The time investment, which is directly tied to itemization progression in LE.
The more rarity zones have the more exp they give the more loot drops at the same time. Which means your level directly correlates with the chance for decent gear to drop… without taking into consideration which exact content has been done.
If you never move from 100c you’ll need a substantially longer timeframe to reach level 100, which means you’ll also drop substantially more items which then even roughly out to become around the same baseline chance (a bit lower) to drop something good.
The only difference is picking MG or CoF, in CoF you get around 40-50 times more valuable loot when you take the time investment for the same results into consideration.
That’s how extreme the scaling in CoF is comparatively, which is why I switched as MG makes no sense at all, even when everything related to the UI and the mechanics are fixed, the issues there are far far deeper then anything I talked about yet… but EHG can’t even handle their UI and the basics of their faction setup, makes no sense to write a novel about it going ever and ever deeper to address those things.
Yes, I only played CoF the last 20 hours, which was the mistake.
Otherwise I would likely have gotten a substantially higher amount which could at least come close to what PoE provides, maybe.
But RNG also plays a role, a substantial one. I don’t have a baseline yet for CoF drop-rate over longer playtime as I haven’t invested that in such a hefty manner needed to come to a proper result. From what I’ve seen for now it won’t surpass PoE’s ‘easy’ mechanics though in terms of acquisition, not going into high-end crafting mechanics like using percentiles of the recombinator in conjunction with harvest crafts, meta-crafts and base-shifting as well as some more. That would be beyond the scape of the mechanics for LE anyway for now and hence makes no sense to compare.
A top tier base.
With the fitting Affixes for one of the 25 possible builds we can at most have.
With the limited reasonable build-variate present in the game?
I doubt for now.
The ones fitting for my build. For example a well-rolled (above 80% total roll-range) Omnis for example. Not even talking about 2 LP here, 1 is more then enough for that… but that’s a reasonable strong drop which you can say ‘yes, that works’.
I can farm up a damn decent ‘Adorned’ from PoE in a quicker timeframe then I can farm up a ‘mere’ Omnis. Not to talk about the things beyond. A Nihilis? 14,29% chance to drop, 1 LP hence 2,04% to even get a chance at one? Which then has a 50% chance for +2, hence a 1.02% chance to get that, which then also needs to be above the ~35% roll range to even have anything else then ‘0’ or negative stats in total? Which brings us to a 0,765% chance to even have a ‘overall positive result’? Which means barely above ‘0’ for the values which can go negative.
That means we would need to run 130 Aberroth to get it. To access Aberroth we need (I can be wrong, but that’s my result for now) 4 timeline bosses for a single invite, which necessitates to run a damn total of 520 timeline bosses. If I didn’t mess it up and focused properly on drops then envy drops allow you to save up on ~60% of the time needed to access that encounter, with each encounter being ~ 7-8 echos run (taking into account the resets for the web and low stability close to the center). So every 4 echos we get access to a timeline boss at best.
If we take 3 minute of time investment per echo (because of cemeteries to get envy runes in proper amounts) then that means we have 3 x 4 x 520 minutes solely spent on a single goal without any reasonable amount of min-max drops otherwise. That’s 6240 minutes with very high lenience since nothing else is taken into consideration, optimal gameplay to the dot which would mean 104 hours to achieve that singular item.
Which yes, at least the slam of 1 LP is nowadays doable. But that’s a shoddy item still.
If we wanna have it in the 80% roll-range it becomes absolutely abysmal time-wise. 78 Hours baseline to achieve the item for any roll. 80% roll-range means only 20% of the time it hits, which means 390 hours play-time solely for a ‘mid-tier’ drop from the possible ones. No 2 LP, no ‘close to perfect’ roll.
That’s nearly mirror tier.
A Titanheart with 3 LP would be doable, but then we still need a near perfect item to slam on, which is at least doable as the needs are substantially lower and imprint works. 4 LP is unfeasable, 1 in 887612? Is EHG joking? 1 in 1276 is doable definitely, takes ages… but doable. But 4 LP? Nonsensical.
And that’s the ‘easy’ part to achieve, the exalted for that is harder to get, you wanna have a item which fits the power level of that after all, right? One in a lifetime drop after all, 4 LP titan heart is more rare then a mageblood in PoE, it’s an actual mirror-drop, and the exalted is beyond that by far.
We don’t need to start looking at 4 LP boss drops, those are ‘the community at large won’t drop it likely’ for the whole Cycle. What a BS situation plainly spoken. That’s a major design error when mirror-tier items in PoE are falling comparatively like candy.
So you mean those simply give up before reaching the end-line?
Instead of designing the game to give them a fulfilling end-goal to reach rather then enforcing them to give up beforehand?
No, I didn’t forget to equate it… it’s just backwards design. Bad choices.
If your gam,e is for casuals the systems need to adhere to that, through the board, without fail.
Then you can add things for the others on top.
Which yes… you can’t even do in LE, you either have it thrown at you or you don’t get it.
Target farming something very specific? Impossible as well.
See… Grim Dawn is a prime example for a better system, and even there people complain about it a bit, but it’s reasonable.
The strongest items in the game are triple-rare drops in many cases, exceptions apply obviously. But even those can be farmed up in a realistic long timeframe. Nothing beyond exists in terms of pure dedication to achieve the BiS items.
That game knows exactly their audience. You can achieve killing the uber-bosses with non-perfect gear by far, which we once again ‘only’ say is 2 T7 in relation, not even going higher. The effort per character is roughly 200 hours for a non-meta one to reach this, in total. Then you’re ‘done’ content-wise with everything the game throws at you. Sub 100 hours with a meta-build.
Compare it to LE now. Uberroth is the highest boss in the game. The first kill was done through the group effort of ‘Empyriangaming’s’ group. They all pooled their efforts together to have a single Uberroth kill as the world first, which took over a week of dedicated work getting there, and it was only possible through the combined work of I think… 8 players or so? From a group specifically playing to break the game and using the most ridiculous and overpowered methods available anyone else wouldn’t even start to think about. They’re a group which farms up over 20 mirrors in less then a month per league in PoE, which is a sheer magnitude of currency that maybe a total of 1000 players have in the whole game in a year, and maybe 5000 have ever seen… and the majority of players playing for tens of thousands of hours doesn’t even have ever combined together in total.
That’s the level of effort needed we’re speaking about in LE currently.
It’s apalling to even think that LE can be defended in terms of ‘But it’s more casual then…!’
It is not, not unless their game is coherrent to represent it.
Yes, they start the process, see how shit it is and leave. You’re 100% right! 
Instead of the game giving them the fitting results, keeping them playing for longer and being designed for them in mind. Coherrent design, once more.
The issue is that we have such a high ceiling as a first thing.
The second is that even when we take away the itemization ceiling itself there’s a content ceiling currently available which is nonsensical as well.
And even when we take that away then there’s a progression ceiling below that already which is vastly vastly before the point where the content limit is reached where it starts to become frustrating to craft.
And even when we take that away we still have the sheer build imbalance on top of all that causing this issue to exist solely for reaching Aberroth in several cases.
How many layers simply peeling away is acceptable? I would argue at best 1-2, at absolute best, and only if EHG wants to cater to min-maxers. If they don’t want to cater to min-maxers then ‘0’ is the answer.
MG didn’t have such an item for the whole darn Cycle in Legacy since double T7 with both being rare affixes generally don’t exist. They are 2 LP Red Ring value which is beyond the gold limitation of the game and hence not sold commonly.
Not only Marksman… outside of Heartseeker which is absolutely broken OP against bosses. Everything else? Weird state.
Minions are even worse off though since bosses wreck them and resummoning is a mess.
Because the second part you mentioned. LE’s gives vastly less options to experiment.
But PoE’s is harder to get into.
The point is that alternative ways - and many by now - exist in PoE to not need those in-depth mechanics at times, like the recombinator, so you can get to a great result without major frustration.
It’s still a convoluted mess though and that reasonably turns people away. The major issue is that they need a UI unification for crafting. One window, all options at once, with helpful tooltips and mechanics to allow players to not get RSI from thousands of clicks.
LE’s system is better early on. Why? Because it is designed for the early stages, it was clearly designed with only the rare stage in mind, which becomes clear when you were there during those times in EA already.
As exalteds were introduced it had a few small ‘hiccups’ but nothing major, just more progression possible… nothing to progress towards, so no major issue yet.
The problems creeped up when more and more high-end content was presented. The further you got away from rares the worse the experience becomes overall, and swiftly. That’s why I’m saying the crafting mechanic needs a rework. Acquisition of bases is not as easy at the top then when you progress, you need instead of 1-2 hours… 200+ at times. For those high-end items at least an option to ‘recover’ when you fail a craft has to be implemented. And solely if it’s a rare item allowing increasing the FP. Time gating hence.
Yeah, after in-depth analyzing I found out that PoE respects my time more then LE does long-term. Which is a baaaaad state plainly spoken and I wouldn’t ever have expected it when I started the game.
But that’s what it went towards and with no end in sight yet.
Which is why I’m making those novel-sized posts to explain the details repeatedly and in more and more depth.
