Jerle's Feedback on 0.7.9 Patch

Feedback and Suggestions
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I was really hoping to do this after I’ve a full run-through of all the content and tried to farm some of the monolith timelines more before writing this. But work is getting in the way so I thought I better get my current feedback down before I missed this completely.

In summary, EHG has once again pushed out a patch which gave me lots of confidence in the ability of the devs to deliver a compelling ARPG that is uniquely them and which leaves me excited about.

I’ll dive into the specifics:

Reworked Monolith

This is obviously the big one. I will state upfront that I only managed to do the abomination timeline and the god hunter timeline. But let me just say that the design of these fights was very well done and reminds me of FFXIV boss fight designs which I enjoyed very much back when I was still playing the game. The mechanics are introduced gradually within the fight so we get to familiarise ourselves with the boss mechanics before the sets of mechanics are woven together to generate more complicated patterns. I personally consider the gold standard of boss design - much better than how GGG does it where it can sometimes be difficult to know what you’re required to do to deal with the boss mechanics. If devs continue to draw inspiration from FFXIV for MP fights, I will be super excited for the future of MP in LE. The only issue is that I wonder how would the devs continue to ensure LE remains a soloable game while incentivising players to want to group up to do difficult MP boss fights.

I also didn’t experience the issue of feeling underwhelmed by my character’s strength because I was experiencing the new monolith with a fresh character (my SSD got wiped so I also had the privilege of starting with zero twink gears xD). But I just want to chime in on this even though I didnt have firsthand experience on the issue. I am not sure burst-resistance is the best way to go about making bosses always relevant especially when high level characters want to do low level content for whatever reason. Like what many have shared, part of the ARPG fantasy is the feeling of growing more powerful and obliterating lower level content. Struggling against much lower level bosses does fly in the face of that fantasy.

I am wondering if the devs might be concerned about high level bosses trivialising lower boss farm, especially if it is made possible to target farm bosses for specific uniques. If so, one idea I have is that instead of this burst-resistance especially for when high-level characters are doing low level bosses. Make it such that there is a drop loot penalty when the level gap grows too wide. And that players can choose to level down (and hence make the bosses challenging) to receive the intended drop rates.

T6/7 items

This one turned out to be really disappointing to me. I’m not sure if its because I am not farming to a stage where I am completely min-maxing my gears, but I just find it very difficult to get excited about purple items with the wrong base, or wrong T6/7 affix or bad accompanying affixes. Too many stars need to align for a purple item to be good. I feel the problem with the loot hunt now is that there isn’t a chase “commodity” item in LE yet. Well, maybe Orion’s Eye is one. But it just feels like it isnt as rich as D2 with its shako, tals armour, tals ammy, occy, etc or POE with its Ex Orb (mainly) and its other T0 chase uniques like shavs, cospri, mjolnir (rip), etc (I am deliberately not mentioning league uniques here btw).

With EHG’s philosophy to make sure uniques/legendaries are not outright superior items to rares, I am not sure we will ever get that feeling of immediately knowing a good drop has happened for us, maybe the loot filter will solve that - once we can specify the criteria of a good rare item.

Crafting

I want to touch on crafting even though there isnt anything exactly new in LE this patch. I really like LE for offering deterministic crafting when POE hasn’t for the longest time. But Harvest has signalled to ARPG fans that GGG is now willing to embrace deterministic crafting and if callibrated and incorporated well into POE2, it does make the competition for LE in this aspect alot hotter than just 2 months before (in fact, I may argue that Harvest crafting is way superior than LE crafting due to the years of sub(crafting)systems and much richer pool of item affixes that POE has currently).

The other thing I wanted to say about crafting is that I’ve been finding I only craft set defence affixes on my gears and all other shards feel rather useless. I’m not sure if the more experienced players would agree with me on this and if not, I would really like to hear their perspective on how some of the other shards could be great in specific builds. But my current impression is simply that there are alot of useless affix that people would never consider crafting on their gears, and this might be a problem given that LE uses a targetted crafting system. I think it is important that all shards feel valuable or useful.

Combat

I am not sure if this might be anything new, but it’s certainly something I notice more in the current patch. The combat gameplay (outside of boss fights) is really good. It feels almost like D3 where you need to sidestep and dodge attacks (because there is only so much you can tank), but the game also does so in a very natural way (meteors from osprix mages vs lasers and other weird rare affixes in D3).

But I’ve been finding that it’s very difficult for me to navigate my mouse to dodge and move around the attacks. For some reason, I have to push my mouse to much higher dpi for mouse movement (than I need to for POE as an example). The moving around for my character feels super clunky with the mouse and I keep losing track of where my mouse is which wasnt a problem when I play POE. It almost feel as if I might prefer WASD movement for LE but I really prefer point and click for my ARPGs. Not sure if anyone else faces the same issue as I do?

Misc

The above largely outlines my thoughts about this patch. Really excited for the future of LE and to find out more about how MP will play out in LE. I just have a few other misc observations and feedback to conclude this post:

  • Noticed the new quest indicators (these are new in 0.7.9 right?) looking like release quality now!
  • Some animations still look clunky and jerky to me - e.g. lunge, smite-teleport having animation glitch, shield throw animation looks weak (guy is literally standing straight up bouncing a yoyo out xD), mentioned before also that sentinel stopping motion look over exaggerated - i think this is the same issue as mage stopping motion.
  • Still gotta say this - we really need proper mastery quest for such a character development milestone :stuck_out_tongue:
  • Many areas are very narrow which makes the dodging/sidestepping gameplay difficult to execute
  • Liath tower - I really really find it very disorienting. I keep clicking on killing monsters in a level, and sometimes I think I just “teleport” to the next level, and I think the whole moving up to the next level isnt conveyed very well when I seem to be teleporting from floor to floor, and the perception is that I’m teleporting back to the same spot.
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I don’t think its ideal to take solo content and turn it into a multiplayer experience. You could scale the bosses’ hit points and damage, but those are just stop gap measures; the same as the burst damage reduction modifier that everyone hates. D2/D3 does this and it was fine, but not overly satisfying and often times you felt penalized if the other party members weren’t carrying their weight to keep up with scaling. I also think we will need more ally auras/ally-benefitting skills before multiplayer takes off.

In the short term, I would like to see them modify Arena for multiplayer. Create defensible areas in multiple parts of the map (e.g. Protect the towns people) or add a tower defense game similar to POE’s Blight. Open world lends itself much better to multiplayer (both from a particle density perspective, as well as flexibility). Then, long term create raids similar to Marvel Heroes that require multiple players to beat due to complex team mechanics and/or overwhelming boss health.

The difference between D2 and LE is the industry shift between unique items being end game items. D2 started off with uniques being the creme de la creme. Then, the developers realized that it was stifling build diversity and started encouraging players to hunt for rares with better rolls than the uniques offered. ARPGs in general have trended in this direction. Uniques are good at low levels and provide a nice boost, but min/maxes were eventually turn to rares or crafted gear. It’s hard to turn low level gear into a commodity item because eventually everyone outgrows it and not everyone is into playing multiple alts. LE doesn’t have a complex crafting system, so there’s no Chaos Orb currency. We will have to wait and see if gold can ever be a true ARPG currency once we get the Bazaar and possible other gold sinks.

I craft quite a bit of offensive skills on my Sentinel weapons (mostly +base damage). But, the game is certainly tuned to needing several layers of stacked defenses right now. Add in the burst damage reduction modifier and there’s little incentive to build a true glass cannon.

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I agree and is why I flaged this out as a question. But the devs have said they want all content in LE to be soloable. Yet, LE will also be a multiplayer game. So how would we square the facts except to believe that solo content will be made into a multiplayer experience one way or another?

I’m not sure if my point about “commoditised” chase loot was poorly expressed. But what I meant was like the kinda mini jackpot drop that movtivates you to play for “just another hour”, In POE, that would be your exalt drop. Or T0/T1 unique thats meta.

I was actually not quite referring to offensive affix. Though that seems to be another issue which I didnt quite bring up - but this could just be me not seeing the full power of a minmaxed build. But my impression is that there is so much power from just levelling up and allocating points to skills and passives that I didn’t have to worry about offence at all.

Defence I definitely do need to work on as you said. But those single protection just seems so useless and inefficient compared to set protection.

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There are ways round that (kinda), in SWTOR’s Shadow of Revan expansion, once you’d got to the end of the story content they had “final battle with Revan” with two versions, a solo version where the player’s companions were included and had mechanics that a single player could do involving the companions (the companions would be able to taunt, do dps & heal you and the mechanic was that they would all periodically get stunned and you had to run over them alternating light side/dark side in order to free them & continue the combat). There was also a raid version of the “final battle with Revan” which was totally different from the solo version & had the standard raid content (multiple bosses with some trash in between). But they were able to provide by solo players & raiders a relevant “final battle with Revan”.

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Thanks! And the rewards for both versions are exactly the same? Do players find one version easier than the other and gravitate towards doing the ‘easier’ version? Or each is difficult in its own way? Very impressed if the devs managed to achieve that balance!

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No, the solo version was more to give the SP players an ending of the story, while the raid version was a proper raid with it’s usual rewards because that’s what raiders would expect. It’s different in an aRPG with no history of giving MP players a higher tier of gear. Anyone could do the solo version, but you’d need a full raid team to do the raid version (though naturally there was an “easy mode” that was pretty easy with a team that wasn’t paying more attention to whatever was on netflix on the second screen).

IMO, if EHG were to do something similar, they would have to decide whether to give the “raid” version different or “better” rewards. Giving them a higher tier of gear (eg, if gear with t8 affixes were a guaranteed drop) would be bad IMO, but I think that if people do harder content they do expect a “better” reward. Even if it were “just” cosmetics or pets.

This strikes to the heart of the SP/MP dichotomy, if you give MP content better rewards because it’s deliberately made harder the SP people will probably complain (understandably & probably with some good reasons) but if you don’t give the MP content some special rewards, how much will people do it? I know that an answer to that is that in the good old days we used to do harder content just for the sake of it, the enjoyment of pushing yourself & accomplishing something that’s difficult. But I think that after decades of giving players shinies for doing stuff we’ve been conditioned to the pavlovian response & where’s my shiny for doing the hard thing?

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This is exactly what I have been wondering when the dev said they want all content in LE to be soloable, yet want to make interesting (presumably difficult) MP content and fights.

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Yeah. It can be done, but I suspect the decision that will be met with most push back from the community (regardless of which way it goes) will be whether the MP version of a fight gets more/different/“better” shinies than the solo version & perception is everything. Do I think that the reskin of a pet that you get from the MP version is over 9,000% more shinierer than the SP one or am I not too bothered? Am I pissed that the MP version is being showered in t7/8/whatever goodies (even if they aren’t) while I’m slogging through my solo quest to get t5 gear? Am I pissed that the MP version isn’t being showered in t7/8/whatever goodies (even if they are) because I’m slogging through a difficult MP version of a fight and I’m hooked on the slot machine that is random item drops in an aRPG and I need moar!

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This has been my single biggest issue with LE. (Except the WASD thing). And on a Mac it’s even worse. A good portion of mouse interactions in the game are just “off” as it were. I sometimes have to click things three or four times to pick them up off the ground. I almost always feel like there is a slight delay from click to activate on things like chests opening or area entrances. Moving stuff in stash of inventory is frustrating. I finally just switched over to booting into Bootcamp and running it in Windows which isn’t nearly as ideal. It isn’t quite as noticeable on the PC side butt it’s definitely still there.

And I’ve tried several different mouse. Same issue so I don’t think it’s a hardware issue. Not directed at anyone in particular, for the sake of productivity, please refrain from the very tired Mac v. PC comment. I honestly don’t care because this problem exists on both and they’re supporting the Mac platform so it doesn’t matter which OS is used. I don’t have experience on the Linux version so I’d be curious if Linux users are having mouse interactions issues.

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Not sure if I might be misunderstanding you. But just to clarify its not that I was actually using WASD. But trying to point and click in an agile manner required for LE gameplay was a struggle enough that I was actually wishing there is WASD in the game.

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Yeah, sorry, I just meant I do not want to use WASD. I’m running another aRPG what was designed more for a controller (which I don’t own) and on the a PC you have to use WASD and I don’t like it. Too old school even for this Castle Wolfenstein 1.0 guy.

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Oh yea. then that’s exactly what I said too

The problem being that I need to click all over the place so often, whether its normal maps or boss fights that it almost feels WASD will move better than me struggling trying to click all over the place.

And I want to be clear, I LOVE how combat is designed in this game atm and I like that they are making us click. It just feels like I cant click very well and I’m not sure if its a “me” problem or the mouse interaction is “off” in the game like you said.

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I would reinterpret it to mean that all presently planned content (e.g. Story, Monoliths of Fate, Arena, etc.) is intended to be soloable. But, once multiplayer is incorporated into the game and the playerbase has grown enough to form groups/clans, EHG may choose to create new content that is multiplayer intended or exclusive (in some games you can solo raid bosses with superior gear, but if the current MOF system is any indication, EHG doesn’t allow player power levels to outscale content to that degree).

No, I understood your point and I thought it was fair. I’m just not sure how a commoditised item will arise given that craftable rares and rare drops almost always beat uniques (other than for a few niche builds). I actually prefer LE’s crafting system to POE’s, but it doesn’t lend itself to adding a quasi currency to the game (unless they add some rare glyphs that add T5 directly to an item AND make it tradable).

I haven’t played through the 80+ MOFs yet, but I have dabled in 0.7.9 Arena (reaching Wave 175 and 174 respectively on two different Sentinels) and that is where specialized gear really makes a difference. I’ve scrapped really good weapons that had decent rolls because I had too much Elemental Protection and not enough specialized Poison Protection. In Arena, you can see the big hits from Fire, Cold, Lightning, Necrotic and Void coming for the most part. You can see the NPCs that use Poison coming too, but Poison uniquely pools on the ground and for melee classes that’s anathema. So, I had to tailor my build to a specific defense because of a specific condition. Similarly, once you get north of 150 waves, if your damage isn’t up to snuff, you don’t leech enough to survive the big hits regardless of protections. Although it’s more difficult (perhaps too difficult), the current iteration of Arena serves as a great crucible for character balance/testing.

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There was a short-lived game called MxM that was a ARPG/MOBA hybrid that had WASD movement and I LOVED it. Not only did it create the ability to have more intriguing boss encounters/dodging mechancis, but it made both movement and mouse-aiming equally important components of the game (there were a lot of gun classes, but some melee as well with conal attacks).

Sadly, I think Diablo and its progeny have us too ingrained to using the current mouse movement for a WASD based game to become mainstream.

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