I am playing again for the first time in years. Right now playing a multishot rogue.
Problem i am experiencing is that i am now level 75 and i havent really improved my gear since i finished the campain and now i’m kinda running at the end of my characters abilities, but i have nothing to improve it. I already use a lootfilter i downloaded from some rogue guide, but still i just find boatloads of crap that i don’t want to be looking at while i am killing stuff so i just put it into a bunch of stash tabs. When they are full, i still dont feel like looking at all the stats on the items, so i just shatter all of it and go kill stuff again.
I don’t know if i am alone in this. In PoE, i also don’t look at all the yellow and blue items. But at least i get a bunch of easy to recognize valuable stuff (orbs and select bunch of items) that i use to trade for what i need. I don’t even know how trade works yet in LE, but i don’t believe i have anything of value to sell.
Well, maybe its just me. This is just me reporting how i experience the game. Maybe i am not alone, maybe something could be changed to the game.
If you want to trade, you need to join the merchant’s guild.
Lots of exalted gear can be sold for some money, but you can make most from selling idols.
On the other hand, we’re close to a new season and for several months we’ve had a low number of players, so I doubt the economy is in any good state, except possibly in legacy.
Ah 2 weeks from now i’ll be in legacy and i’m planning to stay there.
PS: i think a good fix would be a better help with setting up a lootfilter. A few things i can think off:
A user interface where for each itemslot, you can just select the base item(s) you want and the modifiers (4 or more) you find preferable. And then some option where you can select how close to perfect the item should be, probably best a slider with a simple formula behind it like for example: “X = 5total wanted mod tiers + crafting potential - 20unwanted mods”.
And then give all the items that fit this filter a seperate collour.
The game knowing how many shards you have in stock and highlighting items with mods that you have few shards of.
A highlight for idols that have perfect stat rolls.
Maybe some or even all of these things are already possible with the current loot filter, but it looks cumbersome and complicated to set it up. It could be made super simple.
You can already do this, except for FP which isn’t on the filter because EHG doesn’t want it, and the formula.
The loot filter is actually quite easy to set up. You just have to start from hiding everything and then making rules for what you want to see.
This would be nice. But other than class specific affixes, you will be swimming in shards pretty fast.
I simply make a rule at the bottom that catches all the class affixes so I can shatter those. I never shatter anything besides those either.
It really is not. It’s actually quite intuitive. You should give it a try.
Maybe start with Heavy’s filter and then switch things up?
Although, as I said, it’s easier to just start your filter with hiding everything from common to exalts and then add rules for what you actually want to see.
I have just spent about an hour setting up my loot filter. Some things are unfortunately missing:
-Cant shoose subtypes for lots of items like quivers and armor.
-Need the option of having maximum number of unwanted affixes. I mean, an item with 2 wanted modes and no unwanted mods (so 2 total mods only) is better than an item with 3 wanted mods and 1 unwanted mod. (total wanted mod tiers being equal)
-Need an option to select wanted uniques. (cant even select them 1 by 1 because i can’t select subtypes of many items)
-For idols, need a way to select on stat value within range.
-Would be nice if you can have a grading system within a rule instead of having to make new rules for each quality grade of the item you are looking for.
You can. You just can’t choose subtypes if you choose multiple base types. But if you choose just one type, you can always choose the subtypes.
Yeah, this doesn’t exist.
There are ways to do this, but it’s a convoluted system. Yes, it would be better to simply select from a uniques list. Hopefully this will come in the future.
They don’t want us filtering ranges. This is to avoid the situation where you filter out everything and every drop you pick up without even looking at them. They want you to evaluate the gear when it drops to see if you want it or not.
You might agree or not, but it is by design.
It also might change in the future (like LP being in the filter)
Probably.
Now that you’ve taken a crack at making a filter, you can make a feedback thread and give your suggestions. The devs don’t interact with the forums much, but they do pay attention to it, so they’ll be sure to read it.
You could probably work around that by hiding items with specific affixes, though that would double your rules, or at least add an additional rule per item slot.
I’m not even quite sure what this means. Have different colours/etc if certain affixes had certain tiers? Or the total of tiers was above an amount?
You might agree or not, but it is by design.
It also might change in the future (like LP being in the filter)
They want you to evaluate the gear when it drops to see if you want it or not.
I just came back to add to my post basically saying that this is where the genre needs to make progress. Yes the genre is a skinner box where we get dopamine from finding loot. And the fact that we get immense amounts of loot dropping is where it is obvious that this is what the games are designed around.
I think that is outdated and far overdone though. We see so much loot that it no longer releases any dopamine. Its become an annoyance. Design needs to recognise this and find a better solution for it. Loot filters are a workaround, but spending hours finetuning lootfilters is also not what we really want to be doing instead of gaming. Better solutions need to be thought of. I can’t give the perfect answer to this right now, that is up to all the devs trying different things and the genre evoloving to find better ways. But what you quoted here does imo show the outdated skinnerbox design philosophy.
You could probably work around that by hiding items with specific affixes, though that would double your rules, or at least add an additional rule per item slot.
Yes, hiding items with any but the wanted items. I was thinking of that and i might do it later. But i don’t know if we have enough allowed rules for that.
I’m not even quite sure what this means. Have different colours/etc if certain affixes had certain tiers? Or the total of tiers was above an amount?
To simplify: You can choose a minimum of total affix tiers, or a minimum of the number of desired mods. It would be nice if this could be a scaling system where for example the item label on the floor could have a text size that scales with the total affixtiers. As your gear progresses, you can adjust the loot filter and make it more demanding. But say my boats suck while my helmet is great, you’d need to adjust it for each item seperatly. If you’d have such a scaling system, you could just pick up boots with smaller text but not helmets. Ideally of course it would not only be the total of affix tiers. There is more to quality than that. Like primarily, not having unwated affixes.
I think LE suffers from one specific thing regarding the dopamine of looting:
The excitment is not channeled into one specific moment, but rather over multiple moments. Dropping a decent item, that is craftable, then crafting and possibly another step: Legendary Crafting.
I do think that Crafting and the LP system are awesome, but they do “steal” the moment of excitment and scatter it around over multiple instances, which weakens the excitment.
Your initial comment about range filtering was regarding Idols and I think Idols are fine as they are. They are incredibly chase and having idols with 2 desired mods already is a big dopaine hit if you drop them.
I personally don’t want affix range filtering.
For your specific example, you can make it work already with a set of multiple cascading rules. It is pretty complex and requires some good setup, but it is possible.
But I do think it is not really necessary. There are otehr ways to filter loot more effeciently, which are sufficient in most cases.
I understand where you are coming from, but having such generlized rules wouldn’t work very well. Affix pools for different item types are vastly different with some overlap and some exclusive mods.
But having a loot filtering, that gives you different colors and/or empasizes especially good items is exactly how I do my own loot filters for deeper endgame builds.
You can achieve that by simply copying a rule with multiple affixes selected for that item type and having the Total Affix Tier Sum and/or number of affixes change.
Also not showing items with unwanted affixes is also possible by cleverly cascading Show and Hide Rules.
Here is an example that will only show Citadel Boots With Movement Speed, Vitality, Hybrid Health + One Resistance. How I cascaded these rules, it will never show items with any unwanted affixes and never Boots with two resistances. So the item either has all 4 affixes or one or two empty affix slots.
Depending on the number of other wanted affixes and how high their total sum is, the color changes and the best ones gets emphasized.
I think you missed the point. In PoE, you can fine tune your filter to such an extent that everything that shows through it you know that you want to pick up. And then you don’t even look at the item. You pick everything that drops without looking, you dump them into a quad tab and every once in a while you go through them, mostly to just sell them.
So there is no excitement to drops, unless you happen to drop a mirror or a multi-divine drop.
What EHG wants is that you have potentially good drops that you then see and evaluate whether it’s good or not. That way, when a really good drop occurs, you get excited about it. And it doesn’t even need to be something to sell, it can simply be something you want to craft on.
So you might not like it or prefer it another way, but that’s the way it is because EHG wants it that way.
But as I said before, they also didn’t want LP on the filter and caved to the community, so FP and affix ranges might be a thing in the future.
Yes, this is why I told you the philosophy of filters in LE starts with hiding everything and only showing what you want.
For example, I start by hiding everything.
Then I highlight T7 affixes (you can specify which ones you want, but as CoF I usually want them all).
Then I highlight double health idols.
Then I highlight idols with at last 1 desired affix for my build.
Then I highlight idols with 2 desired affixes.
Then I highlight exalted drops with the affix I want to slam on my uniques (one rule per slot).
Then I highlight gear with at least 2 desired affixes for my build (one rule per slot)
Then I do the same but for 3 affixes.
This is usually a total of around 40 rules and covers most of what I want. Since it reads from top to bottom, this covers almost all the cases. I also sometimes have a few specific utlity rules at the bottom, like affixes I want to shatter, or CoF tagged drops (for using RoA), etc.
Idols are going to change a lot with the new Season, though. I’m guessing you’re in the CT so you probably know the changes, but those of us outside of it still don’t know how much the changes and the impact will be.
Though I will admit that, until now, idols have been the most frustrating thing to both chase and to loot filter.
No, CT knowledge doesn’t effect that comment at all.
Idols are relatively rare to have with good affixes. Early on I agree they are hard to filter, until you have a decent stock fo them and start filtering them harder for only idols that have 2 good or synergytic affixes. But early on (speaking fro ma fresh economy/empty stash perspective) you kind want to stockpile many idols anyway, even though they are not perfect, so filtering them too strictly is not really ideal.
Once you reach a point deeper into endgame and you start to only want very specific idols with specific combinatiosn they simply don’t drop often enough, that oyu need a crazy precise loot filter.
If you make a couple of rules for specific idol types anf affix combinations that is usually enough for me.
I don’t find them frustrating o annoying at all, qutie the opposite. Idols gave me some of the best “dopamine” moments ever that I had in LE, simply because they directly dropped very well with what I wanted. You can very precisely set up your loot filter to have idols with 2 desired affixes highlight and those usually are already a jackpot drop, even with bad rolls.
If we keep it focused on the drop mechanic itself though it’s the other way around.
Last Epoch doesn’t provide much value for things you can find, hence keeping excitement extremely low for drops, releasing massive dopamine bursts in a single sudden rush for a good drop compared to other games in the genre which tend to ‘spread it out’.
Sure, we get Gold, and we get crafting resources… but there’s no excitement about the 500th glyph of hope when you have nothing to use it on currently, or a rune of research when it’s basically a guaranteed outcome from a Exiled Mage.
Overall the cadence of ‘Yes, something nice’ is quite low when comparing it to the other games of the genre.
Path of Exile has not only items but also a vast quantity of consumables and divination cards. Dropping a chaos Orb is a ‘nice’ feeling still after 200 hours into the game. A divine? Great! And it happens regularly as well.
Torchlight Infinite is the same, be it Ember, Flame Elementium or Fossils. They are valuable despite being quite prevalent overall.
And not only that… because of the differences in setups for the follow-up systems we also attach different value to the specific drops themselves.
Last Epoch doesn’t give me this enjoyable feeling as much because the vast majority of consumables… is just enough, or too much available. I acrue them. I don’t store them up to then use on potentially lucrative crafting sessions… as the gear drops after all is rare which can even provide a reasonable chance to give me a successful outcome… relatively early in the game.
That’s just a different itemization method provided between LE and those 2 games specifically.
D2 also had that available with runes to a degree, they were regularly there and quite enjoyable to pick up. D4 in contrary misses that also quite a bit.
I think it’s true to a degree… those mechanics are not designed to enhance the drop-experience… Some of the competition on the other hand clearly did use their crafting mechanics to do exactly that. Making items on the ground valuable when they otherwise wouldn’t be, and quite heavily so.
Even PoE 2 is going that direction with 0.2 now and recombination.
Got this really nice mod on a helmet… but the other things are awful? And on the second there’s 2 other mods which are great… but again the others suck? Both are ‘vendor-trash’ hence usually… but with recombination you enjoy those high tiered affixes simply because you can try and make a valuable result out of basically ‘waste’.
Yeah agreed there.
Albeit I also get where OP is coming from to a decent degree there.
With the pickup it’s kinda interesting because at one hand you ignore the items which drop, you simply pick them up for showing up, you don’t get ‘excitement’ for those.
You get it later on maybe, when going through your stash… but then you do so with maybe… 20 pieces? 50? 100? That’s different from something suddenly ‘coming into existence’… hence the drop directly.
There’s clearly a different response from players when having to deal with those 2 situations there:
-A item is shown, hence picked up simply for showing up and then you get enjoyment from seeing it turning out to be a decent one maybe an hour later.
-A item is shown while running the content. You haven’t picked it up yet. Enemies are around, dieing means loosing it. You know it’s a great item, you haven’t even seen how great it is… just that it’s great. That provides Adrenaline as it’s suddenly a high-stakes situation, a mistake ruining it… but when you make it? Sweet sweet feeling of success and hefty hefty dopamine dose.
I think the second is simply not as prevalent in LE compared to some competitors.
Yeah, I agree, it’s one of the best aspects of LE’s drop system currently. They’re not too massive in range and hence seem valuable. The filtering is a bother though as the progression goes on. But besides that they do the drop-experience surprisingly well comparatively to other drops in the game.
I also get it, truly. I’m just pointing out that it’s purposefully done due to different design decisions.
PoE’s is mostly tailored for zoomers. You’re running around fast, you don’t have time to stop, so you make sure that everything you see dropping has inherent value.
Drops are a “secondary” thing from the gameplay, in a manner of speaking. It’s something to be appreciated later.
LE is more tailored to people who like drops in the moment. They promote a slower gameplay so you can appreciate what you found on the spot and evaluate if you want to keep it or not.
Both have their dopamine moments in different circumstances.
In PoE you get the dopamine when your mirror drops (obvious exaggeration for effect, works for high value drops) because normally you already know what it is, especially for high value gems or currency. So the dopamine hits as soon as it drops in the middle of combat.
In LE you get the dopamine when you’re done with the combat, mouse over the item and see that it’s a 3LP red ring (obvious exaggeration as well).
So in one you get a dopamine hit while you’re in the middle of combat already high in adrenaline. Usually you rush to it, clear the mobs and then stop and appreciate your find.
In the other you finished the fight, adrenaline is gone, when you get the surprise dopamine hit.
I can’t say that one is right and the other is wrong, or that one is better and the other is worse. I think that will change depending on the player.
I do tend to like the way LE does this over PoE’s, but that is my personal preference, mostly molded with D2 where drops were king.
Hrmm… I kinda get where you’re coming from there, but even then I can’t fully agree with that either.
Yes, the notion is definitely there, but the execution works a bit against it.
I would 100% agree if drops were similar to Grim Dawn. Something nice drops, you pick it up, you go ‘wow, that’s nice!’ and put it on. Done deal.
But in LE? It’s not so simple there. A dropped item is nigh never ‘great’, you go into it with the expectation of crafting it afterwards, and that counts for… well… every drop basically, outside of the really rare uniques.
LP is a great mechanic, but it makes a directly dropped unique far less valuable ‘right away’, and since I don’t find a better word for it now ‘undermining’ the drop mechanic itself. Same with crafting, you’re after all expected to craft after finding a base.
That does reduce the perceived value of the drop itself, Grim Dawn and Path of Exile 2 are decently good examples for direct drops having value there instead. In PoE 2 the crafting mechanics aren’t implemented yet, so there’s simply no alternative. You pick up the item… it’s great… and you wear it. Sure, the majority is still achieved through the limited crafting options, but since those are so limited you can still reliably pick up a ‘great’ item. Not to speak of a unique… you see the name and that’s it, it’s ‘good’ right away.
That’ll shift away soon enough there definitely though and align more with the PoE 1 style of steady small drops.
I kinda feel like LE is a bit ‘in the middle’ there. Neither/nor fully, it’s not ‘committing’ to either… albeit that word also is not fully fitting. But it gives a small piece of it to everyone… just not fully to the majority since fever tend to be so much in the middle of the spectrum there.
Absolutely!
But knowing the differences there is interesting.
Drop-wise? I like Grim Dawn itself more then PoE as well, since those represent the different sides of the ‘extremes’ for drop-systems. Both have a very fleshed out one… with their very fleshed out individual issues coming along with it.
But for a long-term game I tend to like PoE more then GD on the other hand.
GD is a fantastic game, top-tier in design. PoE is… as well actually, at the core. Their lack of doing stuff further then just being ‘functional’ though tends to bite them in the ass.
With GD I’ll gladly play up 1-2 characters and enjoy my time immensely for that duration… before immediately growing bored because of the non-guaranteed progression and stopping to engage, though coming back every year for a few weeks usually.
In PoE I tend to play steadily on the other hand. In comparison to GD my experience will be ‘middling’… but it’ll always be that. It provides a baseline enjoyment and that’s fine… though it ‘lacks’ (also not the fitting word kinda a theme with this post) the sudden rushes of massive excitement.
Thinks, this is a good disucussion about where the dopamine hits come from.
I would like to add that it does not all come from the random drops of craftings either. A great dopamine source is seeing your character become stronger.
So even a system which just drops currency like PoE and then would have a no-rng crafting system would imo be fine. The currency drops give excitement without the anoying need to sift trough garbage or spend hours building a loot filter. The crafting gives excitement because you finally get to make that item you’ve been saving for that makes your character x% stronger.
kinda a theme with this post) the sudden rushes of massive excitement.
