Feedback across characters from level 1 - corruption ~200 after 300+ hours

Feedback and Suggestions
1

First: overall, I think the whole game is 90-95% there. It’s fun - mobs crunch satisfactorily, bosses require some effort, and loot - for the most part - doesn’t feel like too much of a grind. But there are a few things that I think could be improved to make LE the pinnacle of fantasy ARPGs.

  1. Keep working on improving the visuals for dangerous mob abilities and playability in general. Some telegraphed fatal attacks are almost invisible - e.g. Wengari Spires, Emperor of Corpses Soul Bomb when the Emperor is rotated facing away from the camera, Rayeh’s Void Hailstorm (or whatever it is) void bombs obscuring the ground as they drop around him so it is very difficult to see the indications where they land, etc. Some areas, like the Wengari Fortress, obscure the character entirely and clicking on the elements obscuring the character cause the character to sometimes run in directions opposite of what is clicked on-screen.

  2. Keep fixing major bugs. Players can still get into a stuck “forever portaling” state when portaling to another player in their party under certain conditions. Zone transitions are still sketchy in general - it’s not always easy to tell when a click for a zone transition has registered because the feedback for that is several seconds. Player clients can also get into a state where 80+% of the mobs in a zone are completely invisible to them (also in multiplayer), yet those invisible mobs still do damage to them.

  3. Balance, part 1: Some of the skill and passive trees have rich interactions between skills and damage types. For example, the Warlock skill tree for Cthonic Fissure and Chaos Bolt are pretty cool because of all of the ways the skills can change depending on choice of damage type and procs. Unfortunately, some of the skill and passive trees are downright pededstrian/boring; most of the Sentinel (with the exception of Void Knight) and Primalist trees fall into this category. Suggestion: make another pass across the passive and skill trees for the “pedestrian/boring” classes and improve them to make them as interesting as the other ones.

  4. Balance, part 2: This is not a call for ward nerfs! I have played mage and acolyte and both seem to be super-fun just the way they are. But melee classes currently do not excel at anything compared to playing a ranged build for several different reasons:

  • 90% of regular mob (non-boss) incoming damage is centered around the mob. Melee classes take the brunt of this damage. Diablo 2 solved this by making 50% of the mobs ranged attackers and adding some chaos to the targeting choices that all mobs made. Suggestion: add some chaos to the LE mob AI to stop them from swarming the first player they “see”. (This is a tough ask, though, because the AI also has to be “dumb” enough to attack the minions for pet classes. That AI balance is likely tough to achieve and would require several passes to get right.)

  • Some boss fights force a 15-30% DPS downtime for melee classes in order to dodge large telegraphed attacks occurring in the immediate vicinity of the boss. Suggestion: revamp the melee skills so that they can “burst” over a short period of time to make up for that DPS loss.

  • In conjunction with the first point about the locality of incoming damage, melee classes need to use gear with many different defensive stats lowering their overall DPS compared to ranged classes. Unfortunately I do not have a great suggestion for this, because the usual mechanic - Fortify - is already in the game as “Ward” and it’s exclusively used by the ranged classes (excluding weird builds using something like “Cleaver Solution”.) Allocating a specific skill (e.g. Rebuke) for this forces builds into cookie-cutter solutions, so that is also not a great idea. It seems to me that whatever the fix is it has to have the following properties:

*) It has to be baked into melee skills and usage of those melee skills. I think we can agree that Ward plays pretty well as it is and it wouldn’t serve anyone’s interests to see even more easy mitigation added to ranged builds. Additionally, the fix shouldn’t be available or should be diminished when nodes that transform melee skills into ranged skills are chosen.

*) It somehow has to enable the player to take much more incoming damage than the normal (2.5k - 5k) number shown in the health globe, either via damage reduction or an increase in health or … who knows what.

One suggestion might be to overload the Endurance & Endurance Threshold stats. Everything stays as-is for both stats but melee skill nodes or passive nodes that affect melee skills (when they are not transformed to ranged) could either significantly boost Endurance & Endurance Threshold or change the way they behave. Suggestions - please take these as brainstorming, as they are likely overpowered in ways I cannot see! It is not my intent to create overpowered builds, just to try to give ideas on ways melee can excel at something compared to ranged builds:

  • Crit strike avoidance transforms into Endurance. Endurance >= 100% automatically avoids crit strikes.
  • Crit strike damage reduction transforms into Endurance Threshold.
  • When Endurance > 100% and Endurance Threshold > max health some portion of the incoming damage is significantly reduced or eliminated.
  • Hits with melee attacks temporarily boost Endurance, Endurance Threshold, or both.
1 Like
2

what level of corruption are you expecting these suggestions to get you to?
because right now people are going over 1000 corruption without these suggestions.

endurance reduces hp damage by up to 60%
armour up to 85%
resistances up to 75%
critical strike avoidance or reduction up to 100%
various uniques give even more damage reductions + passives
ward that applies ALL damage reductions except endurance + threshold

Frailty debuff that reduces enemy damage by up to 18%

your 2.5k to 5k is actually over 10k because of these reductions (IF you have them).

once you can take the damage of corruption 20,000 without a problem, then people will ask for damage, because you will take 10 minutes or more to kill a boss on 20,000 corruption only to get LP 1 item.

once they have made adjustments, then rinse and repeat with suggestions, people want 40,000 or 60,000 or 80,000, do you see where this is going?
more is not always the solution.

you need a destination before you can start a journey.
is your destination 1000 corruption or 10,000 corruption?
also, what time frame to get to that destination, a day, a week, a month or 3-4 months?

apparently 10,000 corruption is already reached also without these suggestions.

3

i think you’ve fallen into a slippery slope fallacy. Seems what hes asking for is normalization in survivability. Some classes have insane native survivability and others get ez clapped. I dont know how long you’ve been around aswell, but EHG has a tendency to hammer the nail that sticks up. I doubt many builds that currently reach such a high corruption will continue to by next season.

4

and i was simply asking what that “normalization” would be.

everyone breezing to 300-500-1000-10,000 corruption?
his suggestion needs a goal otherwise its just adding water to the ocean of suggestions requesting more durability without actually thinking about how much of an impact they will make (just give more!).
everyone wants more and more, but only a few actually have a set amount, that they have actually thought about.

like i said, you need a destination before you start otherwise you will just be lost.

funny thing about nails, they always stick up, so its only reasonable to keep hammering them, you try hammering a nail that isnt sticking up.

the entire game is a half bent nail that has been hammered so many times, if people suggest more half bent nails, it does not fix the problem.

I am trying to help people offer straight nails, not half bent ones.

5

the developers have already defined that goal. Endgame is 300 corruption to them.

People are already stacking crazy ward. It make sense that other forms of mitigation should be competitive. Even after any ward nerf its likely it will still be better than most other forms of mitigation since the regen burns off dots. I’m not even saying his idea is the best, but something has to be done for sure, and just throwing out an idea should be enough to help get the ball rolling on some kind of change.

6

then there is no problem once you are familiar with the game mechanics, because people can manage 300.

if someone wants to suggest something, they should just ask for an increase to that 300 and all the current systems can be adjusted to allow for it.

from 300 to 400-500 corruption
e.g
endurance becomes 70% cap, HP threshold conversion becomes 30%
resistances become 85% cap

or just simply reduction with enemy hp/damage modifiers in the monoliths.

increases and reductions to the current mechanics is a huge thing that people are not thinking about with suggestions.
most suggestions are to rework current mechanics or introduce more, without having an objective level to reach.

the game only needs 1 mechanic for each stat, but for some reason they decided on 5-10+, which is why there is so many complaints and suggestions to increase durability.

some people dont even understand how the mechanics even work, so they think players just need more durability, meanwhile they are running around with 0 ward, 1k hp, 20% resistances and 30% endurance 0% crit avoidance/damage reduction, then trying to push 300-500 corruption.

when they see its not going as planned, they suggest more durability.

no matter what, if the developers are happy with 300, then suggesting more durability mechanics does not solve a problem, it just introduces more mechanics that can be abused, as you can see with ward.

7

youre wildly off base here, that defensive profile doesnt even get you to empowered. Just to step foot in empowered youre going to have to farm a set of gear so you can get blessings and then farm a fresh set of gear.

without ward your looking end/end threshold/armor/hp/dot reduction/crit avoidance/resistances and possibly glancing blow or dodge ontop. The stat budgets dont add up.

8

to what?

maybe you are saying the same thing, but using different words.

crit strike damage to endurance is another stat
crit strike avoidance to endurance is another stat
melee hits to boost endurance is another stat

more stats = bad
less stats with balance = good

both crit strike chance and avoidance directly reduce damage taken by up to 100% when the enemy crits you, either you avoid it or you take less damage from it.

already crit damage and/or avoidance can be capped to 100% with either passive + 1 item or 1-2 items alone and its an implicit on some items, so you gain the benefit from that as well as what ever other prefixes and suffixes you have on it.

feeding these stats into other stats directly increases your durability by a further 60% and then 160% from crits that you would have taken.

if they remove crit strike from enemies entirely, it makes you 100% more durable in the event that the enemy would have crit you.

not to mention the ailment ‘Blind’ reduces enemy crit chance by 50% and makes them less accurate which you can get from 1 suffix or node in skill trees.

9

The devs did so in the past but lately they soften up on this by a lot. In the past they said 300C now they start to talk like poletitians when it comes to this topic. There is no “300C is considered endgame” statement anymore. Most likely because they fear the backlash if they dish out all the nerfs needed to bring all classes down to the 300C level.

I fear we’ll end up in 3k Corruption is considered endgame spaces sooner then later because it seems like EHG isn’t able to make up their mind.

10

I think I answered that with the title of the post: “Feedback across characters from level 1 - corruption ~200 …” I don’t have any idea what players are doing at higher corruption levels.

That last statement is the crux of the problem though, isn’t it? How many of those stats do characters at corruption 100 actually have? How many do they need to progress?

Based on the characters I have played so far melee characters at corruption 100 require significantly more of those stats to progress. For example, with my warlock and sorceror I can basically forget about armor, not worry about capping resists, basically ignore crit strike and stun, any uniques that give DR, not worry about frailty, and just use ward for the occasional big hit that comes in. With my void knight, paladin, and beastmaster, though, I need to ensure that all of them are up to spec at the same 100 corruption level, and even with that they clear much more slowly than my warlock or sorceror.

Like I said, I’m not interested in overpowered. What I’m interested in are melee builds that feel like they excel at at least some things, compared to ranged builds. Currently I don’t feel any melee builds offer that at all through 200 corruption, which is about as far as I have played. It may be true that the classes are “balanced” out at corruption level 1000, but that doesn’t invalidate my sense of subpar melee build experience at corruption 100-200.

11

melee has shields that get stats that other items dont.
melee has weapons that get stats that ranged weapons dont.

melee alone will always be slower with clearing mobs, but they are still more durable and already have more defensive or other stats.
just a few examples, melee has Parry, block, All Resistances and All Stats prefixes or suffixes.

parry combined with dodge or high armour +block can be a pretty good combination defensively.

just like minions will always be better with certain things.

if you want melee to be as good as ranged but remain melee then thats something else, and its called ‘Mage’ or ‘Acolyte’.

what about someone that wants to be a rogue that uses spells instead of attacks.
oh wait, thats still a ‘Mage’

so you see, what you are asking for is already there, but you want it to be something else and the same thing at the same time.

you think that will be solved by increases to durability that will affect every other class/mastery, which further raises your warlock and sorcerer durability and you are still in the same place as you started, because your other classes have become even stronger because of the changes you requested for your melee paladin.

this is what i have been trying to help with, if you want increases to durability for something specific, then you should suggest that specific thing, otherwise you are lost and dont know what will help.

e.g the passive node for sentinel ‘juggernaut’ should be increased to 2-3 str per point because sentinel needs to be more durable compared to ‘Mage’ or ‘Acolyte’.

melee already excels at more durability and in some cases even damage.

12

300 is the goal as EHG stated.
Hence any suggestion if you want or not will be taken into consideration around that level, not more not less.

This might change with 1.1 and the upcoming new content though.

Hence the ‘destination’ is set even without discussing it here already.

Some older masteries with their ‘main’ and straightforward builds available struggle to reach that.

Also some seemingly straightforward uniques specifically made for a build aren’t up to par to provide that experience… while others (Wraithlord Arbor) for example overshoots that goal massively.

Crit avoidance much like a modicum of resistances is a ‘must have’ stat and not a choice. Crits play heavily into stuns which are a grand way to die. Hence reducing the uppermost damage ceiling by 100% is mandatory and not a choice.

Not inherently, absolutely not.

Can you actually scale crit reduction to 100% with any means currently available?
If so it’s superior since the affix also provides armor… but I haven’t seen the option to do that yet.
Avoidance on the other hand is available in a fairly easy way, it’s plenty, as well as in the blessings on top of that.

Much like in Path of Exile any sort of outcome which isn’t 100% guaranteed is not worthwhile to do for alpha damage situation.
In Path of Exile it’s ‘Spell Suppression’… here it’s ‘Crit Avoidance’. If you can’t get to 100% then sooner or later there will come a moment when you get crit by a hard-hitting ability and that will be your downfall. You just reduce the chance for it to happen.

Hence blind is a very bad stat unless you have the ability to hit many enemies at once but without them dropping dead right away, its sole viable function is to reduce overall incoming damage… and even then it would mean you’ve not invested into crit avoidance which will sooner or later kill you and vastly reduce the available corruption ceiling for you.

If they don’t bring it back then this game is a goner in 2 years latest. Rampant power-creep is a major issue in game development and has broken more then a single game to date. It’s better to reign such things in early rather then when it’s too late.

Killing enemies and farming - more - loot :stuck_out_tongue:

Res at roughly the cap, crit avoidance at 100%
Then investment into a damage mitigation mechanic beyond that, usually it’s armor since that’s abundant on gear already and you can scale it well on every class.
After that you branch out. Glancing blows if possible, armor mitigating DoT-damage, dodge, block… whatever is available.

Unless you got - very - high amounts of life though endurance for example is very bad.
Stun avoidance is a pure useless trap and should never be used.

That’s because melee has the inherent issue of needing to be close, hence allowing more hits to happen before being able to deal their own damage. It’s a endless conundrum in ARPG games and even distinct upsides in defenses aren’t enough to alleviate those issues commonly.

I don’t see EHG managing it well since their balancing is plainly spoken… sub-par.

13

my point was that OP was suggesting new mechanics and didnt even know what they wanted, just random increases to durability.

that will always be the case and specific suggestions towards those specific builds could possibly be valid.

which is not the case here, there is nothing even remotely specific to a specific build its just general huge increase to durability.

with the current state there is no balance, just stats everywhere and it is overloading at least a few players, which is why there is suggestions exactly like this post.

just have a look for yourself, 535% reduced bonus crit damage and 3.4k armor with only 1 suffix on each item without any passives that a class may have for it, now OP wanted to feed that into endurance threshold.

every class can have that stat on every armor item which includes shields.

funny thing about this.
the suffix Health and Stun Avoidance has very similar flat HP stats for belt and amulet as the just flat HP stat Health
to some degree it could be considered better for belt and amulet, since it is duel stat.

because people want range but they also want melee at the same time, but they also dont want some sort of mage or archer.

basically coming down to, people that complain about this, dont actually know what they want, they just want it to be better.

this would be an extremely random solution/idea:
when you melee hit an enemy you are also hitting every other enemy on the screen and when you hit a boss then you are actually hitting 10+ times with each hit.

so it comes down to melee needing AOE or more AOE and 10x faster attack speed or 10x harder hits when hitting a boss.

thats just a shot in the dark solution/idea.

14

Do you remember the first balance patch for D4 when everyone cried them a river because they made builds weak? People don’t understand that either the content needs to be made harder to meet the power creep level of players or vise versa. Look at the reaction about the mid season bug fixes… people will go bananas if EHG balances the game arround the initial goal they talked about untill recently.

15

Instead of something like this options for melee builds to build up ranged defense (so anything beyond a specific distance attacking you) would be more viable.

The AoE mechanics have been done by PoE… and PoE basically has no ‘melee’ anymore, it has screen covering builds or it has ‘you feel bad playing this’ builds in terms of melee, that’s it.

Yes, it’s one of the other conundrums of the genre. Obviously devs want to please their audience… and nerfs are always badly received obviously.

On the other side rampant power creep is a surefire way to kill off a game in due time.

That’s why it’s so important to have it handled right away, before a release - which EHG failed with - and go from that line gradually and slowly up. Well… they missed that… so now the bitter pill has to be swallowed, which is outraging the community, tanking for 1-2 leagues in retention and then recovering.
PoE had that once as well I think… 1 1/2 years ago or so? Nobody was happy, everyone disliked the league despite the mechanics being good… and then it become the new ‘normal’ and stuff was once more at least half-way decently handled… or at least in comparison to before.

The big question is simply when EHG can ‘afford’ to do that, their release was rushed, so I imagine monetary issues were the reason for that, otherwise it would’ve been pure mismanagement.

16

its not just defences that people complain about.
also in a way, more offence can be a good defence (nothing can hurt or kill you if its already dead)

as you can see from the quote below

and even though Sentinel actually has passives for more defensive stats which gives more defences.
at least some people want faster clears which is where only some sort of aoe will work.

that is why PoE has done that. (its only what people asked for)
it makes it so every character is on the same playing field and clearing at the same speed.

it doesnt mean just because one game has it, it shouldnt be in another game.
otherwise why does pretty much every game have an archer type, mage type and warrior type? where is uniqueness there?

just copy the core of another game but then say ‘we want our game to be unique’… lol
unique starts at the core. picking and choosing the same things but putting different limits is not unique, its control.

BTW, you want to see pretty much the exact same crafting and monolith system, thats in Torchlight: Infinite… even some of pretty much the exact same enemies.

17

Well… that’s never been what a ‘true’ melee build even can exceed in.
What EHG can lean into is high DPS on the other hand, allowing people to mash down rares and even bosses significantly faster then ranged counterparts.

This makes overall clear-speed less but provides exactly what is asked for ‘excelling in something’.
Which I 100% agree… currently it’s not the state those builds are in sadly.

Yes, that comes at the cost of actual variety though. If you got 20 builds and 10 of them feel like the same build in different color then it’s not really a choice, especially if they all scale in roughly the same ways.
It nonetheless works because of the varied stats and uniques in the game, leading in the end into another direction of what the builds actually needs in detail.

LE doesn’t have that variety… yet at least. I’m sure it’ll come over time though and then it’ll be a viable choice to pick.

I would argue their end-game system is very different form LE given that you run them in a cyclic way, unlock specific ‘cards’ which are upsides lasting a few short runs as well as have the option to use sextant-like items like in PoE to adapt it heavily into different directions… plus empower them for a single run along the way as well.

LE’s monolith system is vastly more simple-minded there in the current state.

As for crafting… it’s close, div-card system of PoE + diablo clone affixes and the FP items have… beyond that the top-end crafting differs heavily again though with the endless re-crafts being possible and - as a major downside - their UI fucking you over and making it sometimes impossible to actually get into the crafting mechanic since the button can drop out at the lower end and be impossible to click on :stuck_out_tongue:

18

i foresee people going back to forums to complain that their melee is able to “mash down rares and even bosses significantly faster then ranged counterparts”… LOL!

in my opinion, first step would be at least making melee weapons base attack rate at least double what they are currently (i dont know if duel wielding stacks it for double, i dont think it does).
as it is, bows have almost the same base attack rate as melee weapons.
yes items offer more increases, but this is also part of the problem, you are sacrificing a prefix slot for it, and the increase is minimal because of silly formulas, it should be ‘flat’ or ‘more’, i dont know.

however, attack speed can be a tricky thing, where too much is actually a problem server side, even the animations will not be able to keep up.

then, allow moving while attacking, so you have a result of something like channelled melee attacks while moving (a movement speed penalty, im not sure) (phased movement through enemies, im not sure).

what i do know for sure is, they need to remove the cooldown on rogue dancing strikes.

it seems like at least some of the skills are there, but someone has intentionally nerfed them below the ground, either by putting silly cooldowns that dont scale from attack speed or huge mana costs that can only be brought down by sacrificing other more beneficial stats.

this is what i was talking about with the core of the game being just a copy from something else and limiting you more in ways, then saying ‘we want to be unique’.
rather than copying something else and giving you even more.

e.g copy the inventory system but every item only uses 4 squares and 1/2 / 1/3 the size they are now, as well as unlimited space.

LE could have been unique by letting you craft exactly how YOU want (in a way, like PoE but also with Hellgate: London mixed in).
the systems are there to some degree, but the developers went in a different direction.

the crafting system in a game can be the 1 thing that makes the most people happy or unhappy.

i would go into detail, but that goes way off topic.

yeah, but the same concept, just less loot because you are not allowed all the nice things.
when chances for LP4 goes into the negatives, you know that they dont want you to have it, even when they have endless systems.

19

I never understood this. I rather have low but meaningfull numbers then running 10 times the corruption that was deemed endgame at one point. It’s even 1.0 and I realy don’t want to know where things end up. Most people know to well what happened to D3 and LE is moving into this direction with 7 league boots.

I think there is sadly no turning back from this without clear communication that the current state of the game isn’t what it should be or they need to set realistic goals.

I don’t understand why they gutted builds in the past so drasticly that they became dogwater and called it “balanceing” while they are now shy away to enforce balancing like they usualy did and tippy toe arround the topic. Mike in his friday streams took a big step back from the 300C endgame stance and it’s dissapointing to me… like big time.

We’ll never know I guess. If they say “We needed to release the game because they money ran out.” noone would be mad because we all had times when there was so much month left at the end of the money.

20

Yes, the same for me, but unless you know the meaning behind it and what it leads to otherwise it’s a situation which falls back onto human psychology.

It’s even a fairly classic sales tactic, give the person the product you wanna sell into their hands and then take it sometime away again… they’re vastly more inclined to buy it afterwards, good, bad… doesn’t matter as much anymore.
The same as if you take away something from a toddler, no matter what it is, the focus is on it and the moment it gets removed the child starts to cry, it wants to have it now.

The same concept never leaves us, if we have something and no matter the reason it gets reduced or taken away it feels bad, we don’t want stuff to be taken away ever, only get more.
This is why nerfs are badly received even if they make sense.

They’re not avoidable though.

I listened to it… and what he said was nonsense plus-ultra there.

‘The corruption is just an arbitrary number’
No, it’s not. The corruption decides the drop-rate of items for you, the higher the number the more you get in return. Hence it has a meaning and can’t be arbitrary.
‘Is that maybe meant that we should increase the difficulty?’
No… also not what was asked, the question was if the baseline balance is going to be adjusted, and what the balance direction actually is.

Hence the initial question never got answered and some random wonky stuff was said that bears no meaning to reality.
Not a good sign when it comes to a fundamental progression mechanic to not have the answer right away at hand.

But if it gets nudged maybe we’ll hear an actual answer on what EHG goes for as a baseline to handle balancing… which makes it seem like currently they’re lacking to have those said internal guidelines… similar to PoE having lacked those before their power-creep disaster started to strike.