Im lvl 97 (on hardcore), still doing low corruption mono’s and i’m rapidly losing interest and i will be probably quiting soon and here is why :
There is just to much RNG to get good gear.
First you need to get the right unique('s), some of them are pretty rare, i still havnt seen the belt and neck i need for my build.
Then you need RNG luck getting legendary potential
Then you need to find an exalted item that has the right T6/7 stat
Next you need to reroll the other stats to be somewhat usefull before the reforging runs out
And finally when you combine them you have to pray you get a usefull stat
Target farm uniques from monoliths you say ? im still trying to get the right blessings with high rolls, after 15 hearot kill i still have a very low roll of the blessing i need, also to much RNG here.
In short : the grind is not rewarding enough
And finally, the seasonal event thing is just to far endgame, cant really call the nemesis mobs content, its just good to have an extra RNG chance on some gear but thats it, getting to harbringers and the final boss is just to far endgame, i doubt ill ever get there before im to bored of the game to continue.
Outside of the Nemesis aspect. That game mechanic literally gives you 33% more content during monoliths. Which is a massive change compared to before.
It is - for the current state of the game - very impactful and well thought out. You find them during the campaign and it lets you progress your character even easier (which warrants to get Act 4-8 into proper difficulty order finally) while also providing a long-term use-case for end-game.
Generally a great implementation.
As for the baseline crafting and itemization?
Yes, it’s not good. It’s mediocre at best, fantastic concept but far too limited by having a low count of tiers and a low count of affixes which causes the issue you’re talking about. You can’t get decent items which are needed to progress quickly enough and the timeframe between upgrades hence gets too much too early.
This is a massive weakness of the game which needs a fundamental change and before then it can’t become more engaging long-term since it’s a in-built limitation. You’ll always have a 40-60 hour engagement time before it falls off into this stage.
Contrary to you, I am able to one shot some of the mobs with higher HP on 800+ corruption with my Sorcerer. The downside is that everything can one shot me. That’s the only reason I made it so far, didn’t get any upgrades either because of stacked RNG.
Did manage to finish the game with my warlock, mainly because of profane veil making me nearly invincible for about 3 seconds and the gear requirements for that build are pretty low / lots of common drops.
there is only 1 massive problem currently and it will be for awhile. not enough endgame content. don’t get me wrong game is better this cycle than it was before, still not enough. i guess it will be years till we will have enough endgame. (if we look at poe for example they have different problem - too many endgame activities. EHG should find a middleground with time).
Crafting Legendary gear is a long-term chase goal, not a requirement to advance through the game.
You clear the game in exalted gear.
This means your issue can be traced back to your build.
High corruption yields more Favor with your selected faction as well as more and better loot in general, so clearing fast and clearing high corruption is the goal for farming legendary gear.
By doing low corruption monos, your yield of favor and loot from monos is also lowered, and that’s why finding a good item feels like a chore.
Adjusting your build for faster clear and better damage output would help solving your problems.
If your build is the one I’m thinking, then the amulet you seek drops from Aberroth, the new pinnacle boss, so you’ll never drop it in low monos.
For the belt, equip Refracting Lens of Wealth and Refracting Lens of Rhyme and keep rerolling the “Arctus” region for the “Unique belt x4” prophecy.
Which is heavily increased by the itemization state of the game though.
There was a time (around 8-9 years ago) when Path of Exile had roughly the same amount of content as Last Epoch has nowadays. Their problem wasn’t player retention though, players loved it.
Partially they did because no competition was on the market and partially it was for another big reason.
If a person gets no upgrades reliably then they stop playing, their progression isn’t worth the investment anymore.
Since Path of Exile always had a higher variance in affix tiers this means miniscule upgrades can happen easier. You still ‘push on’.
Hence the highly invested people were done in a week or two… no issue.
The ones which put mediocre amounts of time into the game nonetheless played for ~2 months since they still got upgrades.
This is different in LE currently.
People which push and have this investment-limit stop after less then a week since ‘all’s done and the character is finished’ in their eyes while mediocre engaged people reach that point at a stage which is below a month.
This is a problem. If you increase that variance then the pure available content matters less. Since we don’t have that the content amount matters. Content is vastly harder to provide though then a singular long-term system is.
Not anymore since it got compiled into the scarab system and hence you simply focus on 1 or 2 which you like rather then ‘all of em’. You’re not ‘forced’ to branch out as heavily anymore unless you play SSF… which is a challenge mechanic though and not the normal way to play.
Agreed, 100%!
Which makes the item chase even less time intensive though, which is a detriment.
The less item chase time there is and the higher the times between upgrades the more people quit.
Agreed. The randomness of the item grind makes me lose steam a lot. I only really went any further this season because of the new bosses. But once I was done with those it just became really hard to care enough to deal with the usual progression woes.
The game needs some ways to work towards guaranteeing yourself useful upgrades. It can take a while or be locked behind difficult content, but I need to know the end exists and I’m not just endlessly pulling slot machines that may never hit the jackpot in a thousand hours.
Surprise surprise, rng feels bad. It never felt good even in turn based games such as DnD and that is a game where you can control it to large extents. There is a good reason devs who know what they are doing do not use rng without limiting its impact. Why Xcom felt good to play and bg2 did not.
What we need is to move away from layers of rng. Buff sets by 3-4X and then I will be willing to entertain the idea of keeping rng as it is now, as i play grimdawn around monster infrequents which are predetermined.
Ideally, go back to my older posts. I outlined before how gear should drop and where.
I talked often about the topic that Items in LE are slot machines on tp of slot machines on top of slot machines and so on and so forth. If you don’t have a huge ammount of time or luck you can simply uninstall the game.
Yes, the 98% hit-chance missing 50% of the time in Xcom really felt great /s
In a game where such mechanics shouldn’t even have a space, it’s solely about tactical decisions and not about lucky rolls. It was well made from the basis but this one mechanic made it a mess.
I can understand it in DnD because it’s not a game to tactically solve but one telling a story, you don’t play to win, you play for the experience usually.
Nigh everything is RNG. You don’t even realize how often RNG is used when it’s well used. RNG can and does absolutely enhance the experience of a player. It is solely on the plate of a developer to create their systems in ways which cause that RNG not to deviate to such a degree from the norm that players get frustrated.
In LE this is simply not the case, hence it’s faulty usage of RNG mechanics. If well done you can have 50 layers of RNG stacking on top of each other and it won’t be negative, you just need to devise systems to ‘reign in’ said RNG. Which once more… is not done.
Is it?
I personally wouldn’t be so sure about that.
Crafting entails after all acquisition of the base, adjusting the base to derive the outcome, polishing the outcome to be optimal.
Acquisition itself becomes a mess fairly quickly, which entails that crafting by design building up on that becomes a mess.
Which makes adjusting bases more frustrating then enjoyable since you have a guaranteed fail-state coming closer with each action.
And even should you finish the actual outcome then it’s very unlikely that the polish stage can even be used.
I wouldn’t say ‘RNG is reigned in’ accordingly hence.
It’s extremely strong early on should you get the right affixes dropped and it’s a broken mess late game.
Neither side is reigned in.
It really is! They’ve added several systems to ameliorate the RNG during crafting, you can get critical successes which add an additional tier to a random affix, there’s an invisible “lucky” roll (rolls the FP cost twice & uses the lower value) & glyphs of hope. Most of the RNG is getting the item you want to craft on & since we’re (I’m) talking about crafting, we can ignore that (it’s a sunk cost).
This is the issue, or most of the right affixes, on the right base. But the actual FP used is slanted heavily in the player’s favour.
first you need to a find the right base item with a good T6/7 roll
next you need to get 3 other good stats and hope you dont remove the T6/7 stat, before the FP runs out.
and then hope you can seal 1 of the stats wich either im very unlucky, or has a very low chance to succeed
The crafting was great early and mid game and i really enjoyed playing the game, but endgame … to much rng on rng on rng …
Yeah, but that’s not ‘reigning in RNG’ properly. It’s just changing the goalpost. It’s a static system on a static system. It has no variance related to former outcomes. It doesn’t act ‘smart’.
It’s changing the RNG and not solving it.
I mean… great direction already but not a solution, bandaid, albeit a well-made one.
I’ve mentioned it somewhere before what the issue with RNG is in general, though I’ll get into it again.
So, RNG becomes generally an issue if you’re finding the case of ‘an outlier’. Either extreme luck or extremely unlucky. For example in Path of Exile 6-linking an item takes 3000 fusing orbs. That’s the 50% mark (quality changes it by 1% per quality but we ignore that now since I don’t wanna mess around with 2400 fusings instead for 20%, barely known by people btw.)
So, the outcome is that 50% of the people will reach a 6-link by using 3k fusings or less. That’s the statistic and hard cold math behind it.
But… there outliers. You can reach that goal upon your very first fusing! Extreme outlier, more then enough clips about it out. Or… you cannot reach it after even using 250k+ fusings, which is enough to buy a mirror in the game, more then all your character should be worth in 99,999% of characters. Ridiculously unlucky.
If you re-roll that value you do nothing else then halving this chance, it’s as you mentioned it… a ‘lucky roll’. Hence 50% will reach it by using 1500 fusions… but that 250k+ example will still exist! You just double the value, you shift the goalpost, you don’t handle the existence of the example by itself.
That’s why Path of Exile implemented the craft to guarantee the outcome no matter what. People can gamble on it or use it outright. Solved! RNG successfully reigned in!
This is a solution through a guarantee
The next thing to take into consideration is ‘cadence’ for RNG. Higher disparity in RNG can be alleviated by having the rolled amount increased. So if something becomes extremely unlikely but still possible through sheer ‘big numbers game’ and hence realistic… you counteract it via increases the respective rolls to a degree that it becomes ‘a miracle’. a 1 in a 10 million chance for someone to stumble upon it.
This is for example done with damage calculation that has variance. ‘5 to 15 damage’ is done by an attack… but you attack 20 times a second. Hence you re-roll it 20 times a second and hence get a new chance overall for any specific outcome, that outcome is infinitely more likely to get closer to the 50% mark the higher the ‘cadence’ is.
This is a solution through reduction
The third solution is one which memorizes outcomes and counteracts them accordingly in the background. Optimally through at least 3 layers to make it impossible to discern if an outcome is getting affected positively or negatively.
For example, you have something which has 1000 tries to success into the 50% chance (hence a roll-range of 2000), now for every time you go below 1000 it provides a positive counter in the background, and for every time you get above 1000 you get a negative counter in the background.
This counter then is hidden by providing a variance by itself. A chance to proc (another layer of RNG) and a variance on how strongly it procs, with that variance shifting according to the initial counter for ‘positive’ or ‘negative’.
This causes the RNG to be tripple-layered, providing specific outcomes and creating a so called ‘wave behavior’ without slipping into any of the extremes of successive successes or failures. It enforces the outcome to have variance but the chance for it to go into any extreme is hard-capped.
This is a complex solution
Now for LE though… we have no guaranteed solution and we have a low cadence of item usage. Also no complex solution is provided. This means ‘no, RNG is not reigned in’.
Which is the current status of crafting. The measures were nice, the outcome is lackluster as it didn’t solve the problems, it just made them more unlikely but still guaranteed.
The lower the tier of the affix the higher the chance. Optimally T3 is used since it still has ‘a’ chance but it isn’t abysmally low.
Exactly, that’s because the variance for the current system is handled in a way that it outpaces perceived progression in late-game far too early.
It’s a fundamental design issue we have in LE.
