I very much dislike the fact that the echo completion rewards are lost on death and has made me stop playing for the night on multiple occasions because I’ll lose a node i really want and has taken me 30+ minutes to find. It’s feels really great to find the correct exalted weapon echo or a node for the monolith specific gear type i’m farming for which is how it should be. But it kills my desire to play when i permanently lose that reward, usually to something that feels like was out of my control.
It feels like I’m being punished for engaging in content that is appropriately difficult to where I’m at. I don’t want to mindlessly run content where it is impossible for me to die just so i can guarantee i won’t lose loot. Yeah it’s not as efficient as going down in corruption and speed running through echos but I don’t personally find that fun and shouldn’t be unreasonable to want to play the game like that.
I don’t feel like there needs to be any sort of punishment for dying in an echo except having to start over from the start. But if you really feel like there needs to be some further punishment you could do other things. The obvious thing would be to do something with stability. Either lose some every time you die or make it so you don’t gain stability unless you complete it on the first try. Alternatively you could do things like have less gold find or experience gain during retries. Missing out on loot in a game that entirely revolves around getting loot is just bad design. Losing 5-10 minutes is fine, but with how rare some of these nodes are we’re talking about potentially hours in between seeing another another copy of the node.
Sure, there need to be consequences, but not necessarily that harsh. Just look at PoE where they got the inspiration for this simplified maps system from: You have several tries (6? 7?) there to complete a map. I mean, if the design goal is to be more hardcore then PoE it’s fine I guess, but if not, it should be more forgiving.
PoE also punishes you with a 10% Xp loss for each death in maps.
Not a lot in early mapping, but it becomes REALLY punishing later on (95+).
Burning through all 6 portals loses you more than half a level’s worth.
Losing out on some loot is way more tolerable to me.
To add further, you have to farm for a long ass time if you ever want to see Maven or the Ubers without using trade. These are hard fights for most, and it is expected to end these fights with your portals gone along with any potential amazing gear they may drop.
PoE is punishing as hell, I’d say far more than LE in a ssf environment.
I’m fine if there is some consequence to dying, but losing the echo reward is way too punishing and denying loot in a game centered around loot is always going to feel really horrible especially when it feels like i just dumped potentially hours of play down the drain when i lose a very rare reward. Essentially the game just dangled something in front of my face and then just took it away. It makes me feel like the game is wasting my time and when that starts happening is when I (and many others) will stop playing and move onto something else that feels more fun. The whole point of monoliths is getting stability to farm boss drops and/or completing echos for their completion reward. So I feel like its already quite punishing to have to lose your progress of the echo and start over. This alone puts the consequence of dying at like 5-10 minutes of wasted time since you aren’t running echos for the random drops. But if the devs really feel like there needs to be more than that I’m not opposed in general, but losing the echo completion reward is the worst thing they could have chosen.
It isn’t a matter of poor play or a weak build when there is infinitely scaling difficulty with corruption. There is always a difficulty you could be running where you are pushing the limits of your current gear/build. I could be playing a lot safer and running content that is easier for my current gear but like I said I don’t personally find that fun.
Different games can play differently, but one universal thing that I feel like should be at the heart of any game’s reward system is being encouraged (or at the very least not being actively discouraged) to run content that is challenging to you. The whole corruption system has two main purposes. First is to provide ramping difficulty as people get better loot and more passive points so that there is always content relevant to them in terms of difficulty. Second, and more importantly, is increased rarity of echo nodes/drops the higher you go. This is both to reward you with better loot at a faster rate to offset how unlikely it gets to find upgrades the more you play. But it also doubles as a risk/reward system which is a great thing to have. However the closer you get to the level of corruption where you risk dying, the reward of very slightly better loot you gain is not worth the risk of losing the echo completion reward completely.
It is never worth running content where you have even a remote chance of dying and you won’t be able to convince me otherwise. The endgame in a game like this is entirely focused on pushing your character as high as they can go, and yet they are actively discouraging you from doing this.
The ones that take away something you already played for (e.g. experience loss)
The ones that take away potentially good rewards (e.g. Losing echo rewards)
The ones that take away something that is fixed/guaranteed (e.g. losing Stability)
There are probably more.
LE is using No. 2 and No. 3
I think No. 2 is very fitting. Because items are the core aspect of a loot driven game and risking these makes you take deaths seriously, even in softcore.
I could see them removing No. 3 or reducing the impact of it. Maybe after dying the stability is not completely lost, but reduced by x% for that particular echo.
Especially when I lose the reward to… say, a sudden lag spike or getting OS by an overturned level boss.
However, I also agree with those who point out that there need to be some consequences.
Suggested Solution: Add a new Currency or Statistic for clearing echoes. As you clear echoes you can trade the Currency for another shot at an Echo. Ex: Instead of clicking on the Reward Octahedron, you can choose some amount (maybe even randomized) amount of Currency. Then when you die, you can choose “Rewind” instead of “Respawn” and try it again for a specific cost of said currency. Perhaps you could also spend that currency to CHANGE and Echo’s rewards… I could see a whole Echo “Forging” system based on this idea.
I didn’t make it very clear but my main point, which no one has commented on, is the fact that the risk (losing echo reward) is not worth the reward (very slight increase to magic find) when it comes to determining if you want to run challenging content. The whole system is built around choosing what corruption level you want to run at. As it stands now the punishment is so bad and the benefit is so slight that i never want to run content that even has the chance of resulting in death. This to me is a serious problem. I haven’t played in the last 2 weeks cause I just don’t find running trivial content fun, but if i run challenging content i run the risk of potentially wasting hours of my time and just being aggrivated at the game. Coupled with the fact that i’ve probably spent the last 20+ hours of playtime grinding for an item that is necessary to advancing my build and am nowhere closer to getting it and not really getting any other upgrades at the same time, I’m not incentivized to play since the end-game is simply not fun.
A major punishment in any game is time investment. Just dieing and having to restart the echo is a punishment and one that i feel is good enough. It makes me not want to die, but at the same time it doesn’t make me horrified of it. Depending on how close to the end of the echo you were that could be 2-10 minutes of time. Losing a really rare node is easily an hour if not more of time wasted and that is just too much. It feels really bad and is easily at the point where i think the game is wasting my time and when that happens i stop playing and move to something else that feels more fun. This game doesn’t have nearly a high enough skill ceiling to have a punishment this hardcore. even soulsborne games don’t just wipe away hours of investment for one death.
But higher corruption will also will also give you significantly more of these rare echo rewards. On top of that the Monolith Systems let’s you systematically choose your challenge vs. reward. If there are echo rewards that you really want, don’t run them with 4 ther enemy modifiers and let them run out before.
The uncovering process within a echo web can take some time, but you are not wasting hours of time by failing one echo reward.
I really dislike comparing entirely different genres of games.
But I really think LE does indeed has the skill ceiling necessary to justify this, especially compared to other aRPG’s.
At the end it is OK if you voice your disliking of this kind of punishment.
But I personally think that dying just makes you need to redo the echo, only losing time and no real reward is not interesting enough.
Really wanted to have those Exalted Body Armour makes it way more interesting, you really will think about how to approach the echo. You will not carelessly dive into it and think about enemy modifiers and how many you want to stack.
Yeah, but the problem is, sometimes you have no choice. Many echos only have 1 connection…or sometimes multiple connections with the same modifiers. Wanting that Idol reward, but you have to go through “Frenzy on hit” and “+75% Void Damage” to get to isn’t really a player’s decision.
Let’s face it, there are some echo mods that are just exponentially more punishing than others. And we don’t always have mod-less echos to burn through to reduce them either.
While I’m in favor of keeping the penalty, it’s too simplistic to say people die simply through carelessness, bad builds or poor play. Sometimes the echos are stacked against you :\
You can choose to do other echoes in a different direction/branch first, until all dangerous modifiers ran out.
Yes I agree and echo modifier balancing and variety needs to be improved as well. Together with corruption difficulty scaling vs. enemy modifier difficulty scaling.
But you can hold back certain echoes, like Beacons or easy modifiers.
It is all about how willing you are to take the risk/challenge.
That is where I simply disagree.
A lot of people always see the most direct way to navigate through the echo as their only “choice”.
But in reality there are dozens and dozens of different echoes available in different parts of the echo web, depending on how much you uncovered already.
Talking a slight detour to strategize your enemy modifier stacking is part of the possibilities of the Monolith system.
You can even take full advantage of this and purposefully NOT do 5 specific echoes with modifiers that give a lot of % item rarity and do them right before a boss run to maximize your reward chances.
Just because people don’t see or use them methods doesn’t mean there are not there. I might be OK with a little bit better tutorialization, but on the other side the game does not need to tell you every single advanced strategy that is possible.
That’s not always the case. I am playing a mono right now, where every available path has shit mods – mob crit, mob dmg, frenzy, enrage… there isn’t a path where at least 2 shit mods aren’t going to stack. And, if you’re in empowered, you can count on them being around for 4+ echos.
But whatever, it’s not important enough to me to get into (yet another) semantic argument with you.
Maybe you can start your own video tutorial series teaching all the terrible players out there how to git gud.
