MG has got to go! (and other suggestions)

Feedback and Suggestions
1

No, this isn’t a CoF bad/MG good thread, but I’d like to offer my 2 cents on how I think the current guild system can be improved.
My biggest gripe with MG compared to CoF is that, once one gets to the end game, there is way too many layers of RNG for CoF players to progress. You have to find the exalted stat of the right type, hope it doesn’t get bricked in the forge, find the unique with enough LP and decent rolls and then hope the affixes you want slam in. It feels incredibly random, especially compared to MG where you can simply buy the item you need. On top of that, if I find a great item for another class, it’s completely useless to me, where as an MG player can sell it to help someone else while getting closer to their goal(s).
TLDR: MG always has a carrot to chase (even with the messed up economy), and CoF doesn’t.
I am enjoying the game overall, but I feel progression has ground to a halt. I have some suggestions on how I think this could be improved (with a couple of randos tossed in):

Suggestion 1:
Add a new guild and demote MG to a ‘neutral’ position that is non-exclusive and open to all players. If I had to create a guild, it’d probably be a smithing guild that allows the player to better focus their upgrades, and maybe even allow us to add 1LP to a unique at rank 10.

Suggestion 2:
Get rid of rank 9 from CoF. The only use I’ve had for it is to actually know which set pieces go together (something that should be in the base game). Instead, move down rank 10 and make the new rank 10 an ability to actually target farm something useful. The player can pick an affix they want, and instead of gaining renown, we get a gradual boost towards the drop rate of that affix.

Suggestion 3:
Unique items should only require an exalted to have an equal amount of affixes as it has LP. It’d still be difficult to obtain the affixes I want (try using rune of removal 3 times and see how often it works out for you), but at least the player can have some sense of control. I find it demoralizing (and boring) to run the dungeon over and over again, just to see item after item bricked by RNG.

Suggestion 4:
I’ve seen it mentioned in a dev interview that they want to adjust ward in a way that it becomes less OP without punishing players for using it ‘correctly’. Why not make max ward tied to the players max HP%? It wouldn’t change any of the current ward building mechanics and it would be easy to adjust that % to an acceptable number.

If anyone has read through all that, I’m open to constructive criticism. If you feel these ideas are detrimental to the game, feel free to point out the flaws as I hope this game can continue to improve and be enjoyed by most for many future cycles.

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Rank 9 CoF will be much better when they make set items better, which I think they are doing in 1.1.

The RNG involved in making legendaries is a common source of complaints. I suspect they are talking internally about ways to deal with it.

I really don’t see them opening MG up to all players and making a third faction. It’s just too big of a change. I damn sure don’t see them locking the fix to legendary crafting behind that third faction. If they fix it, it will be for everybody.

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3

Hello,

The whole point of the guilds system is to balance loot acquisition between trading players and non-trading players. I think it’s not unreasonable to expect the system to be balanced in future seasons. However, MG cannot be made cumulative with CoF in any way, it goes entirely against the point of having those systems.

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I may be wrong, but I’ve never seen anyone asking for SSF players to be able to trade in any games.
Why is this the case here?

Seen so much people asking for this in LE… maybe it’s their first aRPG?

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5

“Rank 9 CoF will be much better when they make set items better, which I think they are doing in 1.”

I hope so, but I don’t see them replacing a good unique in the end game when most of them can’t compete with exalted items.

“I really don’t see them opening MG up to all players and making a third faction. It’s just too big of a change. I damn sure don’t see them locking the fix to legendary crafting behind that third faction. If they fix it, it will be for everybody.”

I’m not sure how much work went into creating factions, but I imagine changing every set in the game would be comparable. Perhaps I was unclear with my post, but I wasn’t trying to suggest they tie a crafting fix to a specific faction.

6

Well, given that in end-game the discrepancy between those systems is a natural cause of ‘SSF style’ and ‘group founded’ loot drops it’s not something which can be taken care off in the first place.

The factions shine when they’re used during progression… which is a fairly bad implementation on the part of EHG to put the access of them into Act 9 rather then early on and creating a proper system to let MG access items properly according to the current game-stage of a character instead of the Rank-mess they made.

If the respective base item is available with said affix + you got the funds for the darn expensive thing + you don’t brick it in the forge.

So I don’t see much difference there.

Which is the inherent point of a market, selling items not useful to you to acquire items which are.

Also… why wouldn’t it be useful to you? You can after all play all 15 classes, so working towards - at least - creating 15 different builds over time should be a given.

Roughly quadruple amounts of T7 exalted item drops as a baseline + around 10 times the amount of uniques dropped is not even remotely ‘no carrot’.

The sole and only weakness of CoF currently lays with the boss dropped uniques which are clearly an oversight from the devs as it falls out of line with everything else. Otherwise CoF is working more then fantastic with you easily acquiring all common uniques which are in the game, rare or not. If you focus on them you’ll get them in basically no time.

The use - which isn’t stated in the rank - is the third lens slot.

The set reward is one massive joke… maybe useful in the future but currently utterly and absolutely worthless. Bad implementation on the side of EHG again.

That would utterly and absolutely ruin the whole idea of the LP system, so a hard no.

Currently crafting a legendary item makes the base unique always better, not reliably for your build… but it’s better then before. Targeted crafting of such a kind would make the ‘perfect’ stat on it darn easy to get.

Because it’s a separate system and would make gearing for instead of life (and the inherent downsides coming along with that) utterly senseless. It would mean ‘always go ward no matter what’… which clearly isn’t the end-goal with the system in mind.

Guaranteed?
I haven’t seen the mechanic yet, have you?

Hence we don’t know, we can only say ‘maybe, under circumstances, if handled right, with EHG going a good direction, the adjustments to the fitting… we might have better sets’
I don’t do ‘maybe’ and ‘might’ stuff eagerly, it’s a prime way to be disappointed.

Absolutely! At least to a baseline level… which currently isn’t the case.
At end-game it’ll diverge from each other, you can’t reign in trading properly to a degree where it would still stay useful and well-used while also providing the same outcomes for a CoF player with a singular build.

Because the factions are presented as ‘equivalent’ psychologically in the game.
This is why we get the situation.

If EHG would present them in a different light then it wouldn’t be the case simply… but it is. It’s a design-error one could say even, but that’s something which comes from tons of research and experience over time, as a newer company it’s to be expected for them to trip over some convoluted things like gaming mentality and presentation. At the baseline game they provide a very good experience though… so it simply shows they’re not experienced in that area yet.

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CoF != SSF. You can play in a group with your friends or whomever.
CoF is just an alternative for people that don’t like to trade for whatever reason. So making both available at the same time would effectively remove the reason why CoF exists in the first place, as it would basically force people to trade, even if they don’t like it.

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Imagine choosing the faction that revolves around random loot drops and complaining that your only method of getting gear is random loot drops. Wait, hold on…

Oh, it’s just another “Make the best loot easier to get” thread in disguise. Nevermind.

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Except that it’s not at all balanced between the two, and it can’t be unless they make drastic changes to CoF (which they’ve already said they won’t do). It’d be much easier to balance another faction against CoF than trying to balance CoF with MG.
Could you elaborate more on the cumulative statement? I’m not sure what you mean.

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You can make all the drastic changes you want to CoF, it will never be balanced with MG. Ever. MG will always be better.
CoF isn’t supposed to be the same as MG, it’s just supposed to be a tool so people that don’t like to trade don’t feel like crap like they do in PoE, nothing more.

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Except the current mega-inflation (possibly from the gold exploit recently reported) has made it impossible for most players to buy anything remotely decent, unless they buy gold in RMT. Seriously average items are going for millions now. It is ridiculous.

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Base state is no trade (MG), no CoF.
If you add in trade, the difference in efficiency between trading and non-trading is such that either the game is too easy when you trade, or playing without trade becomes the bad way to play the game.
Since the development team wants offline play (that is to say non-trading) to be a normal way of playing, they need to create a solution to compensate equipment acquisition for non-trading players. That solution is the creation of CoF, that is made incompatible with MG with trading (MG).
If you make CoF compatible with MG (for example, by making items from both wearable at the same time), then you return to the issue where trading is the good way to play the game, and non-trading is a lesser experience.

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13

Thanks for the detailed response.

The difference is the MG player knows they will get x item with y funds. In 200 hours, I’ve seen only a single -5 spell cost scepter. I brick that and how long before I see another? Even if I somehow got a 4LP unique, I’m still likely to have at least 2 ‘useless’ stats on it.

2 issues with that. Firstly, I don’t think it even remotely reasonable to expect anywhere near that many classes in one cycle, when I’m still working on 1 after 200 hours. Second, even if I did do that, I would end up stuck in the same end game situation with a different class.

It certainly was nice for a while, but it eventually amounts to more garbage to sift through. By saying “no carrot” I mean I can never see where my goals are because everything is so random.

While the first part is true, I don’t think many people will feel that way after missing their preferred stat several times in a row. I don’t see how it’d become “darned easy” to get. You’d have to find several exalts with desired stats and farm runes of removal and get lucky enough to keep the right affixes. The more LP (rarer) the unique, the easier the process becomes. Seems pretty balanced to me.

Perhaps I misunderstood their issue with ward. I thought it was the builds obtaining crazy amounts of ward were the issue that a cap on ward would resolve.

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That’s already the current situation. Virtually nobody would be forced into a non-trading situation.

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All offline players are.
The solution to this situation isn’t to make MG compatible with other guilds, the solution is to try to improve balance between guilds so that MG is less dominant.

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If that’s really all there is to it, I won’t be choosing CoF in future cycles. I only chose it this time because I didn’t know which affixes there even were in the game, never mind which were good for my (or other!) class(es).

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It is.
Introducing trade meant drop rates had to be lowered a lot. People who didn’t want to trade complained about that, so CoF and MG were created, with the sole purpose to have trade AND at the same time allow non-traders to keep the same drop rates they were used to before 1.0.
Nothing else.
CoF and MG were never, ever meant to be “balanced” in any way. All the posts about that are just misunderstanding from players who started after 1.0 and missed all the discussions leading to this concept.

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I expect CoF will be buffed a little and with time even get a little more targetting available. But it will still be inferior to MG, always. Simply because MG has no RNG and CoF will always have RNG. Even if you lower said RNG, it will still be RNG and you might not get it, because that’s how the random part of it works.

On the other hand, CoF does the job it’s meant to do well enough. You can get good gear with CoF so you can do endgame easily enough. You just have a much harder time getting BiS gear. And this is more than good enough for most people.

But if you’re a min-maxer that’s only happy with the perfect item, CoF is not your choice, MG is.

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19

Yes, and instead you’ll see 3 on the market total which are going to brick just as much and cost 10+ mil per piece.

It’s not so much difference.

Also people seem to have this odd way of handling exalteds and LP items… with a 4 LP item you wanna have a ‘perfected’ exalted item since they’re just that rare to get. I personally saw exactly ‘0’ of them to date.

The direction it goes is rares with good stats, switching to a base unique if needed for the build or an exalt which has a useful T6/7 mod and 3 T5 of choice otherwise. And from there you go, gradually working upwards.
Same with the uniques, LP 1 with a ‘usable’ mod of any kind is already working well, LP 2 with 2 workable ones a lot better obviously… perfect ones put on it will make your build boost off to the nirvana of the power scale in LE currently, that’s why they’re rare.

It’s a bonus mechanic on top of the baseline ones, hence no matter how much effort one has to put into it’s actually fine, it’s a full-fledged chase mechanic from start to end… and the devs made it so the more common ones have regularly LP in the first place to put them on par with quite decent uniques otherwise.

You can also work 2000 hours on a single char.

And nobody said ‘one cycle’. The game system is set up so you can return the next cycle with another build… and after that with one more… and so on.

Or like many other people do it 3-4 builds which all don’t get to 100 or are ‘pushed’ far and be fine with it as well.

That’s why legacy exists, if you really want to push to the furthest you can there’s the place to do that, it’s not realistic or even meant to do that during a cycle without ridiculous time investment like 500+ hours per cycle.
Same as in PoE, people just stop since their char outperforms the available content to vast degrees… or they don’t feel like they can reasonably reach the extra juiced content beyond what they’re already running.

In LE it’s simply corruption for now, same premise.

Glyphs of Chaos work more reliably then runes of removal. Runes of removal are only viable as a last ditch method if the common mods aren’t what was the result… and for rare mods. But that would entail a double rare affix exalted which is already a ridiculous item by itself.

So yes, it would be really easy to get at least the right mods on that item… rare T7 mods are supposed to be extremely rare for a reason, they offer levels of power which not character ever needs… but as usual… pushing as far as possible is nice!

No, their ward issues steam from how they messed up ward generation in general and how it starts to interact with high investment and the ‘new’ experimental mods on top. All together they just outperform health a lot. They just need some proper balancing and adjustments for the values in skills, the passives and on gear.
If they sit down and crunch the numbers for a while it’ll be ‘decent’ at least for an outcome. It can never be perfectly the same anyway… but nobody asks for that in the first place.

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By definition, yes. But in practice CoF is just that: the guild for SSF players.