This has been proposed and is, imo, a solid (though incomplete) alternative to what I suggested in the OP.
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Hard disagree, i think with a colour change for example or other methods it could be fixed.
I love the fact that those small things doesnt have to be picked up like in POE.
I feel the value of those shards when i craft. The less clicks for those small things the better for my wrists and hands.
I hope EHG will never ever go POE route in regard of low value currencies.
I agree! This would be great in my opinion. It gets more attention while still being group looted 
Even if they changed this, and I hope they do, I don’t think the auto-collect debate will ever go away, lol. I’d probably be a little less loud about it, but still would want that feature, and it’s clear from spending any amount of time in game chat that a lot of other people feel that way too. At best, the devs could buy a short period of relative peace (until launch, if I had to guess) on the issue if all they did was recolor the shards.
It’s kind of how GGG resisted giving players trade tools for a long time, but they eventually had to relent to the overwhelming demand.
I don’t agree. Too many colors makes it hard to see what there is. When there are multiple colors, I must be sure I really see and differentiate all of them and I must remember what each color is about.
Same with the loot filter. The more colors, the more confusion. Mine are always with no more than two colors at the moment, it’s very easy not to be confused.
On the image I see seven colors. Must I really remember the meaning of the seven colors?
I think the shards should be tagged with an icon in addition to their colors for this reason. Something like:
“
Added Melee Fire Damage Shard”
For that matter, icons are a great way to address accessibility concerns as well, so I’d be double down for it.
I do agree with this.
I still don’t agree with the color (even if it will depend on the player’s perception), but the icon is a good idea imo
I think the coloring could work just like (or even within) the loot filter, so it’s optional yet available.
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D3 respec is completely free if that’s what you mean by “better”. It has zero opportunity cost and doesn’t really require the player to make choices because those choices can be undone instantly. That kind of goes against the spirit of “building” a character. Your choices don’t matter whatsoever if they have no weight. I think skill respec has too high a cost but you can do it freely, and it only takes a little bit of time to get it back to a high level.
Grim internals is a mod. Idk why you’re including a QoL mod that was created due to a lack of QoL in your list of reasons why LE QoL is worse than other games.
Item comparison is a feature that LE has stated they are working on, as well as tooltip and character sheet. Early Access.
PoE stash affinities were just added after years and years of people asking for stuff like it. The GGG devs are consistently asked for QoL features, yet they drip-feed them slowly to the player base instead of dedicating some actual development time to them. The game has been out for 8 years and has gone through countless QoL updates, and still, it’s considered a game with a massive lack of QoL. Early Access Last Epoch has a stash system that UNTIL AFFINITIES WERE RELEASED was BETTER than a 7+ year-old game.
Don’t know what you’re talking about regarding pacing, I’ve played almost every other decent ARPG in the last 20 years and LE is very similar when it comes to movement and pacing. PoE is pretty much the only exception because instead of meaningful combat and pacing, your goal is to create builds that move through maps at 300% move speed, 1 tapping the entire screen in giant explosions. EHG has said they will never move in that direction, and I applaud them for it. It allows for them to develop monsters to have clearly telegraphed abilities and prevents them from having to put in excessive on-death/one-shot mechanics just to make monsters feel slightly dangerous. The game doesn’t have to have super volatile “1 shot or be 1 shot” style gameplay, which is great.
Again, early access. EHG knows minion AI is a problem, in fact, the most recent patch outlines a lot of changes to try and improve the system. Plus in PoE, minions by default pretty much act just like they do in LE. For them to be aggressive you need a gem or certain jewels that target minions. Minion AI is a constant complaint in PoE as well, most die-hard minion players would agree it’s pretty awful. The system could use improvement but I wouldn’t say that with the new LE patch that any other game has an overwhelmingly better minion system.
The only difference between the GD respec system and Last Epochs is that the respec in GD allows you to do multiple points quickly. This is a lack of QoL on LE’s part and I hope they allow for smoother respecs.
They just released a UI update. What’s wrong with interacting with NPCs right now? You click them then you click the dialogue or quest options. Seems pretty standard to me. Vendor stuff is weird and quirky, hopefully, there are a few changes in the works.
Idk, Wolcen was a complete and total dumpster fire that designed movement skills well. You can’t go through the last 15 years of ARPGs and cherry-pick the best features from every game and expect LE will measure up. I’m sure by the time the game actually releases there will be tons of work done on QoL, movement, etc. So it’s good to give feedback on, but it kinda just seems like you really want LE to be the PERFECT ARPG for you that takes all of your favorite features from all of your favorite arpgs and improves upon them.
They just decreased the amount of loot and improved the quality in the patch. In terms of loot, LE is by far one of the better systems. It can use improvements yes, but it isn’t bad. Using vendoring items for currency as an example of how LE’s system is bad doesn’t really make sense. You’ve just gone around and posted all over the forums about how clicking once to vacuum up shards and clicking a second time to send them to a stash adds tedium, yet picking up items and vendoring them is literally the same thing but worse, since vendoring items in almost any ARPG becomes pointless once you have hit a certain point of progression. Vendoring items for gold in Diablo 2 was incredibly tedious and annoying. I wouldn’t want this game to have a similar mechanic.
The devs are well aware of the lack of chat QoL, but up until a few months ago they only had 200-300 hundred daily players. It wasn’t a priority at the time, but the issue has been brought up many times and is almost certainly on their to-do list. I would expect a huge chat overhaul before the multiplayer patch drops later this year.
GD still requires you to complete the quests. You can level in the crucible or skip to ultimate difficulty mode, but you have to play through to get to the end game content with every character. The story is crazy long too. D3 is the exception, but then again the game is widely considered by most hardcore ARPG players to be hot garbage so shrug.
As for clicking to pick up loot and then being “forced” to click a single additional time to transfer it, I just think it’s absolutely ridiculous. I play games on my PC expecting I’ll have to click stuff. That’s what the mouse is for. It’s not tedious, it’s not menial, it’s literally expected that you need to interact with NPCs and items with your mouse. In terms of session clicks, it’s a million times lower than PoE so I’m incredibly happy with the current state of things. At a certain point, you have to realize that automation introduces a whole other slew of problems. They both have pros and cons, I believe manually clicking 1 shard in a pile of 15 and vacuuming them up is just one degree shy of GDs auto vacuum and leagues away from the horrible QoL of PoE’s 100,000 clicks a session. If you find yourself sighing heavily every single time you have to pull your mouse up 2 inches in order to click “move to crafting stash”, maybe PC games aren’t for you.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a long list of improvements I think could be made to LE. I just think it’s a waste of time and brain power to enter “clicking a few times per monolith on materials” into the conversation.
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I could go point by point to dispute most of those, but the point I was making with that list seems to have been missed. Here’s the most important part:
You want newer games to learn the lessons that older games have to teach. I don’t expect LE to take every bullet point and move the game that way. I doubt anyone does. However, your original claim that LE has more/better QoL than other games on the market is simply untrue. It’s a wild overstatement. THAT was the point of that list. I should mention that most of your arguments with the points on my list seem a lot more like looking for reasons to be contrarian than how those features are actually received by the players of those games.
There’s also no point in saying “It’s still in development” when I already acknowledged that in the very post you quoted.
There’s nothing ridiculous about reducing unnecessary clicking related to inventory management. Even the devs recognize the value of this on the RSI/Accessibility side of things. They are just trying to find the balance between, “What is QoL and what is Auto-Pilot?” They aren’t always mutually exclusive, but I would draw the line at what the gameplay is most focused on: combat.
It’s perfectly fine to minimize the work necessary to perform inventory management tasks while still not wanting the combat to be passive/uninteractive.
One more point that bears mention is that having to manually click shards right now sucks for a couple other reasons than just the ones already described in the thread.
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Builds that run through applying dots to everything have to double-back to loot. Hit builds don’t. This feels pretty freaking terrible for the dot builds. For LE in particular, that’s a somewhat bigger issue than some other games because it really only has three builds: hit, dot, and minion. Sure, lots of builds are some flavored variant of these, but having 1/3 of your archetypes suffer an unfair disadvantage is probably not the best design choice.
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Some monos sit there and harass you with global artillery, so you can’t actually stop to look at the loot. You’re forced to decide with minimal information whether to grab and run or leave it and run–in either case, that decision has nothing to do with the quality or “weight” of that particular loot. It’s a consequence of the confluence of two bad mechanics–manual looting and global harassment. I’d like to see both of these fixed.
I ran a DoT build through the test & wasn’t doubling back for loot. I also didn’t have any problems picking up loot in spire maps since you can just wait for the hit to land then go collect the loot. If a player wants to zoom zoom through maps, that’s entirely up to them, but it’s not how the devs want the game to be played.
They want people to just stand around and stare at health bars when the dot is already going to kill the mobs? Making it sound like it’s just about “zoom meta” and not someone playing their build optimally is a weird approach.
There’s also going to be a lot of gray area between something being “zoom” to one person and “slow” for another. I predict this will be a real thorn in the devs’ sides as the game grows. Players are pretty sensitive to unneeded interruptions and inconveniences in their play.
EGH doesn’t have to go full GGG with sprint pots, 1,000% movement speed buffs, or any other crazy shenanigans, but they should be careful about what slows people down and why.
I’d also be super cautious about making the game too slow in general, because that immediately translates to too boring. This is why I walked away from Wolcen–even though I was willing to tolerate the bugs and disconnects. It just takes too long to do anything. Even Grim Dawn feels pretty quick by comparison (to Wolcen).
Yeah, there is a lot of area between the two options, that is true. But if the player wants to make the decision to ignore loot that’s dropped (or going to drop), that’s entirely up to them.
It kinda feels to me that there’s pressure from the player (or putative player since I think most of “those” types of player are still playing PoE) for an inexorable drift towards a speed meta even within the bounds of what the devs set as how they want the game to be. And as you say, one person’s “OMG zoooooooooooooom” is going to be another’s “sloooooooooooooooooow af”.
I’d personally like to see a bit more challenge added in to give the player the choice of either slowing down, killing enough stuff to not be ganked by the massive group they’re pulling or go full zoom and take the risk.
The downside with that is that it’d likely push people towards a more restricted set of builds that can handle it, which the devs then nerf 'cause they’re out-performing & “those” players loose their #### 'cause they can’t do X as “efficiently/effecitvely” as they could before, despite that not being the devs view of how it “should” be played.
TLDR - we’re all doomed to a relentless march of “OMG neeedz moar zoom”.
sigh
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This is actually one of my biggest concerns about 1.0. I’m perfectly willing to accept criticism that this maybe a type of “slippery slope,” but bear with me, please:
*Release multiplayer
*Release trade
*Try to slow game down
*Trade puts pressure for players to speed up
*Builds that are fast get nerfed
*Builds that are slow are boring
*Everyone is unhappy
*Game fades well before it needed to
I think GGG has run into this a little bit so far, which is a huge reason they had to give ground on both speed and trade tools. Yet it does beg the question, “How do you have an ARPG with trade that doesn’t feel like it needs to be fast?”
I’m sure plenty of people can come up with ideas–and that’s probably worthy of its own topic–but I don’t think the game, the players, or the devs are served well in the long run by making it slow in some of the ways it currently does (looting and inventory management in particular).
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On a related note, the instability bar added to Monos really hurts my desire to play (especially when combined with the mana changes). I’ve barely touched the game since patch as a result. I put some thought into why I felt this way about what should have been an exciting patch. The mana changes are pretty obvious. The mono changes–that bar–however, is a bit trickier, but I think I figured it out.
Before the changes, I ran monos because I wanted exp, gold, and loot. After the changes, that bar became an objective–and a super grindy one. It shows just how long I’m going to have to grind to progress this timeline and that it’s slow. Don’t get me wrong, it felt pretty slow before too. This is really slow. Maybe it’s a tuning issue. Maybe it’s just a psychological trick working against me. Maybe the mono quests should be a separate system and each timeline needs individual reasons to farm that timeline. Could be anything… but it feels awful.
Even if it’s the case, it’s something interesting. If it’s “only” psychological but it affects a majority of players, it will become a concern. So such feedback is important. And if it’s only you, that will be sad for you but the devs also need to know.
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Yeah, I’m sure the devs know how disruptive mp/trade is going to be which is why they’re taking their time with it (in addition to all the technical challenges of getting it working well).
I don’t really focus on the bar much, I look at it from time to time to see if I’ve got enough to do another quest echo but apart from that I’m far more focused on extending out from the centre & doing monoliths with “nice” bonuses, almost to the exclusion of what the modifier is!
Which games are you talking about?
D3 - where you have to click every crafting material that drops, even if they have a special store space…
POE - Where you click 3000 times to get all those splinters that drop
Tochlight - Hate getting the useless loot here
This are the ones i can think off. BUT, you are correct, they could put a toggle option where you can choose to auto-pick them instead of clicking in one and swooping them all. Also they could add an option to assign a Key so when you click it, it gets all the shards. Seems like stupid, but when you´re rushing the map, you may be missing the click on these itens on the ground XD.
But i understand in the developer way, there is a complication to do this on the coding side, since there are several itens that need to be programmed for the auto-pick. and by doing this it causes some stress over the server as this is something that keeps running at all times (srry, i can´t really explain how this works).
They changed that several years ago (before I stopped playing) so you only have to click on one to pick them up. Whether they changed it since I have no idea.
Grim Internals is an extremely popular mod for Grim Dawn that facilitates this.
Sacred 2 has aoe looting (not quite auto) with a hotkey instead of a click–wouldn’t mind this, actually.
Dungeon Siege 1 & 2 had a hotkey that told your party members to automatically loot everything nearby.
Llama is correct that D3 aoe loots, but automatically puts crafting materials into storage.
Plenty of other games (not specifically ARPGs, necessarily) have similar or actual auto-loot mechanics.
Basically, it’s not a novel concept. There are several ways to go about it. The current system just seems like one of the more tedious ones.
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