New Harder game mode - Exiled

I saw another dudes post about making the game harder. Despite myself always asking to make things more accessible for more (weaker) players, I actually like it when players get more options to tailor their game experience.

Hardcore, SSF exist because of this. POE has Ruthless.

LE is about time to have their own. Introducing “Exiled” mode. which is a new harder game mode for those wanting a challenge.

Here are some features:

  1. Monster’s gain 1% penetration every area level with no cap.
  • in regular mode it normally caps at 75.
  1. Monster’s gain a new mod pool that they can randomly get such as
  • Prevent player Life/Ward generation above 50%
  • More on death effects and on death effects happen faster and do significant damage
  • Enemies that are immune to leech or can disable player regeneration entirely.
  • Enemies which has cycling resists, where they can gain a massive resist weakness to one damage type while being almost immune to every other damage type. the chosen weakness changes every 4 seconds.
  • Reflect specific damage types
  1. New echo mods such as
  • monters gaining 50-100% resists to certain types of specific damage/ailments
  • monsters gaining 50-100% chance to avoid specific ailments
  • player gains blood magic (all mana costs are converted to life costs), players can die if they run out of life this way.
  • disable flasks from dropping
  1. Dungeons and bossing
  • dungeon keys drop less often and become more valuable.
  • dungeons that have different tiers, now have their final tier locked behind a drop only key which is can only drop upon completing the dungeon at a tier before this final tier (2nd highest tier). you need 4 of these keys to attempt the final tier dungeon.
  • for abbaroth, players need a new key that drops exclusively from harbingers. 1 key from each harbinger is required to attempt abbaroth.
  • for uber abbaroth, players can obtain a new fragment which is an exclusive drop from regular abbaroth which is guaranteed but different fragments exist. you require 3 different fragments in order to attempt uber abbaroth.
  1. Monoliths
  • players now interact with a new guardian NPC and are required to pay gold in everytime they want to run a new echo. empowered echos cost more gold. corruption increases this gold cost.
  1. Crafting
  • glyph of stability is removed
  • shards no longer drop and is no longer a quest reward. players need to shatter gear in order to obtain shards
  • fractured items are reintroduced to the game. fractured items are the result of crafting critical failures where not only does the item can no longer be crafted. some affixes may lose a random amount of tiers.
  • you can only craft at a crafting bench
  1. Portals
  • Now require a new “Portal scroll” currency to use. Echos now spawn a free portal at the echo’s starting point.
  1. All items are unidentified.
  • New “identify scrolls” currency are required to ID items.
  • This also means a huge amount of lootfilter options have now been disabled
  1. Death Penalty
  • Players now lose xp at a rate of 10% of their current level. At level 10, thats just 1% xp, but at level 99 its 9.9%.
  • Whenever any echo with a specific boss encounter is failed, there is no retries. any cost used to run the boss encounter is not reimbursed and needs to be reobtained.
  • Timeline bosses that require stability to run, now consume the stability equal to the requirement. For example if you need 800 stability, then 800 stability will be removed from the timelines stability to fight the boss. if you die, then you have wasted that 800 stability.
  1. Respeccing
  • Now require a skill respec NPC to remove points/respecialize.
  • Skills no longer have a minimum level nor accelerated XP bonus.
  • An additional game mode “Purist” (Purist Exile) mode can be enabled. This prevents respeccing of any sort. Blessings can only be replaced by earning new ones by killing timeline bosses.
  1. Bossing rework
  • Certain telegraphed attacks now inflict a powerful ailment that reduces the player’s max resistances. This ailment can only be removed upon completion or failure of the encounter and can have unlimited stacks. This ailment could also reduce healing effectiveness or ward generation/decay thresholds.
  1. Item storage
  • Inventory has been reduced by 6 rows and 6 columns.
  • All items must be manually clicked to pick up the item.
  • Specialized inventory tabs such as keys/woven echos are removed from the game and require such items to occupy regular stash.
  • You get 4 stash tabs right from the sta
  1. Factions
  • CoF is removed. All players are automagically MG faction. faction costs to list items are increased.
  • As a result of players relying on trade, item drops have been lowered globally to give value to trade.
  1. Idols
  • Idols are now single use. if you slot them in, you can only destroy it to free up space.
  1. Timed content
  • Overall content now has a timer. If you take too long you will simply fail the event. For example nemesis encounters only last 15 seconds, before they run away and drop nothing. similarly loot lizards will run more often only allowing the player to hit them for 1-2 seconds before running off again.
  • Bosses gain ENRAGED mechanic which makes them gain power every second they’ve been alive over 1 minute (They start gaining power every second after the first minute has passed). Upon reaching 2 minutes, players are repeatedly inflicted by a new Damned ailment which deals DOT damage which is removed at the end of the encounter but can have unlimited stacks/duration.
  • Bosses may also summon permanent DOT pools on the ground which requires players to quickly finish the encounter.

I’m not sure I agree with your other suggestions, but this is one of the worst things to happen in gaming (EA & their egregious monetisation notwithstanding). It needs to be staked through the heart, have it’s head removed, doused in holy water, burned then the ashes put into a lead & silver lined box before being tossed into a black hole with whatever gypsy curses can be placed uppon it so that when it does revive that happens in a different universe & it’s their problem not ours.

No.

So, like it used to be back in the old days?

3 Likes

This is just scaling on top of scaling. It’s boring. I’d say change the AI, introduce new attack patterns - instead of just shaking up numbers on the backend side.

Sounds good in theory, but usually is excruciatingly prohibitive to certain builds. Like, nobody really liked to be phys melee in Diablo 2 because Iron Maiden could kill you instantly before it was patched out.

Some of those can easily turn anti-fun, just like the univerally hated “glyph that follows you” from early Diablo 4. (not sure if it was patched as I left the game after 3rd season and never came back).

But that’s just layers of boring, mundane, repetitive tasks to do before you can actually play the content. It’s called gatekeeping and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t provide any extra challenge, it just wastes your time like D4 Duriel keys.

Is it planned to force you to grind gold on lesser corruption levels? Sounds, again, something that just introduces unneccessary ways to force you to repeat easy/pointless content in order to be able to play “the real thing”.

The last change is basically anti QoL. Hard nope.

…why? You don’t have a pause in this game online. Free TP is the next best thing.

Hard pass. Anti QoL.

Sounds good, makes death less insignificant that it is now.

I am honestly not a fan of adding chores to a video game, or modifying the interface to be less approachable.

Instead, I’d rather see: different enemies as you progress (unlocking new, stronger enemy types every XXX corruption), more pinnacle bosses, AI changing instead of being static from level 1 to corruption 10000000, and a campaign mode that isn’t so laughably easy it’s embarassing (just introduce a veteran mode, FFS, and make it scale the hp/damage of enemies from 1 to 3-4 of current values, and it’s done).

Exile mode… give every enemy a telegraphed attack you need to dodge or you lose 75% maxhp… done.

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Any new exclusive mechanic for such mode is a kind of wasted effort from dev point of view. Why not use that new thing for regular mode as well? Like we don’t get exclusive content for seasons for same reason. Not enough resources. And because of that all that can go into “hard” mode are simple restriction or modifications done once, like hardcore, SSF.
Grim Dawn uses global modifiers (usually player debuffs or mob buffs) for its arena. LE could do that too for its arenas and all of the game in such hard mode. That would reuse content for both modes.
Or maybe way simpler, another steal from GD. They had “veteran” mode for normal difficulty in which mobs were tougher, but you got a bit more XP for it. Just tuning of numbers. It’s a starting option, not some boots.
Keep current difficulty as default difficulty and add mode or two available from the start, so even newcomers can play on hard if they want to (for example for experienced ARPG players).

The only way you can actually please everyone that wants more difficulty (since that means different things for different people) is to make a custom mode. You get slider to adjust things as you want them. Like “More damage taken” is a slider from 0 to 500%, “Less damage dealth” from 0 to 99%, etc.
Then each player can just make their own difficulty as they please.

1 Like