So it is apparent the imprint change is a notable piece to S4. And lots of opinions are going around on the patch notes, and honestly some of them are a little much.
So I figured let’s make a thread specifically about imprint change and have a civil opinion topic on change. I say civil as everyone is entitled to your opinion, but if you essentially just go anger, anger, anger, hate, hate, hate your (what may valid) point can get lost.
So I figure you could start with do you like or dislike the imprint change. Why you feel that way (as in what cause from the change makes you have your opinion). Any negative or positive that you believe will come from it. And if you have a possible suggestion as to what could “fix” your issue end with that ideally.
I’ll start.
Do I like the change: Nope.
Why I feel that way: I feel as this is just harm to the players, as it was a way to target farm items that is now being hindered. And this is essentially a non competitive game where someone having a good item and lots of them didn’t harm another player (as far as I’m concerned). “Everyone” using imprints (to me) should have been a sign that the devs made a good feature for the players. And opposed to “killing” imprints they (imo) should have leaned into it.
Possible negative or positive: I feel that in the long run this will create a player dissatisfaction general feeling, and cause early exit from finalization of builds or even playing the game at all. Even if S4 come with a mechanic that is 10x better then imprint, it will feel like(to me) they are forcing players to play they want and limiting the ways players can choose to play.
A solution I propose: CoF is sad to be bad even by the devs, so let’s make one of the CoF levels increase the chance of imprints to at least the level prior to the change. My justification for this CoF is supposed to be about loot so it’s a natural connection to me.
Personally, I think the change is a simple balance fix. They saw how much was dropping from imprints, felt it was too much and dialed back on the power creep.
You can still target farm, it’s just slower now. The change only affects the frequency of the drops, not the drops themselves. So you’ll still have the same drops as you had before, except now they drop half as much.
Imprints were, after all, a huge power creep once players figured out how to get triple exalts from them. Devs are just dialing it back.
It’s just a simple slowdown in progress. The developer knows full well that very little new content has been added to the game, and they need to find a way to keep people playing longer. It’s a shame that all the other targeted farming mechanics work so poorly compared to Imprint. Maybe, along with nerfing Imprint, they should have improved the other mechanics so that the Imprint nerf wouldn’t be so critical for targeted farming overall?
I was very satisfied with the farming and the time it took to get items in previous leagues, including the most powerful and rarest ones—it took time either way. For example, I farmed 20+ hours for 2 of these 1LP Red Rings, but since the developer thinks that’s not enough, I think I’ll just play a different game.
Honestly, I’m always feel high dissatisfaction when developers coming with just a nerf instead of nerf with something back instead. So for me it just like they ask to stay less people who still wants to play even with lowest chances. Terrible gacha on my view, I hate it when chance is less than 1%, it just pointless and kill all my love to grind. Sorry, it was not only about imprint system but about a lot nerfed things.
But isn’t that relative, though? Most likely the devs saw the result of the imprints and felt like they overtuned it. So now they’re adjusting it to how they wanted it to be in the first place.
Moreover, they even started to think as it is normal, that point about harm to community is not popular, because not everyone saying sad things about broken promises and expectations. So here we have now - they make enemies even more healthy and damaging, while some classes can’t go over 300c on builds, and less chances to get good loot. And it is right for them. I’m terrible upset right now
It was a way to bypass meaningful progression. It was also a way to get items that were never intended to drop like double T7 or even Triple T7.
Below is Mike’s answer which you read from my other post but relevant for this discussion.
I think on the surface imprinting was a good idea implemented poorly. If they totally removed it, I think that would be fine. However the reduced chances should maybe do the trick for now and maybe they can remove it at a latter date and try something else.
I’m impartial as most of my 2,000 hours farming never used imprinting much since last season I quit after 1 week. So I never abused the broken mechanic. We have to admit though it was broken right?
I believe the core idea of imprinting is wrong. It’s either going to be too weak or too strong so the best thing to do is remove it. Just my thoughts.
It all started two seasons ago. To put it in perspective, I think it’s crazy to spend 20+ hours farming an item in the game. It doesn’t matter how rare it is or how powerful it is. Simply because, for example, if I’ve chosen a build on Maxroll and want to put it together, but then find out that the strongest version will require an insane amount of time—why waste that time? It’s better to go play another game; chances are, I’ll have a more enjoyable time there than grinding like that.
Aren’t all non-D3/D4 ARPGs like that, though? In PoE1/2 you have the low budget/moderate/mirror version of builds. And the mirror version is something that will require an insane amount of time for the average player.
Same for D2, TLI, GD, TQ1, etc.
If you don’t have a hard goal at the end, then the sweatlords will finish the game in 1-2 days (and sweatlords usually dump plenty of money on the game).
A well balanced game should be like this, I think. The average player will be able to grind for a moderate budget build and get there in the same time as a sweatlord gets to the mirror-tier build.
And it should be balanced enough that even a casual can achieve most things in the game (though not all) even with a low budget build.
If you make it so that casuals can reach the pinnacle of the build in a couple weeks, then most players will only play for a few days before leaving because they already “finished the game”, as can be seen in D4.
That’s like 2 days of farming. Hope you don’t play PoE where it’s 100’s or 1,000s of hours to find what you want.
Really? So you don’t want chase items? Chase items are the reason to play ARPGs. This genre is about loot hunting and farming. If you can get what you want in 20 hours that is a mistake. Some items should take 100’s or even 1,000’s of hours.
That’s just what ARPGs are about. I don’t understand your thinking.
If you don’t want it in the game don’t have it in the game. It took me around 3,000 hours for my first quad 7 to drop. And then I shared that with others then they shared theirs with me. Making the game better for me.
So silly basically saying oh it’s possible technically to get this item, but in reality you never will or should.
It’s like saying look at how awesome loot is in our game you can get items like (x) and it’s a total false advertisement as devs have zero intention of you getting it. And trying to get you to hunt for an impossible drop.
I’m ambivalent on the change. EHG needs to battle the rampant power creep and I never liked the imprint-system much, most (all?) are still present in S4:
They are effectively “mandatory” notes to path to in the weaver tree
Arcane / intransparent rules applying
No indicator something dropped from imprint or not
Need to keep the imprint base around if you want to switch farming another item type
The game revolves around farming towers and troves
On the other hand, I like systems that help targeted farming and gets us away from the gambling only RNG systems (I find Rune of Corruption gacha like-mechanics really not fun).
I think EHG should introduce a hard line of max. chance of something occurring. Anything currently above that line should be simply impossible. That way, the very very rare finds would still be possible and create dopamine moments (like mirror of kalandra rarity). But it would also set expectations correctly. We have so many “theoretical” possibilities that would never surface even if we all played until the freezedeath of the universe.
I feel like the point of the post is being lost already. If you want to argue and just complain the patch notes have more than enough room there. I tried providing guidelines or a layout and provided an example with hope to prevent that. And it seems I failed
A lot of us had this arguement/convo yesterday on discord A LOOOOOOOOOOOT of people are not happy. One reason it’s bad is due to the quality of imprints that get dropped. I posted this as an example - https://imgur.com/a/FO8QGns this was a weeks worth of pure trove running 10+ hours a day (I play a lot) these were all 777 daggers - the imprint came from Nemesis with 62FP on it, 85% of those daggers dropped with less than 40FP - then you have to try seal/havoc/add affixes - you hit one high roll on a rune of havoc and 20FP is gone and you’ve basically bricked it before you try another move. Every 50 imprints that drop at 77 or above you’ll only successfully craft a small percentage of those into what you need - ON TOP OF THAT you then have to hope you successfully slam both of those affixes onto your item another small percentage to hit.
Right 70 hours of pure troves for me - I work for myself I can afford to do this, I have no life. Most people have a life and family and normal jobs, how the hell could they put the same time in to this? If you cut that drop load by 50% and not only that it’s the HORRIBLE other nerf that items drop with LESS exalted affixes you’re probably talking more like 75-80% of what is on my screen instantly gone, that picture then becomes “3 weeks” - I won’t do that, no one in game will. The people in game now if you go on are all my friends who play the WHOLE season. They keep the servers going, they help new people, they carry people through high corruption and uber and make new players feel welcome and share info. Those players will all be gone. The servers are going to be empty.
I get why some people say “it needed balancing” etc because you probably got quite lucky with imprints or you don’t min/max. You might have hit an lp2 slam and being content for your season, great. Everyones different.
With ANYYYYYYYYYY nerf you need to start small and work on the balance as it goes - you don’t destroy a build or people rage - ask any person playing any game where this has happened. Try 20% and slowly monitor the drop rates. Nah they go 50% AND now items that were 77 probably going to drop single 7’s while you’re collecting your lp2/3 items which have slots you’ll end up slamming with T5s because your 77 dreams are gone.
These are my personal thoughts I will not respond to any quotes on this you’ll be talking to yourself.
honestly for me just slap cof tag on imprints and just make it a cof thing. According to MG players they have the strongest faction and can literally buy any item so why do they need imprints that are account bound even without cof(as far as i know) tag.
Usually people will flock to overpowered mechanics. Usually people will complain when said overpowered mechanic is (properly) nerfed.
So it’s a good thing you won’t try to discuss your point of view - there isn’t much of an argument beyond how you are sad that an overpowered mechanic has been adjusted.
I won’t discuss my point but happy to point out that I’ve seen a lot of your posts and it’s pretty clear you’re a mid player with anger issues that everyone else is better than you. Your knowledge of the game is terrible and the advice I’ve seen you try give would only make people who take it worse at this game, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
I’ve cooled down a bit since yesterday’s patch notes and had time to think about the changes. Spoiler — my opinion hasn’t changed much.
First of all, the game doesn’t have that much content to stretch out the grind. As it is, this grind revolves around two activities. Farming Conquered Tower and Unclaimed Trove already become boring after a couple of weeks. Luckily, by that point you can put together a decent build and move on to the next one. The latest changes only make this problem worse, since this farming method will most likely remain the most effective, and we’ll keep farming Nemesis and running the beach — it will just take much longer.
In my opinion, the problem lies with the Sealed Riches node itself. The trigger for such a powerful node shouldn’t be tied to such a rare event as opening a cache, especially when players can run maps filled with caches themselves. The trigger conditions should be simpler and not tied to a specific mechanic that almost never appears in regular Echoes. In that case, I wouldn’t even mind a 50% reduction in the trigger chance. By the way, Commoner’s Riches doesn’t have this problem.
The reduction in the drop chance for items with multiple T7 affixes is the most unpleasant change. That was the whole point of imprints. Wasn’t it? I could understand their logic if we were getting a 90% match with the original, but we’re not. Most of the time, such items are useless. I don’t know — I can’t justify this change
