Managing expectations

It’s been a while since I got epoch and I’ve been through a few patches, I’ve given my feedback on things I thought needed changing but honestly I’ve seen very little of it making any difference in how the game is developing (despite the fact that I’m not the only one saying these things). One of the unfortunate effects of not being a large streamer who has a huge community backing, my word is worth practically nothing.

Still I believe there is some point in addressing the issues that LE faces, even more so now that it is very close to 1.0 and most of its defining features are either there or close to completion.

I’ll preface this by saying one thing. There will be many comparisons with PoE, regardless of whether or not this is a game in its own right, it’s a game out on the market and has competition and the only real competition is PoE and Diablo 3 (that later however wouldn’t be as big of a competitor and I have no knowledge of so I’ll stick to PoE).

Let’s begin thus with players’ expectations. What do players expect out of LE? Well, these expectations are going to be different, possibly even very different from what the Developers have planned for LE. It is however important to understand that LE doesn’t exist in a vacuum and therefore must respond to the expectations of it’s player base (which is the market).

A small part of the players coming here will be people who like ARPGs in general and just expect a good game with no real big expectations beyond that, these are also going to be the more vocal community because they didn’t came here looking for something different as what is on the market already satisfies their needs, instead they came here to expand the options available to them of games to play. Again, these are the vocal majority but a minority in numbers as far as the total player base is concerned.

The major part of the player base are going to be people coming from other games, disappointed with what they offer or simply disappointed with how it changed over the years. Yes, I am looking at PoE as the primary one here. Since these people are your biggest customers and the life blood of your game that will keep it alive, it is important that you realise one very important thing. If you fail to hold on to these players they will just go back to where they were like PoE or Diablo 3. If they come here for changes and something better but they perceive this game to be more of the same problems that exist in where they come from, they will stick to the one they know the best and have invested more time into.

It is therefore very important that EHG understands very clearly that their plans play second fiddle to player’s expectations. Do understand that I also understand that you cannot make everyone perfectly happy with how the game is. But the core problems that these players identify with other games must not exist in LE or people will leave and LE will never stand a chance of being an established ARPG on the market capable of competing with the others out there.

So what are the things that players expect to see a major improvement over games like PoE?

Let’s start with crafting. Crafting is the one form of gearing in LE and therefore crafting takes on both the role of how easy it is to craft items and gear up your character. The one perhaps major issue that PoE has is how terribly bad it’s crafting system is, where only those who have unlimited funds get what they want and everyone cannot get anything. This is further exacerbated with how hard it is to gear your character with how they moved all of the player power from levelling up to very high end gear. This creates a feeling on the players that it is impossible to finish a character gearing and that they can never have a strong character or do the content they want because of that.

It is true LE crafting system is already way ahead of PoE but the question that remains is, is it good enough to keep the people who are leaving other ARPGs to come here hoping for a better system to be satisfied? The answer is a very definite no!

The minimum expectation for a player who will have finished the campaign and are now getting into maps (we’ll call them maps for the sake of brevity) is to have full resistances and a strong level of power as well. For this I’m going to say at the very beginning of maps, players expect 2 tier 5 resistances in each gear and at least 2 tier 3 attack affixes. In other words, bare minimum expected is full tier 16 gear with 2 affixes (the resistances) being soft caped.

The expectation is to have a full set of T20 gear well before the map is upgraded to level 100 and probably have most of the gear already t21 or t22 by the time they are starting level 100 farming (what I’d call the actual start of end game).

The problem with the current crafting system is that it’s still very much RNG and RNG systems hardly make up for a system that allows players to gain the kind of power they need.

Once again, if players do not feel they are being able to complete their builds and a build is never completed before it is soft capped, then they will just go back and not come back. You need to change the crafting system from partially deterministic to being fully deterministic. Chronicon is an example of a game that is mostly deterministic in the crafting and it works out really well and while I’m not saying to copy their system, you need to take a page out of their book in that players need to be able to complete their builds reasonably fast.

With crafting out of the way, let’s talk about trading. Trading is very important in an online ARPG. However when it’s poorly implemented it always creates issues. We have 2 very clear examples of what not to do. Diablo 3 failed very hard with it’s auction house system but in all honesty it failed primarily because they had a real money auction house. Second we have PoE trade which happens through direct trades only and it’s very much unsupervised which leads to artificial inflation of prices as well as scams. These are all things to avoid but LE is already looking like instead of trying to do better it’s just going to copy the tried and failed methods of PoE. I say failed because the majority of people hate it. The ones who like it are the scammers and the flippers which are the people who break the whole system and ruin it for everyone. There is also something to be said about not being able to instantly trade, sometimes having to wait hours to be able to do a trade.

So let’s look at proper solutions. People want to trade instantly, they don’t want to be scammed and they want prices to be fair rather (not artificially inflated). The solution is therefore a trading house. A trading house works as follows. It can be accessed from any safe zone where there is a storage chest. Players can then put items for sale and buy items.

This alone solves the waiting time and the scammers since people are buying precisely what they are seeing for the marked price. But it does not solve the problem of artificial inflation. The solution to that is simple. Anything that is expendable, like keys or crafting materials, have a set price. Players don’t need to sell these to other players, instead they sell to the market itself and the market keeps it in stock for whomever wants to buy it. This may lead to shortages of materials but if it becomes a problem it’s as simple as allowing the market to just have unlimited amounts of materials for sale (since players still need to gather the money to buy it anyway). Now for item selling it’s another matter, these cannot be priced at a fixed value as they are not something that is expended and it’s always in demand. The solution here is simple to prevent flippers. When a player sells an item, it gets a price tag attached to it that lasts for a year (356 days). If that player wishes to sell the item they bought, they cannot sell it at a higher price than what they bought it for, therefore preventing flipping.

This doesn’t mean this method is fool proof, but it is a solid starting point that can be improved upon as issues appear if and when they appear. But the important part to remember is that if you don’t do better than your competition, then you are not going to win the player base coming here that are looking for something better because they are dissatisfied. If a player is going to be dissatisfied in either place, he’ll likely stay where he was before or in neither place and just look for a different game to play.

Next we look at build diversity. Players have prefered builds they like to use and occasionally try something different. For the most part they stay with what is the most satisfying to play. This is why when games like PoE goes on and nerfs builds or never makes certain skills good enough to begin with, they just don’t play because everything else is not appealing for them.

Why do I speak of this? Well because my prefered builds are totems and minions, these are builds that are not good in LE. Minions are playable, but not in a good state, even more so after the last nerfs a couple patches ago and totems were never viable.

You need to improve majorly on this front or a large portion of the player base is going to come in, see that you have nothing to offer on what they want to play and then leave immediately to go back to PoE.

I urge you to take very seriously the comments you’ve received on minions and totems as well as other builds that are perceived as bad by the community. They are your best friends who are already doing all the leg work for you. You just need to focus on solving the problems they find.

Next I’ll address the content difficulty… From what I’ve played so far and there is definitely content I haven’t explored. I didn’t find anything to be overly hard. There are cases where modifiers make bosses too powerful which is something that may warrant a look at but at its core, with no modifiers in play, any boss is quite doable. This is something you can get right with some time investment into balancing. Make sure you don’t make bosses like PoE did with Sirius and so on because the majority of your player base will not like that. They want fights that are fair and can be won without having to die several times. Yes, I realise the better players may find it boring, but if you make content for the good players and ignore the largest part of your community, you’ll be doing what PoE does and you’ll bleed players.

Lastly, I want to address mapping. This is the one point where you going different is probably going to backfire on you. You have several elements to mapping, a sort of a chain with difficulty modifiers that last for a certain amount of turns and specific rewards as well as a system where maps aren’t important, what’s important is doing the objective and leave.

First I’ll address the problem with stacking penalties. It gets really hard trying to run away from penalties you don’t want, it completely undermines the rewards when the name of the game is, get away from the penalties that ruin your game and start blocking all your available paths. Second, no one wants debuffs that last for X amount of time but rather a controlled, these are the debuffs I take for this map and this map only. People also want the ability to control to some degree what debuffs they take and what rewards they take. Now these can be RNG but players should just be able to say, I don’t like these modifiers/rewards, reroll that and it should not cost too much money because hunting for very specific things with no bad debuffs is going to get costly regardless where getting debuffs that are doable and either not caring about the reward or at least not being too picky about it is going to be doable and cheap which is the goal here. Customising the run to how players want with some level of randomisation.

Second has to do with how maps are handled. Quite frankly, mapping is extremely disappointing in LE because it subverts expectations. People want to go into maps, clear them and then look at the rewards and go again. When you make all maps be, a rush to the objective and leave, it makes mapping really unsatisfactory. Now to be fair, I haven’t played with dungeons yet because right now the game doesn’t offers me any builds that I like to play (remember, I like minions and totems and both are bad in the current state of the game) and so I don’t know if dungeons actually offer a solution to this problem. However, mapping is still mandatory because players need the buffs that come from defeating the era bosses. Therefore they need either be changed so that it is more fun to do them or the era bonus must be attainable elsewhere so that players can get their bonus by playing in a format that they prefer.

This is not to say that the current mapping is strictly bad. I am sure there are people who like it, but I am also sure there are far more people who dislike it than people who like it and therefore something has to be done about it or you’ll lose players as they get bored of mapping.

And this is it. The 5 pillars I feel EHG needs to work on if they want to have a game actually able to compete in the market with its competitors, especially PoE. I don’t have too much faith this will be acknowledged or that anything will really be done. Going by the track record of people asking for improvements in several areas and often seeing nothing happening doesn’t really inspires much confidence. However at bare minimum EHG can’t say that they had no idea of how the community felt about something.

There is of course a small myriad of things that could be nit picked to try and make things better but at some point it would be just smaller preferences that players have. These 5 however are the 5 main big things that need addressing because these are the expectations that players coming to EL will have and if they are not met, as I said before, they will just go back like it always happens.

On a last point I’ll just say that I will not be addressing comments on this thread over what other people think about what I said in this very important piece of feedback. As I explained earlier, the majority of the vocal player base are actually the minority of the player base and they aren’t comming here expecting this to be an alternative to what exists and as such aren’t trully invested in seeing the player base really grow. It is pointless to explain to these players why this things are importants because the only thing they can say is I like it how it is now, regardless of it being good or bad for the game as a whole. The only thing that I care about with this thread is to raise the awareness of EHG as to what will be dictating their success or lack thereof.

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It’s always nice to see well thought out feedback, especially in a format where you can tell someone put in some real time & effort to communicate their experience and their thoughts.

I mostly agree on the lack of build diversity as it stands. There are several things i’d like to try, like a pure spriggan form caster, or a spriggan/swarmblade hybrid, or even a pure caster shaman (without totems) that just don’t seem to work right now. I also enjoy most minion builds, but I haven’t gotten to try them all myself yet. There are several top tier minion builds, although I can understand you not liking the playstyles of the ones available. I’ve seen a few builds for totems, but I’m not sure how viable they are, as that is one playstyle I personally don’t enjoy.

That said, your post is full of points that kind of contradict each other. You point out that the game is too easy, then you talk about how avoiding modifiers makes mapping frustrating. If it’s too easy, then the modifiers won’t matter. If the modifiers make it so you change your clearing path, then the game is not “too easy”. This isn’t much different from PoE, where certain builds avoid certain mods, particularly the melee or elemental damage reflect. The mods here aren’t much different. you can avoid the ones you don’t want, you can increase the difficulty by increasing the corruption of the timeline, or reduce the difficulty by reducing the corruption and/or avoiding certain nodes.

Also, saying that feedback is important, and then saying that you won’t be discussing other’s thoughts on the feed back just struck me as passive aggressive, but that could just be my own interpretation. I mean, I understand it to mean that it might not necessarily matter what we as players WANT, because we’re not designing the game, but EHG has a pretty good track record when it comes to communicating their vision and intent, and MOST of the forum posters that i’ve seen are pretty reasonable most of the time. Discussion is usually a good thing.

Anyway, I hope you have fun with the game. I would recommend trying out some other builds. One of my friends just got the Scurry helm and built a whole new character around having 10 squirrels following and fighting for him. I’m a bear druid that summons vines to shoot my enemies to death. There are bleed and poison and crit bow builds, bleed and poison and elemental melee builds, channeling builds and much more. There’s a lot of new experiences there if any of them sound fun. If not, then there’s always other ways to entertain yourself, right?

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Seeing the title and reading this made me laugh out loud :smiling_imp:

Speaking of managing expectations^^

We are at least 3 patches (8-9 Months) away from 1.0 (which is highly unlikely, but the bare minimum, knowing that 085 will not have MP and assuming that the next patch would be 090 with MP and the very next patch being 1.0, which is highly unlikely to happen like this in the first place)

These “expectations” you set are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too high IMO.

First off: this is not PoE or GD, resistances are not your only primary defense layer, they are just one of many, so stating only resistance as some kind of measurement/expections does not make sense in LE.

Secondly: I never had mroe than one or two pieces of gear with T16+, when finishing the story.
I also did not have a lot of T20 gear, when entering empowered.

In fact, even on some characters, that I played for dozens of hours, I still don’t have all T20 gear.
Maybe I am more picky than other players, because you could get alot of T20 gear with semi-desired stats for sure.

Hard disagree. I think its completely the other way around: It is way to easy, to make gear, that is way to “strong” (much stronger gear than you need to have)

This can go both ways. I am personally not a fan of any fully deterministic loot/crafting system, regardless of how it’s balanced.
Those kinds of systems always tend to be more of a chore/grind, because you have 100% expected/deterministc results. Feels way more “grindy”.

The statisfying part about loot-driven games for me is, the uncertainty of when and what upgrade I can make.

And making decisions to maybe take a very good items, with high stats, which are semi-desired, but its still an upgrade.

This whole paragraph can be a entire thread on its own.

But IMO, especially in regards of PoE, this is a problem of having the tools to measure the dps of almsot any given build with absolute ridiculous precision.

“statisfying” does vary from person to person, but especially in PoE, there are a lot of people that simple play the objectively strongest build possible, because that’s “their fun/statisfaction”, but this also dampens build diversity, because another build, that is like 5% worse, would never get touched by these types of players.

I think what LE needs to do is, to not give players too much tools. Because if the “top builds” are all within ~5-10% effectiveness, but nobody can say for sure how good each build is individually by numbers, the “meta” will be way more diverse.

Sirus is one of the best PoE Bosses, very fair and very cool fight (he only had a few bugs early on). He also has some of the best audio cues of any boss across any game IMO.

I am not sure, why or how you adress this and in which context?

Last Epoch is already doing this, a little bit too much IMO.
Currently, there is literally ALL content available while only being level 70-80, if you get through normal MoF.

There is no exclusive content very far into endgame.

I totally agree, that it is very important, that a lot of the cool and good content is accessable to a lot of the player base, but LE also needs some aspiring content, that takes some timeto unlock.

If you don’t uncover dozens and dozens of nodes and go to the very outer edge, MoF offers a lot of chocie and alternative paths/branches.
You are never ever forced to take any modifiers.

That is already the case?

That something I actually agree with despite disagreeing with all your previous points.

In the old MoF system, there was a re-roll modifier feature, which cost gold.

I think if you can re-roll every echo once, that would be a cool gold sink.

But this could and should cost substantial money. LE desperately needs gold sinks.

This paragraph confuses me.

Too some degree I can understand your sentiment, but on the other side, ther are all kinds of player types in the forum. Not only “the vocal minority”.

I don’t think that there is one strict player type, that does not come to the forum at all.

There are players across all types, that eitehr don’t go to the forum at all, or write alot on the forums (We have a lot of people here taling in the forum A LOT, that do not actively play the game and we also have players that play a SHIT TON, but don’t come to the forum, even though they are kind “hardcore” player)

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I rather they stick to creating the game themselves.

Ermm no. This game is attracting more new players that dont like POE AT ALL, or players who like both game for what it is.

Lol say what

The End

As always any and all feedback is appreciated… and the devs do read through everyones comments so starting out your post with “my word is worth practically nothing” is a subtle jab at them even before you begin.

I dont agree with comments that the developers plans play second fiddle to players expectations - sure they need to be cogniscent of what players want out of a game in this genre, but lets face it, the vast majority of players just need some comfortable familiarity from an expectation point of view. Beyond that, I for one am keen on LEs own take on the genre and the possibilities that they will innovate and try things rather than just making another copycat that we all play for a thousand hours till the next copycat appears.

The other comment I would make on your feedback is that you havent really taken the time to read up on the previous threads/discussions on the topics you mention - almost all your comments on topics like crafting, trading, gearing, difficulty and mapping have had hundreds if not thousands of comments and thread discussions and some have been discussed ad nauseam. The devs have also taken a lot of time to provide their views on some of these topics - all of which you seem to have ignored. It would have been more valuable, imho, if your comments could have taken that into account - i.e. added value…

Sorry, but the more I read, the more the tone of your feedback annoyed me. While you do offer some valid points, I dont agree with everything you said and you seem to ignore the fact that the game is nowhere near complete and that the devs have demonstrated their willingness to revamp huge parts of the game based on feedback from players. Unfortunately the way you have phrased your feedback, comes across as particularly condescending… What would qualify you to assume that your views dictate EHGs success or not? Why is your feedback better and more important that anyone elses?

Probably should just have deleted this reply, but I have not had my coffee yet and I dont like it when people assume superiority of thier views over others and dictate what others want.

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I’m sorry it’s felt this way, however I guarantee you we listen to as many players as possible - not just pay attention to streamers. We’re often watching the forums, in game chat, reddit, and steam. Even if we don’t actively respond to the threads as we want to let the community have a conversation without our influence, we’re reading and discussing it. We regularly bring up community posts within the team and discuss them. However this doesn’t mean we’ll always change things to match your requests, or implement your requests, but we certainly try to be listening and adjusting the game based on as much feedback as we can.

I don’t like to say things to influence how players play the game, but I think you’ll find many long term players don’t agree with this in LE. We’ve created a resistance system that isn’t nearly as punishing as many other ARPG’s, and recently we’ve actually been getting a lot of feedback regarding defensive layers and how resistance can offer so little compared to other options for effective HP. But defences in general is a topic we’ve been discussing a lot more again recently.

I can’t really say too much regarding this at the moment. We will have a trading blog post out in the coming months. We’re certainly still listening to feedback on the topic.

This is a very hard topic to really talk about. There’s very few builds that cannot complete all intended content in the game, however with an infinitely scaling system, there will always be builds that can push further than others, and it’s something we’ll always be looking to balance. It depends on player perceptions of what “viable” is, because as you’ve stated here, being able to complete intended content is not “viable” for you. This comes into how we would look to re-balance things - player perceptions. Right now we’re making a big push for multiplayer, but we’re certainly not done with balancing by any means.

The majority of content is designed to be accessible, with the option of infinite scaling in some endgame systems to take things to wherever you want it to be. This is another hard topic, but for a different reason. Player views can differ greatly on this topic, but similarly, it’s something we always have our ears to the ground on and make adjustments based on feedback. For those that were playing when Sands of Majasa was first released I think can provide input on how we’ve adjusted difficulty of certain boss fights based on feedback. As Majasa was the final story boss for the current moment, she was originally designed to be a ‘much’ more difficult fight - but more people were having a negative experience in the fight with less conventional builds; taking it back to an earlier topic of wanting intended content to be accessible/viable for as many builds as possible.

This is a pretty massive topic to be honest. We used to have the ability to re-roll echo modifiers before we released the Monolith rework, however we saw issues coming down the road. Being able to be so picky with modifiers actually limits builds, since certain defensive mechanics may be particularly strong against a certain subset of negative echo modifiers it can easily create a system in which only builds with those defensive layers and picking those modifiers is accepted as the “viable” playstyle. There’s far more to it than that as well, but off the top of my head, that’s one of the big drawbacks to allowing this level of specificity with modifiers. Path of exile gets around this by forcing a number of modifiers at once, so even though you can keep re-rolling modifiers for a cost, you’ll can’t be super specific without a massive cost. Currently we only add one modifier at a time, so we have to counter by not having extremely easy high specificity with modifiers. We also try to ensure no modifiers completely shut down any build style, though they can certainly effect some builds more than others (eg. how damage type reflect can be a 100% no-go for many builds in other games).

This is something we’re absolutely aware of and looking into making changes to address. We’ve lightly discussed it a couple of times on our dev streams, but we certainly want to make changes to mapping to provide more incentive to explore more of the map / kill more enemies rather than just rush the objective. In Path of Exile this is done with opportunity cost - to enter the map you have to “spend” a map, so there’s incentive to get as much in return as possible. We don’t have a cost of entry in monolith of fate, so we’re looking into other methods to incentivize more map exploration.

Again, none of this means we’re not listening to feedback, or that we’re not going to be considering yours, and others input on these matters. I just wanted to provide some of our current thoughts on some of the items you’ve brought up. Thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts, the feedback is greatly appreciated.

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I think a lot of players don’t recognize the difference between “viable” and “optimal”. A lot of player behavior is driven by the desire to be more efficient, and we sometimes get wrapped up in thinking anything that doesn’t maximize efficiency isn’t “viable”.

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Although I wasn’t intending to answer, given that I actually got EHG to answer which is something I’m happy about since it’s a first for me, then I will elaborate a little bit more on certain topics. This won’t really change anything of what I said, it will simply give a bit more insight to the thought process behind it.

Resistances may not be a be all end all in LE, but when I spoke about resistances what I actually meant was ALL defensive layers. Players need capped resistances, they need crit immunity and all other layers stacked to as high level as possible and even then it can still feel rather squishy (as no all classes are meant for tanking so all this mitigation still feels inadequate, let alone not even having it capped). And to make matters worse, you recently made it harder to cap resistances.

With how easy it is to ruin a piece by a couple bad rolls and the limited amount of affixes it really is hard to cap defensive layers which is 100% mandatory and on top of that get at least some semblance of damage juiced out of it. In my experience, crafting in LE has always felt miserable. It doesn’t feels as bad as PoE crafting or even as bad as gearing up in PoE, but it still doesn’t feels satisfying nor does it leaves me with a sense of satisfaction or progression.

Understand that like what is going to be the majority of your player base, I look at LE with the hopes it will do better than what is on the market right now. I want to feel like I have a finished build before I get to the true end game (empowered monoliths). A finished build is when your gearing gets into the stages where you can only get minor upgrades and it’s very rare to find them. So when you are looking at T21+ gear as the only way to get better or legendary items.

I understand that you don’t want to talk too much about trading because nothing is set in stone but what I said was in relation to what you already revealed which was no auction house and direct trades only. That is what PoE is doing and it’s horrible. Waiting hours for trades because you need gear to do something and you don’t have it, scams, item flipping. None of these things should exist in a well made trading system so I hope you reaccess this. Auction house is also bad though. No one really wants auctioning, players want to set a price and sell it for that. Instant and simple.

I will now talk about your build issues with 2 examples since they are the ones I have experience with. Totem builds and this are builds that works esclusively by using totems and nothing else as means to kill enemies are not viable. You may say it possibly can do end game content. But how far does it goes? How good is the leveling with it? A good build at corruption 100 will be instantly melting everything. They should definitely be able to go 200 or 300 corruption before starting to feel the heat but the very fact is that totems struggle even on corruption 100. they cost far too much mana to cast, they deal far too low damage, they just don’t get the job done. struggling to do basic end game content compared to melting is not a good balance point and definitely doesn’t makes it be viable.

Looking at the necromancer build. They were already one of the worst builds that could still be considered good. They definitely could not push as high as other builds and as far as a minion build it doesn’t even follows the basic rules that minion builds should follow. Players of minion builds normally play them to have a low maintenance build. Whether because they can’t handle high maintenance or don’t like it. This means, it’s a build that should go about as far as the good builds and it should not require constant resummoning minions. What you did however was nerf the most influencial damage skill that minion builds use and 100% fail to deliver on the need to not recast the abillity or not having minions die. It was a straight up nerf to a build that was already on the cusp of going from being just barely good enough to play to longer good enough. This was pointed out several times by many people and it was never publicly acknowledge nor was there any atempt to further address it made. If you don’t communicate what you are thinking of doing to solve the issue, we are left thinking, you just nerfed for no good reason and don’t intend to make the method of play good again.

You can see now where I am coming from as none of my play styles are viable. Understand that viable is not struggling to do content or can do some but won’t push nearly as far as other builds. A build is viable when it can push very high like the good builds. If one build can do 400 corruption and another can do 350, they are both viable. But when one does 400 and the other can’t even do 200, the latter is not viable.

On difficulty I didn’t meant to say you were doing things that are too hard. The content I know which is not all but it’s a large portion, seems fairly well balanced. It was merely a note to keep on this path which is good.

When I talked about stacking penalties I did also mention that I penalties should be for a single map. As you pointed out, PoE gets around that by sticking several modifiers at once. That is actually what you should be doing too. If you were to put 1 penalty at a time it would be a problem, it needs to be RNG but only to some extent.

It is also good to see you still are looking for a better mapping experience and although I’m not usually a fan of saying, just do the same as PoE, it is a fact that PoE has the best mapping system that has ever existed in any ARPG. If you simply combine what you have with what they have, that will take you far. A simple way of doing it would be having the current map system where you go from node to node, each node has it’s own reward and you have ways to influence the modifiers for the node. You can make it in many ways but essencially you can treat each node as a map item which is pent when it’s run. As for a reason to clear the map there are 2 things you need to pay attention to. One is that you must make players want to kill everything on the map, therefore killing everything must be valuable, this is easier to do if each map has certain enemy types that have really good drops. The second thing you need to do is make good map layouts. As of right now they use campaign maps which are meant to be big and not fully cleared. Maps should have a more limited size and should not require you to backtrack in order to complete (yes PoE has some maps that require backtracking and that’s why no one plays those more than once), this way the players do a rotation, kill everything and then move on to the next map.

I just want to quickly clarify that you’re making some assumptions here about what we said. Just because we said option “A” won’t exist, doesn’t mean we’ve confirmed option “B” will exist. Nor does not confirming option “B” will exist, mean it won’t exist, but you seem to believe we’ve said/confirmed something to be which we haven’t.

I’m not sure which skill you’re referring to here. If you’re referring to Summon Wraiths, it was dominating almost all other playstyles by being able to spawn over a hundred wraiths which did crazy damage and distracted all enemies. One the main reasons this was changed however was for multiplayer performance, as having four necromancers each having over 100 wraiths was not something which was realistically feasible. The net result was an overall “nerf” to their potential power - yes, because it was far out of line. However it wasn’t just a straight nerf, we attempted to redesign their power to a better path that would work with performance considerations. They were given some compensating buffs to try to ensure they stayed a relevant ability. Again, balancing is something we constantly consider, and we most certainly take feedback, such as yours that something may not be where it should be. However if you could provide more specific information it could certainly help us narrow things down.

We had a dedicated blog post here (Necromancer Updates coming in Patch 0.8.3) prior to the change to discuss what changes we were making, and what our intents with the changes were.

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I still think your view on defensive layers in LE is a bit skewd, there is no defensive layer that needs to be capped on every build. There are way too many defensive layers in LE, no build will ever max all defensive layers. You can hardcap some of the ones that are hard capped and then focus on the ones which have no hard cap or you can deliberately not hardcap some and invest more into the ones that have no hard cap.

You can choose to not cap CSA (or even completely ignore CSA too), and even “just” 70% still offers a great amount of avg. DR, if you have enough eHP to survive the occasionaly incoming crit.

Same goes for all other defensive layers, that also have a hard cap.

What are you refering here? The in fact only made resistances easier to come by (a few patches after they switch from protections to resistances they buffed resistances even further) and then on top of that the new crafting overhaul was a net buff to acquiring desired stats.

I think he was refering to Dread Shade, but you adressed this as well with the necromancer update post you shared.

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In addition to what Heavy said, different masteries have a very different time capping resists/getting defences. The Paladin, for example has an exceptionally easy time capping resists and CSA given the can get a massive amount of resists from Holy Aura and they can get the majority of their CSA from a chest and helm implicit.

Yes and no. Defenses are always suffixes and offensive affixes are prefixes, so they generally don’t compete for affix slots, with the possible exception of minion builds that have some minion affixes as suffixes. Minions builds are a bit different in that regard, but then they “shouldn’t” require as much defences due to being minion builds. Plus, as you said in an earlier post, some Necro minion builds can generate stupid amounts of ward.

It bothers me a bit that the premise of this whole thing is how you and others like you, with the assumption that your view is the majority, don’t get listened to. Then you proceed to claim that level 100 is “the beginning of the game”.

YOU are in the VAST minority. Your views are fringe. You don’t get ignored, you get outvoted.

It is fine that you have some feedback. Some of the minor things maybe even have some common ground with others. When you start going on about how the game needs to change to the will of the players, you lose me. The devs should make the game they want and let the players come for that game. Mutating the game to the current players desires only excludes players that don’t agree. On top of that, if the game is no longer the vision of the devs, how are they supposed to add to it? It becomes disconnected and patches end up causing unending drama.

I think I did read in some dev blog that it would no longer be the auction house but it would be a direct player trade that you were going to implement, however if I read it wrong or may be misremembering then I apologise for the mistake. Still do take the original sugestion of a trading system implementation that I gave into consideration.

As for the necromancer I was specifically talking about dread shade which is mandatory for every necromancer build. Not that I think a skill should be mandatory, but when it gives so much it is impossible to say no. It was just nerfed under the idea that it would cause no minions deaths as well as giving more base power to the minions to make up for the loss of power on the upgrades it gets. In reality, the it still causes minions death because there is no point taking it unless we go through the poison change which still damages the minions. Having just 1 doesn’t makes it worth because there is no effective way to keep the minions clustered up (essencially AI issues) and the minion buff was imperceptible but the nerf was felt very harshly, to the point of breaking minion builds. What should have happened was give something along the lines of 3 max dread shades that are permanent (no need to recast) which also don’t damage minions and with no damage to the minions in any form from the dread shade itself. This without nerfing the damage buff the skill gives.

As for the wraiths, I agree wholeheartedly that they needed to be nerfed in how many a player could have. With that said however, they should have been buffed to the point where having 4 or 5 permanent wraiths would be just as powerful as having the same number of skeleton mages. As they are, they are worthless to have because they deal almost no damage and whether they are permanent or not they never come in any significant number to matter.

The abomination was another disapoitment. It was already very weak and the permanent form not only creates an infinitely weaker version of itself, but it also removes the much more powerful skeletons. It is pure insanity to take it, much like the current wraiths.

A minion build must follow very simple rules to operate in order to be fun for the kind of people who like minion builds. It must be low maintenance, You summon things once and you need to resummon, even against hard bosses the player should be far more likely to die than it’s minions. It shouldn’t really have much of a need for active skills because the whole point is letting the minions do the work while the player focus on kitting. Lastly it must still compete with the powerful builds because if a build isn’t really capable of going far, it’s not enjoyable to play. I know balancing everything to the same power level is impossible, but getting things within a rough power level that doesn’t makes it vary more than 10% should be plenty doable.

Lastly, I wasn’t talking about you not saying anything prior to changing it. In fact until we had the changes implemented and had a chance to try it out we couldn’t really have got a grasp of how deeply affecting these changes were so we were excited that they on paper seems like a step in a good direction. The problem is that it was actually a step in the wrong direction of the most part (except removing the hundreds of wraiths) and after all the feedback you received, you remained quiet not answering any of the posts about it nor showing any plans to rebalance it.

The only reason I don’t actively play LE anymore is because totems have been incredibly bad from when I bought the game up until now and minions got nerfed to the point where they are no longer fun to play and since these 2 types of builds are the kind of builds I enjoy, I really have little to look forward to.

maybe you should actually respond to non streamers for once then

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Passive builds should NOT be competitive. They don’t want passive builds to be competitive.

One of the best things they have done in this game is make it so that minion builds DON’T play like the traditional minion builds where you just run around and pick up loot while your minions do all the work. You use some skills to buff your minions, use A to direct them, and the more active and clever you are, the better the build performs. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

I can understand you feeling a bit left out if that was something you enjoyed, but if you REALLY think a build that builds entirely around being as passive as possible should be competitive with builds that are complex and require intricate timing, I don’t know what to tell you. Find another game that already has this feature?

Part of me wants to say that your mindset that you should have your build nearly complete before hitting empowered Monoliths is a reflection of your time in POE, where many players never reach 100. I feel like that is not meant to be the case here, but in all honesty, end game can be whatever each individual player decides is their endgame. That said, feeling your gear should be complete before you’re even level 90 seems a bit off to me. I prefer endgame that starts at max level, when you have all talents and passives and skill points available. I don’t see 100 corruption as the endgame, as most builds can do that before they hit 90. That part is just my opinion though.

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That is common, “we” usually/often assume that we are part of the majority/norm whether that is true or not.

They said they weren’t going to go with the Bazzaar that they previously talked about, but that was going to be a randomised car boot sale rather than an AH.

So you say you don’t think that any skill should be mandatory then proceed to rework Dread Shade to make it an even more powerful and essential Necro skill with no downside or consequences other than it taking up a skill slot?

I’ve not tried it, but this build from Boardman says hi.

That’s one view on how minion builds should function and probably more in line with Beastmasters than Necros where the entire theme is higher numbers of more disposable minions.

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