I do watch Aaron from time to time and he was my main for minion builds. I only got to know of Pixel for less than a year now. The builds are solid once you get past the gear wall but unless you are a great player you are not getting past that. That’s the issue.
In fact Aaron put a vid recently about a new build theory which I’m sure it will go well. I’ve played necromancer so much that it’s about the only thing I can theory craft myself and be fairly sure of the result if I could somehow get past the gear barrier so even just looking at the theory it looks rock solid. Problem is once again, getting there. Even more so with necromancers which are very squishy. In the final form as he has it, I expect it to get to 500 corruption but that is still full legendary gear.
As for S5, we’ll see if LE last till there and even if it does, unless they change what needs changing, I doubt I’ll be playing it anyway.
i agree with him, i saw that dev stream he was talking about, i and 6 of my friends played last season, we all quit during the huge controversy due to introduction of huge difficulty spike in empowered monos, which caused large portion of negative reviews on steam, also whole steam forum for a week was about oneshots and how last epoch becoming poe oneshot or be one shot fiesta. And dont reply to me idk, i made this post just to support that poor dude cos 99% of casuals never bother to interact with insufferable nolifers that hold your type of opinions
Thank you for your hard work!
I love this game and I’m looking forward to the new season.
I already stated my critique of the imprint nerf.
Another point I can’t really understand is the nerf to Detonating Arrow. The skill is mostly useless now and one shotting bosses was just a fun thing you could do, without real implications on the game overall, because you can’t clear with it and it’s clunky.
Please try not to nerf harmless fun!
He says while completely ignoring that the problem is precisely the lack of gear that I said can’t be found in monos as well as a lack of grand blessings. Had the build the gear I needed it to have and the grand blessings it wouldn’t have been dying at all.
I find it fascinating that your experience is so different from mine and of my friend group.
We are around 5 people, with 1 veteran in the genre (around 5k hours across several games) a regular ARPG enjoyer and 3 tourists that only play ARPGs if they happen to see a really cool seasonal mechanic or something. One of those is someone without much patience to learn systems or mechanics or anything at all really. He just wants to have cool effects and watch enemies die.
All of us consider LE easy. There are the spikes, yes. We all feel or felt them (only two of us still play), but they only made the impatient one quit at Lagoon the first time around. That was in EA still. He tried again this season and had no problem playing a Warpath smite build. And no we did not exchange gear except the occasional drop when running around together.
Then most (3 out of 5) quit shortly after reaching empowered monos. Not because it’s too hard but because it gets too repetitive. They also quit D4 shortly after finishing the campaign and PoE shortly after reaching maps. That is a player thing not a game thing in our group.
Of course I agree that they need to fix the spikes. They are just badly designed imo. But from my personal experience I would doubt that the spikes are so much of a showstopper. I think the timing of most players quitting after reaching empowered monos has other reasons as well that are a lot more important. I’m not saying that the spikes don’t contribute, just that they are not as bad for us as they are for you and your group.
Most of the time our builds are empowered monos ready halfway through regular monos progression. I only once had a build so bad I struggled to progress into empowered. That was a celestial doom void Runemaster. Now that build was a failed attempt. ^^’
Yeah, my group which is about 10 people including me all had the same problem and in my group too there are those who stick around for a while and those who are tourists too and play for a shorter duration. We all got to empowered and we all quit there. I am the onyl one who has had it since EA and played a lot more and every season with the difference that many years ago this problem wasn’t as bad before they started to nerf the players defenses and making corruption worse. There was another guy here who also say he and his 6 friends all quit for the same reasons as me and my friends did.
If the difficulty spikes aren’t a show stopper for you and your group then one of two things are true. Either you are much better than the average or you have a very high tolerance to dying in the game. In my specific case the tolerance is low and in average it is low for most people, however because of the loss of timeline progression and loss of reward this makes it so frustrating to die that it has got to the point where in 1.3 even dying once in a mono was enough for me to stop playing for the day. This is somehow 10x worse than PoE loss of XP because realistically in PoE, if you are level 95 which is easy to get to in a week even for an average player putting 4 to 6 hours a day you are good. You don’t need level 100 for anything. Gear is more important. The same can be said for LE. Not being level 100 is not going to stop no one, not having gear is and losing the rewards can feel frustrating to an unbearable level, especially when gearing is already so hard.
I don’t scour the feedback forums in LE anymore like I did in the past but this was relatively common to read in people giving feedback, most people got to empowered and were stuck. The Devs themselves said most people quit right after hitting empowered which clearly indicates there is a problem in the transition from normal to empowered and since farming isn’t even realistic prior to empowered, fixing this should have been priority number 1.
For my case even one of the most OP builds a variation on the paladin that has been considered broken since 1.1 just dies. A couple people like to point at how bad my gear is but honestly, only my chest piece was bad because I never found good ones and anything I found crafted to something worse than that. The rest of the gear is very much on par with what people generally have around this point, T10 to 12 affixes. I even have some T15 and even a T20. My gear, despite a bad chest piece is overall at least on par with what is normal for this point in the game, potentially better than most in fact. But no, they like to point out it’s bad and that the build itself is bad despite being one of the best and the build Pohx played lol.
On the one hand while this is healthy so not all melee builds are funneled into using the same belt, this is also a 20% less damage nerf to ALL melee builds and there doesn’t seem to be any compensation…
It’s how they balance things around here. Ward is OP on a an extremely limited number of builds because they have high generation per hit and they stack attack speed to ludicrous level. Nerf ward across the board instead of nerfing the skill ability to generate as much ward and thus ward is now in the garbage.
I have a couple questions re: the new Marrow Shards. If I allocate both Marrow Caster and Bones of the Follower, will Splinter Nova consume a minion in addition to the one consumed by Marrow Shards itself? Or will MS just consume one minion, but also apply its bonus to SN?
MC says it applies projectile speed modifiers to the area of SN. Dead Weight reduces projectile range, does that also apply to the area?
In my case, compared to the non-vocal LE enjoyer that does not do social media, yes absolutely I’m above average. Compared to most players that frequent forums? pretty average or below that. Same is true for the other regular ARPG enjoyer in my group. He has a lot less hours but reads up on what is strong and takes his own spin on it.
We both also think that the complains about the base difficulty are a bit overblown, we are both satisfied with it for the most part (well except some leveling items that are WAY too strong and trivialize everything till mid monos on like level 5 already).
We still think LE is an easy game, but we are fine with it. I wouldn’t mind if it got harder but I don’t need or want it to get harder. I honestly just wished EHG would make up their mind on what they want to have and adjust everything to that level.
The rest of the group is a lot more “average” with the impatient one being the “worst” player of the bunch.
Cause he does not have the patience to repeatedly die and if it does happen he does not have the patience to learn why. He is the kind of guy that tries to change a few skill points around without much thought and tries again with a worse build and then quits, cause surprise he died even faster. As an example he died twice to the first real Dark Souls boss, tried to use magic the first time, was animation locked, died instantly, quit for good and never touched a Dark Souls like game ever again. It’s just not the type of experience he is looking for in games.
I’m writing this because this season he did not quit. He played till he was able to beat Abberoth (regular one) solo. And without much help in terms of item aquisition from the rest of the group. We mostly helped with build theory. He also had a lot of fun experimenting with some of the drops he got (Aurelis made him happy) and was very invested when his ideas actually worked. This was a first time for him. In PoE this caused him to quit because it did not work (was something RF related but don’t remember what it was about). All in all it was fun for him. He ran into some walls (Aberroth, Julra) but managed to overcome them without too much frustration.
Again (just to be sure) I’m not down talking your experience. I just find it interesting that we have so wildly different experiences with the game in our respective groups.
LE is the ARPG we - in a group - played the most because it is the most approachable for us (we are not a fan of Blizzards buisness practices so nobody wanted to pay for the expansion).
When I speak about what average is in terms of skill I cannot consider specific groups. I consider the entire playerbase because that is how you get an average. If you could put the skill level of every player together (which technically you could if anyone bothered to make a tool for that like they do for competitive games) in a numerical form, you add all of that up and divide by the number of players, you get an average and from there you start creating brackets of average, below average bad, etc…
I am probably in the average, potentially above average even considering that when I play GD, PoE and other ARPGs I generally do significantly better than the average. Not to any degree that would make me anywhere good, but still a cut above the average and yet in LE I and the people I know get completely progression blocked.
This is why it’s when people complain about this, it’s not overblown. You’d think so if your experience is different or if you took the average vocal minority in the forums but most of the people in the forums actually tend to be the very good players which makes sense as they also tend to be far more invested in the game.
While ARPGs does necessarily translate well to other game, each game is a beast of it’s own and require different types of skill I am generally pretty decent at games and while I will enjoy a game that isn’t hard from time to time, generally I like things like Stalker GAMMA which is one of the hardest shooters you can play. I enjoy Remnant which is basically dark souls with guns (not much of a fan of dark souls because I don’t like melee and magic generally comes with more restrictions than I find enjoyable). I enjoy Rogue-likes, one of my favorites is Sword of the Stars: The Pit and lately I’ve been playing Quasimorph which is probably one of the hardest ones in the genre and I’m still doing very well. I probably got get Menace at some point but wait for it to develop more. I also enjoy RTS and TBS games and have been big into those growing up.
This is not to prove I’m pretty good, it’s merely to say that I’m no stranger or shy to a game being hard. But there is a difference between a game hard blocking progression and a game being hard but fair. LE is just progression blocking players and the reason is because as you mentioned, the Devs can’t decide whether they want to make the game they said they were going to make or if they want to directly compete with PoE for a more hardcore ARPG market and this lack of direction is what lead to this complete mess of things because even if their decision was to compete with PoE, as long as they were adjusting the entire game for it, they would also have to adjust for how you gear progress and while the game would be harder there wouldn’t be a progression block although a lot of the more average players would still be unable to play just like they can’t in PoE (in fact they can do PoE more easily now than LE which seems like a bad joke but isn’t).
Personally, my belief is that is a huge mistake. You cannot compete with PoE, you don’t have the quality nor the content and your end game system is inferior to their mapping system which is just about perfect as of the last update (this is feedback I’ve given then more than 6 years ago about how mapping should be and finally we see I was right). The original vision for the game, a game that is easier than PoE but not a walk in the park like D4 is the perfect structure for this game, it slides right into the untapped portion of the market in the ARPG genre and because of that could potentially be even bigger and more profitable than all other ARPGs because it would have by far the largest player base and with numbers comes sales (assuming they ever bother to make good looking MTX).
You’re making anecdotal references of your friends and use it as proof that the majority of the player base feels that way. I could make some of my own and tell you that all of my friends quit mid-campaign or in normal mono because all mobs and bosses just fall apart on the slightest touch and you can simply stand in telegraphed attacks without taking any or next to no damage. This information doesn’t tell you anything at all either, except that the difficulty experience detrimentally seem to differ again.
It is a bad joke. If that is really true, then they must all be doing something really really majorly wrong.
I find it extremly hard to believe that your friends have no problem playing PoE1 and/or PoE2 but struggle with LE. Compared to those games, LE - especially the progression up until empowered monos - is like a kindergarten birthday party.
Are you all trying to play a Necromancer Skeleton Zoo Build or what?
You’re also contradicting yourself:
they want to directly compete with PoE for a more hardcore ARPG market
You acknowledge that PoE is for a more hardcore ARPG market, but at the same time you (and your friends?) count yourself as “average” players. Yet you don’t struggle with PoE but do so with LE.
Sure, I get that. But I can’t speak for any “average” (that’s why I’m using quotation marks) of all players. I can only safely talk about my personal group. For anything more than that I’m missing a lot of information and metrics.
If you got the impression I was talking about that, I apologize. Wasn’t my intention.
I just wanted to know more about the specific group experience, cause from what you have posted we are quite similiar (we have almost the same taste in games!) and still our experiences with LE are quite different.
Well maybe, but also not what I was talking about. My “overblown” was about the people that think the game is too easy. I think the impact that has is overblown. It may be for them, personally I still don’t see it of as much as a problem. Mechanics can be engaging even if they are easy.
We get quite a few threads like this here so there are a lot of people that have the opposite opinion (i.e. game is too easy). I don’t mind easy ARPGs and my friends are mostly satisfied with the status quo as well.
And yes, of course, these are people that post on the forums (or discord or wherever) and are as such much more invested and mostly better players.
But the problem with the silent majority is that you never really know why they do the things they do. You can only make good guesses based on data. Since I don’t have the data I can only rely on personal conjecture.
And these personal experiences lead me to believe that the difficulty spikes are there, they are a problem, but not the biggest problem for player quitting early. Most of the player I know quit as soon as the gameplay becomes less structured without clear goals (i.e. empowered monos). The harbingers do not provide enough “goals” and the first time players quite frequently asked me how the F they work and what they are supposed to do. That was more frustrating for them than the gearing problem. Way, way more.
Again not to disregard your point, the difficulty spikes are shit, but not the biggest reason for players quitting when reaching empowered monos in my experience.
By themselves it may be anecdotal evidence but when we look at the greater and see everyone quitting in the same time frame it puts things into perspective. Sure enough not 100% of those that quit in the same time frame do so for the same reasons but it’s fairly safe to assume most do.
This is backed up by EHG which once again have stated that yes, most players quit once they hit empowered.
Because it isn’t. In PoE you have things like RF which can basically tank anything and craft on the very cheap so it’s relatively easy to keep progressing. In LE once people hit empowered they have a lot of low resistances, they have very few pieces of gear with HP, they have no crit immunity and a lot of this is also meant to be solved by the grand blessings but a significant portion is meant to be filled by gear, gear that you do not have.
Also necromancer especially with lots of minions does indeed also need to be fixed, it’s been joke since forever but I’ve played meta builds too.
On the whole, PoE 1 is the harder game but it’s also a game that does progression right so players don’t get stuck. To put it into perspective, if I entered empowered monos, I somehow had all my grand blessings, I had gear to cover all of my defenses and at least half of my attack, so around T15 to T17 gear then Le would indeed be the easier game but because it doesn’t allows player to have the bare minimum required to proceed it is harder because you can’t get past empowered monos. Ideally most builds would go up to 500 corruption no problem but that is assuming you have the gear.
I understand, I just referenced it because you also compared your group to certain levels of skilled players but for the sake of we all being on the same page, we should just call average exactly what it is instead of the average of the good players because that is meaningless.
They can be conjecture but there is a difference between pure conjecture and educated estimation based upon data.
Prior to EHG talking in a podcast about this we knew from steam charts data that a very large amount of players drop after 1 week and we keep seeing that number go down fast. The running theory by the vocal majority was that people were getting bored but this didn’t ever made sense to me. How can they say it’s too easy when they can scale difficulty to infinite levels. Some also said that there is a lack of activities to do and certainly I can agree especially when comparing to the amount of side content games like PoE have.
However in 1.2 if I’m not mistaken there was a podcast where the Devs were asked about player retention because people were mostly falling off after 1 week and they said they were trying to address it but most people seemed to quit right after reaching empowered monos.
This is what lends a heavy credibility to the people who say the difficulty spikes are blocking player progression and making them quit. If the problem is that it was too easy then why are people quitting right as they hit not only a difficulty spike but also at the precise point where they can scale difficulty? How would that make any sense? It also can’t simply be they are bored with the current activities in the game because if they just got to empowered they barely played with the new content this league. We can account a few people quitting because they didn’t like the new content so far but only a few, what about the rest?
There isn’t any logical explanation for people quitting the game that early in very large numbers unless something very wrong is happening and that something right now can only be attributed to the difficulty spike.
I have literally never had this issue. Between using filter to hunt for res/life rares or good T6 exalt Res and usable stats, especially rings and ammy, along with Idols, I always reach Empowered Monos around lvl 80 with 75% in all res or very close. Expecting to be in T14+ gear when your just breaking into literal T10s difficulty wise is mind boggling. I can only assume you are not actually using Shatters and reforging gear, or have pure tunnel vision that ever slot must be purple or Legendary or it’s trash, which is just foolhardy thinking.
The fact your character is reaching Empowered Monos and is so poorly geared, with how easy and frequent crafting mats, and the means to acquire more are, on top of Nemesis and Loot Lizards which spew out tons of shards. Instead of worrying about spikes, you should worry about learning to use the forge.
It’s easy to talk when you do not know what you are talking about or never seen the person in question playing.
Let me tell you how I set my filter. Early game I just filter out items with 1 affix I want until I am about a third of the way through the campaign. After that I do a specialized loot filter for what I need. Let’s say for example a chest.
Top entry will be only show the correct base and the correct exalted affix.
Next entry will be any chest with the correct exalted affix.
Next entry will be correct base with 2 of the 4 affixes I need.
Last entry will be any chest with 2 out of the 4 affixes.
I will do this for every piece of gear, plus have a few other for gear I want to shatter like specific class affixes that I need as an example and another entry which normally is inactive for common affixes to shatter which I activate if I run low on any common shard types. I also tend to use removals for the rare affix shards and only resort to shatter if it ran out of FP before getting what I wanted. It’s very basic and it is quite lenient in what it shows.
In a 6 hour play session in level 90 monoliths I will get maybe 2 items which can potentially be upgrades if I craft them. I get more drops of course but depending on how the whole piece has rolled for affixes it often isn’t worth crafting as it has like 2 or 3 tiers of good affixes or has very high level unwanted affixes and low FP. In general 1 or 2 items a day in a 6 hour session is the average for normal monos and that is horrible for farming. it has to be empowered farming or it’s just garbage. Now here’s the kicker. Even those 1 or 2 drops, more often than not run out of FP before they are better than what I have and when they do it’s often a T13 or T14 which is not a big enough upgrade to jump into empowered.
Also in can you think I am only after lengedaries and exalted items. I’m not. Back during EA I’ve always said that crafting should be improved a lot so we could easily make T20 items because T20 is the ideal entry point for empowered. The game has since changed of course and you get a bit more power that even a T15 is good enough but it has to be the 2 correct defensive ones and 1 offensive. That is still ignoring your defenses will be incomplete due to the lack of grand blessings.
So again, don’t speak about what you don’t know. I have doubts you are consistently getting to empowered monos with your defenses complete when you need grand blessings for that to start with and even more, it’s extremely hard to get there with complete defenses even if you are trying to do a horrible thing which is doing a complete gear reset after being in empowered for long enough.
