I recently got into the Empowered Monolith of Fate and I feel like I’ve really hit a wall in terms of the effort:reward ratio. I don’t remember the last time I found a gear upgrade, or even a drop that gets through my (fairly relaxed) Loot Filters. I feel like there are WAY too many Yellow drops, and the fact that there are even Blue drops at all stinks pretty bad.
Right now the Empowered Monolith just feels like a slog, and I wish it didn’t.
Yeah. Its always been such.
Dinging lvl 100 isnt really useful and means nothing really.
Pushing Corruption in Monoliths doesnt really improve the rewards enough to make it worth it.
and RNG is RNG…
But…
Thankfully MoF in its current state isnt meant to be the final version of end-game content and if they tweak things like corruption scaling and dangle some more carrots at the end of an already excessively long stick, we might get lucky. 
It IS useful for filling out your Passives, if nothing else.
Sure but by then your build is already at the point where a few more % from a passive doesnt really make much difference.
As far as I am concerned Monos are just farming tools. My end-game is seeing how far my builds can push Arena. And that is never boring or lacking for me, despite terrible (material) rewards, as I find it much more fun and challenging than Monos.
Confgrats, you’ve hit the real endgame, and the issue we’ve been telling them for a long time. Have a seat while we wait, we can get you some tea to pass the time.
The progression curve in the last epoch endgame simply almost reasambles a flatline. That was bad months ago… it’ll most likely get released in a not optimal way and will be balanced on the fly.
Well… okay. But only if it has honey.
I’ve really hit a wall in terms of the effort:reward ratio
Absolutely. I think the problem is layers and layers of RNG gating meaningful upgrades.
e.g., now that I have a good T6 weapon, other T6s or 0LPs will only be sidegrades. The problem right now is that not only is finding the right 1LP or 2LP unique for that slot a barrier, but there is more RNG in actually getting the right affixes on it for it to be an upgrade for my weapon. I get that 4LP needs to be very rare because it completely negates the RNG of the last step though.
But for 1/2 LP uniques, we should either be able to target farm them a bit more reliably, or we should have some more comfortable control over not getting a disappointing combine in the temporal sanctum. Then I’d feel more determined to work toward that for said character. Instead now I’m like well I got this purple weapon and looking for an upgrade is too daunting so I’ll just go play a different game.
But that’s always going to be the case. When youve got your t20 gear on the right bases, you then want to replace them with an exalt (which are rarer as an item rarity) on thrle right base with (after some crafting) the right affixes & those are going to be very rare so the time between them dropping is going to be high.
Once you get into the 90th centile (or whatever) of gear power/progression, you’re a long way past getting frequent drops that are upgrades, it’s like you’re sliding down to the right on a Gaussian distribution curve & it takes longer to find a possible upgrade because there are fewer possible upgrades.
The problem - at least, for me - is that I’ve only just arrived at the “real endgame”. I would’ve expected a gear equilibrium of that nature to crop up at about 80 hours in, not 18 hours in.
I know it’s uncouth to discuss The Other ARPGs, but in Diablo 3 I felt like I always had something to look for. Even hundreds of hours into the game, even with a full loadout of Legendaries or a complete Set, I frequently saw loot that was worth at least picking up and looking at. I have over 3k hours in the Steam version of Destiny 2 and I still keep an eye out for Weapons and Armor that might matter to me because they might have worthwhile Perks or noteworthy Stat spreads.
Empowered Monolith of Fate does not currently provide that same level of chase because the high-quality drops just aren’t there. The Exalted drop rate needs to be much higher to account for the frankly brutal modifiers that you can sometimes be subjected to. I know that part of the strategy is to plan your route through Echoes and avoid making things too dangerous for yourself, but like I said in the OP, the effort:reward ratio just isn’t landing. Clearing an Echo with 50% increased health and damage and 34% increased health and damage and 24% increased damage and movement speed and 90% increased void damage and 90% increased physical damage and 100% increased enemy critical hit rate and 24% increased Resistances should blind you with purple lasers when you open the chest, not cough out a few Rares and some Affix Shards.
My partner loves destiny 2 a lot, so i’ve tried to get in it a few times, but it’s never really clicked much for me (i’d play like, super hard for 2 weeks, do the raid, then never go back). And even not really liking the game, I made the exact same observation to my partner about destiny 2 being in a much better state for loot then last epoch.
I don’t necessarily agree with your idea of how to fix it, but yeah, like multiple people have brought up to them over the past like, years? Endgame sucks for gearing. It’s nice to see more new people again pointing this out though, maybe they’ll finally do something about it.
For the record, I’m not particularly married to any one solution - “replacing Blues and Yellows with more Purples” is just the first notion that came to mind.
There simply should be imo more character growth options like blessings.
My character progression I enjoy most is like
Step 1, level to monos. Step 2, grind out normal monos. Step 3, farm up my blessings. Final step, grind out gear for remain progress.
Normal monos are boring because they are too easy, and drops during them are kinda bad, but I really enjoy the blessing hunt, I usually get bored when I have finished getting my blessings settled and my gear hits a wall.
Imagine if there was other sub systems like blessings that were essentially small or medium character power that required you to grind another system for them?
By the time you finished all the sub systems you would probably be satisfied with your character and would be slowly pushing out more and more corruption/gear grinding while you were doing it.
I sorta thought we would see dungeons prop up that offered more permanent player power rewarded through grinding. But mostly all the new content seems to be different ways to get to the same end power level. Gambling can give you strong items, so can WW, so can legendary crafting or spending gold in the vault. But at the end of the day this is all rng item related power and means you can spend weeks doing it making no progress.
We need some more character power that you can work on over time that isnt strictly from items.
like imagine a dungeon that as you gear up you can do more content in it, that rewards more generic power of your choice, damage, health, ailment chance, whatever. But since its a dungeon, you need keys. So you bounce back and forth from mono to dungeon, hit up monos to farm keys, getting blessings and gear. then you get some keys and hit up the dungeon letting you go deeper into the dungeon and unlocking more player power which you can then use to go even farther in monos etc etc.
I am scared however that if they add a paragon style or “infinite player scaling” then people might migrate to the best builds, but I think they already are doing that so at this point id just love systems that let me push a character forever little by little thats not attached to gear that way you have something to do while you wait for the 10k hours you need to drop a 4lp
I personally don’t mind it. I think the rewards balance out and make sense across multiple characters. I’m on my fifth character, almost to 100, and I’ve seen around 20 bank tabs worth of uniques and 5 of set items. What is kind of supposed to happen is that you’re supposed to see items you like but that you’d want to use on a different class or spec, and then start that character as soon as you’re done with the one you’re playing. That might leave you high and dry on the first character for awhile, but after 2 or 3, you start seeing a pattern in the loot that (kind of) makes sense.
My only real complaint with endgame is that it takes too long to get all the way done with Empowered Monolith and reach 100. I’ve averaged right at 120 hours per character, but I think the game would be much less frustrating in terms of that last stretch and how long it takes to level up if it were about 80 hours total. The last three levels especially take something like a total of 8 hours to grind through, unless you’re extremely optimal and you have tons of tome of experience nodes banked. That’s not to even mention getting lucky on things like blessings and idols.
Yes, trying to get useful Exalted items is annoying. That’s something I also kind of stopped paying attention to at a certain point. Once you have seen enough of them, you can kind of start to have what you want. But yes, that could use a lot of work and I’m not sure what the real solution to that is.
I’m not going to disagree that I would rather that point comes later than it does, but I find it very difficult to believe that it’s possible to find frequent gear upgrades in D3 (since you mention it) after 50-80 hours. I can’t remember how long it takes a "normal " person to get to 70 & their full set, but, maybe 10 hours? Maybe you’re counting gear for other builds/alts & I’m not?
I’m also not entirely convinced that just throwing more purples at you is the best idea. Ive nit played Destiny 2 enough to know how their gearing works. Is there any crafting there like there is in LE? Maybe that makes the gearing too quick/easy?
That’s how it’s been in my experience. Granted, the majority of my time came prior to Patch 2.6.5 in May of 2019 that added Torment 14-16, but my seasonal journey usually went like this:
Compared to my time spent, I expect to still be in the “Rifting” stage, perhaps “Greater Rifting” since I’ve Empowered the Monolith of Fate. However, I haven’t gotten a relevant Exalted or Unique to drop in roughly two days of playing on and off, which feels… pretty awful! Especially when I’m deliberately stacking the most dangerous modifiers I can find to try to push out a little extra challenge.
Yes and no. While Crafting in Destiny 2 grants you complete control over the Weapon roll in question, it’s limited to specific weapons in each season and unlocking the Pattern requires a fair amount of grinding. Crafted weapons are generally considered to be mid-high tier based on their pattern and perks, but “god rolls” are almost always drop-only. It’s also not possible to craft Armor, which is the primary driver of most builds since that’s where Stats come from.
Frankly, I can’t imagine a reasonable solution other than that. Past a certain point, Exalted drops are the only non-Unique/Set drops that matter:
It’s very easy to reach a point prior to the Monolith of Fate where you have “perfect” Yellow Items in every slot, at which point lesser (and in many cases, equal) drops no longer matter. And, given that Exalted Items are still subject to the same random Affix application and stat ranges that everything else is, it’s not like Exalted Items are guaranteed to be an upgrade anyway - a purple drop that makes it through my Loot Filter isn’t assured to be something that I can use, it just has the dubious honor of passing the entrance exam. Exalted Items being more common in the endgame would just mean more chances at relevant drops.
The alternative options for improving Endgame Rewards would be implementing something like Diablo 3’s Loot 2.0 (a major systemic overhaul that can have serious knock-on effects such as making fringe builds impossible) or allowing Loot Filters to influence drop chances (something that would take an enormous amount of work to prevent easy exploits), neither of which are as safe or straightforward as replacing trash with purples.
Neither do I.
Right now purples are the BIS gear for lot of builds, and making getting them piece of cake can ruin the entire game experience.
I have discussed before how the rewards should be improved in some areas of the games, and there are others threads that give this subject a better approach other than just making them dropping substantially more.
The core idea to me are some important words that makes all the difference. A Slightly improved chance of getting certain types drops (uniques, exalted, double exalted) in very higher difficulty areas.
The problem is that we already kinda get too many purple items, it’s just that the vat vast vast majority of them are useless for the build we’re doing. Adding more into that would definitely dropt he time to get an upgrade, but ti would only increase the amount of useless ones that drop.
Imo that’s what the devs should be looking at to fix, because otherwise you end up with a situation even worse than poe’s for amount of loot being ignored.
I agree. I think what bonuses show up on what items and the ranges they give could be vastly streamlined / improved. This problem is greatly increased by how many totally useless bonuses can show up together or on items for classes and builds that would never use them. (Well and, how much crafting doesn’t really help you change an item, but that’s a separate issue.)
I’m not really sure where we’ll end up when that dam eventually breaks, but I think it can’t be the way it is now.