My take on a way to improve echo’s for late game players

Feedback and Suggestions
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TLDR: the idea to add consumables to change and boost individual echo experiences.

So my idea I doubt is original and is probably has a similar rendition in another ARPG, with that being said I only play anymore for ARPG’s so I didn’t know.

Features that are within LE that inspired/relate to this concept stem from: woven echo placement system, dungeon keys and charms, folly woven echo’s ability to add amber to surrounding echos, the choice to spawn a harbinger in timeline fights, the woven tree ability to add dungeon drops to general echos, and prophecies.

The general concept is adding dropped non tradable consumables that can be selected to alter the next echo you enter.

The simplest version in my mind is incorporating an echo modification placement spot above the start echo box within the echo web. Prior to selecting start you place the consumable echo modifier. Once you enter the echo it consumes the modifier and you gain whatever it gives. I do believe to ideally prevent obvious exploitations is if you die and fail the echo you lose the ability to place a modifier. As I can imagine people would find the most effective area and just keep renter if the echo and potentially gaming the system to make the echo broken.

A more advanced system would be an autonomous system you can turn on and off and it will automatically consume the selected echo modifier to buff the next echo entered.

As for my ideal version of the system it would allow for multiple different echo modifiers to be consumed at once and will apply all effects of consumed echo modifiers. Just note I am a glass cannon only or ganon for short. I can easily die 3/4/15 times before I complete an echo at times. And I hate the idea of losing the abilities to use echo modifiers on death but I realize it’s probably needed to avoid exploitation of the system.

Originally when thinking of this idea I wanted to incorporate the ability of adding more modifiers to the amount of corruption reached, but then considered could this become an issue. And I came to the conclusion that this system could be viewed as a must pay and restrict build freedom of players. As they may be forced to play a build that is strong enough to reach the required corruption for max allowed modifiers. Opposed to playing a build they enjoy or experimenting with build ideas. Out of fear of missing out on drops and being punished for playing their way.

So I reworked my brain and thought of what’s something players keep asking for but has yet to be implemented into my brain. And the conclusion I came to was in game achievements. Opposed to locking the ability to add more echo modifiers per echo through essentially build damage output. For example kill your first empowered boss any corruption gain access to the echo modifier system. Kill one of each dungeon boss gain a second modifier slot. Kill normal abberoth gain a fifth modifier slot.

I believe the incorporation of “my idea” and in game achievements is a two fold bonus. First being it give the achievements weight opposed to an arbitrary check list with no real purpose. As well as I believe it would promote player’s to experience different aspects of the game and help players discover useful area they may miss from being new to the game. For example if one of the conditions included completing the turtle woven echo and re-rolling at least one unique of lp amount one or more.

So a few examples of what consumable echo modifiers could be:
*add ten cashes to the echo. (Just to note this whole post started because I’m sick and tired over group play basically only being troves speed running)
*add three random enraged timeline bosses at low health and increased damage with increased boss lp chance
*chance to spawn normal roaming abberoth with four randomly placed champions protecting his health.

  • increased mob spawn packs but all mobs are now deadly.
  • spawn 3 empowered cashes and one mimic cashe all look the same
  • all mobs are now (x) spiders/siege golems/immortal eyes/ruined mages.
    *all mobs now drop at least one exalted chest piece but the echo contains fewer mob packs
  • imprint slot (x) has increased chance to activate but imprint (y) is disabled
  • mobs but one mob can no longer take damage and you now need to find the hidden mob that can take damage before death clock with time (x) runs out
    *players move speed is set to zero and all mobs now advance towards the player
  • more loot lizards spawn with increased drop rates but killing a loot lizard now gives all mobs (x) more damage and can stack an unlimited times
  • killing enemies adds (x) buff to players stacks (y) times but now killing a mob adds persisting dot (z)
    *all mobs are now champions but all champions cannot drop loot (champion imprint can still activate)

I’m going to stop here as if I don’t I won’t :grin:. If you made it this far and read the whole thing my hat is off to you for giving it a read. And as always hate or loving my ideas is all gravy. if you say any feed back it’s much appreciated positive or negative as I try to apply it to my future posts.

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Just read the TLDR line - boosting echos would be cool if it was done well (not sure what that means) I guess it’s same as we did in PoE2. I have no idea what different concepts of boosting people would want, everyone would be different. If they considered this they might need to gather the few most sound ideas and have a poll on which people might like the most?

Anyway - not against it if it was worked out and done well

PS it’s Cache bro not cash haha love you <3

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Blame my bad brain and inability to pay attention in school for bad spelling my bad. Also yeah I do my best to have a tldr sum up as not everyone wants to read a novel. And sometimes when I over explain the idea I paint it in an unfavourable box. Which is why the tldr is general concept and my word vomit is just my take on the idea

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Nah it’s all good I went through afterwards. The cool part with this idea is that there is basically infinite ideas behind what an upgrade/boost option could be from spawning more mobs, more exp per mob, boss mobs, rare items, etc etc that it definitely could cater to everyone. I think the thought of making an echo much harder by boosting mobs would be a really nice idea for people who just don’t have the time or patience to run a gazillion echoes to reach a higher corruption. Having a build which could with stand 5000c but no time to get there able to boost monsters by 500% or something of the like would be kinda cool.

I think as it stands now grinding corruption yeilds absolutely nothing. A few more exalted items but otherwise it’s actually really pointless and a lot of people are unhappy with its current state so yeah. Would be cool to spice it up a bit :slight_smile:

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The roadmap mentions “Monolith of Fate Update: Corruption Tiers”. I imagine it will be somewhat similar to D4 Torment Tiers and Levels, just from the word “Tiers” alone. I’m in favor of getting away from the continuous corruption system we have now (or they keep it for the last tier).
The proposed or other “juicing” systems would complement corruption tiers well imo.

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Oh I didnt see that at all - I’m actually pretty out of date with Diablo haven’t played it in years so wouldn’t know what its like I’ll have a google and see.

Yeah endless corruption is actually the worst ever it needs variation for sure!

Edit - the way it sounded on google - unlock different tier difficulties as you grind areas pretty much just sounds like grinding echos and unlocking higher corruption? If there’s a good video on it or if you can explain how it works that would be sick, thanks <3 <3 <3

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I haven’t played since launch either :grin: . To me they sounded like fixed difficulty levels with the last needing to be unlocked first by completing a specific challenge. Otherwise you could swap between the tiers freely. WoWHead seems to have an updated description. But the details don’t matter. We don’t need an exact copy in LE.

There’s no actual grind needed to get to a higher tier. If you your character is strong enough or you’re skilled, you can select a higher tier or complete the challenge to unlock that tier. The grind is about getting stronger to be able to “play efficiently” in the next higher tier.

However the new tiered system may look like in details, it would/should be more tangible than “I’m at corruption level 656”. I’m also not against milestone challenge to advance, like beating regular Abberoth to unlock a later tier.

With the current corruption system we are like the frog in a pan and the water is brought to boil gradually:

  • Suprise from sudden one-shots
  • Doesn’t feel challenging unless you really overshoot corruption somehow
  • All difficulty levels feel the same, it feels like a chore and grind and becomes repetitive quickly

Also a tiered system would/should give clear goals and inform the player that the character is done and they “beat” the game. The balance discussion also becomes much easier (I guess that’s why the gruadual / endless approach was chosen in the first place, plus it stretches the endgame “content” artificially).

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There is an issue with this, though.

The way it currently is it’s true that you have no endgame “sense”. But on the other hand, players don’t feel like they have to reach corruption xyz to feel like they’re playing effectively. Anything past Aby is pretty much the same (Uby excluded) and you push however much you want.

If you had the tier system D3/D4 uses, then players will feel like they have to push to the max tier, otherwise they will be inefficient. And since one of the tiers will have to be on par with Uby, this will feel bad for many builds.

Having a tier system is good for the endgame grinders since it gives them something to push for (although once they reach it you will have the same situation again). But it’s bad for the mid-tier players that previously felt like they were already in endgame (again, excluding Uby) in 500c and were happy with their efforts, which now feel like they’re only halfway to endgame.

It also removes the incentive to keep playing by pushing corruption. Plenty of endgame grinders stay around longer so they can push to 2k or 5k corruption. If you had a tier system where the last tier is Uby equivalent (or 1.2k-1.5k equivalent), then they have no more reason to stick around. They already beat the game.

So either system has pros and cons, depending on which type of player you are.

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I’m curious is all this talk about d4 and tiers directed at corruption scaling or my proposed “consumable echo modifiers system”. As I don’t believe I mentioned tiers anywhere, closest thing is the extra consumable modifiers slots. Of which I picked random examples of how to unlock them just to show a way it could be done. And nothing required crazy gear I believe the hardest example I gave was normal abberoth.

Just a post note.
not every addition has to be directed at the casual or die hard player. And not everything added is going to be liked by all. I believe I suggested something that can provide added value to a wide variety of player base types. And rewarded the player with extra ways to improve their playtime by allowing them to alter the grind. And again I provided my version of core idea and by no means said this is the one and only way to do it.

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In my opinion, all of these are good points.

  • It shows which homebrew builds are trash and which are OP. It shows the community and EHG clearly which builds are fun but underperforming or which ones need a nerf. Currently we have builds that do 50x more damage and are tanky at the same time and hardly anyone raises an eyebrow.
  • “Anything past Aby is pretty much the same (Uby excluded) and you push however much you want.” - you push corruption once or twice past Aby. There’s no point in doing that each season on new characters. You’ve seen it already.
  • “It also removes the incentive to keep playing by pushing corruption. Plenty of endgame grinders stay around longer so they can push to 2k or 5k corruption.” This incentive is a bad thing imo. There’s no point in it. To the contrary, there should be incentives to start a new character. It is where an ARPG shines. Not keep players all too long in stale endgame when they’re actually finished. It makes them quit the game for good.
  • Uby could be outside of the tiers, as the very last pinnacle challenge only for players that truely want to face an Uber boss.
  • “So either system has pros and cons, depending on which type of player you are.” - The player that gets attached to their character comes from other genres like MMOs or RPGs. We should nudge these players into the other category. Because these players don’t stick around. They play the game once and move on. (It’s also where MMO’s struggle. WoW “solves” this by devalueing your current gear each season, power creep until they need to squish it down all again when they reach quadrillion damage numbers)

Sorry for the disgression. My train of thought was, that tiers and “juicying” go better together then the continuous corruption system we have now. Introducing juicying mechanics doesn’t really make sense at the moment, because “you could just push corruption”.

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I wasn’t really addressing your post (which seems fine), just Shathor’s assumption that tiers only have benefits.

We already know which ones are trash and which are OP. We see them (or their absence) in the leaderboards and in the various examples online of their shennanigans.
More importantly, EHG definitely knows which are which. Balance is all over the place not because EHG doesn’t know what to buff or nerf but because balance is a hard thing to accomplish and they still lack the experience (that GGG accumulated over 10 years) to pull it off right now.

All tiers change in this regard is that the build that did 5k corruption and killed Uby in 10s now clear T16 (or however much is the highest tier) echoes in 20s and Uby in 10s.
And that a build that reached 500c felt good and now will feel bad because there are extra tiers that need to be pushed.

Most players that get past Aby will try to push to close to 1k corruption. Not only are the drops better (there’s a soft cap, but that’s all it is, soft. 1k still gets better drops than 500c), the exp is better (and thus you get more favours).

There are plenty of incentives to start a new character. One of them is reaching 500c and feeling like you finished the game, excluding Uby. So you start a new character. With tiers, this is gone, since you haven’t finished the game. You have to keep grinding for the next tier.

Also, not everyone likes making new characters. There are lots of players that will play a single character for the whole season. Lots play only 2. Because they’re the types of players that like to push the limit. Once they reach the limit, they leave. Tiers will make them reach the limit sooner, so they’ll leave sooner.

That doesn’t actually change anything. You still need tiers to progress to the point where you’re at least close to be able to deal with Uby. Which means previous 500c builds that felt fun and finished now are only halfway done and need to keep grinding.

As I said, tiers are good for some types of players. Corruption is good for other types of players. And both systems are meaningless for casuals (other than the fact that they see that there are 16 difficulty levels, or tiers, like in D3 and might be scared off from even trying).

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I think you may have pigeonholed your self into a box by attaching the word juicing to what you previously associated to what u define as juicing.

You could say “my concept” can be the same as the typical juicing, but it is not limited to just the notion of “better drops”. I personally view it as more of target farming opposed to just increasing drop rates. And more so the concept was like a choose your adventure book style of game, if your old enough to get that reference.

I know everything can be related to drops as by default ARPG’s typically always boil down to loot. But if you read some of my examples given in the original post it contained examples where changing how mobs function.

For example:

This is basically a combination of hid and seek and a race age at the clock. And has no mention of drops in this on.

Also I don’t believe I mentioned easing corruption to access my concept.

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I just reread my original post I actually specifically said that attaching the system to corruption would be “a bad idea”

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“We”, in you and me and everyone else active in forum, discord and so on. Because we are a very minor group of players that follow this game more closely.

Sadly, I think EHG has no clue which are which or they don’t want to address it. Their train of thought is fair: “Not all builds need to be viable for end-endgame as long as they are fun”. On the other hand this causes balance to be all over the board, as we see now.

There’s no need to push anything. You’re too stuck in this corruption pushing mindset. The last tier might be 500c to 1500c or open-ended equivalent. The tiers just indicate clear difficulty jumps. If your build can’t handle the last tier, then it’s not a viable build as currently a build that is not getting to anywhere past 500c+ is not viable either. Uby as the last pinacle boss should be excluded from these tiers difficulty band.

This is nowhere clearly communicated either. If the last tier encompassed 500c to 1000c or a bit more, it could be communicated correctly.

It’s only an incentive to us, because we know there’s nothing past 500c to be gained (excluding Uby). There’s no communication by the game that 500c is enough. A regular player doesn’t stop until he realises that the theoretical character progression is next to impossible to achieve in reasonable timeframe. They play until they hit the 2T7 wall, if they have not quit in frustration beforehand. If they have not quit, then they become like us. The game dangles a carrot in front of you that you can never reach. (Corrupted items make it even worse).

Or they turn into the other type of player, realize the journey was fun and restart with another build. Instead now they play until they get bored, quit for good and never return. They may even leave a bad review. They last thing they remember of the game is the boredom.

This other type of player is not sustainable on the long run, because they leave or have left already for good.

@legionone I agree with everything you said. As you’re aware, these modifiers need to balance reward (which may be more loot, targeted loot, position on leaderboard, achievement, …) with modifier difficulty. “Variety” alone could also be a good “reward”, unless there’s a more efficient way of achieving the same. Because players would stick to farm the easier option. This is showcased by the Rift Beast. There’s no point of choosing any of the three evolution paths consciously, the rewards (Affixes, Runes, some random item type) are too minor. Once you get your primordial, you’re done. No point of engaging with the Rift Beast henceforth despite it giving a variety to the monotony of monolith (pun intended). It’s more efficient, not to unlock the 7th evolution until you got your well rolled Evolution’s End, …

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Why would tiers change that? You, me and everyone else active in forum, discord and so on would know because we are a very minor group of players that follow this game more closely.
Everyone else would have the exact same information on whether a build is UP or OP whether you use corruption pushing or a tier sytem.

Nah. Mike already talked about what their goal for balance is and that is to bring them closer together. It’s just that balance is very tricky when you have billions of possible combinations where small changes can have huge impact.

GGG only got a hold of balance after lots of years of tweaking. And the thing that ended up fixing their balance more than anything else was actually power creep, which made most builds have a chance at all content, given enough currency dumping.

Yes, currently there isn’t. I get to 500c, kill Aby and my character feels finished. I don’t feel the need to push corruption.
With tiers, at 500c equivalent, I wouldn’t be on the last difficulty tier. The same character would feel incomplete until they could deal with the last tier.

The same character, no changes. With the current system I’m happy with it and can make a new one with a free conscience, with tiers I feel like I have to keep grinding to reach the final tier.

Sure it is. You look at the modifiers (especially item rarity) and see them going up when you go up in corruption. What more do you need?

There is a huge difference between 500c and 1k. One tier wouldn’t be enough for that range. And you’d need a tier after that, since Uby needs more than that. Otherwise you’ll have a huge gap between the last tier and Uby.

Sure there is.
You get the campaign quests to guide you.
When you finish the campaign, you get the normal mono quests to guide you.
When you get to empowered monos, you get the harbinger quests to guide you.
When you kill Aby (at around 500c) there are no more quests. So you’re done.

That doesn’t happen (or very rarely happens and can be ignored). Just look at PoE1, with clearly defined difficulty tiers (map tiers) and see that there are still lots of players that only play 1-2 characters per season. When they’re done, they leave until next season.
They don’t change and become a altoholic instead. What they like is pushing the limit and they don’t like doing that 10 times per season.

Why? They like the game. They like the build. Pushing corruption actually gives them a goal to keep playing if they want to.

Getting to endgame (500c) in LE doesn’t take too long. You get there in a week of semi-casual play. Or in 1 day of sweatlord grinding. It’s only a bit longer than D4 endgame.

As we see every single season in D4, many players (these types of players) finish the content in 1-2 days and then leave because once you reach max level and get your ultra gear, there is no point in continuing to play. Even if the character is fun to play, it feel empty because you’re not actually advancing anything anymore. There are no more goals.

In LE, however, they can still keep advancing if they want. They can still reach 500c and quit. Or push to Uby (which most of them finish by the 2nd day as well). Or push to 10k corruption. Or continue to push. Or just feel like Uby is enough. Or that 5k is enough.

One system clearly tells you “You finished the game, go away”. The other tells you “You finished the game, but you can keep playing if you want and we’ll give you something to do”.

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The greater part of players don’t engage with any information source outside of the game, except maybe a build guide (but then they are already on the more OP builds). The game itself doesn’t give you enough pointers that your build is on the right path or not. You might find yourself in a limbo of corruption pushing and lowering and have questions like: is 254c or 277c or 312c doable? What corruption should my build - in its current stage - be able to do? In this timeline I can, in this one I can not? etc.

The tiered system makes this more clear: If you struggle in your current tier, it makes sense to keep farming and refine your build. Once you are confident you can advance. If you struggle too much, you go back a tier again. At some point you will come to the realization, that the next higher tier is unachievable with your build unless you drastically change it. The corruption system makes it too foggy to come to such a realization.

They have been kind of flip-floppy on this topic. First they said that 300c is somewhat what value they balance around, later 500c. Then they completely stopped communicating around corruption values and kept saying that fun builds have their right to exist and just because some skill is up/op on paper doesn’t mean it needs a buff/nerf and that’s why they have been reluctant with drastic changes. With a tiered system, they can no longer dance around this topic. (I also hope their new data tool gives them better insight into it all)

I get what you’re saying. They’d need to frame the last tier in a manner that is truely only meant for the sweatlords. So that you feel like you don’t need to really reach it, the same way like you feel you don’t really need to tackle Uby (I like the idea of a truely uber hard boss like Uby is now only for the most skilled players or those with endless time).

Or afformentioned “juicing” comes into play here with the last tier encompassing a difficulty band from 500c to 1000c+.

Or the last tier is open-ended again (which idea I personally like less and less).

Btw, in the future you will need to go beyond Abberoth and probably beyond the current 500c anyway: EHG has acknowledged the gap between Abberoth and Uber Abberoth and they want something in between.

Clear(er) communication when it stops being beneficial. When I’m finished. When there’s no point of continueing unless I’m a sweatlord. Less a gradual approach and a higher tangible jump in difficulty and reward.

The quests are done, but the difficulty may rise endlessly and more importantly there’s a nebulously teased character progression with 3LP+, 3T7+, corrupted items etc. It’s all only theoretically achievable because of the nigh-impossible chances. In LE, you could always go further. Become stronger. Beat higher corruption. But the diminishing returns kick in and realistically there’s no progress possible any more (it also varies from build to build).

There’s no limit. I think its more like they only push high once, get very bored, burnt out and turn their back on the game for good. I think it would be much healthier to show a clear finishing line earlier, make them feel that they want more and give incentives to restart another build (the last part is actually already pretty good in LE with interesting uniques and the skills that are shown thoughout your current playthrough).

The better system is: “You finished your character, but you’re not done with the game yet.”
The current system is: “You have never finished your character, so keep playing the same again and again and again until you’re burnt out or bragged about 50k corruption to everyone else that doesn’t care.”

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And even then we cannot make a fully coherent statement to it either as it’s only the representation of the top-skilled players in that area.
If - for example - 20 player dominate the leaderboard and 5 of those love to play acolytes then the whole board is dominated comparatively by acolytes, no measurement if the acolyte is or is not the most powerful class even.

It’s to a degree happening, we just don’t know how high the degree is. Has to be taken into consideration though to exist.

I - as sadly - have to agree to this statement. Otherwise we would see more action accordingly, which is missing. They seem to be missing the tools for collecting in-game data properly to make informed decisions… or they lack the knowledge to properly look at the data… or just ignore em. The outcome is always the same.

Because it provides a distinct end-point.
Nobody says it has to change it. But the possibility is very high.

Progression for different builds is different at each stage. Some work immediately right off the bat and you just blast through until the end-point. Hence those are the ‘superior’ builds then as you can reach the last point which is defined.
Others are extremely good in pushing endlessly, but are not really ‘great’ at any time. They just function in a way which allows corruption pushing itself well, not the moment-to-moment gameplay.
And others reach fast into a portion of the progression but fall off as we try to optimize them further, struggling substantially to reach the end-point which then is defined.

The definition of a end-point absolutely adjusts the balance of leaderboards, specifically as now we have metrics for needed timeframe to get to it suddenly.

Yeah, and no proper data to know what ‘closer together’ actually means or where it is needed and where not.
Also GGG and EHG are not extremely far apart anymore. 2010 was GGGs starting point, 2017 EHG’s. That’s 7 years difference.
In 2020 we easily had the position to state ‘Yeah, GGG has a massive headway compared to EHG’… but given that unlike GGG EHG isn’t a traiblazer either we can also state that the first years before release and a portion after were still ‘formative’… while EHG had the ‘recipe’ for it presented on a silver platter already.

Nowadays? LE exists since 9 years now, it’s not a ‘newcomer’ anymore, it’s a old game by now.
PoE? Exists since 16 years, not even double the time anymore. We’ve passed that mark already.

If we wanna compare the games in terms of balance then the ongoing consensus for PoE players is that the ‘golden era’ was 3.10 to 3.13. The more simplistic gameplay from pre 3.10 being changed through significant build variety without a major meta-focus while beyond 3.13 it became more rigid again with many one-shots and meta-builds again (while that is easing up substantially again).
So ‘Delirium, Harvest, Heist and Ritual’ had a great base-game state. Not league state itself.

That was 2020. Hence 10 years into development, 7 years into public release.

So if we wanna compare it then EHG needs to obtain the variety and balance tightness of PoE back then until next year. Does that seem realistic to you?

To put it into comparison directly:
1.3 of LE was as far into development as ‘Blight’.
By that time GGG had released ‘Abyss’, ‘Incursion’, ‘Bestiary’, ‘Delve’ and ‘Betrayal’ as leagues which were deemed huge by the playerbase back then.
LE managed to do… weaver content. That’s it.

We’ve passed the time when we could say ‘but GGG has so much time ahead!’.

It’s over by now practically when we go into comparisons, and from now on any day passing will make the comparison only worse and worse unless very substantial changes happen.

Hence giving you a urge to play on and achieve it before potentially moving into a endless mode beyond.

Which is the goal of tiered progression, to keep a direct goal ahead as that’s proven to work a lot better then non-direct goals. And the upside? It doesn’t stop non-direct goals to exist.

If inferring it means ‘clearly communicated’ then everything is always clearly communicated. That’s not a proper measurement for clear communication at all.

Clearly communicated would be a in-game visible state showcasing directly with little possibility to say ‘Yes, this is the basic end-point of progression’.

In PoE it’s T16, with options beyond.
In LE we have none.

300c to be clear. So 300c is the end-point as you get no more guidance.

It’s just 500c where it becomes realistic to do so, so already we see it being detached even when looking at it from that perspective.

Yes, and most don’t reach the top-end of progression, which is why they come back. ‘I haven’t reached the end-goal yet, so I can do better!’.
That’s the vast majority of returners in PoE 1.

The majority of people leaving longer-term are those passing the end-point and struggling to improve their character as nothing clear-cut is available anymore to push them forward.

The alternative are those which give up beforehand as the progression time is too long.

But the statement relies on ‘I’m through with the progression, that was fun, so I make another character’. So you cannot include those not making it to the end-point in the first place.

If you wanna compare it for ‘percieved end-point’ with those 2 games then stepping into empowered is the one for Last Epoch comparatively as from then on forward you’re solely repeating the exact same content you’ve already done.
In PoE it’s actively T16 since every single tier opens up new map layouts which have to be finished, hence only when you’re through that you can state ‘you’re done’, and by that time you already have access to all the extra content on the side, like delve bosses in the mind, like the pinnacle content, everything around opens naturally by progressing through the tiers which give a clear-cut progression line.

It’s not even remotely comparable in quality, ever since the Atlas was introduced that was the case.

Because they loose interest quicker ‘or already left’.
Someone who doesn’t exist cannot sustain the game.

And the other portion is stated with the argument ‘to leave before long’. Which yes, is the overall condition of the game. More people leave then come in, releases have shown a distinct trend in that regard and until it’s overthrown and starts actually either stagnating or becoming a positive trend again it means it’s not the case - yet.

Exactly, that’s just on the dot.

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There is no recipe for balance. No game in history managed to get balance right on release, despite years and years of examples.

Starcraft, the ultimate example of balance, required a few years and an expansion to get it right. Despite having the “recipe” no other RTS since has released with good balance. Not even Starcraft2.

PoE, which now has a very decent balance overall (mostly due to power creep, though), still hasn’t managed to deliver that same recipe they themselves created and PoE2 had no similar balance.
Nor will it have it until at least 2 years from now.

And that is because balance doesn’t actually have a recipe. It has a bunch of interlocking systems (which are different from game to game, even from PoE1 to PoE2) and all you can do is tweak those numbers until they coalesce into some sort of balance.

GGG just has more experience on how to tweak them to reach that balance faster, but they will still take a while to get balance in PoE2 right. I doubt they will achieve anything close to it at launch or even 2-3 years after that.

You mean the quests that take you all the way to Aby (with options beyond being Uby)? I’d say those are clearly communicated. Anything after that is “options beyond”.

It’s not detached. 300c is the requirement to kill the last harbinger. Aby doesn’t have a corruption requirement (it’s static difficulty, after all). You just get a quest to kill Aby without any corruption requirement.

It makes sense that if you needed to grind more for each harbinger, then you are expected to grind more to kill their boss. Whenever you manage to kill him, you’re done.

I’d argue that they lose interest quicker in a tiered game like D4 because they already finished the game. There’s literally no more reason to continue playing. There isn’t a single number you can improve anymore.

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I’m not talking numerics - hence the details - I’m talking about design methodology.
PoE started with the same type of design methodology for end-game as LE did and keeps… and that was relatively early overthrown.

It was the ‘mealstrom of chaos’ back then which had the exact same issues with being unclear in progression, which was why the Atlas came which made progression more clear-cut and the death penalty which caused people to not overstretch their means as XP now had inherent value to defend.

As little as people enjoy the XP penalty it has solved this issue to a vast degree there as death in content which is limited through the portal count and also removing a lot of progress (or even more then you would gain in a single map later on) should you fail even once resolved those things, enforcing a specific metric for players to personally decide ‘this is the position I can play in properly’.

In LE no such declaration is existing. The one-time loss of the end-reward is not impactful, and the reduction of mob count is detrimental as it makes the time invested feel ‘wasted’. Nobody likes wasting their time.
A clear cut one-time punishment taking away formerly acquired results has shown in games to be far more accepted then reducing the enjoyment created from content you’ll still have to run in the future.

Not good enough.
So no. The content itself doesn’t support the potential to create this simply.

Exaaactly, so after 300c there is nothing, right?

But you state 500c. Why do you state it? Because 500c is the reasonable expectation for achieving the necessary power to deal with Aberroth.

So detached.

This is the case if there is ‘nothing beyond’ which is ‘inspirational’ as you could call it. Something to achieve beyond the handholding, self-made goals.
The point is that only a fraction of people work with self-made goal and the majority does majorly related to dictated ones. Very few systems manage to engage people with the self-made goal direction as a primary measure… not even Minecraft does it very well, that’s why ‘progression’ modpacks are substantially higher favored then ‘kitchensink’ modpacks for example. It showcases the proclivity of choice for individuals on which type of goal they tend to favor.

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I get you guys have your own conversation going on now.

I’m just curious is there any feedback on the original post I made here. Notes/dislike/pros/cons/areas you would want/ stuff that you see as an issues/ maybe your own ideas on a few examples of your take on consumable echo modifiers/how you would want this idea to roll out???.

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