Slow progression in monoliths?

General
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Hi! I’m relatively new to this game, I got it as a gift for Christmas and have played for about 50 hours so far. So far the only character I’ve played relatively much on is a Druid Primalist, who I think is about level 73? Somewhere 70+ at least. I use Bearform, Swipe, Warcry, Upheaval and Fury Leap.

I was excited to start doing monoliths when I got to level 58, as it seemed like a cool end game thing to try out. However, after finishing 3 monoliths (or echoes, I’m not entirely sure what the correct word is… What I am referring to as finishing is completing the 3 quests and getting to choose a blessing) , I am slightly disappointed… I spend 3+ hours grinding random maps, running around and killing stuff, and my reward is… A random Unique that doesn’t fit at all with my build (or worse, one that can’t even be used with by my class) and a 25% increase to Hat Drop Rate? Really?

I’m guessing that it gets better once you go further and unlock more monoliths / echoes, but currently it feels extremely slow, and the rewards very lacking. I am dual wielding 2 Unique swords, and I have Unique gloves. I haven’t replaced ANY of my gear pieces for at least 10 hours, just running very similar maps again and again and not getting any improvements on my gear feels very bad. Sure, I am leveling up sometimes, but even that feels… slow. I can put 1 more point into a passive skill that gives me a 1% damage increase? Yay…? My skills have been at 19 for a long time now, so nothing new there either.

Maybe I just haven’t played enough, or I just need to do more monoliths / echoes before I can actually feel anything change, or that I get stronger or can do stronger content. I am getting to the point where I am getting tired of playing this Swipe build, but I feel like if I wanted to swap build, I’d have to make another character, and getting that up all the way back to 70 feels like a huge investment of time that I’d rather not have to go through again.

One thing that I am thinking about: Maybe make it possible to boost new characters to the point where you select your specialization? At least for classes that you’ve already gotten that far with before. Playing a Primalist up to that point again would just be extremely repetitive, because I’ll have the exact same skills to use up until I can choose the specialization.

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Hey man. I agree with you on the progress of the monoliths (which is the one where you complete the whole timeline and recieve your blessing, echoes are the maps themselves that you do). I do wish they were a little quicker to complete, but they start to get a bit quicker once you have a nice build and stuff.

It does get quicker, especially once you start getting corruption and once you unlock empowered timelines. Also once you have a good build.

Yeah, one of my biggest problem with the game is that you can’t respec your mastery, but you can respec all of your passives and skills. So you don’t have to worry about going back through it unless you want to play a different mastery. So I would recommend doing another build if you aren’t enjoying the one you’re playing, especially because how you said it, it doesn’t sound too good, it sounds like you might have too many DPS skills and not too much else. But I could be wrong, I don’t know too much about primalist.

Yeah I think that would be cool if they added it, along with not having to re-do monoliths to unlock empowered.

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Innocent suggestions such as

and

are blasphemous here, some people prefer to dance with the devil and go even further to suggest even skipping monoliths, these people are sinners and need to feel the weight of doing every monolith 41 times (yes)

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What’re you smoking bro

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I can agree with many of your points. Right now the game is a lot of fun at times, and then a bit repetitive and shallow at other times.

I have a level 94 VK and unlocked Empowered Monoliths the other day. The power jump from normal monos to empowered is a bit much, in my opinion. So if you’re having troubles in normal monos now, you’ll certainly have issues in empowered ones. What’s worse is it seems like so many enemy mods in empowered seem to last 5+ echoes, meaning you’ll have a ridiculous amount of enemy buffs just after doing 3-4 echoes. It got to where enemies had 80% chance to shred, like 300% health and damage, and a sprinkling of a couple other buffs. I was still killing stuff, but my tank ended up feeling like only leech life was keeping me alive since the enemies were just shredding through all my defense.

The devs have said that monoliths aren’t the “true” end game they have planned, which makes me optimistic. I love the concept of monoliths, they just need more variety versus simple enemy buffs (from mods and/or corruption). I think it’d add a little more flavor if they even added player mods for echoes (could even make them last only 1 echo). Aside from mods, the rewards should be more interesting as well, particularly in empowered. The Vessel of Order/Chaos nodes are cool, so it’d be neat if they expanded on that idea (e.g. Vessels that will add/combine echo rewards onto other random echos, Vessels that turn some echos into a boss arena with special drops, etc).

As for your comment on “boosting” alt characters, I think it’s unnecessary. They added the Sanctum which can be accessed quite early on new characters. Getting to level 25 really doesn’t take much time. If they provide additional fast leveling avenues for alt characters, that of course would be great. Alternatively, allowing you to respec your mastery through a repeatable, non-trivial quest chain would be most welcome. Could even tie it into monoliths where you go back in time before you choose your mastery and have to fight a level-scaled “shadow” version of yourself to stop them from choosing your current mastery so you can choose a different one.

Anyway, just my two cents. This game has so many awesome ideas, and it truly is addictive and fun. But it also has quite a few areas that are shallow/need more “spice,” in my opinion (Idols are another one that really need some love, but maybe it’s only Sentinel that has boring idols and the other classes have more interesting mechanics). Sorry this turned into more a personal tangent that’s kind of all over the place.

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I would be all in for a little quicker progression - maybe at least only half the stability needed for the quests to happen - i am almost 80 now and just about to reach the first level 90 node…

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