Gear, Rarity & Loot System

Hello dear Developers and Community!

Im a veteran of ARPGs and wanted to suggest a possible remedy to avoid the sometimes problematic/frustrating way these games (including yours) handle loot drops, rarity of gear and gear power.

Background: what can be bad and frustrating
Common gear usually possesses less modifications than rare gear and are thus less powerful.
This tends to render common gear practically useless (leaving aside the crafting in PoE).
Additionally, a lot of loot will drop, so the majority of loot will be useless stuff that clutters your screen - possibly even killing you, if you cant see your enemies.

The goal of a rarity system is to make players feel good upon finding rares and make them grind for it, so they spend a bit more time in the game. However, it can be done in a way that makes no item useless:

Suggestion:
a. all items of a type (ring, etc) possess the same number of modifiers, regardless of rarity
b. rarity is now determined by the modifiers the item possesses (the more rare and specific the mods the rarer the item)
c. reduce the amount of loot (-15 to 30%)

Let me use and example to explain what I mean by a) and b):
Assume we get 2 rings, a common and a rare one.

The common ring could do simple things like grant grant health, mana and intelligence.
The rare one could do something more special, like:

  • granting an additional level in a specific mastery
  • greatly empower an effect of a certain skill
  • grant weapon attacks a chance to apply a poison debuff
  • grant conditional effects (example “+ Health regen per second while under Y% health”)

This way, normal gear will be useful, but to min/max your build you will need very specific rare gear. Not only will this make the game more accessible to casual players who do not care much for grinding, but finding a “fitting” rare would be at least as rewarding as it is now.
Since there are more usable items, there is no need to clutter the screen anymore, thus I suggested the reduction of the loot drop rate.

NOTE:
It is also possible to introduce “gear-only skills” and mods for these skills.
Example:
" While equipped, you may use ‘Fire Aura’. "
" + X to radius of Fire Aura"
“Fire Aura deals Y% increased damage.”
This would allow players to have access to more than just class based skillls and compliments the suggested rarity system.

What do you guys think of it?

This would likely require an encyclopedic knowledge of all the modifiers in the game for a person to be able to determine at a glance if an item is worth picking up, which is not necessarily a good thing.

There are already currently at least 81 unique affixes used for crafting, along with many other modifiers that are used in shards, already totaling in the 100s. It would take a long time to learn them all already not to mention such a system would likely require adding 100s more “more specific modifiers”.

This is the purpose of unique equipment. (see: Volcanus - Official Last Epoch Wiki)

As it stands I think that common items are pretty valuable given the current crafting system. All equipment can be crafted to have the same number of modifiers (which is similar to your idea) however pieces that have undesirable modifiers will be harder to craft into an item that has desirable modifiers, or even no modifiers at all. Personally I prefer having the base items with no affixes and decent implicit rolls since it gives me the most freedom in which affixes I can put onto it, even though it carries a slightly higher chance of fracturing.

Recommended Reading:
Crafting - Official Last Epoch Wiki
Affixes - Official Last Epoch Wiki
Equipment - Official Last Epoch Wiki
Unique Equipment - Official Last Epoch Wiki

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