Constructive criticism and general suggestions

First of all, I would like to say that I truly like the game hence why I’m writing this. Usually if a game has certain flaws that I don’t like, I just simply uninstall and never play it again. I’m just hoping that some if not all of these issues will be addressed.

Lets start with EXPERIENCE:
I honestly don’t understand the reasoning behind the Exp. nerf in the recent patch 1.1. If your reasoning behind that is to get us to play longer, I get that but we have to be honest here the game is not yet at a point where there’s enough end game content or a number of pinnacle or uber pinnacle bosses where it would justify longer play time on a single character to min/max, there is currently no incentive at all to even try to reach lvl100. As I understand it, the game is designed to incentivize build crafting which in tales playing multiple characters and trying different play styles every cycle. I myself would like to kill the pinnacle boss on multiple characters with different builds, but the Exp. grind is just soul crushingly boring.

  • My suggestion is: revert the recent nerf and in fact lower the Exp. requirements.

CORRUPTION AND MONOLITHS:
the fun part about corruption is being able to push higher corruption and test the limits of the build, not resetting the corruption on every monolith multiple times just to kill different harbingers. In addition to that there are a few timelines where the end result of the time put in to doing them are useless blessing that have absolutely no effect whatsoever in the character progression, for example the increased drop rate for shards/idols and so on. As well as corruption pushing on each character separately is disheartening.

  • My suggestions : 1- change the harbinger kill requirements to where it no longer matters which timeline you kill them but keep the corruption requirements at 50 corruption increments till 300 corruption and lower the required kills from 10 to 6.
    2- remove the timelines that have no useful blessing to the character progression and bring them back in future cycles with specific cycle content in them, or change the blessing to where they actually have an impact on the character.
    3- make corruption progress account wide and change it to where it changes with 50 corruption increments instead of what we have now where you would have to reset the entire board just because you’re missing 1 or 2 corruption for the harbinger. On top of that, the single digits have no significant impact on the difficulty and in my opinion 50 seems like a reasonable jump.

CAMPAIGN AND PASSIVE POINTS/IDOLS
doing the campaign at the start of the cycle with new content is fine, but doing it on multiple characters is just boring especially with a geared 2nd or 3rd character where the entire campaign is extremely trivial is mind numbing. Especially having to run around doing the side quests for the passive points and idol slots. You might say that doing the dungeons is a way to skip parts of the campaign, that’s true when the dungeons function well without bugs and on top of that you still have to go around looking for the required quests for the passive points and idol slots.

Suggestions:

  • 1- remove the passive points and idol slots from quests and just make them linked to certain levels whereby you get extra passive points and idol slot at certain level breakpoints.
    2- after completing the campaign with the first character, give us an option to just skip the campaign completely after getting the mastery, where we would get asked after choosing the mastery if we would like to skip the campaign.

ITEM SLAMMING:
the fact of the matter is that doing an entire dungeon to slam an item with a high probability of bricking the item especially 1 or 2 LP items, is frustrating. On top of that, the current difficulty of the content doesn’t really necessitate slammed uniques. I know that a rework of Temporal Sanctum is in the works but I don’t think that’s enough.

Suggestion:

  • keep it as a feature of the dungeon (plus the rework) but also give us a special forge at The End of Time that we would have access to after we have killed Aberroth, where we would be able to slam uniques at a cost of gold. At this point there’s only corruption pushing, might as well make it more efficient. Someone who has killed Aberroth would most likely steamroll through Temporal Sanctum, so it would just feel like a boring chore.

SKILLS RESPECCING:
Again this goes back to the core of the game, which as I understand is to encourage build crafting. Having to re-level every skill point after respeccing point is counter productive and discourages testing.

Suggestion:

  • leave it as it is but also give us the option to respec the point at the cost of gold without having to re-level the skill. This way end-game characters can easily switch points and test different things, while leveling characters can still respec and level the skill without the cost of gold.

GROUP PLAY
I’m not sure exactly what the reasoning behind not having shared results in group play (for example corruption). If it’s to try to prevent RMT or boosting or whatever, well lets be honest RMT is already happening in the game and this is not the major issue in regards to RMT. In regards to boosting, well… that’s what friends who play together usually do, they help each other level up faster by boosting each other that’s part of every game. Playing with someone and pushing corruption together but not being able to continue where you left off and play solo at the same corruption level because your friend holds the progress is for some people a major reason to just quit and uninstall the game. Because it makes you feel like all the time and effort you put it is just simply deleted, and the progress that you have made never existed in the first place.

Suggestion:

  • give us shared progress, so that friends can actually play together.

MERCHANTS GUILD
as we all know RMT is a major issue in every online game that has trading, with no simple solution to it because people will always find a way. when you see idols being sold for 1.5 Billion you know things are far too gone.
As well as the whole reputation level gating of being able to buy/sell certain items is in my opinion counterproductive and goes against the whole point of trading.

Suggestions:

  • 1- place a gold cap (not sure if there is one atm) at a reasonable amount seeing things being sold for billions is not feasible by just farming gold.
    2- change reputation level benefits to actual buffs instead of gating trading. For example: increased gold drop rate, discounted stash tabs, higher gold from actually selling items to the vendors, access to an actual auction house where people can bid on items, or at lvl12 you get the ability to open the shop UI from anywhere to buy/sell without having to travel to the Bazaar.
1 Like

I like the sugestion about item slamming. The rest not so much. Respecing points is ok for endgame chars but it is bad along the way when leveling. Changing it to gold sink wouldn’t fix this imho.

They have stated their reasoning for experience gain. It’s because they want you to NOT have the expectation that you hit 100 BEFORE engaging with end game content. For me, this is one of the PROs of the game. I hit the cap SO fast in other games and then engage with a lot of content that does nothing to directly help my character. Personally, I am very GLAD for ONCE to have a game that doesn’t usher me to the final level right away. It ensures I have this thing to keep working on while I do other things.

Sure. A lot of your thoughts on monoliths, actually. They just don’t feel right, as is. Also, I spend hours and hours and hours and hours trying to get ONE drop from a monolith boss and continually have no RNG luck so I move on to other games because I can only hate myself so much. Very open to monos being reexamined.

I certainly don’t do the whole campaign on alts or even my first cycle character. I mean… on my first character I have to do a bit more of the campaign until I get the right dungeon keys but… not sure what else to say here. They have already MANY times stated that they are looking to introduce alternatives.

Now you’re just talking seksi.

GROUP PLAY. Yeah. Didn’t copy/paste the rest because… yes. YESSSSSSSSSSS. PLEASE HELP GROUP PLAY.

The exp requirements weren’t changed in 1.1, they’re still the same. What changed is that higher corruption (i.e., 600c, 1k+, etc) doesn’t increase xp gains as high as it did before.

So, power creep?

Many players would hate that. Players that like making alts to watch them grow and watch the build come online would hate that. A big part of the fun is making sure an alt reached endgame on their own. If everything is already unlocked it immediately takes away the fun.
It’s why these types of players (like me) left D3.
Lastly, sharing account wide will leave to situations where you have a character that can easily do 700c corruption and now your other weaker characters can’t do monoliths anymore. Or you’re constantly having to reduce corruption or increase it when switching characters.

How do you propose leveling up? A level 1 character can’t handle any content that isn’t in the campaign.

This won’t happen. Devs want you to have friction on making legendaries. You’re just asking for removing that friction with no downsides.

This will simply affect CoF players disproportionally, since MG players can make much more gold. Also won’t happen.

Again, basing thing on gold will affect CoF/MG disproportionally. Unless you make the gold cost irrelevant like passive tree respec, which is not going to happen. This won’t happen because it doesn’t prevent cheesing.
There have been good ideas for alternative ways to handle respec in a way that prevents cheesing and doesn’t harm people that genuinely want to respec. This isn’t one.

-Probably so you don’t do 10 echoes in a party of 4 and now you can do 4 mono bosses/harbingers in a row.
-Also that if you share corruption, a party of 4 would reach 1k corruption in the same time as 1 person would (faster, probably)
Both of which would make party play the superior way to play and effectively mandatory.
-Also the fact that in a party you can usually reach higher corruption levels than you can solo, so you’d be at a point where everytime you want to play solo you’d need to start resetting and lowering your corruption constantly.
-And lastly the fact that if you’re doing 100c monos and then join someone that is doing 500c monos, what sharing will you do? Will you automatically jump to 500?

It’s not any different from what PoE did with maps for many years (apparently they recently changed that?).
It’s not like you don’t get any benefits from being in a party. You don’t get corruption, but you get double reward choice, which is actually pretty nice. Not to mention you clear everything faster.

The gold cap is simply the 32-bit range, wich should be around 4 billion.
Placing a gold cap on sales won’t solve anything, it will just make people not sell the rarer items. If you have a very very rare item but you’re forced to sell it for the same price as a 1LP red ring because of inflation, then you’d rather just keep it.
So this would just keep the best items away from the market.

I like the idea in general. I don’t think they should get gold drop boosts since they already make way more gold. Likewise, they don’t need stash tab discounts. Selling items to vendors for more could be a thing, since it’s irrelevant in the game anyway. A single 100c echo will give you 10x more gold than selling everything in there.
But accessing bazzar without having to travel there is nice. Though I think that should be a feature for everyone, not gated behind rank.
I think MG does need some changes (and Mike has said that there are still more changes for MG/CoF that didn’t make it in yet, especially for MG) because it doesn’t even give you anything for the whole campaign until you reach Maj’elka. Which is already after Lagon, a boss many players aren’t prepared for, so being able to trade a few pieces of gear to get better defenses would reduce frustration. Only by then you still can’t.

Agreed.

Which my suggestion hence would be ‘keep corruption character bound but for all timelines’. Playing up each separate timeline is just no fun, simple as that. It’s tedium pushing your perceived progress back to the start for empowered timelines. All it does is take time to push it back up, it’s no challenge at all, the challenge of corruption comes by trying to push it high, not by trying to re-do it.

It’s a good middle ground between ‘if you make a new character you have to do go through the content’ and ‘re-playing is boring as heck’. So that compromise is something both sides could handle.

Given that currently a death in a party doesn’t mean a boss is lost, allowing you to simply re-join again is bad enough. Actually that stuff should go, one ticket per character per instance. Go out? Well, then either wait until a new one is opened up or all leave to open up a new one.

The current party-play function is a bit of a mess.

Yeah, much progress is shared now, which is good for PoE as it was doubling the effort solely, which is a different system from corruption though, the setup has entirely different needs and outcomes to function.

It’s not a very good idea in general, more viable them access gating but also not good.

The Ranks should be directly related to the functionality of the merchants themselves, hence taxation reduction - for a taxation system implemented in the first place - would be a viable thing, I haven’t found much else viable yet without feeling disconnected to the core idea.

Also it would take care of resource sinks since that is utterly ruined with MG currently, which is bad, permanent inflation is detrimental by design and makes the market stop functioning more and more the longer it goes on.

I wouldn’t mind that, but you realize EHG would also reduce corruption gains at the same time? If you’re raising the corruption of 10 timelines at once, you’ll at least get x5 slower corruption gain.
So overall it’s still faster (though you never actually farm most monos, so it’s also kinda wastd), but individually it’s a lot slower than now.

I meant the idea of providing alternate rank bonuses.
I can understand gating LP uniques and legendaries behind progression, but everything else should just be freely available from the start. And players should have a way to trade during the campaign.

The taxation breaks seem like a good idea. I honestly don’t know what other bonuses they could get unless they relate to gold or to taxation, since nothing else really matters to MG.

You don’t need to reduce the gain that much given that most players simply start to ignore full timelines after establishing 1-2 of them beyond the Harbinger mechanic. The majority is and likely will always be ignored… because why play em up in the first place outside of blessings? So you’ll simple ignore them anyway.

But as Mike explained already ‘It’s more about the feeling to reach an outcome, if the outcome is roughly the same and you just have another feeling it’s already better’ more or less his words, wrangled together when it came to explaining why and how they changed the crafting system form old to new.

And since you wouldn’t loose corruption anymore this way and can freely choose the timeline I imagine overall it’ll feel better even if the progression is a bit slower.

100% agreed.

And LP access should be adjusted to how rare the respective item is. A empowered boss-drop unique which by itself has a ‘rare’ tag is vastly more valuable then a 1 LP common unique you’ll have 50 pieces of already sitting around.
Same with legendaries, 1 LP legendaries for common uniques shouldn’t even be a thing to hinder much… but a 3 LP unicorn item from a very rare unique? That’s something you should work your way up to even be allowed to access progress-wise.

Boss drops. Which is why they would heavily reduce the gain. Otherwise you have the effort of raising a single timeline to 500c and now you’re farming all bosses at 500c for their loot.

Yes, boss-drops. So you have your 1-2 timelines for your boss-drops after all. Those are the ones you want. You ignore the other 8 timelines basically. Maybe you play 3 for that reason, so 7 will be ignored since they offer you nothing at all personally.

So at worst EHG reduced the corruption gain-rate to 40% but pushes it for all timelines at once.
Same outcome in reality, different feeling.

Alts are a thing, you know? This would actually just make you have one farmer that would grind the all bosses at higher corruption for drops for your other characters.

I’m not saying I don’t like the idea in principle, but to prevent the above corruption gains would be much lower and you’d end up taking longer to get where you want.

Not only that, it would actually remove some strategy with harbingers. Right now you can have your timelines staggered so that harder bosses are at lower corruption. With your suggestion you’d always do harbingers at max corruption.

they did increase the exp requirements for lvl96 onwards, generally speaking it takes way too long to level up a single character.

so in that sense i guess you would also consider the other blessings as power creep.

that can easily be fixed with a small window that lets you choose which corruption level you want to run up to the maximum corruption you have reached.

i did mention after getting the mastery. either way you can easily farm exp in the open world till you can run echos which can be run mid to late 30s.

that’s fine the friction is still there until you kill the pinnacle boss at that point your character progression and gear is way past any friction this system is supposed to implement, unless by friction you mean a mindless chore that’s literally pushing people away from the game.

these have absolutely no effect on CoF cause the gold cost should be as you mentioned irrelevant like the passive tree. it doesn’t have to be gold they could add a new rune that could be used for this and it drops from high corruption bosses or the pinnacle boss. how can you cheese respeccing?

i’m sorry but none of those are reasons enough to prevent people from wanting to play with friends, it is after all a live action online ARPG with supposedly a social aspect to it. at this point it’s just a solo game that’s being played online just for MG. in this case might as well just have all CoF players just play offline cause there’s absolutely no reason to play online since it’s that big of an issue to have people wanting to play together and progress together. plus all of the issues you mentioned could be solved with coding. support skills have been implemented in the game for exactly party play.

that was a suggestion to try to limit inflation due to RMT.

In the end of the day it’s a discussion to try to get the Devs to fix/change a few of the core mechanics that are literally pushing people away from the game. on top of that i don’t think EHG have invested so much time, money and effort in to designing this game for the few who are still playing the game this is a business after all more players behind the screen means more supporter packs that’s just how it is. My point here is that it’s sad that the game has lost so much traction overnight not to mention the people who refused to even try 1.1 due to the mentioned issues.

Again this is a discussion not an argument because we want to see this game that has so much potential to succeed.

Which yes, that’s a viable point.

Albeit we can argue that having a strong Harbinger in a miniscule arena and then giving them the same power level as the others is just nonsensical (welcome Lagon Harbinger).

The Harbinger System is directly related to corruption level, to make you progress through corruption rather then stagnate early on as you have actually something to push for. So proper balancing for them should be a high priority to allow that properly.

But that’s all beside the point there.

Which yeah, you use your strongest character for that. Don’t you already?
I can already progress with my strong farming char faster through progression since I’m simply… well… faster in the first place.

So that makes literally ‘0’ difference in the end.

They did, the last 3 levels take longer. this is compounding with the changes they did with 0.9.2.

They were when they were introduced, obviously. It was a controlled power creep where most blessings only have slight benefits. What you propose is that all of them have significant benefits, so power creep.

Options aren’t always a good thing. It’s the perception that matters. Players that like making alts would see that as a net negative and it would detract from the fun they have. And LE is very targetted at making alts.

Much like in D3 you had an option to make another character in the same class. But since there was absolutely no need for it, since you could respec on the fly and be every build at once, people that like making alts didn’t like D3.
It was a choice, and yet they simply left.

What open world? You mean the campaign zones that have fixed level values? How is that any different from what we have now?
I always rush campaign until I am around 25-ish and then start doing monos. Your system would change nothing.

Alts are a thing. Once you unlock this, you can gear up all your alts without friction.

You have a speed farm setup which you switch to boss setup before fighting them.

It doesn’t stop them, though. You can still play in a group and you in fact get better rewards when you’re in someone else’s mono.
PoE was exactly like this for years and I’ve played with a friend for a long time without having any issue with it.
It’s still faster and more rewarding for 2 friends to rush each other than to do it solo.

The only real way to limit inflation is to apply a tax to buying/selling. Money has to disappear somewhere for this to happen. Since Arbor gold sink is optional and not many people run it, taxation is the only real fix for this.

Some good ideas, I particular like

CAMPAIGN AND PASSIVE POINTS/IDOLS
doing the campaign at the start of the cycle with new content is fine, but doing it on multiple characters is just boring especially with a geared 2nd or 3rd character where the entire campaign is extremely trivial is mind numbing. Especially having to run around doing the side quests for the passive points and idol slots. You might say that doing the dungeons is a way to skip parts of the campaign, that’s true when the dungeons function well without bugs and on top of that you still have to go around looking for the required quests for the passive points and idol slots.

Suggestions:

  • 1- remove the passive points and idol slots from quests and just make them linked to certain levels whereby you get extra passive points and idol slot at certain level breakpoints.
    2- after completing the campaign with the first character, give us an option to just skip the campaign completely after getting the mastery, where we would get asked after choosing the mastery if we would like to skip the campaign.

This desperately has to change… I play multiple alts, have about 20 in legacy and already 3 in the league and I am beyond tired or repeating the story just to get my passive and idols. I certainly don’t get to the end for the laughable reward of 1 point to each attributes.