In my opinion, I think that if “all” builds could do all T4 and high corruption, then it would take away from the pleasure of finding the right combination of skills and passives to take you where you want to go.
I don’t take away from the thought that there needs to be more diversity in the capability of builds, as I think having it work that only one build per class/mastery can achieve the penultimate level of the game is a good concept. Then nearly everyone would be playing practically the same character for the mastery (every BD would be the same BD, every Shaman would be the same, etc.).
It’s just a matter of finding the right balance so that each class/mastery can have multiple paths to get them to the highest levels of success, and yes I know that can be very subjective but I think at least most of you know what I mean.
If you look at all the builds for each patch, and nearly all of one class use practically the same nodes in the same skills and nearly the same passives, then it doesn’t lend to build diversity. The rest of the skills, nodes, and passives at that point have no use and the time creating them is what I would consider a waste.
I do not agree with the premise that all skills for each mastery should be available to every other mastery of that class. I think they should be locked to provide identity for each mastery.
I came out with a more clear thinking these last minutes, and Ill try to explaing considering every point I kind of disagree around here. And in the effort of trying to put aside at least a little all the subjectivity the topic brings.
Who am I to dictate whats viable or not, whats high content or not, what works fine or not? I am noone to put the rules. But thats the catch, its not me, its not Heavy, nor Vapourfire, each one of us have different takes of the same subject. But the game itself make the rules.
I can only make assumptions based on what Im playing for the moment. If the game turn to be balanced around 300+ corruption, fine, we will discuss things around this later.
But right now we have many , a good variety of builds capable of doing 500+ corruption, maybe even lot of builds capable of doing 1000+ corruption. Thats the actual game and I see nothing wrong with it, I think its good to have such things. Also lot of builds are capable of doing T4 dungeons. Thats our standard. That will always be the goal, so subjetive or objective aside, thats the things many players will be comparing when talking that something is not well balanced, something is weak, something does not have diversity enough.
So emphasizing one more time, the game itself tell us what is being good or not, whats being strong or not. Even when something is “working” to do some kind of content you still can tell that its not strong enough, that it lacks damage. Perry made a bladedancer build around Shadow Cascade (actually he took the idea by other guy in discord I think), and it works to clear monos, it can even do T4 Julra, but when you see the game standards and compare it to the other skills you can observe that it lacks damage. Its hard to build around this skill. Its a great skill but by the game standards and by the bladedancer standards it should have a higher damage.
I can bring my druid up to 200+ corruption with the meme joke skill Tempest Strike. But its not a viable skill considering all the content of the game.
You can use almost anything and finish the game, but ultimately I really think there should be a fair amount of builds & diversity in a same class that can do the Higher Content. Its the game itself who will dictate whats high contet or not. I think we should have at least 3 different skills & setups per mastery competing who goes further in monoliths or who goes further in arena. Right now there is only one setup that rule the market with no contest. Ideally we could have shadow daggers setup competing against pure umbral blade damage competing against light shurikens competing against shadow cascade damage. That would be sick and great fun. Playyers trying different setups to se who goes further. Im not asking all skills to be in the same level. Im only asking a fair amount of diversity, its not too much.
And If you dont care about competition, totally fine. But it is this that will set a standard and will help to bring more diversity to the gameplay.
My main one (Bone Curse/Rip Blood/Retaliation Golem) got gutted in 0.9.1, before I’d even been able to farm the relic that gives ward on necrotic skill cast.
I am sorry, but if you really believe that this level of damage is necessary to not feel that “you are lacking damage” you are out of touch with a big majority of the playerbase.
These are outlier builds. Bringing all other builds up to their standard is absolutely unreansonable and not pratical at all.
I cannot comment much on shadow dagger builds, because I have no experience playing them myself (because I hate that archtype), but I genuinely believe that LE already is in a great spot in terms of build viability and diversity for builds reaching 300-500 corruption (which is the upper end of what I would consider reasoanble). Again Dungeon are really bad as a gauge for builds because you can do them with basically any build if you ahve the mechanical skills.
But having builds that can do some things easier or harder then other is just the nature of complex loot/build driven games and that is totally ok. How much time and effort players are willing to put into specific builds is also something that is very hard to balance around, because there are so many different player types.
But I love, when there are builds, even though they require huge amoutns of investment and time, can still work well if you put in the time and work. I don’t care fi they are objectively bad at the end of the day.
I couldn’t think of a worse example than PoE even if you asked me to think for a week about it. They literally let you mix every skill in the game with every skill in the game. The only thing you cannot mix and match is sub-classes, and you honestly don’t lose out much, mostly stats.
This game is super restrictive on what skills you can match with which skills, adding even more restriction with the class thing feels wrong. Let me throw meteorites with a flame spell-blade and let me transform into a bear as a storm shaman.
Lot’s of cool concepts arbitrarily locked by this, and the game could definitely do with more build variety.
It was a perfect comparison, what are you on about? I mentioned how powerful you could be to freely pick notables from different Dualist ascendancies, no different from being able to freely pick whatever you want in LE. Perfect example, user error on your end.
to be fair to my whole post I tried to be very reasonable and I said “At Least 3 or 4 builds per mastery competing to do very high content”. Nothing at all related to bringing all builds to the same level.
Again to be fair, I dont think you have the data or numbers to claim the big majority of playerbase does not like this level of damage. This forum can be very vocal but is far from representing playerbase, even reddit is just a smal fraction of what one can infer from being playerbase.
And all my post focus was not to advocate in my own cause. As I said “the game itself make the rules.” But if the majority or if the bosses decide this kind of damage is not meant to be in the game, fine, balance the game around what they think is reasonable, but make 3 or 4 skills and setups per mastery competing with each other around the new damage standard.
I dont want to take the topic to a far different discussion but I quote myself to tell my perspective.
BUT, BUT, with all that said, I am fine if you and the devs think 300-500 is the magical number where the game will shine (personally I think it can break this little unpolished gem we have here, this passionate great project). And this magical number around 300 is just not happening in the moment.
The game make the rules, it is the one entity who will dictate whats reasonable. So far players and all kinds of builds are telling us that 1000 corruption is reasonable.
Just to finish, I genuinely dont think as you. Not at all basically any build can do T4 dungeons.
No matter how pro one is , how mechanically good you can try to be.
But for the time being I will not extent the discussion around this.
So you rather want 4 or 5 super powerful builds instead of dozens and dozens “decent” builds?
I think that would do a massive disservice to Last Epoch, because one of its greatest selling points is, that you can basically make anything work on a reasonable level and clear all content.
Yes I know and I do not relate my statementt solely to the forum, but to literally all ARPG’s I ever played. And the level of buil and content you described earlier is content that only a small fraction of the playerbase even experience.
Of course a lot of people aspire to that and “like it”, but they never reach it.
You might not realize that there is a significant amount of the player base, that might not even touched Monolith of Fate and only played the campaign.
I think there is a difference in having builds that can do 1000+ corruption within a few dozen hours of playtime (basically just getting to level 80-90, slapping a few exalted and requried uniques on and the rest is carried by the skill spec trees).
And builds that are capable of doing 1000+ corruption, but require a lot of fine tuning and getting the perfect balance of stats on their gear.
While the first kind of builds already starts farming for high corruption for some BiS exalted items with minimal effort, the second kind of build needed like 100-200 hours to even reach that point.
So my point is not, that there shouldn’t be buidls that are capable of reachign those super high numbers.
My point is, that I rather have 100 different builds being able to reach that level of content with enough effort, instead of 95 builds need to work hard to reach that point, while the top 5 builds can basically get away with solely slapping together some good skill spec trees and you are already beyond most other builds in terms of performance.
I especially don’t like this, because most of the character power shouldn’t come from some clicks in some menues, but rather from actual gear.
I know this is a topic that ahs already been discussed, but I think it has a major impact on build diversity and how people build their characters.
Its ok, if you disagree, but its hard to argue, because its fact that you can do a dungeon boss fight without taking any damage if you play correctly. (there are only very few dungeon boss abilities that are unavoidable and these are basically non-lethal).
So with enough mechanical skill and a movement skill or enough %inc. Movement Speed every build can do T4 dungeon bosses.
About this, I cant help thinking that it doesn’t matter what I prefer or not, it’s incredible how players explore all corners of the game and discover so many great interactions and so many fun and powerful setups, that I find it to be super hard for devs trying to achieve your idealistic scenario of having dozens of builds working in a reasonable similar baseline. I’m not against it, but what I generally see is that there is always some builds that outshine others, always some tier S, tier A , Tier B builds, it’s the nature of these games …
And if it’s not possible to achieve what you have said , my fight is only to bring more diversity to the top builds. My fight was never against to the “selling point of the game”,
I don’t think my points hurt in any way others builds being able to do all content from the game.
If tomorrow shadow cascade is buffed to a similar damage of shadow dagger (with the correct setup, correct gear, passives and blessings, it would not be something achievable from night to day, but with a lot of work and grinding), I guess it won’t take away the fun of people playing with other things nor it will discourage mature people from trying other skills.
(just an example of extremes, that does not mean I want all skills to have this absurd damage)
I can give you an example, two jobs with exactly the same content, one can get you $100, and the other can only give you $10, which job would you choose? What high corruption brings is not just a sense of accomplishment, more gold coins, more T7, faster farming BOSS, the difference in income brought by the same time is huge, you may say, I think this build is very COOOOOOOOOL, even if it can only farm 200 corruption, why don’t I get the equipment I want more efficiently and enjoy it later?
Yes, there are many types of players, some will experience the plot and feel the scenery, some will study construction, pursue better equipment, and some will even study various bugs, but in the end it is the diversity of the game that can maintain the vitality of the game Uniqueness, various interesting gameplays, powerful equipment, and challenging challenges can keep players enthusiastic for a long time.
And one point I would like to raise implicitly is the arrogance of the production team. I know many people will say that this is a malicious point of view. How much EHG likes to listen to players’ opinions. In fact, the discussion on whether to automatically pick up affix fragments has already It has lasted for a long time. The production team’s point of view is that manual picking will give players more sense of participation, and most players think it is a waste of time, but what they dare not admit is that if a switch is set, players can Free choice between auto loot and manual loot, most players will choose auto loot, they don’t like to admit it, they want to stick to their own ideas, sometimes sticking to their own ideas is a good thing, but not always In this way, they said to many suggestions: We are open to this, but the fact is that they are not willing to do it.
The recent D4 forum let us see that their production team lowered their proud heads and admitted their mistakes, but obviously they did not find the right path to modify the game. These changes were made based on the fact that a large number of players left the game. Their player base is large enough and they can give a lot of feedback, but at the same time, a large number of players have left the game. BLZ can bear these losses, but EHG may not be able to. Many of my friends have left the game. Come back one day, but there are bound to be some who have to leave forever.
I’m not saying I agree or not with his line of thinking, but following his method he is being reasonable in his arguing.
If it’s the same content it can’t be done in one minute or 12 minutes . We assume both jobs will have the content done in the same amount of time
But maybe you are going very deep in the discussion, bringing the point that one place have the tools and means so that the person can do it in one minute, and the other job ,even with the same content, have different tools and means and the person will take 12 minutes to get the work done.
I don’t know if it’s this line you are trying to follow …
Yeah, 'cause neither things are instantaneous, nor are they unique in that you can only choose one of them. Just because “they have the same content” doesn’t mean they take the same amount of time because the higher corruption mobs have more hp & if they have more hp they take more time to kill. Now, if you’re one-shotting mobs in the higher corruption content, then yes, it absolutely makes sense to do that over the lower corruption content because, all other things being equal, you’ll get more “stuff” (xp, gold, gear, etc). But if you’re not one-shotting the higher corruption content & it’s taking significantly longer than the lower corruption content, then maybe the lower corruption is more “efficient” in terms of stuff-per-unit-time.
Now, clearly you’re not going to get 10 times as much stuff (£100) in the higher corruption monos as the lower corruption monos (£10) unless you’re really pushing corruption & modifiers, but then you’re presumably not getting through it as fast as the lower corruption monos.
So, as with most things, it depends on the detail. Just because higher corruption content gives more stuff doesn’t mean it’s better to do that, but it might be, depends on how much more stuff & your build’s ability to get that stuff without dieing.
It’s just bragging for bragging sake, it’s pointless
I think most people should understand what I mean
When I say the same job you say, being able to do a $10 job 10 times faster, when I say the same thing, you say, that job is more fun, anyway, you can always add other conditions to achieve balance.
But you overlooked one point, whether you are 10 times faster or more fun, it is still based on the income, and you add conditions to achieve the balance of income.
This is still based on the income problem I said, the income of 200 corruption and 1000 corruption is not equal, for some powerful BD, the speed of passing 200 corruption and 1000 corruption is almost the same, but the income is very different, it does not exist The speed of passing 200 corruption is 5 times that of passing 1000 corruption. You can say that these builds are supermodels, but the difference in income at the same time is huge. A mage build I am currently playing can be built within five minutes at the fastest Complete a kill of T4 Jura. From entering the map, the time to run the map is about 2-3 minutes. Killing Jura takes less than one minute. The rest of the time is used for the long transition of the map. You can imagine that it is different from other How big of a gap is there in the build yield.
Similarly, for the Boulder Boss, 1000 corruption requires only about 8 maps to kill the boss once, and 200 corruption requires 20 maps. Maybe I can get enough equipment to complete a build in a few hours, which will bring come to a completely different experience
