Everyone should have the same crafting experience

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21

You went on a nice tangent there… but actually @DJSamhein has a very good point there.
The reason why I say this is twofold.

The first is player perception. If other people run around - even in CoF - and doing things your build can’t even fathom then that affects you personally actually. Many many people compare themselves to others, it’s a baseline social behavior actually. Why? Because it allows you to have feedback on your personal social standing in a healthy environment and hence act accordingly, which is necessary. In a game it just does cause side-effects to have this.
Not having this behavior style is actually comparatively rare.

The second is that prevalent existence of items of any kind mandates balancing to go towards it.
Why?
Because if it’s not done we got issues like Uberroth, which is absolute dog-shit balancing implementation on a level not formerly seen in the genre with less then 1% of the people with high play-time even beating him… with no knowledge about individuals killing him but only times killed… meaning repeat kills from the same person are counted… and still it is below 1% total even.
As well as the balancing in campaign from Act 3 to 6, which is a snooze-festival for everyone, no matter new or old player, average joe or veteran sweatlord.
Access to power is the core part related to balancing.

You’re right, but doing so without anything else included (hence solely making it easier to achieve, no rework, just a pure buff) will cause balance to shift. It just moves the goalpost.

Moving the goalpost is not always bad, it’s done to adhere to the core audience you got in your game… but moving goalposts away from what your core audience is is nonsensical.

The issue isn’t with FP alone. Nor is it with drop-rate alone.
You gotta see the whole itemization route as a complete thing and dismantle the individual parts to see where the most effect would be done with any change. This seems hard to do but since it’s a step-by-step process and each has a friggin myriad of available options showcased in games over the decades even mixing and matching them together to achieve the right outcome has never been easier in the history of game-design.

I mean, yeah, I can see that definitely. That’s why I push regularly towards what the core audience of EHG was supposed to be with LE.
Not quite average joe but also not quite in-depth veteran of the genre. Below PoE, above Diablo.

Which is not upheld.
We got systems that are more stringent then PoE (crafting at the top level) which is utterly baffling. We got difficulty levels lower then D4 and we got at the same time difficulty levels above anything in any ARPG seen (Uberroth).

This is just a mess and EHG needs to fix their shit to be coherrent for a playerbase rather then this sloppy ‘catering to everyone’ crap they got going on involuntarily.
Why involuntarily? Because I don’t believe they actually know what their core audience is and wants. They came in as gamers without ever in-depth asking themselves what specific aspects make the game enjoyable not only for them but also people close to their own enjoyment. It feels like they try to cater to different groups willy-nilly as they have no clue about what they actually want.
We can see it with MG, trading is a shitshow.
We can see it with Uberroth, that’s not ‘pinnacle content’ that’s just nonsense. I can handle pinnacle content with my bow-build - which is well known to be really bad survival-wise - in PoE, I can do it with severe effort with nearly every build. It’s vastly beyond the common player to get there… but there is a clear-cut road to achieve it. This is not the case in LE. Got a Jhelkor build? Forget thinking about Uberroth. Got a minion build? Forget about Uberroth. That’s just nonsensical design.

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22

This. This is an excellent examination of crafting in ARPGs in general. I’ve through everything everyone said from top to bottom, so pardon me replying here, but I think that there was a breakdown in communication between DONZPIE and everyone else at some point that could have been avoided by really reading what was said here.

Further down it was discussed what the player base wants based on it’s core identity. As a no life player, the things that keep me engaged are almost all centered around build craft. The style of crafting in this game is unreasonably difficult once you get to the top end of min maxing, but incredibly accessible for a casual player to get to 200 corruption on a homebrew. All of this was touched on perfectly by everyone involved, but I would like to say:

Because of the nature of crafting, I find myself often times juggling multiple builds around the same area of progress to incrementally build upgrades for others. I’ll farm with my “main” in 500-1.5k corruption depending on the balancing of a cycle and the build I choose until I can make an alt that is significantly overgeared. I’ll then push that alt to 100, go as far as I can on the homebrew, usually collecting a few bases for slams across the characters I have, slam, upgrade, rinse and repeat. After hundreds of hours this has become an isolated system I personally use to keep the resistance in crafting from staling the feeling of progress. I have made exactly two homebrews that can kill uberoth, and both of them have unethical gear that takes them far into quad digit corruption. Mike apparently said on stream that player’s reaching that high of corruption means they messed up.
How? How when if your build can kill Uberoth, it will naturally be able to do that level of corruption? Whatever the case is, You should copy your entire response as is and open a post to be voted on. Please. I think having you, DJ, and anyone else with a relevant amount of experience in game really breaking this down could greatly benefit crafting if the devs take heed.

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23

Mike said that during 1.0 and 1.1. At that point, it was a valid point from them.
With 1.2, I don’t think it upholds anymore nor do I think they hold to that anymore. They haven’t repeated that since (now they just say that 300c is a successful build) and the content introduced this season makes it feel like they aren’t trying to limit builds to 1k corruption anymore, exacly because of your point: you can’t kill Uby if you can’t clear 1k+.

So now we have a lower goal of 300c, which continues to be the minimum required for a build. If a build can’t reach that then it’s not successful and needs a boost.
But we now have no clear upper goal from EHG. They’re trying to balance builds within a certain range, meaning they will likely nerf Pally/VK and other outlier builds, and keep bringing the lower builds up (most likely Necro and Lich will be quite strong next season), so we get a relative balance between them, but not a clear goal in regards to game objectives.

I expect when all masteries are somewhat balanced within an acceptable range, they will all be able to kill Uby (at which point we’ll maybe have Hyper Uby? :laughing:). But I don’t think they’re going to be giving us a clear upper ceiling anymore. It’s not like it ever upheld well anyway.

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I really look forward to this point. I know that having every archetype be capable of doing all content is the intention. The devs are doing an incredible job given the sheer volume of different perceptions they have to juggle while also maintaining the original identity they evolve to give us what is Last Epoch.

On a separate note, I was about to start a post about an idea I had but would like to run it by you real quick. I know FP isn’t perfect, but what if there was a an item to help bridge the crafting experience for late game gg items? I was thinking of a rune that would consume all remaining FP to potentially turn a random affix to either T6 or T7. To maintain some sort of balance, it could hit any affix, even pre-existing exalted affixes. A critical success could turn an item with 1 exalted affix into one with 2, or 2 into 3. A failure would reduce the FP obviously and do nothing. The item itself could be scarce, not able to be farmed with prophecies, and have a lower drop rate than havocs. Maybe even only dropped from boss encounters. Just not only uber, that would be terrible. Consuming the FP means even if it’s successful it can’t be duplicated. This is all assuming Last Epoch will stick with it’s current system.

Given that we have guaranteed affixes in synthesis, the goalpost has been moved, as you’ve already mentioned. With imprinting, the LP loop between Farsight Turtle and Nemesis, we have a lot more control with getting the items we need for pushing builds. I just feel that once we hit a certain point in that progress, the difficulty could be complimented with another way to acquire those incredibly rare top end exalted items. So what do you think?

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It’s not that it’s a bad idea, I just don’t think we’re going to need it. Gear is being power crept at a fast pace.
With 1.0, it was very rare to get a double exalted item. With 1.2 it’s reasonably common to have double exalted drops and not that rare to have a triple exalted one.

I feel like we won’t need too long to start having 4 exalted drops anyway. So your rune would give you more control over it (rather than requiring Havocs/Redemptions), but I think the game will soon reach the point where it’s not that relevant anymore.

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Yes, but doesn’t that showcase one other major issue?

If the timeframe from ‘we can barely reach 300c’ to ‘1000c is mandatory to kill the last content in the game’ is changed over the timeframe of 2 major updates… then that is a hefty hefty problem.

It’s more then 3 times as far in scaling as we’ve formerly seen, if we follow this exponential trend of power increase we’ll be in 5000c+ in 1.5. That’s not even remotely sustainable.

Now, usually power creep comes in combination with content density though. It’s mandatory to do that as otherwise power-creep has a purely detrimental aspect to it.
Why? Because you only have 2 viable options presented to work with power creep.

  • You reduce the time needed for acquisition to reach that stage.
  • You implement content which causes that time to be passed as it provides you the same pacing.

In Last Epoch the current state is a mixture between ‘we don’t do anything to alleviate it’ (which to a degree is fine since the total time investment to reach top-end was too low) with ‘we reduce the time needed to reach the same stage as before’.
The aspect of ‘new content implementation’ to allow investment of time into that is miniscule. The weaver web does not substantiate a massive improvement of play-time.

This is different to other games of the genre which are doing well. D4 doesn’t have this at all since after a league their content basically ‘resets’. So it’s completely avoided… which brings other issues with it as it focuses solely on the specific league mechanic and that needs to be very substantial to uphold the effort to go through everything else.
Torchlight Infinite does majorly implement content density. Every mechanic gets their own tree to improve upon, specialize and provide a different type of playstyle focus.
Path of Exile does use primarily content density as well. The majority of the times the content comes into the core gameplay afterwards. Yes, exceptions apply, yes, depth is reduced, all viable problems which have to be taken into consideration and are a major issue for GGG’s long-term players. But it provides a venue nonetheless to come back and experience a substantial content density which formerly was not available. Avenues which create interest and hence lead to engagement long-term.

In Last Epoch we don’t see that, which brings me to the next point of reasoning behind it:
The 'how' of implementation.

In a live-service game (hence inherent long-term power creep with good design) we see content becoming more and more and hence that enforces adjustment of power from the players accordingly. What was ‘fantastic’ years ago will at best be ‘mediocre’ today. A totally normal and acceptable thing to happen as the counterpoint is that a substantial extra amount of content to experience is included.

This upholds with Torchlight Infinite as the end-game process allows focusing on a single mechanic at a time basically. Which means in totality the power-creep is low… (still existing) but it is contained in a short area. Adjustments don’t need to happen quickly but the experience is nonetheless improved because of sheer variety.

In Path of Exile GGG leans more towards gradually expanding the timeframe needed to reach the end-content, this has happened over the years from the game becoming a 80 hour investment to deal with the most powerful bosses to nowadays 200-500 hours of investment if you already know what to do, and substantially more if not. But the whole road there is filled to the brim with options to acquire a variety of items as well as the ability to specialize on the mechanics which are personally most enjoyed.

What both games have in common is that pre-established content isn’t touched substantially. This means the campaign stays the campaign. Your progress through it will likely feel roughly the same 3 years from now then it does today. In Torchlight Infinite this is fully upheld. The campaign is ‘bare’ of any implementations. In PoE small aspects of implementations have been done through the years. Those mechanics are substantially reduced in power compared to the end-game ones, they solely act as an introduction method to them, not as a method to severely increase power level during that time. Often they actually are the contrary and a hindrance. The same goes for the league mechanic, the common notion is to ‘try it out to see of it feels interesting’ and then ‘ignore it until end-game (maps)’.

This is a severe difference to Last Epoch. The implementation of loot lizards has been done in the campaign and increased pacing substantially, as did Nemesis, and Nemesis is a massive power increase for that time.

So this all leads directly to that:

How and when?

The ‘how’ is a problem given what I wrote, isn’t it? How will you adjust the campaign when you implement power creep into it on a semi-regular basis? This obviously enforces the whole balance to shift. Is it too easy? Too hard? Who knows! Untouched classes will feel awful, changed ones too strong during that timeframe.
It lacks a baseline to build up from, the campaign is the foundation and the foundation is not solid.

The ‘when’ is also very clear: Never. At least not in the current state of content implementation.
The weaver content being enforced onto you during normal monoliths (which is pre end-game as it’s still not the last stage of content, we can see it as campaign 2.0 basically and is a miniscule amount of time investment inside of it comparatively to empowered) is detrimental. It mandates your build to have a respectively higher power level at a earlier stage in the game. Which yes… gets counter-acted by the acquisition of equipment through loot lizards and Nemesis. All fine you might think now, it evens out, right?
Sadly though it doesn’t. The rework of the classes is needed as another step for that.
But the crux of the matter is:
If content implementation upholds the same methodology as currently then VK will be underpowered vastly before the second pass for it is even in the making.

And that is not a viable strategy for progressing the game steadily. It screws over people entirely.

Yes, other games break builds as well over time, but that happens over a very very long timeframe commonly. It gets weaker… and weaker… and weaker… and then years later it’ll likely break entirely, unfeasable even with moderate adjustments. Thought upholding those moderate adjustments will still let it function on a ‘decent’ level during that time.
A prime example is my phys only pure Cyclone (spin to win!) character in PoE. This character broke finally as mana needs for the skill outpaced my reductions, so the total character is broken for now. But it only needs a change of exactly 3 items and that over a timeframe of 8 years to be returned into a functional state.

This is acceptable pacing by far. Many builds fare similarly in 1-2 years as well… but still, the solution is ‘switch 1-2 items’ commonly. And that is fine and doable.
This option isn’t present in Last Epoch, either your character build can do things… or it fails at the moment.

This is especially true given Uberroth. Uber bosses in Path of Exile can with substantial investment be killed with a pure fireball character… they even can be with a leap slam character… any character which plays off-meta, jank builds… with time investment done.
The total viability of the skill is nigh always upheld with few exceptions. In Last Epoch the viability is not upheld as there is no reasonable itemization way to overpower Uberroth currently.

That is a major problem.
And the core issue is that content changes are so substantial for power but so miniscule in density that it doesn't warrant the breaking of former builds at all.

Yes, but that is a major problem too.
The sheer power difference from a 2 T7 to a 4 T7 is massive. That means not a single character below that threshold then would still have any sort of viability retained.

This pacing is unacceptable for power creep.

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I find it quite likely that they created Uby as a balancing goal. They previously had the idea of balacing stuff between 300c and 1000c, but probably realized that would be very hard to achieve with the current state of the game, since it would require massive nerfs to some builds/masteries. Also because they keep overshooting reworked masteries.

So they did the Pally/VK rework and placed a boss at the end. One they can farm with some builds (although, as part of the usual overshoot, they can probably farm it too easily and need to be brought down a bit).
So now every rework has a clear goal. Rather than trying to balance into “at least 300c but no more than 1000c”, they can aim for “can kill Uby”.

So I don’t think it was just a consequence of power creep scaling things higher, but a conscious decision to make this bump in 1.2 and establish future balance goals.

Once classes are all balanced around the Uby cluster of difficulty and the campaign is finished, then they can go back to the campaign to rebalance it and also normal monos (or get rid of them entirely, preferably).

Not really. When you’re making an item you have clear priorities over what you want. The first 1 or 2 affixes are much more important than the other 2.
This is clear when you consider that having a 4xT5 of perfect affixes for the slot is worse than having a T7 of your most important affix and sometimes not even having the other 3.

1.2 was a much bigger jump in power creep than the previous releases. And, again, I feel like this was intentional on EHG’s part to try to create a balance goal.

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Yeah, but then… why?
Because Aberroth sits already comfortably at around 500c difficulty. It’s the perfect position already for that.
Uberroth is just overreaching massively.

So you imagine they needed to have a distinct boss for a goal since their whole game otherwise provides no viable ‘anchors’ for balancing?

Possible, but shines a awful light at the game if that’s the case, incompetence, and not in the manner I usually use that word but the one you see it as before I explained.

So the solution for now is ‘don’t play the game for the next 2 years minimum’ as that’s how long the class balancing will take?

Also a bad move I would argue.

As a live-service game you always have to balance with the state of existence, not the future. You need to make systems scalable to allow for the future but implemented relating to the current state.

Yes, true.
But also not realistic.

Even a single T7 resistance will outpace your build-options massively.

Why do you think we focus on 1-2 Affixes? Because it’s unrealistic to focus on the perfect spread right away, it takes too long, we have no way for acquisition.

So now take into consideration 4 T7 items dropping actually… reliable amounts of that. On a chest piece instead of 48% armor on it it now has 105% on it. Instead of 30% elemental res we get 60% elemental res. Instead of 68% necrotic res we get 112%.

Especially in terms of resistances it opens up several Affixes in total. You don’t need 2 spaces to handle them… you now only need 1.
11 items, per item a single T7 opens up another complete T5 slot. That means a power increase of 11 T5 Affixes baseline… not to speak of T7 in the last slot as well.
That’s 22 T5 Affixes worth of value or a total of 5,5 item slots.

Each single T7 provides this power level in total, the only reason we don’t count in that manner is because often specific Affixes are limited to specific slots, which is good… but the power behind them still is there.

That power level would mean every single life build can implement full resistances, crit immunity, high armour and also fully scaled endurance with high life on top of it. That outpaces every single possible Ward build already, which is not feasable to do, if EHG goes that route then ward will need another rework again which is baffling with how often ward already got reworked because they can’t get it handled to provide a properly scaling future-proof mechanic together. One which is a baseline defensive measure.

1.0 was massive, the biggest to date. 1.1 was medium, because of the loot lizard impementation. And 1.2 was massive again.

The loot lizards alone are the equivalent of power creep what PoE had with settler league. 1.0 and 1.2 were both ‘Harvest’ scaled power creep. That’s something GGG specifically said ‘they fucked up majorly’ and which caused a more then a year long backlash which nearly crippled the game. EHG managed to do that twice over already since release.

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Simple. Because to achieve a balance goal around Aby (which sits closer to 300c than 500c, btw) they would have to massively nerf the more popular builds, which is something players always lash out on.

Whereas Uby is already close enough to the upper limits of the more popular builds that you don’t need to nerf as much and players won’t mind it.

There are currently basically only 2 things in endgame: corruption scaling and bosses. The first can’t really provide you with a clear goal since it’s too abstract. The second can.

If LE had as many different mechanics as PoE does, then you could have clearer goals without requiring to use the pinnacle content. But it’s still a bit of a ways off from having many “horizontal” mechanics to interact with.

So yeah, with the current content available to the game, I think they needed to have a distinct boss for a goal. Because “somewhere between 300c and 1000c” is too abstract and not even that accurate. A lot of different things fit there.
But “build that can Uby in a reasonable timeframe” is a much clear cut one.

I don’t know. Did you stop playing PoE1 for a few years until they got balance in check? The first 5 years of PoE1 were marked by a big gap in balance, especially towards melee.
They eventually got better at it and managed an acceptable balance range for their builds, but that wasn’t the case for the first few years.

In fact, no game ever achieves decent balance on first release. It’s something that requires multiple tweaks over a long period of time until you can fine tune it.
It happened/is happening for D2, D3, D4, GD, TQ, PoE1, PoE2, etc.

Resistances were never an issue even without exalted gear. It’s not hard to cap them. And yes, it will release a few affixes. On which you can slap, for example, more health.
However, the impact of that +health isn’t as great as you’re making it out to be. Because in percentual values it will be a minimal increase.

Having all T7s will maybe let you run 4.5k health instead of 4k. Not that big a jump in power creep overall. Same for other stuff.

As I mentioned, some affixes are way more important for your build overall. And you already run those at T7. The rest are secondary and won’t even give you a 2x boost to your overall build.

I think you’re overestimating the impact of going from 2xT7 to 4xT7. It’s not a 100% boost.

Every single life build can already implement full resistances and crit immunity without issues. And endurance scaling (threshold) is now reserved to a single item, so it won’t change much either.
You might get more armor overall, but again, it will only be a percentual increase.

Why would it? It would also free affixes for them to slap on more ward related affixes. They can also get full resistances and crit immunity as easily as life based ones. They would be able to get high armour as well as life based ones.
The only thing they wouldn’t get is the endurance, which is meaningless to them anyway, but that’s a single affix anyway.

1.0 wasn’t a massive power creep. It was a huge power spike for Warlock and Falconer (and some builds in the same class that could use their tools). Most of the other builds weren’t very affected by it, other than the change in how corruption works, especially the echo modifiers not being as deadly.

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So their go-to solution is what the gaming industry found out decades ago to be a non-feasable one which leads to deterioration of the game?
Namely ‘rampant power creep’?

Gotcha :stuck_out_tongue:

You take the ‘L’ for messing up and not reacting quick enough… you don’t create new issues for your lack of foresight, timely intervention or simply ignoring any issue at hand.

If you screw up then stand up for it and move on. Yes, you’ll get flak… rightfully so… but that’s what the normal thing is that happens and then it calms down.
Do it this way and your product dismantles itself… because how is the value-retention even somewhat upheld in Legacy if this is the way they handle it? It isn’t… and hence Legacy itself has no meaning. It’s there to come back after 2 years, turn on the game, log in and play on where you left off while experiencing the new stuff at your own pace without having to do everything beforehand again. If your character which has 400 hours invested now turns into one you can simply equip in 10 or less… what’s the meaning behind it? There is none anymore.

At that time EHG could simply remove Legacy and only do a cyclical game… and then they would swiftly see how well that fares after all.

‘But it’s still better it’s even there!’. Yeah… it is… but if you take a part away and the whole thing crumbles then maybe… just maybe this thing had more priority then you give it.

And we have Aberroth for that, which is not even a reliably reached goal for many people yet as many many builds struggle severely against him!

Hrmm… I dunno… maybe fix that crap first before introducing garbage on top? Just my argument there. Dunno how widespread that is… but I imagine quite much so given the proclivity of what is voiced about LE in terms of long-term engagement.

And plainly spoken… unlike with PoE 1 and 2 I don’t see any people coming by here to take it as their main game. D4 screwed up and people leave in troves, loads of content creators moving over to PoE 1 or PoE 2… but have you seen a single big one instead picking up LE? I didn’t. I only see ARPG streamers being LE tourists, playing for half a month and then leaving for the actual next game. It’s a decent fallback option but offers nothing to keep anyone here. That’s a problem!

Yes

I’m a caster, for me it was fine hence. And for many other too.
In LE we got a single viable Uberroth build which can reliably reach that content, a few builds following which can do that content and a lot of ‘perceived crap’ besides those miniscule amounts of builds.

Also EHG is not making a game at a time when no comparison is available and they gotta find out all the important stuff first-hand as nobody else had done it yet. PoE was the first live-service ARPG and hence paved the road for others. So why isn’t EHG going on that road and instead does re-invent the wheel?
Learn from your darn competitors! They showcase the good and the bad really really well! So why the heck are they making the absolute same mistakes happening throughout the history of ARPGs over and over?
EHG steps perfectly into every… single… major pothole along the way. UI design, class balance, boss design, content upkeep, player agency., itemization progression… all of it… every single aspect is sub-par which is mentioned.
The saving grace for them is the in-game loot filter, the stash tab filters, the half-way proper controller implementation and having enjoyable graphics. Heck… I’d rather play a game which looks like shit but plays like a diamond rather then the other way around in several ways.

Nobody asks for it. But if other games miss throwing a ball into a pot then EHG missed throwing the ball into the right country.
There’s a magnitude to it, just saying ‘but others fucked up too!’ is not a viable option. Be better, you’re in a competition with other companies, you have to be better to survive. So do it or fail, it’s simple.

Yep, no issue.
Agreed!

Taking up space anyway :slight_smile: And if it takes up space it can be used for something else, can’t it?

Actually it is a 300-400% boost in survivability for several builds, but likely only a 30-50% offensive boost, you’re right.

Yes, and now imagine you achieve that vastly easier, so you have space for more Affixes otherwise, don’t you?
double endurance without any endurance uniques? Maxed out easily! Put some DR uniques on top, all Affixes on them T7 rather then ‘this has to suffice’ amounts as acquisition would be vastly easier.
Then that means you’ll also get triple rare T7 on chests, double rare T7 on helmets, no issue comparatively as for 4 T7 to even happen the drop-rate has to be ridiculous on the lower end or viability of any drop in that type of content becomes basically zero.

Oh? Which are you talking about there?
Ward retention which is not available on gear?
Or do you mean the absolutely useless ‘Ward per second’ which scales like crap?

Ward is very limited Affix wise, it’s in-built into mechanics, not into the items. Majorly uniques and bases affect it, Affixes barely do.

The only reasonable Affixes to take are ‘Ward per Second’ on Helmet (Need that space for something else), Body Armor (same) and the off-hand Catalyst. We also have the option for Threshold + Ward per second and Rinsg and the Amulet.
This means we got 3 slots viably to use. A total of maximum 136 Ward/second. Hence a sustain of 176 DPS.

Wow… I’ll surely survive with that garbage!. The only reasonable thing is threshold since that allows minimum Ward to be built up for initial hits, which is at most 690 at the perfect roll.

Ward scales primarily through uniques, base types, passive tree, skill tree and Idols. Not Affixes on Equipment.

Saying they would ‘scale as well’ is utter nonsense, you should know that baseline at least, that’s basics of the basics DJ.

You would say that neither MG nor CoF implementation was massive power creep?

Really?

Mhmm… I’ll leave it with those words, I love writing stuff as you know but even I won’t go into that, beyond nonsense.

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There isn’t enough content yet for it to be detrimental. This is actually the proper time to do it, before they start adding more and more things.
They just need to rebalance the rest of the stuff in the game, which is just the campaign/normal monos/dungeons.

If the current power level for Sentinel was the norm when they first launched you wouldn’t bat an eye. Doing 1000c would be the norm and everything would be fine.
It’s just in comparison that you’re finding it to be an issue.

So yeah, this is the perfect time to establish a clear goal and increase everything up to that level, since you have few things to re-balance. And new mechanics can be added with this new goal in mind.

The biggest issue for balance in LE was that endgame wasn’t static. It was scaling. Now it has a static perceivable top to aim for.

I doubt there are many builds that can’t do Aby. There might be builds that people with lower skill levels struggle with, but I’d say the vast majority of builds all can do regular Aby. Even zoo minion ones.

If I did that, I wouldn’t ever have played D2 in the first place, since their balance is still all over the place for PvE.

2 actually. Both ES and judgement can do it reliably.
Maybe even umbral falconer as well.

Nah, most games have that imbalance as well. PoE did with 1.0 as well. GD was the same. D3/D4 as well.
The difference between the strongest and the weakest build in those games was as abysmal initially on launch as it is in LE.

As will happen with any other game on release. And that is because of unforeseen interactions which only come to light when lots of people (or jungroan) play it.
Over time you fix those issues and also plug the holes where many similar ones can come up, but on first launch it’s always atrocious.

Because players are a lot better at breaking games than devs are at making unbreakable things.

It’s nowhere near that. Because:

This would actually have a much smaller impact than you’re considering.
After all, with what we have right now, your main defenses are already covered. So what you would do with those extra affixes is just stack more of what you have.

This means, like I already mentioned, that you could stack more health. But with what we currently have, we’re already stacking health. So yes, we could likely go from 4k total health to 4.5k. And you could stack armor. But we’re already doing so (except on builds where armor isn’t as important). So we’d also only get a small increase from that.
And so on.

You’d likely end up with around 30%-40% increase offensively and 30%-40% increase defensively.

Not massive, no. Especially because the base game drops were nerfed by some undisclosed percentage at the same time.
Nemesis was a bigger power creep than those.

Before 1.0 you could already get 1xT7. With 1.1 you could get it a bit faster.
Nemesis was the one that allowed you to get double exalts reliably. That is more of a power creep than factions were.

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It’s the opposite. The less content the more severe of an issue power-creep causes.
Content acts as a buffer for power creep as it allows you to still feel variety despite being away from the sweet-spot of difficulty related to said content.

The less content the easier it is to balance and the more mandatory it is to uphold that balance tightly.

If that was the case I wouldn’t be a player at all likely nowadays.
Unless it was fixed in the follow-up patches and I see the game in a ‘decent’ state.

Beta of LE was ‘decent’ with promises for more. It’s gotten worse I would argue, balance is beyond acceptable nowadays and not a game I’m enjoying as much as in beta despite the - at parts really amazing - implementations which EHG has made.

At that time I had no comparison for it and also at that time I had no issues with any build to kill Diablo in Nightmare. He wasn’t easy either with all of them but it was a enjoyable gameplay which wasn’t too punishing or too lenient most of the time.

The majority of bosses in LE are snooze-festivals and some are just bollocks comparatively. There is very little in the middle. They struggle with engaging mechanical implementations. Their ‘bullet-hell style mechanics’ are not really well optimized, they tend to over- or underdo it.

Once more, PoE 1.0 was a trailblazer for the segment, they had nothing to take in as comparison for this style outside of D2 and D1, and they did a good job comparatively for what was available to copy from.
D3 was unacceptable at release.
D4 is still unacceptable.
Grim Dawn had a very short timeframe but was a fantastic game even in 1.0 as the variety of viable builds and options simply allowed to sidestep those issues majorly. Torchlight Infinite didn’t have those issues at all. Even PoE 2 didn’t have those major issues, their content design is the issue, not the classes during campaign, they were rock-solid, even melee despite melee being a issue at large in 0.1.

Magnitude is simply different. And LE is not a ‘new game’ anymore. They got 5+ years on their back, they had time to learn, it’s not acceptable in the current state of the market.

I remember it being to 60% of the base drop-rate from before, I can’t find the source anymore but that’s what stuck in my brain very tightly for some reason.

Given that with MG you trivialize unique acquisition entirely as well as a majority of the formerly hard to acquire exalted drops this already is a massive reduction in time-investment needed.

CoF doesn’t even need to be mentioned here as it provides comparatively to MG around 5000% effective drop-rate for exalted items, if not more, the prophecy mechanic which allows more targeted farming of LP items and also the substantially higher LP chance in itself while also providing more chance for a boss unique to drop and hence also respectively upgrade in LP.

I’ll mention it again: It’s laughable to think this wasn’t bigger then weaver, Nemesis or loot lizards.

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Fair point and you present a compelling point. My main issue is consistently securing combinations of affixes such as T7 Hybrid Health and a relevant T7 damaging stat on a belt, or getting similar affix combinations on rings. Even with massive time dedication to farming, maximizing efficiency running content, and strategic use of resources, I find it can take more than a week to get a single upgrade. A couple of items I had chased took nearly the full cycle. Obviously those chase items were only able to be fixated on with the recent changes with crafting (getting T7 Block chance + effectiveness was my personal longest chase). Getting the items to drop with multiple exalted affixes, especially after the first one with imprinting isn’t too terrible a problem. It’s getting the right affixes that drags the process out for so long.

Now I personally love the feeling of success that comes with a hard earned upgrade, so I have no desire to influence power creep in such a way that even further exacerbates what is obviously a growing problem that has to be balanced around. I would enjoy seeing a leveling of the playing field a little and make crafting a bit more “deterministic” once we hit the hard ceiling. Scarcity would be an effective way to have an idea like this not become just another massive boost to swiftly gaining player power. You gave me a lot of constructive feedback. I’ll use it to carefully word my idea when and if I decide to put it out there. Thanks again for your insight.

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