Bugs/Optimization - it is a very serious concern, the game performs very poorly despite outdated graphics for most people, the quantity of bugs is too much. You don’t want to be compared with Tod Howard games really.
Gold Dupes/Market Economy - gold dupe has a dramatic impact on market economy, and player confidence, trade faction is the only one with sensible/qualtiy loot/gear acquisation. Most of my friends uninstalled the game when Dupe happened. If it happens again in next cycle you will be losing potential players, that were willing/interested to play further.
CoF did get buffed this season but it is still far behind the Trade and not a choice for anyone competetive. Gold dupe itself would not be so bad, if not 2 absolutely nonsensical limitations in the game,
inventory gold limit of 2.15bln,
sale trade limit of 1.5bln
Hyperinflation caused nominal price increase, but overall it has caused prices decrease and being capped, new 1.5bln price is old 10million price, if there was no upper limit the economy would stablize. But when you have a limit in price, and extremely valuable items have to go cheaply at 1.5bln, that causes market shortages, neither me, nor any of my friends playing over the past week, have been able to buy any valuable loot from the auction house. It just does not exist or stay for longer than 5 minutes, at 1.5bln price.
I.e example is when lp2 is sold for 1.5bln, Lp3/Lp4 version of the same item, will be a hot sale.
That would be like buying a lambo and a mansion, for 20k$. All due to market limitations introduced by devs.
Those limits are not just stupid they are further pushing inflation pressure, as people cannot withdraw or hoard money, they have to spend it, so they buy anything even remotely valuable.
Nemesis - got hidden nerf, I used to get LP 2 items from it, now all I get is T1-T3 weaver will random stats. Idk how for many, but after buying 10-20 perfectly rolled lp0 items and getting not even one lp2, the mechanic as whole becomes a boring chore to grind.
Campaign skip - you have to introduce an option for those who already beat campaign once or twice, to immediately get into monoliths or a more fun end activity on new cycles. Or make campaign less tedisome boring chore running around.
Arena - I am not sure why it even exists, it is boring, extremely slow paced, with no real rewards apart from ego ladder.
Mob Density - I have experienced improved Mob Density in this cycle 1.1, only to find out it is inconsistent, there are a lot of echoes where you get few mobs in a dozen of seconds running around.
Monoliths - there are some improvements with monoliths this cycle, but overall it still remains a boring and unappealing activity.
Dungeons - making each dungeon as kill time running through a maze of blocked exits, often having nemesis spawn in a completely sealed location is a bad game design. Dungeons need a complete rework/overhaul. I have run T4 Julra and Arbor 100s times, and it is not good by all means.
Skills - and passive nodes, there are just a few of those that scale with gear and have any real value. A lot of filler, disfunctional, unworking garbage. You claim to have a variety of builds, but for a sorcerer there are only 2 skills viable, glacier and static orb. Diablo 4 has more build variety unfortunately. Diablo 4 has at least 3-6 endgame viable builds per class.
Party play/Trade - Party play is too restrictive and unrewarding this game. Being unable to trade or give away any useful items, having to wait for obsidian resonance, that drops once in a century, and even resets drop counter when you change party. When doing arbor or pinnacle boss, the reward is only given to one player, which further demotivates running a party, as you would be wasting double the time for same rewards.
Faction Favor Gain - it is abysmal low, I am rank 12, with about 100 hours into the character, and I have been running out of favor both selling and buying items, at this point I feel like putting anything on auction house for less than 100 millions is a waste of favor points. This further constricts trade. Look a single item can costs 40k favor to buy, and a lot to sell. You get like 2k favor per echo on 1200 corrupt on rank 12. That is 30mins grind for a single purchase/craft on auction house. It is double/tripple that for everyone below high corrupt/rank 12.
Drop rates - you have to balance drop rates around amount of players playing your game. I simply have not seen items, that were common in previous season. The gap between 220k concurrent players in 1.0, and 18k in 1.1 is significant, with further more going for CoF to avoid duped market economy.
Pinnacle boss - I have killed him 100s of times, his drops are abysmal. Not only all his uniques except for good rolled amulet are worth about zero on trade. He does not drop anything form farming. Making him drop random double/tripple exalts, would make the boss way more appealing.
In addition, boss dialogues and unskippable animations are annoying, NO OROBYSS SAVE ME.
There is, dungeons are meant to cut the campaign short and hence only needing vastly smaller amounts of backtracking to acquire the needed passive points and idol slots. It cuts investment down to 2-3 hours or so instead of the ~10 needed for the campaign otherwise.
If you talk about Arena monoliths… yes… they’re a menace simply.
If you talk about the arena itself? Leveling is vastly quicker in the arena then in monoliths, some people use it that way.
Also the arena bosses have exclusive unique item drops which can be specifically for your build.
The stand-alone arena has reasons for existence.
Nah, just having nothing exciting to do during this time-gate.
That’s the bad design aspect, the existence of it is actually good design and a necessity.
Or using Thunderstrike, or going mana-stacker with meteor, glacier and static orb, a pure meteor build, going frost claw is also a way to do it, can also go directly with lightning blast.
So nah.
That’s the intention.
Alternatively a hard-cap limit on listing is possible. Actually I would heavily prefer that since it doesn’t mess with supply/demand aspects as heavily and introduce a natural cut-off aspect to diversify listing depending on progression.
Overall well thought out posts besides a few misconceptions there, especially the market ones are fairly solid to a degree. Nice feedback!
Don’t bother. His idea of “viable” is “can do 1k+ corruption and kill bosses in 2s”. Anything short of that for him just isn’t viable. He keeps confusing viable with competitive.
I think it’s important to understand your perspective before reacting to feedback.
From what you’ve written I take it you play far and away more than the average player (100s of hours by now is more than a full time job (80 hours in 2 weeks). I don’t judge that at all, I would play more if I could, got 55 hours in 1.1 on my legacy chars.
You also think in competitive terms and you are right that:
CoF doesn’t hold a candle to MG regarding ladder placement - it absolutely needs two separate ladders for those who care.
in MG you’re screwed if you’re not a dupe beneficiary, how should one ever catch up to those?
The problem with these is that a huge portion of the player base isn’t affected and will neglect these issues.
regarding…
I don’t think it was nerfed. Are we talking about the same uniques here or have you started with low lvl uniques, where 2 LP is easy and now you’re putting in high end stuff?
It’s really not necessary given how fast you reach the end of time zone.
Yes, both are on the list to be improved/removed.
First of all, @DJSamhein please stop those useless “viable” definitions. Maybe you (and a few other perpetrators) are right in an Oxford sense, but it really doesn’t matter, when people apparently mean it in a different way.
You would claim a car with a single gear is viable for you can get anywhere with it and we cannot disprove that. But among the norm of 5-6 gears, the 1-gear car is a negative outlier and thus by a more popular definition not viable.
Regarding the Sorc skills, Static Orb is simply an outlier like Jelkhor’s Marksman was in 1.0. Shouldn’t trash every other skill like that and will probably get reined in with 1.2. It’s true that the game would be healthier without such outliers.
I don’t think I will. Especially in this case. Because people like him will turn to new casual players and say that only those builds are viable when it’s evidently not the case.
If people would just say they’re not competitive or that those are the strongest, sure. I have no issue with that.
But when you go around telling new players that LE only has 2-3 viable builds when LE has the best build variety in any ARPG, you’re actively misleading players.
So I don’t think I will.
It’s not only this post. This pedantic discussion spreads everywhere
The point is, no one can say what IS viable for everyone has different metrics. We can only talk about what we CONSIDER viable.
You say a single-gear car is viable for it gets me from Chicago to LA… this year.
Sanchez says only 6 gears are viable.
Neither is wrong but neither is THE truth. If we were to consider 5 gears viable, we’d still have plenty of builds without forcing crap into “viability” via forum arguments.
Second best.
PoE has a higher build variety since a good time, which is a given.
But overall… yeah, no need to call it out, can just dismantle the thing simply, does the same and actually showcases others what to do rather then making you seem like someone lashing out and hence simply ignored.
Because to be true… I skipped over your post and just ignored it because of that, probably not as the only one Like people skip over mine when I go on a tangent.
No, according to your metaphor, this is more like “Only cars with V12 engines and 2.5cc engines that do 0-100 in 4.5s are viable”. Which, if you say that to someone who doesn’t want to spend too much money on a car is ridiculous or might simply drive them away from buying an affordable and completely viable car.
That is debatable. Most builds in PoE these days revolve around 1-3 base skills and then the same skills every build uses, namely flame dash or one of the movement variants, molten shell or one of the defensive variants, 2-5 auras that most builds use, including skitters, etc.
It did use to be more diverse, but not as much anymore.
Not if we come from the same position, which is ‘viability’ and not ‘competitive or strongest’.
Then it’s not even remotely debatable. PoE has a vastly bigger variety of active skills compared to Last Epoch and outside of some very very rare outliers each single one of them can be made viable without extreme investment. Even fireball which nigh nobody will ever touch when in their right mind because it’s simply a bad skill.
You can even make a viable Winter Orb build still… viability is the point here, and unless you shift the goalpost then it is a objectively true answer.
Yeah, I will concede that. Although if we use viable as can do everything in endgame, few builds actually can do that in PoE these days.
But for the purposes of our argument, yes. PoE has the highest build variety, at least in theory.
Maybe that’s where he or someone else draws his line. I’m not that into cars, but isn’t that the overpowered equivalent to the underpowered stuff you want to sell off as viable?
You’re simply provoking people with other standards everytime you make such a post for many people disagree that being barely able to reach something makes that “viable”.
I’m sure you don’t mean time investment, right? Because there’s no way anyone can make a viable “original” build in PoE if they’re not spending several hours in PoB…
And since PoB exists, it makes it really easy for players to just copy-paste builds, so the majority of Characters tend to be just copies of a guide.
So, PoE really have more individual skills, but it’s not a valid argument if majority of players only go for the same sets of skills/combinations, leading to less variety in builds overall.
Now that’s funny… Every time I see someone drop the car metaphor in a videogame forum, I think “damn, they must really like cars”…
I mean, if you want to make comparisons, compare it to another game (preferably of the same genre), or at least some other software, computer stuff, you know…
No. Again, if you asked someone for a suggestion for a nice car because you need one to get around and someone said that only Ferraris and Lambos are viable, you’d probably not think that was a helpful suggestion.
And if you saw someone saying that same suggestion to someone that doesn’t know much about cars, you might even be tempted to correct them rather than let them induce other people in false assumptions.
Now, if someone was asking for a sports car suggestion that they could take out on the track or whatever, that could be a valid suggestion. But that is not the case here.
Context is important and how you present that context is as well.
Well I’ve been taught to break down complex issues so non-experts can relate. Metaphors are pretty helpful to bring a point across that is otherwise too technical.
@DJSamhein the problem is, you would suggest a carriage and that’s just as helpful
When did I do that? I always said that viable builds are builds that can do all content (which includes 320c mono, dungeons, arena and pinnacle boss). That is the equivalent of a car that can get you around and even drive you across the country, even if it won’t win a race.
That’s fine but that’s YOUR definition. I grant you it is a good one given that that’s the end point for prophecy progress. But you already had that during 1.0 when people were doing 4-digit corruption, hence a build meeting ONLY your criteria would be considered weak by many.
That’s the problem when using metaphors… You THINK you’re breaking it down and making it less complex, but sometimes it just causes more confusion.
See, OP has stated time and time again that only builds that do 1000 corruption are viable, and everyone that contradicts this, he just tell the person does not know how to play this game.
So yeah, in your metaphor, OP is saying that only Lambos and Ferraris are viable for going to groceries. Then DJ joined to say that economy cars are just as viable, even if you want to cross the country. Now you say he’s suggesting carriage?
Then I don’t think the metaphor worked really well here.
It’s not HIS criteria, though… It’s the Devs view on what a “viable build” is… That’s what they work on when thinking balance.
I know but a build that was ONLY able to do this in 1.0 was considered weak, like a carriage. Weak and viable don’t go hand-in-hand. That definition extends viable too far into what most perceive as underpowered.
Was considered weak by who? From many discussions about this (most with OP), most people don’t agree with you.
Only the really competitive players consider this true and those are a minority.
Most players just want to have fun with their build and do the available content. And for those, pretty much all builds are viable. So that is the definition by which the majority goes by.
What you are talking about is a fringe case used by a minority of players.
You get that impression in an echo chamber when you and ~4 others post the same ad nauseam whenever a new poster comes here and presents a different opinion. You always “win” 5:1.
I don’t believe there is a factual majority that considered builds capping at 320c “viable” in an environment where 1k+ was easy for many builds.
Like people skip over mine when I go on a tangent.