Let Us More Easily Choose Our Endgame Content

[Airowird]

@averbeverage

It wouldn’t have to be implemented in such a fashion and I believe painting any suggestions of web customization as “easy mode” is disingenuous and irrelevant to the discussion. As I stated in my question;

@averbeverage

There could easily be shootoffs of content to choose from, like one could be a random path and others could be chosen or something.

And as I have later elaborated here;

@averbeverage

My idea was to have similar objectives along the same path, I know it is currently randomized completely but I would like to see it shift. Say at the start, you have 3 choices, one is Spire, one is find and kill, the other is ambush, and as you go down these paths your choices to change content for variety will remain open via the different offshoots along that path, and you will be forced into variety to get to the rewards you want on the web.

@averbeverage

It doesn’t have to be the terrible thing you imagine.

At what point ever would someone take random over a specific type of objective that their build excels at? I remember the Spire insta-killer reflect build in beta, and if you could do nothing but spire echos as that build, there would be 0 reason to pick any other customization, because you guaranteed to clear those echoes within 10s.

So you’re saying that person would swap for the reward nodes. Let’s say he has 0 need for gold. At best, he’s only ever gonna swap to an ambush path until a gode node shows there, because spire with gold is still better than ambush with gold and both unlock a new node.
So if the reward is completely random, the spires are always better for the reflect-build.

Don’t forget the web is already customizable, you can already skip the bad nodes. Personally, I avoid the Arena nodes without decent rewards.

@averbeverage

@Airowird

Come now, players never enjoy anything if the internet is to be believed!
There are already lenses to ignore campaign, and the difficulty of the prophecy is so easy, it becomes a speed issue over damage/survival. That’s the change that some people could enjoy.

I’m just saying I think your point of it being “a change of scenery” is a little bit out there, don’t you think? Sure, it’s an easy prophecy that’s pretty meaningless and you just turn up and get it. That doesn’t mean you make people jump through more meaningless hoops before doing the meaningless content. That’s not difficulty, that’s a waste of time. You really believe it wouldn’t be any better to just have a more difficult fight scaled to you that’s more enjoyable to repeat and unlocks after killing the boss once? I think it would be awesome just in general for every campaign boss, without even considering prophecies.

Considering you can have access to Prophecies before you even kill Majasa, there needs to be an easiest content. And this way it costs no new boss design. And why should those prophecies scale when I can have a 12 corruption and 320 corruption choice next to each other? You pick the difficulty you want!

If we’re talking purely about Echo objectives: Ambush always takes X% clear before it spawns iirc. Spires you can rush and kill, only if you have the speed for it. Patrols you do faster once you have map knowledge.

Certain builds are always gonna favor certain objectives due to how they are, to allow players to only do easy (to them) content, they’ll just get bored, or ragequit when they finally hit another type of content they never had to check their build against

[averbeverage]

@Airowird

At what point ever would someone take random over a specific type of objective that their build excels at? I remember the Spire insta-killer reflect build in beta, and if you could do nothing but spire echos as that build, there would be 0 reason to pick any other customization, because you guaranteed to clear those echoes within 10s.

So you’re saying that person would swap for the reward nodes. Let’s say he has 0 need for gold. At best, he’s only ever gonna swap to an ambush path until a gode node shows there, because spire with gold is still better than ambush with gold and both unlock a new node.
So if the reward is completely random, the spires are always better for the reflect-build.

Don’t forget the web is already customizable, you can already skip the bad nodes. Personally, I avoid the Arena nodes without decent rewards.

Okay, so certain builds are better at certain objectives. Certain builds are also better at mapping in general. It doesn’t mean absolutely everybody is going to play those builds. You don’t have to make it so they can chain the same objective until the end. There is limited options, but there can still be a balance of choice and forced variety instead of purely forced variety.

You are thinking of 0.01% of people here, when you are saying they are going to optimize to speedrun the web in such a way it completely breaks the game economy, and they are going to find ways to do similar things anyway whether you like it or not, or if the web shows which objective you are doing or not.

We’re also acting like web completion is everything in here and monsters don’t drop items. I would bet my arms that most of your good items are from monster drops and not getting web rewards. If you spend less time getting to the level of corruption for rarity but miss thousands of potential good drops you could get efficiently doing it, then it’s obviously not very good. A player killing a spire, being unable to loot it, and then immediately exiting the map… Well it sounds pretty funny, but ultimately probably bad for that player really. They are not getting to see the drops in the map at all, and missing tons of experience.

We’re also acting like we can’t already just exit the maps and re-enter to reset them to get the objective we want. If it truly was that efficient, people would be doing that on reflect builds right now.

In the first place your argument is nonsense because my proposition was never to let somebody choose all the way to web completion the exact objective they want. My suggestion is to show them some options they can pick from, those options can be random, they can be algorithmic to balance the time of every web completion, they could be anything. But you pigeon hole my suggestion into some static terrible idea you have, and I think it’s because you want a better position to argue. I don’t think that it has to be so black and white and nor do you, I do not think reflect players getting a few more spire maps on their webs is going to turn the world upside down, and nor do you, but you will make it seem you do think that way to elevate your argument.

I am not here to argue, I am here to hopefully get a nice change for players implemented into the game with my suggestion. As I have said before, it does not have to be the horrible thing you imagine, but hell, if you want to fight with ghosts to hold onto some kind of ARPG genius title you have in your imagination go for it, and I’ll indulge you.

We can even play a fun little game. You make up whatever you want to argue with, then tell me all the faults with it, and I’ll remind you that your talking points exist at your whim, and the idea can exist separately from them. Then we’ll loop back around to the beginning after you’ve decided to take another position based purely off of your own assumption and imagination. You know, like we have been this whole conversation.

[Airowird]

@averbeverage

The different directions you take in Monolith webs should lead to different content, and the type of objective should be stated in each instance.

reads vastly different than

@averbeverage

There is limited options, but there can still be a balance of choice and forced variety instead of purely forced variety.

This is also the first time you mention not having 100% access to the preferred objective, btw, which is exactly what I was arguing against.

So what you’re actually asking for is just knowing the objective (like we already know by map name & stability reward which are arenas) and be able to chose ahead of time. The webs aren’t designed to be cleared, so you would already be getting more of your preferred objective overall, without injecting more into the web balance (like CoF lenses do).

Did I understand what you actually wanted now?

Because if so … a lot of tech needs to change. Unfortunately, objectives seem to be generated on map load, as rerunning an echo after dying will show you.

I’m still against it though, as I think the randomness of the objective helps create better overall builds rather than task-specific ones.

[averbeverage]

Yes that is what I mean mostly. I want them to show the type of content and give us different options on the offshoots, so when we don’t care about the rewards shown we can run the content we prefer. I prefer some objectives over others and I would like to choose them and avoid the others on the web when I don’t care about the rewards, rather than load in, exit, and load back in. Simply for my own enjoyment of the game. Not to make my special build more special, or to make tons of gold and get rich. Just wanna play the objectives I like.

[Airowird]

Counter-suggestion then:

Instead of knowing exactly which node has what objective (assuming that’s possible), get us monolith lenses.

“80% increased chance of Spire objective”,
"90% less likely to be ambushed* or something like that.

Something people can’t cherry-pick their web with, but at least helps you do the objectives you like more often.

[averbeverage]

Sure, sounds better than current state. I’d give it a shot.