Newer player here, picked up LE a couple weeks ago. Since then I’ve played through the campaign 3 times, 2 as standard and 1 as hardcore. I really enjoy the core game, but I have to say, finishing the campaign and making it to end-game feels really bad. Like, quit and wait to see if the game makes progress bad.
The time you spend from when the campaign ends until higher-level corruption monoliths just feels awful. On my hardcore character, I can’t say that my character’s life was ever in danger between killing Majasa and my first 150 corruption empowered monolith; in that same time span I gained 27 levels. My gear quickly upgraded to almost entirely T20 rares, and the remainder of the journey to empowered monoliths was spent finding almost no interesting loot. Further, there’s no reason to do anything in early monoliths besides rushing the objective, moving to the next one, and getting to empowered as fast as possible.
At the same time, the echos themselves feel bad. Some echos I spend longer loading in/out than I actually do fighting. I clear almost every echo in under a minute, and some take significantly less than that. I end up zooming in and out, but the majority of my time feels like it’s spent waiting to actually do stuff, or looking at an echo map trying to find a single decent reward. The rewards themselves feel bad as well…gold, experience tomes, weapon types I have no use for just make completing an echo feel disappointing.
Finally, there’s no actual content to do once you reach empowered mono’s besides pushing an arbitrary corruption number. There are no end-game bosses, no uber-level dungeons, no pinnacle content. You simply sleep through early-end-game, so that you can grind endlessly with no challenges in the late-end-game. It almost feels like I’m back in old school D2: LoD, where once you beat Baal you’ve done everything. Julra runs are basically entry-level difficulty compared to other games.
Some suggestions to make the end-game actually enjoyable:
Remove levels on monoliths and allow players to chose what corruption they want to run from the start. Scale monolith difficulty entirely off corruption.
Increase experience gained between levels 55 and 85, at least until the story is completed.
Make echos much longer and provide much more stability when completed.
Make echos grant bonus stability based on the amount of killing you do within an echo.
Add challenging end-game content you’re meant to fail on.
Allow players to pick echo rewards from a random pool, similar to blessings.
Anyways, it’s a fun game right now, just no longevity until end-game is massively changed.
A lot of what you are discussing has been mentioned before in many different threads on the forum… You touch on so many different things in your suggestions that have been discussed many times in individual threads… seriously… everything from scaling corruption (lots of debate on this one) to experience gains etc… most people want echos to be shorter not longer (plenty of discussion on that one too)… your idea on stability bonuses on echo completion levels - ditto… picking echo rewards like blessings - also discussed, even discussions about making blessings better to get without so much grind.
because your suggestions are so varied, I would suggest that you find those threads and add your two cents to them else your post is just going to be so broad it will likely get lost…
The only real thing I would say is that the game isnt finished… they only just added the Dungeons for Legendaries with Julra as the first “hard” end-game boss and there hasnt been any difficultly balancing (to make campagin & mono bosses more/less difficult etc) … So everything you are concerned about is probably just because the game doesnt have the ultimate end game in place yet…
That sums up the current state of LE pretty well. The issues is time, the devs simply have not created all of the end game features yet. They are planned and are being worked on, but like with PoE it took years to get to where it is now. PoE has the opposite problem where they are so bloated it is confusing to new players on what to do. These issues are currently being discussed and worked on by the dev team. Join the dev discord server and you will see chat history on some of these comments.
Maybe MP is that magic bullet to keep players going. I recall even in the early days (when POE ended with piety/dom), I had fun doing ledge/dock runs and also piety/dom MF runs with pubs.
I am pretty sure @Jerle and @jehzir were mostly talking about, that the actual moment to moment gameplay was so fun, that they even had fun doing the most basic and “boring” content and still had longjevity.
Which is something, that is still missing for a lot of people in LE.
Can’t remember the number, but a 4lp Ravenous Void was 1.something x10^16 (or 19) chance to drop (ie, you’d need that many Ravenous Voids for 1 to be a 4lp).
I feel like the monolith system is going to feel worse as they add chapters to the campaign, until they can balance the game as a whole which is challenging. How do you make it easy to slide into monoliths without finishing the campaign while still making monoliths challenging to people who do the whole campaign? Right now chapter 9 feels harder than the first monolith, but you don’t even need to finish chapter 8 before going to monoliths.
I almost feel like the only way to solve this is to have the path to the lvl 90 monoliths open from the start so people can skip the early ones if it feels too easy. But they do need to increase the challenge somehow in the monoliths when adding the rest of the chapters. There will be a balancing wave, count on it.
Heh, depends heavily on your build, melee builds and/or builds that need move around have it quite harder. To me T4 is a bit over-tuned, damage-wise, if your build doesn’t have very solid defenses or pretty high HP you’re one-shotted, even with her lesser damage attacks.
To me the endgame is not looking bad, I hope they add more into it, like secondary missions on the echoes, or some other goals to accomplish other than pushing stability/corruption. Also we miss more dungeons that sure will come to the game.
Gets a bit repetitive, but the gear progression and the blessing progression gives me enough entertainment, I hope/expect it will get better.
I think end game is in a weird spot right now, because it’s in a transition phase.
Arena has been barely changed since the beginning. Chapter 9 and the dungeon have been released and more story chapters and dungeons are yet to come. So right now we are not seeing the full picture.
As a result, normal monoliths are a grind, because monoliths are still the same as they were when it was the only Post-Story content. Hence, it takes too long.
There are still no interactions between endgame content except for keys.
Also they should do something with blessings. Story bosses could give blessings (which is kind of already in the story) and present an alternative way to empowered.p
Hi there, am an old player who play LE for a few months, take a break, come back to “feel” the new changes every time and take a break again.
Every time the biggest thing that make me take a break again is that i am not satisfied with leveling and gearing my chars after around level 70 and especially after 80-85.
Personally for me arena is a big no-no as
i have not the time to do arena as i have family and i usually interrupt my gaming each 10-30 mins
i HATE arena
and the monoliths, ohhhhh when i fist read about them i was so exited , finally i could choose
something else than arena to gain good xp and get also good gear to improve my chars, yeah i LOVED it in theory…
but… when i play my chars i , how can i say it, i feel that each char is not progressing enough, is not leveling fast and these drops, oh these drops, PLEASE and i say it again PLEASE stop these useless drops and make them close to my char level related drops and above ONLY and make them only tier 3-4 and above drops,.
As it is right now we have WAY too many drops, around 70% of these drops are useless, give us an option to clear the whole monolith run to get a special xp bonus so people that want to level their chars can do that and remove that empowered thing or just make it an option when 1 of your chars completed the monoliths to be unlocked account wide.
Hating arena is pretty much a meme for a lot of players, myself included…
Are you playing the appropriate levels for your characters? I have 4 chars up to lvl 100 now and other than the last 10 levels or so, leveling has seemed fairly easy for me… but I do tend to run empowered monos leveling up and push to at least 150 corruption once my chars can handle it…
Obviously the quantity & quality of the drops still depend on your Monolith modifiers & the level of the maps you run - all controlled by you… But you could do this with lootfilters… just hide everything that doesnt meet your level or Tier totals requirements… relatively easy to create a filter like that.
Monolith unlocking has been discussed at length in another thread so I wont comment on that one other than to say that I believe there needs to be some sort of gate - perhaps it doesnt need to be as high as it is now (i.e. locked for all character individually) but I think it would be far too easy to just unlock everything at once and thats not even considering the reperussions on difficulty for lower level players now able to get into unlocked end-game content before they probably should… lots more opinions in the other thread.
And that’s the problem with games of this nature… how to balance between hardcore players and more casual players, without alienating either.
Make things too easy to acquire, and the hard cores get bored after a week. Make them nearly impossible to acquire, then the more casual players get frustrated, and quit because they are effectively time-gated for eternity…only obtaining those items when they are no longer BiS, or the meta has moved on to something else.
The argument is usually that something like a 4LP Ravenous Void isn’t required for anything. But that lacks the understanding that much of the hype for games like this come from watching streamers and/or youtube videos, where people with high-end gear are smashing content left and right. Then, when the more casual player attempts the same build (with lesser gear), the feeling is ‘meh’, and ends up discouraging them.
I have 2 chars in empowered and about 15-20 others that I was so hyped to farm empowered monos with, but completely stopped playing after completing the first 3 or 4 non-empowered monos for the 10 or 15th time…
I get it, some people can (and even enjoy) hamster-like treadmilling. Hell, I had a friend in EQ who would farm xp/AA in the same spot, 15 hours a day, every day. I, unfortunately, am not one of those people. I despise having to regrind pointless content over, and over, ad nauseum. I’m fine with it when I’m at the making-progress stage, but can’t stand it when I have to do it over again as an entry point. Achieving empowered monos should unlock them on that account, setting (hardcore/softcore), excluding the Solo option. There’s no valid reason every character should have to unlock them…
