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.
I’d like to specify again that the intent of this topic was not about loot and gear. We have several ways of getting loot and clearing mobs does give more drops from the map and from the chest already.
The intent of my suggestions was specifically aimed at the progress through normal monolith while working toward empowered monos and also for when you want to farm timeline bosses. These are when you want as much stability as possible which can lead the player to skip mobs as the fastest way to obtain stability is to rush to the map objective. My suggestions are aimed at allowing both this AND killing mobs in these situations feel rewarding for players that want to do so.
This take seems much too strict for a genre like ARPG. I agree that the game should be fun to play, but at the end of the day the endgame phase of a looter-ARPG with chase items is an “efficiency chase”. However it doesn’t necessarily hold from there that it has to become like a job.
When it’s used positively, the framework of allowing the player to strategise and organise their activities in respect to their long-term goals can make the game more fun. Human brains are wired to enjoy working towards something, especially when they make smart decisions or experience windfalls that advance their goal in discretely identifiable increments. Obviously tastes in games vary, but the Monolith system is clearly targeted directly at that sort of player.
It’s worth noting that a main thrust of my suggestion is that as well as creating more discrete points of excitment/stakes in mono, removing the modifier stacking mechanic also cuts the potential for tedious drags on your attention and unexpected consequences during echo web navigation. So it shouldn’t be entirely offensive to people who prefer just playing the game to optimisation or metagaming.
Place extra Rare monsters off the “path” in monos (Rares can drop dungeon keys)
Add new special spawns to monos:
– Spawn of Orobyss: this randomly appears in Monos (you never know if its there, or where). Killing it adds a small amount of flat corruption (maybe 5 or less normal, 10 or less empowered).
– Beacon Power Node: this randomly appears also (same as above). It is surrounded by Void mobs, and is attackable like a Spire. Killing it releases the power and adds a small amount of Stability (again, 5 or 10 might be sufficient).
– Vestige of the Gods: this shrine is guarded by monsters (random). Once they are killed, the shrine opens & drops a Vestige of the Gods, a new currency. Collect them. After you complete the final boss of any timeline, you can spend them to “reroll” one offered Blessing at random. The cost would scale with Mono level & cost more in empowered.
I disagree, the reason me and many others have come to LE is that its a breath of fresh air to have a moderately paced arpg that does not bog itself down with controlling and juicing the player as hard as possible.
Also your first post goes on to complain about dealing with rolling modifiers, and talk about purely pure per node modifiers.
is this not exactly what rolling modifiers do? if a node is too hard in a locked in modifier per node, you have to skip it and go around. Ala delve. Where as in the mono system you can simply go do nodes you know you can beat to clear out modifiers allowing you to start over. it gives you 100% of control of how you interact with it. Hell you can even see and plan what modifiers you want to use before a boss fight if you are so inclined.
At the end of the day, I think almost all of this is a non problem, if you want higher stakes, play hardcore, or push corruption which is a system that exists to allow you to set your difficulty. The base game should not be made harder or more grindy when the tools exist to satisfy what you want.
The problem is that as it stands, the strategy is there, but it’s boring and unrewarding to engage with. There’s a reason I mention discrete points of excitement elsewhere in my post. The current system demands a lot of attention and fiddly inspecting tiny indistinct echo icons & mods and never gives you any kind of distinct payoff moment to reward it. Altho technically you get more loot, the decisions you make to get there are too small and indistinct and there’s no mechanism in place to create actual attribution between the action and reward.
I intentionally didn’t try to flesh out every detail of how you’d replace this. Other than just choosing between easier and harder echoes, you probably want some other specific decision points on the web that can be used to affect your run. Generally the point is to break things up into bigger, more discrete decisions that produce less drag when navigating the mono web and stronger patterns of anticipation and attribution between actions and reward.
It’s not about making the game more punishing or grindy but about making it more engaging by spicing up the way we interact with mono. Which is, bluntly, a repetitive and boring system right now. Having some occasional more demanding and exciting segments is a staple of design in pretty much any kinds of action games because it’s a good, fun pattern. People don’t want to run at full power all the time but generally respond well to being invited to step up at specific, rewarding occasions.
For me this can easily fall into fatigue if its done poorly though. if you make it too rewarding and spicy if you engage in a particular manner then we have simply moved the goalposts and that new strat is the new one people are complaining about is the “culture” or the “meta”
lets say you can make the echo web drop more uniques or drop more exalts based on some choice you make in say the first quest echo and each one comes with its own random downside, do you not think people are still gonna just optimize the shit out of this?
Then we are gonna have a repeat of this thread but with “why is picking X always the best strat? we need to fix it!”
I guess thats my entire point is that this is basically a cursed problem where no matter how you tackle it, there is gonna be a sub set of players who feel obligated to play the “best” way and are not gonna like it.
These are good ideas and add fun random RNG to zones, one thing you need to realise though is this is exactly how PoE started - small mechanics ie add mobs to maps but then they became more convoluted and time consuming plus adding more to each map as time wore on, some people disliked it, i think its great since you can just skip them anyway
