The “level” ladder is only relevant for the first day (or hours!) of a new expansion. A level ladder seems frankly somewhat irrelevant for Last Epoch. I personally would remove it entirely.
I respect the Arena ladder, but I personally don’t find it very fun to play Arena.
It would be much more exciting to have an in-game mono-corruption ladder and a 60/80/100 speedrun ladder. These would remain relevant the entire season, as there is no practical “limit” to what one can do on them. So they wouldn’t be dead days (or hours!) after release.
Then consider putting a little card on the character select screen for each character, and maybe another with the “best achieved ranks” on any character in the currently selected mode (season or legacy) and now we have a motivating scoreboard there all the time.
Mono corruption ladder doesn’t work in the current state of balance between classes and even masteries. Also it compounds keeping infinite corruption in the game (bandaid to misbalance) and the mindset that only a 10’000+ corruption broken build is worth playing or that insanly high-corruption push is something to strive for.
I beg to differ. There is no need for perfect class corruption “balance”. The game is “fair” because you can play any class you like. They are not limiting you to only play certain classes.
The idea of a leaderboard where every single class/build is balanced to be “equal” is nonsense. The whole idea of seasons is for things to change so we have to experiment to discover what works. If everything equally works, there is nothing to discover.
i think LE currently doesn’t change classes (aka scramble balance) enough between seasons.
Also, while LE has some of my favorite class mechanics in ARPG, the “seasonal games” are just dressed up enemies to kill.
Look at the Season 3 Rift Beast thing. It’s just more monsters to kill in an isolated forest-zone and a vendor. It’s not even as interesting as POE1 Beastality crafting that it’s semi-mimicing. It’s nowhere near Heist, Expedition, Kingsmarch… I’m not a fan of the POE1 class gameplay, but their “seasonal minigames are top notch and interesting”. And we still don’t have true random level generiton, just templated zone maps being reused and rotated.
If LE had a ladder worth deep-ending on, and a seasonal mechanic that had some complexity to it, and true randomized maps, it would be my go-to ARPG. As it is, I played into monos in Season 3, but i’m just fighting same-same bordom… I think a competitive PVE ladder might be interesting.
But maybe the game model is not to bring players back to spend money, but just to bring in new players who have never played LE before. I certainly don’t see any reason to invest more in it’s present state. Sadly.
No-one’s asking for perfect balance, I think most people asking for better balance want it such that all classes & more/most builds could get to a broadly similar corruption (ie, within a certain threshold, though how close likely depends on the person).
Would it be fair if class A struggled through monos while class B snoozed through 10,000 corruption? After all, nobody’s limiting you to only play certain classes…
Why would it be? The purpose of a leaderboard is to be able to compete. If you have class A that does 500 corruption, classes B, C and D that do 1500 corruption and class E that does 50k corruption, then the only way you can compete is by playing class E.
Whereas if more classes can compete for the top spot, then you actually have a choice.
Just look at the arena leaderboards. You have Paladin with the most entries, but you have a Beastmaster and 2 Shamans in the top 5 and even a Druid in the top 10.
Some masteries are barely seen in the top 100, but you have several options to compete in the leaderboard without being forced to go Paladin.
That’s the balance players want. Not having all builds doing the same damage with the same defenses, but with enough builds being competitive that they have a choice if they want to compete, as opposed to everyone being forced to use the same exact build and hope they don’t sneeze at the wrong time or that the waves are more favorable to them.
For that to happen, you need to have a base balance in the first place. That’s what PoE does and their balance is pretty decent, after several years struggling with it. So they can scramble said balance because they know that while a few builds will rise to the top and some will fall down, all of them are pretty competitive before and after the changes.
It really isn’t possible to balance classes like that, because even the devs don’t know all the interactions and what will happen when it’s in the wild with users doing unexpected things.
If you look at actual “endless” leaderboards like this in practice…
#1 - they are never “balanced” across classes, because that’s not practical. And even if it “is” balanced, you wouldn’t even know it because…
#2 - there is typically some “best build” for a while that less innovative players complain they can’t reach becasue it’s overpowered, then someone else figures out a different build on a different class (one that players were formerly complaining about being weak instead of doing the work to innovate) and then THAT build is the new top… until someone figures out a different overpowered mechanic to leverage.
This challenge of figuring out what works is what makes the ladder exciting… which is why classes and items need to change, to give us new build puzzles to figure out and new ways to innovate.
Typically there are some “strongest things” people figure out, and they use that for a while, until it gets the nerf bat, allowing other buidls to rise in effectiveness. One of the simpler examples of this is the pet-snapshotting that formerly dominated many leading ladder builds in LE… and thankfully was removed (aka nerfed).
This is the endless cycle of innovation and balance… in basically every game. Embrace it.
P.S. - It’s so well known that ARPG players enjoy is discovering something unexpected - that “power/build bugs” per-say are not strictly bad, because its fun for players to “break the game” to get more power… And then when those bugs are fixed, others “mysteriously” pop up every time. LE is too small a studio to need to worry about injecting bugs, but Blizzard shipping the spiritborn power bugs a few seasons ago? Yeah, that was either complete incompetentence or intentional power bugs that went further than they thought.
It is, it just takes time. PoE was also wildly unbalanced at first. After a few years of tweaking each league, they arrived at a pretty good balance where almost any build can do all content and even compete.
That works for most stuff. Not for corruption (same reason deep delve in PoE is always dominated by 2-3 builds). You currently have 95% of builds in LE doing 2k or less. 4.9% do 2-5k. 0.1% do 10k+.
The vast majority of builds can’t even dream of getting to 5k corruption. They can’t compete. At all. This excludes a bunch of masteries immediately. If you want to use them, you simply won’t score on the leaderboard at all.
You can try to innovate as much as you want, it won’t happen. You’ll be stuck with 2-3 builds, most likely all from the same mastery or two.
Want to compete in the corruption leaderboard with a Spellblade or a zoo minion necro? Tough luck, you won’t be able to.
What you’re talking about does apply to Arena a lot more than for corruption. And there we do see some diversity. But for corruption pushing you won’t see the same thing. You’ll see 1-2 builds at most.
Yes, I’m specifically advocating for a Delve-like Corruption pushing ladder, and I full accept that there may only be 2-4 viable top builds at any given patch… Then every patch the top stuff gets nerfed and the bottom stuff gets buffed, and the game changes. I would love this, because at least this gives those of us who enjoy the optimization game something to do long game.
I don’t mind if the top 2-4 builds are not mine because it motivates me to either (a) learn one of those builds, or (b) try to innovate to get my build to the top in a way nobody has seen yet. We don’t need to hand everyone and every build a top trophy… work for it!
Today Arena is the place you go “show off” your build, but Arena is just not fun the way Mono grinding can be at times.
Even better if we could change “veterans boots” to be something you lock-in to (say ruthless mode or something) so we could have a veterans/ruthless hardcore solo character found ladder for corruption pushing. That’s the kind of challenge i can sink into. We can’t do this presently as a ladder, because you can just carry the boots and take them on and off whenever you want, so there is no proven accomplishment, it’s only a personal one. (And i’m much more into proven accomplisments than personal ones… i know others are wired differently)
For me, the most fun gameplay in the game is just that “veterans boots hardcore solo character found”… but what it is for? There is no ladder. No scoreboard. I feel like I’m challenging myself on a lonely island, and that’s not fun for me. I want to be part of the community that deepends on this stuff, and have a forum for it, and talk about strategies, and try to get to the #1 slot. THAT is a game. what we have is a toy.
At some level, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corruption ladder or something else… but what the game is lacking is a SCOREBOARD that remains RELEVANT.
Level ladder? Irrelevant hours or days after season start. I personally think this scoreboard is absolute trash, because it’s more measuring how much certain players no-life the game, rather than actual skill.
This is why I think a PLAYTIME driven speedrun latdder would be much more interesting. It would be relevant over the whole season. Even on the last day of the season players could be trying to get a better time and get higher on the scoreboard. Speedrun rankings to 40/60/80/100 would provide endles fun (for those who like to compete) trying to beat eachother’s times.
Likes, a proper corruption leaderboard would never become irrelevant…
Even better if all of these were clearly broken down by the permutations (hard/softcore, trade/SAF/SCF, veterans-ruthless/standard)
And now… time to go back to League of Legends and Megabonk… games that actually understand players who want to compete on a scoreboard. (j/k, i’m not a megabonk fan, but i do want to point out that it’s barely a game… ultra simple, and yet it has a meaningful scoreboard - until people start cheating it)
