Loot Determination Spin Off, by request. :D

General
1

Continuing the discussion from Baldurs Gate 3 & Game Dev recently:

Per @DiceDragon request. :smiley:

This part 100%. I’ve already stated this is what I think LE is trying to do and what I like about the crafting system. Not yet LOVE but really do like. And the more ‘stuff’ they add to the game, items, affixes, etc the more it will be necessary to find the best place between fully random and fully deterministic. Grim Dawn had this same issue. MIs were really cool but the more affixes they added it became more and more unlikely to find a good one. So they started adding some ways to ‘adjust’ the odds. In this upcoming release they’re doing something is even coming in about REROLLING affixes. Can’t wait to see what that is. I hope it’s doesn’t make it too easy though.

I’ve even come around on the 4 affix t7 argument. I now do think that the odds being so astronomically impossible is too far. Mind you. I do NOT want it to easily obtainable but the fact that if someone ever actually DID drop one none of us would believe them and there’d be an argument around cheating because the odds are so ridiculous has made me realize that needs to be ‘fixed.’ I don’t have ideas on how, but I’m not a game designer or a number cruncher so I’d defer to saner minds on that one.

1 Like
2

Yeah, I also am in the boat of not really knowing the exactly solution.

it obviously cant be “you play for 10 hours and now you have all t7 affixes”

But currently fairly early you hit a wall where looking for items is just spending hours playing and praying you hit an upgrade.

In slormancer, you obtain materials everytime you do something. Even if you need a t15 material, with enough t1 material, you can trade up to a t15. So playtime = progress.

In chornicon you have slightly more rng, you get mats, which can be used to reroll affixes forever, so sometimes you will take lots of rerolls to get the one you want. But eventually your odds become like 1/20 instead of 1/10000000 to hit what you need. Chronicon also has a system called “Mastery” its a an exp system detached from your levels, mastery goes up infinitely. if you play for an hour you will get a few mastery levels and thus gain a bit of power. You always leave a session of chronicon stronger then you started even if its only by like 1%.

LE frontloads lots of stats, then the backend of progression is just one armed bandit gameplay… and that just kinda sucks.

Though it sounds like maybe there is more loot stuff coming this patch? I pray its not just side grade stuff.

1 Like
3

I think this is definitely an issue. While I have to admit I really enjoy the leveling process from 1-75ish because there’s almost a constant feeling of progression it’s a trade off because right around the 75 mark the curve just logrithims or something. I’ve been leveling a forge guard the last few weeks with my own build idea and from level 84 to 97 it feels virtually stagnant in terms of gear. I’ve gotten a few craftable pieces but only one has panned out well enough for me to decide to use it.

Do that over six or seven characters (or more) and that starts to feel “bad.”

Psychological my gut is telling me it only feels bad though because of how “good” 1-75ish feels. I don’t think higher levels should be as easy, don’t get me wrong, so I wonder if it might be something as simple as slowing down the power in the early bits to carry the “growing power” feel further into the rise too 100.

Couple that with the fact they’ve talked about ramping up how much XP it takes to go from 95-100 and my uh-oh radar is pinging big time.

4

I’m on the same boat.
Getting into my fifth char, I’m understanding better what people say about endgame and the feeling about the lack of progression, and also some complaints about the so many RNG layers devs put in the game in order to create a balance and make it difficult to achieve the best itens. The problem is that most times it is not possible to achieve the semi-perfect or BiS itens.

And I’m not optimistic they understand this well, e.g. let’s remember that one aspect of one of the factions will boost chance of uniques to have LP, but in order to do that they will first nerf the current LP potential rate :confused::face_with_peeking_eye:.

To me sounds like they intend that things remain in the field of impossible for a long time.

I do not want easy things too, or break any balance the game have, but the game current state about drops and getting A-tier or S-tier itens once your char is full geared is not good.

5

I’m a little more optimistic. I think they recognize it and want to figure out a way to do it. Keep in mind, if they accidentally over do it and everyone starts having A tier gear every season, if they realize they have to reign it in, the meltdown on the internet would be reactor-core level. So I think they’re playing it conservative while they fine tune it.

6

Im not even really after BiS or perfect items.

I just want there to be some meaning to play.

These games are very much about long term character building, be that over a season, or over years in the non seasonal stuff.

Where as right now I create a character, and in a week im pretty much done, I have hit whatever the level cap may be(if they make 95-100 take 10x as long for example most people will probably just stop at 95/96.)ive farmed my blessings, and gotten good enough gear.

The only thing left after that week is to push corruption or chase 5% damage upgrades through insane gear grinds of pulling the lever and hoping to get them to drop.

I really enjoy the blessing system, it adds a layer of non gear specific grind to have you go and get that feels decent enough to farm in my opinion.

But then its just back to one arm bandit upgrades and it feels really bad.

I am not really sure if expanding end game would even fix that. Im not particularly bored of the end game loop, more so bored with the lack of meaningful progression as I play past a certain point.

Diablo has paragon, Chronicon has mastery, PoE has currency, and Slormancer has materials for crafting. All of these mean you slowly but surely are always trending up towards character improvement.

LE is really lacking on a system of tiny rewards that build up to a big reward. Everything is just a “hit big and feel good!” system, Legendary crafting is “pray you hit the good mods you want, and pray you drop big LP” the weavers items are “okay you dropped 18 WW, now will it actually pick and upgrade good mods!”

So far we dont have any mechanics that reward us with slow but sure progress.

2 Likes
7

I created a Reddit pool just for the sake of curiosity,
A very limited one but it’s there anyway, about current drops state.

https://reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/s/kmvzBNhBm7

1 Like
8

I did vote and put some comments on the reddit:

I voted for “More than 100 hours played and drops need to be buffed”, but that is not entirely representetive of my opinion.

I think unique and rare drops are fine.

I really like Rare item progression during the story and early MoF.

Also target farming uniques is great. Both Boss uniques and random drops are realisticly targetfarmable in Acount-Found.

Exalted items are what I feel is not where it needs to be currently.

They drop in abundance, but are rarely any good. Even with investing a lot of crafting into a exalted items they will often turn out to be medicore or unusable in the first place, because of wrong base etc.

The Legendary Crafting increased the usefullness of good exalted items on bad bases by A LOT, which is good.

But overall 9/10 exalted items are not exciting.

So by “buffing” them I would like to see a little bit fewer ones, but have the quality increased a bit (something like smart-loot, where affixes are sometimes grouped together in combinations that make sense together.

1 Like
9

For me this isnt actually really the topic at hand.

Drops are fine as is, the problem is more so crafting/long term goals. So I would vote “more then 100 hours played, loot is fine as is”

The bigger problem is that just increasing drops does not solve the problem of feeling like you are making progress each day you play. instead you simply lower variance times to hit big.

You still have a slot machine, the odds are just more in your favor.

Buffing drops raises the floor of builds, without really helping solve the top end or changing how we progress our characters. its still just “play and pray something good drops”

Like the bad string of luck aspect feels bad. For example heavy had a post when 0.9 just dropped about how there was quite a bit more “unique X” tiles on monos, which is true. I can definitely tell there is more of these now.

I still spent 4 days searching for the potion find to throwing damage rogue relic. I did dozens upon dozens of the unique relic spaces. I end up with an entire tab of WW relics.

Adding more chances for me to “roll the dice” did not improve my feeling of joy from playing the game. id much rather get a singular “unique splinter” for each space I did, 100 lets me pick my unique. like perhaps they add the ability to shatter uniques, and you get 1-2 unique splinters, and with 100, you can simply make any non boss unique you desire.(Id count rav void as a boss unique despite it being a global drop. :stuck_out_tongue: )

A game I used to play used a similar system, the highest tier of items were extremely rng, you had to do an end game encounter that cost materials that were expensive/hard to find, and only 20%~ of those encounters dropped an item of the said highest rarity. Then it could be any of the several hundred. But every time you did one of those encounters you got a few dozen fragments, with 1000 fragments you got to simply craft the item.

You never wanted to have to craft the item, as it would most likely mean weeks to months to get it. But there was basically a soft pity system that meant eventually you would get it no matter how bad your luck was.

I wish we had a “build an exalted” shatter enough exalted and you get to slap an exalted stat on a base. it would be t6, and only once per item, it would allow you to close the gap, but still leave found gear the best.

I dunno just spitballin, but basically I just want to be able to slowly grind up to 80%~ gear, or even like 70% gear. I dont need BiS, I just want to feel like everytime im doing something at end game, progress towards a goal is happening.

10

I dont know, I think BiS or God-Tier itens should at least have a slightly chance to occur. Even if its after a thousand hours. Whats the point to exist in theory exalted itens with T28 and rares uniques that could have 4LP if it will never occur.
The pool is very limited and just to give a glimpse of general opinion, but yeah, the discussion is in another layer, quantity of drops is not the real problem.

To me the biggest problem is the RNG after RNG after RNG to get a great Legendary item. As they have said, the odds are next to nothing. Once you get your 1LP rarer unique, a couple of average to good exalted itens, and is finished with blessings, you have nothing more to do with the build. Because you could farm for another 100 hours and still not find a single upgrade. You spend hundreds of hours to find a good unique with 1LP or 2LP (and pray that it has good implicits). Just in this first step is two layers of RNG. In tandem with this step you are also looking for a great exalted item with the correct affixes. Sometimes it never comes. Another RNG wall. And when you finally get the two there is the final RNG that can brick your two itens that you got after and enduring grinding. This step can alo brick your heart and mind, because sometimes its too much to endure in something you are trying for enjoyment.

Another problem worth to mention is the exalted itens. Another drop gated at least in two layers of RNG. Its difficult to get the correct combination of affixes and a good exalted affix, and more difficult yet that these come with the correct base item.

11

I’m sympathetic to making exalt crafting more deterministic since I also found the RNG gauntlet pretty frustrating at times. However I think the single most important change to make the approach to endgame feel satisfying is just a solid nerf on rare items (or specifically rare items crafting).

IMO it’s not particularly a problem that you cannot easily make a perfect exalted item. The problem is that an imperfect 1x or even 2x exalted item absolutely sucks in comparison to rares that you can produce for minimal effort.

You can make t20 items to exact specifications quite easily from a fairly early stage. The issue is that these items are really really good. Ignoring Despair glyphs, the maximum outcome for your first T6 exalt is 21. A perfect exalt crafting outcome is just a bit more powerful than a yellow item that you can make easily. If any step of crafting goes wrong and you get any missing or suboptimal affixes then it’s almost certainly weaker than the printed rare. The result is that you flatline for ages at t20 items and often suffer frustration as you find very cool looking purple bases only for crafting to leave you with what may as well be a brick.

There is a very easy fix for this. Just slap a hard cap of 16 or so total affix levels on yellow items (excluding despair if you like). Suddenly there’s a long chunk of the core progression where an exalt can be useful with some basic upgrades rather than a perfect run of 10 chaos glyphs and removal runes. You will likely be making incremental gear improvements over a much longer period and have reason to use a variety of interesting items instead of stock pseudo-BiS t20s. I think this would go a very long way to improve the experience without touching crafting determinism in the slightest.

I know people don’t love nerfs but I think it’s completely appropriate and important in this case. I think 16 cap is a good choice to give exalted items some real room to shine while still leaving crafting plenty powerful enough to get most builds rolling.

12

I concur with others that the issue is the lack of the sense of building towards something, and not the drops.
My main gripe with the game is the crafting system. The more I play, the less I like it (in the endgame / min-max phase). The system is always either a success or a brick with no recovery available. So, if you brick your craft, you are going to have made exactly zero progress, you have just spent a bunch of time with nothing to show for it.
And since bases play a vital role in crafting and are very specific to the item you want to make, you probably have to farm for a very long time before finding another usable base. It just feels like a waste of time.

I am very curious to see how the enconomy will shape up once we finally get trading.
In my characters, for every upgrade that I crafted, I created dozens of very good items that barely missed the mark in terms of being an upgrade. The system produces almost perfect items at an industrial scale, I cannot imagine these bricked items being very expensive in an open market. So there is a chance that the best option will be to sell exalted bases and just buy the crafting failures from other players.

13

I think there is a large difference between totally random drops with random bases (exalted items) and unqiues items with pre-determined stats.

Regarding unique items

I think they are really well balanced right now. With a system such as the legendary crafting system, the devs would need to drastically change power and drop rates, if all uniques have the same LP chance.
The fact that LP chance can be balanced on a case by case basis is just for the better for everything. This allows the devs to give unqiues, that fall off at high end game, a chance to still be viable and competetive by increasing the likelyhood of LP.
While on the other hand making items that are already on a huge power level not too much of powercreep and essentially making those “weaker items” completel obsolete.

There are several cases, where I got a mediocre unqiue with 3-4LP that I could turn into a really good and useable item by sacrificing a very good 3-4 stat exalted item.
That is excellent.

But I don’t need an already super rare and powerful unique to have easy chance for 3-4 LP, because this would invalidate a lot of the lower/weaker items.

Regarding exalted items

I don’t understand the critique that people have about items not being realisticlly possible.
This does not really matter to the player, unless they set themselves the goal of getting such items. And this is not a system fault, but a player fault.

Having these “theoreticaly miracle items” doesn’t hurt the game, if people have realistic expectations. The only thing I understand here, is that a unexperienced player might get from informations about these items “being possible” and then he thinks those are actually obtainable.

There are even other things that are simialr in nature, that are already in teh game, that nobody critizes. For example having an Implicits with a roll range and 4-5 affixes on an item with a roll range. Getting all these 5-6 stats in the same items to be >=95% rolls is also very unlikely and will basically never happen. Yet nobody seems to critique that.
(I know that the power difference between low rolls on affixes and 1xT7 vs 4xT7 items is very different, but its still the same “problem” at its core)

In loot driven games I don#t think there hould be a ceiling to how powerful items can be, even though its unrealsitic and basically will never happen.

But once in a lifetime there will be this one miracle items popping up and whoever gets it will have the best time o their lives.

14

this is the one point that I think I fundamentally disagree with your way of thinking.
If it was my company I would think in a much better way to explain why a person cant have my best product other than blame himself. This justification doesn’t hold even with a reasonable audience, a lot less with the gamers nowadays who are most time superflous and looking for immediate results.

I have to live enough with realistic expectations in real life, when I go to a fantasy game I think its fair enough to expect to be able to achieve its best item.

Some of your other points are misjudgment or maybe its on me for not expressing in a good way what I expect from “buffing” the LP system and exalted drops. But the topic and answers are in a field of maturity high enough that I would not expect anyone thinking one wants anything to be “Easy”.

There is a huge difference when

one want some of the rarer uniques being more viable to achieve them with 2 or 3LP potential with good bases than just saying we want every unique to spam 3 or 4LP with a phew hours. I just know they need to address this better. Maybe building another system that is not relying on item drops but capable of making the current drops better, maybe with DiceDragon suggestion to add mats or any other currency that could slowly change the item, maybe with something that would blow our mind, I dont know, I am no dev, but as a player I can try to point things that are not in a good spot for end-game player.

This is something I also see with another perspective, being able to achieve these powerfull itens dont invalidate anything, because thats the nature of these games and each one has its space. I like to think more in stages. The Lower/ weaker uniques more easy to obtain with 3 or 4LP would be in a given stage of power, lets say the third “power creep” stage, just an example, while the higher and better uniques with 2 to 4 LP would be in the fourth stage of power. To me it would be perfectly fine. If you dont want to hurt the variety of end game itens just include more, or balance the weakers ones. But just dont tell me they need to maintain the best itens unreachable because weaker itens need to stay relevant.

15

I agree with you about uniques. I really don’t have any issue right no with how they’re acquired, the LP on them, etc. As they add more uniques to the drop pool, I think this may need to be revisited (depending on how many get added) but I don’t think we’re even close to that point at this venture.

I ‘mostly’ DISagree about exalteds. @eliel77 covers some of my thinking as well. The ‘mostly’ part is because I do NOT think it needs to be vastly tweaked. I still think exalteds need to be endgame chase goals and that the need to be something ‘hard to get’ but I think adding in a few more ways to be deterministic about WHAT you get on an exalted are needed. As I’ve said before, I don’t know what form that should take whether it’s a new type of rune/glyph or some means of better manipulating the type of gear you can get as drops in dungeon rewards.

WARNING: NEXT POINT NOT REALLY RELEVANT. One side effect of this, I believe, would also be a slight decrease in ‘hording.’ Right now as it stands it’s so hard to get really good exalteds I’m constantly saving sub-mediocre ones thinking “oh I could possibly tweak that”. With slightly ‘improved’ obtainability I’d spend more time playing and less time combing through my ridiculous stash. Yes, some of that is entirely my fault and that part I accept but I think as it stands right now it makes it necessary because it’s far more difficult to know WHAT to save.

16

Well , I see a pattern here, because that’s exactly how I play and save exalted itens. Too many that could be potentially good or could be just trash, but with the game in it’s current state it’s very hard to know what to save and what to discard. It’s so hard to get the right affixes combined that I’m always afraid to loose a great future opportunity discarding an exalted.

1 Like
17

Like see, the new Rune prison items fall into yet again the same trap as the current loot cycle.

While you can in theory figure out how to deterministically slap an affix onto an item with materials etc.

For the exalted versions, eventually the gameplay loop is going to boil down to “find rune prison, blow up guy, pray you get exalted mod you need and can then finish crafting” if you fail at any point during these steps you are back to square one. making getting an upgrade just a one armed bandit chase.

2 Likes
18

So, sometimes life just hauls back and gives you a swift kick in the 'nads just out of spite.

Seriously, RNG bastard is just laughing BASE at me the entire time.

2 Likes
19

Go on… theorycraft a poisonous void melee build… you can do it.

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

1 Like
20

The only thing I can think to do is use it on a Merophage (or maybe a Last Laugh with 3 LP), and then bring back everyone’s favorite build:

Poison 2-handed Bladedancer. :crazy_face:

1 Like