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.