With the new update comes a lot of things. While all of them deserve a place of mention I’m going to focus on 3 things. 1 good, 1 bad and 1 that isn’t being addressed but should have been.
So the good thing. Spires now don’t fire at player unless they are in combat. Thank you for finally listening. It wasn’t the removal of the spires but as long as it allows me time to breath and look at item drops as well as walking a bit back to a safe place if I need to leave the computer for a minute or two. I can’t express how good this is for the game.
The bad. Well, it’s less of a bad change but rather a bad system that changed to continue being bad. Yes, I’m talking about the crafting!
As I’ve said many times before, crafting has multiple stages. Leveling crafting, early endgame, mid endgame and late endgame.
For leveling crafting it’s non existant. It’s generally not worth crafting during the leveling process, this is a big mistake. The reason why it’s not worth it is simple, it costs a lot of shards that are otherwise necessary later on and items don’t last very long during leveling. Leveling will be much more enjoyable if crafting is to be taken seriously right from the begining.
How do we address early game crafting? Well, a simple solution would be by introducing something like a special rune of breaking which will guarantee to give the players all runes they spent on crafting an item so long as the item is bellow level 50. That way they just need to break one item and reforge a new one as they go and not waste their early game shards.
Then we come to the main portion of the game which is the endgame. Now, as I’ve said time and time again. People want to finish their builds. This comes to several extents of course but it is important that players feel acomplished with their character. One of the main reasons I’ve stopped playing PoE is because there is no sense of acomplishment in that game. I cannot finish a build because the amount of currency required is unattainable by the vast majority of people. This is a mistake that you shouldn’t make here or this game will not grow.
Previously the idea was to have the highest rolled uniques that are build enabling or very powerful for the build that it managed to beat crafted items (this was pretty rare). The majority of items were thus crafted with a soft cap of T20 items and a hard cap of T28 items.
Now that goal has changed massively. You have a soft cap of T20 still, but you now also have T28 items with 4 T7 mods or a T30 item with 3 T7 items, 1 T4 and 1 T5. However this is just for crafting. With the option now of legendary items on the table the true engame gear is full legendary gear with 4 T7 extra mods.
Now, I’m not saying everyone should easily get that. However let’s look at what I consider to be the stages and gear corresponding to said stages of the game.
Early endgame should be the point where players have their build defining uniques and everything else is crafted T20s. That is to say, anywhere in the first 2 monoliths, the gearing for early end game must be complete in this form. This is the bare minimum level of archievement a player should expect. It is not a 100% finished build, but it is finished enough to be considered a completed build and whatever comes after that is the improvements to the build.
Mid endgame is where players will have T22 to T26 items as well as some legendary which will probably not have 4 extra stats, it’s probably going to be 1 or 2 extra stats. Players should be reaching this point somewhere during monolith push with extra corruption. It should be noted that most players should be able to archieve this level of acomplishment within the space of 1 month of playing and when i say 1 month I mean by average player standards.
Late endgame is when players are already in full legendary gear, all of which has 2 to 3 extra stats at least. By this point players are pushing deep levels of corruption. Probably the average player will either already have quit or moved to a different build to try other things too. At end game the whole point is crafting T28 items, finding high rolled with 4 forging potential uniques and then craft the really good legendary items. This is something that won’t easily happen but it will be expexted that the good players will easily have at least T22 or higher items to stick in the unique and make it legendary.
So what is the problem with the current crafting for all stages of end game? Simple. It is RNG. Changing one form of RNG for another that is just as bad but doesn’t gives as much false hopes is still not really addressing the problem. To this end changes need to be introduced and I have 2 sugestions but I’d like to say something first. Stacking RNG on top of RNG is not a good solution. Finding a good piece is RNG, then you have RNG to craft and then let’s count more RNG to find a high rolled, hiogh crafting potentital legendary. It’s just RNG on top of RNG and it’s unnecessary. It makes the game inaccessible for the majority of the playerbase.
So option number 1 and this is by far the better one. Make crafting 100% deterministic. Remove the idea of forging potential entirely except for uniques. This means that as long as you have the shards, it is guaranteed to get T20 items which is perfectly fine. T20 is and should be just the begining of the journey, that’s where the soft cap is. To make a comparison with an RPG like D&D, getting a stat to 20 (which is the soft cap) is just begining of the journey, that should be done by level 4. You still have plenty of RNG to find the exalted items with the right stats and the right uniques with the forging potential and high rolls as well. This is not a small amount as average players will still never be able to get a fully complete build with the sheer needed amount of time put to get the drops. It also will not ruin any market implementation as the value will be in shards as well as those really good RNG drops.
The option number 2 is not as good but would at least aleviate the current problem by quite a bit. Instead of crafting potential being a random roll, instead it becomes a number of craftings you can make. So an item with crafting potential of 10 can be augmented up to 10 times. This makes crafting at least fair in it’s deterministic sense but still puts more RNG on top of RNG which is not a good thing.
I understand you want to make rare items feel good and exiting but let me be perfectly honest. If making it exciting comes at the exchange of players feeling like they can’t progress or their progress is too slow, you will just bleed players and players will prefer to play PoE or Diablo rather than playing LE as they are better extablished games with much more content. Instead it’s better if you try to appeal by doing what others aren’t but have been asked for years.
Last I want to address what hasn’t been (or rather won’t be) addressed this updated and that is minions, especially the necromancer side of things.
Last update we got an update that was meant (at least from your words) to make them better.
The things that were asked for is a way for minions not to die because constant resummon is a problem (most people who want to play a minion build play it for the low maintenance and if you have to constantly resummon you essencially remove the reason to play a minion build). A way for minions not to depend on dread shade. More damage for minions because they were the top contender to not stop being able to progress as minions die too easily and stop doing suficient damage.
What did you do?
Minions were nerfed in their damage potential.
Minion are just as easy to kill as before.
Dread shade was nerfed with the false pretense of making it able to be permanent (false because you know all too well that everyone uses the poison dot option) which just made it a direct nerf.
No alternatives to dread shade were given, it is still mandatory in every build no matter what and it keep killing minions.
Abomination is still terrible even with the permanent abillity compared to other minion options thus making it still not a viable option.
Shades are nerfed to hell and back, to the point that if before they were ok with a specific shade build or non specific but usuable as extra DPS wonce you had summoned enough. Now they are just unusable with their terribly low damage and low numbers.
In sum, not only you did not deliver on any of your promisses, you made the minion playstyle even worse. Now I can’t speak for other players, but speaking for myself, I don’t have the best reaction speeds which means any build where I don’t have a very stronf defensive layer to protect me means I die very easily to a quick burst of damage in a map. That is why I play minion builds and totem builds (in game like PoE) so I don’t have to tank everything with my face. Considering minions are not good and totems aren’t even viable. What choices do I have to play?
Sufice to say I will not be playing in the new update. It’s a shame but there is nothing for me here. The spire changes are good, but that alone is not enough for me to play. I cannot even get a build early end game completion because you refuse to do the right thing and keep following the same recipe for disaster that every other ARPG used and has been universally rebuked by the majority of the ARPG community (it is only supported by the minority which are the good players because it creates an even bigger disparity between them and everyone else). You also provide no other way to play other than a highly reactive and high key press usage which again limits your playerbase and even other ARPGs have recognised is not a good thing. It definitely is not for me so you know. I guess I’ll hear from you more for the next update. Hopefully it will actually bring something good to the table. Something that changes the major 2 factors that are keeping me from playing the game. The abillity to get endgame gear at a reasonable pace and having a low managment build (because that’s the only kind of build I can handle competently).
