Here is where I think you may have an item awareness issue. I have a T19 helm on a VK that is better than a T23 (3 6’s and a 5) just because the stats are correct for the build. Not all Tiers and stats are equal.
Aspirational gear is gear that is optimized for the build until a better version of the T19 is made or found, not the T23.
No, you are just making wrong assumptions. The assumption of ANY item that is meant to be in your character is that any affix it has is the perfect affix you need. So T19 with the 4 right affixes is going to be worse than a T23 with the right 4 affixes.
It’s a bit disingenuous to not compare like to like.
No it is not, you made an open ended statement with a question. Then proceeded to frame the answer you wanted by continuing to comment. THAT is further out of line than any item for item comparison it is like for like, a VK helm. Just because you can type a lot of words and fill walls of text does not make you right. Learn to be concise. Stop attempting to put words in our mouths, this is same as calling me a liar which is against ToS.
Pretty sure you are the one with the messed up perspective. You basically consider T20 to be the starting point. T20 should be the end point and anything beyond that is bonus.
This is a common problem with many people here. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of itemization in this game. I don’t know how long you have been playing this game for, but beyond T20 is a relatively new thing. Maybe understanding that will reign in your perspective a bit.
The “Perfect or Garbage” attitude is a common problem with certain types of gamers in every game. It’s one of the most poisonous perspectives in gaming, and it’s actually hilarious because I seem to only ever see it come from casual players aping at thinking like the hardcore players they wish they could be.
Exalted items have been around for a long while now, it’s just getting a 5th affix and legendary items that are new.
And this is a point where we will disagree. T20 is from my perspective, no matter how you want to paint it, the starting point, not the end point. If T20 is the end point, the whole crafting system is nothing but a huge failure.
No matter how you look at it, you have so much more to look forward past T20 items that to look at T20 items as the end point rather than the begining would make the crafting system like a joke. Why would there even exist anything past T20 if T20 is the end? That just makes absolutly no sense.
Do you also somehow think that T12 and T14 items are perfectly fine items? Because out of that, T10 is the bare minimum you need to fix most of your defenses which means most items that are being archieved by the casual players have 2 to 4 tiers of damage affixes which is horribly low unless of course you discard survivability to do the damage but then you are constantly dying which for most people isn’t fun.
No matter how you want to look at it, T20 HAS to be the begining and not the end.
Hey Elhazzared, so I’m not going to reply to everything you’ve said, since at this point it’s really just going around in circles. As a player who understandings crafting, looting, and the new player experience intimately, and who spends a lot of time theorycrafting as well as communicating with other veterans of the game, as well as new players who are asking me about content I’ve made specifically for them, I’ve done what I can to try and fill in gaps and resolve misunderstandings here. If you just want to keep insisting that my crafting strategies don’t work and your loot filter is clearly better then that’s your choice. I’m confident that I understand these systems very, very well, and I have done what I can to pass that knowledge along to you. I hope you’re able to find a comfortable spot with LE’s crafting and looting systems in the future or, if not, find a game that fits your interests better.
You’ve passed along what you think works better for you and i am sure it does works well for you, but the way you play and the way a casual player plays is worlds apart and the amount of items that are worth crafting which will be found is going to be the big difference here.
This is a shame because LE right now is in a position to have a huge growth by taking all of the PoE players in that have been alienated over the past 4 years. Even more so with D4 looking to be an MMORPG rather than a dedicated ARPG. LE has never been in such a good postion to grow and establish itself as this moment. But if they don’t cater to the casual crowd which is right now the only crowd that has nowhere to go in the ARPG market, then they just have a worse product than PoE and it will take PoE far more screw ups than what they have done so far before PoE hardcore players look at LE as a reasonable alternative.
We have tried. Recently there have been commenters saying LE HAS to take over the market. It renders any commentary completely irrational. Anything put here is a waste of our time going forward. Their mind is made up and it is the only thing that matters.
True, there has been a few people saying that LE has to take this opportunity now that PoE did some major mistakes with this league although to be fair it’s been nothing but mistakes for the past 4 years from PoE. But that means EHG cannot just keep doing what they are doing and completly ignore this opportunity. They need to develop the game to a state where all the people who are unhappy with it want to actually come to LE. Of course multiplayer needs to be in place which they are working on but that is still far away and there are a few areas of LE that also need addressing. However now is the chance because not only PoE having done a massive mistake to make everyone hate it and D4 seems to be going after Lost Ark rather than trying to stay true to the genre.
The chance to do what? “Oh, PoE messed up their league, let’s change our crafting system, because… because… it’s an opportunity to…”
The crafting system currently is in a very good state. This is my personal opinion and my overall impression. Its praised a lot by content creators that play LE for the first time. People in general from my perspective have a positive opinion about crafting. There are some people that dislike it or have an issue with specific mechanics.
I don’t say there’s no way or need to improve things. But the core concept is well received overall.
You make it seem like the system has flaws in its core mechanics and that it is not casual player friendly. But that’s only your opinion and not facts as I (and others already have) would say it is the exact opposite. When the crafting system was overhauled I was impressed of how easy it was to craft very good items.
It gets more powerful the more you progress as you get more forging potential with higher rarity. And when you are at the point where you have access to the temporal sanctum, you have a place to farm for exalted items reliably. And these exalted items have a very huge amount of crafting potential. But only if you don’t filter them out and do crafting attempts.
It’s your choice to not accept any advice regarding better and approved crafting strategies. But you cannot just refuse to use the crafting system for it’s full potential and then complain about not having the best results.
Also please don’t make this a casual vs. hardcore players thing. Because it’s not.
In addition, it would also be nice if your could stop insulting people. This just weakens your arguments.
I did say that was not the only thing. Crafting needs to come to a point where regardless of you being a casual or the best player in existance, you can archieve the same crafting results with ease. Minions need to be massively improved. Totems need much, much larger improvements than minions. Skills meant for autocasting need to have no casting animation so it doesn’t creates a clunky feeling with the constant recast stutter. In fact you also need a few more passive skills like auras and such because very few people like piano playstyles and skill rotations that are reminiscent of MMORPGs. Multiplayer needs to be added. Trading needs to be added in such a way as to allow offline trading and preferably not allow flipping.
I think you get the point, there is a lot LE needs to improve before it becomes a game that can be called competition by it’s peers. But as to why now is the time. It has to do with the D4 announcement. D4 is going the lost ark route, that means it isn’t even competition (except maybe for lost ark) and as for PoE, it’s not specifically about them having messed up big time this league, it’s about them having been messing up every league for the past 4 years with this league happening to be a major mess up. LE has a real chance but it needs to step up the game if it wants to take advantage of the opportunity because opportunities often only come around once.
This is your oppinion, not that of a casual and more importantly, I have explained why from both a mechanical perspective and a perception perspective it is factually better the system I described. No one has actually shown any beneficts of the current system other than I like it better (because it gives the top players a massive advantage which they don’t openly admit to) and because they feel it makes loot unimportant, completly ignoring the fact I already disproved that.
You also think the system was improved? You can only be joking. Before the changes the average place where the casual player would get stuck at upgrading was items around T16 with some luck maybe get a T18 or T19 rarely. Now the casual player just doesn’t gets any better than T14. You call this an improvement? Yes, it was an improvement on the way to see crafting odds, but it was a huge nerf to how good an item you could craft.
Except that in order to get more crafting potential you need to go to higher corruption levels and to do higher corruption level you need better gear. By the way, PoE has that same problem and it’s what’s making their player retention garbage in the last 2 years.
It’s not that I don’t accept advice, I’ve tried that and it doesn’t works. That advice needs one thing to work and that is to find a very large amount of craftable item bases with a high number of affixes but the average player just doesn’t gets that many. In many cases, they may not even get 1 a day depending on how much time they have to play. In average it will take several douzens of attempts before something better than T14 is archieved and that is not even talking about getting at bare minimum the T20. But if the casual player doesn’t even gets 1 crafting piece a day or maybe let’s say they get 1 a day because they have a lot more time to play, they are going to be at it for more than a month to even get a single item above T14. This is not progression, this is stagnation.
It very much is. Everytime someone sugests something that makes the game more casual friendly, you see a number of people trying to immediatly drown their voices because the unfortunate reality is that these people cannot be happy with a game where only them stay at the top and the rest can barely crawl out of the misery that is scrapping the very bottom of the pool. There is this mentallity that games must be all darksouls and they need to show how much better they are than everyone else or they cannot have fun. This mentallity needs to go away. People need to start learning to enjoy a game because playing them is fun and not because they are better than someone else at it.
And I am not insulting people. At best there was one earlier thing I said which could be taken as one and the mods deleted it anyway but the post [content removed by moderation].
Guys & Gals, Thems and Theys…
I think this has just reached into troll levels now… Opinions have been stated. Some may be wildly and deeply into left field based on general concensus, but they are opinions no matter how you feel about them or how factual they may or may not be.
The one thing that is blatantly obvious is that there is no constructive discourse here…
Stop feeding the flames…
Some people seem to either think
Agreed Llama. I have closed this book on it and recently added crafting topics and LE to take over the world posts. It has gotten to the point where it is a full-on Pinky and the Brain skit.
No it’s not.
Why? Most/a lot of the people who are unhappy with PoE just want a tweaked/un-####ed version of PoE, I don’t think that’s what most of the people who play & love LE want.
Yup, everyone hates it, so much so that I’m sure the continuing players are just playing out of spite to show GGG how badly they’ve screwed up. Yes, there’s a notable drop since league start, but that’s normal (though probably not quite as quick as with the current league).
There aren’t any skills meant for autocasting, the devs view skills that we put on autocast as a design failure. And while I’m not sure I agree with them, I get where they are coming from.
But PoE’s always been down that rabbit hole & you appear to want EHG to slavishly copy PoE, so I’m a bit confused why you don’t want a more active play style?
While I agree with you here, I know “most people don’t” (not sure where the devs are on this though given their previous implementations, I’d assume probably not).
There is, but aping the other games doesn’t make it competition. While I know that EHG do value all feedback, I’m confident they will choose their own path & put their own stamp on the issues that you’ve called out (where they haven’t already, ie, crafting).
You don’t, forging potential is based on item quality, so exalted items will have more FP than rares which will have more than blues which will have more than whites. While I can’t remember if the area level the item drops in has anything to do with it, I know that corruption most certainly doesn’t directly (given that you’ll see more exalted items at higher corruption). If you think otherwise then that’s perception bias/pareidolia.
No, it’s actually not, their peaks & troughs are pretty constant over the past few years, but, please don’t let data get in the way of a good bias. There are some “good” leagues & some “bad” leagues, which seems reasonable given it’s probably quite difficult to make new content every 3 months.
If everybody else is saying the same thing & you’re saying different, are you sure that “everybody else” is wrong? They could be, but I’d take McFluffin’s advice over yours. Apart from on pronunciation but I don’t know what accent you have.
If I only have 5 mins to play a day & don’t get “1 crafting piece” a day, does that make it the game’s design fault?
You are & your following sentence is a good example.
Yes it is, from Delve onwards, all you see is removal of base player power being shifted to high end crafting which makes the game harder for casuals, you’ve seen several monster buffs making regualar content harder, you’ve seen ridiculous boss fights that casuals have no way of winning without extreme levels of gear that they will never be able to attain and you’ve seen even mapping becoming much harder. It has been nothing but mistakes since 2018.
People want am ARPG where the natural course of a game is respected. One where all content is doable even for the casual player and one where the natural progression of character and gear is respected. That does not happen in PoE or LE at the moment.
“Normal.”
Let me talk to you about normal. Prior to Delve the player retention in a league was like this. 33% player loss after a month, 50% player loss after 2 months and it would only reach 66% player loss in the last 2 weeks of a league.
In the last year or 2 player retention has been as such. First week, ~50% player loss. 66% player loss after the first month and it keeps going down a bit slower after that.
Let me compare it to you one more time. The player loss in the first week of a league is the same as 2 entire months before. That is how bad things are, but you don’t have to take my work, go check the charts, I’ve done so in the past to reference the player retention issues and bring the problem to light with GGG when I folishly still believed they listened to players.
As a funny side note, people say that this league is beating records with player loss, it isn’t, it’s about the same, it’s just more visible cause even streamers are quiting this league early.
If it wasn’t meant for it they certainly are not doing anything about it even though it should be relatively simple to. That means they should either remove it or embrace it, not it it in the current state.
That being said removing it would not be viewed kindly by the community.
Since when has a 1 skill use build been a thing that only PoE does? D2 was basicaly 1 skill use, Chronicon is basically 1 skill use, grim dawn is basically 1 skill use, in fact most games (not all) are 1 skill use because most people don’t like piano style skill rotations. That is something old MMORPGs like WoW and such created and that people loved at the time but now hate it with a passion.
Why don’t I want a more active playstyle? Because more key presses doesn’t = a better game. It is just adding more unnecessary complexity whose only purpose is to make players struggle with the controls, not the actual difficulty of the game itself.
I can accept some people like it and they can make builds that are more active, but there should be options for those who don’t, even more so when the people who don’t are the major part of the gaming industry.
That’s where you’re wrong. There are some people who don’t, not most people. Let me tell you who doesn’t wants offline trading. Flippers don’t want that because they want to be able to snipe things from the market easily and with very little competition. Top players don’t want it because they can get so many items worth of selling every day that the market flipping will heavily benefict them. The people who want this are the larger majority, the people who though sometimes sell stuff, the market is more of a tool for buying than a tool for selling.
Yet LE seems to have no direction as of right now. It’s direct competitors were D3 and PoE. Now D4 is going a different route so it’s no longer a competitor, but PoE is and PoE has a direction which I cannot understate how much I hate it. They are going for the hardcore gamers. Le on the other hand, well they are clearly not going for the hardcore gamers because the game design is not made to make life as hard on casual players, by the same token, the game is not going in the direction to cater to the casuals which are right now the part of the market that is looking for an ARPG to play. Sadly, something in between doesn’t works either. Because in between is still not good enough for casuals and it’s also not good enough for the hardcore players.
You can call it perception bias, but prior to empowered monolith I rarely get anything above 20 crafting potential. At 100 corruption I get around 22 to 23 and at 115 I can get 24. This on rares. But I’ve seen people playing the game on 300+ corruption and their rares are well over 30 crafting potential. So if corruption does not influence the crafting potential, how come their rares have about 10 more crafting potential than mine? I can only go from my observations.
Again, look at the player retention prior to delve and look at it now. It’s a night and day difference. Yes league will have some influence on it but actually less than you think. People moan about how this league is terrible or how that league was great but at the end of the day those who like the game as it stands still play it for the most part, the variable in player retention is probably not even 3% from bad or good leagues. On the other hand, the variable on player retention from GGG switching from casual to hardcore is huge!
Casual players have 2 to 3 hours to play generally speaking. They work, they have family obligations so while they do find the time, they are not like the people who play this for 12+ hours a day or even those more sane who despite having time still “only” do 6 to 8 hours a day. Even so, I can tell you that I find 1 crafting piece every several hours. In a day of playing some 8 hours, I find 1 or 2 crafting pieces, maybe 3 if I’m really lucky.
So there is either a game design flaw with good gear dropping (which I don’t think there is) or there is a game design flaw with the odds of being able to craft a good piece of gear leading to character progression stagnating.
No, that is not an insult. I could beat around the bush and say that what someone said was not realistic but that is not just the case. Somethings said were on such a level that you have to question what is wrong with the person to even go there.
I’m going to leave this here because it will be useful to some people still actively participating in this thread.
If that was the case, why has every single league since Delve (with the exception of Blight) been more successful with significantly higher launch numbers? If PoE has become harder & harder for all of those casuals who, be definition, make up the base player numbers of the game, how do you account for the higher steam player numbers? Even the mid/end-league minimums have been broadly comparable, occasionally lower but usually somewhat higher than Delve. Why are all those casuals who are being forced out still playing the game?
All content? Even the uber/pinnacle/whatever bosses that are intended to be completed only by good players with good gear? Plus, what exactly is the “natural course of a game”?
It varied TBH, using the steam player numbers, from Legacy to Delve, the “final month” peak player numbers could be anywhere between 73% of decline from peak (Legacy, though that was in Jul 17 & it started in March 17 so it was a much longer league) & 21% decline from peak (Incursion).
The leagues since Delve have been a bit worse (generally in the high 60s to low 70s percent decline compared to peak) but certainly not what you’re claiming, and that’s comparing the final month, not the second month (ie, the loss after the first month). If you want to see the first month losses (using the second month peak figures since that’s probably the closest we can get to the first month losses), then they vary anywhere between a 28% decline (Metamorph) & 74% (Archnemesis) with most of them in the 40s, significantly lower than your purported 66%. Archnemesis & Sentinel, however, are notable outliers since they have both worse second month peak declines (74% & 58% respectively) & the lowest end of league peak declines (86% & 81%).
So while it’s not as bad as you think it is, GGG’s player retention is spikier than it “used to be”, but the game has also grown significantly so there are going to be far more “casuals” than there used to be. I’m not sure I’d feel confident assigning that broadly faster drop off to “just” crafting & difficulty though I’m sure the difficulty at least would play some part in that, I’d also argue that if you’re a casual player then you may not be able to muster the interest to keep playing a single game for months at a time over years.
I have, they don’t support what you say, though they’re monthly data, not weekly. Here’s a link to an image of the data with the declines for you.
No, if you read some of the devs comments about autocasting, it’s a windows thing not an in-game thing & while there may be some “simple” ways to fix it they would likely come with downsides that would impact non-autocasting players.
That wasn’t the point I was making, PoE is known for it’s flask piano requirements.
Yes, but we’ve already established that you’ve got a bonkers strict filter, so if you’re not seeing potentially good craftable items, that’s more likely to be on your filter, not the game’s crafting system.
Your observations are wrong (well, perception bias).