I’ve enjoyed playing some Last Epoch, think the game has tons of potential, and would love to see EHG and Last Epoch grow over time. I don’t want to sound overly negative, I simply think some changes need to happen for the overall health of the game. Last Epoch’s item system has some fundamental flaws that significantly impact the ability for many players to enjoy the game.
To be clear, there are tons of unique and amazing ideas that Last Epoch has as far as item systems when involving trade. Taken at face value these ideas are arguably the best system for handling items while letting the player decide whether they want to engage with trade or not, the problem is the current nature of the implementation, which can absolutely be changed for the better.
TLDR: CoF isn’t actually rewarding enough to compete with Trade, Item factions require way too much reputation to rank up, and the current Bazaar search system is grossly inadequate
Not everyone fully understands how the item faction systems work so I will do my best to explain it in a way that even people with little knowledge of Last Epoch can understand.
You can align yourself with item factions to decide your preferred approach to handling loot, and most notably whether you want to trade items with players.
Item factions have ‘tags’ that an item CAN (but don’t by default) have, which tie that specific item to that faction. This tag can be found in the bottom right corner of an item card UI. Items with a Circle of Fortune (CoF) tag cannot be equipped by a character aligned with the Merchants Guild (MG), and a MG item cannot be equipped by a CoF aligned character. This is to prevent players doing something like playing MG, buying some build enabling unique, then switching to CoF for bonuses to loot, or otherwise playing CoF for bonus loot then going and selling that extra loot in MG. In a system where one faction literally increases the amount of items you find, this is a necessary requirement for balance.
The game doesn’t even let you switch to the opposing faction until you have removed all items tagged with the opposing faction. This prevents you from accidentally bricking your build, among other things. You have to manually remove all of said items, so that you know exactly what you now have to replace before you can even join the opposing faction.
Now to delve into the issues at hand.
Circle of Fortune (CoF):
I’m of the opinion no player should feel forced to engage with other players in order to progress their characters, either in regards to completing playable content, or completing their character. Last Epoch’s solution to not engaging with trade is the Circle of Fortune item faction. The surface level concept behind the faction is that you find more loot at the cost of being unable to trade with other players, limiting how much a player might feel penalized because they didn’t want to trade. Taken at face value, this is unusual among games with economies and a very refreshing concept. My problem with it is the current implementation.
What might be outright shocking to many CoF loyalists is just how few of their items were actually obtained BECAUSE they were CoF. What do I mean by that?
To back up a bit to item tags, not every item found while playing CoF is tagged as a CoF item. They will all have “cannot be traded” which is a separate tag, but those items CAN be equipped by a player who has switched to the MG, they simply cannot trade those items found prior to switching to MG. You might wonder then, under what conditions does an item actually gain the CoF tag, and it’s actually relatively simple. By default an item that drops does NOT have the tag, meaning most items that drop will not have the CoF tag. What would cause an item to gain this tag is if that item is obtained specifically because the player is playing CoF.
Long story short, I played CoF prior to patch 1.1, reached level 100, did all the content, and ranked up my CoF to max. I was absolutely blown away when I wanted to mess around with MG, and only needed to remove my weapon, 2 armor pieces, and 3 idols. Of all the time that I had been playing CoF, barely any of my upgrades had come BECAUSE I was CoF, they had dropped off of normal monsters, chests, or echo rewards. I had been penalizing myself for barely any benefit, and yes I was aggressively using prophecies and lenses. Notably every one of those items I had to remove had only minor downgrades I had previously found that didn’t have the CoF tag that I could simply equip and then go play MG.
Let’s look at some examples of situations in which a player would gain items with the CoF tag.
-
CoF rank 3 gives a 25% chance that when an idol drops, there is a 25% chance that 2 additional idols would drop at the same time. Of those 3 idols, only the 2 additional ones would gain the CoF tag, the original 1 that would have dropped does NOT have the tag. If you would have 4 idols drop, on average you would instead see 6 drop, of which 2 have the CoF tag. Rank 3 of CoF gives approximately 50% more idols, however only 1 out of 3 idols that drop would have the CoF tag. This means on average, 2 out of 3 of your idols could otherwise have been self found while still playing MG.
-
You pay favor (obtained from killing monsters) to ‘buy’ a prophecy. You go to a specific area and kill a specific monster and that prophecy drops items of a certain type. Every single item dropped by a prophecy will have the CoF tag. These items simply could not have otherwise been found in that manner.
-
You use favor to gamble at the NPC for an item of a certain base type. No matter what that item is, it will have the CoF tag.
Something very important to note is that as part of this tag application system, the CoF tag itself has different ranks, which innately tell you not just that it was a CoF effect that gave you that item, but which one. In the case of the aforementioned Idols, the 2 bonus idols would specifically have the CoF (Rank 3) tag.
Okay, so there are 12 ranks of CoF, each of which give new ways of finding items, as well as prophecies, which to some degree allow you to target certain classes of items. In Cycle 1.1 the amount of reputation that a player has to gain to get to the highest ranks is very high (Even after accounting for rank 12 taking less overall xp than 1.0 rank 10). So high, that a player can easily get to level 100 and kill the pinnacle boss BEFORE they reach the maximum rank. This means that for the majority of your playthrough, you are only benefiting from a handful of ranks in CoF, barely finding any more loot than you would otherwise be without even being aligned with an item faction. There is also the issue that you are completely at the mercy of RNG in regards to things like boss uniques, LP Uniques, specific exalted modifiers, and specific idol modifiers. Rebalancing how much loot these sources give or at the very least just reducing the amount of xp to reach the highest ranks would help make it actually compete in some regard to trade.
As it stands the amount of benefit you get from a couple ranks of Merchant’s Guild far outperforms even a fully maxed out CoF item faction for the first few hours of monoliths
Merchant’s Guild (MG):
There is an in game ‘auction house’ (Not really any auctioning going on), features intended at preventing people from playing the market instead of playing the game, and it allows players to obtain items deterministically with gold instead of having to wait on luck. At face value these are all amazing design decisions, and have so much potential. It’s again the implementation that unfortunately leaves me and many others with a sour experience.
We should shortly establish under what conditions that an item gains the Merchant’s Guild tag. Only the act of purchasing an item with favor will give that item the MG tag. This item can be purchased from the NPC gamble vendor, from the Bazaar, or directly from another player to gain the tag. Yes, even trading (Note, different from Gifting) among your friends without using the bazaar still gives the item the MG tag. MG tagged items not only cannot be equipped by CoF players (of course), but also cannot be sold.
While I’m of the personal opinion that you should be able to re-sell something to do things like recoup a portion of the cost when you buy an upgrade, or respec your build, this is a fair and reasonable design decision aimed at preventing people from playing the market instead of playing the game (also bot deterrent). Instant forced selling prevents things like price fixing where you list items for cheap that you don’t intend to sell in order to buy items that people mistakenly price at your arbitrary below market value. Great. The Bazaar system doesn’t require action from the player when another player chooses to buy something from them. Amazing. Your items can be sold even when you aren’t online. Incredible.
Let’s talk about the Bazaar as it is essentially the entire Merchant’s Guild item faction system. The Bazaar is a zone where there are some 2 dozen various NPCs that each correspond to a specific item class, or item subclass. There is only 1 NPC for boots for example, but 6 NPCs for idols (1 for generic idols and 5 for each of the playable class’ idols) There are separate NPCs for 1h axes and for 2h axes. They are spread throughout the Bazaar with some general sections of the zone corresponding to different item types, like one area for idols, another for jewelry, another for 2h weapons, etc. You can go to an NPC to see all the listed items for that item class. You can then filter by things like specific base types, item rarity (rare, unique, legendary, set, etc), and modifiers. Having to walk to a specific NPC each time you want to buy or even just look at certain types of items is rather annoying, but far from ruins the entire experience. One can argue it really adds to the immersion (this isn’t a discussion on the importance of immersion) To be clear you can list an item as for sale from any of the NPCs regardless of whether said item matches the item class, which is a great QoL.
You can sell any tradable item regardless of your rank, (MG tagged items are NOT tradable) however your rank decides what kind of items you can purchase off of the Bazaar.
At face value the Bazaar is a pretty cool concept, and overall a great take on trade. The majority of problems with the MG boils down to one of 2 issues. Rank Progression, and Item searching.
- Rank Progression:
Getting all the way to rank 12 takes a TON of reputation (Faction xp). This is accounting for the fact that in patch 1.1, rank 12 takes less reputation than it used to take to get to rank 10 in patch 1.0. You can gain reputation by killing monsters, but mostly by spending favor. Listing an item for sale, actually selling an item you previously listed, buying an item off the Bazaar, buying an item directly from a player, or gambling items at the NPC are all methods of spending favor. The amount of xp gained from buying/selling the item is NOT tied to the gold price of the item, but rather the item class/rank. You get ‘full’ xp from gambling at no monetary benefit to you, or ‘half’ xp for listing an item for comparable favor. Only when the item sells do you get the ‘full’ xp. It also isn’t immediately clear that you can get reputation by gambling your favor at the NPC.
-
This means that players are incentivized to race to the bottom to sell an item, to get xp not just from listing it, but for selling it too. For most uniques, set items, and even exalted rares, this means that there are almost always some of them listed for quite literally 0 gold. This puts players who find these items in the position where the item is quite literally worthless outside of throwing it into the aether hoping that someone will pick it up for no monetary compensation to you, the player. This kind of listing is highly incentivized by the ranks of MG requiring an extremely large amount of Reputation. Free items on its own is far from a fatal flaw as it is largely beneficial to the players who are trying to buy said free items, but a player shouldn’t have to choose between selling an item for xp, or selling an item for money that they can actually use to improve their character.
-
Generally speaking players have to make a choice. Do they want to focus on making gold, at the cost of slower faction progression, or B-line to rank 12, and have barely any gold when they get there? I’m of the opinion that in a system designed solely for the trading of items, players should be expecting something of value in return for the item they are trading away, not literally 0 gold.
-
With how much reputation it takes to get to higher ranks, players run into the issue where for the first week of the game, there are either literally, or functionally no players that can purchase items that require the highest ranks of MG. Notably most types of legendary items require you to completely max out your reputation to rank 12 to be able to buy these items. This creates the situation where almost all legendary items have no demand and thus are completely worthless, and the ones that have value cant even be purchased until far later, essentially delaying the benefit of finding/making that item in the first place.
-
As it stands for most unique items, the most expensive version of that item isn’t a legendary, or even one with Legendary Potential, its quite literally the worst version of that item that has value. Not a small difference either. Legendary items (uniques with extra mods) are completely worthless since no one can even buy them. LP items with only LP 1 or LP 2 may have some value (but due to also requiring a fairly high rank are often also literally free) and the base version of that unique, the only one that players can actually buy early on and objectively the worst version of that item, is hundreds of thousands of gold.
-
With the implementation of the Harbinger Nemesis system (Which to be clear is a base game system), it is really easy to get legendary items in even the campaign. In fact it’s easier to get Legendries through that system than items with legendary potential. If it offers a unique or egg (which is essentially a random unique unless you otherwise replace it with one of your uniques), you have the option to ‘upgrade’ that item by empowering the nemesis. That unique will either gain some amount of Legendary Potential, or more often, add modifiers to it making it legendary. This means that in CoF the nemesis system should almost always be empowered as it will objectively make the items better. With MG, empowering a unique item will almost always make that item utterly worthless even if you hit one or more decent affixes. This is the opposite of how it should be. The value of an item should be decided by the quality, rarity, and demand for that item, not some arbitrary xp threshold.
I do want to acknowledge that a player starting halfway into a cycle shouldn’t be able to buy a perfect legendary item at a stage that such an item shouldn’t otherwise be obtainable, but the solution shouldn’t be to so completely overcompensate that it ruins the entire experience and invalidates those items in an economy.
- Bazaar UI and Searching:
The other, and arguably equally significant issue with The Bazaar in the current state of the game is how difficult it is to use the in-game system to search for what you want to buy. The system is so poor that even the loot filter is better and more specific in almost every way at searching for items you want than the search filters. An immediate band aid patch could be integrating many aspects of the loot filter system into the Bazaar UI, though as I’m not a programmer, I don’t fully comprehend how much work something like that could actually take.
-
You want to search for a t7 mod and a t1 mod on an item? Too bad. You can either search for both at t1, or both at t7. You can’t use search logic like allowing a number of mods from a pool instead of the entire pool, so you have to search each acceptable permutation of an acceptable item or search through dozens of tabs where the majority of items aren’t even close to acceptable. These are issues that could be so much better with even the loot filter system, which itself is drastically insufficient for a quality ‘auction house’
-
One of the bigger offending incidents that caused me to quit this cycle was that I had a simple idol with 4% health and 8% elemental resistance. The rolls range from 2-5% health and 3-8% resistance. As you cannot search for minimum values of modifiers, I was forced to scroll through pages of results to find anything even close to mine. At page 47 I finally found the first idol that had an 8% resistance roll, but its health roll was 2%. At page 56 I found the first one that was the same as mine AND MINE WASN’T EVEN PERFECT. I could have scrolled farther towards page 82 which was the total number of pages of listings to find what a perfect one would go for if I happened to have one, but I don’t want to spend that much time just to find out how much is a fair price to list my item for.
-
The difficulty of pricing certain items is restrictive to a significant number of players, so restrictive many people don’t bother. Players are incentivized to list an item for free just to get the xp, or throw a random price on something and hope it sells, making it very difficult to know what the fair market value of an item is if you want to purchase it. I’m of the opinion that selling is equally as important as buying in an economy based game but most players aren’t engaging with the trade mechanic in an interesting or healthy way
It’s easy for me to identify problems or throw out my solutions to the current systems, but any significant reworks are both difficult or time consuming to implement, and have implications beyond what I alone can realize. Many changes could also go beyond the scope of what the developers or players even want from the game, which is why I’m hoping to spark some constructive discourse, as players who would like to see the game to improve.
By far the simplest and most impactful change that I think should be made to the current system is a rework to the amount of reputation required to fully level up the item factions. Not just a 10% or 20% reduction either, but around 50%. Depending on how much the reputation values are reworked, certain thresholds could be re-arranged, replaced, or their bonuses being tweaked to accommodate having to play for so long before you can reach them. We don’t need to be buying perfect legendries at level 70, but we don’t need to be killing the Aberroth before we can buy an item someone found at level 20 either.
CoF has so many ways of giving additional items and yet somehow, still isn’t rewarding enough to compete with MG, as getting things like 0 LP build enabling uniques or rares with resistances or otherwise build enabling modifiers takes less only 3 ranks, with things getting more impactful overall. I don’t think a maxed out CoF rank character should be able to swap to MG so easily, and then double their damage and improve their survivability within an afternoon. CoF is moderately more rewarding in some ways than prior to Cycle 1.1, but many of my friends still made the switch easily and immediately benefitted.
With regards to buying and selling items, I don’t think that players should be incentivized to list things for free, or that it should cost both gold and favor to buy an item and favor to sell an item when the tags innately prevent things like market bots. I also don’t think that gambling an item from the NPC in the Bazaar should make it untradeable, as it’ll prevent situations like where the player gets lucky finding a good item they can’t use and aren’t able to sell it (slightly salty about a 20 mil gold exalted ring I gambled)
By far the biggest nightmare in terms of development time to fix is the Bazaar. There is no shortage of requested features, so I doubt the Developers need many suggestions from someone like me, but I think at minimum you should be able to use more complex rules for searches and be able to put a minimum acceptable value for certain modifiers, especially if they don’t otherwise have ranks like with Idols or the base modifiers on uniques.
TLDR: CoF isn’t actually rewarding enough to compete with Trade, Item factions require way too much reputation to rank up, and the current Bazaar search system is grossly inadequate
