Hello,
I’d like to know whether the game indexes monster level on the character’s level, like Diablo 3, Grim Dawn and Wolcen do (or rather, will it be there at full game release)? And if so, is it mandatory, or can we disable the functionality?
(Please don’t treat this as a suggestion to add it in your game if it’s not in there yet, I hate this functionality and it seems like it’s sadly becoming a standard for the genre. :’-( )
Mobs scale to your level in endgame but not in the storyline (yet) who knows the future
:’-(
Thanks for the info.
Have a nice day.
As a little extra info, when you open the overlay map(tab) you see the monster level of the current area in the corner of your screen.
Actually, I don’t have the game. I was inquiring in order to know whether to buy or not the game. 
Ahh yes, you don’t have a tag beneath your name…
Personally I’m very happy I bought it at the beginning of the year. The devs engage with the community a lot, major patches are pushed out every ~6-8 weeks (we’re due another one soon) which add a lot of new stuff to the game. Minor patches to fix bugs are on a more ad-hoc basis, and while there are certainly bugs, most of them are more minor in nature (though there are certainly some bugs that are quite impactful for some people).
There are plenty of videos out on LE (Boardman21 seems to be on a mission to log any & every build possible for every class/mastery, especially if he can fit in the Plague Bearer’s Staff) if you want to see what the gameplay is like.
There is still quite a bit left of their plan (not last of which being multiplayer, 1 class with it’s 3 masteries & 2 more masteries for 2 other classes), we’re currently at the last bit of phase 2. The graphics & animations get constant tweaks.
All in all I’d say they’re doing a very good job for such a small group of devs.
There’s also a discord server where the devs are pretty active as well.
Edit: The current timeframe for the release is the end of the year, though that’s been pushed back once.
Yes, it seems like there is a lot of hype around the game, and I am sure you guys will enjoy it.
Alas, in my case, the feeling of gaining power on level up is something I am very attached to, and level scaling runs directly contrary to that, so it’s going to be a “pass” for me (typically, I bought Wolcen through Steam, played it for an hour, noticed the level scaling, and almost instantly lost interest and got refunded).
Fair enough, you may wish to pop back later in that case as the current end-game with level scalling isn’t the dev’s intended end-game (it was put in to give us somethng to do after completing the campaign, so it kinda has to have level scaling) & we don’t know what “proper” end-game is going to look like.
That said, there are more details regarding the level scalling as that’s not everything that determins the difficulty/sense of power.
For example, if we take the Arena (wave-based mode in a small-ish arena with a break every 5 waves), the primary scaling that provides the sense of difficulty (or lack thereof at earlier waves) is how many waves you’ve got through. So wave 10 is a lot easier than wave 100 or wave 1,000, mobs gain damage, health & (presumably) protection (resists in other games) with higher waves. Therefore the player can gain a sense of growth in power as they see that they can survive higher waves. You can then either die or cash out to collect the reward & the arena then restarts from wave 1.
For the Monolith of Fate, the player is given a choice of 2 modifiers to choose from (& can re-roll the choices once for a gold fee if they’re both ****ing aweful) that will affect either the next run or the next few runs & as you complete more monoliths, these modifiers begin to stack up & can become quite painful (all mobs do XXX% more damage, mobs have increased speed & crit chance, champs enrage at 1/2 health, etc) similar to PoE’s map affixes. It’s these modifiers & how many you’re going up against that determin how easy or hard a monolith is rather than the level of the mobs. Again, you can reset it back to zero if you want to.
IMO, after you complete the campaign, it’s the wave number, or monolith modifiers that determin how easy/hard something is rather than the level scalling of the mobs. But that’s just my opinion.
If you’re not sure about getting it, by all means wait & think about it later…
I think the overall “power gain” per level/time played is pretty good in this game, thanks to alot of different System working together(skill spec trees + passive tree).
And with the yesterday released annoucement of class passives tree/mastery chagnes i guess the baseline lvl exp will get a bit bettter and with the choice of your mastery oyu will get a real “power spike” that will (hopefully) feel good for most people.
I’m not sure that’s going to change anything outside of the few levels between when you would be able to put points in the mastery now & when you get the mastery quest, assuming the additional passives they’re adding into the base class aren’t totally bonkers.
Well we have to see how the changes pan out. But i think alot of the critique was that Mastery Unlock and Skill Spec Slot Unlock didn’t match.
Not sure if this gets changed though
Yeah, that’s what I gathered from Mike’s post. I’m not too fussed myself (as I know how it works), I just don’t see how shifting back the mastery will be a particularly big change. Ok, I don’t get it at lvl 22, now I’m getting it at 25. Oh the horror!
Thank you very much for this information, Llama8, I will come back to check that again right before the game launches.
Heavy, I’m afraid that my issue is that having extra levels actually makes your character weaker when compared to the world around it, and then you have to grind some higher level items to make up for the loss of power. Basically, [Character Power] = [Item Power] - [Character Level Drawback]. If for some reason you stopped getting loot, your character would progressively become entirely unplayable due to the extra levels. It’s not a complaint about how powerful the character actually is when compared to its surroundings, but about the intrinsic feeling that comes with getting a level up (“Damn it, I just got a level.” instead of “Hurray, I just got a level.”).
I’m going to argue (because it’s fun & my alternatives are doing invoices) that the power mobs gain as a result of being 1 level higher is miniscule compared to their power creep due to having more monolith modifiers, or being arena wave 200 compared to wave 100.
In my experience, as you get to the top 10-20 levels, the increase in player power (from the additional 1 passive point per level) is comparatively small. For example, if you’ve got +400% increased damage & then you get an additional 7% from a passive, that’s 1.75% more damage. That incrimental power will only get smaller (since you’ll have unlocked the entire passive tree by then & you won’t get a higher tier passive that might give you more of an increase), but that’s the case in every aRPG. In PoE, a lvl 95 character isn’t 1.06% more powerful than a lvl 94 character (well, they might be, it’s a tiny number & that’s kinda my point), and while the end game bosses don’t also get more powerful, at that point, their danger is due to the map modifiers they can have, not because they’re lvl 83 instead of 82.
I can honestly say I’ve never felt less powerful due to having got an additional level. I’ll feel less powerful/more endangered because I’m doing a higher wave in the arena, or because the mobs have an additional 175% increased damage & crit chance on a monolith. but YMMV.
I agree with the premise of scaling feeling bad. I am hoping that the current implementation of scaling is just a placeholder until we see real endgame content added to the game.
I haven’t read all the replies in here but I’d like to shine a little light on the issue, how we got to where we are and where we are going.
I think that level scaling content is a very useful tool that can help extend the available content. If overused it can completely remove the sense of progression as the world just grows with you. In Breath of the Wild, if you go back to fight the first Lyonel in Zora’s domain after you’ve got the Master Sword, you feel like a badass. It’s awesome!
When we first started making Epoch and were going to Kickstarter, we only had about 30 mins of content (15 if you knew what you were doing). So we added the arena as a temporary feature so people could explore higher levels and test out builds. It ended up being a pretty popular feature so we expanded it and it’s probably going to stick around. We then added a very early version of the monolith and it also scales to your level for similar reasons.
These are not the only 2 end game systems planned and neither are finished yet. Internally, we call the monolith, the minilth because it is a pale shadow of our plans for it. We completely intend to have non-scaled content in the monolith that you will need a strong character to complete. The main campaign is also not level scaled.
Long term, we plan to use both scaled and non-scaled content in our end game systems so that people have a variety of content to play.
I really want to know what that is now…
That’s some great news. Thanks for the info.
That sounds like you guys have some pretty awesome plans.
I totally agree with the idea of having multiple (different) working endgame System in Terms of scaling.
And i am REALLY curious what you guys have in store for Monolith.
Seriously @all guys at EHG, Keep on doing what you do. (really love that you guys respond to alot of Topics, even if you dont have specific, just let the community know that there is still stuff in store regarding some Features/Content)
This is by far the best community/dev relationship i have ever been in (Together with Marvel Heroes Online, which also had really cool devs, especially Community Manager)
Thanks for the kind words bud. Hearing that people are enjoying the game is what gets me up in the morning.