Feedback from a slightly frustrated player

Feedback and Suggestions
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The following is just, like, my opinion man.

Let me start by saying that I love the skill system in this game. Being able to customize the skills via the skill trees is fantastic and keeps me coming back despite some of the issues I have in other areas of the game. I also love that I have to pick which ones I’m going to build around instead of having a million of them on a hot bar. Seriously, bravo devs.

Having said that, there are a few things that are bugging me.

First of all, the amount of xp it takes to level skills from 18 up seems way too high. I spent hours plowing through monolith timelines and arena runs and the skill xp bar barely moved, even though my character is still gaining experience at a pretty steady clip. I’m guessing that the new +skill affixes are meant to alleviate this but I rarely see them drop and when they do they are nearly always attached to gear with affixes I’m absolutely not interested in.

Gearing is my next gripe. It’s great to see tons of loot drop but 99% of it is worthless. I barely even pick it up to shatter for the affixes anymore. I have hundreds of all but the newest affixes at this point, but it barely matters because…

Crafting is really frustrating. Crafting from a white item doesn’t get you very far, same with blues. I’m not looking for absolutely perfect gear here, but when I finally get a drop with semi-relevant stats on it and it shatters after a couple upgrades I get pretty irritated because it took forever to see something decent drop in the first place. It’s very time consuming and nearly always disappointing in the end. I pretty much just don’t engage with crafting anymore. EDIT: I have revised my opinion on this, see reply below. tl;dr I spent some more time playing with it and it isn’t so bad after all.

Related to this, is the loot filters. Maybe I’m just getting impatient in my old age, but they seem ridiculously complex. I’ve seen filters in other games where I just click boxes next to the stuff I want to see, but getting them working in this game is a chore. I am aware of the excellent guide posted on these very forums, but I don’t want to have to read a chapter to just filter out all the junk that drops. That’s on me, I get it, but if it bugs me it’s gotta bug other people. I really wish the filters were a little easier to use.

Uniques and set items straight up don’t seem worth it considering that you can craft what you want, eventually (I assume). I always get a little excited to see a purple item drop and then get immediately disappointed when 3/4 affixes on it are completely irrelevant. They almost never seem to be worth keeping, frankly.

In closing, overall the game is a lot of fun. I’ve completed the current story content many times and always have a blast doing it, but I also pretty much always give up after that because gearing (again, just my opinion) and crafting really kinda suck. It feels like progression just grinds to a halt and once I’m not having fun anymore I stop.

Just to end this on a positive note, I love the new minion power scaling. I usually hate minion builds in ARPGs because they all just sort of crumble in end game content, but I’ve gone hard after building for minion survivability and they have become incredibly resilient. Awesome job.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Have a good one.

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in my opinion, LE’s crafting is quite balanced. the only reason to pickup whites is if they have high rolled implicits. blues still have value if you are trying to craft specific mods. but yeah sure, you may get to a point you dont even want to shatter anymore. thats where we’re kinda funnelled into using lootfilters.

as for your engagement with crafting, it IS time consuming but the caveat is it IS POSSIBLE for a normie/ casual player to get 4x tier 5 mod items. i have crafted a couple myself. it is not easy but it is doable. the end game crafting would be having t6-7 rolls but for the most part that is pushing your character’s optimization and in most cases not too necessary.

i am very biased towards LE’s crafting because i came from POE where crafting a 4 x top tier mod on an item you want is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more difficult than in LE. not to forget, POE items can have 6 mods and you cant specifically target mods that you want with a very few exceptions.

If you want a more forgiving crafting, i highly recommend warhammer inquisitor/martyr. you may need to grind to get more materials, it may seem difficult but it IS possible to craft a perfect item that you want.

If you’re a little lazier, than GD is quite good, theres no real crafting in it, instead you can enchant/augment equipment pieces.

and yeah LE’s uniques… i kinda dont like em.

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There are crafting that have some random factor, like Diablo 2 crafting system, where I think 2-3 are fixed (with range) and the other 3 random.
There there is one that every stats are fixed, like witcher 3.

Then there are hybrid craft/mods like PoE.

Then there is deterministic crafting like LE where you can craft every stats you wanted with the balance being you can brick something before hit high tiers, & exalted items with higher tiers than can be crafted.

Personally I am not a super fan of LE super deterministic crafting, non am I fan of PoE super RNG (at least before harvest crafting) crafting. I like to called it controlled gambling.

I think loot in ARPG should have a combination randomness & certainty. I personally like idea of precraft receipt like D2 or loot with predertimned stats rolled that you can make limited deterministic modification/add/remove (before they brick like ) to finish your modification.

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I am going to walk back a little bit of my crafting frustration. I hadn’t played in a while and after trying it out a bit I was able to actually make myself some decent items without quite as much frustration. The critical success mechanic helped too, so I’m gonna eat crow on that particular point; it isn’t as bad as it used to be.

If you’re a little lazier, than GD is quite good, theres no real crafting in it, instead you can enchant/augment equipment pieces.

I appreciate the suggestion. I’ve actually played GD so much that it is definitely coloring my perception of the loot filter in this game. There’s not as much depth to it, but I can very quickly get it to hide most of the stuff I don’t want to see without any fuss. I should probably just take the time to learn LE’s implementation.

Thank you for the reply.

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You know I really like the idea of LE’s crafting, where I have a ton of choices and can make my own custom gear. I love that part, and as per my reply above after really taking the time to mess with it some more I was able to make myself some acceptable gear, so I’m gonna say that I was off the mark somewhat on my crafting complaint. It still sucks to finally pick up an item with the stats I want and have it bricked after a couple upgrades, but I was able to get a few others well beyond what I thought I’d be able to do and the critical success mechanic really made a difference in that regard. Crow for lunch and dinner!

Thanks for the reply.

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No worries. We are here to discuss,

I think able to put every stats you want in a gears defeated RNG base loot base ARPG.

I do not think everything should be RNG but I also do not everything should be too deterministic. So there is always a loot hunt, so players can feel unique as oppse to everyone running with copy pasta gears with all same stats (just different tier).

I think theer should ba a bit of RNG, a lot of deterministical possibility (crafting) but not too much of one extreme or the other.

But its just my view.

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My way of crafting an item is 1) find a good blue base (with at least one t4+ affix I need or two t3+). Then craft it with Glyph of Stabilty till chances for success is about 70-80% then I use Glyph of Guardian. Maybe that helps.

The main rule to remember with LE loot filter - the higher a rule stands in the list the higher is its priority. For example, you don’t want to see 2h weapons. Make a rule for HIDE all 2h weapons. But then you want to see 2h with a t4+ critical multiplier. Ok , create such a rule but drag it above the former. And it WILL show you only 2h with t4+ crit multi affix even though the rule below tells the game hide all 2h weapons.

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The loot filter is certainly powerful & useful but also very confusing.

It was made that seemed readable to peoplw who understand some form of programming block logic while not actually work like programing format (And, Or, Nor etc)

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There once was the intention by EHG to implement some basic filters right away that you can expand on.

They did not make it into the game yet. The easiest way currently is to use one of Heavy’s filters you can just copy from pastebin.

But I think it would be great to have same genetic filters ingame as presets.

This may be true for some low-mid level uniques. The Monolith specific boss drops I find really exciting. These uniques have very interesting mechanics you don’t find on non unique gear.

Yeah, exalted items can be underwhelming. But the new stat balance of the recent patch makes t6-7 really impressive. And when you find an exalted with ok fellow stats, that’s really great.

People often see rarities as a quality indicator of items because they are used to from other games. In LE the rarity says nothing about quality but only measures affix quantity.

Can’t say something about your issues with crafting. I really like it although it can be frustrating to fracture items sometimes. It’s hard to improve gear later on, while it is really easy and impactful throughout the story levels.

But that’s the character of ARPGs. The progression slows down a lot towards the end.

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