I’ve been playing since beta. I’ve always liked LE’s SSF systems (which obviously were required to work before MG was a thing) since for the most part it allows me to gear up my characters in a way that just goes with playing the game. However, it’s always kind of had the problem that once you get past a certain threshold of gear, it starts just feeling really random and takes increasingly long times to find new meaningful upgrades. This is also kind of exacerbated by the lack of endgame goals aside from pushing corruption, but that’s a very content heavy problem, so I’m not really gonna focus on it here even though I very much want to see more stuff.
I was worried about the introduction of trade ruining SSF and was very pleasantly surprised by the item factions solution EHG came up with to quarantine the effects of trade on droprates from the SSF experience. Without looking closer at the numbers, the item acquisition rate doesn’t feel any worse than it did pre-1.0.
With that said, I’m gonna describe some problems I have with CoF/SSF item acquisition. I might suggest solutions where I can think of them, but I trust EHG in coming up with good solutions if they see the problem and agree it should be solved.
UX
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I don’t lenses being physical items. You either have to buy multiples of them to put them in different telescopes, or you can manually move them every time you go to a different one. Then if you’re playing an alt you got to go take all of them out on your first character, put them in a stash, etc. It just seems like unnecessary tedium. Just let me unlock them once (Adjust the favor cost accordingly) then just have a menu to select which ones I want in each slot.
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It would be nice to be able to sort your prophecies by reward type or objective.
Mission Types
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I don’t see the point in offering campaign prophecies after you beat campaign. They’re easy but tedious, especially when you get one that requires you to do it a lot of times.
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Mission Difficulty seems disconnected from rewards. I’ll sometimes see really high difficulty missions like killing some high corruption boss with the same rewards as something trivial like killing some rares.
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I think the system has potential for creating variety in content, but the way it is now encourages focusing on one thing. It’s faster to get rewards if you get prophecies with the same or overlapping conditions and the game gives you lenses to get rid of potential content to accommodate this.
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It would be cool to have some rewards related to making different content easier to access. Maybe one that adds exiled mages into your next X monolith echoes, one that gives you a chunk of timeline stability or corruption on a timeline, etc.
Rewards/Target Farming
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I don’t think CoF really did anything for the problem of feeling like you’re just pulling the slot machine over and over in hopes of the gear you want. All it really did was give another set of pulls. Being able to get any item of some specific slot doesn’t really make me feel any more in control than just getting random items.
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To be clear, I don’t want trade. I don’t want something exactly like trade. I don’t want to just farm for a while so I can just go to a menu and select the exact item I want from a list. I just want more definite goals and a light at the end of the tunnel. I want to be able to know I’m making progress as I take on increasingly more difficult challenges.
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Like I said, I’d mostly be curious what EHG would do if they were going to give a shot at solving this, but just some random ideas without consideration for balance:
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Lenses that let you bias the prophecies towards more specific things like affixes, bases, etc. They’d still have to compete with slots for other lenses that give more rewards, etc.
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More distinct relationship between difficulty and rewards. Maybe rewards of a high enough tier of difficulty can give you guarantees of higher level bases, higher level unqiues, uniques, uniques with more LP, specific affixes, etc. Maybe a guarantee that the next boss you kill drops an item from it’s rarest loot table, etc.
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Very rare crafting materials that allow for more control over crafting. Maybe something like being able to remove a specific affix, giving more forging potential, upgrading a mod to exalted, upgrading an item base to a higher level one, etc. It’s still random, but when you drop these it would be really exciting because you KNOW you’ll be able to use it to improve your character rather than having to gamble to see if you can make it good enough to be an upgrade.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing how the system and engame in general evolves over time.