Right… I agree except that the boss is buried behind 20-30 monoliths. Lets say for the sake of argument you are geared up and classed well enough that you can speed run a monolith in an average of 5 minutes. My two encounters with Rahyeh came at monolith 22, and 36. But lets just say 25 monoliths on average to get to Rahyeh. Everything goes perfectly, you don’t die. We’ll assume there is a loot filter so no time wasted scanning loot. I think that’s a pretty optimistic timeline, and that puts you at one boss fight every 1 hour 25 minutes for your 14% chance.
That’s hardly farming in my opinion.
That is like having to play all of act III in its entirety to kill Mephisto.
It is farming though, you’re killing a specific boss for some specific loot, you’re just doing it slowly. If I’m only able to do one monolith per day, does that mean I’m not doing the monolith because I’m doing it slowly?
I don’t have to do all of act III to kill Mephisto do I?
Once you get to Rahyeah…kill him…and fail at getting the 14% drop you get to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. All of it. YaY. (and lets be honest, 1 hour 25 minutes is hugely optimistic). Keep in mind the mobs aren’t scaling either. Fun times.
If that’s your idea of farming we have different ideas on farming.
Maybe. IMO, farming would be killing a specific thing for a specific drop, since the only things that have specific drops are the Monolith bosses (& Orchirian, but who cares about his petals), that what would be concidered farming in LE. If you could go to a particular area to try & drop something (like Titan Quest & Grim Dawn’s MIs) than that would be farming as well.
No, but you could also probably run through act 3 to get to Mephisto pretty quickly (if you didn’t have to bother doing quests & killing stuff). But it boils down to a single fact, this game is designed to be slower than most other aRPGs. Maybe it’s too slow & the devs need to tweak things to aleviate that & I’m happy to have that discussion, but we need to be honest with ourselves that that is what we’re saying, not that "oh this isn’t farming because I can’t do it 30-60 times an hour*…
Indeed we do (and that’s fine, as I said in anther thread, you’re allowed to think differently, I’m allowed to think you’re wrong and vice versa). My view on farming is that it’s killing specific mobs to get specific things to drop. Your view seems to be the same but with a minimum speed limit attached.
Could they do with making it a bit quicker, probably, IMO.
I think that might have more to do with how you farm. Some others might say that if you’re not just sprinting through the areas going straight to the monolith objective & killing it with the most OP build they can put together, you’re not farming.
Well, you could do the empowered version if you want better drops while you slog through the monoliths.
I’m not willing to defend the notion that one should to do 20-30 monoliths (or more) for the opportunity to fight a boss that has an 85% chance to drop something I already have, and a 14% chance to drop something I might want.
But you are.
I’m going to quote myself here:
"Based on design choices it appears that the devs have chosen to discourage one of the things I love most about ARPG’s… that is farming. Specifically boss farming.
Guaranteed drops
A multiple monolith barrier and quests to get to each Boss."
So I ask you LLama8, two questions:
Does putting the boss behind 20 to 30 (or more) monoliths encourage or discourage farming of said boss?
Does having the boss drop something that you all ready have (85% drop chance on atrophy) encourage or discourage farming of said boss?
You can answer those questions or we can argue more about what farming is.
The devs need to balance the player’s desire for awesome loot naow(!) with the inevitable consequence of getting it quickly that they get bored & stop playing.
A 15% drop chance isn’t actually too bad, the drop chance for a Zod in D2 was 1 in several million, but that didn’t stop people from farming for it (dupes/cheats notwithstanding).
Yes, I think that there you have to go through too many monoliths to get to the boss. I’m ok with it being semi-random & I think the way they’ve done it (with an increasing probability the more monoliths you do) is good, though I agree that they could reduce the thresholds a bit. Probably somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 after you have beaten the boss for the first time.
And I think that’s part of the problem, gamers today (myself included) want to have things a lot faster than they did “back in the good old days”. They (/we) are so focussed on the destination that we forget to enjoy the journey.
I have 710 hours invested in Last Epoch since buying the game in late January.
The monoliths aren’t a journey. They are the same maps we’ve done over and over, with a couple quests injected in the cracks to give the illusion of variety. Monolith loot is uninspired, over abundant and worst of all unfiltered. Rare mobs aren’t particularly rare, challenging nor are they rewarding. Cleaning forges and destroying spires does not a journey make. Part of the reason they are so boring and so monotonous is that we are forced to do SO MANY. In any ARPG you’ve ever played are you not rewarded with a way point as you progress? Do you know of any ARPG that makes you start at the beginning of an act if you fail or simply want to kill the boss again?
I’ll say it again. 36 monoliths to get a 2nd crack at Rahyeh, and of course he drops another Atrophy (now I have two).
So we’ve come full circle. Guaranteed drops plus A multiple monolith barrier to get to each Boss. = a lack of desire to kill that boss again (aka boss farming).
I agree on that, nowdays it’s all about efficiency, and not the fun of playing said Games anymore. And in one Hand we complain Games get boring too fast, at the other Hand we aren’t willing to spent more time on a particular Game anymore either. Ironically if “grinding” is outsourced to Monetization, than people are okay with, even when by only playing / grinding it’s so overdone that you grind down your soul for specific stuff you want (look at Lootboxes and stuff).
I for myself are more the type of player who prefers you need to invest more time to get stuff, and not less, and i really hate it when stuff gets to overcasualized or pimped down to efficiency like people expect in Grim Dawn to have waypoints direct on Boss and stuff, and not running put of the Dungeons / Ways anymore.
Speak for yourself, that’s how you feel about stuff like that. For myself it’s part of the journey and the interesting part about doing Endgame and stuff. Not to mindlessly fight “Only” bossmobs over and over gain, but also running around and slaying normal Mobs as well which in a ARPG also can drop stuff.
So you’d rather have a much faster turnaround on the boss but with a miniscule drop chance for what you want, which I understand because you have a lot more pulls of the slot machine even though your chances of getting the good drop are probably similar to winning on a slot machine.
I agree with you, they could do with making subsequent runs quicker, they could also do with adding more zones & more objectives so it’s less boring (for want of a better word).
From my Viewpoint, yes it should be “forced” because this is how this Mode works. It’s not a Bossfight arena mode. If this is planned out as a Bossfight Arena Mode from the beginning, and they would add such stuff afterwards, than it would be a different topic, but this is meant to running this monoliths over and over again until you reach the boss, and shouldn’t be shortened and taken away from one type of players, only because the other type of players expect more of an bossrush kind of type.
Also i’ve to add:
One of the aspects, and consider i almost played it for like 12 years, which i found most boring in D2 were this Baalruns and stuff, only trimmed down to running the same boss over and over again and not playing with the enviroment anymore. I was quite happy when modern ARPG’s introduced Normal Rift (Diablo 3), Endless Dungeon (Torchlight), Mapworks (Torchlight 2) or roguelike dungeons / shattered realm (Grim Dawn) [and they also have stuff like crucible and now also totems which you find exploring the world, and Nemesis is also more exciting because it wasn’t on a fixed spot, but different so your running around the world anyway). I’m quite happy the go this route also with monolith.
I ask because you have 32 hours played in Last Epoch.
'I’m quite happy the go this route also with monolith."
I was happy with the monoliths after 32 hours as well.
After you’ve put a couple 100 hours into the monolith I’d love to know if your opinion has changed.
You’ve got 900 hours in Grim Dawn, Do you think they should get rid of the way points? Make you start at the beginning of every zone or act to fight a boss?
Slightly stalker-y, but yeah. Making subsequent runs quicker by reducing the threshold for the quest echoes to spawn and ramping up the spawn chance a bit faster would be nice. Is it a slippery slope?
Edit: I’m also not sure that’s a wishlist rather than a store’s list of available SKUs.
