My favorite thing to do in this game is experiment with different classes and builds, and see how far I can take them. With that said, there is currently a major wall that limits the ability to do this: monolith corruption.
Clearing the story and unlocking empowered monoliths is fairly straightforward, and levels your character up quite well. Increasing monolith corruption, on the other hand, takes FOREVER. This isn’t due to being unable to handle the content: it is just the mindless grind of clearing tons of monoliths to increase corruption by 5-15 every 30 or so runs. I really dislike this aspect, because you have to clear hundreds of monoliths with zero challenge before you get to the ones that are actually risky/challenging for your build.
I’m curious if there are any plans to add account-wide catch-up features or anything, akin to the catch-up mechanic that already exists for single characters? Arena basically has this via the memory keys: you can go as high as you can handle instantly.
This gives me an idea. This could be done with an item. Useable with a small UI addition on the mono map. Click to consume one to increase corruption by 10 up to a maximum. Dropped by Orobyss when above a corruption threshold. Make the item 1x1 and stack so its easy to store.
You have the high risk to have several builds totally stuck.
A new hero, fresh out of the campaign, can’t handle 400 corruption. So how would the catch-up mechanism work? Steps, 50 by 50? You have a risk to have a hero totally stuck in too high corruption.
OP is right, the feature as it is implemented totally sucks. 16 Corruption max is way way to little to increase the corruption in a meaningful way.
There should at least be some items / options which give you the possibility to increase the corruption in bigger increments.
The way it is now is soo tedious and keeps from playing because its super boring to do this stupid grind to get 16 more corruption and now imagine you have to do this for EVERY SINGLE MONOLITH
That’s fairly easy to deal with I think. One way is to simply add a difficulty slider to pick your corruption level. The other is to use the system currently in place: echos already get harder as you move further from the center, so rather than have the outer nodes give 16 corruption, have them add 50-100 and be the same strength as a 50-100 corruption map. That way, if you can complete it to add the corruption, you already know you can handle it. Or even allow you to base your corruption levels off of max. arena wave completed.
Being stuck is already a risk with the current setup: if a balancing patch comes out and nerfs one of your builds, you may be stuck WAY over your head with no good way to reduce corruption.
How about just allowing corruption to increase with every map in empowered monolith (ONLY EMPOWERED)…
Any map that goes away from the starting island adds 1 (?) corruption if successfully completed
Orobyss islands allow for an increase or decrease of 15+ corruption (depending on how far you are away from the start) when you have defeated him - you just chose to add or subtract corruption like you currently get blessings
This should then allow for 20-30 corruption for every complete monolith run excluding Orobyss islands… It allows a quicker way to get higher corruption and because corruption is increasing by only 1 each island, its not going to be a big jump in difficulty… and its easy to decrease corruption.
Could even make a failed Orobyss decrease corruption by default so that anyone having trouble can just fail the island to reduce the difficulty and try again on another.
To get corruption in a bigger chunk to address the issue around how long it takes to get corruption up to farming levels or to decrease it if you cant handle the current corruption level… Just doing maps gets you a slow increase in difficulty and improved drops etc… doing Orobyss gives you the opportunity to increase faster as it does now.
Although to be entirely honest, I dont believe that Orobyss has any real purpose other than the drops - the meager amount in Corruption increase that Orobyss currently gives is pathetic… and I agree with the OP that it takes forever to get it up to a decent level to really push a good build.
To be honest, I dont think that the existing corruption mechanic has been implemented well… it sounds like a good idea, but in practise I dont personally think it works in its current iteration… Increasing difficulty shouldnt be hard - actually doing the map is the hard part - it should be easy to increase the difficulty and harder to play… not hard to increase difficulty and hard to play at the new level…
Its like some sort of fake/unneccssary hurdle to overcome just to play the game at a harder setting…
Monolith progress should be account wide, restricted to character type (SSF, SC, HC, etc), like Path of Exile’s Atlas. With Corruption being toggleable. I don’t see what the downside of this is, as having access to high level or high Corruption monoliths does nothing for a lower level character who will need to progress through and get their blessings anyway.
i disagree that there needs to be catch up but i completely agree that adding corruption to monoliths is way too slow. also wtf is up with NEGATIVE corruption ?
meanwhile what’s particularly annoying is that it’s hard to build corruption in regular monos but empowered start at 100. There is no smooth ramp between the two.
The difficulty jump between regular monos and empowered is definitely too large and part of the reason for that is that the accumulation of corruption in regular monos is too slow.
You can decrease corruption in a given timeline, for example to make running echoes smoother if you feel like you pushed a bit too much.
Having slightly less corruption, to have less corruption dmg and health modifiers and weaker echo modifiers can be beneficial, especially in softcore, when you feel like you die to regularly in echoes.
The negative corruption shades don’t even interfere with pushing corruption, so there is nothing wrong with it.
If you do every normal Monolith Timeline once, you are about lvl ~80, when you finished the last mandatory normal timeline.
If you immediately start empowered the jump in difficulty is noticeably.
But you can also do one of the lvl 90 normal timelines a few times, while pushing their corruption to make the transition more smooth.
In the end you are not forced to instantly go to empowered, just because you unlocked it.
And I’m pretty sure we’ll see the moment when we’ve pushed too far, just enough to be unable to fight any Shade, which would let the char stuck in this timeline.
I wasn’t clear. I’ve never had to use decreased corruption in regular monos, and yet it seems to show up with 10 or 15 corruption.
So what I should have said was “wtf is up with negative corruption showing up so early”.
True, but eventually you will. The problem is that you would have to run regular monos for a LONG time to get to 100 corruption (hence why i’m wondering why negative corruption shows up so early). So you end up going from monos with a corruption of 10-15 to empowered with a corruption of 100.
i still think that the transition needs to be smoother. the entire concept of a discrete jump into 100+ corruption monos doesn’t really make sense to me.
I confess I had the same thought when I first started monos and sort of forgot about it because I tend to run monos on my better/higher performing chars so you dont really concentrate on the things that would be more obvious for new chars…
The negative corruption islands that pop up so early really do not make sense… I understand the concept that the closer you are to the start point the negative corruption appears but it also doesnt make sense - especially if you have just started a monolith run…
Must admit, this thread has, imho, exposed more than a few inefficiencies with the corruption concept… I like the idea and think it should exist/stay, but the more I read other replies (in this thread and others) I definitely dont think its implementation is ideal… at least not yet…
I would like the idea with the corruption difficulty slider. More direct control for the player instead of wasting a lot of time to increase the corruption and he has a way to get it down if increased the corruption too high.
So let the MAX corruption - based on maximum corruption level obtained on any character - be account-wide (in each mode… normal/empowered), with each character getting a slider to set the corruption for their game? Perhaps changing the corruption setting resets all progress of all monoliths (in that mode) for that character. So there’s no upping the corruption to farm xp/gear in base nodes, then dropping it to 0 to kill a roadblock boss.
It’s honestly not that slow currently tbh, maybe 4-5 hours per 100 corruption. Then catch up means any other timeline you want to do only takes 3-4 orobyss kills to catch up.
Any system to make it account-wide needs to be able to account for different characters having different power levels. Some builds can cruise to 500+ with ease, others start to struggle at anything over 300. Even then, I think the current relatively smooth increase in difficulty is quite favorable for new characters and makes it very easy to transition straight from the 90 monos into pushing up corruption in empowered without any need to re-run stuff in normal.
