My problem with how it currently works:
Right now, modifiers are what really dictates how difficult it will be for the player to progress through an echo. Even though corruption also directly increases the damage and health of mobs in the echoes most builds are not affected by it that much until you start to have a lot, so for most players it will only affect passively because it increases the number of harder modifiers in the web, and the modifiers themselves are what will directly make the content more difficult.
But modifiers can often feel bad and too much of a hassle to deal with, especially those who specifically changes what mobs can do like “chance to slow” or “chance to dodge”. And because they can extend to next echoes and can even stack, this bad feeling increases with each new echo you do after completing the first one.
The response we heard a couple of times from devs is that those modifiers are in place to make more challenging to get the best rewards in the monolith web. Even though i like the ideal behind it, i doesn’t feel that it is always applied and when it is, it can feel a bit unproportional to what you receive.
Sometimes “normal rewards” echoes, like gold or experience, are the ones who get the most difficult modifiers and even if they increase your rarity, it doesn’t feel enough. It’s not that hard for “rare rewards” that the player would be more interested to pick to also appear with modifiers that are easier to deal with. And because of the nature of randomness from the echo reward, you often will feel like it wasn’t worth it to have to deal with an annoying modifier after completing the echo and not getting what you want.
My ideas for improvement:
To explain what i want first i will separate the modifiers in too different categories, those who generically increase the strength of monsters like “increased health” and “increased damage” and those who add a more specific trait or buff to monsters like “chance to dodge” “critical avoidance” or “deadly”.
What I’m proposing is:
The first group with more generic modifiers would be the ones to stack and increase the difficulty and rarity of multiple echoes, being found commonly, especially in early monoliths where you don’t find many exalted/unique/set reward echoes.
The second group with more specific modifiers should not stack at all or apply only to the next echo at most, as they are the ones that will really add a new difficult layer to the echo or require that the player pays more attention and play differently. Those should be attached to echoes with rare rewards, special echo types or pathways to those rare echoes. And them you should get the feeling of balance between reward and difficulty.
With those changes i feel it would be less frustrating to go through echoes and get a “bad modifier” without notice, making it best overall for the new players who doesn’t know what those modifiers can really do to their build and for the player who already has thousands of hours in the game and just end up not looking at every modifier they take. It would also introduce a sense of more linear progression when you start stacking the first type of modifiers, in opose to the sudden peak in difficulty when you pick the second type.
Another idea would be to add a new type of echo that gave you modifiers of the first type for the entire echo web or add an option to choose to add/delete a modifier instead of increasing corruption for the fight against the shade of orobyss.
Its of course a suggestion:
Of course, i also know that i’m just another player and definitely dont know more about the game then the devs that have been working on it for so long. But having more opinions is good and i like to share my opinions. And fortunally EHG often hear what the community has to say.
Thanks for the great game and keep the good work!