Do not get me wrong: monoliths are fun. Much more fun than the nightmare dungeons of D4 and for some elements, as fun as maps in POE. For a game that just game out, it is nice feat to achieve.
BUT, I feel one level of difficulty is missing between the regular monoliths and empowered monoliths. I breeze regular monoliths, hoping to hit some drops upgrades, which are really rare since my gear is good already. But I am too slow in empowered monoliths because the difficulty is a bit too much for my current skills and gear.
My regular monos is the Last Ruin into which I have 18 of corruption. I know I can get it up more but it takes too much time to find the shades as opposed to hit the rare islands with the rewards I seek. Vs level 100 mono with 100 corruption where even with 6k wards I can die to one shot because I do not have enough crit avoidance. And playing lesser monos is even worse as they are of a lower level.
I feel that having a level 90 monos with all 50 corruption would feel the gap. Like, you play regular monoliths until you feel you can tackle those with 50 of corruption, then do the same until you feel you can tackle those with 100 corruption.
I am not posting this in suggestions as I wonder if I am the only one to feel like this. If not, I might post it down in that category next
I didnât understand why EHG increased the difficulty level. In my opinion there was no reason for it. The way it was before 1.0 was good. If the intention was to speed things up so that it doesnât take too long to get to high or very high corruption regions, they could have simply lowered the stability needed to make the monoboss. The vast majority of players wonât see the 300+ corruption anyway, but now it has been made much more difficult for most of them. Iâm currently running around 500 corruption, but I still think it wasnât a good decision by EHG.
I donât understand though. I entered EMs with electrify javelin paladin and it was pretty slow. However, I swapped my build to vengeance/healing hands and now Iâm blasting through.
I made the change by swapping a few items and directly went into EM with level 10 skills. It was slow at first, but by no means was it stupendously hard. By the time my skill level caught up to around 18, I could comfortably do EMs with a scuffed character. And I was level 80.
I think the problem is EMs start to test your buildâs viability. Pre EM you could reasonably get by with a less than ideal build. The difficulty jump starts to weed out the ineffective builds or weeds out characters that arenât built properly.
I agree with this. My mage just enabled empowered monos (he is 89) and itâs too tough. I can get through them slowly but heâs really not up to that difficulty yet.
So Iâm working on adding corruption to normal monoâs and while thatâs OK, itâs a bit of a chore. A good solution would be to allow you to enable empowered, and then choose 25, 50, 75 or 100 corruption â instead of just 100 or nothing.
Iâm quite baffled by this.
I pretty much just started playing and I entered EMs at around level 78.
Yes, theyâre slower and sometimes I get oneshot out of nowhere, but theyâre quite doable.
I wonder if I just got lucky with my drops, but it happened with both the characters I made.
To me, this should happen at corruption 300+. It is like if I was to say in POE that you need to dig into a build guide for red maps. You should not have to do this. If you want to push the ladder and go truly high, sure, you need to do so. Not to start EM.
I mean, how are we supposed to get the gear for these âoptimalâ builds if we canât do EM at 100 corruption?
so I just did another empowered mono as a test and I got through it OK. But you really have to be careful, it seems like my character is weak in there. Would be nice to power up a bit more before running those. I canât imagine fighting Orobys (sp?) with 100 corruption, heâd probably 1 shot me.
The most âhiddenâ thing that makes my run a problem is when enemies keep dodging attacks, this makes them both extremely tanky and make me weak because of the on-hit effects not proccing.
Runs where enemies donât have a high dodge-rate are a breeze.
Please no. It already takes far too long to reach empowered monos. An in-between difficulty would make it a lot worse. I hate to be that guy but the difficulty jump from standard to Empowered is very little. Iâve rarely noticed it with any build.
If this is an option you want that other players can bypass then sure I am all for more options.
I do recall there was mention that the devs wanted to streamline monos so there only was one tier but they scaled evenly from level 58 (or wherever it is they start now). I like that idea because standard monos really are the long lingering limbo between campaign and empowered that most people loath. The low point of any characterâs development is the period spent in standard monos. It is tedious.
You donât really have to âfindâ Shade nodes. Just travel outwards, as far away as possible from the starting point. Just look at teh stability gained on each individual echo, these will give away if you are traveling âsidewaysâ or deeper. Eventually everything will be shades and you have +10, +12, +14 up to +18 shades. Once everything is blocked take the highest shade, even if you were unlucky and only got a +10 shade, traveling sideways too much will cause you to lose a lot of time.
Going from a fresh resetted timeline to a +10 or higher shade takes like 30-60 mins.
That is like 2-3 hours to get a 0 corruption normal timeline to 50 corruption. While you are doing this you can sometimes branch out and get desried rewards as well.
The difficulty spike between norma land empowered definitely god bumped up, but I personally think this is actually pretty good. It does serve as a barrier and something to work torwards with your build.
So the main goal is not ârush normal, ignore everything and go empowered asapâ.
There is no shame in gearing up in normal monoliths.
Itâs interesting how we all have different experiences. Iâm on the camp where I never really noticed a huge jump. I even told you guys what I did. I changed builds (passives, skills, items) when I got to EM and I was perfectly fine. My build is still scuffed as Iâm way over certain resistances and thereâs so much to improve on.
The problem then is that EVERY guide,. video, tutorial I can find are ârush through the game in 2 hours and go to EM in 4 hoursâ kind of content. Almost none on how you can and maybe should enjoy normal monoliths for a while.
I totally reckong this is how it has been for the longest time. And it still is like that to a certain extent. But with the changes to corruption and difficulty scaling in 1.0 I think it is a lot more reasonable to stay in normal monoliths a bit more.
But even before 1.0 I often feel like that this is a problem created by the community. People always wanna be as efficient as possible and donât âwaste timeâ.
if you build or player skill canât handle the higehr difficulties yet, just gear a bit more, nothing werong with that.
LE has a pretty big learning curve, but once you figure it out, you can do stuff like finish the story in 2 hours, be doing monos in 4 if you play the flavor of the month S+++ tier build. I play primalist, which I feel is balanced ok. It took me a while to get through the monoliths thou before hitting empowered. I still have a healthy fear of dying for sure. Damage isnât an issue at all, itâs more staying alive and not losing progress.
