Yea, I don’t have 8k hours (good lord man) but I did put 350 in during Affliction, and with the drop rates I really got into trying to learn the crafting more than ever. I have to say… I love Last Epoch, but POE’s crafting (once you get beyond chaosing / vaaling stuff and into actually building an item from the base to bis or close to bis without having to spend a mirror lol) is AMAZING.
Would love to have more dynamic options for risk vs reward in place on LE, game has been my second favorite ARPG since I bought it in EA last year.
Yes, with a rough medium amount of time spent to achieve it.
RNG has ups and downs, the negative downs are definitely something which need to be mitigated if they can become too harsh.
But making it more determined makes it also so that medium need to be raised inherently. The chance to get the modicum outcome through all RNG is after all another layer, so if you want to make things more deterministic they inherently need to make up for the overall layering of chance-based system to take that into account.
Also a lack of RNG makes systems feel more ‘stale’, hence a modicum of luck is generally a good thing to have.
Acquisition time.
That’s the right argument there.
So let’s switch over to that since it’s a more fitting terminology.
And acquisition time relates directly to player retention.
Too high? Players stop trying.
Too low? Players breeze through the content, also bad.
Oh, i can absolutely agree there! It was even better several versions ago, nearly every single item had a possible ‘more or less deterministic’ path available. Which means without ridiculous amounts of retries needed to achieve it.
Nowadays sadly there’s crafts which require 500+ mirrors in value to even attempt, GGG made the overall crafting worse in that case.
Crafting complexity is a great thing, I hope EHG will implement more of it over time similar to what PoE provides. Hence enhanced base items (influenced items in PoE), alternative crafting methods with unique outcomes that stay only there (which PoE is more and more removing, bad thing) as well as when the investment becomes too ridiculous allowing mechanics as stop-gap measures to not auto-brick 50k of the same item before achieving at least a fitting outcome.
I can agree with you fully there! It’s the way any respectable loot-based ARPG which provides a good crafting system should gradually move towards. It’s one of the major reasons why PoE does so well despite the glaring shortcomings it has since ages.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. ‘Deterministic Crafting’ is what I was trying to get in at in my description above. Should still have a chance to ‘brick’, but adding paths to making GG items without having to farm, refarm, refarm etc or get mega lucky w/ a 4LP drop (have played this game for almost 800 hours and have NEVER seen a 4 LP item lol) - only adds gameplay variety.
Will all players engage with that variety? Probably not. I see enough people complaining about gear now because they don’t understand just how forgiving (and let’s be real… pretty easy) crafting in last epoch is currently. I almost wonder if they should open up the ability to like ‘Merchant Brand’ an item for x amount of favor from the Merchants guild which then would allow you to sell a master crafted legendary or something for tons of gold. (Gold is so easy to get in LE if you know what you’re doing, just need to pay attention for Shrine of Wealth and hit it… I look for one in every greater echo I do). Plus w/ the cost reduction of stash tabs, should be a nice influx of gold soon.
I’m just excited for the game, think it got off to a rocky start online wise, but it’s still super solid and engaging for longer periods than some of its competition, and it’s just amazing to see how far it’s come even in the year or so I’ve been playing.
True! For that there needs to be a very high upper ceiling though. Which always ends in the ability to buy solely. No single uppermost tier item is reliably farmable… and actually shouldn’t be.
This is where CoF outlasts its usage… when you play to the point where personally dropping those items are just not feasable… but… someone else surely has no need for it for some reason! This is where MG shines and is actually needed.
Playing for a long time? Got your builds set up basically? Got tons of resources stored up and fantastic items? Well, time to switch over to MG and get the respective uniques, give that gold some use as tab expansions only last ‘so long’.
This is where LE currently fails to provide the option to do that given the faction system is limited to using their items only when you’re actively aligned with them. It hinders you actively do switch over and actually progress further, you would need to re-do the whole thing.
Absolutely not! But it’s something for a small part of the playerbase… but that part? Well, those are the people investing 2000+ hours into the game… at least.
Which means they’re a very very important core audience to keep pleased.
Absolutely! I’m looking forward to the direction they’ll take it with 1.1 and the end-game overhaul/expansion/whatever they’re planning.
Also with the faction tweaks/reworks.
Overall the game is solid. It has some fairly glaring issues which are to be expected from a first-time dev-group but nothing extremely game breaking. Fixing the bugs, adjusting the systems, providing something beyond. Those are the 3 things EHG simply needs to focus on and provide. They got a few months for that and need to make that count.
