I recently took a look and the game again to see what changed and came up with two things that bothered me:
Timelines
The new map with the paths is great! I really like it ans it is a great improvement.
However (sorry ) one thing wasnāt to my liking - farming for specific uniques. While before you could kill the Boss and do one or two Maps to get the stability up again, I nie have to āregrindā the hole timeline to get another chance.
Donāt get me wrong - yes ARPGs are about grind. I get that and I know there are a whole lot of different Opinions in that.
But I want to farm a boss, grinding the whole Timeline for a build-enabling item is just tedious and not funā¦to me, at least. I tried to get that one Item for over 20 hours, the whole weekend and nothing. Yeah I know what RNG is and that I was out of luck.
What killed the fun for me wasnāt the fact that it didnāt drop. It was the fact that I had to do the Timeline for 30-60 Minutes to get another chance.
Soā¦any Plans in changing that again?
Seasons
I do like seasons. Did not play them in D3 but PoE to a degree. The mechanics were fun sometimes. But in the end what PoE did was merging all seasional mechanics together which really, really bloated that game until it was impossible for me and my friends to manage (well at least if you did not intend to drop all other hobbies you might have).
So my question here is, are there Plans or ideas how seasons will be designed?
Final words:
I know, those questions imply Iām a ācasualā and experience shows some people donāt like that or draw conclusions because of it and donāt want a game thatās ācasualizedā too much.
Have a nice day and see you in game as soon as MP is up!
So, even in the old system the timeline completely reseted and you needed to do another 15-40 echoes (depending on the timelines) to redo the boss.
I am not sure what implementation of this system you are referring too, where you could farm a boss within one or two more echoes.
The new system also allows you to gather twice the amount of timeline stability needed to do the boss, so you can do it twice in a row. Also with a very developed web(far away from the starting point) you reduce the amount of echoes needed to unlock the boss by 2-3x. And all timelines got a little bit more equalized in terms of how many echoes you need to compete to unlock the BOSS.
We donāt know a whole lot of details yet, but 2 things I picked up quite a few times over the last months and years that EHG wants to try is: they want to co-exist with other big games like PoE and D3, so they talked about off-setting the cycles potentially, so you could play both games in parallel, enjoying the start of each league/season/cycle.
And the other thing they said: they want to avoid any kind of bloat coming from additional mechanics.
So I assume when they implement new mechanics in a cycle they might remove it after the cycle ends and not implement it into the main game.
Once they did a few cycles I could see them āre-usingā some of their previous cycles ideas, maybe slightly altered or in conjunction with something new.
What I am referring to was the first implementation of the web. You could Teleport out after the bosskill and it would drop an unique again. I suppose this was labeled as a bug.
Iām aware of the increased stability gain when you travel further. Because of the random nature I already managed to get myself locked with reset-nodes and the like (no kidding ). And you still need to do the other echos and so on. Like I said, itās a personal flavor but I guess Iām not totally aloneā in this.
About leagues, yeah. In PoE the League mechanics introduced new items exclusive to that mechanics that where pretty much mandatory for the Endgame so you had to do most of them (or trade if not SSF).
Yes that was an exploit and not the intended method.
This also only worked on timelines, where you had to interact with some quest objective after the boss kill, but they fixed it already.
Yeah thatās normal, only thing you can do is going for other areas of your web or resetting via a shade kill.
If you character can handle it, you can also increase the corruption, which will boost the timeline stability gain by a lot.
Normal Timelines have a cap of 50 corruption, which gives a slight boost, but once you start doing empowered, they initially take a little bit longer than normal timelines, due to higher timeline stability requirements, but when you are able to get 200+ corruption and doing echoes far from the center you can even do empowered timeline bosses within 10-15 echoes.
Itās a good thing if new mechanics or item are good, desirable and enticing.
But keeping them in the game is just not healthy in the long term.
Main problem of PoE is: There are multiple mechanics that basically do the same thing with some slight nuances.
Way too much stuff is too similar, which is just daunting and confusing for beginners
For me personally it depens which leagues from poe are we talking about, for some of them i would really hate if i would not be able to play them, for some i wouldnt mind it depends. But i do not agree that all leagues should be removed for the sake of simplicity to new players or for the ones that are not soo good in this kind of games or that they cant putt more than 10 hours a weekā¦ for those ones i believe we have torchlight series, D3 etc. In Poe i like that there is always something new to learn so game is not repetative with its mechanics couse of milion of combinations no matter of the balanceā¦ Just my opinion and it all depend of the developers what their vision of it is. But if i was creating my own game i would not remove all mechanics from leagues just some that i find not so interesting and inovative i would remove
Edited: what i hate in Poe is remalance of those implemented leagues every season since u have to relearn tham again and again but its the same content
For me itās really simple (or maybe I am over-simplifying):
Does the League add a new fundamental mechanic which affects all characters?
or
Does the League only provide new, unique content which, itself, requires interesting mechanics to interact with?
If it adds inherent mechanics which affect all characters, do NOT include it in the Standard game.
If it only adds content, and even if that content requires interesting mechanics unique to it, then its fine to add to the Standard game.
POE examples of both:
Bad: Harvest Crafting (fundamental change to crafting, thus power.)
Good: Legion (just adds an interesting thing on maps randomly to interact with, has nothing to do with the base characterās stats, abilities, crafting capabilities, etc.)
I got to agree with Zaodon here. Blight was another one that Just added more resources for a kind of crafting and farm. Or Delve. Heck, basically I loved delve but again, you more or less needed it for crafting and had an artificial slowdown to farm itā¦
It comes down to how well the āseasonal mechanicsā blend with the game and there PoE imho failed at least with 50% sadly.
Nevertheless I played it alot. The active skills and gem combinations where awesome. TBH the skill-web, as cool as it is, couldāve been reduced by alot because there were only a few relevant nodes compared to the filler ones (the complexity is just artifical).
And as a final thought, Last Epoch like any long term GaaS needs a steady influx of new Players so putting those off by making a game artifically complex and ā¦ Well ā¦ Bloated with dozens of mandatory Endgame mechanics and Task might not be the best way to do stuff (I cannot tell for sure).
Anyway, donāt get me wrong. I love it so far and currently it nearly 100% hits my sweet spot between complex, grind and fun.
Because thatās what adds complexity. More content to do is fine, even content that requires you to learn cool interesting tactics or mechanics not found elsewhere in the game. But things like Harvest League from POE wreck the game, because now that becomes the new way to craft and you āhave toā (no one actually has to, butā¦ you have to) engage that system or you canāt progress (which is the main goal of ARPGs - loot + progression).
And why is complexity necessarily bad? There is complexity in everything, including the base game. You seem to be making the assumption that the base game has the right level of complexity to begin with.
I am talking from the experience of POE, where Leagues are either cool new content, making the game interesting, and giving players more to enjoy, or fundamental in altering how the game functions to the point that it becomes almost impossible to understand it all.
Harvest Crafting & Delve are the two bigger examples in POE, where they fundamentally increased complexity, and forced players to engage in those things if they wanted the best gear. You could no longer continue the basic gameplay of ākill monsters for lootā, because you got cutoff from progression once you hit the wall where you needed the uber crafted gear to complete the highest content.
In this game, I could imagine a scenario where you canāt even get into Empowered Monos, or corrupted Empowered Monos at all without doing some league mechanic they added in order to , I donāt know, like, craft exalted items for example, which donāt drop naturally, but give you something necessary to survive those challenges. Its an example, I donāt know if LE Seasons/Leagues will even fall into the same category as POEs. But the point is that there is clear evidence of a kind of League/Season mechanic that is fine when its around for 3 months, making that league cool and interesting, but breaks the game when made permanent.
So youāll rather close your eyes and slam an ex? I get your point. But we have to agree to disagree. I think there can be situations where adding layers of complexity can be good for the base game. Especially for LE, the base crafting system is great. But I wish it can be more complex with more decision making to make BiS items.
Iāll just say that there is no hard or fast rule, but this is governed by the Slippery Slope argument, in that there comes a tipping point where youāve added so many mechanics and features to a game that it becomes impossible to understand or manage. Sure, having specific, targeted inclusions of new base mechanics for intentional reasons here and there probably wonāt hurt the game. But it does have to be managed carefully. It would be better to make those come from a Game Version patch, and not a League/Season, though. But, Leagues/Seasons could also be a way to āBeta testā a feature before adding it to the base game, too.
Well I think it depends If it adds complexity or If itās just complicated and convoluted.
PoE reached a Point in itās development where all that stuff is complicated and convoluted - the ārulesā of the mechanics arenāt clear, much less how they interact with each other.
Another thing is that (again in this Case) PoE didnāt just add new ways to get new shiny cool stuff - they powercreeped existing Builds and Equipment with the League mechanics, making old stuff obsolete and patricipating in the new mechanics mandatory because it is the only way aside from Trading to get that stuff.
Guess why PoE is loved by RMTers ^^
TL;DR: New Options are good, new content ist good, complexity isnāt bad. A complicated Powercreep with new brickwalls and exclusive stuff imho is
The problem with stuff like power creep and also things like screen clutter is, that itās slow and insedious.
I am sure that GGG did not deliberately wanted to get things out of hand.
Most important stuff IMO when new mechanics are added, it should serve an entirely new purpose and should not be too similar to something that is already in the game.
I hate when you have multiple mechanics that are basically doing the same thing in slightly different ways.
As I understand it, they try to limit the power creep to ~5% per league but that still means that every so often you have to reset things otherwise you end up in a D3 situation where damage is measured in the billions & you need to compress the damage numbers being displayed with SI units k/thousand, m/million, b/billion, etc, needless to say, kk is not a millionā¦
POE is just way to convoluted and archaic and complicated for the sake of being complicated.
Some of the features like heist, delve and harvest were really great. Eventually however, I just couldnāt take the insane amount of clicking that game requires. Its ridiculous, and the current league added 20 different types of currency to an already way over bloated number of currencies.
I would love to see last epoch add new features every so often. Last epoch seems to be generally positioning itself in between D3 and POE in terms of depth and game play, I hope that trend continues.
) one thing wasnāt to my liking - farming for specific uniques. While before you could kill the Boss and do one or two Maps to get the stability up again, I nie have to āregrindā the hole timeline to get another chance.
and donāt want a game thatās ācasualizedā too much.
). And you still need to do the other echos and so on. Like I said, itās a personal flavor but I guess Iām not totally aloneā in this.