Mike talked about adding new factions, and he mentioned that the new ones wouldn’t be mutually exclusive with the existing factions.
Wondering if new factions are planned in mutually exclusive pairs?
If the new factions are being added in isolation, is there any planned downside to joining one of the new factions? (other than time expenditure).
He talked about that several times with slightly different wording.
The few tiems I remember him talking about it it sounded more like that they will eventually add more factions, but maybe just one at a time that will be accessable for everybody.
Just as another form of meta progression that everybody CoF or MG can use.
Maybe one major patch will bring multiple factions at once, but I personally don’t think mutally exclusive features are things that EHG wants to adds from a game design philisopy standpoint.
MG and CoF are quite unique in that sense because it is very hard to combine the benefits of both without being mutally exclusive. So that is why they did it here.
I suspect factions meant more in a wow rep farming style. Where each faction has a specific set of drops either via rng or deterministicly. I like this idea as long as the reputation is account wide.
I really think they will keep the theme of factions with ~10 ranks and each rank giving different benefits.
If these benefits do affect loot acquisition of other mechanics in some capacity and will improve over time via gaining ranks/favor it will be some form of meta progression that will make you keep making progress even in higher empowered monolith.
Especially maybe if its a factions that might be unlocked later than CoF and MG, so its more focused on endgame activities.
That is what I always envisioned factions.
For example some kind of “Time Watchers” (or whatever you wanna call them) specific to Monolith and then you maybe get different benefits for different timelines.
E.g. if you kill mobs in The Last Ruin (which drops Unique/Set Relics) has also a greatly increased chance for Class Specific Relics Prefixes.
And then maybe another faction for Dungeons or whatever endgamne content they add in the future.
Personally, I’d expect the next faction to be crafting-oriented. Other than that, I have no idea what they might have planned for further factions.
As for them always being presented in binary pairs, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. CoF/MG are about 2 different playstyles, so it makes sense they were introduced as opposing and exclusive. But other factions don’t have to be like this.
For example, there really isn’t an opposite to crafting, so you would introduce that as standalone. It also wouldn’t be exclusive to either CoF or MG since it fits both.
And you could just as easily introduce 3 or more mutually exclusive factions, as well. This is a bit of a silly example, but you could have a pet faction, a ranged faction and a melee faction. For each character, you’d join one of the factions according to your build.
And you could also get multiple factions that aren’t exclusive, like a faction that boosts monos, one that boosts arena, one that boosts dungeons and whatever else endgame systems we might get.
A crafting faction would be good. As of right now. The best way to exploit the faction system is to use CoF exclusivly for farming shard affixes as they are not faction specific, and use MG on your main pushing char.
So having a faction that removes the RNG simulator will be good thing. Maybe this factiom just lets you buy item directly from them for rep at a much higher cost. In this case, the crafting faction have an anvil of some kind that guarantees the item with all affixes. You pick all affixes, it tells you rhat you need 999K rep. Pay it. Your done. Perfect legendary with all stats perfected
I don’t think anyone actually said they were. I asked if they were, but the way Mike talked about it, I don’t think they are. I agree with Heavy, his language made me think each faction would be added as a one-off.
The reason I asked is because I was thinking of something Mr Llama had said. Paraphrasing, it was something like, if you add a faction all by itself, that has benefits that anyone would want, it becomes mandatory. I think he’s right in that regard, and I think WoW showed (me, at least), just how quickly faction-fatigue could set in. Especially for a longer grind to reach max.
So, I would hope that EHG would be super focused on adding interesting/fun gameplay to the faction grind*. Adding factions just to give me an incentive to do the same boring things I’m already tired of simply makes ‘playing the game’, more like, ‘punching the clock’. Once it gets there, I will simply leave. I have a job, I do not want another.
*for example, prophecies get a little bit of the way there, but I would like to see prophecies enhanced to actual cause the spawn of something that wouldn’t otherwise spawn to make it more interesting.
Personally, I hate prophecies. It’s a mechanic that interrupts gameplay. You have to keep going back to get new prophecies or you just stack favour and fill prophecies all at once, but that just means you’re spending almost an hour just going through them.
I also hated prophecies in PoE, so it’s a personal thing. I’d prefer to have CoF have another more fluid mechanic, but it is how it is. Overall, I still prefer CoF playstyle to MG.
As for new factions, I really have no idea what they might intend to do with them, but I hope it’s something new and possibly fun. CoF was a good idea (even if the implementation left something to be desired) and I hope we get new stuff like that.
As long as the faction can be advanced while playing the game (kinda like CoF), I have no issue with that. It just becomes a buff.
And by that I mean that you can advance it while also advancing MG/CoF. If you have to stop progression on those to progress the new faction, then it sucks. But if you an advance both, then I have no issue with it, even if it’s just a single faction and is becomes sort of mandatory.
Do you use both of the Greater Lenses that increase the cost but give you double the rewards and double the completions?
With that they cost a lot of favor but give a lot of rewards.
With those the favor I stack in 1 hour of playing is spent in ltierally 3-5mins maximum, depending on how much you reroll or just take the whatever prophecy.
I usually use one to remove arena and another to boost either exalted or unique, depending on what I’m searching for. Still rank 8, so last one is still locked.
If you gripe with the system is the “flow” I really recommend using both of these greater lenses. One right now next one with rank 9 then.
Then be very picky with the prohecies, because they are very expensive and the reroll cost is irrelevant comapred to prophecy costs.
Once you use one of these greater lenses the block lenses are nto worth it, because the reroll cost is so low anyway.
Just be very picky with what prohecies you pick.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try.