The current system already has non-RNG components to it.
Making a new account to support your own argument is kinda scummy mate.
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Unfortunatly, EHG do not want players to be able to archieve their goals for their characters. It is true that having a non RNG crafting system would make this game better.
Letâs start on the very first thing which is balance. Does having T20 items (and these is not perfect items as some people might want to say they are, to be perfect theyâd need to be perfectly rolled withing their range) breaks the game? The answer is no and the reason is simple. Content difficulty is infinitely scalable and with scaling comes better rewards (more on that later). The early mapping would be easier sure, but once we enter empowered monoliths and go down letâs say 150 corruption, most people even in T20 gear are going to be struggling.
Now, why would full control over crafting be good? Letâs start with perception. The perception of a player over what is happening shapes his enjoyment of the game. If a player feels he is not progressing his build because he just canât find bases that are good to craft, that is, bases with very high affixes that he needs to the point that essencially he needs to find nearly âperfectâ pieces (and I use quotation marks because perfect includes perfect rolls), then the player just feels his time is wasted, his build is not going anywhere and therefore he wonât have fun leading him to quit the game since the point of playing games is to have fun.
Moving on from the perception issue and into a more mechanical issue, LE has no gear direction. It seems that the idea of LE gearing system is to maybe find a random usable piece and craft it to be as good as possible leading itemisation to essencial not have a goal but rather be this transient mismatch of things that barely work when put together and that are not really what any sensible person would do.
In a well developed crafting system, you want to have natural progression points. First you aim to reach a very specific state, then you aim for upgrading to the next state and then you reach a point where upgrading is no longer something that realistically happen, it is instead something that is so hard to get that upgrading is aspirational content.
So how does removing RNG archieves this? Well, that is actually rather simple. At first your goal is to get T20 items on the right bases. That is the very starting point for your character upgrades. Once your character has T20 gear in all slots and they are the base you want them to be, then you reached the first stage of a geared character.
So now it time to move on to better gear. Now you need to look for that exalted gear with T6 and T7 mods on them and probably gamble a little bit to remove any mods you donât want so you can craft on it. This is also bearing in mind that the item needs to be the right base. Once you got the item with letâs say a T7 on the right base and you managed to remove the unwanted affixes which was RNG, now you craft it to T22. Finding one T22 piece might not be that hard, you may in fact be lucky to get a single T22 before you finish getting everything to T20 considering class specific shards are hard to come by. Still that is one piece, upgrading every single piece to T22 and donât forget, in the correct base is going to take a long while, however it is definitly archievable.
Now that you have all your T22 gear, youâve reached what is called build completion. From here you have 2 choices. You either swap builds to try something different or you keep going for aspirational gear. But what is aspirational gear you ask? Well, anything T23+ is aspirational. You can have at best a T30 item. You also have the combination of uniques with rares which is very much aspirational gear since you are looking to bring the right modifiers or at least the better modifier if you donât have an items that can take 4 affixes potential.
As you can see, doing it like that makes the players have more fun as their perception of gear is positive. It also makes for a sensible upgrade path as opposed to having a mixmatch of things that shouldnât really be there but they are because essencially you can never what you want just because of RNG.
Before you say this is bad, there is an ARPG that gives player full control over crafting. Chronicon does this and it is by far the best crafting system ever developed in an ARPG. Their crafting system in universally praised by how good it is and all their crafting system does is give you full control over how you craft your items. There is a tiny bit of RNG in it but it is completly trivial that only makes you spend a bit more currency (and I do mean a bit, not a lot) early on to lock in the affixes you want in place. So we know a fully controlable crafting system works and itâs praised by everyone who played the game as the better crafting system in an ARPG. There are no escuses to justify RNG crafting systems anymore. RNG systems exist for one purpose, and that is to make the good players who have no life get all they want and wallow in a sense of superiority to everyone else who canât. That is not a postive system to have in a game.
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How can you âask againâ, when this is your first thread? Multiple accounts??
Also your question is not very concrete. Nobody is against innovation. But I donât get your point.
What is it you want to fix? Whatâs the concrete issue you have with the current system?
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ARPGs revolve around the hunt for loot, not the gradual accumulation of crafting materials. Crafting is a supplement to the item hunt, not a replacement. That player chose the wrong game genre if they donât like how that works.
âI went to a pool party and donât like that I got wet, so I took my ball and went homeâ is not a valid complaint.
It doesnât matter that âeveryone who plays Chroniconâ praises its crafting system when âeveryoneâ is approximately ânobodyâ. Holding up a game that nobody plays as a paragon of game systems design is an extremely weak argument.
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As with many others, you may have written 10 paragraphs but the only thing you communicated was âI want an item editorâ.
EHG has been very clear that they are not going to give you an item editor. Itâs time to stop asking for it.
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Talk about being disingenuous. You are ignoring the fact that you are still hunting for exalted items on the right bases. You are ignoring the fact that you are still looking for unique items especially with good rolls and legendary potential and even more ignorant is the fact that you are saying that ARPGs donât revolve about hunting for crafting materials which news flash for you, most of them are because without crafting materials, you cannot craft and crafting is still the way to get the best gear.
These nobodies include very well known streamers and top players of ARPGs including those you may potentially watch. Just to give a name I know for sure, ZiggyD but there are more.
The argument is by no means weak, you are just the are just the kind of person that rather than actually having an argument of your own why the current system is better, just attack someone elseâs argument with completly disingenuous things in order to try and make it look like itâs not valid. Indeed the strategy of the weak who cannot even defend as to why youâd think that the current system is better. Because you know it isnât and you canât argue that with any level of credibility.
No, we asked for a way to make crafting something that is actually useful instead of a tool that beneficts only the top 1% of the player base which unlike you make it sound, itâs actually rather reasonable.
EHG maybe have stated that they do not wish to go in that direction but there is an important thing you are missing here. EHG has to do something to sufficinetly distinguish itself from the competition or they will never grow. This is not me saying they wonât be viable in the long term, just that they will not grow and be able to take their game and their company to the next level.
Who says they have to grow and by how much is not up to the player base to decide. EHG has a very targeted plan on incremental scaled growth that succeeds in the long term despite what flaws we look at with ruby-colored glasses. Developers will only be able to satisfy so many groups before it costs too much to keep the core identity intact. It is the spiky growth and falls that doom so many titles that have come before and will be after LE. Each game has to earn the reputation by the methods they choose to engage customer feedback. Some stay some leave, but it is the reluctance to transition that causes that reaction, just because of change.
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What dictates the companyâs growth is itâs sales. Now it is true that they may not wish to grow, but it is likely that they do want to grow if they want to actually be competition because at the end of the day you got to offer something that isnât being offered or you need to offer the same but better, otherwise you are just a worse version of whatâs out there and that leads to people starting to leave.
Right now we are not at that step, the game has isnât released but as you talked about identity, what is LEâs identity as an ARPG? What are the things that sets it apart from the rest of the ARPGs?
It has a campaign that no one cares about, we want to get to the eng game cause thatâs the fun part. The same is true for all other games like this and on this point itâs never going to change and it could in fact be said that if you like the campaign more than the end game something is very wrong because the end game is where you are supposed to spend most of your time.
Is it their mapping system? It is a little different but itâs not so different and as far as quality goes, it is much worse than PoE.
Is it their crafting system? Well, itâs different than most crafting systems out there for sure, but it does exactly the same as all the other crafting systems where only the top 1% can ever craft good gear and everyone else has to make do with trash gear by comparison. This is a case where you can say the more things change, the more they stay the same and why I say it needs to change into something that is actually different and better.
What is the targeted audience with LE? I think perhaps this is the most important question to ask. Most ARPGs out there are targeted at a hardcore audience. The kind of people who are extremely good and can put 12 to 16 hours a day into the game. Problem is, the people who are not being served are the casual audience which are the larger part of the market. But these are the people who can usually put 2 or 3 hours a day into the game and they are at best average players. Some might be better than average, might even have 6 to 8 hours a day to put in, but they are still limited by their skill to make it further if the content is hard. Unfortunately, LE doesnât even has a place where it fits. Itâs closer to being hardcore with the crafting rules and how easy it is to die and how hard it is to build defenses but at the same time, it is easier than games like PoE for example. However this just shows a lack of direction with the game. It doesnât knows where it wants to go and is suffering as a result of this lack of identity.
In my opinion and an opinion is worth what it is, it would be better to cater to the casuals because not only they are the larger market but because the competition for the hardcore market is already too fierce and too entrenched. The fact of the matter is, trying to beat PoE at an hardcore game with the hundreds of talented employees they have and they years of game design they already put into place is just not realistic. The only realistic approuch is going for the casual players.
You wrote 10 paragraphs of words and said nothing more deep than âStrawberry ice cream is my favorite, I donât like it that EHG only offers chocolate and vanillaâ. You didnât make an argument, you stated your personal preference. Thereâs nothing to rebut. You are not right by default, or by virtue of your verbosity.
If you want contrary opinions, there are hundreds of them in dozens of threads that have already beaten your complaint to death. Go read them. Youâll find mine in there. But donât pretend that there is any combination of words that would change your mind when you canât even be honest with yourself about what you want, as demonstrated by:
Your example of a perfect crafting system is literally an item editor. âTalk about being disingenuousâ, indeed.
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If you failed at something even as basic as reading my first post here and then say I never made an argument, that really is on you and not on me. I explained quite well why the current system is bad from both perception point since perception matters for the enjoyment of a game and from a mechanical point too. Saying that those are opinions is again, you just trying to attack the person or argument with disingenuous claims as to try and make it look less valid. unfortunatly for you, not everyone is dumb enough to fall for that kind of thing.
And I donât need to go hunt around other threads, this is the current thread and Iâm actively speaking on it. If there is an actual reasonable argument that anyone can make to explain how the current system is better, I am willing to listen. I may or may not agree with it depends on the argument itself but I am not an unreasonable person. I listen to reason and I can admit to being wrong when I am. It doesnât hurts my pride to be wrong. That being said you are puting no arguments to demonstrate that I am.
And lastly, the example of a crafting I gave is not an item editor. An item editor by the very nature of what it is allows you absolute control over the item. That means I could grab a T0 item, make T30 with no failure chance and on top of that still make all the item rolls maxed out. That is what an item editor is and sugestion is very far from ever giving you perfect items. It gives you good starting items, it allows for slightly better items if you get lucky with the drops but youâll still be gambling because at the end of the day, even though the drop was already RNG enough to get an exalted item on the right base with the right exalted affix, you are almost guaranteed to still need to gamble on removing affixes that you donât need.
You also need to farm those crafting materials which may not sound like hard now, but the fact of the matter is that now matters very little, when multiplayer is in and you have leagues, you start from 0 every league that means farming for materials, farming for gold to buy materials and bases and so on. But an economy to a game is a good thing too.
Right now is the point where you need to get your bases covered, you need to make the mechanics that support the game working even if they may not feel entirely right because of all the acumulated items over the years, since when you release the game into a finalised state everything is working correctly.
Well, itâs a single player game that released 2 years ago & apparently itâs had 0.5-1m sales.
Itâs a bit rich saying that Bronco is being disingenuous when you say something like thisâŚ
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Yeah, single player and being pixel art is what essencially prevented them from having a lot more sales, but mechanically the game is really good. Best crafting system ever designed and best minion system ever designed.
Why is it disingenuous? Itâs things like this and the ridiculous levels of difficulty that have been destroying PoE for the last 4 years (although more noticable in the last 2).
Because this:
Is blatantly not true.
How is it not true?
Unless you are one of the top 1% players you are going to be finding an item with crafting potential every now and then, quite possibly not even 1 a day. When you actually try to craft it, odds are you arenât getting better than a T12 to T14. While they may just barely be a passable item, it is by no means a good item.
Compare this to the top 1% players who are extremely fast and extremely efficient and player 12 to 16 hours a day. Every day they will find at least a few douzens items with crafting potential which means that they will experience that gear growth and eventually even get a build with everything at T22 but even for them that will probably take months.
So who is beneficting from this crafting method? The player who is getting a subpar item every day or every other day and that is assuming they play at least 6 to 8 hours per day, or the player who get douzens of attempts a day until he eventually gets past the RNG barrier?
Hereâs what a PoE streamer said about crafting in PoE and he put it in the best words possible. In PoE, crafting is 100% RNG at low budget and 100% deterministic at high budget. The same kind of comparison can be made in LE, we just assume budgets here meaning having enough bases with potential to at least get to T20.
Therefore the ones who benefict are the 1%, not the whole playerbase. A good crafting system is one where it doesnât matters who you are or how good you are at the game. Once you start crafting you can just as easily reach the same end result. The only factor that should matter is whether or not you can find a workable base and therefore the 1% will get their full T22 gear faster than the rest, but everyone will be able to get T20 fast and everyone can without a shadow of a doubt get T22 with enough time played. Gear above that remains inspirational gear that anyone may or may not get but again the 1% will definitely have a better chance but we are talking extreme levels so that is fine.
I want to reply to this particular issue, but I want to preface it by saying I really donât like the tone of the conversation right now, and I donât want to be a part of that general tone. However, I think thereâs some misunderstandings here that need to be addressed.
I donât normally talk about my playtime or my âstatusâ in the community, but for this situation I do want to lay it out a bit so that Iâm not dismissed out of hand. Iâve been playing this game since late alpha and I have about 4,000 hours in the game. Iâm also a âcontent creatorâ and Iâve created content for both beginners and advanced players. This includes the âLast Epoch Universityâ series, which is targeted largely at brand new players. I stream the game regularly and welcome even the most basic of questions from players, no matter how many times Iâve already answered it. I say this all of this to make it clear that my perspective heavily involves the new player experience, and I think the new player experience, as well as the casual experience, are very important to the health of the game.
With that being said, I want to be clear that the crafting system, as it stands, couldnât be farther from a system that only benefits the top 1% of players. Itâs very new player friendly, very easy to make upgrades, and in fact is so powerful that it probably makes the overall speed of progression for Last Epoch right now far too quick to adequately support a seasonal system. I feel like this is where the primary disconnect is, and the crux of the argument between players lies in this fundamental misunderstanding of how the LE crafting system works. It is not at all like PoE, with nothing remotely like the complexities that are found in that game. There are also many avenues of improvement on crafts, and most of them are relatively obvious to the player. Once you get into exalted items, most crafts end far higher than T12 to T14, and exalteds begin to drop before you even reach endgame. And if youâre only finding one or fewer items that are worth crafting on per day, then you are the 1%, because your gear is already extremely good. Even with builds that can farm at 500+ corruption I can find way more than that even in a four hour play session. And if your gear is really that good, then you sure as hell arenât averaging a Tier 12-14 when youâve finished the craft. The only alternative I can see is that your build isnât strong enough to farm the appropriate content for the gear you need, which in that case just means you probably need some assistance with build making (a very common problem for players with a game that has this much complexity).
The crafting system also offers a very powerful level of deterministic crafting already, which, as I understand it, is what this whole post is calling for. The very fact that you can choose which prefixes to upgrade and, when an item has an open slot, choose the prefix to place in that slot, is a very powerful form of deterministic crafting that PoE simply does not have. I understand the desire for fully deterministic crafting, but when youâre trying to make a game that players will want to play for weeks, even months, at a time (which is generally how seasons tend to work) that kind of power comes at a cost. Usually, that cost is something like exponentially increasing costs of crafting materials as you continue to craft on an item, which creates a slog of a grind that, well, benefits the top 1% of players because they have more time to grind. For me, the crafting system as it stands is more or less in the sweet spot between being deterministic and RNG. It allows the system to be powerful while also giving the player agency to strategize, and the RNG allows for situations where players can get lucky while also not forcing a very tedious grind with very few dopamine hits, since weâd just be looking at a number going up, waiting to get over whatever threshold we need before we can use our shards to hit the next tier.
I hope you donât take this as an attack, but as a gentle correction from someone who understands the crafting system at a very intimate level. I think you have some misunderstandings that, frankly, are pretty common at this point in development, and I hope the devs can find a way to fix that. When a player fully understands the implications of the crafting systems, theyâre very likely going to see just how powerful it is, and just how easy it is to get very good gear with relatively little investment compared to other games in the genre.
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I donât see this as an attack, I do see this as a first atempt at a civil discussion over how the crafting works and how we view it in our experiences. With that said let me point out the places where I disagree with you.
The approuch is different and I did so so when I posted about the problems I find with the current crafting system, however itâs only the approuch that is different, the end result is essencially the same. But let me elaborate. Letâs say I find an an item that has some ok rolls on it, maybe I have a total combine affixes that I care about in it of 7 or 8. It may have a total of affixes that make it a T12 or higher, but the ones that specifically matter to me are only 7 or 8. At this point the item is at best a T8. Even if I upgrade it a bit, Iâm unlikely to get above a T14 which is passable, but not good. Letâs compare it to PoE. I find an item with 2 decent affixes and probably a few that donât matter. I put it on the crafting bench and bench craft something else that is decent too. Itâs an ok item, but by no means a good item. For the average player what you can craft in both cases are not good items, they are passible at best. So even if the approuch is different, the end result is the same and the end result is the problem here.
Let me tell you how I search for items which I imagine is way people should be searching. Letâs say Iâm searching for boots. I will search only for the specific base that I want, any type of boots that is not that base is out of the filter. Then I have 4 specific affixes I want in it and thatâs what goes into the filters with a search for any combination of those 4 affixes and a total tier of 7 or more of those affixes. This was the example for boots, but this example is valid for each type of item that you are using excluding uniques you need of course. Right now you are almost never going to find a drop because you need the correct base with at least a decent amount of affixes that you need. Hereâs the problem, not only items are incredibly rare, you almost always get items with 7 to 8 affixes that you want and now you are left with 1 of 2 options 99% of the times. Either itâs a blue and it has incredibly low crafting potential so good luck bring that above T12 or itâs a rare that needs you to gamble in removing affixes that are bad for you before you can start crafting. It normally bricks before itâs even craftable and even when you are lucky to not brick it immediatly, it rarely ever goes above T14.
Now letâs talk about how quickly you find items and 500+ corruption. Letâs begin with the fact that casual players donât do 500+ corruption, often they donât get into empowered monoliths because their build just feels bad, not because itâs bad but because of the lack of gear progression. Even when they do, even with the best possible builds out there, they die very often in 200+ corruption and still die a few times in 100 corruption. This is because the gear isnât in a great state but even if it was, a great deal of the layered defenses come from mechanics like ward or leech, mechanics that have a build up time gained in combat and they die before they can get those going. The higher the corruption, the more likely they are to die before they can engage those defensive layers.
There is also a disconnect between how fast you play and how fast your average player will play. One thing you often see in youtube vidios about currency making strategies is how you can make X amount of currency in X time and that disregards the incredibly simple fact that these people, much like you run maps very fast, in PoE these people run a map in under 3 minutes but the average player normally takes 5 to 10 minutes per map with the exact same build, sometimes up to 15 minutes. So you saying you can find more items in a 4 hours play session has to do with how restrictive your filters are, how fast you run maps and what corruption level you are playing on. If I tell you spend 8 minutes per map and you are only allowed to clear anything between you and the most direct route to the objective, play unempowered monoliths and have the same restriction filters as me. I am sure you will not, under any circunstances find anywhere nearly as many items as you are saying you do. Now, this game is faster than PoE in the sense that you donât clear maps, you go for the objective so you save some time, but letâs a assume a player that is even a bit slower than I am.
Also I donât play bad builds. While I am not good enough to make perfect builds, I can make good enough and what I still do is follow someoneâs builds that are able to melt content. My problem is not the build itself. To give you an example. I played arc/nova mage with the abillity totarget the nova at a specific location which is at least an A tier build. Iâve played Ice minions prior to the hugte minion nerfs when they were considered S tier. Iâve also played the void night aura bomber build which is also an S tier build this patch just so you have a frame of reference of what builds Iâve used. Sure enough Iâve tried some less efficient builds too but my frame of reference is the good ones, not the things I tried to mess with to see if I could do something interesting.
That power does not need to come at a cost. This is what the OP of this thread was saying and it is what I am saying as well. There is absolutly no need to associate a cost with a fully deterministic crafting system and Iâll explain why one more time.
When you get to monoliths, you imediatly upgrade all your gear to T20, not all of it is going to be the right bases because some might still be level locked, but youâll still have a workable build. T20 is now the default starting point with the exception of some bases and possibly some affixes that are rarer like class specific ones.
As you go through the monolith on your way to empowered, you will finish the T20 with all the right bases and all the affixes you want and your build is now in the first stage of completion.
Once you get into empowered monoliths you might have a T21 or T22 item already but now your objective is to slowly find those items capable of getting to T22 and this will take time because you will have to gamble on the removal of affixes which can brick the item.
Eventually you will get to a full T22 build (excluding uniques) which is a completed build state. For the average player this will probably not have been any less than a month, possibly 2. Now you can chose to either play another build to try out new things or just for a change of pace, or you could shoot for aspirational items. These are items that can range from T23 all the way up to T30 as well as crafting legendary items.
This is why there is no need for a cost. You have plenty of reasons to stay and play, you have things to look forward to but the most important thing is that at no point you will feel like your build is stuck in a bad state because you canât realistically upgrade it even though there should be plenty of room to still craft but you just ran out of RNG.
Are you saying youâre getting a couple of good affixes, a couple of bad affixes, and leaving the bad affixes when you craft? If this is the case, thatâs not a particularly good crafting base, or I would be using glyphs of chaos/despair to try and improve the rest. If thatâs not what you mean, then Iâm misunderstanding your example and will need you to elaborate in order to be on the same page.
The crafting bench in PoE is probably the most basic version of crafting that the game has to offer, and one of the few areas that resembles LEâs crafting system. However, on itâs own that system is far more limited than what the LE system can do. Itâs the combination of crafting systems in PoE that makes it so powerful (and so ridiculously complicated).
This is similar to my system. However, Iâm not quite as restrictive on bases since I know I can shuffle some affixes around if need be, so usually there are at least a few bases Iâm willing to work with, and I donât generally need 7 tiers of at least 2 affixes, since A) higher level stuff has higher forging potential, so I have more play, and B) chaos glyphs and despair can make up for what seems like warts in items. Chaos is a crapshoot for items that arenât worth investing a despair in, but if I get lucky can become an upgrade, and despair is for the stuff that has very high potential but just needs to open up a particular affix slot to make it all work.
Based on the differences in our filters and our experiences, it seems to me like your filter might be a bit too strict, and itâs missing some high potential items.
Again, with the items being âincredibly rareâ this makes me think your filter is too strict and youâre not letting the crafting system do some work for you. As far as the blue items goâŚyeah, usually donât craft on those at mid end game and beyond. Items having an affix that needs adjusting is definitely a common problem, but not one that we donât have solutions for. I go back to my previous statement about chaos and despair glyphs, and emphasize despair. One of the less obvious uses for this is to remove a low tier affix that isnât right for your build by moving it to the sealed slot. On exalted items, tier 1 is guaranteed, and tier 2 is close to guaranteed. Itâs a pretty reliable strategy but definitely not an obvious one.
This makes me think youâre using Rune of Removal instead of Chaos and Despair. Save your removals for acquiring affixes you need. If an item could be good but needs a better affix and isnât worth a despair, chaos it. You get the upgrade as well as the change so if it works out youâre way better off than a removal and have several shots at it as long as the affix isnât already tier 4. If that one affix is the only thing in your way to an amazing item, seal it.
This wasnât to say that casual players should be doing 500+ corruption (really nobody should be doing that right nowâŚ). Itâs to say that Iâm playing on a build that is already geared enough to do that level of content, yet still find items worth crafting on that could be potential upgrades.
But no, a lack of gear progression isnât stopping them from doing 500 corruption. The game is just very top heavy towards certain builds right now. Many builds just struggle to reliably handle that level of corruption even with really good gear. Fortunately, it doesnât matter because that level of corruption isnât important, it was just an example of how even a build that is already at that level can still find gear worth working with.
Thereâs some things here I agree with, and some I donât. Gear isnât in a great state right now, since builds generally find much more of their power from skill trees and passives right now. Thatâs not an issue with the crafting system. Even if you had fully deterministic crafting and could make T20+ gear with ease, this would still be true. Iâm not sure what you mean about layered defenses coming from ward and leech. Leech is definitely super powerful right now, and many builds can get so much leech that a single attack can basically instantly fill their HP bar. Sustain is not generally considered a problem in high level corruption, getting one shot is. As far as ward, there are also a good number of builds that can maintain ward gen at high corruption. Using Vessel of Strife can make almost any build good at ward gen and itâs enemy independent, since it interacts with Health Regen. I hope you understand that I donât mean this disrespectfully, but these sound like build issues, not gear issues. Some builds just top out earlier than others.
Sure, definitely. But this isnât a crafting problem, or even a drop rate problem. If I decide to spend 8 minutes in a map while for some reason not clearing anything extra and only do unempowered monos and have a filter thatâs way too strict, thatâs on me. By the way, Iâve played many many builds in this game, so I do have a pretty good understanding of the difference in clear speed and efficiency between builds. But even slower builds (that are still âgoodâ builds) can gear very quickly just following some general farming strategies.
Itâs interesting you mention this build because itâs actually one of the most gear independent builds in the entire game, as show by Lizard_IRL in this video. Did you feel that you were undergeared for the content on that build?
Youâve just made all loot in the game that isnât exalted or a base you donât have irrelevant, and the first item of the right base that drops will make those irrelevant as well. This completely undermines the looting system.
The difference in power between a T20 and a T22 is frankly, pretty negligible. Thereâs little reason to push further if you have perfect T20s already. It wonât make a meaningful difference in the content that you can do or even your efficiency in that content.
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Iâm saying Iâm getting a couple good affixes with 7 or 8 tiers of total affixes mixed in with 1 or 2 bad affixes whose tier isnât important since they are bad for the build. I used chaos runes too but what happens is that it never gives me what I want cause itâs a big list of things it can roll and the odds are very bad on top of wasting crafting potential. Rune of removal just has better odds of working. Despair I donât use, despair are for making better items, not for locking garbage I donât want into the item.
Again, itâs not important because the end result is what matters and in both cases you end up with the average player never being able to get good items.
Iâve already explained my view on chaos/despair so no need to go there again. As for not needing 7 tiers of affixes, even in empowered monoliths, items have ridiculously low crafting potential and I mean rare items. Generally speaking it takes 4 to 6 atemps before crafting potential runs out. Assuming a best case scenario of 6 atempts, you need to find a T14 item ready to craft. Having a demand for a total combined of 7 tiers of affixes that I want before it even shows up is actually quite a low requirement if you are looking at crafting a T20 item and Iâd say itâs nearly impossible to bring that to T20. The level of RNG required for that is insane.
Again, if anything my filter isnât strict enough. The reason I need to keep 7 tiers affixes as the the lower base is to make sure it wonât throw away an exalted item with a tier 7 affix that could be useful for my build just because the total affixes didnât meet the requirement.
Again, I am not nearly strict enough if the point is crafting at least T20. I need to have a lot of high tier affixes to have the chance of being able to get the item finished before I run out of crafting potential. Items really donât have a lot of crafting potential. Maybe at 500+ corruption they do, but at the realistic corruption levels for the average player? No, not at all and chaos/despair are not good runes to use here. They just consume crafting potential for a very unlikely payoff when compared to removal.
It is, in fact a lack of gear progression is preventing players from even wanting to reach empowered monoliths because it feels bad to play since you canât upgrade. Perception matters a lot more than some people give it credit. Secondly once you do hit empowered, most average players will struggle even with the best builds if they donât get the upgrades they need. They just donât play that well, they are the average, not the good ones.
What I mean by layered defenses is that not all defenses come in several layers. Total HP is on layer, resistences is another layer, crit immunity is another layer and endurance is yet another layer and these are just the 4 basic layers. If you have the 4 basic layers handled, you actually still have a build that is squishy. You need to layer even more defenses some of which result from attacks, these defenses are block, dodge, freezing, leeching, ward, etc⌠You need to have at least one or two extra layers of defense on top of the basic ones just to be moderatly safe.
I agree that the skill tree provides a very large boost of power. Iâm not sure I agree itâs more power than items, Iâd say itâs probably closer to 50/50 but it does provide a good amount of power. That being said you are losing an insane amount of power by not having good gear. This is an undeniable fact even if you want to say the skill tree has more power. This amount of power you are losing will manisfest itself in gameplay by you clearing and killing bosses slower, it will make you easier to kill as well. Even more important it will feel terrible when you are playing through monoliths, rarely find an item that is able to be an upgrade after crafted and almost every single time it bricks before it becomes an upgrade. Even if you are gaining levels and therefore power, a lot of people will feel that they are not progressing because their gear is not progressing. I will say it again, perception matters because it directly impacts how much fun you have with the game.
Not everyone plays the game in zoom zoom mode. They take it at their own pace, this is doubly true for casual players. I am not trying to run as fast as humanly possible through a level. Iâm not going out of my way to clear more of the map, but Iâm not trying to be as efficient as itâs humanly possible because that is no fun, that makes the game a job. You can easily assume I will take at least twice as long as you to run each map and Iâm by no means the slowest type of player. You should also be assuming that whatever time it takes to do a map, Iâm doing it on the exact same build as you just to put things into perspective.
Depends on what you understand for undergeared. Did I had enough layers of defense to feel safe? Yes. Did I have enough damage to do the content I was in? Yes. Did I feel I was killing and clearing fast enough? No. Did I feel I was able to progress my gear? No.
So it was playable but not enjoyable as a result. I also didnât liked the playstyle too much due to the way autocast works with the cast stutter but that was not the main reason I stopped.
I disagree, what I have made is make a player feel like his build is coming together, heâs got the basic gear for maping and that will complete once heâs high level enough. After that the hunt is indeed for exalted bases.
You have a 3 tiered build system. Base where you just get your T20s, Exalted where you spend what is probably going to be 1 to 2 months getting the build to a really good shape and lastly aspirational gear hunt. This works well because at no point you feel like your build is stagnant as a result of things not being realistically upgradable and you are constantly hunting for better gear.
This is very much incorrect, a T7 mod has about twice as much power as a T5. That means you can get somewhere between 50% and 100% more damage out of your gear from upgrading from a T20 to a T22. That is anything but insignificant.
Yeah, use Chaos on things that would only be an upgrade if you got lucky. Chaos drops like candy, so itâs easy to throw a few at an item and see what happens. It doesnât have to work out every time. As far as DespairâŚwellâŚthe tool is there. If youâre unwilling to take advantage of the power of that tool, itâs not a problem with the crafting system.
This just isnât true. From your response to me, it seems like youâre unwilling to follow strategies that would improve your success, and are doubling down on what you think you should do despite getting advice to the contrary. I do hope you give some of my suggestions a shot and see if it helps. There are plenty of people in the community that are telling you that what youâre saying here just isnât the reality of the crafting system or loot.
Thereâs a lot of variance in the crafting system that can cause much more than 6 crafts on any particular piece of gear, including rare items. There are 4 systems in the place that can cause the player to get âluckyâ on any given craft:
- A craft rolls and ends up costing very low forging potential
- A craft rolls, and then has a chance (about 30%) to reroll something between 1FP and the FP of the initial roll (example: You have a craft that costs 1-15 FP. You roll 10FP, but then you hit on the 30% chance to reroll. Now you roll between 1-10. You roll a 3. Your final FP cost is now 3)
- You get a crit success, which now costs 0FP and gives a free additional tier. so two crafts for 0FP
- You successfully use a Glyph of Hope, and the craft costs 0FP
Itâs not uncommon to go on a chain of lucky rolls and end up with a crazy good item, even when the initial FP wasnât amazing. So no, itâs not nearly impossible to bring these up to T20, and at this point I think itâs worth pointing out that even if you were to only get a T18 or T19, that is probably a very good item that will only be slightly worse than the T20 and if it has the right affixes and you prioritized them properly itâll very much be deep endgame viable.
I canât force you to change your filter, I can only point out that it seems too strict to me. If youâre not willing to use Chaos or Despair to improve an item, then I guess it makes sense that youâre being this strict, since you have much less hope of turning an item in your favor than I do.
In the previous post, I also forgot to mention something about filtering for only four affixes. Does this mean youâre only filtering for one resistance on any given item? If you planned for Necrotic resistance on your gloves, are you not also filtering for other types of resistances and shuffling as needed? If so, that would definitely hinder your ability to find good items.
Corruption does not have any direct affect on the FP on an item. It does make finding exalted items and items with more affixes/tiers more likely. By the way, you keep referring back to my 500 corruption example as if most of my experience is in that realm. I reiterate again that there no good reason to be doing 500 corruption right now. Even on my builds that can farm at that level, I drop it to closer to 300 or less because the clear speed is better and there are diminishing returns on corruption when it comes to improving drops. Iâve also made a lot of SSF characters, running them through to empowered and beyond, so my understanding of loot drops is through doing the same content as you, just doing it many many times and with more focused strategies. Iâm trying to assist you with some of those strategies, so that your experience can be closer to mine.
Removal also costs FP and doesnât give you anything in return. It doesnât upgrade the affix like chaos and isnât as controlled as Despair nor does it give you the sealed affix. You need to change your strategy here.
Sure, perception matters, which is why I wanted to discuss this. One area that I think could be improved is how some of the mechanics of crafting are hidden from the player. For example, very few players know about the reroll system I mentioned earlier. Until recently, us veterans didnât even know the mechanics of it, just that crafts skewed towards lower FP. We still donât know the exact odds on it (although based on what we do know itâs almost certainly 30%). An actual crafting tutorial that laid out the mechanics of crafting would go a long way in helping.
Well, the devs agree that items currently provide too little power, and are making adjustments to put more power into gear. This is something that has been outlined on several occasions by Mike, both in his weekly dev stream and through Discord. It is definitely not 50/50 right now.
it depends on what you mean by âgood gearâ. Having no gear vs tier 20s that have all the right affixes? Sure. Going from t16 to t20 with the same affixes on both? Not really. Itâs a pretty small jump.
You keep saying this, but itâs contrary to so many playerâs experience. Youâre going to need more evidence to show that this is the typical experience, but I donât think you can because itâs not the typical experience for most players. I guess this might be typical if youâre hellbent on using Rune of Removal to try and upgrade your gear, which is why we donât use that strategy. Itâs just a worse strategy overall than Chaos/Despair.
Which is why I mentioned that I have a lot of experience with slower builds as well. Your example, though, isnât a realistic one. If you just went to the objective and only killed enemies in the way while using any of the builds youâve described, then it wonât average anything close to 8 minutes. To be clear, the builds youâve used in the past are much faster than a number of builds Iâve played, and they donât experience anything like what youâre describing here.
Iâm sorry, but if youâre not clearing fast enough on that build, then itâs not your gear. That build is so gear independent that you can take your weapon off and still do very good damage. Something needs to be tweaked in your skills/passives.
So youâre saying, that if you got all tier 20s with the right affixes and perfect rolls at empowered then you would still be looking for rare items to pick up on the ground that have the same bases as yours? Why, exactly, would you want to pick those up? They cannot possibly be an upgrade for you outside of sealing, and why not just seal as soon as you get a despair? After all, with your system, youâll only need one Despair per item since itâs deterministic so youâll always nail the seal. So keep the gear youâve been crafting on at tier 19 until you find a despair, use it and craft the item up, and boom you have a tier 24 now and you didnât have to pick up a single additional piece of gear to get there. This is why your suggestion invalidates the looting system.
It will not take you 1-2 months to make exalteds in a deterministic crafting system. Also, like I mentioned, the difference in power between a T20 and a T22 is very small, so thereâs little incentive to push this. And what exactly falls under âaspirational gear huntâ? Youâve already perfected all of your items. If youâre hoping to get anything above a single exalted affix on your item, good luck. The odds are devastatingly against you.
It does not mean that. This would only hold true if all of your power came from gear and wasnât heavily determined by skill trees with multipliers and passives. Even if that werenât the case, this still wouldnât be true because youâre only upgrading one of your affixes on a 4 (or 5) affix item. Your estimate that getting a tier 7 on all of your gear leads to 50-100% more damage is, frankly, wildly incorrect. Itâs probably not even 10% for almost every build.
4 Likes
After spending some time lurking with some popcorn in this thread, @McFluffin beat me to a reply that I wanted to makeâŚ
@Elhazzared, I agree with McFluffin here⌠your approach to crafting is doing yourself, your enjoyment of the game and the crafting system a disservice.
My experience is no-where near what you describe - so much that I would even be as bold as to suggest your entire premise is based on a really bad approach to crafting & loot in general. I have been a chaos crafter since I used a removal once and realised how crap it was related to losing FP for no gain and how much better the alternatives are. I dont use despair as often as McFluffin does, but its in the toolbox definitely⌠Loot filters based on tiers are exactly how I approach things, but I am very careful wrt to getting too strict⌠that is a rabbit warren down which a lot of great potential crafting items can get lost and absolutely destroy any enjoyment from loot chases and drops - a core of ARPG games.
I have lots of thoughts and suggestions on crafting, item levels, impossible drops and issues with the current loot chase that I have hashed out many times in other threads but I simply cannot agree with your assesment of crafting as a base from which your suggestions are derived.
6 Likes
I used chaos runes multiple times. I can tell you, not even once have I ever got it to change into what I want because the problem is that Iâm trying to change an affix that I donât want and randomly picking one from a list that has possibly 20 or more. Of course the odds of success are very low. Theorically speaking, it could turn a bad item into a good item but realistically speaking, you will get that affix to tier 5 and still not get what you want at which point with how much crafting potential you already lost the item is definitly bricked and despair, Iâm not sure the odds of locking but again, I wouldnât waste a despair to make a better than T14 item, Iâd use it if Iâm trying to do a T26 item. It is a waste of a rare rune otherwise and quite likely a waste of crafting potential on par with a rune of removal.
The problem is as explained, Iâve tried those strategies. When I saw the reveal for the chaos runes I was like. Oh, that has huge potencial! But after trying it it on many items with an exact success rate of 0% I was forced to face reality. They just donât work for someone who isnât getting douzens of crafting bases a day.
You already explain the problem here very well. The player has to get lucky. But let me go further, itâs not just getting lucky, itâs getting ridiculously lucky to even upgrade anything at all to T20 and T20 should be the starting point, not the end goal, not when you have exalted items with possitbilities of going up to T30 (with T22 being theoricaly reasonable to archieve) and legendary item crafting.
If I make my item less strict, all that is going to happen is showing a bunch of items with much lower affixes which in turn means it needs more work to get to the same state of the items I am already trying to craft but the same crafting potential. Considering the items Iâm getting donât ever go above T14, what chances do you think I have of going higher with items that already have lower affixes?
From my observation it does. Iâve seen at best items with 24 crafting potencial and that is around corruption 115. Usually a bit lower around corruption 100. It rarely even gets to crafting potencial 20 before empowered monoliths. But Iâve seen people drop crafting potencial of over 30 in very high levels of corruption so while I have no evidence as I cannot see the game code, I can only make an educated guess that corruption does indeed affect how much crafting potencial an item has.
But that isnât the issue. The issue is that the methods we have to craft items are constantly getting T12 to T14 and that almost every single time items break without becoming an upgrade. That is the perception the average player has. What we need is the means to be able to properly upgrade our gear so we donât feel stuck.
That could be good or could be bad. If the devs simply add more power to items and make no further adjustments then that is fine. If they remove power from the tree to give it to the items or make monsters harder to compensate for the extra power then itâs terrible. Thatâs what PoE has been doing since 2018 and why itâs such a piece of garbage now-a-days. I sure hope the devs donât go that route.
Granted if they take power from the tree and put it into items but make it so crafting is fully deterministic, that is ok.
Except those 4 tiers missing are usually the damage tiers which make a huge difference since first players need to take care of their survivability so yes, it makes a big difference of 4 tiers in every single item. To top that off, the average tier of gear is T14, not T16. T16 was the average gear tier before the crafting changes, funny how it goes.
Itâs not, you are forgeting the casual players rarely complain and the few that do, their voice gets drowned by all the 1%ers who donât want a change. I can only speculate why they donât want the change but in the interest of not souring the discussion Iâll leave it at that.
On average I take about 5 minutes per monolith. There are some that are faster because the objective is closeby, but there are actually far more that takes longer because itâs something like going after multiple spires. That said, I am not the slowest player. While I canât compare myself to anyone else in LE since I donât really have friends who play LE, when comparing myself against other people in PoE, I generally take 6 to 7 minutes per map. There are people there who take 15 minutes with the same build as me. The average player takes around 10 minutes per map. The reason I am saying this is to give you an idea on how fast I am going through maps in LE compared to the average player. When I told you to spend 8 minutes per map and only kill what is in your path to the goal, Iâm not exagerating, this is the casual player experience.
You may say you do content directed newer players and casual players, I have no doubts you do. But you just donât understand the difference between how you play the game and how someone with much less skill and much less interested to play as optimally as possible is. I donât mean this as offense, but it is a fact that people who are much better than someone else at something cannot comprehend how they arenât as good or at least close enough to their level. Someone in my position has a better insight to this because I know canât do it as well or as fast as you, but by the same token, itâs hard if not impossible for me to grasp how someone who is much worse than me cannot even do what I do. However I can at least understand the feeling and the problem because I can compare myself with both people much better and people much worse. You on the other hand do not because you are amoung the top players already so you struggle to understand the difficulties even if you can accept we have them.
There is nothing that is gear independent. You can increase your damage output massively by having good gear and this is true for all builds, no matter what you put in front of me. You can say there are builds that will not perform well without good gear and builds that can still perform well without good gear and Iâll agree to that. But gear always makes a big difference. also understand that fast clearing is also a matter of perception. Take my other 2 builds. The mage build instantly destroys anything in the AoE as soon as I attack. The minion build clears the entire screen very fast. The aura bomber needs to be making the bombs and they have a relatively slow travel time and often it needs multiple hits to kill plenty of enemies leading to much worse clearing. With good gear this gets mostly fixed, but it doesnât destroys the entire screen fast enough to feel good at T12 to T14 gear.
No, If I have all T20s Iâm looking for uniques, especially with good rolls and especially with legendary potencial as well as exalted gear. Normal rares wouldnât be important anymore.
You need to find the right base with the specific T22 affix you want to then craft. Finding 1 of these items, it wonât take 1 to 2 months, with any luck you may even have that before empowered monoliths (which by the way, for the casual player can take weeks if they have like 2 or 3 hours to play a day but it would still be expectable at least 1 week for the casual player that has maybe 6 to 8 hours to put most days). Finding every single item that isnât a unique with the right base and the right affix is going to take the casual player 1 to 2 months easily.
As for the power of T20 vs T22, iâll say it again, a T7 affix. Is about twice as powerful as a T5 affix. In any piece of gear you can have 1 or 2 mods that contribute to your damage, in many cases itâs only an attribute like intelligence and the item has no other damage affixes like say, boots for example. In an item like this you are getting 100% more damage from that specific item. In items that have 2 damage affixes you could think at one of them being a T7 would increase your power by at least 50% but in reality it should be more since one of those affixes is going to contribute a higher level of power to your build than the other and thatâs the one you are looking to get a T7. This means every single item gains anywhere between 50% and 100% damage to your build than previously. How much is this compared to the total you tree nets you? Well, itâs hard without going into specific examples so Iâll try to use a theroical number as an approuch here. Letâs say a all T20 gear your build has a total of +1000% fire damage. Increasing 7 of your items from T20 to T22 you can easily end up with 1200% to 1300% fire damage, that is a 20% to 30% total damage gain. It is not by any means insignificant.
Also letâs talk about perfect items. T20s are NOT perfect items. I really cannot emphasize enough how a T20 is by no means a perfect item. It merely is an item that has the 4 affixes you have upgraded to itâs maximum upgradable tier. A T20 item is perfect if their rolls including the implicits on the base are all maxed out withing their tier. Even then that is not a perfect item. A truely perfect item is a unique transformed into legendary with 4 legendary potential and literally every single affix with a max roll.
A T20 is therefore very, very far from perfection. T20 should never be taken as a perfect item, it should always be seen as the starting point because it is the point where you start your hunt for the good gear, the exalted and later on the aspirational gear.
What is aspirational gear then? Any item that is T23+ and legendary items are aspirational gear. The kind of gear that is very rare to get your hands on.
Sure enough anyone can craft a legendary item but we are talking something, something that you would actually consider using and that anything that came from the legendary crafting is actually useful because you may get a resistance transfered on a 1 legendary potencial that you really didnât need as an example.