Problem: CoF prophecies are fun, but one of the things detracting from that fun, is that it’s very hard to avoid CoF sometimes proccing tons of stuff inside a dungeon or place where it’s impossible to cart out the valuable stuff, because we have too little space.
Solution: Have CoF Prophecies “completion tokens” (in a dramatic way!) instead of loot. When we are back at town, we should be able to then click on completed tokens to get the loot to drop.
Those tokens could be 1x1 items, or it could just mark the prophecy as completed, and show a “pending prophecies” button in the lower-right (like the weaver points to spend button), and take no inventory space at all. An argument could be made that taking CoF should not make our ability to loot worse than MG, so just using the prophecy window is preferred.
This will also modestly help CoF players earn a bit more gold… not nearly as much as some MG players, but more mind you.
I like this idea… I have always played CoF… and sometimes I will go a while without picking up any prophecies, then spend all my favor in one go… so pretty common for me to just get spammed like crazy with loot, and have to decide what I want then and there rather than just keep moving through an echo for example.
To be honest, I would personally prefer an alternative mechanic to prophecies for CoF. I dislike them a lot. They promote a “start and stop” style of gameplay that is very annoying to me.
I accumulate favour. Then I stop playing for an hour so I can roll prophecies on and on until I get the ones I want.
Then I go back to playing the game. But every 30 minutes I stop for 5 minutes to evaluate the lootsplosions that happen.
Then I finish the prophecies and I stop playing the game again for another hour because I have to reroll them again.
Not to mention that prophecies often force me to jump around timelines even if I don’t want to.
Personally, I’d rather have a more passive system. Something similar to what we now have in the weaver’s tree. Imprints are a great idea. But we could also have a CoF tree that let us block affix groups (like melee or minion) and favour other groups, so that the blocked affixes are more rare on your drops and the favoured ones drop more often.
Same for item types (drop more wands and less 2H weapons, drop more gold rings, etc).
This way we’d still have loot based progression, but it would be more targetted and it wouldn’t force us to stop playing the game all the time.
I like this idea in general, although maybe there are some downsides I haven’t thought of. If it’s implemented it should definitely be optional.
I will say that the new unique item filtering options solves a LOT of this for me. I need to play some more to see how it feels on higher corruption. But right now when I have a unique prophecy pop, about 80 percent of it is hidden by my filter, which is a massive improvement for CoF.
The CoF prophecy mechanic is interesting and unique… and it would be sad to lose it into another completely passive tree.
That said, I do find that I only sporadically interact with CoF… Lately, I’ve turned to burning favor on set pieces for cash and set-affixes, and glyphs to try to hit more glyphs of envy… because it lessens my loot management load.
That type of mechanic is always a overall downside, getting ripped out of the gameplay loop is usually a detriment, so devs tend to avoid it.
Instead of prophecies actual more pronounced target farming where you get similar things would be better, fitting for CoF after all and not pulling you out of the core loop.
I thing that profecies could just last infinite choosed once. If they trigger they will just consume exp. This way you would choose your pekrs once, than farm all your exp for cof. This way you will be forced to go to lens only once in a while. What do you think about this idea? It would be basically just like weaver tree as I think sbout this idea longer…
Kinda like passive loot drop buffs? You’d select the ones you want, they’d complete, drop their loot & reset costing the relevant amount of favour? I guess yes, as long as you could pause/disable them (so that expensive LP prophecy didn’t suck up all of your favour).
I mean… I would argue that avoiding any sort of convoluted mechanic where you can actively mess up by forgetting you turned it on is something to be avoided, same as a messy time-waster like we have now.
I know EHG put a lot of effort into creating the areas of CoF and MG… but plainly spoken? They’re uninteresting and uninspired. If there would be lore or memorable characters behind it sure! But there aren’t.
2 arguing street-vendors, one a fortune teller and the other a peddler would’ve gotten the same results and be less interfering with actual gameplay
Passive triggering like @Gregory_Portman_PL suggested is already a better solution.
Choosing a area and a focus on what exactly to grind for would be even better in my eyes simply. While the UI is well-made and lovely to look at for CoF (not the mechanic itself) it’s a pure time-waster and actually kinda annoying. The same goes for a bazillion traders in MG.
Which is what @Gregory_Portman_PL suggested. No matter what, there’s always going to be unintended friction so you need to choose the least worst one.
That sounds the same as we have at the moment but with one point of interaction for MG, so it’d be a minor improvement for them, but it’d still break everyone out of the gameplay loop just as much as we are now.
Apart from when your LP prophecy triggers and sucks the rest of your favour up & then all of the other ones refuse to reload 'cause you don’t have enough favour. It’d mean you don’t have to go back to the CoF area every so often but it still definitely has it’s issues & ones you likely wouldn’t spot until you notice that none of your other prophecies are popping.
A simple numerical buff to drop rates of certain things? That’s kinda boring isn’t it?
Honestly, the imprint nodes in weaver’s tree is what CoF should have been about all along. You’d get a bunch of lock/buff nodes and a few imprints to target farm.
But now weaver’s tree has it, so CoF would need something different.
No thanks, hard pass. If you drop “too much valuables” to carry away in one go you either need to target your prophecies better or get a better loot filter. Possibly both.
Unless you have something like 5 prophecies trigger at once for, for example, unique body armour, on a boss and you have to sift through them all. And lots of them can still be useful, more than you can carry.
There are plenty of cases where you get several prophecies at once and you get a whole screen full of loot.
So we’re either encouraged to take just a few prophecies at once (in which case we’re always having to stop playing to roll a couple more, also, what would you want so many prophecy slots anyway?), or there should be a way to prevent a bunch of drops from being wasted because of limitations imposed by the game that could be avoided.
