I wonder how many incoming players realize that the mono chest is directly tied to the amount of clearing you’ve done? My guess is very few. This concept it not conveyed well during your time in the mono or the echo of a lost world. I am aware that it’s stated in the game guide, but players aren’t going to be aware of it’s presence until they stumble onto the guide and also think to look up monoliths.
What if a progress bar appeared at the top of the screen or near the XP bar while the player was in an echo? The bar fills as you kill generic enemies, or maybe specific special mobs that have to be targeted/hunted down. At certain points on the bar is a little reward icon that, when reached, grants a bonus of some kind: extra echo chest treasure, gold, stability, a bonus shrine appearing in the next mono, whatever. The player could hover over each to get a tooltip explanation.
The main goal here would be to make it very obvious to the player “Killing mobs in the monolith can be worth your time. You have an option other than making a beeline towards the quest marker.”
I’d love to see more incentives to clear the echo mobs. More “magic find” in the chest and echo reward per %mobs cleared or something.
But if we’re doing this, I’d also love to have a mob counter like (I hate to say the P word) maps in PoE. Show me how many I have remaining, please.
Using the MoF to level alts, and get all passive points and idol slots, would be fantastic. Perhaps require an account to reach empowered monos first? Then it’s unlocked for your account, in the same way that Adventure Mode and Rifts are in D3.
Or a merchant that you could buy tokens from, to unlock per character, the way they have it in Grim Dawn. Unlock all the waypoints, idols, and passives.
I haven’t seen it lately, but it used to be in the loading screen tips. I think the big issue now is it’s more efficient to get less loot faster, than it is to get better loot longer, because the end chest really isn’t that great. There are some maps I’ll full clear depending on the mob type.
I love giant crabs, especially twinned ones. And I always full clear the Bloodworks, because that’s my favorite map layout. And the end chest is really never different than skipping all the trash. Give players a (good, better) reason to do it.
What if there was an occasional big incentive to delay going directly to the quest objective, just to shake things up? Example:
There is a 25% chance on arriving in an echo that the game will alert the player that “A Time-lost enemy walks this world.” Killing the enemy quadruples the chest reward, but the enemy has to be hunted down, or is distinguished on the minimap via a red quest marker. It’s obvious that this is an optional objective, but when the player beats them their echo chest has an impressive golden glow to let them know it has been infused with extra goodies.
If I can rush throughmonoliths and kill bosses and shades in a small time frame I’ll always rush. When I get to a point when my clear speed suffers I go for new equip and kill more enemys.
I’m at a point with one of my toons where I get a usefull item (for my minmax taste) every 20-30 hours that benefits my build propably. Clearing fast or killing every enemy in a monolith isn’t changing everything about the I need to get an item so I rush from start to finish to get the bossdrops.
It must be a BIG bonus to make me change my ways because right now it feels kinda useless to kill the enemys instead of getting the objective done.
I really don’t think the reward scaling matches time invested right now. I’ve tried it before, just to experiment - and I think in many cases you can barely tell the difference in rewards between a rushed Echo and a full cleared Echo.
I think adjustments need to be made there first.
What I would really, really like to see is some kind of Checkpoint system. So normally, we get one reward egg - I would like to keep that, and then add 2 more, one for 50% of mobs cleared, and a third for 75% mobs cleared - with some kind of progress bar in the quest tracker.
That would encourage me to clear a lot more.
Also, another barrier is modifiers. Right now, it feels like there are two classes of modifiers - modifiers you steamroll, and then modifiers that are just straight annoying like Glancing Blow and enemies take reduced damage at High Health.
In those cases I’m just rushing anyway to get those out of my mod pool.
I think eventually some kind of rework to modifiers would be needed too, because that’s another thing often pushing players to just get out and get it done quickly.
I guess thirdly, enemy composition is another barrier to full-clearing.
When I get a map full of Diamond Matrons, or so many Ice Goliaths or Profane Flesh that I can’t see my character - just, No. I’m getting out of there ASAP. The enemy composition in Echoes can feel really ‘off’ sometimes. I’m going to rush out of those so I can do my next worms and spiders only Echo in peace.
While not a bad idea, one that could be improved upon, that would just lead players to: Point A-time-lost enemy-> echo objective. Now, if you were to clear either all of the mobs, or a % of mobs before that enemy appeared, that could give incentive to clear, as long as the reward is worth the players’ time.
For a while it does feel better until ive done it a lot and then iam looking forward to more juicy loot. Especially since my character grows after finding loot.
Beside that i think its partly the players problem and partly the problem of the system.
It doesnt have a random generated map. This makes the system getting stale quicker for certain players (me atleast).
Not enough variety of special events which could occur. This could be small ones like getting a random chance in your map system of dropping a special mini boss or a secret pathway. Getting a chance of getting a special tileset were the monsters do more damage and a few special mobs spawn in the area with a higher chance of dropping a unique with legendary potential with a max of 1/2 (so bosses etc still get there farm importancy).
Wolcen did many things wrong but what i liked was having a chance of encountering a special dungeon with a merchant that would sell special gear which was only obtainable at that merchant. Those were the extra exciting moments of breaking the standard procedures in the endgame system.
I think this is what the LE system is still missing. I do have the feeling with the beacons that theyve added btw! I hope they add more of these things to keep the monolith more interesting.
Its not worth it in my opinion, iam a type of guy who loves to fully complete every map.
In POE i still do sometimes despite knowing its not effective most of the time.
In LE i hoped with the extra loot it would be more rewarding but in my opinion its not. The extra loot drops are nice but most of the time the type of loot is not worth it (on my end atleast).
So in my opinion its more rewarding to rush so you get to clear faster and get to higher corruption faster. Or to kill faster to get faster to higher lvl monoliths and farm there.
Agreed and no random chances of popping of special events/monsters or something which might keep players in the map to search for it. Which might reward the extra time you spent in the map.
It’s definitely much more efficient to speed clear. Just watch the weekend tourneys and see how much farther along those that do are from everyone else. I also wish this wasn’t the case. I want to be incentivized to kill more enemies and explore the map more. But for that to happen, there needs to be rewards for doing so, i.e. another endgame mechanic that the player has to find. At first I thought the Eternity Cache would be nested inside of certain echoes, and I thought that would be really cool.
Unfortunately that didn’t happen, and so far we’ve only gotten disincentives to speed clearing. Stuff like disguising the objective until we kill more monsters or happen to run into the objective on our own. This has just incentivized us to memorize the objective spawn points so we can rush there on our own. I don’t think disincentivizing is the way to go since it just makes the game more tedious and we find ways around it, and I also appreciate that the suggestions in here are all about creating incentives. Dungeons do have a mechanic like that with increased drop rates on enemies, and I think it’s pretty successful so far. I hope concepts like that are something that EHG starts to implement in the Mono as well.
I appreciate that people are investing in this discussion
My main grievance is not about loot as I feel we actually have a lot of varied was to farm for loot right now. Particularly with the addition of the dungeon system. My point is mainly about normal monoliths feeling like you’re not really doing much to progress your character besides getting to empowered monoliths and the fastest way to do that being to skip through each echo to the objective.
My proposals might not be the best solution. Maybe something else to make normal monos feel more impactful for your character would be better since it addresses the root issue of empowered being substantially better than normal (which I think is fine, endgame timelines should reward more). I’d just like to see my time invested in killing enemies in an arpg not feel like I was delaying my progress compared to running past them. This is specifically tied to stability gain and reaching empowered monos in the current system.
I think normal monoliths just cant ever be interesting, because even if you make them more so, people still are gonna know that empowered is waiting and empowered is always gonna be better.
This again is pretty much just player mentality that you cant escape. Normal monos are an exp stepping stone. Which is about as much character progression as the campaign.
And to be honest I dont really feel the way most people do, I enjoy my little jaunt through normal monoliths, its the same as empowered but less loot. So if its not loot related, not sure why you would care to rush through them.
Drop/time investment-wise, it’s still worth it to kill the mobs in your path. You can even drag them and then slay, if your build can allow it. But exploring is a waste of time. The only way worth our time is to directly go to the objective, kill the mobs in the path and start another echo.
The endgame chest would have to be exponentially more rewarding if you kill more mobs in the echo. Otherwise, echoes are not limited resources as maps are in POE or Dungeon keys in LE. In POE, you wouldn’t want to use a juiced red map and not explore it, maybe you even find Zana or something else on the map.
Right now, even if you get loot for killing monsters and clearing the echo, it’s better to go to the objective and start another one. By not backtracking, you can clear 2-3 echoes in the time it takes to do one, so you can get 3 times the endgame chest which probably makes it worth the same as clearing one full echo. But you additionally get more stability (Blessing grind, Boss Unique Item Pool Grind) and you can farm more Rare Nodes, etc.
If clearing the echo could make the echo reward nodes more valuable / better then maybe it would be worth it. Because once you find Exalted Item nodes, Unique Item Nodes, etc, you could clear the echo to get a chance at a better reward (More T7 Chance, more rare affixes chance, more rare Unique chance, etc.)
But, if there are no incentives worth our time to stay in the echo, people will continue to rush them, which I don’t see any issue with. Echoes are unlimited resources. Rich people with close to unlimited resources will in general feel less bad wasting food than a poor person who cannot spend a lot on food.
This makes me think of something I’d considered before - mono would be much more engaging if instead of the stacking mechanic for difficulty+rarity modifiers, each echo had its own uniquely rolled set. If an echo with several mods is a rare resource then you have a solid incentive to do full clears sometimes. On the other hand the stack mechanic offers very little positive imo. It’s just tedious to engage with the rolling modifier stack as a strategic element, especially with the messy and sprawling echo web. And there is no payoff moment since you’re only dealing with tiny Rarity% increments at each step. Per-echo mods is a pure win imo - less tedium, more excitement with some nice potential for high-stakes moments around high-value echoes.
This would be a particularly great improvement if it came in step with a more interesting pool of map modifiers. The selectable modifiers in the dungeon are on the right track on the loot side. The monster/difficulty side needs a lot of attention since the current difficulty scaling is mostly boring numbers scaling with the only spice being the oddd interaction that arbitrarily stonewalls certain builds. Things that mess with the spawn pool would be a start, eg. “Add Embermages to the spawn pool”, “Rares are much more likely to have X modifier”.
The problem with this approach is that the reward of a game should be playing the game. Otherwise, it turns into an efficiency chase, just like a job. If people are skipping content, the issue is with the content failing to be a rewarding (fulfilling) experience.
They could add a cumulative item rarity/quantity modifier based on the percentage of map clear. The modifier could start in the negatives to create a disincentive to rushing the objective. The scaling could maybe be more than just additive to give incentive to clearing as much as possible with maybe a bonus on top if you full clear.
I also like the idea of echo nodes in the web that add a very high difficulty in exchange for a very high increase to item rarity/quantity. It would last for X echoes just like echo modifiers do now. This could emulate “juicing” just like in PoE.
