I’ve played 2 builds during 1.2 and while I like the game I feel that there is one general area where the game has not made any progress and made me stop playing. It is also what made me stop playing every other time I started playing and I feel this is a problem because I’m quitting the game far too early in the league.
Also, from what EHG has said, most players seem to quit the game once they hit empowered monoliths which is also around the time I quit so I figured it’s best to explain why I am quitting and what I think should be changed. This doesn’t means everyone else who is quitting at the same point is doing so for the same reasons as me since I am not in other people’s heads, this is just my case.
For the most part, the campaign feels good to play but there are some small issues. Lagon as a boss feels very out of tune with difficulty compared to the other bosses (even though there is the small corner exploit which I don’t use). Then we have the Majalsa part of the campaign and everything here feels like they hit so much harder. It’s a huge step up in damage these mobs which just feels unbalanced. It doesn’t stops me, but it feels like the game spikes up in difficulty instead of gradually going up. There are in fact many enemies throughout this part of the campaign that are perfectly able to one shot the player with a crit which before lagon, nothing does.
As soon as I enter the monolith the difficulty goes down, I’m back to fighting for the most part regular mobs though if the occasional Majalsa mob shows up it gets a lot harder as potentially capable of killing me very fast but since for the most part I don’t fight that many of them due to RNG of what mobs are used on the map, it generally feels a lot easier during this part.
Once I start getting to the last monoliths the difficulty again spikes. Lagon is brutal, Hearot is just as brutal with his AoE damage and him dashing across the entire screen and really any boss at this point can kill me unless I have an absolute beast of a build. In fact even with that they can still kill me, just less likely with a good build.
Then we enter the empowered phase which is when I quit. Enemies now are level 100, they now have much more HP and much more damage on top of the extra bonus they get from the echos. At this point the defenses just can’t keep up. Both my builds got to this point and there was nothing they could do.
The problem lies in the fact that a large part of the defenses is in the gear and a not insignificant part of them are from grand blessings which can only be farmed in empowered monoliths.
Well, if I can only farm the grand blessings in empowered monoliths and realistically speaking, I can only farm for decent gear in empowered monoliths, I now have I problem of not being strong enough to farm what I need to keep pushing. At least not without dying a lot and I don’t have the tolerance to keep dying over and over again until I finally made it. If I’m dying the answer is I need to do something easier, but doing something easier isn’t going to give me what I need.
Here we have the classic problem of hitting a brick wall which should be happening at relatively high corruption (relatively being however much a specific build can realistically handle), not as soon as a player hits empowered monoliths.
In my opinion, empowered monoliths (100 corruption) should be the absolute basic level of gameplay. Where people actually start farming for their gear and blessings. As such, this is the point where virtually any build will not struggle. Even bad builds should be getting here with bad gear and still doing fine. Once people start pushing corruption then they should start feeling the difficulty, but never before they get to the point of being able to farm.
Ideally, I’d like to see some nerfs to lagon, At very least on those big hits, or bare minimum, remove any crit chance from him during campaign and non empowered monoliths. Make the phase where we are teleported to the lower part of the arena a lot faster too, that part is incredibly annoying. I’d also like to see a nerf to Hearot, at least make sure that he can’t dash when the AoE is happening. Lastly, please nerf Majalsa mobs, they do too much damage, they are not on a comparable level as all the other mobs.
From there I’d like to see a much more gradual difficulty increase, to the point that empowered monoliths (100 corruption) are about as hard as the level 80 monoliths because again, this should be the farming stage.
Lastly and I think this has been said by a lot of people already but it cannot be overstated. Weaver stuff is a HUGE difficulty spike. It is not in line with the rest, things hit much harder and are tougher and this is before even taking into account them getting possessed which makes it extra brutal.
These are the reasons that made me quit so early in the league and quite frankly feeling like I didn’t play the game even 1/10th of the time I wanted to because it’s just frustrating to constantly die because I don’t have the defenses and I can’t even farm for it.
I’m sure many will just say, skill issue and yes, true. But I’m just an average player and if I’m quitting like so many others as soon as I hit empowered, perhaps skill is not the only issue here. Perhaps the game needs to have a more gradual difficulty curve to allow players to overcome the skill issue.
