To clarify, I would be a fan of spending resources to make timeline or individual epochs stronger though. I’m just in agreement with the opinion that the monoliths, as they are now, aren’t bad (comparatively speaking).
+1 vote (with caveats)
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Hello, thanks for the warm welcome!
I’m just calling it how I see it in the forums – but at the same time, reading the forums for me is just hopping in every few weeks and checking out the hot topics on the side bar. That’s naturally going to be biased towards topics that get people heated, since you don’t respond to pleasant posts more than once or twice. That’s how it is for me, anyway. I really like talking shit!
I probably need to clarify what I meant in a few places.
[With regards to Monoliths incurring no risk] That is actually objectively not true.
There is one risk in MoF: If you die, you lose the echo reward.
So you are losing potential rewards.
This is kind of tough to talk about since it involves a discussion on the nature of “risk,” which probably isn’t going to lead us to a mutually agreed upon conclusion. My position on this is that if I don’t put any investment into something (i.e. currency, materials…things that I can use for something else) there wasn’t any real risk involved.
Getting to another Monolith with the rewards that I want might be tedious, but it’s not really rare, and it isn’t something I could use anywhere else. Basically, there’s not really an opportunity cost in lower-level monoliths. In Empowered Monoliths things are indeed different: I actually care about the rewards, I actually care about pushing; I want to see where my character can go, and I want to go further! They’re fun. But my issue isn’t with Empowered Monoliths, it’s with the lower level ones and how they feel like eating sawdust.
For the rest of you post I don’t really want to go into detail, but to summarize your idea, you basically want a “craft your own difficulty”?
While I don’t dislike the idea, I kinda feel like this would not really solve the core issue you named here.
For solo characters this system wouldn’t probably do much, depending on the cost.
And for characters with a shared stash that are already really strong I am not sure if increasing the difficulty and the rewards for these low level monoliths will be worth it.
It’s not really about it being “worth it” — Empowered Monoliths should always be where the best loot is. But at the same time, getting to that point shouldn’t feel so frictionless. Normal monoliths don’t have to be the most fun I’ve ever had in a video game, but they should still be fun, and they should feel meaningful. The ARPG motivation loop is out of whack. Right now, whenever you create a new character, the stick is the normal Monoliths you have to grind out, and the carrot is the Empowered Monoliths — which is just another stick! There needs to be a carrot somewhere in the equation. It can be crafting materials, items, gold, a digital autograph from all of the members of EHG (collect them all!), whatever. But there has to be something to make the thing you’re doing feel meaningful.
As a final note I want to say: I really do like the MoF System in its current state and while there are a lot of additions to it, that I would like to see, I don’t have any problem with normal monoliths. I would like stuff to get added to the empowered MoF to make that even more exciting.
Aside from liking normal Monoliths, I have to agree with everything you say here. Really, I can’t even say that I hate them. I’ve played bad ARPG endgames before, and when compared to grifts in Diablo 3, the normal Monolith grind is heavenly. But Last Epoch is a game filled to the brim with systems that feel incredibly meaningful — from characters to dungeons. It just feels weird that I have this huge gap in the middle progression of my character that feels like I’m on a treadmill.
But above all else, the fact that you can think up something on your lunch-break, make a forum post about it, and realistically see how it could fit into the endgame system is a shining example of how beautifully modular Last Epoch’s endgame is. I think that modularity should assuage any fears one might have of Last Epoch falling into a rut (it’s not, and it won’t), but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t strive to be better.
Wanted to respond to this to elaborate on the final point of my last post — Monoliths are a better end-game system than all of these games combined. And it’s not even close. Which is why it’s even more confusing that Monoliths have this strange awkward adolescent phase to them that takes forever to get through on every character you make, that can not be circumvented though any in-game means, and that isn’t really fun.
I really would like to wait a bit and see how many other people will chime in here and give their opinion.
One more thing I wanted to touch on:
For me normal monoliths, at least the later ones, so the Lvl 85 and lvl 90 ones are perfectly fine already grinding out a bit.
I played some buidls where I actually enjoyed staying in normal monolith.
Monolith never feels tedious or unrewarding for me.
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Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference in mindsets.
I really like minmaxing, so going through everything on new characters feels like waiting in line at a candy store. But I could totally see how chilling on normal Monoliths could be fun if I wasn’t so focused on numbers. What builds were they?
Mostly builds that don’t really scale that well or some weird hipster stuff.
I really do like to min-maxing as well, but I also just play what ever I personally want to play and I don’t play strong builds for the sake of playing a strong build.
Some of the builds I played there were objectively really bad, but they just were fun to play or had a cool fantasy.
For example a Void Sorcerer using the Gaspar’s Set.
Why do you feel like normal monoliths dont have this? by the time you reach 75/80 monos every base and unique items can drop. You can actually make and farm fully functional end game characters in just normal monos with all t20 gear, good bases, good uniques etc.
The only things locked behind empowered are stronger blessings, and more rarity rate, which is just getting what you can get now, but faster.
I think the problem is this game currently has people with stashes of years of gear, its a lot like playing standard in PoE, how many people do that? its boring for many because you have all the gear you need, and your atlas is already complete etc.
Going through normal monoliths presents a very important part of character advancement, not all builds just cruise through into empowered without stopping to actually pick up and craft gear, even more so if it is a character without a shared stash.
Remember this games goal is to move towards few month long cycles, meaning every few months you get a stash reset. Do you think on a fresh solo character you just should go right to empowered or even have resources to spend to “buff” normal monos like in this system?
Normal monos to me feel no different then empowered, its just about getting loot like empowered.
I think the crux of the issue is that ARPG players dread not being efficient and time spent “farming” normal is viewed as time wasted, rather then a viable option to farm gear to prepare for empowered.
I also think there is a drastic issue with skill scaling currently that creates an even more obvious divide on this topic. Some builds/archetypes crush up to 300 corruption basically naked, and others are just “bad” skills that struggle going to empowered without actually focusing on getting gear online.
There is a lot of talk recently that the devs have even commented on about trying to shift power from skill trees to gear, when this happens for all we know it might make farming normal monos a required step before you get into empowered.
I guess my TL;DR is currently the game balance is too out of whack and experiences felt now are not exactly representative of the future of seasonal based content. As the game shifts and gets closer to its more balanced final form we might view normal monoliths much differently.
apologies its long<
Trying to understand exactly what are the things you are trying to resolve about Monoliths…
From what I can gather its two things;
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firstly, its all about alts/additional characters and bypassing normal monolith content in a similar way to how players currently want to bypass the campaign to level up new alternative chars faster…
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secondly, its that monoliths dont have enough incentive to grind away at them and/or it takes too long to use the existing modifier & corruption system to make the rewards more intersting or worthwhile and/or the monoliths more challenging.
Obviously the Alt issue has come up many many times and does skew things a little - yes, it may be boring for your 5th char to do the campaign and have to get through normal monoliths, BUT, the existing stepping stones from the campaign to empowered monoliths via normal ones is still required, so whatever is suggested would have to “leave this in place” rather than change it… For me this issue is something that isnt about the content in the game and how boring it may be to do over and over - its about bypassing it for people who have already done it… i.e. I dont see the normal monoliths as a problem if you have never done them before - balance / difficulty scaling issues aside, they are there for a purpose to prepare for the end-game and are generally fine imho. In this instance, an optional way of skipping to empowered if you had already unlocked it on a different char would probably resolve this issue immediately for everyone wanting to play on alts… to be honest, I see no problem with the devs just allowing this by default after you had maybe done 2 or 3 other chars to empowered… I dont believe that the dungeon method of skipping content is even useful and I dont even think the devs should be worrying themselves beyond just unlocking the content based on some past completion criteria and talking to an NPC in the End Of Time to unlock everything if you wanted to… honestly imho, that would be problem solved and not mess up any part of the game.
Regarding Monolith incentivisation/difficulty/rewarding… This is interesting… I must have done hundreds if not thousands of monolith echos attempting to improve blessings or farm specific rewards across maybe a dozen chars - and more if you count build respecs. Have I gotten bored, yes, especially farming blessings - but have I felt like the rewards were not enough? Well, the simplest way to answer that is if I failed a monolith on a unique/exalted/XP rewards node I was dissapointed/frustrated and sometimes even annoyed if I did something stupid or it was a reward type I really needed. From a reward perspective, I am sure everyone wants more loot & better loot to drop or have more exciting blessings but in my experience the rewards are good enough for at least a few hundreds of hours of grind (if not more as I have).
Monolith variety and customisation for difficulty etc…
Would I like more modifiers? Absolutely. I even made a post quite a while ago about having player positive modifiers as well as additional and more varied enemy modifiers… The possibilities in this regard are endless and I expect the devs are likely to invent new ones as the game matures… I’d be disappointed if they didnt.
Would I like more control over the modifiers… Perhaps, but this is tricky… one of the good things about modifiers is that they add a level of choice & decision making to your path through a monolith timeline - it is foolish to ignore them… allowing control outside of this, could make the decisions less meaningful and actually make it boring…
Would it be good to allow for a gold / item sink to be added to monoliths to enhance either the modifiers or rewards? Sure… I dont see too much of a problem with that… but is it really neccessary… not sure… I could dump 100 Runes of Chaos into a monolith for a modifier that increased mobs randomnly for one echo but doubled up the chest reward at the end… I could dump 100 shield only affixes to temporarily improve exalted shield drop rates… I could dump 100k gold into a monolith to hope for a portal to the Llama level… No real issue with anything like this… Maybe it would help incentivise more…
Corruption already enhances the difficulty - and honestly, recent changes to monoliths have made that less tedious that it used to be… Not sure if I would want to mess with this mechanic or make it easier to increase - its a very important choice you have to make for your build - just ask anyone who rushed to higher corruption only to get “stuck” and unable to progess in that monolith because they cannot beat Orobyss to reduce the corruption/difficulty back down…
So… yes, I agree with some of your suggestions… but others are more complicated even if imho, the solution is easy… Like just give people who want to do alts a way to unlock the content for goodness sake… who cares if they want to do empowered monoliths at level 10…
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Very good point. However, ARPGs are a blend of skinner box and chew toy. If you’re not aiming for efficiency, you have to have something more to aim towards — a challenge, something unique, a creative thing to do, something to brag about — or else there really isn’t a reason to play. And, granted, with the addition of dungeons, Last Epoch definitely has “more.”
And, in fact, even considering how much ARPGs are a genre whose biggest challenge is trying to synthesize many different ways of playing for many different people, Last Epoch is in an amazing state…unless you want to get your 2nd character to empowered monoliths, which is an unrefined experience compared to everything else in the game.
All of this would be me baselessly malding if it weren’t for the fact you can use dungeons (or simply hopping into the monoliths) to skip sections of the campaign if your character is strong enough. So why not the early monoliths?
As for your next point…
…It’s actually air-tight. The state of the game I’m talking about and the state of the game as it exists to EHG is wildly different. But that doesn’t mean that these current issues aren’t worth considering.
I actually wouldn’t be opposed to this as a solution, either along side or instead of what I’m suggesting. Right now I think Last Epoch might be a bit TOO generous with character power, even though it’s kind of fun. It can definitely screw with the pacing.
This is the most important part about your post to me.
The current way MoF modifiers work are: You can choose echoes based on rewards or modifiers or a mix of both.
If you build is strong enough you can essentially ignore them, but the further you get into a echo web or the higher the corruption goes the more meaningful the modifiers get, to the point were some maybe be borderline unplayable. (Difficulty balance of modifers vs. corruption is another thing that already has come up countles times in the forums before).
But the point being is: I think the way modifiers inside the echo web work is great.
The player already does have a lot of choices, but is still forced to take one of many pre-determined options.
Giving the player more control over the modifiers might lead to people always choposing the “easiest” modifiers, that still give good rewards or don’t slow you down too much.
I really like game modes that throw a couple of choices at you, so there are options, but at the end you need to choose one of them.
The only thing were MoF can really improve upon would be a greater enemy modifier variety (most importantly adding some modifiers that affect only DoT builds as well)
I think what generally happens is that players start the game, and the first few characters they make go to empowered normally and it feels fine and rewarding.
But as you progress in knowledge not exactly gear always then you learn to make better, more sound characters that abuse the cracks in the skill balanced and suddenly now normal monoliths are boring and a slog because you have a character that is out of the gate more powerful the last few characters you made simply on build choice alone.
I do think the issue is worth considering, but I think its more akin to making them skippable if you have done them once before or something like that or perhaps cutting down how much is required, perhaps you have hit level 75 and now can do empowered, or maybe you dont need to actually unlock monoliths by doing the lower ones and can just choose to start on the 90 ones and blast those three to empowered etc.
I definitely do think the pacing is a bit odd myself. Id just rather see normal monoliths become something that is important to advancement rather then just a chore we skip. but if skipping is the easiest solution then I guess it is what it is.
I don’t really think it’s an either/or type situation. In fact, if you’re able to choose certain modifiers, it might make you think twice about certain monolith affixes.
In the end, skipping the normal monoliths might end up being what they do, but the issue with that (aside from what Heavy is saying) is that there wouldn’t really be a reason to have them if they were skippable. And furthermore, I really just want more Last Epoch! It’s much better to make existing things exciting rather than to take them away, I think.
So you want additional modifiers over and above the ones the game rolls on echos… ok, sure… but my concern would apply if your choice of modifier could make it easier to handle an echo modifier… and thats what I am concerned about … so still tricky for me…
Making content so exciting they wouldnt want to skip it after running it multiple times… well, if you could package that then lets start a company and retire to a beach somewhere forthwith… 
Skipping content… honestly… I would’nt want this to be possible unless you had unlocked empowered for multiple chars already - at least to ensure a player got their monies worth by forcing them to do the content at least a few times… Just allowing unlocking as a default option would definitely be a problem as Heavy suggested… So the person would already have done the content numerous times and experienced the excitement… for those that still found it exciting, they could just continue… for those that dont anymore, they could skip it and bang their alt against the endless difficulty of corruption…
More content… I expect that you will not be disappointed with this request…
BUT why?
As it stands, I don’t think there is a good mechanism in place for skipping anyway. Lets say you skipped story, are you supposed to instantly level to ~55-ish (I don’t know what level you’d be at considering Majasa update… sorry…)? that’d be kinda toxic… Endlessly do arenas until you level enough to do monoliths? I’d rather do story… On the other hand, what wouldn’t be so bad is giving people the 12 or so passive points so they don’t have to do side missions…
Go on… I like seeing the corpses of level 60s littering the landscape of my lvl 100 echos… adds a nice crunch as I walk…
Ah… was wondering if this would come up…
My skipping content is skipping content not gaining levels … if you wanna skip the campaign, then you can, but that means you are gonna be attempting arenas or monoliths at whatever level you skipped from…
In my opinion, you can skip the content that you dont like or find boring after the 5th runthrough, but skipping isnt fast levelling… at least not to me…
Gotta still earn your keep somewhere… maybe that means running a campaign map over and over for a few levels or something… but you aint getting it for free from me…
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That’s fair. People want to skip campaign which I think is fine considering there isn’t really a reward at the end. All that it really provides of value is smooth leveling curve. There isn’t really a reward at the end. Though the point still remains that it is the fastest and safest way to level early on (I haven’t played the new arenas or reviewed how the were changed, so I may be wrong here)
Since when was gambling fun again? I mean if you aren’t a gambler thou.
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