One-shot caches and personal items

[GiraffaGonfiabile]

When one-shot caches were first announced, I thought that they were a very good and interesting idea.

Having some deterministic and good items that are exclusive to levelling (since they would be too weak for endgame) sounded very interesting to me.
In my expectation, the items would be diet uniques, weaker than real uniques, but stronger in their particular niche compared to low level crafted items, and maybe mildly build-enabling in some aspects.

Unfortunately, this is not how they played out.
Personal items are few, and generally weak/boring. I think this is a missed opportunity.

If these items were good, they could gently nudge players towards playing the particular build they enabled. Finding a new personal item could be a fun experience for beginner players, because they would be tempted to change their build according to the newfound item, encouraging to experiment.
The fact that the items are deterministic would also be interesting from a speedrunning perspective, because people would be able to plan their acquisition, and therefore setting up speedruns around builds with these items.

So the question is, these items are not going to be used in endgame anyway, why not have some fun with it?
Make them a bit stronger and build-enabling, and perhaps, put some mini-bosses to defend each cache. This would both give players a reason to go out of their way to find the caches, and give them a challenge to overcome to get the reward.

[Travoas]

I have to admit that I’m not as enthusiastic about them as I was at first. For the most part they really don’t offer anything more exciting than regular chests, with a couple of exceptions:

1. I’ve never had one that didn’t drop at least 2 exalteds, even though the vast majority of those are no better a chance at a usable one than any other exalted that drops.
2. Runesmith chests that, at least in my experience, always drops a Rune of Ascendance.
3. As I was typing this there was a 3rd that just slipped out of my feeble mind.

I would love to see something more done with them but I can’t think of anything right now that would make them more worthwhile without making it look like it’s a jackpot system.

[CaiusMartius]

@Travoas

Runesmith chests that, at least in my experience, always drops a Rune of Ascendance.

I think it’s the same chest but they also frequently drop a Glyph of Despair as well and on numerous occasions I’ve had them drop two Despairs.

[eliel77]

Well as I have said long ago,

@eliel77

Yeah, for the starting players that is doing mono in it’s first or second char I guess it should be ok, and maybe it’s planned for these users, but it should be tweaked for the veteran player as well, maybe behaving different in higher corruption or adding more layers to these chests.

Could be improved to special chests with more rewarding itens ? For a given combination of the existing lost cash could have 3 versions of it, let’s say silver lost cash, golden lost cash and diamond lost cashes. One being more rewarding and meaningfull than the other.

It would be one more way to spice things up to veterans, otherwise it will be just one more content that will fall in the repetition territory, improving the feeling some players have to be wasting time.

[Travoas]

Yeah, I’ve had them drop the Despairs on occasion but they drop Ascendance every single time in my experience. That’s why I put them in this list, since it doesn’t rely on chance from what I’ve seen.

[GiraffaGonfiabile]

I think you are confusing the lost caches (the ones you find in monoliths) with one-shot caches (the ones you find in the campaign).
The ones the post is about are the campaign ones.

One-shot and Lost Caches | Coming in Runes of Power

[Caches_Cover] Welcome to the final Pre-Patch Blog Post before the release of the full Patch Notes for Runes of Power! Today we’re going to be looking at another new encounter mechanic we’re adding to Last Epoch in just three days! As mentioned in the Rune Prisons blog post, we wanted to improve the moment- to-moment feeling within the Campaign, as well as within Echoes. To bolster this, we’re adding two types of caches to the game: One-shot Caches, which can be found during the Campaign, and …

[CaiusMartius]

Oh. Yes indeed. I confused the two as well. Thanks for clarifying.

I’ve only done the campaign once since they were introduced so I didn’t really notice any impact one way or the other but I’m definitely a more ‘veteran’ player. I do recall that the Personal Affixes (not to be confused with Experimental) I never actually used because I’d already been fully geared, which now I see was the point you were making.

[Travoas]

Ah, yeah thanks. I’ve been playing a lot of monos lately and completely forgot there were 2 different “caches” introduced so thought it was all the same. Thanks for setting me straight.