I have been playing this game for around 200 hrs since release (casual dad :D!). Let’s go!
I would like to suggest three elements as follow:
The empowered monolith needs to stop scaling damage at some point. The overall defense we are able to get is limited. In most aRPG, we are able to scale damage quite well, but not our defense (maybe with crazy rare 4LP). Ward vs health is a known challenge for sure!
The infinite scaling with those monoliths could reach a certain threshold where you can progress further to test your limits and your build, but it won’t affect rarity, exp and such. Not many builds can go way pass c300. Meta builds are great and they shouldn’t be required!
If c300 is currently the goal, there are still some weird aoe and bad telegraph we just can’t avoid or being way overtuned.
Better rewards for monolith would gap the defense and damage we need. I find it funny to have armour value and %armour mandatory (from two monoliths) to have in order to survive. This system isn’t fun to unlock. Most of the rewards are not useful at all or there are mandatory ones you need to get.
Some ideas to improve the rewards:
Every monolith could have a progression tree where you pick some nodes you need. That would greatly improve the fun part because you get those skill tree points to invest. Even if you are unlucky, you are still progressing further. Account bound, no need to refarm on other characters unless its SSFC. You could have a monolith tree focusing only on armour as a example, everyone needs that!
It would also help closing the gap for normal monolith/empowered and then pinnacle content.
Reaching empowered monolith would give us access to some more powerful nodes further down the monolth tree.
I hope it will help in the future. I believe this game is one of the best aRPG out there
That is the whole point. It’s like PoE’s delve. It’s inevitable that any build will hit a wall at some point. The objective is to find out how much you can push. Much like arena.
That is because the endgame balancing EHG aims for is 300c. Mike has said before that no build should ever do 1k corruption. And now they introduced a soft cap on xp/gold scaling, so there’s even less reason to push for really high corruptions.
So meta builds aren’t required. They’re just required for those players that are ultra competitive and whose goal is just to see high numbers on the game.
You don’t. If you find it hard to survive, farm a little lower corruption. If you want to push your limits, then yes, you need it to farm higher corruptions.
As PoE’s delve has shown us, the most successful strategy for endlessly scaling content isn’t defense, since that will run out faster. It’s all out offense. Which is why Falconer/Marksman are usually the top builds that farm higher corruption. Kill stuff before they can kill you.
That is an interesting idea regardless of the previous points.
1.3 will bring us a monolith expansion, so we’ll see what EHG comes up with.
Thank you for your clarification overall, it does help understand their vision.
I do trust the vision they have and there is still some concerns:
I do have very good defenses, well almost the best you can have with HP pool. I sit around 3.5k, 60% armour, res cap, endurance cap + good threshold, etc. I do die sometimes randomly with mechanics I could barely see and it’s a oneshot.
I could be wrong, but I don’t believe oneshot ground stuff is good. I am not taking around pinnacle boss one shot mechanics. I am talking running echos and getting killed. I should be dominating those echos with the gear I have (mostly T7, double T7/T6).
c1000 do feel stronger according to many Youtubers/streamers. The gold income seems a lot higher, experience as well for completing echos/getting favors, also the rarity does make more legendary drops per echos. For the LP, it seems to scale like you said, so it’s a smaller value.
Just to recap:
Better reward for the monolith with good system, I suggested passive tree for each as an example. 1.3 seems far honestly, it’s what there is to do atm.
Better damage scaling for c300 so a good build with good defense should not die randomly during echos unless playing really dumb.
Try to balance the game reward to be more across c300 instead of making c1000 being more optimal (I could be wrong, but it doesn’t look good at the moment).
In the end, the player base will speak for itself. I don’t see a good 1.1 player retention and the player base also started 1.1 way smaller which is an issue for the game health and survival. Nothing is lost forever, just need a very strong cycle.
Lastly, Last Epoch will pretty much be F2P model soon as the game cost is very small and they dont intend to charge us anything for the future, so I believe my feedback as a casual is important to consider. I don’t think many will stay to endure this grind and therefore spend MTX money.
