Endgame Loot & Progression Ideas

Feedback and Suggestions
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Hey everyone,

I’ve been sinking a ton of hours into Eterra lately (369 hours and counting!), and as I push deeper into empowered monoliths I am currently farming at 1135C. I’ve hit a wall that I’m sure many of you have felt. It’s that point where you can spend 60, 80, or even 100+ hours completely stalled, without a single meaningful gear upgrade.

It begs the question: if the drops feel just as unrewarding at 500 corruption as they do at 1000 corruption, what is the long-term motivation to keep pushing?

ARPGs are built on a core power fantasy: the idea that your time investment should provide a tangible reward. When that loop breaks and 98% of the loot is filtered out, the endgame chase can start to feel less like a thrilling hunt and more like a pointless grind.

I believe we can improve this for everyone. These suggestions are for the dad who only has 30 minutes to play and needs that session to feel impactful, just as much as they are for the dedicated player at 2000+ corruption who is striving for those tiny, incremental gains.

With that in mind, my thoughts on elevating the long-term experience boil down to three key areas:

1. The Ultimate Chase: Fated Drops

Crafting is, and should remain, the most reliable way to build powerful gear. But to keep the spark alive after thousands of monster kills, we need a “lottery ticket”—that one-in-a-million moment that gets your heart pounding. I propose a new, exceedingly rare drop type: a “Fated Drop.”

A Fated Drop would be signified by a unique visual and sound effect—a different colored beam, a distinct chime—and would guarantee an item with perfectly-rolled affixes.

  • For Exalted Items: A Fated Drop would represent the pinnacle of monster-dropped loot. Instead of just random high tiers, it would guarantee an item with four highly synergistic affixes (for example, all affixes are fire-related, or all are for melee bleed). Crucially, at least one of these affixes would be guaranteed to be T7, and all four affixes would have perfectly maxed-out numerical rolls within their respective tiers. This creates an electrifying moment: you’re not just getting a random T7, but a perfectly rolled, build-defining item. As the absolute pinnacle of this system, there would be an ultra-rare chance for this Fated Drop to also manifest as an item with two synergistic T7 affixes, creating a true once-in-a-cycle treasure.
  • For Unique & Set Items: A Fated Drop would roll with perfect stats on all of its implicit and explicit modifiers, along with a very high, but not always perfect, Legendary Potential (e.g., a guaranteed 3 or 4 LP).

To make these items truly legendary, the “perfect roll” property would be an inherent quality of the item itself. This means if you use a Glyph of Hope to upgrade a max-rolled T4 affix on a Fated item, it would automatically become a max-rolled T5 affix. This unique quality makes them not just perfect drops, but also perfect crafting projects, preserving their fated power as you continue to enhance them at the Forge.

2. Smarter Loot: Making Exalts a Foundation for Crafting

This is the most crucial point for the health of the day-to-day grind. The biggest source of frustration is spending hours farming for a single viable Exalted item, only for it to fracture on the first craft. The problem isn’t the crafting risk; it’s the scarcity of items worth taking a risk on.

The solution is to make Exalted items drop with more synergistic affixes. The loot system should be weighted so that affixes on an item have a higher chance of making sense together.

Imagine the difference:

  • Current Drop: A Warlock’s Helm with T7 Minion Health, T2 Dexterity, T3 Bleed Chance, and T1 Fire Resistance. This is instantly shattered or filtered out. It’s a dead end.
  • Smarter Drop: A Warlock’s Helm with T7 Chthonic Fissure Level, which then has a higher chance to roll with complementary affixes like Necrotic Resistance, Intelligence, or Increased Damage Over Time. Now, even if the tiers are low, you have a coherent base. This is an item that sparks excitement and is worth taking to the Forge.

This change would directly reduce player frustration. A crafting failure would sting less if you knew you had two or three other viable bases in your stash. It would make short play sessions more rewarding and ensure that when we see that flash of purple, it’s a moment of genuine potential, not a likely disappointment.

3. Divine Favor: Progression That Unlocks Build Diversity

Hitting level 100 should be a milestone, not an end to character progression. A post-100 system, which we can call “Divine Favor” would provide a slow, steady sense of growth. More importantly, it would serve as a powerful tool to free players from “mandatory” gear choices and unlock true build diversity.

The core problem this system solves is the “solved slot” issue. How many builds feel locked into using a specific Unique simply to acquire one crucial stat? A perfect example is spell critical strike chance. Many Mage builds feel compelled to use gloves like Grasp of the Blood Mage just to reach a viable crit level. This removes choice and creativity from a key gear slot.

Divine Favor would address this by allowing players to source these crucial stats directly through character investment.

How It Works:

After level 100, the XP bar continues to fill. Each time it does, you earn an “Attunement Point.” To encourage varied gameplay, you could also gain points from major endgame milestones (e.g., clearing a T4 Dungeon for the first time, reaching wave 300 in the Arena).

These points could be spent in a dedicated tree with finite nodes. By investing enough points, a player could gain the +4% base crit chance they previously relied on their gloves for. This frees up the glove slot for a well-rolled Exalted item with defensive stats, or another Unique that enables a completely different playstyle. The system becomes a tool to liberate build choices, not just to stack more power.

Example Nodes:

  • Character Power (Character-Specific): These nodes would have caps to prevent infinite power creep and allow players to target the stats they need to diversify their gear.
    • Focus: A node where you can spend up to 40 points, with each point granting +0.1% Base Spell Critical Strike Chance. (Max +4% Base Spell Crit).
    • Might: A node where you can spend up to 50 points, with each point granting +1% Melee Damage. (Max +50% Melee Damage).
    • Vitality: A node where you can spend up to 50 points, with each point granting +8 Health. (Max +400 Health).
  • Quality of Life (Account-Wide): Minor bonuses that make the game experience smoother for all your characters.
    • Affinity: A node that slightly increases your chance of finding shards for your equipped skills.
    • Prosperity: A node granting a small, capped bonus to Gold Find or Item Rarity.
  • Cosmetic Unlocks: Reaching significant Attunement milestones (e.g., 100, 250, 500 points spent) could unlock subtle cosmetic effects or titles.

This system ensures every play session contributes to progress. It gives players a meaningful long-term goal and, most importantly, provides a clear path to breaking free from meta-defining items, fostering both build creativity and diversity.

I believe these three interconnected ideas would create a more dynamic, exciting, and durable endgame for all players. What are your thoughts?

Cheers,

Marcavian

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Bragging rights. With a never ending scaling the one with the biggest number can show it of and feel very special about it.
Outside of this… minmaxing if there are gaps to fill or some % to get here and there. Maybe selftorture to a certain degree… who knows?

This was never true for any endgame scenario in H&S games when things go slower and slower with less and less rewards. This is where the “If you don’t like this, this genre is maybe not for you…” folks and mentality normaly come in and ask if you ever played a H&S game.

No we can’t because if 100k people playa game you have like 90k different oppinions on the matter.

We have drops that have far worse dropr rates then 1 in a mill. You are a bit late to this and this makes the idea a bit redundant.

For your ideas on the topic: Those Items kind of drop already and are possible and that’s why there is a lootchase after all. If this items are far to easy to get, like 1 in a million, people will most likely be bored even faster with the game given it’s on the easier side.

People are against smarter loot because they don’t want a D3 scenario to happen again where stuff is to easy to get.

This is just D3 Paragon and people will most likely hate it. I enjoyed D3’s paragon because it was easy to use and nothing to think about. Then again a lot of people hate it with all their heart because it’s just stupid braindead stat increases that allow powercreep to run wild.

My thoughts are as follows. Mike said on a friday live stream if people reach 4 digits of corruption they messed up. So you want to make this stuff even easier while you are already an overachiever or using a broken build or interaction or both. Given this statement of one of the devs, even when they regulary mess up as it seems, you want more power creep while there is already to much.
In short: I’m completely against it!I like their approach with this season with the skilltree they added to season mechanic. Something like this could work realy well for monolith as a standard for example and not only for some fancy seasonal theme that might get removed.

Real stat increases are not needed at all. But that’s just me you’ll for sure get more feedback on this topic ^^.

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Hey Macknum,

Thanks for the point-by-point breakdown. I appreciate you engaging with the ideas. Let me address your thoughts directly.

On your point about motivation beyond 500 corruption, you said: “Bragging rights… minmaxing… selftorture…”

You’re right, bragging rights are a factor. But for many, the core fun of an ARPG is the loot hunt itself. If that hunt feels fruitless for long stretches, it damages motivation for a much broader audience than just those competing on a leaderboard.

On your point about time investment, you said: “This was never true for any endgame scenario in H&S games… ‘If you don’t like this, this genre is maybe not for you…’”

I agree—ARPGs are a grind and always have been. But there’s a difference between a challenging grind with diminishing returns (which is good) and hitting a brick wall where progress feels like it stops entirely for dozens of hours. My suggestions aim to smooth that wall into a more climbable, long-term slope.

On your point about improving the game for everyone, you said: “No we can’t…”

True, you can’t get 100k people to agree on everything. The goal of feedback isn’t to find a single perfect solution, but to propose ideas that could benefit multiple playstyles. As I mentioned, these ideas are meant to help both the hardcore player and the casual player with limited time.

On your “Fated Drop” idea, you said: “We have drops that have far worse drop rates… People are against smarter loot because they don’t want a D3 scenario to happen again…”

This is the most important point to clarify:

  • My “Fated Drop” idea isn’t about rarity; it’s about guaranteed quality. We all know the pain of finding an ultra-rare item that’s still junk. A Fated Drop is about making the jackpot moment feel like a real jackpot by guaranteeing synergistic, max-rolled affixes.
  • I also share the fear of a “D3 scenario.” That’s why Fated Drops would be exceedingly rare, and my “Smarter Loot” idea for regular Exalts is just to make them better crafting bases, not to hand players finished gear.

On your “Divine Favor” idea, you said: “This is just D3 Paragon and people will most likely hate it…”

I understand the immediate comparison to D3 Paragon, which is why I designed the proposal to be fundamentally different in two key ways:

  1. It has hard caps on all nodes to prevent the infinite power creep that plagued D3.
  2. Its main goal is to increase build diversity by freeing up gear slots, not just to add raw, “braindead” power.

On your final thoughts, you mentioned a developer quote about 4-digit corruption and said: “you want more power creep while there is already to much.”

That dev quote is important context, but my proposals are aimed at the entire player base, not just those at 1000+ corruption. A smoother gear curve (Point 2) and a long-term progression system (Point 3) help the player with 30 minutes a night just as much, if not more. Giving players other ways to get crucial stats can actually help the developers balance the game by making players less reliant on a few specific “broken” Uniques.

Again, thanks for the critical perspective. It’s a useful discussion to have.

Cheers,

Marcavian

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Impressively detailed and well thought out. I won’t be putting in near that effort into fonts or distinguishing my text, so please bare with me.

I checked out your gear by looking you up on lastepochtools.com to get an idea of your progress and before I get into the meat of my opinions on your suggestions, I would like to say that you have plenty of room to grow in your build. If you are able to consistently farm in the corruption you’ve stated, upgrading your gear to the “next level” shouldn’t be as dull and inaccessible as one could be led to believe reading your feedback so far.

The chase items as you’ve outlined have already been addressed consistently with each update. With the introduction of Nemesis and now the Farsight Turtle, players have a way to consistently get unique items with higher Legendary Potential. Once you have the desired item, you can imprint it and effectively force it to drop, with the LP subtly influencing the weight in the players favor. This allows you to get perfectly rolled items with the LP you need. It takes time, but with the minimum gear requirements for most builds to be able to hit 300 corruption being a single T7 affix synthesized (slammed) and that affix being guaranteed when you attempt to create a legendary item, getting to where you are currently on your second build is easier than it has ever been.

Imprinting is one of the most powerful mechanics that I have ever interacted with in any ARPG. It gives the player near total control over what they want to farm. This control covers every single item in the game barring boss specific drops. Couple this with prophecies in Circle of Fortune and the increased drop rates for most content, and the only thing you are left chasing if you use the resources we already have are items that were never intended to be easy to acquire. Items in the realm of 2LP Red Rings, 1 in 15k+ 3-4LP unique items, and perfect exalted bases with 2 or more T7 affixes minimum.

It is incredibly easy once you scale your build past 500 corruption to acquire items with 2 T7 affixes. This leaves the most dedicated players attempting to acquire bases with 3 T7 affixes to make what once were considered “impossible” items that are now not just the pinnacle, but over the course of the entire player base, relatively common to see at least one in a build. I personal enjoy the grind associated with min maxing a build to push higher difficulties, so I might be biased, but playing since release my opinion is that unless you are doing a fresh start in a cycle, there is very little challenge to getting a build up and running. Even then, the only real challenge to get through the first barrier of entry is experience. That barrier being empowered monoliths. The idea of altering the RNG behind items to drop more synergistically sounds good on paper, but it already exists. The only thing in game that is missing is the visual cues you suggested and the affixes being maxed when it happens. I have had items drop with perfect affixes, three of them T7, sometimes with an open prefix or suffix allowing for crafting the exact thing you need. It’s rare, as rare as getting a good 4LP, but it should be. Having it be any more common eliminates the effort that makes scaling a build into high corruption so rewarding. Same thing with unique items and their respective rolls. You can farm a perfect base, imprint it if possible, get copies, and run them through Nemesis and Turtle for LP.

I agree with Macknum. The D3 paragon system you’ve suggested implementing would obviously benefit players who only care about player power and power fantasy, but it would be incredibly easy to exploit regardless of the limitations. Adding those build rounding affixes as passive gains allows players to forgo farming gear to compensate for very real and impactful decisions. There are plenty of ways to get crit cap, but how you choose to do it, and what you give up not only gives you something to work towards but adds value to your choices. The gloves you mentioned were just recently introduced. Just another example of player expectations following a moving goalpost to ask for an easier experience in my opinion.

If I were to interpret the intention behind the game’s design for retention, it would be centered around creating more builds to scale to completing the most difficult content, not giving the player the opportunity to make one build that scales further the longer you play it. Though it absolutely does that. It’s just in the form of investing the time needed and having the lucky breaks to accomplish getting the gear that rightfully is difficult to obtain. Rewarding players for pushing to max level 40 times with incremental increases would completely distract from build experimentation-centric design. This would also force the devs to employ a permanent account wide reward for accomplishing this or adjust the post max level experience gain to compensate for the fact that players who only play cycle would have to grind this out every time or risk losing player power other people have. This creates busy work for hardcore players, makes a system inaccessible to casual players, and restructures the game for developers.

I recommend you upgrade your gear. Going through the process and learning to use the resources we already have might change the way you feel about the game entirely. I am assuming you are Circle of Fortune, as discussing the drops at all while being in trade would make little sense to me. When you have multiple T7 slams on all of your unique items, come back to this. If you still feel the same way, and think everything you said so far is still worth putting forward, by all means. I’ve put in nearly 3k hours in this game, and in it’s current state I am engaged, in love with the crafting, and only look forward to the upcoming cycle with the hype expected from a fan. I’m happy to see another player so engrossed they are looking for ways to improve it. Just be mindful of the fact that the devs have heard and addressed many of these concerns, and we have many of the tools necessary to address most of what you’ve discussed without changing too much.

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i cant help but feel the end game is seriously flawed when a person who plays at corruption 1000 still cant get meaningful drops after playing a lot.

as someone whos at c200 ish before stopping. it makes me feel that theres no point to keep playing so much.

playing a game forever was a dream i wanted. but nowadays i understand burnout is a thing.

i respect my time a great deal more nowadays and if being at c1000 isnt enough to farm what we want (not need), then what hope do i have if i m only a c200 scrub

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What a person can accomplish in terms of gear and pushing a build really does take deeply into consideration a player’s experience and well they utilize their resources. I spend the majority of my time between 500-700 corruption even with builds that I have that can easily farm 2k+.

The reason being that I enjoy playing new things and I would rather try something out and level up a new idea than just get the “best of the best” in the highest corruption. Some of the best gear I have crafted was on a whim, and some of the best drops came in 100 corruption.

I have nearly 3k hours in the game. 3-400 hours is respectable, but unless someone were to intentionally research any ARPG as if there was a degree on the other side of the effort, chances are there is plenty to learn. I suggest looking up people’s builds on lastepochtools.com. You can compare the difference in quality and volume of gear and decide for yourself if the problem is a lack of drops, or maybe some resources could be used better.

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tho i do appreciate your suggestion, i tend to find it more easy to just not play such games.

i dislike games where the ceiling is too high and the gap between decent builds and good/optimized builds are too vast.

taking a look on other peoples builds is essentially checking a build guide. tho i do admit i have compared my build to others before, i m from the mindset that i find games that make following a build guide seem necessary are games that are not balanced.

after all, whats the point of all the complex systems that the game devs developed if all that is expected is for players to just follow a build guide? a lot of people shit on d4 for having a twig for a skill tree. or d3 for having pre built builds via their item sets. but what difference is there between those games vs the likes of POE and LE? POE and LE has vastly more complex systems. but the best way to play is follow a build guide.

if i m going to follow a build guide, i might as well play a survivorslike. if i m being honest, for power fantasy, survivors like does it way better than d-likes.

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That just sounds like Ancients & Primal Ancients from D3 to me but with the benefit of the affixes being tailored for a particular build architype. My main concern is on the defenses (suffixes), if we take fire per your example, we’d presumably want % increased fire damage & but what about the second prefix? If you’re a caster % melee would be a junk affix, and on the suffixes you probably wouldn’t want fire resist & if you’re not a dodge build you won’t want dodge.

If the affixes are random then you’ll still likely mostly get junk. The alternative is to have them hand made, like uniques, but that would require them to make items for all archetypes which would be time consuming.

Also, if they’re that rare such that they’re “once in a season” then why bother having them?

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another mageblood to exist and never drop for me lol

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Absolutely true. I’m not married to a game and noone forces me to play the game more when I don’t have fun with it anymore. So I simply stop if I lose intrest or stuff takes to long. The Endgame of LE is pure repetition anyways and there are not that many different things to do like in PoE 1 for example so I stop at a certain point when my fun is diminished. Everyone who puts in time might have their reason to do so.

Yeah but this won’t happen. When you are lvl 80 (iirc) you are able to find the best stuff outside of drops behind certain corruption thresholds. Look at D2 for example. I played it back in the day and sometimes had no meaningfull drops for days. Same goes for every other H&S game. Updates get rarer and rarer.
For example if I have my setup in LE and my Lootfilter is only specific bases with specific affixes and a minimum ammount of tiers on it I can run for days without finding anything. On the other hand look at D3 and the ammount of fun people made about it because you had your gear in one or two days. There is no H&S game that hits the sweet spot… at least for me.

So I couldn’t even say what would be a right ammount or a long term climbable slope.

But you can’t help both in most cases. Look at last season. How many people defeated uberroth? If LE EVER had the mindset to do something for people who play casualy and for the diehards it is gone for a long time.

Back in the day 300C was mentioned as an Endgame goal. Reasonable for everyone to reach but then LE was beginning to move goalposts. Right now they only serve the “We want more endgame!” crowd. How does this help casual players who might have even to little time at hand to get to emp monos or through them?

This will be the point of time again where people pop up that say “Maybe this genre isn’t for you then and you should play candy crush.”.

As long as seasonal themes don’t start at low levels, let’s say 10, and scale for the rest of the game LE isn’t doing anything for casuals.

And that is a bad thing. Look into the last epoch DB and into the droprates of some LP 3 and LP 4 items. It’s more likely to get hit by lightning twice while taking a dump. Quality items take a loooong time get and therefor they are batshitcrazy rare in the “once i na lifetime” realm.
Sure you have to go through a lot of junk to get this jackpot item but that’s again the heart and soul of the genre.

But if you make them better and more achiveable you hurt the loot hunt in the long run and everything becomes easier in the big picture. Many people are against improving FP on items or reducing the costs because it would be to easy to craft good gear. Look into the topics we had in the past and then guess the feedback you get on making it easier to get good rolls from the getgo :slight_smile: .

There is a divide but I think this divide will never be solved. Nolifers will end up on top of everyone else because that’s the name of the game.

Sure but non the less D3 Paragon is what people see at first glance and given their past experiences with the system they might want to puke instantly… or even love it ^^. There will be power creep still and as mentioned: Mike said if people reach 4 digit corruption they messed up. So there is no need for additions at this time because LE is messing up constantly all over the place.

Freeing up gear slots isn’t a good thing. There is kind of a balance between numbers you can achive and numbers you shouldn’t be able to achive. If I can put stats on gear slots for example like 8% crit chance on gloves and 50% MS on boots this would lead to into a meta shift where you aim to replace mandatory affixes from gear with passive stats you get as a present to become even more powerfull… to me that’s kind of braindead if it wasn’t part of the basegame as a complimentary game system that is balanced in. For LE it would be power creep again :slight_smile: .

But what is smooth and what isn’t? Again, first 300C was endgame, then 300C was mentioned to be a good build able to push further, then they said if people get into 4 digit corruption they messed up. Now first of all tell me where the balance is you want to improve. What curve are we following right now? What data points are there? What is the goal to achive?
I can’t make a cruve smoother when the idea of balance and endgame is a spiral and drawn over many times so even the devs can’t tell it anymore. I’m with you on the topic to make things more smooth but we have no baseline to begin with because there is none. LE is ever scaling for a reason from my point of view and the reason is to get away with completely messed up balancing.

All we can work with right now is reaching 1k corruption is a nono. Then my question would be: What could be done to make things worse so people can’t reach 1k corruption.

As long as EHG isn’t growing some balls and set some goals in stone talking about smoothing out stuff or to add more power or whatever is kind of mood.

I appreciate the thoughts you made and your attempt to make the game better for everyone and realy wish LE will become a better game but right now I’m only an optimist with experience and I can’t see things change if EHG isn’t working on the change first themself. They took a long time to change stuff after 1.0 but it wasn’t enough as it seems because to me the game still looks like a construction site.

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Mike has said on stream several times that they’re against any paragon-style system. They want level 100 to feel optional, not something you feel like you have to always get.
If you had any post-level 100 bonuses, then everyone feels like they need to get them or they’re gimping their builds.

It doesn’t mean that they can’t change their minds at some point about this, but it’s not likely to happen.
Stuff that gets added is available to everyone, not just people that grind for level 100, which is something most casuals will never reach in a season.

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No I understand where you are coming from, but my intention wasn’t to compel you follow what somebody is doing, but to give you an example of the difference between a player who has experience with the systems in game and the progress they make on their builds vs. someone who feels held back because they aren’t optimizing the resources they have.

If Marcavian hadn’t said they were farming in 1k+ corruption my response may be slightly different. But given that they on their first playthrough are able to access the most difficult content, there should be no problems for them to progress their build far beyond where they are currently. I would hate for the bias of a player expressing their grievances to influence new players into giving up early before they took the chance to test out everything available. If someone uses it all and still finds it lacking, by all means. Everything isn’t for everyone.

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Hey everyone,

Thank you all for the incredibly detailed and passionate discussion. There are a lot of great points from multiple angles, and I want to take a moment to clarify my own position and experience, as I think some assumptions have been made that are central to this conversation.

1. My Motivation and Current Progress

A few posters, particularly ResplendentEgo, have suggested that my feelings might stem from a lack of experience with the game’s systems. I want to provide some context to show that I have engaged deeply with what the game has to offer.

  • In this cycle, I’ve played for approximately 369 hours, almost exclusively on my main character.
  • My reason for farming at 1135C is not for bragging rights, but for efficiency. With tens of thousands of hours in other ARPGs, I’ve learned to always farm at the highest possible difficulty where I can maintain speed, as this provides the best chance at meaningful loot.
  • I am not struggling to get my build “up and running.” The bottleneck I’ve hit is at the absolute peak of min-maxing. My stash is filled with the 2LP and 3LP Uniques I need for my final build, but I am completely stuck waiting for suitable Exalted items to slam onto them. Despite using every tool available—from targeted Prophecies for Exalted items to high-end crafting with imprints—the specific, running nemesis towers, and reworking the woven tree several times, high-tier bases needed to make progress are simply not appearing.

Despite this deep investment and efficient farming, my build has hit a hard wall. I have not been able to finish my final pieces of gear, and I still cannot defeat endgame challenges like the Uber Abberoth. My feedback comes not from a place of inexperience, but from the perspective of a player who has engaged with the endgame systems as intended and found them to be unrewarding at the highest level of play.

2. The Broader Player Experience

I want to thank ExSea for sharing his perspective. His comment, “if being at c1000 isnt enough to farm what we want (not need), then what hope do i have if i m only a c200 scrub,” perfectly encapsulates the core issue. When players see someone like me, who has invested hundreds of hours, feeling stalled, it creates a sense of hopelessness that can damage motivation for the entire community. This isn’t just about my personal progression; it’s about the health of the long-term player journey for everyone.

3. Refining the Ideas Based on Your Feedback

  • On “Fated Drops”: Llama8 raised a great point about the complexity of generating synergistic affixes. My proposal isn’t a technical spec, but a conceptual goal: how can we make the “jackpot” moment feel truly like a jackpot? Perhaps it’s not a fully themed item, but one that guarantees multiple T6/T7 affixes with perfect rolls, leaving some room for crafting. The core idea is to make the rarest drops in the game feel mechanically special beyond just their rarity.
  • On “Divine Favor” (Paragon System): Macknum and others have rightly pointed out the community’s fear of power creep and the D3 Paragon system. I also agree with the comment that the developers have been against such a system. However, I believe a capped, finite system designed to increase build diversity is fundamentally different. When players are less reliant on a single Unique for a crucial stat (like crit), it actually gives the developers more freedom to balance that Unique without breaking entire builds. It can be a stabilizing factor, not just a source of power creep.

Ultimately, a game’s design philosophy must align with what keeps its players engaged. While I respect the developers’ vision, the long-term health of the game depends on a reward structure that feels fair and motivating. My experience shows that at the very top end, that structure currently feels flawed.

Thank you again for the robust debate. It’s clear we all care deeply about this game’s future.

Cheers,

Marcavian

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No reasonable one besides self-created goals. Those are not as ‘solid’ as competitors though as it’s heavily reliant on drop-luck rather then gradual progression through crafting as an example.

It’s one of the major weakspots of Last Epoch currently, though it’s gotten better with 1.2 because of the new runes and the Attribute exchange from the weaver node.

The first one:

After stating that the hunt is ‘too long’ already this kinda lost me, the follow-up hinges on it as well.

Yes, I find your idea interesting as a baseline, but it’s not the solution for the problem you describe, quite the contrary… the current situation of ‘only lottery is available’ is the issue after all, which makes it so highly long-term to find any viable upgrade at all, it’s because the drop-mechanics RNG is not sufficiently alleviated through the crafting mechanics.

We already have a massive gulch between ‘this is a realistically achievable item’ and ‘this is a sought after top-tier item’. The difference between them is massive and that timeframe is to be filled rather then another massive gulch being created that causes this issue all over again. It’s viable in the future though when those issues are solved and the systems advance accordingly enough.

The second one:

It’s either/or., Which method is used to alleviate the chance for a ‘fail’ is of no matter, but that the chance for that fail is respectively high is pushing people away from engaging with it.

This can be solved in several ways.

  • Adjustments of drop-rate of base items. Your solution falls into that via ‘targeted drops’ instead. The system decides on fitting Affixes according to the highest one available.
  • Adjustments of the crafting mechanic itself.

My go-to solution I would enjoy to see is the second, not the first.
Why?
Because it allows more variety and is better future-proofing then the first. You limit the options available with the first one substantially more then the second. The second opens options, the first reduces options. Both lead to the same result but if a new build comes out needing off-meta rolls then it would comparatively become far harder to achieve with the first one.

All in all it’s a good solution though.

The third one:

I’m heavily against such a system. A definite end-goal should be available rather then a gradual endless progression.
This provides a clear-cut goal to strife towards as well as ensuring that gear isn’t simply ‘trivialized’ as you keep playing longer and longer term. Since getting stats this way it - as you mention - removes the reliance on gear itself.

This is a patchwork solution, it is one which is actually detrimental long-term.

It relates directly to the problem you mention which is:

This is alleviated through variety of Affixes and options. The current issue with the system is that there is no choice present. You have to use ‘item x’ since it’s simply BiS. Commonly this relates to a unique item in the majority of cases.

Unique items can come in LP versions, especially items which have a realistic chance to drop in 4 LP become substantially stronger then anything else available for the same base easily.

To solve this implementation of a vastly higher variety of bases is a solution for example. Alternatively a vastly higher variety of non-transferable Affixes, hence those which can’t appear under any circumstance on uniques.

The issue was created by implementing LP items in the first place, EHG had nothing in place to counter the reduction of viability for base-items, this caused the whole system to substantially narrow down to just a few viable options rather then actual choice.

That’s not quite true, but close.

What is forgotten to be mentioned here is that you and @Marcavian are both right! But each of you forgets a part of the whole for it.

Yes, H&S are built upon the power fantasy, to get a tangible reward.
This reward is also including higher count of item drops of the same base-level, quicker clear or trivialization of game systems through said progress.
Especially the last is the peak of the power fantasy.

That’s why people play with multi-mirror builds in PoE when they can easily do content with vastly weaker characters for example. It’s the progress comparably to the content which is felt. Be it a faster clear, a higher count of item drops, a quicker boss-kill or a boss-kill where you can simply stand there and ignore everything the boss throws at you entirely as you’re baseline ‘immortal’ for that content.

And it also allows implementation of content which is similar to Uberroth… but not with exclusive drops but scaled baseline rewards instead. ‘The better your build the better the reward’ is a mandatory long-time standing aspect of H&S games since the start of time basically. Magic Find builds, trivialization and speed-ups.

It shifts the goalposts of it but sadly doesn’t solce the core issue. It just makes it look initially better while feeling ‘empty’ in reality. The same issue as the corruption system has… which is no clear-cut goal existing. And without clear-cut goals there is far less motivation to achieve something specific.

The next ‘motivation-killer’ is content which is nigh unachievable but locks exclusive rewards that are highly sought-after. ‘I’ll never be able to achieve it even if I play for thousands of hours’ is a clear-cut way to loose player-engagement.
Mind you, this only holds true when there is nothing filling up the space in-between.
That’s Last Epoch’s issue currently, long stretches without them being filled with anything. ‘Long progression droughts’ so to say.

Sadly I have to say it would be detrimental for the hardcore player. Those people primarily play to overcome a challenge. Pure time investment itself is no challenge, knowing that no matter how well or bad you play you’ll outpace content just by being existent basically is no motivator.
Creating top-tier equipment through a combination of efficient farming and knowledge base on how to use the systems to be magnitudes faster then someone not investing their brain-power and time into it combined is the motivator. And for that a clear-cut goal has to be provided.

Guaranteed quality is nothing else then reduction of RNG. Hence it is about rarity.
If you keep them respectively rare then they have no meaning at all as they would naturally occur. Hence you would need to make them more prevalent then the naturally occuring counterpart which is a direct increase in chance for the drop.

So your solution is either ‘do nothing’ or ‘reduce rarity’. @Macknum is right there.

Then it would simply be power-creep, this effort can be used in the same way by providing more variety of the quite limited base systems instead to achieve the same outcome.

The Paragon system always was a crutch since the content couldn’t hold in people, instead that system was introduced to allow people to overcome issues through sheer time investment.

It reduces build variety, not increases it. If it has a hard cap then the same items would still be necessary to build.
If the power level is not substantial enough then it stays that way.
If it is substantial enough then it trivializes gear in itself.

It’s always a loose-loose situation with it. Every game having endless progression systems suffers from the same issues.
Mind you, endless progression systems are not inherently bad, I’ll gladly point to the ‘Siralim’ games for example. They use the endless progression system to allow upholding the extremely long-term systems otherwise existing. It allows to bridge the time to achieve those things as it’s a highly repetitive game purely about grinding.
But for an ARPG it’s unfitting as it’s based on player skill and direct action, not pure theory-crafting.

Smart loot reduces the road-time simply, which leads to a higher end-point. This is inherently power-creep.

Point 3 is a top-end system attached to the existing system. This is also inherently power-creep.

So no, your systems wouldn’t ‘change’ things but simply implement alternative options of power-creep.

Which as mentioned: Reworks are mandatory by now, new content to fill those current gaps and alternative power-scaling methods in terms of Affixes, base-items and unique variety. Those are supposed to uphold such a system, yours works counter to that sadly. But the core ideas are nice. And the Fated drops have potential for the future.

Unless it’s a boss-drop item, then pure repetition is the only option. Which is fine though, they are meant to be more rare in terms of acquisition.

Yes, that as the first step.
The second being to introduce variety of content as mentioned. Mechanics with exclusive rewards. Focused reward types on specific mechanics similar to the weaver nodes which drop class-specific gear and so on.

Which is fine, absolutely! Flavor simply.

But that genre is specifically designed for the ‘forever’ players in mind, with few exceptions existing. Hence the disparity between ‘mediocre build’ and ‘top-end build’ needs to be substantially large.

The issue involved when there is no progression to be felt for vast timeframes between those two stages. Back a few years ago Chris Wilson had a dev-talk and stated that they see itemization as so called ‘steps’, with a specific amount of ‘steps’ to be done to get from start to finish. Skill influences the ‘step-count’ obviously but each ‘step’ as a distinct timeframe attached to it which gradually - but smoothly - grows. The issue with Last Epoch is that neither the ‘step-count’ is upheld nor the timeframe to reach the end result, and also the power is not reliably same-ish then. The balance-baseline is simply missing. Neither power, nor time nor progression steps are the same for any build.

That you got what feels like 10 builds total in D4 but around 500+ total in PoE, and even in those builds there’s substantial amounts of people adjusting those for specific content to exactly be tailored to their needs. Which is not existing in LE either yet in a substantial manner.

So with that variety you can follow a build-guide and still divert from it to have a severely different tailored experience. Build-guides in PoE are majorly ‘basic tailored experiences’ which can be changed to your own choices while in LE it’s a ‘either you do that or you loose out massively’ sadly.

Yes, and it’s the developer’s task to provide as many venues of those reasons as possible.

You can make a open-world sandbox game like Minecraft where each specific goal is always a ‘self-made goal’ and still do that. Underwater temples have exclusive loot, so searching for them is a reason to play. Killing the Ender Dragon and getting afterwards a Vajra is a reason. Building is a reason. Gear enchanting is a reason. Creating redstone contraptions is a reason. And so on and so forth.
Remove the temples and a reason is gone. Remove redstone and all contraption based reasons are gone. Remove methods to cheese mobs into mob farms and those reasons are gone. Remove gradually allowing to enchant items further and the optimization reasons are gone. Reduce block variety and the build reasons are gone.

You get the gist there?
The same upholds in Last Epoch. More venues… more reasons.

If you get no meaningful upgrade or at least resources to get that upgrade during that timeframe then you’ve done something wrong in Torchlight Infinite and PoE.
That’s a ‘you’ problem, but the upgrades do exist and happen with someone playing a lot for 1-2 days. Be it through personally farming up specific items like an ‘Adorned’ in PoE actively (which you can target-farm specifically), playing the market through margins with the automated resource exchange (there’s a series coming out currently which showcases someone trading and crafting from 1 chaos orb to a mirror), crafting or even providing services for other people who can’t personally finish specific content on their own.
More avenues mean more options. Some are not well supported in the framework but that can all be fixed… they exist at least.

This creates a more gradual accessible slope, which is the major issue Last Epoch has… spiky balance… spiky difficulty… spiky progression overall.

Yes, that is a substantial problem, agreed… and sadly true :rofl:

Which is why I’m repeatedly saying ‘We need ground-up reworks of the systems to fit into the current state of the game’ rather then all those patchwork solutions implemented by EHG and thrown in by players.

It’s vastly overdue, like many things EHG never addressed and which become worse… and worse… and worse over time until it becomes hard to even see the core issue as it’s absolutely buried under a dozen other issues created on top of it.

Sounds like a proper crafting system which rewards you for putting in effort and hence alleviating the drop-RNG is what’s needed, don’t you think so too? :stuck_out_tongue:

As you say, exalted bases are scarce, the LP bases are not outside of the absolute top-tier ones. So you sit on em and can’t use em until you get a viable base which is at better then the one used at the former craft.

So a way to create those bases is needed. This is not done by adjusting the drop-table, which is more then fine as it is. It’s by creating options to adjust the dropped items afterwards accordingly… without repeatedly destroying them immediately.
The FP system was a bad idea from the start and still stays a bad idea, no other game in the genre in modern times follows a ‘one chance brick mechanic’ outside of PoE 2… which is under flak specifically for having that rather then re-implementing their alteration orbs which were specifically designed to alleviate this issue in the first place.

Kinda like D3 to D4 happened. Loads of QoL from D3 didn’t make it into D4. Problems already solved were re-introduced.
This is not progress, this is stepping back.
Which is not always bad… but in such a substantial base system it absolutely is the case.

Then please describe how exactly it would achieve this increase of build diversity.

All I see is that it would cause the percentile power of gear to be reduced for the total power level of your character. Hence reduction the importance of gear. Which is exactly what should not happen in a H&S.

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i’ll just avoid games like that. coz it goes back to what i mentioned about. with such a big gap, you will simply feel punished for playing the game organically.

the game simply is not balanced.

i ll also go out to say that d2 was imbalanced but it was “fine” somewhat as on release, you did NOT need an OP build to clear the hardest difficulty and reach 99, and on top of that it felt quite optional. so despite being an unbalanced game, balance could be ignored.

the problem i have is the casual dismissal of balance. you have grown to accept it, but i will remain one of the few who really care about balance as it goes back towards how i like to enjoy the game. which is thru organic playing without relying on guides.

i would even go on to say that GGG didnt give a damn about balance. they couldnt. they started off as an unknown company. they were too afraid to nerf builds as they were afraid of losing their already small community. the people who found overperforming builds were the ones actively enjoying the game. why not keep them around?

that is what lead to POE being POE today where its a fully powercrept game where balance is thrown out the window. the gap is honestly huge. a weak player could be struggling to reach 100kdps, while other players would be doing millions of dps. remember when shaper was the ultimate boss of the game? powercreep went off the rails so bad a joke was how many shapers per second you could kill instead of dps.

poe became the game it is today to make money. EHG saw POE and saw what players liked and strived to emulate it. to me LE was in a better place as higher corruptions always felt optional.

but now we have stuff gatekept by harder content. it really is becoming POE all over again.

if you want to defend this practice, all i can do is just voice my disagreement. EHG themselves tend to follow builds and make content based on stuff they see on max roll.

i hope that it will not come to a day that my view on LE being another POE solidifies. the day that comes. i ll just post less on these forums until one day i just stop going altogether.

i dont even know if i ll try s3 at this point. but seeing the my class (acolyte) is being buffed perhaps i might give it a go

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Oh tell me what H&S games offers more and better drops overall when you do content you can barely beat. I couldn’t come up with one because all H&S games increase their difficulty a lot but the drop rates only a tiny bit. On top of it the increase is for all items in most games so your chances to get meaningless crap are going up as well.

The only game that makes stuff a bit different that i can remember from the top of my head is Hero Siege because you can target farm items in specific zones where the drop chances are just so much better that there is a reale increase in chance to get what you want if you do the same stuff for 2 days straight.

Outisde of this there are only overall mf increases that might increase the rarity of drops what often translates into getting more high rarity bad items.

So naturaly the progression speed when it comes to items goes down. Heck even in D3 it got slower once you had your seasonal set and just wanted to increase the rolls on the items or looking for the right affix you need on item X.

Uhm… duh?

In PoE I concentrate on mat farming and buy the stuff i need no problem there. Then again every time I try ssf things turn out far worse and if you are unlucky with crafting you could argue that I’ve found a potentialy valueable item that bricked but I found something valuable. I don’t look at it that way when dropping a potentialy good item is just step 1 of X. Who plays TL:I right now? i played it in the past and had no issues to run stuff down and never touched it again :slight_smile: .

You are not alone in this. I stated many times that I wanted fixed difficulty goals set in stone a baseline to balance arround. Sure there can be differences and I don’t want everyone to do 1 dmg and there we have balance. What I want baseline to work arround. If one build performes 10% better or worse or if there was an oversight and something performes 40% better then expected then this happens. When I look at LoL for example and some hero there get’s a buff of 10% here on skill dmg, 2% more HP and whatnot and everyonegoes crazy how OP the champ is now and the winrate could climb from 48% to 50 because of this… those are some ranges I like… then again what do I know of LoL.

EHG need to make up their mind about their goals and what is a good thing to achive and what isn’t. If someone reaches 4 digits we did something wrong just isn’t enough enymore.

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Is that not allways the case though? If you’re at 10% of max gear potential/quality/whatever, 90% of gear drops that are relevant (ie, not melee focussed gear if you’re caster/minion build) are likely to be upgrades, if you’re at 90% of max gear potential/etc, only 10% of possible gear drops will be & if you’re at 99% then only 1 % of gear drops can be possible upgrades. If you’re at the point where 2/3 lp drops would be sidegrades at best then yes, you’ve hit a wall that it’s impossible to not hit. If the 4lp items that could be upgrades for you (& attendant items with 2/3/4 exalted useful affixes) droped “frequently” enough at high corruption then the lower gear would probably drop too fast.

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As said, not necessarily.

It’s about the gap having something in it rather then being entirely ‘empty’ like in Last Epoch.

The mediocre build and top-end build in Grim Dawn are also far apart… but it is filled with the farming of recipes, resources and unlocking stuff along that way.

In PoE the disparity is also massive, but you have leveling of Heist, setting of the Betrayal board, delving into depths, double-corrupting uniques and your gems… and so on and so forth. Along that way you get the resources to craft the other items gradually, unless you just focus single-mindedly on one thing… which causes failure.

Guides are not related to balance but to complexity of the game. You’re right that D2 wasn’t all too balanced… but yes, it didn’t need it as much either.

But D2 for the time it came out was when games didn’t have that much content yet, the way it was set up also was a novelty, and they involuntarily stumbled upon a great long-term recipe with how they set up the Affix system and drop-rate. Yes, you can go along without any substantial drop for a long time… but by that time you’ll already be through the game likely, and with a decent merc helping out it works surprisingly well overall. Just a good combination which kept things baseline in check.

The balance of the game nowadays is much much better then it was many years ago. Buidl variety is at the top, viability for each class and nearly each skill is there, variety of acquisition strategies allows to progress fluently… if you use em and know the way the mechanics actually work.
If you don’t know how they work it’s frustrating.

But that’s why PoE is a game which has a high knowledge-based difficulty, that’s what makes PoE enjoyable for many long-term players, having to test out things, go in-depth and optimize their playstyle. Things like which mechanics quant, rarity and pack-size affect, when to run white, alch&go or corrupted 8-mod maps, when to run T16, T16.5 or T17 and so on.

Millions is the baseline. If your build does 100k only then you screwed up majorly in your build. Even my broken phys-only Cyclone build does 1,2 mil, and that is a 8 year old character which finally is non-functional (I need to switch a single item to reinstate it fully) and is build as sub-par as a build can be. Still 1,2 mil… with gear from 8 years ago… on a skill nobody plays in phys form as it’s really bad there.

Shaper is ages old, obviously you can kill dozens per second nowadays with rare mobs in T16 maps having more health and damage as well as 2 map tiers above that and 2 full boss layers on top of that above him. Uber-elder is equivalent to maven/cortex/eater/exarch and so on… shaper and elder are both below that, they’re the ‘small exarrch/eater invites’ in equivalent, those are meant to be run at T14+ nowadays… as can shaper be easily.

Which is a problem from EHG, absolutely!
And which practice exactly are you talking about there?

I’m saying that complexity does autimatically cause a rift to happen between mid-tier and top-tier, by design. You cannot avoid it unless you dumb stuff down massively… which is only possible to a degree. There is a hard limit. The more complex the bigger the rift, simple as that.

So, do you want a in-depth game with hence inherently high complexity coming along? (Unless you make everything same-ish, welcome to Ubisoft open-world games design philosophy) Or do you want a simple game where the complexity isn’t available?
Obviously that is a scale, you can go from ‘as brain-dead as D3’ levels to ‘Far beyond PoE design complexity’ in terms of that. There’s games out there which go further in complexity then PoE by far… just not in the same genre. But if you look at ‘Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead’ (rogue-like survival open-world game) then you got a mechanic for everything, and you need to know a majority of that to even make a run work out half-way decently or make it a permanent thing to be sustained. Extremely enjoyable and well made game!
On the other end we have games like ‘Minutescape’ which is simply ‘avoid things flying it you’ and that’s it, with 2 buttons to press at best. Also really fun!

You gotta find the space of complexity you aim for, neither is good, neither is bad, one is right for you.
But saying ‘this is bad because it’s too complex!’ is by design a nonsensical argument, it’s inherently wrong and can’t ever be a right statement as it’s depending on the situation and the person. The only argument to be made is ‘what does the core audience enjoy’ and this is what I tend to vie for in general.
I have 2 things which I urge for:
Customer focused service (Which means no predatory aspects for any monetization, no matter how small, transparency, proper communication on a top end level and cohherency)
Core audience targeting (Fitting gameplay mechanics, clear design directed at the targeted audience from positioning on the market, fitting time-investment and difficulty accordingly)

I personally want a game which is more complex then PoE in crafting and has many many mechanical boss-fights. This is not what the target audience is though… so I don’t push for it, I push for things fitting for the position on the market of Last Epoch.

And that has always been 'We are not as casual as D3/D4 but we're not as complex as PoE'. And this is not upheld even remotely anymore.

For the customer side my stance is that your company shouldn't exist no matter how 'decent' your product is if your product can't sustain itself without a single usage of predatory (psychologically urging in some way) marketing methods. Including times supporter packs, lootboxes and any unique timed rewards outside of competition based ones.

I dunno… if I use the… I think compasses it was?.. in Torchlight Infinite the difficulty does go up but the rewards do scale ridiculously with it, not only ‘a tiny bit’.
If I play PoE and do a basically ‘bare’ 8-mod T16 map I get basically nothing, but if I use scarabs and design my Atlas passives according to a direction I can get from tens of times to thousands of times more… some adjusting the difficulty… others not even remotely.

So it still doesn’t uphold. Those things are existing, you gotta use em though.

I literally can’t think about any specific item - including Mageblood - which isn’t farmable in a single day if you set up your strategy right.
Want a mageblood? Get a extremely tanky character, juice up exiles and run Rituals, kite em in, seal em this way with a vessel and then re-use that vessel in a map which has massive reward scaling. I guarantee the mageblood drops raw in 1-2 days latest… and I guarantee your character will die regularly while attempting it.

Same with boss uniques, store up enough invitations, run em one after another and get the results.
The only things which are out of reach are specifically gamba catered items like a good ventor’s gamble, a 1 passive voices, a top-rolled ‘Adorned’ and so on. Everything else can be acquired reliably nowadays with the right strategy and a powerful character.

Which is also showcasing a lack of understanding of how LE’s competitor mechanics work.

What you proclaim holds true for Last Epoch. You got a single layer… corruption. That raises rarity, which means more ‘bad loot’.
It also directly correlates to T6 and T7 upgrade rate which makes the good loot accordingly less rare.

Beware massive massive explanation as it's a complex system following. Skip if you don't want to read... but don't comment on it unless you do, would be disingenious otherwise, wouldn't it? ;)

But let’s talk about the PoE system:
Quantity and Rarity have 4 distinct multiplicative layers.
The Area, the player, the group bonus, the mobs.
This can be used. For example you can roll ‘100-250% increased rarity of contained items’ on strongboxes, or you can enforce a ‘guarded by a rogue exile’ modifier which spawns a unique enemy.
So now you make a map which has 120+ quantity, around 100% rarity and let’s say 40% pack size.
We’re ‘fishing’ for uniques in the example, which means as much quant and rarity as possible.
Our character has a total of 400% rarity on gear during kills.
Magic mobs have a so called ‘hidden’ modifier which gives them 600% quant and 200% rarity.
Rare mobs have a hidden modifier giving them 1400% quant and 1000% rarity.
Unique mobs have 2850% quant and 1000% rarity.
Group bonus is set for us for ‘2’ currently as there’s mercenaries this league and they might stay afterwards and go core, which is likely to happen.
This means 27% quantity and 17% rarity bonus.

Now for the examples:
As a baseline we say every 1000 white mobs a unique drops.
Our goal unique needs 15000 uniques to drop to be achieved.
This cumulates into a total of 15000000 mob equivalent.
We say each map has 100 packs.
We say each pack is 20 mobs large
We say 10 packs are inherently magic.
We say 2 packs are inherently rare, 1 rare + 19 magic hence.
We got 1 unique boss added to it.

Our pack values hence are:
Normal = 20
Magic = 20 x 7 x 3 = 420
Rare = (1 x 15 x 11) + (19 x 7 x 3) = 165 + 399 = 564
Unique = 1 x 29,5 x 11 = 324,5

Base map value:
Normal: 88 x 20 = 1760
Magic: 10 x 420 = 4200
Rare: 2 x 564 = 736
Unique: 1 x 324,5 = 324,5
Total value: 7020,5
Base maps to achieve our goal: 15000000 / 7020,5 = 2137 maps needed.

Solo, good map, no other modifiers:
It’s simply a multiplication here from the total value of the base map.
Hence:
7020,5 x 2,2 x 2 x 1,4 (pack size) = 43246,28
Good maps to achieve our goal: 15000000 / 43246,28 = 347 maps needed.

I would argue that alone is a massive difference, wouldn’t you?
But we wanna go the ‘full’ route this time:

Good map with group bonus, player bonus, and map bonus:
Base: 7020,5
Good map: 43246,28
Player: 43246,28 x 5 = 216.231,4
Group: 216.231,4 x 1.27 x 1,17 = 321.298,23726
Maps needed for goal: 15000000 / 321.298,23726 = 47 maps needed

There it’s not even finished yet. We can use other mechanics. Delirium would cause around a tripling to quadrupling in pack size while inherently giving 100% quant and 50% rarity, map layer based as well, which is massive.
Then we can include shrines.
Or ritual.
Alva Incursions for mass magic mobs.
And so on and so forth.

Instead of running over 2000 maps it’s reduced to around 50. That 2,5% of the time investment needed.

I would argue this is kinda relevant, especially since we can improve that by magnitudes through some further mechanics. Instead of farming 100 hours we farm 2,5… with those extra mechanics it goes down to 5 minutes… 10 minutes at times.

So no, it does provide a massive difference in progression along the way.

End of example

Yeah, so EHG should finally do that, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

Like… making Lightless Arbour a viable farm-worthy thing.
Making the dungeons overall provide exclusive rewards while being reworked in how they’re set up to become more interesting.

Detaching weaver more from the enforced spawn in echos.

Allowing more moderation of the echo goals and specific rewards tied to them.

You know… the basics? Instead of shoving in a ‘aspirational boss’ which is just causing frustration and is utterly unfitting designed and positioned?
‘If we have someone reach above 1000c we screwed up!’ Mhmm… great that Uberroth needs that as a baseline power to even try attempting it!

That showcases a lack of game knowledge rather then SSF being the problem.

I’ll gladly point you over at Zizarran’s ‘Gauntlet Events’ he does, which are absolutely insane in difficulty. The drop-rate is normal there but the bosses and content is substantially ramped up in difficulty.

And guess what? Consistently several people clear the gauntlet after 1-2 weeks despite the shortcomings. No trade, 100% SSF, with uber bosses including Atziri mechanics, multiple projectiles, sped up attacks, 100% more damage and 50% reduced damage for the player.

If with all those downsides people can reliably do that - even if they’re speedrunners - then without all those handicaps - which are massive - we can expect a common player to get at least in the range of it. Not to speak of trade.

More then Last Epoch actually when we look at the same timeframe.
Yes, LE has a higher spike but a substantially longer off-season still. That is to be fixed.
The overal engagement in TL:I is hence actually a bit higher.

But it’s a worse received game, P2W elements to thank for that… and it still competes with LE nonetheless.

It’s not about ‘I wouldn’t touch it’ or ‘it’s a great game’… it’s knowing what competition does, why it works or doesn’t work and what hence is the general trend of players. Combined with the remarks happening in every… single… ARPG of the type repeatedly, especially from people in adjacent genres writing about their experiences why they aren’t playing anymore.
This is extremely important information and commonly ignored though, lovely echo-chamber of the forum and reddit which is solely compromised by people with active interest anyway, not those which didn’t pick it up or left right away because of issues… despite otherwise being in their area of engagement.

Exactly, and with that I agree 100%! It’s really important to have a clear-cut baseline… for the customers and internally even more as you can design things around that.

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You state the obvious. Sadly it looks like EHG is deaf and blind when it comes to it or they life in an echochamber without any critical feedback. Don’t know, can’t tell.

If you played it from the getgo you are mostly decked out on the gatche pet system. It’s only sooo p2w. Compared to genshin or tower TL:I is completely innocent. Then again it’s p2w ^^.

That’s the point EHG misses again and again and again. Right now we can only tell that they fuck up a lot with all the people running 4 digit+ corruption. So it looks like the most you should be able to do is 999 corruption and that’s the only half assed goalpost we know about. Then again they will move it for sure instead of doing something against messing up big time again and again.

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That echo chamber with Kulze (& others) disagreeing with them in various degrees of well thought out constructive arguments? That echo chamber?