You’re preaching to the choir. LA’s honing system was fundamentally designed to be a funnel to the cash shop. And let’s be real, the F2P if you wanted to do end game was just another layer of psychological manipulation.
LE’s end game grind is simple RNG. Frustrating, as RNG often is when the item pool is massive, but I truly believe it’s honest. What players forget is that at max level upgrades are simply statistically harder to find. That’s why so many min/maxers prefer to trade.
As a grind comparison, in vanilla WoW, you’d have 40 players running MC or Onyxia hoping to get their pants or hat or weapon or something. NOT EVERYONE GOT THEIR ITEM RIGHT AWAY. You could go weeks and weeks before completing a set. Sometimes you’d get items for the wrong faction that nobody could use.
You would have one shot at your item a week. The rest of the week, you’d run dungeons with your guild either filling in your own weak slots or helping guildies fill theirs.
And don’t get me started on running Pindleskin or <insert level 85+ zone> in D2 for hours on end.
Many of the most beloved and played games have been grindy AF. The assumption was that you were playing because you enjoyed the game, not because you had a box to tick.
LA’s honing system was fundamentally designed to be a funnel to the cash shop.
That much is obvious, but seems pointless to mention it in this discussion. Lost Ark was mentioned as a comparison for time investment, so obviously we’re not talking about a player swiping their credit card 
Right away??? cough I’m not at all bitter about my priest T2 bracers never dropping in Classic. It became a running joke in the guild. Will we get rogue or warlock bracers this week? Oh, double warlock. Sorry, maybe next week. We finished more Thunderfuries than priest T2 sets.
I remember vanilla MC. Same for when we played EQ, which didn’t have instances. So the 7 day boss drop was for the entire server…yikes.
I didn’t mind D2 for the simple reason that once you eventually got the item you were golden. I’m sure you could have gotten a bad roll, but a Shako was never going to “suck” even with subpar rolls. I’ve seen one in two decades lol.
We’ll see what LE does over time, it’s still young and I’ve only got 70 hours in it. It’s like you said above about there being more productive things to do. Springs just about here, I’ve got a motorcycle and a kid who loves sports… so my Epoch schedule is a couple weeks away from just being shot for the season. There’s a good chance it could be a different game come fall.
Speak for yourself 
Lmao.
Force Gaming is a YouTube channel. He covered the Nexon scandal with Maple Story.
You catch on quick kid, good on you.
D’oh. In fairness I’ve known about MapleStory for years. Wasn’t BDO doing something sketchy too?
BDO shows you the rates, the rates are just absolutely abyssmal. They are also very openly Pay2Win
Yes, I feel sometimes the RNG is rigged. Even though I only have 1 LP, it always get me the affix I want the most. Well, not always, 90% of the time. Joke aside, now what does that say about RNG. Yes, RNG is RNG. There’s no conspiracy here.
But I agree that it’s frustrating for a lot of players that they lock a core crafting mechanism behind a challenging boss. I have been the one advocating to change that, at least some sort of partial reward related to legendary crafting, but apparently people think it’s lazy and the only way you are worth of legendary crafting is killing Julra.
But the real hard part about getting a good legendary was never the boss. It’s actually getting the 3-4 LP legendary. When you have builds that can kill T4 Julra like it’s a walk in the park, the so-called challenge aspect already lost its purpose, and now players are just forced to use those builds in order to reliably get access to legendary crafting, while farming Julra.
I want to try to challenge T4 Julra on all my 19 alts, but I kinda don’t want to because it’s a headache to go through the dungeons again if you get killed during the boss fight. Let’s not even go into the barriers where you can just go through with certain traversal skills while some characters have to backtrack. I felt so dirty and stupid the first time when I passed a barrier like that because I don’t like exploit bugs while I feel I should have started doing it a long time ago instead of backtracking like a noob.
Yes it’s unlucky, yes it’s frustrating, BUT there are several ways for you to migitate these factors. In particular:
Honestly, LE’s crafting system is a lot more forgiving than say Path of Exiles’. One thing that both games share however, is the concept of odds of success being influenced by player agency to some extend.
EXACTLY, rng used to be a subtle variation of the item, now it’s the excuse they give for an item to vary between complete rubbish and the ultimate god item. and in the search for it you only receive in return a huge waste of time, CLEARLY with artificial barriers to progress.
Yep. Me and two other folks that I play with are getting the same feel more and more (all of us are CoF). In other terms it is also called PRNG (pseudo RNG) with biased output away from your “needs”. It’s easy for the game to “see” what you’re after and slap you the other. That’s how we feel it more and more.
Because those of us who have been around for longer do know the developers, we have spent years interacting with them & they’ve never come across as anything other than fellow gaming nerds. That’s not to say I always agree with their decisions, but they aren’t doing anything just to be a bunch of dicks about it.
Because the maths is too trivial to need that. If you have 1 choice & 4 options, then you have a 25% chance for each of the options to be chosen.
You do, you just didn’t realise that there wasn’t anything malign or mentally strenuous behind it. 1 in 4 is 25%, it’s that complicated… It’s also not Xcom maths.
Except in HC your time isn’t respected as much as it’s not respected in SC. HC is neither harder nor easier than SC, it’s just more punishing. Masochist was actually harder & that was glorious.
I suspect that it may be code for “I don’t like loosing so can I have the nice shiny now please”.
T4 Julra is not aimed at casual players. If they do want a legendary that requires T4 Julra then they should either buy it from the AH or get someone who is capable of doing it for them.
Also, improbable isn’t impossible.
That’ll be because legendaries are aimed at “hardcore” players, not casual players. It’s ok, they’re not aimed at me either.
potential slamming is garbage, they should do a mid cycle fix for this cause honestly, dont really feel like playing the game, two characters at 100 and im about done.
i get that the end game is garbage, sure. but i mean come on, who cares if we get a few more legendary potentials , who cares if we can maybe increase the odds of getting the enchant we want each time…it doesnt break anything, just allows people to have a bit more fun with the end game before they decide to quit the game.
This… is stupid.
Even if this were the case, it would be countered by, idk, something trivial like… crafting LP on a character that doesn’t actually want the item. Then the game “sees” this different character with different “needs” and builds what your other one wants.
EHG has stated they don’t use any RNG manipulation, if you don’t want to believe that, it’s on you. If we are to believe that random is truly random, it’s gonna bone you sometimes.
Yes you are.
@thread and OP: omg…
Trust blindly? Then you tell someone they are naive if the do?
So do you check every bottle of medicine when you go to the pharmacy? Do you test the pills? At least check the code?
Have you put gas in your car? How can you trust them blindly? I sure hope you don’t ever put a higher grade gas in your car. How do you know it’s not actually the lower and they rip you off?
I’m guessing you take your own sheets when you travel 100% of the time. You don’t know who was in that room supposedly cleaning.
Poor grocery store. Definitely can’t trust those people blindly. Especially anything just sitting out like fruits and veggies. You probably buy all frozen just to be sure. Can you really trust the company behind those products though?
Do you check your break fluid each time you drive your car?
I could keep going and maybe you think this is a little absurd. I hope you do because that is what your post comes off like.
Agree on the slamming. ARPGs are always a grind, but the gameplay loop and grind need to be enjoyable. Right now it’s not that LE is a grind, it’s that every aspect of the game is its own grind.
Crafting is its own grind. Run out of forge potential, brick. Randomly remove wrong affix, brick. Failed to seal affix, brick. And all this assumes you found a decent exalt in the first place.
So you have your exalt, now you need say a boss drop in monos, which is easy, because you know right where it drops. Grind echos to get stability to get to the quests to get to the boss… didn’t drop? Grind echos to get 900 effing stability to get to the…etc etc. Finally get the item, no LP? Repeat.
Now you have an LP item so you can slam it right? Noooo, now you need keys to get to the dungeon to get to the correct level of the dungeon…that you have to beat to be able to have a % chance of the affix you want coming over after all of the previous steps. Don’t get it, repeat the whole thing again from step one… and that’s for a single item.
Look, I know I’m complaining, it’s a fun game and for my dollar, I got my moneys worth already. My friends group play it now as just something to do. We’ve put LP items or really anything we’d want to target farm out of our minds, because it’s so random, the game has already conditioned us to believe that we’ll never get what we want lol.
Anyway, I’m sure they’ll tweak things over time. Diablo 3’s loot was worse in my opinion and after loot 2.0 came out, it ended up being my most played ARPG of the last 20 years. Anything’s possible. See you all in game.