On levelling alts, dungeon's shortcut and difficulty scaling

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I really don’t get it. I am on my third character now, plus 2-3 done in Early Access.

I see dungeon that are LVL 20 (?) to enter in T1, and you exit in areas that are way over your level. What’s the use case for that? Surely not for alts as you lose on side quests that give you passive point and idols, and end up in maps that are way harder than you can afford, resulting in slow progress.

There are so many QoL in this title that it amaze me that they didn’t implement the only(ish) good thing of Diablo 3. The adventure mode.

I know this is a topic already discussed and devs for some reason are against a way to simply skip the campaign, but I’d like to understand why. So, please, if you have sources on the reasons, share them here so I (and others) can understand.

One of the staples of this genre is the push to try new build, new characters, etc. Goes without saying that beside a first run (per each season maybe), every subsequent run should be facilitated to arrive at the fun part in a painless way.

What Diablo 3 did was having the adventure mode. In which every teleport was enabled, and you could just go anywhere and do random quests (kill X of this, gather Y of that) in maps and level up via those rewards as well as the regular enemy killing.

Last Epoch literally have everything already in place with the timelines’ monolith.
What eventually need to change, if the devs want the players to experience the story at least once, is to lock them behind the story progression. Right now you can access them around LVL 15-20, but the first one have monsters LVL 58. Which is equal to say “good luck with that”.

Instead, put a barrier of sorts in it. Until the first character have unlocked the empowered versions, then each subsequent character can just enter the world, press M and teleport in a timeline at the end of time and grind at their heart content.

The only real big change, is that non-empowered timelines need to scale with the level of the player, instead of being fixed level. How hard that is really depends on how the logic has been written in terms of maps/levels until now, but it shouldn’t be that hard as:

  • You already find the same enemies at different point during the campaign
  • The game have always the level of the player as a data reference
  • The game need to determine the player level only at the time a new monolith map is being generated

So, the only issue is “why not”.

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Yes - dungeons are to speed up progression for Alts. More than enough quests to max passives/idols in the campaign leading up to the dungeons, and in Chapter 9 where you come out (and can pick up your faction). Area level is fairly meaningless by the time your in your 30’s with twink gear.

That said, they did post in reddit recently that they’re actively working on a solution to help speed up corruption for secondary characters too.

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Did you read further? Because the dungeon shortcut approach is not the point, without considering that someone might make an alt for other reasons beside reaching the endgame with the main.

One as an example, the main isn’t working or is not fun for the player. Thus completely negating the “you got twink equip”.

Also, clarify “twink equip” because beside saving uniques and some exalted (crafting) I doubt everyone is normally saving equip for every 5 levels to “twink up” their alts.

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Until now, I was able to skip with second dungeon Fire/Necrotic + Temporal Sanctum without any problems with 2 alts. And it was very fast leveling / finishing campaign. I do hope though that they will make this easier, as a matter of fact I think some of the devs confirmed on reddit as well. Great dev team, give them little time, I am so hyped for cycle 2 to see what they have planned for us !

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I like your ideas.

I enjoy the game a lot but as for alts… I finally looked up how to skip the campaign for alts and felt bewildered that the whole process seems to require me taking notes as at a university lecture and then jumping through a bunch of hoops.

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Alt setup causes your character power to vastly outscale the content you’re going through, this means your character is able to tackle it on a much higher level then you would normally be able to.

Also the loss of passives and idols is not the case, there’s a large amount of side-quests providing that available. If you do them all together with the dungeon skips you’ll end up with all of them unlocked by the end.

Player retention time, an important thing in any life-service game. The longer you interact with the game the more likely you’ll buy something during that time.
It’s basically their income source.

It’s also a very interesting aspect since easing things up for specific situations can result in a higher retention time then enforcing to go through easy or low-value content.

That’s why it’s already reduced vastly for the amount needed to get there. EHG wasn’t willing to fully remove it, reasonably so.
The D3 experience in general is one which wasn’t ever built on being especially long-lasting. LE wants to compete with the giant of the genre, PoE. They have the highest retention numbers on the market for their type of game, LE is working to take over that place and does a fantastic job at doing so for some fairly solid reasons.

Too much retention time lost. A bit of ‘grind’ can be expected.
It’s a ‘linear’ grind there. You have to go through the content before it to arrive at it.
Contrary ‘parrarel’ grind would be to focus on providing solely the respective equipment to tackle specific content, foregoing the need to tackle the lower-scaled content before it though.

My personal opinion is that EHG is to fervent with making sure no parallel grind happens with the same class-choice, that should be alleviated.
I’m absolutely on their side to make everyone go through a campaign once fully and then 14 times in a minimized version of it.

It’s not working:
Adjust your build. Every class is viable with mediocre gear easily acquired in a very short time at the point of starting monoliths.

Not fun:
If you don’t realize during leveling the character up since the play-style itself roughly stays the same unless you re-spec heavily then that’s a ‘you’ issue rather.
You have 2 options there then.
a.) Go through the campaign fully again.
b.) Farm a few monoliths for uniques and set items, low-level ones are all common and very prone to drop for that reason.

I don’t even use rares for my twinks, just slapping any fitting unique onto them, it makes them become literally invulnerable at times for the content they’re going through.
Exalts are too high level, hence you can’t use it anyway.

Add sets to your list, because that’s what they’re good for, being otherwise worthless sadly.

But yeah, alternative options would be fantastic, I’m all for it! Currently we have a very simplistic and linear end-game, branching out and providing more options are expanding on the pre-existing concept would be nice.
Also ‘Alternative leveling ways’ as you probably would enjoy the most after finishing the campaign once are a good option to solve the whole problem. Still the need to level through and progress… but it’s not in the usual way. Variance.
So I’m with you on that part if that’s the case.

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It is basically marked red on the map with description tooltip and even special shortcut icon…

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“twink equip” - go fast, moar dps, moar better. Low level items with movement speed and added flat damage. The way the game scales, you don’t need to change much every few levels.
I legit flew through the entire game with half of my stuff from ilvl 10 stuff. Pure trash that I forged some random crap onto.

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