This is kind of an irrelevant request. Having empowered unlocked at level 53ish won’t do you much good. You still need to level. Sure, you can go to Arena, but where will you get Arena keys? Oh yeah, only found in Monoliths.
I somewhat agree. It is a grind to get to empowered… The story + the regular mono grind = wanna re-roll by then.
Maybe unlock completely once per account.
And you have ACCESS to the three level 90 monos before empowered, but its up to you when you feel you can handle level 90 mono when youre fresh off the story. So maybe grind out normal mono until you feel youre ready. Then take on the three level 90s to get to empowered.
The issue is, unlocking empowered for the entire account doesnt do much as a fresh 50-55 off the story can’t typically handle empowered, unless I just suck.
But I 100% agree, the grind to the pinnacle difficult content is a bit long. Its why I quit POE for good…7-12 hours to level a character, then another 30-40 to get to A8, at a minimum…for me. Im bored by then. Re-roll.
For me, ideally… 5-12 hours to complete story, another ~10 until Im grinding out the hardest stuff and chasing endgame items. Regular monos just don’t do it and typically aren’t too difficult. Either remove them completely and make empowered ‘do-able’ fresh off the campaign, or give some sort of skip ahead, in a reasonable way.
I too have quit a character or two in last epoch within the last few weeks because I didnt feel like grinding regular monos.
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Not a bad idea that.
I think you guys are missing the point of content gating. You are supposed to achieve/accomplish/work for things in arpgs. Unlocking something feels good because you worked for it. If it’s unlocked just after doing it once, the novelty factor of empowered is going to go down, and it will be less exciting to get to and do the content. Not to mention, when multiplayer comes out, people are going to get bored far quicker if the goal post gets moved closer, and this would do just that.
The current system is not designed to just be unlocked once, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to re-format the system to become something that makes sense to unlock for all characters. I just don’t think that in its current form it would work for the future.
I was pumped getting my first 100 in PoE, fast forward multiple years and 21 lvl 100’s its meaningless now
There is no novelty, there is no excitement. This is an aRPG that works off repetition and farming/grinding. make the repetition exhausting and hardly anyone wants to bother
Imagine having to re do your Atlas every character, redo your delve. No thanks I just wont play other characters.
I have dabbled in alts of various levels in LE but once the games releases and cycles begin I will play one character for an entire cycle because this game does not want to you play alts without putting in the same effort as your first character and thats just ridiculous and not respecting peoples time
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Everyone says this “Respecting time” crap, but nobody stops to actually think about the fact that if you genuinely feel like something is a waste of time, continuing to do it is YOU not respecting YOUR OWN time.
Where did the concept come from that if you’ve done something once, you deserve the fast track when you do it a second time? Is literally anything else in life like this? Does Usain Bolt get to start at the 50m mark after having broken the world record for the 100m? I’m so confused, because this is a game, and every game is inherently repetitive and grindy. If you really actually enjoy playing this kind of game, the repetitiveness and grindy-ness shouldn’t be something you aren’t willing to put up with.
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I have to totally agree here, once you unlock the monos with any character, you may have the gear to go directly into empowered monos for a second/third char.
I would also share the max corruption ceiling so you can push faster with new characters. Having to go to the extreme of the monos for 11-14 corruption in every character can quickly become a chore to do.
There’s absolutely no downside, you can get some needed levels and some T1 blessings doing the normal monos on the battle blessing side and for sure will help, but if they are already unlocked, you have the freedom to level in arena instead, or focus on specific blessings while leveling and preparing your character to enter empowered.
Because you cant actually begin making progress towards the real end game activity which imo is collecting your Lvl 100 blessings, pushing a higher level in general and adding corruption to see if your build cant actually handle it. This isnt for new characters
There actually is a quite a big jump in terms of incoming damage at 100 mono’s which you dont get at the lowers so you get little feedback
Im pretty sure you play PoE so this would be like having to complete every map on the Atlas on a new character before going to reds, you know you level insanely fast on a new juiced character that you can get from 68>90 in about 2 hours just from solo mapping/delving - at the same time you dont go into red maps at level 68
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Vastly agree! It should be a QoL (a nice one)!
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I think there should be a gate to each timeline.
You want to access a timeline? You do a trial echo first. If you succeed, you can access the timeline. If not, you can try again, try other timelines or continue farming.
And this includes empowered timelines.
Otherwise, it would be too easy. At least, you must prove you can handle it.
So you just want things to come easier, faster, and with less effort, even though the end result is literally exactly the same.
This is against the best interest of EHG when multiplayer is released. It’s as simple as that.
And what’s the point? Is a waste of resources and overcomplicating things for the sake of it. Is not that accessing a timeline is a reward per se, you still need to push stability, and if you die you lose main reward or stability gain.
What are you talking about. It only gives you more freedom to tackle the endgame, and only when you already unlocked it already with another character. This is mostly aimed for alt-oholic and hardcore gamers, also useful for those streamers/youtubers pumping out builds and promoting indirectly the game.
You still have to level to 75 at least to equip fat items, and sometimes lvl 80-90 for the endgame ones. You still have to push stability and kill the boss in order to unlock the blessings. And if something, you put yourself at a disadvantage because you-re doing those empowered monos without blessings.
Right now there are some over-tuned build options out there, we all hope they will be nerfed/fixed by release (and hopefully not nerfed to the “not viable anymore” status)
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Well, I disagree. I think free global access is not a good thing. With each character, I want to feel victories, even if small victories. Having everything open for free is not a victory.
Each one their own opinion.
I think gating access to the endgame per character only makes sense if the game were planning around an active economy and a somewhat competitive item hunt.
Given that this isn’t the case though, and the game systems are clearly based around SSF principles, I’d argue an account unlock would be a pretty good thing. I’m fine with playing the campaign again, but having to re-do all timelines is pretty horrid tbh.
Heck, PoE doesn’t even do that with its Atlas system, and that’s with a heavy focus on economy.
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They are two different games. PoE has a million progression points. The game is WAY deeper than LE, the atlas is just a small piece of the puzzle of what ends up being a ton of choices on how to play. You could play 8 hours a day for a month and not even get around to doing delve or heist. The atlas is a jumping-off point to your end game farm strategy, it isn’t the sole piece of content, otherwise, you bet your ass GGG would make people repeat it. Out of all the games I’ve played, PoE is one of the worst offenders of trying to stretch out playtime from their players in really annoying ways.
in LE Monoliths are the major end game. The ENTIRE POINT OF THE GAME RIGHT NOW is to progress to and through empowered monos. If you just “get” the finished unlocked timelines on a new char, the luster will wear off, you won’t feel that accomplishment/victory, and actually getting to empowered monos will mean a lot less because it becomes the norm, it becomes the baseline of what you should be always doing. Once that’s true, what’s your goal on a new character? Gameplay only takes a game so far without layered, deep, expansive end game goals. This is why D3 is fun to play for a while but gets incredibly boring for most people really quickly a few days into each season. Progression in that game is meaningless because the second you clear the story once, you’re just jumping in day after day doing the same shit on your level 1 as you do on your max level char, and your only sense of progression is gear and a higher rift number.
This game already has an empty feeling progression. You run into a random tileset, with random monsters that sometimes you don’t even have to kill, a random objective that gives you a random reward, and you randomly encounter an end-game boss that is supposed to be super impactful but kinda just ends up feeling meh.
The only thing pulling you into the experience is the progression from timeline to timeline. If you take that away, you’re literally just opening zones, killing monsters, getting loot, and your only point of progression is min-maxing. There needs to be depth and goalposts to the gameplay cycle otherwise you’re just playing a spreadsheet.
Having multiple layers of progression is what makes ARPGs rewarding and fun, and you guys are out here trying to take away a major mid-level progression point of the game, and it’s just going to feel more empty.
As weird as it sounds, you think you want it, but you actually don’t
If you want to essentially claim it to be ‘easier’ infact it wouldnt it would actually be harder since you could jump into higher content at a lower level.
You are literally saying ‘going to red maps at level 68 makes the game easier’ just stop lol
You cant tell me how to have fun
Ive owned LE since November 2019, theres not much left for me and if im burning out as I hit empowered monoliths on a new juiced characer wearing 6 exalted items, my gear is decent so I potentially dont have to farm 6 blessings - now…lets begin at corruption 100…
So theres actually lots of issues here
You shouldnt pull the Diablo ‘you think you do’ BS. I have NEVER entered a red map when being vastly under leveled.
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I mean, your entire point is already fairly invalidated by the introduction of the dungeon. More endgame avenues are certainly coming. The Monoliths are a similar system to the Atlas in that it is also the jumping-off point for more things later.
So this doesn’t make sense long term, for one. For another, there is the fact that if that were the state of the game permanently, as it stands now, it is not fun. So essentially, yes, i really do know what i want, because i don’t enjoy the alternative.
The progression from timeline to timeline feels like treading water on alts because it is a meaningless hurdle to overcome, once you’ve already done it once. You will eventually do them all anyway, to farm blessings - this makes it even more pointless to have the access to Empowered timelines be gated after the first playthrough.
I absolutely get your point. And I also agree with some of your concerns.
The I understand the intention of RPGs and that grinding is a big part of it. Unlocking stuff by progressing through content is basic behaviour and it’s absolutely valid to do it.
But theres something with the current Mono that makes the grind before empowered timelines a bit of a chore.
When I level a new character, I’m personally ok with the story. I usually go the right route and do Abomination, Rayeh, Lagon and Emperror. On that point I’m really already burned out. But the game still wants me to do 3 more timelines to unlock empowered. The echoes are all the same. They change their tile set between timelines and enemies vary a bit. But the rest is all the same.
3 quest echoes with always the same “story” don’t add much variety.
And this is all just not to do additional content after doing 7 timelines in a row to qualify. The content is exactly the same. The game then let’s me replay everything I already know on a higher difficulty with better drop chances. This now is where the endgame begins with. The normal timelines are only good for the t1 blessings and some nonspecific loot. But you barely find so much useful items. Now with empowered, the game starts making fun again, because the difficulty ramps up to be challenging and the rewards are getting good (better chances, better quest echo rewards, better boss loot, better bkessings).
So all you want to do is to rush through normal timelines to get to the point where the game becomes fun again.
I’m sorry, but this is the way I feel about normal timelines. They are a roadblock and time sink to stop the player of getting too successful too fast. I get that there need to be such mechanics to stretch the playtime and to make the rewards feel like an accomplishment. Giving the player everything he wants easily is what the player aims for but nothing a game should provide.
It’s just that normal timelines are so obvious of an artificial roadblock. Especially with the introduction of the 3x 90s timelines. It’s not even that the content gets more challenging for the different difficulties. You progress in levels and gear up and so the 90s timelines feels the same as all previous timelines. Because with increasing difficulty my character increases in power equally.
The current mapping in LE lacks variety. The timelines with different tile sets, bosses and rewards are some well. The echo web is nice. But 90% of your time you spend in repetitive echoes rushing from point a to point b. I think if there were more variety and excitement in playing these echoes, less people would complain.
So for me the whole phase of running normal monos is the worst experience of LE currently. Having to do it with every single character leads to a point where I abandon some of my toons because I don’t want to do it all over again.
I totally agree that the monolith in its current state is not as fun to do as it could be, and I think that’s causing this complaint. I can however see a future where it makes total sense to make monolith progression account-wide per league/cycle, but I don’t think that’s where we are at right now.
For that to happen, the monolith needs to be expanded upon a ton. It needs more layers of depth and deterministic progression, where each echo you do is meaningful and the objectives/tilesets/monsters aren’t just randomized. The monolith needs to feel like it’s a part of something bigger like you’re working towards something other than just increased monster multipliers. Right now it feels far too thin to be something people will want to do years from now.
I for one don’t think it’s right to give a shortcut through a system because people are tired of doing it. It’s a grindy arpg. The system needs to be good enough that people don’t mind doing the same thing over and over again, otherwise, it’s just like you said: go from point a to point b (diablo 3 being the perfect example of this). To give people access right now would be to put a bandaid on the actual problem, which is that the system doesn’t feel good to do.
I agree to a point, but I think the major problem isn’t that empowered timelines take too long to unlock, it’s that the system is not engaging, complex, or deep. I think with the current state of the game, giving access to empowered Monos would leave a bunch of people bored with nothing to work towards, because it’s basically the only major goal in the game for alts. I am really hoping they expand on the system and a year or two from now we will have a ton of really fun end game activities to do that tie in with the monolith and give meaning to doing it. In that scenario, I totally think empowered unlocking account-wide per league/cycle makes sense.
Is just unfair to compare a not released game’s endgame with PoE, which has an iterative season-based and 10+ years of refinement behind their endgame.
I think the little we have now is quite good, to me, the gear progression and crafting is in a really good spot, adjusting your gear as you introduce exalted items, switching and getting better versions of the T2 Blessings, pushing corruption as you are able to do so… Legendaries also introduced a new dimension into gearing.
Yeah, if you compare the endgame with PoE, feels a bit shallow, but they will introduce new systems, hopefully not over-complicating things the way PoE does, and with a successful synergy with the whole endgame progression like Legendaries did. Also AFAIK they plan to do some seasonal upgrades to systems much like PoE does.
The problem is narrowed down to people who already unlocked the empowered monos and want to build another char. Having the freedom to level in the arena and perhaps do a few monos before heading into empowered, or try to get away with an hyper-twinked char instead of doing all the obligatory ones is not damaging and only benefit those players and their experience, after all if you go unprepared or under leveled into empowered monos, you will be butchered, there are penalties for death (you lose rewards or stability) and goals to achieve in order to get those T2 blessings, is not that you get anything for free just by unlocking empowered monos.
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