Last Epoch’s Season 4 and Beyond: Expansion, Paradox Classes, and Roadmap

[Elhazzared]

@Kulze

I dunno if you quoted the wrong thing… but your answer makes no sense there.

I argued about the content and how difficulty-wise it is able to be achieved. I dunno how you get to farming multiple sets of gear.

Aberroth can simply be killed with the normal gear you generally run.

It is related, if you are not going straight up for the gear you are supposed to use in the game and are using gear that is meant to cover things covered normally by blessings then you first are going to lose something and going by what you say you will lose HP on almost every piece of gear and then if you want to upgrade something then it needs to drop with the resistances you already put in that place which makes it harder or needs you to constantly change gear to constantly re-balance resistances. In other words, you will be going through multiple sets of gear instead of working for the gear that you actually need.

Normal aberroth should be killable with normalish gear, you still kinda want some LP 1s because let’s be real, you can chose what goes in there. You still want T22s because again, why do a relatively hard boss without having at least good gear?

Point is, people still need good gear to progress especially when they can’t make up with skill.

@Kulze

D4 demands more skill then mobile games of the genre do comparably with the same rought level of skill for input.
By far more even.

You#re setting the bar a bit too low there.

While I did indeed exaggerate a little bit to drive the point across by using casual players as an example of bad since they are the absolute worst, it isn’t that far from the truth, bad players are almost on that level of bad and that is the kind of D4 player. Very bad players who like the idea of ARPGs but they cannot even get close to being average just because it’s a type of game they aren’t good at.

Also the only skill involved in D4 is skill rotation, that is it, the rest is nearly brain dead.

@Kulze

Not really unless you’re - once more - a pure glasscannon, which would make you fail in the canal and in maps anyway.

Or you know, they land a crit. The average build that is neither tanky nor a glass cannon will on a normal ranged attack get hit for 75%ish of their HP and will be oneshot on a crit, the jump is a little less powerful but still enough to oneshot on a crit.

@Kulze

Yeah, you don’t slam into them, their range is basically non-existent. As a melee character you’re supposed to have learned basic positioning by that time and as a ranged character you never have any issue either.

It’s not about you being melee or not, you can simply find yourself in the receiving end of them if you don’t get out of the way because they see you they cast it and you have to get out of the way no matter how you put it. Yes it is avoidable but the point I’m making is, you are not going to face tank that except on very specific builds like RF.

@Kulze

I’m a experienced player in PoE, it’s my main ARPG to be exact, with several characters having beaten the pinnacle bosses, non-OP builds to mention that.
I’ve over the course of the many years played in a total of 22 leagues (paused for a few times for other games and general life).
To date I’ve managed to get 7 first-time characters into maps with res cap.
I’m one of the people which plays that commonly at Day 1 and I rush since I’m experienced… hence there is no market to buy anything from yet. And despite my experience at the game I generally lack some resistances at a sometimes substantial manner while entering maps.
A few maps with 20-30% res is no big issue for most builds, not a great experience but also not something which causes overly major issues as you get half-way decent gear in maps really swiftly.

Another example of how you are a good player. The average player will keep dying without capped resistance even on t1 maps. You are compensating with skill where the average player can only do it with gear.

@Kulze

This was a official statement in interviews with the developers.

The same devs that say they have not had retention loss from Delve onwards because their “core player base” is still there. They refuse to count the people who play, only the usual 30K that always stick for at least a month, everyone else doesn’t exists in their eyes so you know what, I’ll question their statistics when they do not seem to comply with reality.

@Kulze

Also factually wrong.
Any build which is demanded to ‘dodge’ generally (and not simply have decent positioning to not get slapped into the ground, which is a basic skill of the genre) is a non-viable build as it wouldn’t be able to even get into the vast majority of farming strats.

No matter the build you always either have positioning (minion builds) or you demolish enemies before they can even become a major danger. Exceptions for singular enemies and some bosses… as well as some mechanics like expedition at times (if you’re lazy and don’t care about defense or evasion based mods being added)

Decent positioning is dodge. Whether you are walking out of the way or you use a skill to move out of the way, you are getting out of the way one way or another. The only 2 points here is. You either face tank because you have the gear to take it or you have to not be hit which requires skill. I thought this was apparent but I supposed I should have elaborated more.

@Kulze

You’re making my point.

A single item with T5 health and some res without any offensive modifiers is sufficing already and would’ve been upgrades comparatively.

As a general reminder… as you progress survival is the primary factor, up until the point where you can start scaling damage to such degrees that killing enemies before they have reasonable time to act becomes a option. Or you reach a skill level to avoid the vast majority of abilities (which few manage to do)

When I said a single affix I didn’t meant 5 tiers of it, I meant 1 tier. So if my T2 life suddenly is t3, you think that will make a major difference? The answer is no. White items have almost no CP so obviously trying to get one or 2 affix tiers higher after spending a ton of crafting materials which I don’t have unlimited amounts is unreasonable, the investment isn’t worth what you’re gaining.

Also while defense is important damage also is because one of the major ways of not taking too much damage is killing things before they can hurt you. the longer they are alive the worse it is for you so you cannot just say, put everything into defense and that will do it. I’ve done it, damage was so bad I couldn’t play because things would take forever to die. You need to strike a balance.

@Kulze

Oh piss off with that argumentation line plainly spoken. You don’t know me, you haven’t seen me play, so don’t assume shit. It’s not only annoying but bears absolutely no value. You can make up anything this way.
On what are you basing it? Because I managed to get to 500+c? Because I actually use my brain to think for a minute when I get trashed completely to find out what value I need to improve to avoid that in the future?
Because my statements towards you are based on your build versus the guide you provided back then. So we got a proper example of what it actually is.
Where do you have that for me?
Nowhere? Good… then plainly spoken screw off with that type of comment.

Even if personal skill level would play a role here… if you go into D4 and play it… then go into PoE 1 and play it… then you get a grasp on what is ‘in between’ clearly unless you’re incompetent.

Simple as that.

You already proven the point yourself. No average player has EVER beaten a pinnacle boss in PoE. No average player has ever done with without being cap res in early maps. No average player is in maps day 1. This is just not a thing, we are nowhere near that skill level, that skill level for us is insanely good and the fact that you don’t recognizes it only proves my my point.

I’ve been at the point where I was good at games, Again WoT and thought people were absurdly bad players. Then I saw an average player, statistically average according to sites that make those statistics and it looked so bad to me I was horrified. But yes, that is average no matter whether you want to accept that reality or not. It is you who is incapable of accepting what average is.

@Kulze

This is a universal model by the way.
Doesn’t distinct topic.
It’s the same in communication. In sports. In crafts. In science… everywhere.

The human mind has some areas for everyone it excels at… but outside of different neurological wiring (which in that severty is commonly called a disability because it diverts from the norm, upsides or not existing since they come with severe downsides in return as well and society) the differences are surprisingly small, mostly reliant on interest. The only exceptions are physical based actions, hence dexterity, endurance and strength.

And I disagree because the reality is, there are people who love certain games and play them a lot and do everything they can to get better and they are still awful at it despite being a completely normal person who still do well or average at other types of games.

So your theory doesn’t really conforms to reality in here and to be fair that is true for most things but a lot of how good you can get in many areas are physically conditioned but even ones that aren’t are still conditioned by what are your limits.

@Kulze

Willing to.
Capacity is available in the majority actually.
Willingness is not. The vast majority of people aren’t putting effort (including building a knowledge base hence) into the vast majority of things they do. Why would you think this would be bigger for a entertainment product? It’s less so even as necessity is not there which at least puts some to do it at least.

Again we’ll disagree on this, I’ve already pointed out that willingness isn’t the factor. It can be sure but it isn’t in all cases and probably not in most.

@Kulze

How about letting you be told then by someone who actually does instead of telling the one who has experienced and compared it that they’re wrong?

I can accept that is your experience but at least from what I see, people certainly seem to struggle less in videos or streams.

As for why almost no one ever touches Uberroth have you considered how many people play LE for more than a week including major ARPG streamers? It’s not really that strange when you look at it from that point of view but I’ll accept that from your point of view Uberroth is harder and that I may be wrong here and that is just a case of what manages to pass out from what I can watch. However there is room for other people who are not you and are capable of doing both to say otherwise. Either way not overly important, everyone agrees that pinnacle content was a wrong move for LE and that its pinnacle content probably should have ended with dungeons.

@Kulze

It is, as stated. You’ll get a T5 health Affix + a res Affix to T4 at least. That’s all that’s needed to be superior to what you had.

You can play broken record about it as much as you want, it won’t change that fact no matter how often you repeat it.

Already answered this before but 1 or 2 tiers of affix are nothing in the grand scheme of things.

@Kulze

Not talking about Uberroth. I said Aberroth. Those are 2 different pieces of content.

If someone is unable to kill Aberroth with 4 LP items and fully decked out then they chose the wrong game.
If they have fun, great!
If not… leave.
If they demand it to be changed for them… laugh.

Yes I misread here.

@Kulze

Scaling, yes.
The early parts of corruption have barely been touched. It’s the progression along the way which changed and becomes harder faster. It starts out nearly the same though.

You say barely but prior to it happening, in fact prior to when they changed the resistances I could with some good builds move straight into empowered and do it. I did feel the big jump in difficulty but it was still at a point where it was doable. After the change it was no longer possible so I’d say it was perhaps more than just barely touched.

@Kulze

What’s right is following the basics of the basics rather then wanting to enforce ‘your own personal flavor’ - which is nonsensical by the way - onto the game in general.

I’m the first calling out nonsensical design which is unfitting. I take issue with many aspects of the game. From itemization, to crafting, to the factions, to boss ward, to the actual content positioning and more.

But what you ask? I’ll defend it tooth and nail to state ‘if it’s done what you ask for the game would be in even more shit then it is even now’. And you should know how hard that is to achieve.

The switch to empowered itself is not a major burden yet… it’s not smooth, that’s the sole actual existing issue which needs to be solved, the difficulty itself not at that point.

This is the point where we disagree the most and the most important point really. The problem with the switch is not it being jarring. That’s not good of course but that isn’t the problem, the problem is that it becomes too difficult.

Let’s look at both our examples of how to fix the problem.

Your “git gud” option will cause people to start not being able to push further once they hit higher 70 levels monoliths or lower 80s and that is me included. That means weeks of farming mid to lower level 70 monoliths for gear before we can progress just a little and with some gear not being available by level.

Realistically what is going to happen in this scenario. Are people gonna “git gud” or are they going to face the same problem early on and say, they made it even worse and quit? I’m sure I’ll just quit earlier and I’m not the only one. I doubt the player base will be any bigger even if progression is smoother, the progression wall is still there.

Let’s look at my example, you keep progressing as normal until you reach empowered. Now you stay at 100, you farm your gear at a more reasonable rate, you farm your grand blessings and as you feel that difficulty is lowering because your gear is getting better, you increase corruption and you keep doing that till you reach a point where you are comfortable. Rinse and repeat.

In this scenario, how many people do you think will stay compared to before? Probably most of the people who were quitting now are playing for longer including me because guess what, the game now allows me to tackle difficulty at my own pace instead of blocking me from getting the start line.

So we’ll have to disagree on the effects on the game. The game will be exactly what it promises at that point, a game in between D4 and PoE in terms of difficulty and people will stick around and play. If MTX gets better after that then the game is financially viable.

The question you have to ask before you come up with a “solution” is whether or not something is going to reach the desired effect which is keep the people who play the game day 1 of a new season playing for a few more weeks and the fact of the matter is. Telling someone to “git gud” has never had the intended effect, it has only made them quit or in case of single player game use cheats or mods to make it palatable to them.

@Kulze

You would be surprised…
I wish it were true, would make it so much better if people actually engage which stuff they do rather then just not engaging in ‘other’ stuff… but it’s not the case.

It usually is the case. I am not going to discount some cases of people who have absolutely no care and play a game cause they are bored despite the fact that they are actually even more bored playing than watching paint dry but those are rare cases, you shouldn’t be taking those as being the majority.

@Kulze

That’s why you’re able to see people with even middling IQ being ‘wizards’ at what they do in any place you go. You don’t need to be a genius IQ person to achieve a great result… you just need to have the technique for progress down and willingness to engage. That’s all.
The vast majority of humanity doesn’t have that.

We’ll disagree with that. In real life work related stuff I agree but that’s because of a different phenomenon which in many cases the better you do the more work you get assigned but no pay raise and no promotions and so people tend to just do the bare minimum not to get fired because there is no incentive to do better.

However in games this is not often the case. You also hear often the so called. I just want to turn off brain and have fun and heck, even I have said it. Am I actually doing that? No, almost no one is. They are for the most part referring to just relax and play without being a sweaty try hard which right now is the preferred method, hence why competitive games are now more and more falling by the wayside where single player or co-op games are rising in popularity but it was the opposite 10 to 20 years ago.

---

Anyway, I think there isn’t a point to discuss this any longer between us. We’ve seen that telling people to git gud never helped and if people have to gid guf then perhaps the game is not for the average which LE is meant to be.

If you don’t fix what is getting people to quit which is the difficulty then people will continue to quit. That is my take and the take of many others who have reported this same issue and were always ignored.

To be completely honest however it probably doesn’t even matters. EHG has never listened, Krafton certainly won’t and the things that are in motion are unlikely to change which will kill LE before 2028.

[Elhazzared]

@BeardusMaximus

Or you dreamt it and it was never actually said.

Believe what you want. I know what was said, I heard it when it happened so I understand what is happening, you want to ignore it, fine by me.

@BeardusMaximus

You use gear and passives to cap resists earlier then respec and replace gear once the blessing has been obtained.

Which means grinding multiple gear sets at a point where grinding is horrible. I’ve said to Kulze and maintain this. You can grind the same amount of craftable gear (by craftable understand gear with bare minimum potential to become a decent piece) in 1 or 2 hours in empowered monoliths as in 2 or 3 days in normal monoliths. Empowered also gives you better quality in terms of more likely to roll higher CP and more likely to get exalted items.

This is not really acceptable. Imagine the average player being told in let’s call it the equivalent of PoE to grind T1 maps for 3 weeks before he gets the bare minimum to progress.

@BeardusMaximus

I can find lots of posts stating the game is too easy causing players to get bored and quit early though.

You are finding the few people who want to turn LE into PoE by just making it harder and harder when that is what is killing LE.

LE is never going to compete with PoE in the hardcore market, they can compete for the average player market because no one is tackling that specific part of the community who turns out, are the largest. Even D4 massively failed when they made it for the bad players and then used mechanics like skill rotations. Not that they aren’t doing well enough to survive but had they done a bit better (which normally would be hard but blizzard) and there would be very little room for any ARPG that wasn’t D4 or PoE.

I dunno what search you need but any complaint of people saying the game is hard or that there is an issue in difficulty scaling are the things you are looking for. That being said, threads being what they are it can simply be under Feedback for 1.x or whatever they decided to call it.

@BeardusMaximus

You don’t need to get mechanically better, you need to improve your overall knowledge of the game, this way you can identify flaws in your build and devise a solution.

It’s possible the build guide was outdated and that is why there are so many questionable decisions being made.

That is just as unreasonable. How many people do you see creating build guides? Most people may understand the mechanics but from that to understanding how to put up a build together is a huge undertaking that most people just aren’t capable and this is no insult to anyone’s intelligence. Just as there are some people who are cracked at math and some who are cracked at philosophy and really any subject. It takes a very specific kind of brain to be good at that so you can’t expect people to be able to do it even if they understand how most things work in the game.

[DeaDite]

that HAS to be the least information in a roadmap EVER made. well done.

[Kulze]

@Elhazzared

It is related, if you are not going straight up for the gear you are supposed to use

Welcome to a basic ARPG!
You start with generic crap.
Then you specialize.

You don’t skip steps and wonder what happened.

It’s simple as that.

First provide the basis, then improve on your basis. If you find something which is good enough to be a step beyond? Hurray!

@Elhazzared

Or you know, they land a crit.

Their crit is 50% more damage, which is the same chance for nigh any enemy. 5% chance.
It’s no 100% crit like in LE which is severe and not a fun design. It’s just showcasing ‘now you got a dangerous hit!’ and that’s it. Expected to be mitigated.

And if you get hit for 75% you fucked up, plain and simple. And if you’re one-shot then get back to farming for gear instead, your build’s broken.

@Elhazzared

you can simply find yourself in the receiving end of them if you don’t get out of the way

They have no range… and they’re slow as fuck.
Don’t play blindfolded.

@Elhazzared

The average player will keep dying without capped resistance even on t1 maps.

Welcome, I do too! I just don’t loose the map. Hence why I said ‘not a nice experience but acceptable still’.

@Elhazzared

They refuse to count the people who play, only the usual 30K that always stick for at least a month,

As they should. Toursists are worthless for a live-service game.

The only reason to improve the early experience is to acquire more of those people, not to provide anything for thise not being them.

Welcome to live-service.

@Elhazzared

Decent positioning is dodge.

Dodging is actively avoiding stuff coming at you.

Positioning is not letting it happen in the first place in many many cases.

@Elhazzared

So if my T2 life suddenly is t3,

A white item will provide you with a extremely high chance of a T5 + another Affix with 2-3 Tiers on it.

Also crafting mats are worthless for health, they are common, you get them shoved up your rear faster then you can use em. So use em when in need.
As for shatterings… they cost 2k, a single gold shrine provides 15-25k. Then there’s lizards as well for some extra Gold. Gold scales awful so it’s good returns comparatively to end-game still.

@Elhazzared

Also while defense is important damage also

If you’re not alive you cannot do damage.

@Elhazzared

No average player is in maps day 1.

If they don’t sleep they are…
Time investment /= skill. I can only repeat that.

@Elhazzared

And I disagree because the reality is,

So you disagree with the current scientific knowledge accepted in psychology? Gotcha!

And as stated, the willigness and the knowledge on how to improve yourself (generally) are a necessity. Very few people have the first and even less the second.

@Elhazzared

As for why almost no one ever touches Uberroth have you considered how many people play LE for more than a week including major ARPG streamers?

Yes, and the numbers are still atrocious, even when considering the quicker falloff time and the pure numerical difference between the games.

@Elhazzared

You say barely

The power difference is somewhere around 5-10% more then before. It’s basically nothing, especially since you got access to exalted items, LP uniques, Nemesis and Weaver content which each provide vastly superior gear then seen before that adjustment was made.

@Elhazzared

Realistically what is going to happen in this scenario. Are people gonna “git gud” or are they going to face the same problem early on and say, they made it even worse and quit?

Some will quite. Some will ‘git gud’.
As long as the itemization progression is adjusted a little accordingly it means the expectation state for end-game is provided properly and hence it simply doesn’t turn off those which would stay while those which anyway wouldn’t leave earlier.

The second have no long-term value to the company plainly spoken, they’re not important for the business… which is the struggling thing after all.

We disagree because your ask is to provide the ‘average’ non-staying player with a venue in a live-service game. This business-style doesn’t cater to them… actually it wants to keep that number small as it costs database size, bandwith and doesn’t provide income, hence is a detriment. Their only value is word-of-mouth and only to a degree as well since the most likely follow-up are once again similarly minded people which come and go swiftly.

SP and MP game? I would be with you as stated.

[Llama8]

@Kulze

Yes, and I didn’t state the sheer amount of time invested to achieve that.
So it has no basis for the skill yet.

Ahh yes, because someone having a physics doctorate & working for NASA can definitely say that they’re “just average intelligence”! If the premise that pinnacle content is by definition the hardest content in the game (it is the pinnacle after all) & you’ve done it multiple times (so not luck) on builds that aren’t OP (so not brute forcing/nuking the boss down before it gets to difficult mechanics) then surely it’s logical to say that said player is towards the top of the skill-pool? Assuming said pinnacle content isn’t so easy that most players are doing it. Also assuming you didn’t just buy a carry.

So, which is it?

@Kulze

Anyone who uses as much time as I do and isn’t utterly awful at the game can achieve it.

The bolded part of the sentence is doing a lot more work than you think.

@Kulze

And the absolutely worthless aspect for any live-service game though. Low staying power, low paying power.
Sure, you need a few always but they’re never the focus unless you want your product to fail.

That’s the thing about averages though, you can have long tails in both directions. Just because they aren’t particularly useful from an economic point of view doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

@Kulze

Time /= skill.

That goes against your previous statements that as you spend time playing the game then you get more skilled at it? Not an exact quote, but I’d agree with that within limits:

@Kulze

Yes, if you don’t have a ramping up difficulty you aren’t getting challenged after acquanting yourself with the controls and hence getting gradually more skilled.

@Kulze

Thoughtless repetition has a extremely low ceiling, true.

Thoughtful repetition has a extremely high one for a large portion of people.

The overall ceiling of skill is based on interest (engagement and curiosity hence) and IQ actually if we wanna be very clear about things.
The lower the IQ the lower the ceiling.

And you have had over seven years to practice (not continuously & only playing PoE, obviously, but then you’re also not as dumb as a bag of rocks).

@Kulze

@Llama8

Ok, and you’ve killed them with several characters that weren’t OP, by your own admission & yet you still think that you’re average?

Yes, because it’s extremely taxing content for me at which I struggle to get through, which is why I need such immense amounts of time and effort to overcome it.

That’s fair enough but you did. The fact that you got to that section of the game and completed it puts you well above average, unless, as I said/intimated before, most players kill the ubers, which I would be quite surprised with.

You know the saying about courage & fear? Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s doing the scarey shit anyway. The fact that you did the hardest shit in the game means that you are well above average regardless of how long it took you to do it and speaks to your determination to learn & get that shit done.

Christ on a rope man, just accept the fucking laurels!

[Kulze]

@Llama8

If the premise that pinnacle content is by definition the hardest content in the game (it is the pinnacle after all) & you’ve done it multiple times (so not luck) on builds that aren’t OP (so not brute forcing/nuking the boss down before it gets to difficult mechanics) then surely it’s logical to say that said player is towards the top of the skill-pool?

And would it be fair to say that a player which plays 10 hours but starts to play as good as someone playing 500 hours has ‘poor skills’ for example?

Snapshot-wise you’re right, 100%… should’ve made the distinction with ‘talent’ rather I realize.

Time invested should matter for taking into consideration how skilled someone is. If a person catches up to others while using a fraction of the time but has not a higher IQ then obviously ‘something’ is going on there. And that’s a common thing to happen. What’s the deciding factors there is the big question?

I’ve got 8500 hours in PoE, did you expect me to stay at the same level of skill as someone who plays 500 hours? Or less? But if you checked on me when I only played those 500 hours a ton of them would’ve been vastly better then me.
Time isn’t inherently skill… but skill differences should be compared with the time investment to get a proper picture.

Obviously someone cooking for 30 in a professional kitchen has a high chance to be better then the new hire being there for a few weeks. Experience which turns into skill.

@Llama8

The bolded part of the sentence is doing a lot more work than you think.

Fair, but that’s also not ‘average’

@Llama8

Just because they aren’t particularly useful from an economic point of view doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Why cater to them though unless you already are established enough to do so without any severe downside?

@Llama8

That goes against your previous statements that as you spend time playing the game then you get more skilled at it?

Ok… you are not guaranteed to be more skilled with time investment as another person, it’s not a primary decider sadly.
But I also worded it badly again there.

But to state it more in detail:

• ‘Talent’ makes one part. Talent is the genetic disposition. Fixated. Be it IQ or some diverging neurological setup hindering or improving that aspect.
• The second is interest. Without interest for improving you’ll not look into ways to improve. The analyzing part doesn’t happen this way.
• The third is the skill of analyzing. To know the steps to take to analyze properly, if you don’t even with talent and interest barely anything happens.
• The fourth is time… and as you can see we already several indicators for it.

We can say Talent is your absolute skill ceiling as well as a multiplier in acquisition speed.
Interest is also a multiplier in acquisition speed.
Analyizing skill is also a multiplier in Acquisition speed.
Time is solely a decider after taking the other 3 into consideration on the percentile to the skill ceiling which you’ve reached by then. It starts slow, then becomes steep, then flattens out commonly.

[Llama8]

@Kulze

And would it be fair to say that a player which plays 10 hours but starts to play as good as someone playing 500 hours has ‘poor skills’ for example?

That very much depends, it’s possible, certainly.

@Kulze

Time invested should matter for taking into consideration how skilled someone is. If a person catches up to others while using a fraction of the time but has not a higher IQ then obviously ‘something’ is going on there. And that’s a common thing to happen.

Yeah, that’s fair, but if you’re reaching a certain threshold that most players don’t, you’re certainly doing better than most, one way or another.

@Kulze

Time isn’t inherently skill… but skill differences should be compared with the time investment to get a proper picture.

There is, IMO, a non-linear asymptotic relationship between time & skill, though I’d definitely say that people have a skill cap. The more time you put into doing a thing the better you get (generally) but the further you get your rate of improvement slows down. I’m never going to be as good at theoretical physics as Stephen Hawking, but if I put effort into it (the maths side specifically) I would get better.

[BeardusMaximus]

@Elhazzared

I know what was said

Yet you are unable to find a single source for this claim.

@Elhazzared

Which means grinding multiple gear sets at a point where grinding is horrible

A white item purchased from a vendor was an upgrade on your paladin, providing greater EHP from the increased armour value alone, then you’re free to craft whatever life and resist affixes you want on there. Literal minutes to gain a significant defensive upgrade.

If you don’t like grinding for gear that you’re playing the wrong genre of game.

@Elhazzared

You are finding the few people who want to turn LE into PoE

No these were mostly posts from players that jumped on with the season 2 hype and found the game to be too easy. You on the other hand haven’t managed to provide one instance of a player quitting at the point they reach empowered monoliths, if your claim that a majority leave at this point was true, do you not think there would be more posts about it?

@Elhazzared

PoE to grind T1 maps for 3 weeks before he gets the bare minimum to progress.

My brother in christ you are doing something horribly wrong if this is how long it takes you to get any gear.

@Elhazzared

How many people do you see creating build guides?

There is a very large difference from creating a new build, and then writing a guide to looking at your current build vs the guide you are following and noticing “huh I need more fire resistance, I’ll craft that.”

I’m not suggesting you write a build guide, I’m simply suggesting you might have more success and get further into the endgame if you take a little bit of time out to learn some basic crafting and defensive stats to include into your character.

[Volsalex]

I can understand that they have issues with funding and need an additional source of gain whether community likes it or not. However, I suspect idea of “free expansion and paid DLC classes” might be actually worse than “paid expansion” since many players heavily connect that with “pay-to-win” especially after previous similar occasions like Diablo 4’s Vessel of Hatred expansion where Spiritborn (class gated behind paid expansion) was massively overpowered and made all other classes look lame in comparison. This is not what players dedicated to a specific class want and they would cause massive backlash if something similar would happen in Last Epoch’s expansion. Including me. As a Sorcerer player (that is already underpowered compared to most other classes and needs work) I would be extremely angry if they release new class that would just outshine all the existing ones and the solution would be “just play new class instead of your preferred / main one” like many people wrote during Vessel of Hatred release. Even more so if that would also mean spending additional money for that.

As such there are several options that can be done to mitigate the harm.
First - either stick to “free expansion with paid class” model, but make this new class well balanced (not underpowered since it would make its buyers angry and not overpowered since it would make other classes players angry) and just different. So people can just optionally buy it if they like its flavour to feel different mechanics / gameplay and not require it to dominate content / leaderboards or whatever.
Second - switch back to paid expansion model, but put ton of work into both seasons before it and expansion itself to make it really worth the cost and show people that money you are asking for the expansion are really being put to good use.
One of these options while still having backlash from many players can at least work and mitigate the harm / reduce community hostility. Either other option that involves additional payment (like free expansion with class gated behind paywall being intentionally overpowered to increase its sales) would likely make the situation only worse.

[Elhazzared]

@BeardusMaximus

Yet you are unable to find a single source for this claim.

I am able, I don’t want to do it which is different. As I said, I am not going to waste hours of my day doing that just for a “Ah, told you so”. You want to believe it, be my guest, you will only understand better what is happening, you don’t, that’s fine by me. You’re the one not knowing any better.

@BeardusMaximus

A white item purchased from a vendor was an upgrade on your paladin, providing greater EHP from the increased armour value alone, then you’re free to craft whatever life and resist affixes you want on there. Literal minutes to gain a significant defensive upgrade.

If you don’t like grinding for gear that you’re playing the wrong genre of game.

A white item purchased from a vendor would at best gets 1 or 2 more tiers of affixes in total which isn’t much of anything, couple that with needing some maybe 15 or 20 attempts before I managed to roll well enough with not losing CP and having small losses of CP to even get there and the waste of crafting materials makes it completely worthless of an investment.

And it’s not that I don’t like grinding for gear, there is however a difference in grinding for gear upgrades where one piece literally just replaces the one that was there because it has more tiers of affixes than the previous and grinding for and entire garbage set that is just to cover some weak points right now while creating other weak points like low HP for example, and then in order to get to what I need I have to craft an entire different gear set once I have some other stuff.

@BeardusMaximus

No these were mostly posts from players that jumped on with the season 2 hype and found the game to be too easy. You on the other hand haven’t managed to provide one instance of a player quitting at the point they reach empowered monoliths, if your claim that a majority leave at this point was true, do you not think there would be more posts about it?

Again, those are the few post of people wanting to turn LE into PoE. Look at what EHG has been doing as of late to please those people and the streamers who say the same thing. They kept adding pinnacle content, they added tombs which is harder content and what was the result. Was there more people sticking around? No, of course there wasn’t. Even in PoE these people keep asking for harder stuff and has that ever kept people playing longer? No, if anything their retention lowered but at least in PoE’s case they are marketed for the hardcore audience so fair enough.

Again, much like with the other point. I am not going to waste my time looking it up, it was reported all the time and the fact you say you cannot find any post when even I literally made a feedback post about this every single season already shows that you are just incapable of finding them. Even if in the absolute worst case scenario I was the only one (hint, I’m certainly not), you still couldn’t find it. Perhaps the problem is that you aren’t actually looking for it in the first place, contrary to what you say.

Also do understand one thing. While there are more posts than just mine about this, the average player normally doesn’t says anything, they don’t like and they quit. Only a few people bother to say anything however we have the data that most people are quitting after a week and EHG said, regardless of you believing in it or not, that most people quit once they hit empowered monoliths. Does that means everyone who reaches empowered and quits are quitting for the spike in difficulty? Probably not but I’d bet most are quitting for that same reason at least.

@BeardusMaximus

My brother in christ you are doing something horribly wrong if this is how long it takes you to get any gear.

Normal monolith gear drops are way too low, that is one of the issues why grinding in normal is not considered acceptable by most people and why the absolute bare minimum grinding place is empowered with 300 corruption being the sweet spot for grinding.

Those 3 week, it may look like a lot but when you consider that is equivalent to 1 or 2 days of empowered, it puts things into perspective. Actually not even equivalent. It’s equivalent in terms of number of drops but generally you’ll find more items with LP and more exalted items not to mention higher chance for higher CP.

@BeardusMaximus

There is a very large difference from creating a new build, and then writing a guide to looking at your current build vs the guide you are following and noticing “huh I need more fire resistance, I’ll craft that.”

I’m not suggesting you write a build guide, I’m simply suggesting you might have more success and get further into the endgame if you take a little bit of time out to learn some basic crafting and defensive stats to include into your character.

Let’s run with this idea for a second. So I’m missing void resistance (cause elemental are a bit more finicky with how you go about it). Ok where do I get my void resistance, looks at guide. 10% from the tree, rest from a grand blessing.

Ok, option 1, I will completely screw my gearing and lose HP to get it and then lose more for other resistance I’m lacking and then for crit immunity and once I get all the grand blessings assuming having nearly no HP anywhere as a result of covering for those weakness isn’t a weakness big enough to still not allow me to do empowered. Then I will need a whole new set of gear because I can no longer trade piece for piece, I’ll have to replace the entire gear set after I get the blessings.

Option 2, I stay with some weaknesses in the defense until the blessings are in place and I only need to keep upgrading my gear instead of having to farm and entire new set to replace the old set.

People go with option 2. First because they are following the build guide and if the build guide tells them, don’t get this resist anywhere because it will come from a grand blessing, that’s what they will do but even if they think, I need this right now then they are putting themselves in a situation of needing to farm 2 entire different sets of gear and that will kill any motivation to play because it’s not fun to sit on a garbage set of gear that you are using just to make due and then have to wait until you’ve got a whole new set of gear to be able to progress.

This is before we take into consideration the first set of gear, the garbage one, you are grinding is going to still be done on normal which takes forever and the idea that we can ignore damage for defense is also pure fantasy because if you take forever to kill not only that means you take more damage hence your defenses are not doing enough for you, but also it’s not fun to play when enemies take too long to kill. I’m not talking about bosses, boss fights are meant to have some level of staying power but mobs on maps should be being deleted as you go or it’s not fun.

[khoroshy]

Wow. Somehow you made the situation and the feeling about the game even worse than before. Hope you guys can recover from this and have actually good stuff prepared for us in the next season

[BeardusMaximus]

Source, Trust me bro.

I’m not going to take the time to reply any further, you’re clearly trolling at this point.

[Elhazzared]

If that is what you want to call it even when ALL other things all point towards the same issue then go right ahead.

Fact is, they ignored the issues reported as a whole, people stopped playing and now EHG is in the state that it is with absolutely no chance of recovery in sight.

[Kulze]

@Elhazzared

Again, those are the few post of people wanting to turn LE into PoE.

The notion has been ongoing since pre-release. Those are not people wanting to turn LE into PoE, it’s simply that the game’s difficulty is not only a mess but also completely underwhelming during the campaign, with the exception of Act 1-2 as well as the other extreme with Act 8 (Lagon) and Act 9 and 10 now which are overtuned.

The middle is simply a crapshow.

@Elhazzared

Look at what EHG has been doing as of late to please those people and the streamers who say the same thing.

EHG has done nothing to please thos sub-group.

They added the asked for content in the absolutely most atrocious possible way.
People asked for more bosses and content for end-game… which any reasonable common developer will sit back, nod… and then create content a bit above the current top-end content.
EHG instead tried to see just how far they can threw the content out to the far end causing the whole situation to become even worse since the monotone gameplay cycle which people wanted to break up is now mandated even more so to reach that new end-goal rather then providing it in a way where you have a bit of this… and then a bit of that.

So don’t use the absolute garbage they provided us with to underline your argument there… there was no upside for even the people directly asking for it… and it wasn’t also the first priority, fixing how progression feels and adding mechanics was the primary one.
Mechanics like the idol enchanting… but a bit more balanced rather then the RNG festival we have. Mechanics like the beasts… but with a bit more depth then this shallow mess we have.

Not random champions which are a utterly throwing the try formerly to establish balance completely out the window or self-inserting content by adding buffs to normal mobs in monoliths with the weaver stuff.

@Elhazzared

While there are more posts than just mine about this, the average player normally doesn’t says anything, they don’t like and they quit.

And you cannot properly know why. Which is a common thing to happen in every game.
And the overall interaction rate with out-of-game things rises in chance the more invested people are in the product.
Those which are not invested are not valued anyway as they don’t provide any meaningful revenue anyway.
The only aspect relevant for it is early-game experience to cause people to become invested.

So that’s a nothing-burger argument which you brought. It’s a misconception to attach weight to it as it cannot act as a metric reasonably. So you cannot make an argument out of it reasonably either.

@Elhazzared

Those 3 week, it may look like a lot but when you consider that is equivalent to 1 or 2 days of empowered, it puts things into perspective.

Nah, you just screwed up if you even have to do any of that, plain and simple.
I’m talking about at most 5 hours of play-time as extra investment being needed to fix up stuff. In total, if you’ve had bad RNG and messed up.

@Elhazzared

Ok where do I get my void resistance, looks at guide. 10% from the tree, rest from a grand blessing.

Exchange Affixes shown as the end-result and are offensive with a void res one. You solved it. A single T5 suffices to make it reasonable enough.

The blessing is used to free up a Affix slot, that’s all.

@Elhazzared

If that is what you want to call it even when ALL other things all point towards the same issue then go right ahead.

Nah, plainly spoken you just got a serious issue of ‘broken record’ while simply stating ‘no!’ without any proper reasoning behind it.
It’s kinda worthless to argue properly, but there’s some aspects of misconception from your side I’ll still point out anyway. I ignored the repetitions already after all.

[Llama8]

@Kulze

People asked for more bosses and content for end-game… which any reasonable common developer will sit back, nod… and then create content a bit above the current top-end content.

And if EHG’d done that people would be vociferous about how the new boss doesn’t offer a challenge. And (to be pedantic), where is the “current top end content”? The end of the campaign? End of normal monos? 300/500/1,000/3,000 corruption? If current Abberoth is around 500c, original Abberoth was somewhat higher before they nerfed it & added Ubberoth.

[Elhazzared]

Again, you are the in the wrong. You still believe blindly that people will “git gud” when the fact of the matter is, average exists for a reason. good is only good because everything else bellow good also exists. So your idea of fixing the game will not change anything other than people quitting earlier.

At the end of the day the pattern is simple, people are quitting, worst case 1 week in and even if you want to say a handful of them did so cause they did everything and are bored, the majority of them just reached empowered and quit because they can’t progress.

You can keep your fantasy that your way of thinking would change things. It won’t and you know it. If a company needs more money the answer is simple, it needs to get people invested into playing long enough to justify spending money on it.

Pleasing the few people who are good and want more challenge even if they did it wrong, that’s not the point, trying to please those is the wrong answer, they need more people spending, not the same people because they are already running at a deficit and more importantly, even without the so called challenge they crave they are still here playing for months. The ones who aren’t are for the most parts the ones getting progression blocked.

Ultimately it doesn’t matters though and the reason is, they will not listen to you anymore than they will listen to me. EHG has never listened to feedback and when they did it was mostly streamer feedback. You know, the streamers that play it for a week and then go back to PoE.

LE is dead and it’s a result of gross mismanagement of the development of the game. Ignoring proper smooth progression with no obstacles until the player is at a farming point and ignoring all the feedback about it.

I don’t care that you think I’m a bad player, that is your delusion. You have no idea what average is because you remove 90% of the player base before you make that average, that is a very skewed view that does not corresponds to reality in any way.

[Kulze]

@Llama8

where is the “current top end content”?

Uberroth, hence 800-1000c since that’s the viable spot where you can tackle Uberroth and have a realistic chance depending on build.

It’s not where Uberroth is introduced, it’s the point where it’s half-way doable at least. It’s a bit further up if we wanna say ‘decently’ doable, since the vast quantity of kills happens not ‘normally’ but with some builds which are ‘exploiting’ some game mechanics to simply burst him down.
Overtuned stuff simply.

@Elhazzared

average exists for a reason.

Yes, and that’s where D4… Chronicon… Victor Fran… TL:I (which doesn’t need much skill at all)… and so on comes into play.

We got a boatload of ‘average’ games around.

Which wasn’t what LE is supposed to be, but also not off ‘the deep end’ like PoE.

@Elhazzared

At the end of the day the pattern is simple, people are quitting,

Yep, lack of content, lack of quality, lack of balance.

The unholy trinity of retention killers.

@Elhazzared

Pleasing the few people who are good and want more challenge even if they did it wrong, that’s not the point,

Never said that it’s ‘the few’.

It’s about the long-term players.
And long-term players tend to become ‘above average’ because of the sheer time investment.
Not speaking about the top-tier here, really massive difference.

[Elhazzared]

@Kulze

Yes, and that’s where D4… Chronicon… Victor Fran… TL:I (which doesn’t need much skill at all)… and so on comes into play.

We got a boatload of ‘average’ games around.

Which wasn’t what LE is supposed to be, but also not off ‘the deep end’ like PoE.

D4 isn’t for average players, it’s for really bad players. You do need a little bit of a very specific skill which is the ability to do moderately with skill rotations (which I don’t hence why I never used flasks other than healing in PoE before the automation) but the game difficulty is way lower than for average players.

Chronicon is a great game held back by it’s graphical art style. I did play quite a bit of that but it does lack longevity even if it’s systems are all fantastic and the difficulty curve is indeed for the average.

Victor Fran is for very bad people. You know how I played that game? Fire walk, walk around everything died, basically no damage ever taken. It’s so brain dead that it’s not even fun, it manages to be worse than D4.

TL:I I couldn’t get into it. They didn’t treat summoning right and not much they had there appealed my style of play, controls also felt clunky but the nail in the coffin was P2W. Ultimately can’t speak for the difficulty as I didn’t play enough.

LE was supposed to be there, right in the middle between things like D4 and PoE, somewhere in the same ballpark as Chronicon.

@Kulze

Yep, lack of content, lack of quality, lack of balance.

The unholy trinity of retention killers.

Yes, I don’t disagree it lacks all those but if the balance was enough, they’d probably stay profitable long enough to tackle the other 2.

@Kulze

Never said that it’s ‘the few’.

It’s about the long-term players.
And long-term players tend to become ‘above average’ because of the sheer time investment.
Not speaking about the top-tier here, really massive difference.

What you are blatantly ignoring is that most of those are long term players. They are people who quit LE and then go play PoE for a month.

People won’t become a long term players if the game doesn’t allows them to play by putting progression walls.

I often play PoE for a month before I quit and I’m merely average skill. I play LE for a week before I quit and like me there is a ton of people.

I still supported LE more than PoE. In PoE I only ever bought stash tabs and access to PoE 2. In LE I did buy a supporter pack to help the company, not because I thought I was getting something good for the value I put in and yet despite how obvious it was what needed to change, they never did. They’d rather run the game into the ground than listen.

[BeardusMaximus]

@Elhazzared

D4 isn’t for average players, it’s for really bad players. You do need a little bit of a very specific skill which is the ability to do moderately with skill rotations (which I don’t hence why I never used flasks other than healing in PoE before the automation)

I love how you say D4 is for really bad players and continue is indicate that you’re not very good at it.

Gotta be trolling!

[Elhazzared]

No, I specifically stated that I do not have the very specific skill to handle skill rotations and that has to do with… My brain I guess? I have difficulty handling a lot of different keys that create different interactions at the same time, that is why I normally use single skill use builds and such because otherwise I’m stopping, looking at the keyboard like, what did I need to press again and where was it.

This is a limitation to number of key press and managing rotations, not my ability to play the game as it were.