My interest has waned

General
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I’m clocking in at 130 hours. Not nearly as many of some of you, sure, but I think that’s a decent clip of time that’s useful for judging how a game is going. Now, I’ve had fun, but there are a couple systems that slowly but surely made me want to play something else, so I figured I’d try to make myself useful and write up a thread before skipping out. Here’s to hoping some of my issues get addressed in further updates.

Things that Ground Away My Enthusiasm

  • Monolith of Fate In-And-Out: Diablo 3’s Rifts are largely seamless affairs. You clear a level, go on to the next level, rinse and repeat until The Rift Guardian Has Found You, then you kill it and get a bunch of drops. MoF doesn’t do that. You clear a level, do an objective, back out, touch the rock, touch the chest, touch the web again, and then decide where to go. To be clear, the rewards for Monolith of Fate are definitely not good enough to justify this much fiddling with where you’re going next in the web. My fix would be setting universal rewards for clearing nodes from the map menu and make node progression more like Arena - clear a node, click a button, automatically move on to the next node. Tie node reward drops to the objective, not a rock and a box that you open after the fact.

  • Not Exalted Enough: Even with my fairly generous loot filters, purple drops that get through are extremely rare. I don’t know if it’s because there’s no class weighting or if Exalteds aren’t dropping frequently enough or what the deal is, but progression slams into a wall at a certain point and that just sucks - especially when the Empowered Monoliths are where the real climb begins, and most builds aren’t really ready for Empowered Monoliths once you unlock them.

  • Underpowered Crafting: Crafting could be an opportunity to make white and blue items matter. For some reason, it isn’t. “Oh but Kith, then you could get Best In Slot gear early on!” No, you couldn’t, because low-level gear is trash. A Forest Axe has +23 Melee Damage and a Bardiche has +130 on top of having +130~190% Bleed Chance. That’s not a competition. At worst, it would make the early and midgame easier for people who craft (these are not the parts where the game’s challenge is supposed to be unless difficulty modes get added) and make the endgame more tolerable while hunting for postgame gear because you’ve got stuff you actually want. If you want to put a reasonable limitation on it, section Sealing off into something you can only do to yellow drops instead of crafted yellows.

  • Lack of Shard Auto-Gather Option: I read the topic about automatically gathering shards and saw the dev responding how it’s ~important~ to the people they’ve talked to to have something that ~matters~ to pick up mindlessly. The thing is, it’s also ~important~ to me that I don’t get interrupted every few seconds to click on something that I’m not going to inspect and doesn’t impact my inventory in any meaningful way because there’s a button that I can take an extra second to click to send all of it to the stash. If you’re going to leave manually picking up Shards, at least give us the option to do it automatically. It’s obviously something that the community wants, and if it’s an option, then you can have it both ways.

  • Resistance Breakpoints: It sucks pretty bad that Resistances are just a value check to not take more damage at max level. I know that things were different in the Before Times, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater was not a good solution. Resistances need to matter in some way past the cap or they need to be removed because currently they have no real impact on gameplay or builds outside of punishing you for not having the right t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

  • No way to date Heorot: Don’t lie to yourself, you know you would if the option was there.

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After about 2100h, my enjoyment of LE comes in waves.

I have played through quite a few of the games massive changes and experienced the ups and downs of playing that these have caused. I’ve taken a few months break from LE here and there - purely because I was either bored or didnt want to put in more effort before updates that would directly affect my chars or playstyle.

Truth be told I am probably nearing the stage where LE will become a more casual game for me - playing a few hours here or there instead of mammoth day long sessions of grinding away. At the moment I am enjoying theorycrafting and testing way out build ideas rather than actually playing.

As to your points:

Yip. Monolith scaling is a problem. There isnt really any incentive to push Monoliths from a reward perspective. Modifiers & Corruption and how they interact together needs some more thought imho. There are quite a few threads on this. I do however like Monoliths as a concept esp. the web path where you make active decisions along the route to killing the boss. This web path process could, again imho, use some work to make it more interesting - more paths, more modifiers (+ve and -ve) etc.

After running Monoliths for so long - usually around 250-350 corruption, I can say that Exalted items drop fairly frequently - even with the RNGods involved and causing dry spells. I have probably 60 stash tabs full of exalted items I have collected and seldom struggle to get them in empowered monoliths. What I find tricky about exalted items is the reliance on RNG as they roll - i.e. you get exalted items with incompatible affixes very often - there is nothing more frustrating to get a double exalted with affixes that are diametrically apposed to each other and make the item effectively useless (as you lose the second exalt affix). Another issue with exalted items are the bases - a perfect T7 on a low level base item or a base item with the wrong implicits is equally annoying and you end up keeping it purely for Legendary crafting. All of this is RNG, obviously, but as the game gets more and more affixs and more and more bases, the chances of getting a better exalt is reduced.

Hmm… This one I dont agree on. There is zero need for white & blue items to be better crafting bases. Rares drop early and freqently enough to make decent bases for levelling & the crafting allows you to incrementally improve them as you go through the campaign - even though, imho, you dont need crafting for most of the early game. You can easily make your chars OP during the campaign stages with some clever crafting choices - I have a feeling its part of why people complain the game is too easy. Honestly I set my filter to hide normal & blue items almost immediately when starting a char.

Later game crafting could use some nice additions, like the idea of a transmogrify rune to change the base of an item to something else (higher level) etc. but generally the grind is required to find the best craftable items as a starting point for BiS late game gear. I dont have much of an issue with late game crafting - I find it generally easy to tick off all the boxes for gear requirements.

Honestly dont care either way on this one. It seems like it annoys a lot of people so a QoL option seems logical. One thing for me for online play is the delay of picking up items that bothers me - it can take obvious seconds to register that shards are being picked up after I click. I find that more annoying than anything else.

There are quite a few things that work on overcapped resistances or take resistances into consideration for a secondary effect - uniques etc. - some even added recently in 0.9+ (quick search on lastepochtools will find them). Some of them are pretty powerful when taken advantage of. I would guess that the devs are trying to expand the usefulness of the resistance values beyond the base 75%.

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I agree with Vapourfire here, for me I am waiting for the community tournaments/new subclasses to reignite my passion for LE.
Just remember the skatman: “While your still sleeping saints still weeping because things you call dead haven’t had the chance to be born”

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Before they tweaked the forging potential, blues were the best possible crafting bases because you could have 2 acceptable affixes, then craft on the other 2 that you wanted & get everything up to t20 without much difficulty. This meant that yellows were largely ignored which made @EHG_Mike sad, and that’s why the EQ Werebear was nerfed.

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This highlights that there was never a clear vision / rationale for the crafting system in the first place, which is kind of what the issue is with it. The crafting system has been at its best when it’s been out of the way where the player hasn’t had to deal with it for the most part.

I think an eventual-success system that is less extreme than PoE is almost always the best way of setting something like this up. That way, you can have certain items or bonuses you can get from crafting, and certain ones that just have to drop the way that you need them, so that a certain percentage of your build you’re always guaranteed to complete eventually.

The problem that always stands in the way of balancing anything this way, of course, is a bunch of people liking it the way it was before with no thought about how it could be improved in context of the overall experience. I can understand why some people would be frustrated with that.

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Having been around through the crafting system and item affix changes there is also one thing that I found very interesting… It felt to me like a lot of people where swimming upstream with regard to crafting - i.e. they were trying to force their perception of how they thought crafting should work on the system(s) and invariably those were the ones getting most frustrated with LE crafting. Its definitely different to other arpgs so trying to use the default crafting learnt from other games just doesnt work in LE. Personally, I have found that once you accept how LE crafting works, it is far easier and WAY more successful to go with the flow and change your mindset rather than force the more traditional crafting principles on the LE process and inevitably fail more often than not.

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I think it’s more that people were putting in effort and not seeing the benefit. When something obviously exists to slow you down, it becomes a roadblock or a hindrance instead of something that helps you.

What’s super interesting about the way the community has reacted to it is that there are people who are clearly addicted to it like it’s a slot machine and will defend it to the death, while others have kind of seen through it and try to never use it at all. (I admit to being in the second group, myself.) It’s been a really neat social experiment in that way.

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Is always great to give feedback to the devs, please take this as just a personal feedback of your feedback, nothing serious.

Monolith of Fate In-And-Out: Partially agree, monos need a serious rework.

Not Exalted Enough: Disagree, I think exalted drop rates are fine. If not a bit too generous.

Underpowered Crafting: Totally disagree, I think they hit a great spot, RNG is shared between the drop and the craft itself. I understand is not for everyone, but as currently is, you get excited for both a good drop and a lucky craft.

Lack of Shard Auto-Gather Option: Don’t care, they already reduced the shard frequency, I think is fine as it is.

Resistance Breakpoints: while I am not 100% behind on how the resistances were implemented, from a gearing perspective they fill a role in a not so oppressive way, compared with the typical 75%-80% cap, but not so loose you can ignore them completely (D4). I like how you have to juggle resistances in this game, thanks to idols you can swap things over and over and keep them reasonably high.

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Thats typically how I was reading the peoples frustrations until they explained how they were crafting and I realised how much of the wrong effort they were putting in. Granted, LE has not been intuitive in its crafting approach and how FP works and the RNG involved (potentially ruining a lucky item drop which was RNG to get in the first place) but once you figure it out, it works well imho. Unfortunately figuring crafting by trial and error would most definitely sour the process for the average player - no argument there. So, yeah, I understand how people have a love or hate relationship with crafting in LE. I suffer the same dissapointment as everyone, but I have been able to make a large number of BiS items too so for me it works. The key is that I have played for far longer than the typical casual player would and my experience is averaged out over a much longer time - thats essentially the problem - who is the game for?

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It’s not that it’s the wrong effort. It’s that the crafting system exists to slow you down and break your items. You can’t try harder or play smarter and get better RNG. Even if you do everything optimally, you’ll only succeed a certain percentage of the time. And people know that. They’re not dumb. They just don’t like the system. It becomes a chore once you realize that you’re theoretically tens, hundreds or even thousands of hours away from items you’d like to have. It’s there to slow you down way too much, and that’s really the issue with it.

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I dont see the crafting system as a negative - I see it as an RNG way of improving your char and making you better/faster. Sometimes it works, sometimes is doesnt and you carry on playing till you can try again. Phrases like “slow you down” or “break your items” are odd to me - I dont think that way. Crafting to me is a way of making your char better. Sure RNG can dull the potential outcome, especially if you try a risky craft on an item you are actively using but I see crafting as a net positive.

As for intentionally “slowing you down” , well, if that were the case, then the question is “At what point do the devs want a player to have a char or two min/maxed with BiS items”… and then obviously work back from there so that the systems/mechanics in the game are balanced around this arbitrary playtime figure… I have played too long for my experience to be realistic against a more casual player - if thats who the devs are targetting… I dont feel like LE is anywhere near the MMO levels of “slowing down”.

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When this crafting system was first introduced I actually conducted two 100-trial tests on it. This was the result of the second one: Link

I came up with this formula for expected upgrades in that post. To my knowledge, it hasn’t changed since then:

FP / 4.2 , +1 if R exists , +1, 10% chance; where FP is forging potential and R is the remainder.

This is pretty thorough as it takes into account both critical successes and failures.

This is the basis on which I think about the crafting system. If you have an Exalted item that has 40 forging potential, that means you’d expect to see about 10 upgrades before you run out. This means you have almost no wiggle room for changing affixes, and considering that Glyph of Despair failure rate is much higher than a regular crafting attempt, (I can’t test it because of the rarity of the resource but it’s usually between 25%-50% failure rate, depending on how high the affix is you’re trying to seal,) the reality is, unless an Exalted item drops almost the way you want it already, you’re basically not going to craft it into something that is better than what you already have. This is not to even take into account the implicits, the base stat values on the affixes, if the exalted affix is T6 or T7, what tier you’re going to seal an affix at, if that affix is one of the ones you want it to be, etc. The amount of time you’re going to be able to do that is probably 1 in 10, and that’s assuming the exalted item you want drops in the first place.

The way random chance works is that you multiply out the time all of these different factors take to happen and then that’s your expected playtime to get to the desired outcome. So if one takes 15 minutes, and another takes 15 minutes, that’s 225 minutes, or 3.75 hours of playtime to have it happen. (Assuming they’re all independent of each other, which as far as we know, they are.) As you and I both know, having a specific Exalted item drop, that then has decent implicits, and 3 of 4 affixes you’re after, with T7 on the one you really care about… None of that takes 15 minutes to happen. It’s not even close to 15 minutes for any of those things. It’s much much longer. And that’s not even everything you need to have happen to get a decent item BEFORE crafting. Multiply all of that by your chances of not succeeding at crafting and, yeah. You get the picture: Not pretty.

All of that to say, if you care about getting decent Exalted items and you don’t have the self control to put the game down until you do, then OP is right. Crafting is very much in the way. To the tune of hundreds of more hours than you might imagine.

It’s so extreme that what drops can dictate what it is and isn’t viable for you to do on a particular character / spec. Thankfully Set and Unique items as well as Blessings greatly offset this. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still happen from time to time.

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Bro,

You sound like one of those " I showed up, reward me" kinda gamers. How do you have 130 hours and haven’t figured out LE?

Gear is crafted. Good gear is crafted out of exalted drops. LE crafting system is OP if anything but way far from underpowered. Exalteds drop in plenty. You haven’t set up the monos’s/loot filter properly. The rewards are good enough. I easily shatter 2/3 pieces of gear every mono.

Auto gather shards would be nice. I’m with you on that. I ignore 90% of them by this point.

Resistance matters when you don’t have it. Over-capping resistance matters when you face a res shredding mob or when u have gear that utilizes over-capping a res.

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I’ve played about 670 hours. I agree with a lot of what the OP is saying here.

Plus, 130 hours is a long time to play and not feel entertained. I’m not sure why that would affect the validity of anyone’s criticisms.

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I’ve played 1600+ hours and disagree with almost all of what the OP is saying.

I find his criticisms invalid because they are not accurate. All the gear any player needs to play this game on a high level drops at your feet.
Too many players of too many games always look to find fault in the game instead of asking themselves if they can do anything better. The OP can do a lot of things better.

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Yeah, I participated in that thread you link to. Had to spend a few minutes recapping but I essentially feel pretty much the same way as I did then.

Mathematics aside, your summary of crafting Exalted items is pretty much what I have experienced through playing. Yet, I have been able to produce the gear I needed fairly regularly - a decent number of BiS items for probably a half dozen chars and many more general purpose late game viable others and countless T20s with less than ideal affix combinations. Again, the number of times I have crafted items is probably WAY beyond what other players and I never bothered to keep a tally, but I could very well have had success in the 1/10 range you mention. I have no idea how many times i have crafted, but even if I did so a few times an hour of playtime, I am in the thousands if not 10s of thousands of crafts.

Yet, even after that, for me its been generally successful and occasionally too powerful/too easy.

There are definitely ways to make crafting better and perhaps less frustrating, but I really do see it as a positive aspect of the game and have never seen it as you do as being " in the way " of progress or slowing you down. As you mentioned a few posts ago, this is an “interesting social experiment”

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@perrythepig did an amazing video that breaks down the stats on Glyph of Despairs. It’s pretty stellar. https://youtu.be/JVJn1CWcM0Y

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I wouldn’t go that far. It may be that they did have a “clear vision” and “rationale” but they simply didn’t understand all the intricacies that were needed to make it what it should be.

The fact that it is significantly different than that of the other games in the genre points to the fact that there was some great thought given to it, but the fact that it still needs a lot of work points to the fact that maybe they needed more input from others with a different understanding of how it would work out.

I’m not saying that they were the best and thought it all the way through, because that is apparently not the case. I am saying that I think what it is now says that they thought it through to the best of their ability at the time of implementation with a clear vision of what they wanted and had some great rationale for that. They do need to make sure they are taking the inputs they have received and figure out how to make the improvements that will make it go from a great idea to an outstanding success.

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Well time for some unpopular oppinions as it seems :smiley: .

Monolith of Fate: back when the Mono was fresh and not as evolved then it was these days I was brought back in time when I looked confused at a equaly confused girl and asked “Well that was it?”. Hoped for more but got an experience that was even worth my time… not to speak of the girl who experienced the smallest letdown of her life :smiley: .

Monos are boriung and tedious to me and not fun. On the other hand thes are the bread and butter of Hack and Slash games… mindnumbingly boring content that is repeated again and again and again and again. I dislike the whole progression through them that I have to replay them with each toon and the grind for corruption in the most boring setup ever created. To me even D3 had a better endgame because it was easiely aproachable and fast. PoE mapping, what I realy dislike, is even better in my oppinion because it delivers more choice how you move through it.

The static bossfights are fun once or twice and then they are instantly old and you only die if you accumulated to much corruption or if youself mess up. I feel my braincells die playing this content and I’ll play it again once the game is life because I can’t be arsed to play this again and again on multiple toons.

Exalts: Sooner or later they drop left and right and are farmable in exalted Monoloith nodes. Are they good? Most likely not because the itemesation in LE is a slot machine on top of a slot machine that is built into another slot machine and one of the three seems to be rigged at least.
I played D4 in the last weeks and I had more Legendaries that rolled with a max roll on their legendary stat and worthwhile stats to craft on not to speak of rares to craft on. The less complicated system of D4 with a more frequent meaningfull drop system (and I was unlucky compared to the people I played with) was better then everything I experienced in LE since the crafting changes. What leads us to:

Crafting: I like the old crafting system better. I was happy back then when I found a good rolled base item because I knew I had the chance to roll something good or at least useable for some levels.
I liked the fact that I had worhtwhile items outside of hoping for a 1 in a million rare drop to craft on (remove the lootfilter and count items if you think the chances are better) not to speak of exalted items or making good use of LP.
T20 items are not that important and I don’t know why people make a big fuzz about it when people advocate to get them more easiely. Those are just endgame entry items and when you want to minmay the crap out of the game there is not one T20 item involved in the plan if the theorycrafter isn’t a complete and utter fool when it comes to minmaxing.
I had no problem in the past with destroyed items through crafting because there were a lot of items to craft on back then and today you are either lucky or FUBAR without little inbetween.

Auto pickup: I’m still unhappy with the reasoning of hte devs that shard should be “meaningfull items to pick up”. To me this still sounds like a bad joke and leaves a sour taste behind. If they said they use shards to slowdown the players pacing it would’ve made more sense to me then what they answered on the topic so far. I look forward to all the “auto loot” threads that will pop up in the future and after release because it seems to be a hill to die on for the devs… sadly it’s a very flat and small and unimportant hill non the less… it’s a hill as it seems.

Resistences: Everyone goes for it. everyone maxes it. It’s mendetory for everyone. You could remove it all togheter and remove 4 sufixes on item slots and you would’ve the same outcome. If everyone needs it and goes for it it’s just useless clutter on top of it maxing resis is the most easy thing to do in the game. To me the whole system feels so stuck in the 80s I can’t help it but not like it that much and I’m still asking myself why every Hack and Slash isn’t able to come up with more meaningfull stats.

Heorot: Dates are to expensive so nah thx!

Combat: To me the combat still feels somehow clunky and unpolished. There is still not enough hit feedback to begin with and the animations are… not to my liking/taste. The whole passive and skilltree is just math with the illusion of choise where in reality you gimp your build if you don’t go the best possible way… just like in every other Hack and Slash. Why have skilltrees with a lot of possibilities if there are no possibilities at the end of the day?
Sure if you don’t care for char evolvement and minmaxing you can pick what you want or nothing and play the game and that’s fine but this isn’t changing the fact that… on to the next point:

Balancing: Is all over under and besides the place. iirc correctly the devs aimed for 300 corruption to be the endgame for whatever reason. I don’t know if this is still the case but to me this paints a sad picture of the current state of the game. There are again and again outliers that need to be gutted and a ton of underperforming skill/class options noone thinks are desireable in a minmaxed or effective build.

Classes: I miss the old days when classes had idendity and weren’t watered down by items that made them boring and generic. I still wait for the void unicorn mount that poops flames for the Paladin to make the circus complete.

Uniques: This is a genre wide phenomenon… there are a lot of uniques and build enabeling uniques and almost all of them have trash stats compared to crafted options. Sadly you can’t life without the bad stat uniques if you need a unique mod for a build and you are bound to trash tier stats.
I can’t understand why uniques can’t have desirable stats throughout all the uniques in a game. In LE a looooooot of uniques have trash tier stats not to speak of most set items/bonuses.

Maybe a new build reignites my LE drive but right now I can’t bring myself to play the game and I feel sad about it because in the past I liked the game a lot and played it a lot. Then again this is just my oppinion on the points the OP made with some sprinkles of my own points of dislike. At the end of the day it’s a question of taste and I don’t look for a discussion about my views of the game because I’m sure most people won’t share them. I’m happy for everyone who loves to play LE and I hope I’ll love to play it again in the future. Right now I’m just not convinced by the product but that isn’t a bad thing and not even discussion worthy :wink: .

I realy want LE to to be a good game but so far all I’ve left are my hopes that LE will be a succsess because the systems ingame and the content that is there isn’t rerasuring when I look at it as a standalone product and even less reasuring when I compare it to other titles of the genre. It’s kind of a 4/10 will play it out of boredom if nothing else is there kind of game to me in it’s current state.

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Then why have them?

I understand the issue, but “make them useless for crafting” isn’t the solution because that makes them useless for everything. You don’t HAVE to have trash drops, it’s not against the law to make them useful in some capacity.

You might have the patience to spend an unhealthy amount of time grinding away at monotonous systems for diminishing returns, but I do not. I have a family, friends, a job (doing game design, actually), several chronic illnesses, and a handful of miscellaneous responsibilities. If I’ve already sunk 100+ hours into something and it’s not entertaining me anymore, I have plenty of other things to do - often other games that I still enjoy after spending just as much (and often significantly more) time with. And it’s not a question of different genres, either: Diablo 3 managed to steal about 2,000 hours of my life before it wore out on me, so these problems are unique to LE itself.