End game & taking a note from MMOs

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In my experience the largest fault of most ARPGs is the end game. I think Last Epoch is a beautifully executed game for a lot of reasons and would love to see it succeed, but it’s falling into the same end game no-man’s land most arpg’s tend to. PoE tried to fix this with seasons which personally I hate but it also doesn’t really change anything about the game - at the end of the day you’re still just aiming to farm up the same gear and then once you’ve done everything there’s nothing to do, and once you understand the game well enough you can make that happen obnoxiously fast on any character.

Sure, there’s some exploration of skills and classes that can help, but let’s be honest - arpg’s are often about the thrill of the gear hunt.

Secondly, in Last Epoch’s current end game does not really feel linear or progression-based which takes a lot of the gear hunt fun out of things. Bosses generally have the same level of difficulty maybe with the exception of Orobyss who can be a real PITA depending on the type you get.

Lastly, gearing in this game is nearly 100% crafting oriented, so the gear hunt isn’t actually that satisfying. While you CAN build around uniques/set items, best in slot is really never one of these so the hunt becomes trying to find t6-7 items that have the stats that makes it better than your unique.

Why not take a note from successful MMO’s like WoW? Create a gear based progression system where you need to farm a certain timeline to get good enough gear to kill the boss (or maybe introduce a series of bosses) who drop class specific BiS-potential gear and allow you to make it through the bosses of the next timeline. I understand the difficulty of building a BiS gear system in a game where builds are numerous, but there are several ways I can think of accomplishing this (for example, maybe bosses drop selectable stat gear up to a certain tier, and that tier gets higher as you make your way through timelines).

I also think bosses should feel generally difficult regardless of your build. Make boss abilities hit a LOT harder and reward good gameplay, not good theorycrafting which ultimately results in class nerfs. It should feel satisfying to kill an end game boss. A big victory that took you a while to achieve, an epic reward for your skills & improvement.

This would make the end game last a lot longer for people in general and would set up expansions/new content nicely as well.

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Yeah end game in arpg’s moved to some sort of ladder metric system lately because the devs don’t need to constantly build new content and players have something to strive toward while being able to compare their progress with others.

Currently this is only true for arena. Mono needs help. Dungeons are coming and who knows what that will bring (or also lack). A solid end game is tough to pull off but having metrics and ladders would be a great start.

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Personally I love the idea of simply having more challenging fights, especially in a multiplayer scenario, and hope dungeons brings that. But given how gear-centric most arpg players are I was trying to think of a way to still include that gear hunt satisfaction.

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It sounds like you want uniques to be BiS, I’m not sure how you could draw a feature from MMOs where gear tends to be static (at least it was in SWTOR & GW2 where only specific affixes could drop & every build only wanted 1) compared to an aRPG where the number of affixes & combinations are much higher.

Have I missunderstood?

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Neokortex don’t like this thread.

ARPGs in which you don’t have to use your brain to slide up any “tiers” to advance to the next tier already exist.
→ Diablo 3, Lost Ark and almost all MMORPGs say hello.

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It sounds like you want uniques to be BiS, I’m not sure how you could draw a feature from MMOs where gear tends to be static (at least it was in SWTOR & GW2 where only specific affixes could drop & every build only wanted 1) compared to an aRPG where the number of affixes & combinations are much higher.

Have I missunderstood?

Not necessarily uniques, I think it could be a new class of gear. I mentioned the one concept of selectable affixes - gw2 actually does do this with a lot of gear and I think it’s great… but I could see other solutions.

ARPGs in which you don’t have to use your brain to slide up any “tiers” to advance to the next tier already exist.
→ Diablo 3, Lost Ark and almost all MMORPGs say hello.

Is D3 like that now? It wasn’t at all when it first came out. Maybe that’s part of why it has been able to survive as long as it has.

Anyway, are you disagreeing with the PROBLEMS I outlined or just the solutions? Because it would be more beneficial for you to come up with other solutions if you agree with the problems, than it is to simply nix someone else’s proposed solutions. If you think the game is 100% great for you as is and you’ll be playing it for years to come then that’s awesome. For me I have found after playing for a couple of months I’m tapped out on interesting things to do but I think there are very likely good solutions for this.

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An alternate gear idea could also just be higher affix rolls as you make your way through - like towards the end you are getting more t6/t7 rolls, maybe only end bosses can drop t7’s or multiple t7 rolls on an item. ARPGs are pretty consistently meant to do boss runs over and over and so that could keep the gear grind intact but with the guarantee of a shot at a real upgrade or something great for an alt.

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ARPGs are pretty consistently meant to do boss runs over and over

I disagree on this point. I think there is no “proper” way to play an ARPG. Some people like bossing, others don’t. Some like zoom zoom boom boom, others like slower, more meticulous fights. Some enjoy crafting gear, others enjoy dropping gear.

It seems you fit more along the line of enjoying the bossing and having items drop well rolled side, and while I also enjoy bossing, I prefer being able to create my gear if given the option. I think just dropping BIS gear will ruin some of the fun of LE, as you no longer have an item so search for. If I could do a boss to drop boots with T7 ms and T5 usable affixes (crit avoid, health, resists I need, main stat, etc.) I would take boots off of my filter. Do this enough and I no longer see any items on the ground, so what character progression is left?

If this reply seemed drawn out or not focused I apologize, I should very much be asleep right about now.

TL;DR: Dropping BIS gear on some condition is unhealthy for the long term health of an ARPG because it kills character progression.

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Agreed. I’d love to see some more structured progression in aRPGs. As a related note, I’d love to see more WoW raid - style bosses. Meaning less “avoid the bad stuff” (although some of that is fine) and more bosses that require strategizing. optimizing your gear and build, managing time, resources, space, movement, adds, etc. You can add a lot more interesting difficulty and complexity that way rather than just making bosses have more health and 1 shot you more. There’s only so far you can go with that kind of design while keeping it different and interesting.

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I don’t see an issue with that, PoE is probably the biggest ARPG out there and people use at best 2 or 3 unique items in their builds.

MMOs have a very restricted pool of items, they are not at all comparable with ARPGs, leaning towards this kind of itemization would make a lot of people (probably almost the entire fanbase) really mad.

I don’t understand: first you want an easy way to maximize your build by having a BiS tier of items, then you complain that people who reach such BiS tier by crunching the numbers should not be rewarded for doing so?

I really don’t understand this topic at all…

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Sure, I will explain to you but let’s try to use facts not feelings in our arguments :slight_smile: First off, PoE has around 100k monthly users vs. a game like WoW which has around 5MM monthly users. So PoE MIGHT be the most popular ARPG but it’s still not a very popular game in context. Even Diablo 2 which is a 21 year old game gets around 40k monthly users and had millions back during its peak popularity. If you want Last Epoch to be successful you should hope it has a lot more users than PoE or in order for it to survive it will have to lean heavily on in-game purchases which will change the way they develop the game significantly, I promise you that.

Second, MMO’s do NOT have a restricted pool of items. The only restriction is how many items dev put in the game. In WoW there are more than 100,000 items. There MIGHT be more than 100,000 permutations of items in a game like LE or PoE but I promise you the majority of those are not useful and will simply stay on the ground. What would make people more mad when playing a game - spending countless hours trying to get new gear only to have useless variations drop, or reaching a specific goal they can set their sights on and being rewarded for achieving it?

Lastly, I’m not saying people should “not be rewarded” for getting BiS items. I am saying in a tiered progression getting BiS for your current place in progression will make it easier for you to keep progressing (and in some cases could be the only attainable way of doing so). At end game BiS when you have all the best gear, I think the reward should simply be having achieved that. I STILL don’t think bosses should be a walk in the park, because in a game where you have done everything with a character and the game is now stupid easy, where is the fun? It forces you to abandon that character completely and start over again, beginning the same grind until either new content comes out or you get bored of doing the same challengeless tasks over and over again and burn out and look for another game.

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Not to let my feelings get in the way of my argument but it honestly sounds like you don’t want to play an Arpg. The enjoyment of an Arpg comes from playing out multiple builds and getting your character to your best in slot. (Along with the general style of gameplay)

It sounds more like you want a MMO style gear progression which invalidates every gear item except the BiS item. ARPGs are all about finding that weird unique and making a fun build around it, or grinding out tons of loot to find the shiny object you were looking for.

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You’re comparing peak concurrent players on Steam with monthly subscriptions, not exactly the same thing, you agree?

At end-game the loot pool is extremely reduced and all that matters is item level, not even the stats on an item because you neel iLevel to enter the top tier dungeon.
In the leveling phase you also just slap on whatever item of your class has the highest iLevel and move on.
You’re once again comparing apples and oranges.

Collecting BiS is for the purpose of making your char stronger and the encounters easier.
If the encounters are stupid strong no matter the gear there’s no reason to collect it at all.

You are picturing a endless difficulty like Diablo 3’s Greater Rifts, one of the most absurd and boring end-game ever thought of.
SRPGs are meant to have a difficulty ceiling against which to comprare the effectiveness of your build.
This ceiling also opens the game to the existance of a large number of equally efficient builds, your suggestion would pidgeonhole the game into a subset of boss-fighting builds.

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Not to let my feelings get in the way of my argument but it honestly sounds like you don’t want to play an Arpg. The enjoyment of an Arpg comes from playing out multiple builds and getting your character to your best in slot. (Along with the general style of gameplay)

It sounds more like you want a MMO style gear progression which invalidates every gear item except the BiS item. ARPGs are all about finding that weird unique and making a fun build around it, or grinding out tons of loot to find the shiny object you were looking for.

Nope, I really like ARPG playstyle, but I do find my personal/subjective problem with ARPGs is the grind with no challenge/end game/anything to strive for is the thing that burns me out quickest. Diablo 2 I think lasted so long for me (and for so many players) because boss runs were (are I guess) directly related to the quality of gear you’d get and boss runs are FUN especially in multiplayer.

But I’m not necessarily looking to recreate D2. I think there are novel ways to approach ARPGs to improve upon older, successful models & avoid the pitfalls of the current class of ARPGs which frankly I think are underwhelming as games. I’m finding my chief problem with LE that you can bring a character to end game completion within a week and if you’re not the “I just want to make new builds and play another character every week” player then there’s nothing to appeal to you after that period. There really is no gear farm which I think is harmful for an ARPG, and that’s due to low difficulty. Once you understand the crafting system you won’t ever struggle with gear as your problem. There are no difficult fights or bosses save for maybe Lagon the very first time you fight him in story mode. There are no compelling reasons to continue playing a character as monoliths has no rewards and spending dozens or even hundreds of hours to get a meaningless gear upgrade is not rewarding. I don’t think most players will continue playing for a meaningful amount of time if the only draw is to continue making character after character, that is exhausting for a lot of people and it’s particularly not fun to have to play the storyline over and over.

I think LE has a lot of great QoL advancements, I like the world, I like the characters and the build system. I’d like to see it be more than an alternative to PoE (which IMO is actually not a very good game and probably only even has the player base it does because it’s F2P).

You’re comparing peak concurrent players on Steam with monthly subscriptions, not exactly the same thing, you agree?

No I’m comparing monthly players, not concurrent but unique people playing in a month. PoE has ~100k, WoW still has ~5MM and had around 12MM at its peak. I think PoE hit a peak of around 160k total players this year.

At end-game the loot pool is extremely reduced and all that matters is item level, not even the stats on an item because you neel iLevel to enter the top tier dungeon.
In the leveling phase you also just slap on whatever item of your class has the highest iLevel and move on.
You’re once again comparing apples and oranges.

Sure, and I’m not really recommending the progression is strictly limited to boss-dropped or BiS gear, more that boss dropped gear is more rewarding and maybe CAN be the thing that lets you break the next barrier (if you haven’t had luck with drops prior to getting there).

This ceiling also opens the game to the existance of a large number of equally efficient builds, your suggestion would pidgeonhole the game into a subset of boss-fighting builds.

Isn’t that already the truth for the game? Of course there is arena but everything else in the game just comes down to whether or not you can kill bosses - trash is trivial. Every usable build is only usable because it can kill bosses, as bosses are the only gatekeepers to progression.

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PoE has 100K concurrent players.
NOT 100K players in a day or 100K players in a month: 100K playing at the same time.
And that’s counting only 1 platform.

WoW may have 10 million montly subscriptions, but the two numbers do not represent the same thing.

It’s a huge difference that you don’t seem to grasp, not to mention that a recurring montly sub does not equal actual gaming.

That “thing” does not exist.
Everybody has it’s own build and everybody may be looking for different stats on diffierent pieces. The game cannot know what you’re looking for.
You are advocating a Diablo 3 mandatory-set approach, where there’s a very restricted pool of viable items to progress, which is probably the most despised thing in D3’s itemization.
Even worse you could be asking for the game to cheat and check your stats to drop items with affixes that complement what you’re already equipped with, which will no doubt cause complaints from the people who are not given the exact piece they’re looking for.

Killing trash is important, it’s where the loot comes from.
You seem to be the kind of player that rushes through the map to complete the quest, leaving all the trash behind because it’s “too easy”, and it seems the devs are actively trying to discourage that kind of approach to the game.

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I’m not going to keep debating you but if you think POE is as successful of a game as WoW in terms of the # of players fine, it’s a moot point.

As for the rest:

That “thing” does exist, one example I already gave is selectable stat gear, but there are multiple possible implementations which allow for gear variance while still ensuring the gear is rewarding (another example I already gave - higher tiers guaranteed). I have strictly NOT advocated for limited/linear item pools and I get the impression you haven’t really read anything I’ve written.

Killing trash may be important but it’s trivial, as is common with ARPGs. I don’t think anyone leaves trash behind as every class has abilities which make it simple to clear as you move. But simply moving around and watching things die and only stopping to pick up gear holds very limited entertainment value in terms of longevity. What is the point of loot if it doesn’t enable anything? You can easily clear empowered monoliths with a large variety of builds with sub-average gear.

Listen, if you think the game in its current state is perfect and you’re going to be playing for many years to come, then there won’t be anything for you in this thread. Simple nay-saying other people’s ideas is not only negative, it’s not helpful. Whether you like it or not, the game is a business and if you want it to survive you should open up to trying to help problem solve where other players are finding issues, or simply ignore them and let people who have similar opinions work together to try to find amicable solutions. You coming in and simply saying “NO NO NO” is childish, why be in this thread at all? If no one agrees with me then I’m ok with that. Currently 3 other players in the thread have expressed agreeing with the problem, though. Do you want to be helpful? If not, go somewhere else.

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