New Players and Gold acquisition vs spending

Feedback and Suggestions
1

So i wanted to make this topic after someone else made one requesting a “value” option in the loot filter. I felt that the loot filter option was a poor solution both to solve the problem and given the views of the developers of the game on selling trash for gold.

I want to be clear that the problem i am talking about is both specific only to new players AND temporary.

I want to detail the problem as i see it first and then afterward my proposed thoughts on how it could be solved with minimal time/money by the developers.

The Problem - Gold acquisition for new players does not come any where close to meeting the gold demands placed on said new players. This lack of gold is so extreme that new players often play the game at sub 2k gold (the price of a shatter rune).

Due to this players are picking up and selling trash items to the point that someone felt the need to request a loot filter option for value. I should also mention for those who think loot is worthless, i have personally seen items scaling from 5g at the beginning of the game to 900 gold in the level 50s with the usual item selling for between 75 and 120 gold.

According to many posters the above is the exact opposite of what the developers want.

Reasoning for the problem existing.

  1. Many Guides/Videos advise players to purchase Shatter runes at every available opportunity.

  2. New players lack knowledge of the game and because of this they don’t know what is and is not important. This causes FOMO (fear of missing out) which makes them shatter any piece of gear just in case it is important.

  3. While loot filters from guides somewhat limit this issue in one way they exasperate it in others. From a new players point of view if the guides loot filter shows something then it must be important and they should shatter it.

  4. The lack of game knowledge also extends to respeccing which costs gold. A new player cannot be expected to know what talents are Good/Bad and it should be “assumed” that they will respec multiple times to test what works and what is fun.

  5. Stash tabs are another expense for the new player however i think that they are in a good spot. I only mention this so that no one feels the need to call me out on it.

  6. Gold acquisition at low levels is disgustingly low. I have noticed alot of other people saying to run gold reward monoliths and grab gold shrines. I started monoliths at approximately level 52 and was excited to do a gold reward monolith (because i was dirt poor). My reward? 500 gold. In comparison, my level 78 Acolyte with the gold blessing just did a gold monolith and got 15,000 gold.

Proposed solutions pick one or both.

  1. Adjust Gold Monoliths and Gold Shrines to give a greater minimum amount of gold and reduce the maximum by an equal amount to compensate.

  2. Reduce and Scale by level the costs of Shatter runes and Respec to better reflect the gold income of the characters they apply to.

My understanding is that gold selling is becoming a problem with this game. I don’t think it is the primary factor but i think the “new player” experience of being dirt poor for the majority of the game might be contributing to the problem.

2

Ok, to address the most important points:

The ‘problem’ of not having gold as well as having to choose between shattering runes and more stash space is an intended thing.
It makes you pick your stuff up properly, it enforces to make choices. No space to store them, no money to shatter them… now sort them out!

Yes, it means you’ll loose out in affixes you don’t have yet or which seem nice for future characters… which is fine, focus on your own until you can afford more, it becomes fairly organic as soon as that concept is understood.

As for the respec cost:
Yes, that has been mentioned so… sooooo often already.
The gold cost of respecs are miniscule, at any stage of the game, especially since you don’t even need a remotely ‘optimal’ one to get through the whole game. Take some defensive nodes, some offensive nodes… works out until monoliths without issue, and by then you should have more then enough gold to always afford as much respeccing as you want.

Point 6… you had bad luck. Even the first gold shrine can easily provide 10k+ gold.
The reward monoltihs usually provide around 5k or so… but the shrines is where the money lays. If you’re struggling for money early on in monoliths then go for shrine-hunting and it’s solved. Even during campaign they already work better then they should.

As for the solutions:

Gold drop adjustments are definitely fine, would enjoy less variance there so you can ‘plan’ to seek them out or not without being disappointed. You never need to go ‘woah… so much!’ anyway there, a baseline suffices.

Scatter rune cost adjustments are utterly unnecessary. They are expensive early on (as they should be) and become a non-issue later in the game. Until then they fulfill the exact reason for having that price-tag though.

3

The first part of your comment honestly made me consider if your read my post. Just to clarify, i said that i am “HAPPY” with the cost of the “STASH” upgrades. They felt very rewarding for the cost when i got them and something strive for later on.

The Respec cost is NOT miniscule when you are sub 2k gold which i was until level 70+. I was legitimately in the situation of being unable to respec due to lack of gold despite wanting to.

3rd point - Yes my luck is in fact trash so i will take your word for it.

As to your last point on the Shatter rune cost, can you expand on that? Because from my view point they are expensive in the early game where it is least necessary and cheap in the late game where it is most necessary (gold dump).

4

I’m glad you split this off, because I had some words but they were starting to get pretty off topic for the thread.

There’s something to be said about streamers and video guides often being shitbirds that lean heavy into manufacturing FOMO and then solving it as a way of producing content, but that’s not really a problem that LE can solve.

On the game side, I think part of problem is that there is such a large gap in scarcity for shards and shatters between the campaign and monos. They feel scarce during the campaign and then you just start drowning in them after you get into monos. But you’re not going to know that they’re abundant in monos until you get there and experience it, and even then if you’ve built the habit of treating them like they need to be hoarded it can be hard to break.

While I was ruminating on this I also found myself questioning why Shatters even exist as a consumable item (or, at least, one that can be purchased from vendors) to begin with. You get so many of them in monos that you really have no need to go out of your way to get them. And even further, except for a few of the rarer affixes, you get so many shards just as drops that Shattering starts to become pointless pretty quickly too. I can’t even remember the last time I Shattered anything other than doing dumb stuff for a Merophage.

2 Likes
5

Last time I checked, respeccing cost something like 10 gold per-point-in the-passive multiplied by number of points required / 5. So respeccing from 2 points down to 1 point in the first row of passives would cost 20 gold, respeccing from 2 points down to 1 in the second row of passives would cost 40 gold, the third row would cost 60 gold to do the same, etc.

From the above image, respeccing the 1 point in Fearless would cost 10 gold, respeccing the 1 from Stalward would cost 20 gold, if I had 1 point in Valiant Charge, that would cost 30 gold, etc.

IMO, this cost is so low that it’s almost pointless having it.

It really is. It’s about 2-3k per point if you have ~12 points invested at the top row of the mastery tree. Early on it’s less than 100.

2 Likes
6

Yes, albeit to be fair… what sort of affixes do you need?

After you have ~25 of the most important ones it becomes a non-issue, that’s 5 full tries for making a item with them. Health, res and the primary damage type you go for. Plus the shards you find along the way it starts to stack up fairly swiftly.

Which leaves the rare affixes. Class specific ones. And there you also have only a miniscule amount of those which actually fit or might fit into the intended build you wanna go for.
And since those are rare you won’t need many shatter runes in the first place.

But obviously… if you stack up on all the variants available and try to get a decent amount ‘for future builds’ up then it’s another story, but that’s exactly what the price-tag tries to avoid, building into several further builds before even ending the progression stage for the first ones (which will happen at around 80-85 with empowered monos).

Sure.

So, the cost is 2k, which is not ‘little’ definitely, actually it stays a decent investment for a good while even while running monoliths depending on how you use them.

So, early on you’re hence forced to switch out full pieces of gear, the ‘lucky drop’ is the way to progress. Miniscule upgrades rather then building the best possible outcome for the game-stage and trivializing the content there. At least for the first character.

Then as you progress the cost stays high though, the whole campaign long as you need to get the stash tabs going to actually store gear you might need or might sell. Not knowing what different idols there are keeping a few of them seems like something which people tend to do, same with uniques often I imagine. (I’m a hoarder, so my perspective is quite different from the ‘normal’ player.)

Then when you enter monoliths you suddenly get flooded with items that have rare affixes. Body armor or helmet rewards have them a-plenty after all. So that’s when the high value becomes important. By that time there should at least be a baseline idea on how you wanna build your character, seeing if it scales well and works ‘great’.
So now the system limits you to branch out and instead focus on a single direction… or at best 2-3 directions since otherwise the gold will run out. That’s roughly level 55-75 where this happens I would say.

Reducing the cost would hence mean that you can far more freely branch out, which is not intended, it mandates putting effort in, and since gold becomes less and less important with a set up stash you’ll soon be able to afford those scatters from the vendor when the game starts to spread out personal upgrades a lot more, hence necessitating crafting each possible piece which provides an upgrade… and when you’re past the stage when you have many items which could be a possible upgrade then it allows to branch into a secondary build right away.

It upholds a certain pacing, one which has been messed with if you’re CoF definitely but overall without the faction it was actually quite perfect. Just… the game has outpaced the content with the factions being included now, so they seem scarce in comparison, which at least holds people back from making their builds even quicker since EHG already reduced the play-time heavily with 1.0.

1 Like
7

The tl;dr of this thread is:
-You should have more than enough gold just from picking it up from the ground to respec passives a few times if you need it, unless you’re spending it all constantly on useless stuff.
-The gold cost for runes of shattering and tabs is only an issue for your first character and only until you get up to empowered monos. After empowered monos and on your 2nd+ character, they’re mostly negligible.

2 Likes
8

Bronco is right, maybe the shatter runes should just stop being sold to get rid of the FOMO. Buying them is nearly useless anyway, especially early (you won’t find rare affixes early). They could start appearing at monoliths vendors if people really want them.

Alternatively, people making guides advising to buy all of them should have the decency to start their video with a fair warning, like “Disclosure, I know nearly nothing about the game, follow me at your own risk!”
But somehow I don’t see that happening.

Gold drops are fine, no need at all to boost them.
I play almost only fresh starters, and all my characters have always found far enough gold for respecs and stash tabs.
Granted, I do not trade, maybe it changes the perspective, I don’t know.

Yes, almost all new players, including me when I started, will try to sell items once or twice. Then quickly realise it is a complete waste of time, and stop. It is part of a learning process, like in any game. The monsters respawning every time actually do a good job driving the point, even if it is not intended.

1 Like
9

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.