god the mention of locust build hits hard. I would do literally anything for a locust based swarmblade that wasnt frostbite.
They have some poison synergy implemented in both passives and swarmblade form skill tree, but trying to make that work is borderline impossible. Only way I could even get a poison swarmblade to seem feasible was to just get rid of minions entirely, when i wanted the minions to be doing all of the poison damage in the first place!
well said
Yes, besides one being the core mechanic and all there is… and one being a side mechanic stacked on top of another very distinct core mechanic. As I also said before.
That’s the difference.
Well, it does not, quite the contrary.
We got a linear scale for enemies regarding levels, which goes from 1 to 100, that’s what basically every other game has, and on top of that go the modifiers to adjust said content.
In LE we have the linear scaling from 1 to 100… then the exponential scaling of corruption (which hence already is a multiplicative measure) and on top of that the adjustments for the specific nodes, hence we multiply a multiplicative mechanic, that makes it volatile. You can run 10 monoliths without issue 200 corruption above your means… or you can fail reliably at your actually passable stage depending on the modifiers at times… even if they’re generally ignored (because the web enforces you to ignore them to progress anyway).
And:
This is absolutely putting the cart before the horse.
You’re saying balancing around content which includes a distinct aspect of positioning, cast-time, upkeep ability of your build and more is easier then a simple mathematical equation with comparatively minimal influences. Monoliths need survivability or clear-speed/AoE, bosses do not, I can kill Julra T4 easily because I don’t get hit outside of the singular puddle tick (Which I found out is avoidable as well), but I can’t do that in monoliths.
We don#t have any baseline for damage for characters existing, as long as you simply survive the enemies in 500c then you can run it… but it provides a really really bad measurement to do it this way.
First you deal with the math, then you deal with the feeling of the respective skill/build.
also very well said lol
No, that’s not what I said. What I said was that in PoE all you can do is say that a build clears a boss in x time or can do x sanctums per hour, or whatever unreliable metric you want to use.
There is no clear way to really compare build A vs build B, because both builds can do the endgame, it’s just that one is much faster than the other.
In LE it’s easier. Build A can reach 1k corruption. Build B can never reach 1k corruption and can only reach 500c. Therefore build A is a lot stronger than build A. Build C can only ever reach 150c. Therefore it’s underpowered and needs a boost.
Because the content doesn’t have an actual end and keeps scaling up, you can more effectively compare which are the strongest builds and which aren’t.
After all, this is what this discussion is all about. Some builds can do 1k+, some builds struggle to reach even 300c. This lets the devs know very easily which builds/skills they need to work on next.
Otherwise, the only metric you have is how many people use build A or B and try to buff the most underused ones. Which is very unreliable as a metric.
Why? That is the current endgame goal. You don’t need any other metric. If a build can reach 300c it’s decently good, if it can’t it really needs a buff. If a build can do 500c and Aby then it’s good, if it can’t then it needs a small buff. If a build can do 2k corruption then it’s OP and needs a nerf.
It’s actually quite easy to quantify builds this way. When we get more endgame options things will get muddled more and different metrics will have to be adopted, but currently, with the endgame we have, it’s actually super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Bossing time is a distinct measurement as it provides a clear-cut DPS-uptime and DPS-metric overall.
That’s to come first and foremost. The second one is survivability of a build.
Then comes the feel.
Put those 3 together and you got a well-rounded build simply, but if you ignore either aspect or fenangle around solely about the feel of a build then you’re still putting the cart before the horse. It’s vastly harder to build a house without foundation then to create a foundation and build a sturdy house after all.
But… there is?
Which build has the higher clear-speed at the same content level?
Which build kills a boss faster?
Which build survives more?
Which build needs less inputs to achieve the same feat?
There’s tons of metrics to go by, but they’re all based on ‘damage’, ‘defense’, ‘mechanical feel’. The last being the most unclear definitely. We got 2 metrics though which are very clear-cut, and those need the work hence first and foremost since then you provide the majority of a good result with the least work.
80/20 principle doesn’t exist without a reason, 80% of the work is done in 20% of the time while the devil’s in the detail then needing 80% of the time for the remaining 20% of the work.
If you start with the hard stuff you get nothing visibly done. And LE doesn’t need detailed work… it needs the ‘big ones’ currently.
Is there? Builds in PoE are heavily specialized. You have builds that are based solely on boss killing and not map clear. Or focused solely on Sanctum. Or Ultimatum. Or any of the other mechanics. You can’t directly compare Lacerate with Arc because they do different contents, and they do it at different efficiency levels.
You can compare 2 boss killer builds and say that one kills uber bosses in 30s vs 40s. But you can’t directly compare a build that does uber bosses in 30s and clears maps in 3mins and does sanctum in 10mins, vs a build that does uber bosses in 90s and clears maps in 1 minute and does sanctum in 7 minutes.
But in LE, currently, it’s clear cut. If build A can do 1k corruption and build B can do 500c, then build A is clearly stronger. Because that already takes into account all the metrics of attack and defense.
And you can clearly see this by the fact that that is what players complain about, exclusively.
Yes, but they weren’t always specialized, that came with the differntiation between map running and bossing, which has been separated substantially in PoE, hence not providing a good baseline to compare.
In Last Epoch your bossing ability has to be good enough to progress while your mapping ability has to be good enough to progress as well.
In PoE I buy my boss runs, in LE I can’t.
In PoE I sell my buss runs if I only map, in LE I can’t.
Hence we can’t differentiate between them here because it’s not applicable. For a build to fall into the ‘decent’ metric it needs to do all of it, just as EHG intended, hence you need to take not the specialized metrics into consideration but the general ones to make a build ‘good’.
Exactly. That’s what I was saying. It doesn’t matter if your build can kill bosses in 1s and the other build takes 10mins. You need both. And the way that translates is what corruption you’re able to reach. Because you need both clear and boss killing to advance corruption.
If your build can’t reach 300c because it can’t kill bosses or because it keeps dying in echoes is irrelevant, because it’s already aggregated in the end result which is your top corruption.
Builds that can’t reach 300c need a big buff. Builds that can’t reach 500c need some buff, since it’s the consensus so far that you need to do 500c comfortably to be able to deal with Aby. And builds that do 2k corruption need a nerf.
They’re very clearly identified. The way you go about buffing or nerfing them may vary from build to build, but the balance issues are very clear cut because of this.
Nope, that’s not right.
It matters if your build can kill a boss in 1 second or 10 minutes as much as it matters if yur build can actually reach any specific corruption level.
Why? Because both are equivalent in LE
You can’t ignore one in favor of the other. EHG made it more difficult for them to get stuff right because they limited themselves in their design choices and now they got to deal with it.
So they simply better life up to it or throw that overboard, whichever they can do, but the balancing has always been fairly shit with the promise to become good at release. It was also shit at release, it’s mildly better in 1.1 and we don’t know if it was an outlier or not in the overall direction yet balance wise… because EHG also has provided clear signs to throw a curveball for balance the moment you think they’re substantially improving it, suddenly implementing something new which causes the whole status quo to tumble down and not be fully applicable anymore which suddenly causes builds to overperform oder underperform despite not having done so before.
Boss Ward was a prime example for that. Yeah, bosses felt bad… they don’t feel much better… oh, they might, or might feel worse, but overall it switched issues out. But now the weaker DPS builds suddenly can’t handle content as well anymore as before and the top-tier dps builds can rush through the limiting factor of alpha-damage before DR kicked in to pass by their former limits at times.
So they threw it all overboard what was worked on and allowed to be worked and balanced around having the DR system in place still. It enforced the focus to be more at the overall corruption level running ability then bossing… but now they opened up Pandora’s Box by making it as important as monolith running.
So nah, you were partially right before Boss Ward, you aren’t anymore now - sadly.
It’s not. Boss killing isn’t the only obstacle to high corruption. And the best example for this is the storm totem/upheaval shaman I’m playing right now. I can kill bosse in seconds, but when I raise corruption too much I get one-shot all the time running echoes. Which means that the obstacle that is preventing me from running a higher corruption is echoes, not bosses. I could probably run 1k corruption bosses easily, but dying in echoes all the time means I can’t get the stability required to even get to them.
Boss killing isn’t the be-all end-all of endgame content for LE. Corruption is. And higher corruptions can be gated by running echoes just as easily as by bosses.
As you said yourself. Boss killing is not the only obstacle. But it is a obstacle and has to be taken into respective consideration hence.
Also to be plain clear here… any ARPG rises or falls with their bosses, there doesn’t exist a single decently in-depth ARPG on the market which has success without them. D3 had no substance in that aspect and it dimpled around as a well re-played short-term game for years which the only foundation to make that happen was the franchise name… and D4 even tried to get bossing into it and failed miserably and is crawling along like a limping deer stalked by the predators of the ARPG sector.
Oh… but that’s where you’re wrong with the current setup of LE… you can! You just need to handle a single monolith out of the whole web even… but as long as you can beat one without dieing… you can progress. The only thing standing in your way is the ability to kill the boss then.
And let’s be fair here… getting a random extra easy monolith happens even in 2k… or 4k… or 10k, one where the layout is fine enough to avoid the enemies or one where you don’t get swarmed by stuff since you lucked out on the enemy variety.
But what’s stopping you from getting to a higher corruption is if you can or can’t kill the boss, because no matter how well or badly you manage the stability you’ll sooner or later get to the point where you need to kill the boss and there’s no way around it.
That’s why you see 1k builds seldomly do that in a reliable way with Lagon or Heoroth, because those bosses will cause you to take damage while others are pushovers where you won’t get hit once during the whole fight if you play decent.
How do you figure that? A single echo isn’t enough to get to the boss. Which means that you need to be able to complete at least 1 every 3 echoes (or similar, didn’t bother doing the actual math) to get to the boss, otherwise you lose the stability you previously gained.
And if you decide to use the new glyphs to gain corruption, you still need to complete echoes to farm them, otherwise you quickly run out of them.
My currentt build, like I said, has already enough damage to reasonably do bosses way way higher than my current corruption. But because Shaman doesn’t have good defense options like Druid or Beastmaster do (probably because it’s assumed you’ll want to use Spriggan Form?), random one-shots (or simply a barrage of smaller hits) in regular echoes are a common occurrence. Which makes getting to the boss himself harder to do comfortably.
So for this build, bosses aren’t an issue. Echoes are. And it’s not the only one.
It’s why Static orb runs frost claw. Because bosses are easy to kill with orb, but without frost claw you can’t run echoes and get to the bosses.
Because if you can do one… you can do two. It just is far beyond the hassle someone would take.
But if you can’t beast the boss you have exactly 0 chance to progress, no matter the hassle.
It needs both as said, you can’t progress without managing at least singular monoliths from time to time and you also can’t if you can’t handle the boss. The shade for example is no issue, because the shade has a variety of skills and some allow fairly easy no-hit runs.
And as you mentioned your build has bossing dps but fails heavily with monoliths by then.
For example one of my offline builds has really nice clear, but low damage. That means only tanky enemies rather then the mass rabble can attack me, clear is great. But it sucks against bosses.
So… which one is better now? The one failing at monoliths or the one failing at bosses?
WHich is why I’m saying LE demands both, mandatorily. And hence balance needs to be adjusted accordingly as well.
It’s not PoE where you can progress through clear-speed alone up to T16… and it’s not Torchlight Infinite where as long as you can kill the mini-bosses they provide you’ll get further along.
In LE it’s both combined because of EHG’s design choices and you can’t ignore either side currently.
In the future I imagine it’ll change substantially as more content will shift that focus accordingly and allow variety to get the baseline gear in a reasonable time outside of high corruption levels… but for now that’s not really the case.
The one that reaches the highest corruption, obviously.
And if your build gets stuck at 200c because it can’t kill bosses, then it needs a boost. And if my build gets stuck at 200c because it can’t do echoes, then it needs a boost. The boosts for each build would be different because of their different issues, but you’ve successfully and precisely identified where it lands on the overall scale of all builds.
I’m not saying that corruption identifies what needs fixing in a build. I’m saying that it identifies which builds need fixing.
Aura of Decay is an acolyte skill. Your build uses Ravaging aura, and it’s fine I guess
A huge problem is the number of depreciated mechanics that are floating around.
Dread points this out in his recent sentinel video, they are reworking sentinel and showing off some new node for vengence that has to do with iron blades. Iron blades are bugged and even if they did anything, the numbers they have on paper are trash tastic. “procs” that dont have a tree are turbo bad. proccing unspecced smites for example adds very little damage to your build, smite gets a ton of its power from its tree.
There is tons of 1 off ailments like spreading flames or plague that have numerous nodes wasted on them, these mechanics never do damage full stop. I have been trying for years to make a spreading flames sorc work with fireball. If I use 3lp legendaries in every slot I can do 100c yay! why is there is a like 7 point branch dedicated to this in fireball? its just a noob trap.
A huge part of why people feel the game is unbalanced is because atleast 50% of the unique game changer nodes are just trash and a trick they need to be removed/changed/buffed significantly.
if they removed those “fake” choices, less players would hit hiccups. Some skills you cant screw up, because every node is good. Rive has very little bad nodes, and is a simple straight forward skill. Even if you build around its utility nodes you will do 100c fine, and have tons of utility.
Where as a skill like fireball has a billion noob nodes, and its only playable in one way to any success.
edit: just to clarify i dont exactly think removing them is the correct choice either but if they are there, they need to work and be playable and feel good to click.
Yes, and that’s what I’m talking about the whole time.
The ‘baseline’ isn’t ‘there’ yet at the moment.
As a experienced LE player you simply avoid those ‘pitfalls’ there, going for the things which actually do work and you know to work… or try and fiddle around with the ones which are fairly… awful to say the least and try to nonetheless make em work because you want a challenge.
But that’s not good for new players or returning players without deeper knowledge of either the genre or the game itself, because even with in-depth knowledge of the genre you’ll likely have a bad time if you fall into those pitfalls there at times, you can just make up for them otherwise… to a degree at least.
It’s something I’ve always found very off-putting in nigh every game of this genre, creating skills or baseline skill interactions without thought for the follow-up. All core mechanics should be ‘decent’ and viable to run, with mediocre investment. Much like the warrior in PoE 2 feels like utter crap until you invest really really heavily into it… and even then being mediocre at best in overall feel… the baseline investment should provide at least an enjoyable experience for a player.
Because at the end of the day if you play the game and it feels awful, and you have no idea if switching to something else so it won’t feel awful being actually successful, well… then your motivation to do that is kinda low I would argue.
Because sometimes doubtful combos works better then obvious ones. Melee physical zoo necro(pretty obvious) was not as good as burning zoo warlock(gates of torment CB node) or as fire wolves(2 hakar axes and falconer gloves) vinebear druid
It is fun to find it out. Or maybe… a guilty pleasure 