So I’ve been going at some monoliths (not empowered yet) and what I notice is that when I start a fresh one the first 10 echoes at least are a bit too easy for a character that has completed monoliths here and there. It feels like a backdrop, or a chore.
I appreciate the higher echos becoming a bit spikey in difficulty, feels good to complete them. Just after that it’s … walking and using the movement skill until it gets exciting again.
The easiest thing that would fix this is to boost the mods at the start a bit after having completed the first monolith.
Hi, im trying out different builds in the reign of dragon monoliths (85 area) and i feel that many builds are hitting a wall there. I know many players complained that the game is too easy in the past, but i feel kind of confused about the sense of progression the game is trying to transmit. It takes the whole story for your build to come together. The early monoliths you feel really strong, even without good gear. You get high end gear and enhance them via crafting, while unlocking more passive and skill points. And then gameplay starts to get difficult. It feels kind of off to me.
I think one solution would be different level of difficulties, so that everyone can play at a difficulty they enjoy and different power spikes of builds can be taken into consideration.
That said, im generally holding back with a lot of other opinions, because i think multiplayer might have an impact on all of those, including on ease of clearing content.
It needs to be very carefully done. If not, we would play in easy mode, get the blessings then play again in more difficult mode, that would not be good.
This is one of my major complaints about the system.
Once you have a decently established character, re-doing timelines feels tedious for the first 10-15 echoes, because the loot is not great yet and there is no difficulty.
We probably need to wait and see what the next patch will bring, since it seems that we get some MOF changes.
Other than that, i already suggested a system as another form fo goldsink, that could make you skip the early echoes in return for gold.
Maybe they could introduce something like a double buff option exclusive to the first 2-3 rounds. Not sure how it would balance buy maybe like twice the rewards, 3+ echo duration, and 2x modifiers. And the game treats it as 3 different rounds(not affecting the quest rng most likely)
That way when you finish your third round it’d be like you’re on your tenth and you’d have the double modifiers from the last 2 at minimum still present. You know unless you just double the first or second.
As for the need for a gold sink. Hopefully the introduction of the player trading economy will solve that issue. Will have to wait and see tho.
Seeing the forest from the trees here, I think the bigger problem is actually the fact that generally speaking you end up doing blessing farming (ergo finding the blessings that you need) on the non empowered monos which gets tedious/boring. The difficulty spike between empowered and non empowered mono’s is quite massive so you are pretty much gated on having (almost) capped resistances and a good enough investment in another couple of defenses.
This is a consequence of the reduction in affix’s along with other changes, due to the limited affix real estate you have for all of the resistances plus some other defences (GB/endurance/dodge etc etc), you are kinda forced to fix this by tediously farming the blessings to fill this gap.
This is not helped by the fact that if you look at the numbers, comparatively speaking the resistance bonuses are much higher on blessings vs what you can typically get as affix’s on gear which means getting resistances as blessings is pretty much a no brainer (as an example, the lowest roll Necrotic Resistances blessing you can get is 25%, this is already a T5+ affix for an item). If your build also requires uniques that don’t come with implicit resistance affix’s then this problem becomes even worse.
You really need one?
I mean, I have usually between 300K and 800K gold. No more. I really don’t need a gold sink, I don’t have enough gold for what I want to do!
I guess that’s the price to say when I’m mainly creating heroes and not focusing on fully built heroes, but I wish I had more gold. ^^
I think we need multiple gold sinks, right now there is a good one but its only one and that is Gambling (which was actually nerfed). There are also stash tabs but generally speaking its not enough of a sink assuming you have a properly set up filter so you don’t just end up picking up too much items (i.e. don’t pick up exalted’s with bad bases unless they are really good).
I think as the game gets closer to completion then more gold sinks will get added, at least currently its very easy to hoard gold assuming you have don’t just have a single character (since characters also act as sinks in an indirect way).
That’s exactly it. I’m permanently creating heroes or respec’ing old heroes, so I’m always spending gold and not very often earning some.
I agree there should be more gold sinks, but at the moment I strictly don’t need one: I don’t have enough gold for what I want to do. ^^
I still don’t get why people alway refer to “capping resistances” when talking about a proper defensive setup in LE.
There half a dozen other defensive layers that you can mix and match.
All Empowered Blessings are roughly twice as strong as a equivalent T5 affix, resistances are not stronger than any other simialr defensive blessing options.
Resistances on Blessings are not “a no brainer”, blessings do have quite some good choices.
We desperately need more gold sinks.
While stash tabs are a very good gold sinks for normal players, that use a shared stash and hoard alot. It’s basically a very finite gold sink.
The recent gambler changes were a good change towards the right direction.
But we desperately need more different gold sinks, so players actually need to think about where to spend their gold.
Of course, my point is that the difficulty spike in empowered mono means that the basic resistances are generally more reliable as a form of defense (ideally this needs to be paired with something like Dodge/GB/Endurance etc)
I looked through the numbers and this doesn’t seem to be the case when you take into account things like 2H’s/uniques but I may be wrong here. Generally speaking though due to the sheer number of resistances and limited affix’s and also due to how the game fundamentally works regarding death (i,e. it hampers your progress in mono’s) you are better focusing on your defense.
Sure, but personally I have always found that refarming mono’s for the right blessings are more effective. I guess ymmv, but a good build typically doesn’t need that many affix’s to get damage (especially with idols) however we have 7 resistances and another 3/4 defense mechanics so I find it more efficient to just get those resistances as blessings until I get some really good late game gear.
I don’t wanna de-rail this thread.
It just botheres me, when people try to emphasize that focusing defenses is very important (which i totally agree with), many many people seems to use the the term “cap your resistances”, which does not apply the same way as it does in other games.
Resistances in LE are just another defensive layer and are not more mandatory or better than any of the other defensive layers.
2H, Uniques, Body Armour and Amulet do have different affix value modifers.
But generally speaking blessings are ~ T5 and Grand Blessigns are ~ 2x T5 /blessings do have higher roll ranges than a T5 affix though)
I guesss this will be my last point on this, but I do find that resistances are generally a better defense mechanic compared to the other layers but I agree that its definitely not as extreme as something like PoE.
This just gets to the point of how game mechanics are designed, which is that you have life and when it hits 0 you die, so the most effective way to prevent that death reliably is by damage reduction. For example Dodge by itself works great when you dodge a hit, but then if you get hit by a heavy crit attack and dodn’t dodge it then you are dead where as with reductions its easier to estimate the total amount of damage you can possibly get because you create an upper bound.
Hence why mechanics like Dodge and GB work better when you already have reductions and also the practical effectiveness of Dodge/GB is better the higher percentage you have (i.e. 50%+)
I wouldn’t mind it if people could instantly buy the quest echoes for a big amount and have a number of mods rolled randomly on it. Big gamble, but you wouldn’t do the monolith and could easily fail even with a strong build. Would have to cost a huge amount though and I have no idea yet what’s considered huge.
Having seen 11th’s response in Heavy’s suggestion thread I’m thinking they’ll come up with something different, maybe changing and mixing things up a little.
Right, but its much easier to cap resistances than health (which is fairly constant as you level and generally doesn’t proportionally increase your EHP as much as resistances do). Ward is something thats specific to certain builds, but unless we are talking about crazy lich’s running around with 4k+ ward (which is something that arguably needs to be looked into especially when you have a sad Spellblade that looks at such a lich with envy) the same applies.
Endurance I put into the same bucket as GD/Dodge, i.e. its great as a secondary defense mechanic after resist. I find you can get away with high Endurance values up until empowered mono/high arena waves.
