Just a suggestion. I recommend that there be an alternate way to lower the corruption level in a mono. If you gain a certain amount of corruption (whatever level that is for you) and need to drop it some, you have the difficulty of having to defeat Orobyss which can be very difficult if not impossible, which is the reason for wanting to lower your corruption level in the first place.
Regrettably I don’t have a recommended path for this at this time but maybe the community brainstorm can come up with something that is viable.
@Heavy has thoughts on this topic. having corrupted myself into more than one corner before, an easier way to reduce corruption would be “kind” - its the one time I think its not great being punished cause you mistakenly went too high too far Icarus.
I think I never really voiced any opinion about corruption lowering mechanics/suggestions.
I am not really opposed to it, but I also don’t see a lot of sense in it with how corruption scales currently.
Its not that you magically go from 100 to 200 corruption if you have no timeline that high.
With several gaze of orobyss and a 15+ depth shade you can only get like 30-50 corruption with a single Shade of Orobyss, which is not that big of a difference.
Without that many Gaze’s its even less impactful. The difference between ~ +/- 15corruption is not really that impactful.
But as a more less focused on corruption player, I have myself done a few bosses too many, and ended up with a 250 timeline I didnt mean to that was no longer fun because I was playing some crappy meme build. My options were “abandon that timeline” or “go grind another for some unforseeable amount of time to get gear to go there and work it down”
Its really noticeable if you want say farm shades on a timeline where you want other things say uniques, boss items and blessings, if you farm shades for say a maw, you will raise your corruption so much faster then you can lower it.
If it makes no difference for advanced players, then there is basically 0 reason to not be able to reset it instantly either.
As for the core topic at hand, I think mike has said they have plans to make corruption lowering easier soon, I want to say he said next patch( so 0.9.1) but I am not going to take that at full value since dev stuff changes on the fly haha.
My opinion on the topic is I see 0 reason there isnt a “Safety net” option to just completely scrap your tree. if you push corruption too high and manage to unluckily get really tough mods, it can be excruciating to clear them. Their should be a fresh slate button.
We know that having a well cleared/farmed web is very beneficial for other side mechanics like memory vessals, so there is imo sufficient opportunity cost to blanking your board/corruption and modifiers.
Not sure what you mean with “fair take”. IMO it is not possible to “accendentially” icnrease your corruption too much. You can disagree, that is fine.
But my point is that you can’t increase the difficulty of a timeline from 0 to 100.
At some point you need to realize that its gettign too tough and you should dial back stacking corruption a bit.
But you can do several strategies that will bounce back and forth with corruption or stay on a certain level of corruption.
The chances for rare Shade of Orobyss items are a bit lower if you are not doing high corruption shades, but that is fine for these tactics, because you don’t need to worry about pushing to high.
Again this sorta works towards my point. the natural organic feature of killing a shade is getting more corruption then you would lose if you did the closest. You need to use a particular methodology to balance corruption. The farthest possible shade is something like 16-18 it feels like, but Ive had shades right off the start maybe 2-3 echos away and they only lower it by 5. Why does nearly the closest shade not off set nearly the farthest shade?
in my eyes its much easier to raise corruption then it is to lower it, which seems… backwards.
I think if people pushed for to much corruption the pronlem is between screen and chair. Next time go for less corruption and be golden and push for more corrupstion when you are able to stand it. I learned this the hard way too .
Sorry… was sure I had read one of your replies about corruption processes that mentioned tricks to reducing it.
On a side note… There is something not mentioned here - when you are getting your boosted corruption (i.e. other timelines are playing catch up to your highest one) then you can sometimes jump an additional 50-75 corruption at a time and combined a single orobyss can jump 100 corruption - which in the niche situation of respec’ing a new build on an existing char, can seriously impeded progress by going too high too fast.
I did mention that and excluded it from my example.
Yes there are edge cases when you respecced a character and you don’t pay attention on a different timeline, but IMO that is something that you have to live with. The game tells you everything and if you overlook that better pay more attention next time.
Especially when you are aware that you don’t want too high fo a corruption I would assume you will pay extra attention to the amount of corruption you will get from the Shade, Gaze and Catchup mechanic combined.
Call me elitist, but I don’t think a game needs a safetey net for all player behaviours or possible mistakes that can be done.
This is definitely one of the cases where I don’t really care if its is in the game or not and if enough people want to have it, all the power to them.
But I am a strong believer in games and systems were it is vital to pay attention and if oyu don’t, well, better pay more attention next time.
Generally I would agree with you here but in this specific instance of lowering corruption again it does feel like a harsh punishment - especially where players like myself may like to respec or reskill and try something different rather than level an alt. Sometimes you may want to respec an old lvl 100 only to realise that the last meta build you had pushed corruption way too high for the new respec and “testing” it out is pretty much impossible.
Because of the Orobyss mechanic - its like breaking open a vault door to get to the money, only to have it shut behind you AND sound the alarm.
Not sure on the OPs motivation, but because of the way I play - especially respecing things in end-game - I’d like something to reduce corruption in an easier way - purely to make it less frustrating to try something new without the pain of levelling a new alt just for a whim of a build idea.
Come to think of it - I wouldnt mind a mechanism that allowed you to reset all your corruption - i.e. if you want to do it, sure, but it resets every timeline back to 100 so you are punished for your mistake but could at least progress again from a reset.
Whatever… this is one of those things in LE that I have experienced and struggled to reduce - even after so many hours in-game - and would see it as a nice QoL type option.
I think the main difference here is, that I don’t see this as “Quality of Life”, this is an intrinsic game mechanic that you need to utilize.
But yeah for people that do major respeccing on one character I can see the value.
I personally never do any major respec and rather play that new build with a fresh character, because the best part about LE for me is, that you can “grow into” any build from the very start.
Thanks for all the conversation on the topic, I think that is the most beneficial way to help the devs decide if it’s worth their attention.
My original post was based on the basis that I had once done this and gotten a little too high for my (then) current build where I still needed better gear that I was farming for. Trying to bring the corruption down a bit was definitely too difficult since I then couldn’t beat Orobyss to do that so I had to just move on to another timeline.
I have not done that since but thought it would be a great idea to have the ability to either have an alternative to reducing the corruption or some way to completely reset it. Resetting it of course comes with losing all the benefits you have worked so hard to gain in raising the corruption and you’d have to start that all over again.
I know people have different playstyles and are more adept at planning and playing the games than others but thought it was at least worth raising the question.
This is already something that’s been discussed during the dev streams and Mike did mention that they do plan to have a way for you to reduce your corruption a lot easier in the future.
while I agree with this, I could think in a different situation…
Sometimes a player will increase corruption to test the build limits, and its not a mistake. I think the player should be given choices to play and have fun in inumerous ways, and the game should not have such a heavy penalty for some choices… Some people here are being extremists and are not picturing the whole situation. Its not just a problem in the person playing…
Lets say the player farm comfortably doing 500+ corruption, and he increases to 700+, his build allows it, he want to test it, but doing 700+ his farm is not very good, he can do some echoes, but he dies a lot more, and he decides he wants go back to 500+, thats the case where I think the system fails to give a fair option to this player.
But my point is, that you will not raise the corruption from 500 too 700 within 2 or 3 Shade Kills, it will take quiet a while and while increasing the corruption you need to continue completing regualr echoes.
While slowly increasing the corruption you will notice if the difficulty is getting uncomfortable for your character /build.
Especially when you are uncertai about how much corruption your character can handle you should be extra carefull to not increase the corruption in too big steps.
If someone has pushed high corruption intentionally, but then decided to respec into another build, that new build is not capable to reduce corruption then, cause it’s weaker.
Reducing corruption is way too slow. I’ve looked at my web just now, the closest to the center discovered shade is 10 echos away and gives -4 corruption.
There should be an easier way to reduce/control corruption. I would prefer a simple slider. Just add time travel to fit thematically.
This idea can be developed into something like a new boss, god, that tests your capabilities and moves you into appropriate mono difficulty. This would also solve the opposite problem, of corruption being too slow to rise on every mono, especially for new builds with overpowered gear.
Lowering corruption could just be another node in the network. Alternatively, they could place two different dots on the Reset nodes to where one is to increase corruption and the other is to decrease it. Maybe if you decrease it, you get a Tome of Experience for every three to five Gaze of Orobyss you currently have, something like that, at the end if you beat the boss without dying. This would give you an incentive to stack it up a bunch of times before you attempt it.
Maybe the boss of the decrease corruption option could also be something like “Envoy of Orobyss” that has some of the same moves and abilities that Orobyss has, but with less health, so the game teaches you how to play against Orobyss a little bit before you get to him. That would give the player a way to train for future challenges.
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