The problem with all games with RNG loot is not the ceiling or the floor, is the ceiling AND the floor, combined.
When people say that in PoE you can bring an item from white to god tier with only crafting, they don’t mention the amount of resources AND knowledge you need to actually do that, and how that translates in time spent into obtaining said resources. Taking into account the due differences, the same could be said with Last Epoch: your resources are exalted items and, to a much lesser extent, the correct types of shards for whatever your needs are.
When people complain about the shard system in LE, it’s correct to bring the potential of deterministic crafting into the conversation, but that’s not the main issue players are feeling. Of course that could become a problem, but the other problem that is also true, is that shards and crafting in general don’t feel that good because you need to farm RNG for exalted items and, since shards are all of the same quality and you can’t speed up the process, rely on RNG to get whatever mods you want.
Now, Path of Exile doesn’t gate your bases, so the raw items are abundant and the bottleneck are the resources, but the part that Path of Exile does better IMHO is providing alternatives.
If the problem that the player is assigned is bringing an item from state A (worthless) to state B (good item for their build), then POE gives the player different venues, and the player can choose, to an extent, how he want to solve that problem, while in LE you just do the equivalent of spamming chaos orbs until you get what you need (again, taking the due differences into account).
Don’t dismiss crafting grievances with people wishing for deterministic crafting.
I would wager to guess a large portion of the community would be against deterministic crafting. You can determine which shards/stats to more than 50% of the items. That is a good balance. Because the RNG gods are not looking upon us favorably the best place to come is the forum and air those grievances. Do those pleas land on deaf ears? No, EHG does have a great group of developers that listen to these issues and make changes around the edges until it has the time/resources to do a larger lift about the issue. The iterations that I have seen the crafting system go through since 0.5.4 is staggering.
In case it wasn’t clear, I’ll add I would also be against deterministic crafting.
But I also think that the current system is a bit bare. Legendaries are a fun addition, but they also rely on your build being able to make use of that particular unique to work.
Exalted items are more versatile, but then again, there isn’t a specific venue to target exalted items.
Again, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m not stating that crafting is in a bad spot. However, you shouldn’t consider only the axis of deterministc/randomness. If we look at how complex the system is, and so how “pushed” the items can get, I think the system could improve.
Actually, I think the current system is in a good spot if we consider Tier 24 items to be the high-chase items (3 Tier 5, 1 exalted Tier 7, 1 locked Tier 2 Suffix). What’s the bottleneck of this kind of crafting? Usually finding an exalt with a good base.
If we had more rare things to chase, like higher tier of shards, seals or glyphs, then we could possibly have also a higher ceiling on what could be achieved by crafting.
This is where I say the nodes on the monolith are underwhelming to a certain extent more so than the crafting system. I do enjoy that there is not a “magic finder” system here, you do have to grind, but there should become a certain point where the reward/goal is reached. I think that is what you are meaning. I am not 100% sure.
T24 items are considered by me as the highest end followed by 4LP Legendaries with the best possible combinations.
But this is where my frustration with LE lay… your goal/reward (after a certain easily obtained point) can never be realistically reached. Once you have you couple exalted items, and maybe a LP1/2 Leg or two, there’s really nothing more you can hope to realistically acquire. LE has purposely cock-blocked the endgame, GG/“mirror-tier” gear, from ever being obtained. Either through ridiculous rarity, or hard-coded limitations.
What is the necessity of theoretical perfect gear? Nothing in the game even comes close to needing that. Asking for the perfect gear to be more easily attainable only alters how the game needs balanced. It ends up just being a fancy number you can look at on the screen but gets you no further.
I know, it is hard for those that are perfectionists in everything to be satisfied with a mundane T23 item, and the rest are T24. It is like that scratch you can not reach in the middle of your back and only artificial means can alleviate the irritation, but it still bothers you. I get that frustration but have no empathy for it.
The monolith nodes could be more interesting, perhaps each monolith could offer nodes with different purposes. That would certainly add to the end game longevity, since you’d have more incentive to push for the best setup for your farming.
I think for me the problem comes in that minmaxing is very weird currently.
lets say you are interested in pushing a build to its limits.
You get t20 gear in a weekend pretty much. or two at worst, its very easy to get rare gear with the right stuff, maybe not exalted but rares its doable.
Then you start going “okay I can add a 1lp legendary here” well once you have all your 1LP lengedaries what do you do? farm for 2lp? then 3lp? each step in this process rewards you maybe 10-20% more power but takes potentially hundreds of hours.
This ties into the “Gear does not matter currently” line of thought, but for me most builds are basically done by the time I hit empowered because 80% of your power comes from skill selection and passives and only a bit comes from gear.
They dont have to make the top end any easier to get, they do I think need to make gear matter more so that you progress up tiers more uniform. it does not help that like lets say your chest piece BiS is Skill affix/Strength/%health/Health, the difference between a item that has skill affix 5/%health3 and bis is actually really minor. So even for casual gaming where you dont plan to pass 300 corruption you are probably able to do 300 corruption with really bad gear if your build is capable of it at all.
bit of a tangent since it does not directly deal with FP, and I dont think crafting needs to be changed, rather they just need to find some way to make gear matter more for more builds.
This is because people complained about how “hard” it was to get gear. People kept digging and digging until T20 became common and now it is no longer considered high end.
The same will happen if those people get what they want again. It is a constantly moving goalpost. Even if T28 4LP gear started being commonplace, they would just yell about why there isn’t something beyond that.
The contradiction that they don’t understand is that they want the best possible gear more easily for themselves, but nobody else. If other people have access to it just as easily, they don’t feel elite anymore.
Asking for something new and asking for what is stated are two different things.
If a player gets everything in the game and loses interest in it, it’s a bad game design.
If there are declared but unattainable elements in the game (to artificially retain the player’s interest), this is fraud.
The rough odds of getting those items have been posted. If you can’t comprehend that, that’s on you. Those things aren’t meant to be gotten. They are just what happens when you put in a function for item drops that have compounding multipliers. I’m sure the devs could just add some code to make those things actually not droppable. Would that appease your unreasonable desires?
It’s not fraud. At no point were those things stated to be even remotely attainable.
Is this a popular opinion? I sometimes joke about this but I didn’t expect anyone to actually want that. Would you prefer it if we just did something like make items only able to have 2 exalted mods max and make 4xT7 items completely impossible to exist?
edit: I don’t want to push the issue so I won’t ask again and cause the topic to go off again but I am still interested in this question. If anyone feels this way, I’d be interested in another topic on it or hearing from you directly.
Edit 2: after getting a couple DMs about this, I just want to clarify something. I’m really just looking for a yes or no here. I don’t need a full version of how it could work, I’d just like to know if you want to see an arbitrary cap for max tiers on an item in some way or not.
Not sure if the devs talked about any of the other super rare chase uniques, but at least before they adjusted Ravenous Void in 0.8.5 they did gave us the chance for a 4LP Ravenous Void, which was 1 in 16000000000000000000.
Now after 0.8.5 it is much more likely to get any LP on Ravenous Void, but I don’t think we have any numbers for that.
And I also don’t think the devs would want to reveal any exact numbers anyway.
This number is just so astronoomical that you can’t even grasp it, which kinda makes it funny to even reveal it.
But to get back to the topic: I personally think its really cool, to have this “open end” and no definitive “best possible items”, because everytime you find an extraordinary item you really don’t know if this is “the best item that you will ever see”.
Also in the context of trade or sharing your loot with fellow community members, you really never know what other outstanding items they might have received already.
When there is a clear best possible item, that is also so (relatively) reasonable to obtain, it is just boring.
I would prefer things to be called by their proper names, without substitution of concepts.
If it is stated that “At no point were those things stated to be even remotely attainable.”, but at the same time use the existence of 4xT7 as an argument for something, then this can be considered manipulation.
I would like to return to the topic, we are talking about the FP limit.
We currently have a limit on crafting 4xT5, which causes confusion among players when they say that there is a 4xT7 in the game.
I try to convey my point of view in more detail, since English is not my native language and I use a translator for complex turns of speech. If there are contradictions in my text, pay my attention to this, I will rephrase.
I tried to depict a conditional curve of the player’s interest. The degree of curvature is a separate topic for discussion, but this curve only shows that the player’s interest is nonlinear, which in my opinion is true.
On the X-axis, the gradation is Tir.
There is a gradation of “points of interest” on the Y axis.
The blue square shows the area of restrictions of FP.
The yellow square shows the area of content restrictions (the theoretical existence of items of maximum tir). The areas of these squares can be conditionally equated to the feeling of the player’s reward.
The only difference between the graph on the right and the graph on the left is the maximum limit of the tir, 22 instead of 30.
By reducing the theoretically maximum possible tir by ~26%, we got a doubling of the effect of the FP limit on the gameplay, turning it from a hindrance to achieve the goal into a tool to achieve the goal
In other words, in both cases, when crafting, the player receives the same number of points of interest (8000), but the value of these points is different, since in the first case the limit is 27,000, and in the second 10,600.
In the first case, we get 30% of the possible points due to crafting.
In the second case, we get 75% of the possible points due to crafting.
I do not pretend to the accuracy of proportions, I threw this concept only for visual display.
This is without taking into account the possibility of obtaining legendary items in the game. If we multiply the possible tir items by the possible variants of the legendary potential, I think that the maximum limit of the player’s interest in this coordinate system can easily overcome the 300,000 mark. Thus changing the proportions of the feelings of being awarded.
