TLDR: let’s discuss imprint change without hate.
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.
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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.
That’s my opinion anyway.
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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.
2 Likes
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
Imprint was and still will be too good they should remove it imo
