My wife and I just started doing monoliths and I noticed that we have different echo webs. It appears that we have to alternate echoes in order to both make progress on our individual webs.
Question: do we both need to progress our individual webs or can we pick one of us to develop the Web and the other player just tags along? Will the second player get all the benefits of the first player’s progress or is it important that we individually progress our webs?
Please be light on terminology and assumptions, the system is somewhat overwhelming for a first time user, and we’re still trying to learn all the jargon.
The only useful thing about progressing your web individually is that you get to do the Timeline quests, as well as get a little bit of bonus item rarity / experience. So I’d say if only one player is benefiting, that’s not a huge deal.
Each echo adds to the stability bar at the top the screen. It takes about 2-3 hours to get enough stability on a Timeline to play the quests that allow you to finish that Timeline. (These are the quests on the lefthand side of the screen when you’re looking at the web map.) In total, it’s about 40 hours playtime. So doing them over again with the other person or that person playing them solo will take that time or less, because they don’t start scaling up to your level until you’ve finished them all.
(To do these quests, you actually have to click on them once you have enough stability and click the button that appears to start them. They’re separate echo dungeons just like the locations on the web.)
If you’re comfortable with that, one of you help the other finish and then go back and solo them yourself with the gear and levels you earned in the process. Shouldn’t take that long.
Well I’m not sure how much my wife would be missing out if she can’t finish the timeline quests. If it’s not too much time, we’d probably prefer to help each other advance our respective maps.
Also, I notice that we sometimes complete an Echo objective before we’ve filled the stability bar. Is it better to complete the stabilty bar before portaling out, or just rush to the objectives and get on to the next one? I suppose it depends on our objective (progression speed vs. loot/experience?) but I’m not experienced enough with this game to even know what are good objectives at this point. Ultimately, we’re trying to get to Empowered as soon as we can, but I’d also like to level my skills up (which are all still at 17 and going up very SLOWLY), plus I would like to finish up my passives.
Completing all the timeline quests is what allows you to unlock Empowered Timelines. You should get enough stability to do all three quests and then complete them to finish each Timeline. Once you do this on all 8 regular Timelines you get access to, then you can go back and play the empowered versions. You also get a modest buff from completing each one.
Your goal if you’re in Monolith already is probably to get to level 90 or so, in order to be able to play Empowered Timelines comfortably. If you get anywhere close to that, replaying them so that the other person can also unlock them shouldn’t take very long. The only two that are really hard to complete the first time around are Reign of Dragons and The Age of Winter. The final part of each of those is pretty challenging.
As far as gear goes, I wouldn’t worry too much. In the 35-40 hours you’re gonna be playing, you’re gonna see legendary and set items that will boost your build significantly. In addition to that, you will see huge damage buffs on certain exalted items that are worth using, even if you don’t keep them forever. All of that, plus the idols you pick up, will allow you to have the stats you need by the time you’re level 90. It takes awhile but that will happen on its own. Just make sure you keep picking stuff up and stowing it in your bank when it has stats that are relevant to your class.
Have any other questions, feel free to reach out. Happy to help.
Actually I have one more suggestion: If you do find that you’re behind on gear by the time you start Empowered Timelines, try playing The Black Sun. If the exclusive echo bonuses are the same across accounts, it offers more set and unique rewards for completing levels. Check for these rewards on the first screen at the bottom, where you select the difficulty.
Only one timeline has to be completed, if the other person has enough stability when you fight the boss they will also get the next timeline unlocked and get to choose a reward blessing. There is no need to go back and forth on the timelines with two people. Just have one person in charge and do them all and make your way to level 100 timelines.
At that point it starts to matter who’s doing them because only one of you will get the increased corruption that scales the timeline.
Also 2-3 hours per timeline seems like a massive overstatement to me. At most it’s like 45 minutes if you’re not stopping constantly.
Also you only have to actually complete the last three level 90 timelines to unlock the level 100 empowered timelines. Not all of them.
Theres no need for both of you to progress indivudual maps if you play together. Everything @Bakageyama is right.
Both of you get stability. The amount of stability is dependant on the echo of the person thats start the echo. So all bonus from web progress will apply to your wife, too.
Just make sure you both have the required stability when you do the bosses. It states if and how many party members don’t have sufficient stability.
As long as this is the case, your wife will also unlock the next web.
Empowered is unlocked by completion of the 3x 90s timeline. You can go the shortest way to these by going the right lane of the mono map.
Corruption pushing (killing shades to increase timeline corruption) I dont recommend for regular timelines. You want to do empowered asap as the blessings there have much higher rolls.
Just note that as if now, corruption progress isn’t shared, unlike stability. Only the echo starter gets corruption from killing shades. I read somewhere that this is a bug and not intended. I hope this gets fixed as I find it very annoying when olayin coop.
The benefit of corruption is that it gives a bonus on item rarity and stability gain.
Great responses, that helps a lot. Sounds like the consensus is that one of us (probably me) should choose the echoes and just work my timelines, making sure that my wife has enough stability when the boss fight comes (I’ve seen the notice that “1 party member has insufficient stability”). When we get to corruption pushing, hopefully we will learn that the game is in fact bugged and corruption is fixed to be shared as well. Otherwise, we will probably have to rotate at that point to insure an even distribution of bonuses.
Many thanks, guys, i can see why all my favorite ARPG streamers are here now, this game seems to really hit the sweet spot between the braindead simplicity of Diablo and the mindnumbing complexity of PoE. My kinda game.
