Some suggestions from a 600 hour player

Feedback and Suggestions
21

the drops on their own are just so underwhelming

This is true, and maybe it won’t seem so big when we get trading, but I don’t know about that. It is extremely rare for a usable item to drop. This is fine because it fuels crafting. So you’re shattering most things with useful affixes for later crafting, which works, but the naming conventions in the game prevent you from seeing 1/3d to 1/2 the affixes on a dropped rare item (since you’ll see at most one prefix name and one suffix name), and then you have zero visual indicators in your stash that something was picked up by your loot filter. Let’s also point out that shift + click to get stuff into your crafting pane is sometimes finicky so you end up only right clicking and equipping it instead and then - perhaps - accidentally shatter gear you intended on keeping.

It’s a lot of needle-in-haystack stuff that becomes tedious rather than rewarding. It’s really unclear whether you’re meant to primarily find gear or craft gear. Right now it skews toward craft, which is fine (I like crafting), but both systems have problems at present.

Making the T6/7 items drop in a different color would make one think they should be really high-caliber, but it’s incredibly rare to find one that is worth using rather than shattering. So these separate specially colored items are mostly getting taken out with the trash.

Here’s another weird one. It’s far more likely that I’ll find a blue item worth crafting on than a yellow. So if we’re to craft rather than rely on drops, I’m actually less excited about the rare items and more about the magic ones, which would be a tier down in most games.

There’s another thing. Item color is correlated to affix count everywhere except the purple, which is correlated to the tier of a single affix.

So while the systems may have some issues, it’s also the way they’re presented that confuse things.

22

Yes!!

23

Oh and I want to clarify that I am not pushing for, nor do I think, that it should be really easy to find GG gear.

24

I got not sense that was the case in what you wrote.

25

As it stands, it feels to me like aside from select uniques, it’s around 80% craft - with the caveat that you need to shatter drops for the affixes you want. And that 80% is only because the idols can’t be crafted; for regular gear it seems like many “endgame” builds are 100% in terms of gear.

It certainly works, but as you said I’m not sure that is/was the original intent?

1 Like
26

Yeah and if that’s the answer, that’s all fine. Whatever the mix is supposed to be, neither method is working particularly well at present, and the language the game uses to communicate these things is confused. I don’t mean that there aren’t tutorials or whatever, I’m sure that’ll come, I’m talking about the stuff with color that I noted above, and similar points.

27

Since we don’t know much about “Legendarys” and such other planned things… for the moment i would revamp the loot filter (like i stated once before).

Let us search (set the loot filter to) for things like:

Example a) Show all Engraved Gauntlets and Solarum Bracers with Affixes on T14 (combined) or above.

Example b) Show all T6-T10 (and above) Bronze Belt with T3-T5 Increased Health PLUS T3-T5 Hybrid Health.

Example c) Show all T6-T10 (and above) Deicide Swords with T3-T5 Physical Melee damage and/or T3-T5 Increased Physical Damage and/or T3-T5 Attack Speed, but without Increased Mana and/or without Increased Chance to Blind.

4 Likes
28

This makes perfect sense to me and would make looting a lot more efficient.

29

Honestly the bit about being more excited about magic items than rare ones made me chuckle, because that’s exactly what happens to me while I’m target gambling for craftable base items. Because of the possibility of starting an item at 0-5 instability with a full T5 affix that I’m looking for, thus making it more likely I’ll get the item to T19-T20, crafting on white items seems illogical. However, rare items will almost NEVER have the combination of affixes I need for my build, so it’s 100% rare.

My biggest gripe really is that I feel NO excitement when unique or set items drop. In fact, I just roll my eyes and pick up my 500 gold, since I’m most likely just going to vendor it (unless it is a rare one, which I then keep for a “collectables” type thing). The unique and set items are SO niche, that it becomes un-exciting, especially since I mostly play SSF for a bit of added challenge (in other words, those uniques/sets will never be available to another character).

I had a really neat idea around the whole unique/set item issue. Here’s the thought (just throwing it out there).

  1. Unique items drop with 1 or 2 unique affixes attached to them, and 3-4 BLANK crafting spots.
  2. “Unique Shards” are a new tier of shards that drop more rarely, and can ONLY be used on unique base items. Unique items also can’t be crafted with normal tier shards.

This would solve 2 problems that are constantly brought up on the forums, one being that unique/set items are either boring, uninteresting, or useless (or some combination of the above), and it would really spice up shards as well.

It would add a whole different level to crafting, drops and so forth.

Oh, and as far as the loot filter, I agree with all of the above, and I would also love to be able to specify the implicit rolls I want on an item (eg. I don’t want to see a 3% Raider’s Axe or a 2% crit Moon Dagger, but I want to highlight all the ones that do have top rolls).

30

Interesting, but I’d be against it because letting players customize a unique to their liking would severely limit the range of abilities that the devs would be able to assign without nuking game balance. I’d imagine uniques would end up with fairly bland effects or really harsh drawbacks to balance things out.

1 Like
31

It’d be nice if you could upgrade a unique to a higher tier base though.

1 Like
32

Yeah, D3 did a lot of questionable things, but the unique scaling helped keep uniques exciting.

1 Like
33

Right, and this is what I’m talking about with the mixed communication the game has when it comes to itemization. Most games use the color yellow to indicate rarity and an increase in power over other items, but here they’re some of the least desirable things you can find. And of course there’s the point about the purples, which I made earlier.

Now, another concern with crafting that is different from but adjacent to this topic, is that there usually aren’t many options. Crafting is enormously skewed toward defense to the point that other affixes aren’t really worth considering.

So the game is directed heavily toward gearing-via-crafting (which is fine) but then the crafting actually allows for very little individuality or player choice within that system. There aren’t enough meaningful differences between builds from an affix perspective. Part of that is the lack of “special” affixes but part of that is the way we’re forced to pump so much to defenses. Like… how many characters do we all have that have Bronze belts that are something like Set NP/Set PV/Hybrid Health/Crit Avoid … or Dodge/Dodge/Hybrid HP/Dodge?

34

Hahahahaha, that’s exactly what each and every one of my characters wears, except for one that uses fire damage over time, and makes up one of the set affixes elsewhere.

Funny aside, this is already hotly discussed topic on one of the other threads, so not going to go into it much more.

35

Let me rephrase this. So different damage types already show what kind of damage they are by color. My issue is that if I am a caster for example and all my damage is cold, I can’t see cold damage. I have avalanche and totems going along with ice thorns. If a mob or boss has the same kind of damage output, everything blends together. Fighting a patriarch or lagon for example. I can’t tell the difference between their cold damage and mine. The patriarch also has avalanche going and I can’t tell which is my own avalanche and which is theirs. My suggestion is to outline mob damage in red so their is a distinct difference.

36

Missed this earlier. Good to know about the multiple quotes. TY

37

Hello, new member here. One suggestion I have for fixing drops is to have aspects drop instead of the items itself. By that I mean instead of getting fully formed items, we get affixes, item types, and perhaps even cosmetics. These drops could be themed as materials, blueprints, or something magical or more thematic.

In my mind, this helps make farming and crafting more satisfying.

If I may add my two cents, I also hope the developers consider funneling more resources into the end game and making end game easier to access. Like many of you, I have played a ton of ARPGs, and I have long wondered whether it’s worth it for programmers, artists, and everyone else in the dev team to spend time on early game items and other early game aspects of the game, including story-related stuff (fixed maps, voice acting, lore, etc.). The truth is that we marvel at those for maybe 10% of our playing time, then they become invisible or even hindrances for the rest of our experience.

The fact of the matter is, ARPGs have three main pillars: moment to moment gameplay, build experimentation, and loot. None of those three things are tied to the early game. To spend so much time and resources creating assets, balancing stats, and presenting something that is appreciated only a miniscule amount of time seems inefficient. Think of the amount of work it must have taken to create everything that you see in the first 10 minutes of the game. Then think of how much of that you appreciate after your first playthrough.

In relation to this, I hope Last Epoch bucks the useless tradition of ARPGs of making it harder to make new characters. By this I mean, there is absolutely no point for a veteran to go through the campaign again to create their 10th or even their 2nd character. There’s just no point. After we finish the story mode once, we should be rewarded with the option to start new characters at level 50. That cap will then rise according to the highest level character you have.

I am not arguing for Hardcore or SSF runs to be removed. I am just saying that those should not be the only options. I just want to be more like Boardman21 and try out more builds. As it is, ARPGs actually punish players who like a game so much that they want to experiment with more characters by forcing us to grind the early and mid game over and over and over.

2 Likes
38

Yep. That could be the most asinine element of Path of Exile. If you post on the community about it though, then all the no lifes will just say you can rush through it in like six hours…

NO. I don’t want to burn six hours not having any fun doing the tedious questing BS again.

39

You know. I actually agree with you, whether I am playing POE or LE, that leveling a new character is mostly a chore for me and my interest is in the endgame optimisation of a build. But whenever I see someone suggest something like this, I always wonder what might be the unintended repercussion of this. And I think devs need to tread very carefully in providing such “quality of life”, because this is one of those things that probably cannot be taken back once given.

40

I’m not sure if by repercussion, you mean that we will burn out of the game much faster if we could make endgame toons right away. I think some players will, but then in that case both the devs and the players got what they needed from each other - money for the former, fun for the latter.

But I think that for most of us, it would be an absolute blast if we had the option to try endgame builds within minutes. It all boils down to respecting the player’s time and letting us access the best parts of the game with the least amount of friction possible.

I believe that ironically, this is part of the reason why roguelikes have exploded in recent years. For all their reputation about difficulty and making players start over, good roguelikes actually respect the player’s time. Not only can you have lots of fun with a good roguelike even if you had only 30 minutes to play, you also unlock permanent upgrades that make it faster and easier to, again, get to the good parts of the game.

Like roguelikes, ARPGs typically reward us with harder difficulty settings and endgame modes once we finish the story mode. But unlike roguelikes, for each new build we want to try, ARPGs make us spend joyless hours of early and mid game grind. We already paid for the game, spent hours playing through the campaign, spent hours farming for loot, spent tons of virtual resources crafting, and spent even more hours theorycrafting. There is absolutely no reason to add more hours and frustration on top of all that.