Late Game Gear Progression. (xpost from reddit)

Just crossposting it from reddit to see peoples opinions on it here, since I know not everyone uses reddit

I’ve been playing the game for about 40 hours all on one character (OctavianTheExile) and while I haven’t gotten any high placements on the ladder or clearer every empowered monolith I’d like to give some feedback on gear progression

For the start of the game and getting to monoliths, I love the gear progression. Finally finding a T5 mod or gear with multiple t5 mods is great, and the crafting system is great for finishing these.

The problem comes once you have mostly t15-t20 gear. In the time since I started monoliths, I have found two pieces of gear with a useful exalted modifier for my build. Once you want to progress beyond all t5 mods it becomes extremely unlikely to further improve your gear- you need to drop a useful exalted mod, on a useful base, and then either have no useless affixes on it or manage to remove them all. On top of this runes of removal are weighted to remove the higher tier modifiers so actually managing to remove the useless mods will almost always delete the exalted mod.

Then you might finally have a good exalted item and get a damaging fracture and no longer have an exalted item.

Basically I feel that there’s TOO MANY layers of rng to find and create a good exalted item. And I realize you don’t want everyone to have these easily, but when you run monoliths for 20hrs to find two items, I start to wonder if I should just call the character complete and move on because it’s so unlikely to progress them any further.

Anyone else share their thoughts on this?

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Here are a couple of thoughts regarding your post:

  1. Let’s assume exalted gear starts dropping with better modifier groupings based on the base item type and class that finds it, thereby increasing the number of chances you have to craft an improvement. Eventually, you will be able to substitute the T15-T20 part of your post with T17-22. The Devs have previously commented that they don’t want to just keep adding tiers and that T7 is likely the highest for awhile. In that regard, I think the focus has to be on balancing engaging end game content with the available level of gear, rather than constantly offering new ways to improve your gear. Many MMOs opt for the latter and you’re always on the hamster wheel trying to complete your next tier gear. There’s no rest for the weary and that’s an equally frustrating system at times.

  2. With deterministic crafting, there has to be a check to the system, otherwise you will reach that T15-T20 level too fast and become at greater risk to growing bored. I know the game feels like an RNG slog and I’ve shaken my fist at the screen of a ruined “perfect” item many a time. But, I’ve also geared out 3-4 characters in near perfect gear. If you’re not into playing alts, then maybe you will reach your logical end until new content comes out sooner.

  3. Empowered monoliths do change the mix, as does high wave Arena. Both have humbled characters that I thought were well geared and forced me to revisit my builds (mostly my defenses). Which Grand Blessings you get from the Legendary Monoliths also changes the mix and can cause you to completely change up your gear. As one hole is plugged by a Blessing, new opportunities for offense or defense arise.

  4. Until we know what Epoch’s Call and the Eternity Cache systems entail, it’s really hard to project how gear fits into the big picture. Do we need more gear or do we need more content after we have collected the gear?

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