The recent nerf to Thicket of Blinding Light went wayyy too far. Halving the damage or reducing the range would have been reasonable. Doing both AND adding the damage fall off makes the build unplayable.
Because of that, I want to talk about how retroactively nerfing items so that all versions of it, including existing ones in legacy league, feels awful to the players. I had a fun build but immediately as the patch dropped that build is completely and utterly unplayable beyond 0 corruption without giga investment. And even with investment it feels awful to play.
Builds shouldnât be rendered unplayable.
One might point out that not retroactively nerfing the item can greatly affect legacy leagueâs economy but to that I want to talk about other arpgs like Path of Exile where legacy items remain untouched and unnerfed. Rather than harming the game, this actively incentivizes players to play in the new fresh league every time since they can get their hands on valuable items that may or may not get nerfed in the future and thus gain value.
A large portion of Last Epochâs player base plays Circle of Fortune (based on an unofficial reddit poll showing 71%). I know its not fair to say âbecause most people play CoF who cares about the merchant guild playersâ but the fact that a massive amount of players donât engage with the economy definitely needs to be taken into account.
The last thing I want to mention is the impact of these nerfs on offline play. With no merchant guild at play, there is absolutely no downside for letting players play with unnerfed items. Anything players do in offline mode has absolutely zero impact on other players so why shouldnât they be allowed to actually have fun and play a build they enjoy?
I hope this gets at least some sort of consideration. Thanks for reading!
I agree the nerfs to this build went too far. I donât agree with numerous versions of the same item. Especially when you canât tell that the items mechanic changed like with this item. Description doesnât mention range and damage dropoff.
I disagree because you wonât end up with original item and nerfed item. You will end up with original item and several verions of the item over gameâs lifespan. That clutters the database and game code, makes debugging more troublesome. And what about buffs to items? Apply to all versions, some of them or just newest? What about bugs in items? Leave them be? I donât think so.
Applying changes to all versions is the cleanest and simplest solution here.
The way items are stored prevent legacy versions of uniques. You can look at the files in offline to see this. Uniques are stored using values for the percentage of the rolls for each affix. That means that when you change the affix rolls, your old item adjusts automatically. If you had a max roll (100%) on the old affix, you now have a max roll on the new affix.
This works both ways. Items that are buffed are also immediately updated as well.
To keep legacy versions youâd need to change the whole code on how to store items, which would be a lot of work for little return, since most uniques tend to get buffed over time, rather than nerfed. Usually unique nerfs happen in the league after they get introduced, whereas unique buffs happen all the time.
When I gave a (very) cursory look through the files to confirm this some time ago, it seemed that every item is stored this way, whether itâs unique/legendary, set, common/magic/rare/exalted or idols.
I imagine it was done this was in order to keep legacy in check and try to keep the balance there similar to the balance in seasons.
I know PoE lets you have legacy items of absurd power, but GGG never cared about standard anyway, soâŚ
Yes was always the case. A recent example with this patch where this also applies is Omnis. It went from +1 to +1-2 to all skills. So even the +1 had a roll from 0-100 and once the patch dropped all your Omnis had either h1 or +2 depending on the roll.
And as for âlegacyâ items in poe, GGG has stopped that for a while kinda. lots of items just straight up get changed/bricked and dont get a legacy version. some do, not all do. its not a golden rule of mechanics.
There may still be some items from beta floating around that had old affixes im not sure I kept any, but stuff like non unique unique only bases exist, certain affixes were deleted and replaced by filler affixes that otherwise wouldnt be possible etc.
I completely agree with this. Old items should get a âlegacyâ tag of some kind based on the season they dropped. I had some builds with Evolutionâs End amulet that required the +1 or +2 to all skills. Now those builds are bricked.
Right, I still mourn for Serpent Venom Druid. Though Reflect Shaman just went from S-tier to A-tier. Itâs just not doing absurdly high damage as before but you can still build and do most content with it.
Keeping items unnerfed might work for the stat sticks that most of the items in PoE are. Not so much if they provide actually unique functionality. That would mean EHG would need to maintain old and new code in parallel forever. Also in LE, legacy is at least somewhat functioning, unlike the graveyard mess that is PoE.
one reason i lost a lot of motivation to play poe was because of this. ggg themselves marketed the idea of legacy uniques where you could own powerful items as they are before they got reworked in future iterations. its one way they got people to play temp leagues.
as a permanent league player, i lost a HUGE lot of value when GGG retroactively changed stuff. some of my legacy cluster jewels lost their value. a HUGE lot of value. alternate quality jewels? they might as well delete all of them rather than downgrade them.
that said, iâve already stopped caring. i cared a lot only when POE was to be my forever game. now i prefer games to not have legacy versions.
the lead of crate (grimdawn devs) addressed the topic of legacy items by stating that he didnt like the idea of legacy items as it âpunishedâ newer players for not playing a game âforeverâ. when talking about casual gaming, this rings very true. i would feel that it heavily disincentivizes me from playing the game where the best items in the game only belong to the people who played years ago. i would feel fomo for not being able to get gear that can compete with what they have.
moving forward i think this is a good decision for LE moving forward. for sure its a slap to the face to the older players. but what LE needs is more newer players.
we âolder playersâ have demonstrated that our support is not enough to keep LE going.
The mod explanation (Alt?) does mention the dropoff but I guess at a first glance they do look the same so fair.
Having legacy items shouldnât clutter database or game code that much. It does require a change to the system though. Not completely sure how it works but by making every object that drops immutable and not refer back to the database, it shouldnât be that difficult to let legacy items exist without clutter.
Buffs should apply to newest. There should be a rune of refinement (divine orb from poe in case you know that game) but for unique items so you can update your old items to new versions if you play in legacy. As for bugs its completely reasonable for changes to affect all existing items.
Its definitely simpler to keep it as is but EHG should push for whatever is better for the players.
Yeah the system would definitely require a pretty big change. I however think there would be value in doing it which is why I made this suggestion post. Even if its difficult, if its worth doing, assuming EHG sees this game going for a long time, the effort will be worth it.
The reason I think there would be value in making this big change is because people might prefer playing their old characters in legacy. By doing massive nerfs it could render many builds completely unplayable. Builds players were excited to continue playing after the league they built it has ended.
EHG should strive to make this game enjoyable for everyone. I donât know how many people play legacy but even if its a small minority, its a worthwhile endeavor to make it enjoyable for them especially since more and more builds will become legacy as the seasons go on. It would absolutely suck to see your favorite build become unplayable because EHG cares more about the economy than you. It would suck to feel like EHG doesnât feel like youâre worth the effort.
I mean people can always just buy legacy items through Merchantâs Guild and I donât really think thereâs that much competition going on if any. If anything, Thicketâs most broken aspect was that it was too relaxing to play. Clear wise other builds could compete. Boss damage wise it felt way worse than other builds Iâve played. I would completely agree if comfy powercreep was the argument but there seem to be autobombers and such that exist that are almost as easy to play. I might agree that the beast amulet giving +2 all skills during campaign might have been a bit strong but there are things that compete like the abberoth amulet or omni? or whatever its called now so that could become legacy too. No other items come to mind but I really donât think EHG would allow a completely broken item that clears insanely fast or does insane damage to enter the game after testing.
This will always happen, even if you keep the legacy items. Most nerfs are because of skill node nerfs or passive tree nerfs, so youâd end up with a legacy item but a still unplayable build because the skil was nerfed to the ground.
You even had uniques that applied to skills that no longer exist, so what would be the point of keeping them anyway? Because it does apply both ways. If a unique gets buffed, the legacy one is useless.
This will never happen. The main reason builds die is nerfs to the skills/passives and that will continue to happen. So you need to continue adjusting your build over time if you want it to remain viable.
Except for those that are CoF. Or that play offline.
I agree with ExSea (and Crateâs dev). This all boils down to âIâve been playing longer than other people, give me rewards they canât getâ.
So Iâm fine with the system as it is now. I donât need to go farm Omnis over and over again to get the +2 versions. My old ones will automatically update and some are already +2.
For what itâs worth, the new blinding light is not unplayable. Itâs very much nerfed - and not just because of the changes to blinding light itself, but also due to small reflect idols capping out at 100 reflected damage rather than 150, thornshell capping out at 6% rather than 9% attunement multiplier, etc. Despite these nerfs, I was still able to breeze through empowered echos, farm through the harbingers, and take down abberoth on a blinding light build in season 4.
That being said, the investment needed is dramatically higher now and the build has a much lower ceiling. I can understand your frustration if you went from having an OP screen deleter to a character thatâs merely OK, but the same thing happens when skills are changed and retroactively change a characterâs viability. If changing how a skill operates âretroactivelyâ is fine, you need to accept that changing how a non-skill ability that is blatantly overpowered operates retroactively is also fine.
