For the love of god - PLEASE unlock empowered timelines account wide

Feedback and Suggestions
21

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.

2 Likes
22

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

23

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.

3 Likes
24

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.

25

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.

26

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.

27

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.

2 Likes
28

400 curruption takes too long to get to.

by the time the player gets to empowered they already know all they need to know about boss patterns

Also most builds will not want to hop into empowered before doing some levelling first anyways

29

While I agree that grinding through is a slog, I’m not sure I think simply unlocking empowered for future characters is the way to go, personally. I do think there’s a middle ground to be found between what we have now and what is being proposed, though.

Perhaps a % increase in timeline stability per character on the account that has unlocked empowered. This would lessen the grind a little bit more for each successive character you take through monos without entirely skipping something that the devs appear to clearly want you to have to do.

30

If it was before I stopped playing I would have disagreed with you but coming back and seeing this corruption stuff…I don’t really want to have to try and raise it across every single character, that’s a pain

I don’t know what the middle ground would look like but it would be nice to have something that still let’s me experience the joy of a new kind character, a slight grind but not feel undeserving of jumping straight into empowered monos

2 Likes
31

The basic monolith unlocks should be linear, not this multiple path garbage. For the completionist in me I will unlock them all, but for the pure straight run to the end I do much like Raw does

I am right with him on this point. Increasing the stability needed for the quest echoes was an unnecessary time lock.

I would suggest that the number of regular/emp monos be reduced to such content that the mono islands are arranged in the map that they look like they are spiraling down towards the black hole in the middle. Sort of like the reverse of the climb up to get your mastery. Get rid of non act boss mono’s or at least change the monos to be act bosses.

1 Like
32

Right now, the Stash is account wide. Its a separate file on your PC than your character file. So, LE already has the concept of “account-wide” stuff.

So, what you do is this.

Every time a new character completes a specific Mono the 1st time (only the 1st time), you record it in the account-wide file for that Mono.
Example:

  • Character 1 completes “Fall of the Outcasts”. It’s set to 1. They can repeat it 100 times, doesn’t matter, its still 1.
  • Character 2 completes it. Now its 2. Etc. for each Mono.

Then, whenever any character runs that Mono, they get bonus EXP and Stability (only those two things) equal to the # of times it has been run account-wide, as a %.
i.e. if you have 10 characters that ran it, you get +10% exp and Stability. 70 characters = 70% bonus.

When they eventually do Leagues/Seasons, this can become a League-specific thing (i.e. 5 characters in league complete it, 100 characters outside the league, you only get 5% bonus.)

Why?

EXP: this lets you progress through the monos faster because you’re leveling faster.
Stability: this lets you complete the mono (finish to the end boss) faster as you need less echoes to get there.

Now, I know people also want to grow Corruption faster, but EHG did already introduce one mechanic for that, and I feel that’s separate from this thread, which is more about “not redundantly running non-empowered echoes a lot each new character.”

3 Likes
33

I was going to roll a new character, but figured i’d google if they are account bound. I was sad to come across this post showing me its not. I can’t even imagine trying to do all that again…

34

So what else do you plan on doing while you level from 55 to 100?

35

What about a “Skip by Trial”? If you can beat a 400 corruption random shade poof you opened up empowered timelines. or something along these lines after you unlocked them with your first toon.

36

I believe an old saying that applies here is "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice Practice Practice! So you Should still have to grind to get to empowered Monoliths, but there shoul be some benefit to having made the grind to their multiple times. I thunk EHG has done this a little bit ( not much past 100corrruption myself yet) but I think there should be something that a playercan find at 200+ corruption that will help them along but not neccessarily let them bypass everything straight to empowered.

37

I still liked the Marvel Heroes system of every level 100 character you have increases global exp gain by 5%. So each alt you make, assuming you level each to 100, gets easier to get to the end. They could just limit the bonus to those characters in the same game mode/league.

38

In MH it was actually 25% for the first, 15% for the 2nd, 10% for the third char.

Then 5% for each one after that up to a maximum of 200%

1 Like
39

It’s been a long time. :smiley:

40

So are we saying that you just level faster? That wouldn’t necessarily ease up the grind I thought people were talking about (empowered monoliths). It would indirectly make it easier by allowing you to build your character quicker though.

What about a combination of increased exp based on how many 100s you have (in that mode/season etc) and offering the bonus corruption to all characters are catching up to your highest corruption timeline (again, in that mode/season etc)?

Or would that be TOO MUCH catchup?

1 Like