I bought the game in 2021 and have played 2k hours. I’ve tried 6-8 different builds (a few more than once due to resets), and tried building my builds two different ways (which I’ll get to), and both ways seem to highlight some gearing plateaus I’d like to point out. I won’t be mentioning idols or Blessings because I only want to talk about gearing here.
When I first got the game I tried following build guides, which followed this essential progression:
- Use whatever rares you find to get to monos
- Find your build-defining uniques (or exalted items for certain slots)
- Find versions of your uniques with LP to upgrade
Finding 1-2LP uniques don’t take that long, but while 3LPs in general drop often enough to be noticeable, the problem is that it’s basically impossible to get a 3LP version of one of the uniques you want. Once MG got rolled out I was able to buy a few smaller items, but I quickly got locked out due to inflation.
I like to keep one of each unique I find, and every 2x or 3x exalted item I find, so after 3-4 weeks of not progressing at all I’d find myself looking at what drops I’d gotten, and wondering if I can make a different build that’ll get me further into corruption to where I can hopefully get better drops (for any of my builds).
I switched builds a few times that way, but kept hitting plateaus. So a few months ago I did some theorycrafting, playing with a different way of putting together a build.
My goal was to see if I could come up with a build that used nothing more than T21 gear but was strong enough to get to lvl 100 monos. I figured if I could come up with such a build then it would have a few benefits. I wouldn’t have to care about uniques at all. If I did find better than T21 gear that would just be a bonus, and then if I found a 3LP unique where one of the mods duplicated one of the ones I was already using on that slot, then I could slam that item and go even further.
This was right around the time of the last launch, and I’d planned to play online but in Standard so I could access my stash tabs. My account’s been bugged and I seem to have lost a lot of stash tabs, so I decided to play offline and use CoF, since I had an offline character that was already lvl 50 in the right mastery.
This worked out alright, but mainly because I’d gotten very lucky from the Nemesis a few times. The progression/updating of gear through the campaign and monos went pretty smoothly. I’m lvl 100 now, and while I have chosen to use two unique items, all but one of the other items are exalted. Three of those are 2x exalted (but still not perfect because every one of them has 2 exalted affixes that I want, one other affix I want, and then one affix that is either useless or trivial). And one rare item.
After getting to lvl 95 I’d hit a plateau for 2-3 weeks, then had 2 weeks where I’d gotten those three good 2x exalted pieces from Nemesis, but since then it’s been another 3 weeks without a single item I can upgrade to - not even for that rare item.
So it’s another plateauing issue, but this time it’s because I can’t find the right affixes I need on the right base. I mean … since starting this last build offline playing CoF, I now have two 4LP items, 24 3LP items, and 5.5 tabs full of 2x exalted items (and 5-10 of those are 3x exalted), but not a single one of them is good for my build. That’s great if you’re wanting to push people into playing multiple different characters to make it past 150 corruption, but honestly I’d rather give up all of those to just have the gear I want for this build.
Unfortunately I don’t have any suggestions, except maybe to continue enabling CoF prophecies to be even more focused. I think there’s still room for something I suggested back when I first heard you guys were thinking about prophecies. I suggested that since we’re killing gods you could make an area where we could talk to shamans of each god to increase our odds of getting a specific item or blessing from said god.
Another thing that might be good would be to have craftsmen you could give two pieces of gear, and they take the affixes from one base and put them onto the other. You’d have 100% chance to get 1 affix, 75% chance to get 2, 50% chance to get 3, and 25% chance to get all 4 moved over. Similar to Temporal Sanctum, but only for rare/exalted items and without jumping timelines. Maybe the craftsmen could be people who worship Julra. Could be a way to introduce the idea earlier in game, and then require the player to go to Julra to make Legendary items later.