My issues with Circle of Fortune
There’s two main issues that I have with CoF that I’d like to outline here. One of the issues is what I mentioned in the title of this post, and the other opens up an opportunity to address the former issue. I talked about these issues in another post, but I’d like to expand upon them here. These two issues are:
- The rank 9 bonus “when a set item drops the entire set drops” is bad
- Prophecies do nothing to help ease the boss unique grind, and their design actively disincentivizes you from farming specific bosses
For some perspective, I have over 1000 hours in this game, most of which was accumulated during the beta. I am currently playing legacy. I have no interest in the cycle, nor do I have any interest in the Merchants Guild.
The Rank 9 Bonus
On paper, the rank 9 bonus “when a set item drops the entire set drops” sounds like a pretty good bonus. If you’ve played other ARPGs you know how frustrating it can be when you’re hunting for the last piece of a set to complete your build, but you only ever get pieces that you already have. This bonus is great for alleviating that issue!
However, there’s a couple of problems with this. First, sets in Last Epoch are mostly terrible. Set items are mostly weak, with a few items that have niche uses. Stats on set items are typically lacking. In most cases an exalted item will be far better than a set item, and the set bonuses typically do not make up for the stats you have lost from not using an exalted item in that slot. Additionally, set items can not have LP, so there’s nothing you can do as a player to make set items more worthwhile. So, now we have to ask ourselves “why is the penultimate bonus for Circle of Fortune exclusively giving us items that we will likely never use?”
At this point you may be saying “well EHG has plans to improve sets, so the bonus will be useful when that happens!” That brings me to the second problem with this bonus: even if sets were buffed, this bonus would not be very helpful. Set items are fairly easy to farm currently. There are not that many of them, and the monolith offers multiple opportunities for getting set items between the set item echo rewards and the monolith-specific “item type unique or set item” echo rewards. It’s also important to point out that rank 9 takes quite a bit of reputation to reach, and by the time you’ve reached rank 9 with CoF it’s likely that you’ve accumulated quite a few set items already. There’s a good chance you’ll have the set you need by the time you reach this rank.
You may be asking “What does this have to do with farming boss uniques?” I believe that this bonus being so bad gives us an opportunity to replace it with something that addresses the boss unique problem.
The Boss Unique Problem
Farming boss uniques is one of the most tedious grinds in this game. Circle of Fortune does nothing to help you farm boss uniques. Boss items are not in the prophecy reward item pools, and none of the bonuses give you more opportunities for boss drops.
Additionally, prophecy design disincentivizes you from farming specific timelines. If you are using CoF to its full potential by constantly completing and refreshing your prophecies you could potentially be in many different timelines, in dungeons, in the arena, or doing campaign. You can reduce this back and forth somewhat by removing dungeons, arena, and campaign prophecies using greater lenses, but this does not feel like a very productive use of your 3 lenses that you could be using to otherwise target items more specifically. Even if you do remove these prophecies you are potentially still bouncing around between many different timelines in order to complete the “kill x timeline boss” prophecies, or to complete the “kill x rare enemy” in other timelines that have those enemies more frequently.
This means that as a CoF player you have to choose between taking full advantage of the faction you’ve chosen, or target farming a specific timeline for the boss unique you need for your build. With the current prophecy design these are mutually exclusive.
My Proposed Solution
So, how could we address this? I’ve established that the rank 9 bonus is lackluster, and is in need of replacing. I think this is an opportunity for replacing the bonus with something that
helps players farm boss uniques.
I propose the rank 9 bonus be changed to “monolith timeline boss uniques are added to the prophecy item pools”
I believe this change would solve the issues I’ve outlined above. Most obviously, this replaces the current lackluster rank 9 bonus with something that is far more valuable to CoF players. Second, I believe this helps the boss unique grind in a way that incentivizes players to utilize prophecies to their fullest. I wouldn’t feel like I need to choose between farming a specific timeline boss or getting the full advantage of my faction. I would feel more empowered to use the arena, dungeon, and campaign prophecies. I would feel like I don’t have to waste all of my valuable lens slots removing those prophecies.
I would like to add that I think this should be limited to monolith timeline boss uniques. I think that dungeon boss uniques and arena boss uniques are a bit easier to target farm in a way that still utilizes prophecies. There’s far fewer dungeons and arena bosses than there are timelines (although it would be nice if special arena keys that forced a specific champion existed, but that’s a topic for another time).
In Closing
I know I wrote a lot here, and if you’re looking for a tl;dr I suppose the bolded points will do.
I also want to say that overall I really enjoy CoF. As someone who played a lot of the beta I find the additional exalted items and T7 rolls to be incredibly helpful, and the extra avenues for getting specific types of unique items to be really nice.
Anyways, what does everyone else think? Is there something I’m missing? Did I miss the mark completely? Would this solution be too powerful for farming? Let me know!