For background, we all know it’s impossible for everyone to agree on balance changes, optimal progression rates, etc. What’s too powerful & fast for one person is too weak & slow for another, depending on how much they like to grind, etc. For the real Cycle, the devs have to find a balance that works for most players. This post isn’t about that.
I know this is probably a stretch and a big ask… but: What if individual groups of friends could do their own setup, tinkering the game settings to their liking?
Some multiplayer games allow you to host custom private servers with adjustable parameters like a global XP gain rate, gold drop rate, uniques rate, enemy health modifiers, etc. PoE has similar private leagues with tweakable options, but they can only be made more difficult vs the standard options. What if Last Epoch could allow private instances that could be either harder or easier?
I’m one of those folks who can’t really afford to spend hundreds of hours playing these games anymore, but would still love to see the end-game and play with different class combinations, item sets, etc. My friends are often in similar positions, and can’t really invest the time to progress at the normal (very slow) rates.
In offline mode I can use a trainer to speed up progression, but that precludes any sort of multiplayer (I believe). It would be cool to have an “super softcore mode” where everything happened 10x quicker, especially in the end-game, where I can invite a few friends to play through the campaign and some monos in a reasonable amount of time, just by tweaking XP gain and faction progression, and maybe drop rates.
Maybe something like a private dedicated server could do that (by modifying the true offline client?), if not an outright built-in GUI like the PoE private leagues have.
Yes, this means I’m asking for a much easier version of the game, for private use only. It wouldn’t affect the true online Cycle or leaderboards – those will remain the realm of the hyper-tuners, streamers, bots, bug exploiters, etc. This is just a feel-good EZ mode for us wimps to enjoy in private.