Spice up endgame farming and crafting with more interactivity

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I’ve seen many of the typical lamentations regarding late game character progression: hitting a wall in terms of the effort:reward ratio, feeling the stagnation of your loadout, finding that echo rewards no longer seem meaningful or at least reliable enough, etc.

Understanding that this genre needs some element of perpetual “chase”, but people still want to feel regular progression with the time put in, this is clearly something difficult to balance. My ideas are meant to just be examples of possible ways to make endgame processes more interactive and enticing while addressing the aforementioned frustrations. But they don’t have to be taken strictly - if you agree only with the spirit of these suggestions but have different ideas for implementation, please still engage with this topic by commenting your alternatives!

I think one problem is layers of RNG gating meaningful upgrades - each individual mechanic the game has isn’t bad, but stacked RNG leads to exponentially increased times between workable loadout improvements. Example: maybe you’re trying to get LP on a maw, so you expand an empowered mono with a dozen echoes until a shade fight every single time, and it might not drop at all. Then, every six tries maybe you get a 0LP maw. Every 24 tries maybe you get one that is 1 or 2LP. Finally. Then you do Julra and only get the bottom choice affix(es) you want on it. Oops - that’s a lot of wasted effort. Getting a bad roll in the sanctum feels awful. I may or may not be making this post after getting 3rd and 4th choice affixes on a maw and titan heart craft one after the other.

What are some ideas for accelerating the grind without subverting existing systems?

  1. In boss-specific cases, as mentioned above, a simple thing would be to improve how quickly bosses can be attempted. If the pure RNG sanctum crafting system is to be left alone, then we should be able to roll for 1 or 2LP drops more often. Adjust the stability requirement mechanic for fighting monolith bosses, allow a few re-fights of Orobyss if desired before the timeline resets, etc.

  2. Other uniques: targeted rewards in monoliths could have a reduced 0LP chance and correspondingly higher chance of 1/2LP, (with 3/4LP left as-is) when compared to random drops from mob kills. This would also make hitting those nodes feel more enticing too! The idea here is to bring additional incentive to seeking them out.

  3. Or, what if the nodes for “unique item” or “unique or set [type] item” actually rolled 2 items for you to choose one from? Accelerate the hunt for what you desire. Beyond a certain corruption this could roll 3 choices instead. This is another way to add interactivity to farming and give monolith nodes more identity when compared to random drops from kills.

  4. On that note, the weapon type nodes are already pretty crowded in Reign of Dragons, making it that much more tiresome to find what you want. Perhaps such targeted nodes in that mono should roll an even higher number of weapons to choose from than suggested in point (3). Or it could be that whatever weapon type you’re wielding the most while killing things in that node has an appreciably higher chance to be generated!

  5. As for farming desired purples, I’m having a harder time coming up with something now. But something should be done in the spirit of the above suggestion to “boost” progress. It could be something like how the blessings for specific item types work, but in this case for specific affixes or at least subgroups of affixes that can end up exalted. Maybe a suggestion like in (4) could be used to tailor your distribution of drops from exalted node rewards (getting more 1H vs 2H, etc).

  6. Another thing for purples - it can feel pretty bad to get a highly desired item roll then lose 20FP on a single improvement. The current FP system is cool and I understand if the average FP consumption for each affix tier should be left alone, but maybe the FP consumption range could be narrowed modestly.

  7. Shared stash is currently good for holding generic purples for other characters to pick from. But it can still be pretty tiresome looking for the exalted helmet/armor/relic node rewards in order to roll for improvements to class-specific purples. Maybe those nodes should be made more accessible too.

  8. Alternatively, or in addition to above farming suggestions, improve the odds of good sanctum crafting. Here is another “add interactivity” idea - spend a rune of ascendance to gain a bonus feature for legendary crafting. If 1LP, you can ban 1 affix from the pool. If 3LP, you can pick one affix to guarantee. For 2LP idk what’s more appropriate, one or the other, or something else? For 4LP, perhaps this would generate the item and 1 copy with affixes/bonuses rerolled, and you pick which to keep.

The point with all this is that suboptimal late game drops/rolls/crafts should be only moderately disappointing, but leave me still wanting to continue the journey. Instead right now they currently leave me overwhelmed because of how much time it seems I may have to spend again just to try for the improvement again. After spending a ton of time to still be where I started because a rare 2LP and rare T7 were simultaneously borked, it currently just makes me want to exit and go play a different game instead. With given example ideas for bringing more directionality/interactivity to the hunt, I think the grind could feel a lot better.

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What mostly needs to happen is to reduce the overall number of useless affix combinations that can appear on drops and specialize some of the drops towards what their slots are used for stat-wise. That and some of the more not-useful affixes could probably afford to go away entirely. Streamlining what can appear on what item and with what other bonuses would dramatically improve not only how long it takes to find a decent one you can actually use, but also the usefulness of other crafting items like Glyph of Despair and Glyph of Chaos.

I think if this one improvement were made, all the other aspects of the crafting system would become tolerable as a consequence.

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This issue has been addressed with the glyph of Chaos. Who decides what is “useless”?

This would require the game to know what affixes you are most interested in.

I like the suggestions of the OP. I not in support of someone else deciding for me what affixes I am interested in and messing with RNG. Otherwise its not RNG, its something else.

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Useless as in, the bonuses would never be used together. Like if you get Poison Chance and Elemental damage together. Or getting poison chance on an elemental damage implicit ring. There is a way of determining overall what combinations matter most often to players and reducing the total number of combinations. You could also tune the skills themselves so that they don’t need as many base damage types in order to be effective.

The number of affixes that appear in the game is also massive. A large swath of them are redundant, generally less useful or altogether not useful and could be rolled into each other or gotten rid of. You could even make it where skill enhancing affixes have more crossover between classes so you don’t have to grind for those specifically.

Basically the way it works now is designed to make it take as long as possible to see the Exalted item you’d like to see, and then make it fairly unlikely that it will upgrade into anything useful once you find it. This is playtime padding, because it causes you to do the same things over and over trying to obtain a different result. That’s why it’s called “grind.” Grinding is a low quality experience because it very shortly becomes not entertaining in and of itself. Anything that would reduce this to a reasonable amount of time would go a long way towards making Exalted items more useful in the actual leveling and boss challenging portion of the game, IE before the actual content of the game is exhausted.

Grinding for hundreds of extra hours to get items you feel compelled to get, doing things you’ve already done many times, isn’t my idea of a good gaming experience. Plenty of other fun and interesting things we’re missing out on that we could be doing instead.

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So you want each item type to be homogenized towards what you believe they’re used for, without any variance in their subtypes? That sounds really boring.

“Bad” items need to exist. If you cannot drop a “bad” item, then there is no loot chase.

You are aware that Last Epoch is an ARPG, yes? The loot grind/chase is the entire point of these games.

GGG named their studio after it.

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If you read my suggestion, I’m suggesting reducing the overall affixes and combinations. That doesn’t mean removing all of them. That means reducing the overall number so you’re more likely to get a useful one.

What is actually factually boring is spending hundreds of hours grinding for items with affixes and bonuses that don’t make sense before you get one that does. Just because someone wants it to take as long as possible because they’re bored doesn’t mean what they’re doing is actually entertaining. It means they like RNG based outcomes and feel compelled to keep playing after the entertainment value of what they’re actually doing has already been exhausted.

Yes, ARPG doesn’t have to be synonymous with mindless repetitive grinding. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why the genre hasn’t grown significantly over the last 5 or 10 years the way other genres have. (Save one game that is slowly absorbing the legacy user base, and one that is turning into more of a mobile game series than an actual ARPG. ) If you give people fun and interesting content that doesn’t depend (entirely) on RNG compulsion, they will play it. That’s what I have and will always advocate for.

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So I actually really agree with a lot of where you’re coming from. Obviously based on my OP, I like the idea of you’re aiming for. The possible loot space is indeed super large and that affects the progression slowdown I’ve described.

However, I do understand the criticism that others gave to you as well. In terms of item/build variety from character to character, there shouldn’t ever really be one ‘right’ answer for what affix rolls are desired. I think from a game design perspective, the fact that there might be ‘useless’ combos as you could point out, just means there is more room for a class/build/unique effect/etc that allows for such a combo to be strong, not that said combos should never exist. People are correct that the full loot space should still be explorable.

Therefore going along with my original suggestions - these last handful of comments give me another idea of how to maybe do something in the middle:

This affix tailoring could be implemented as a dungeon reward - perhaps to replace all the blessings which change shard drop rates right now, which are rather stupid blessings IMO. Or it could be introduced as a new reward choice from a 3-4 different bosses that you grind from a different dungeon(s).

But basically, the rates at which certain affix subgroups drop on items, or certain affix group combinations drop as you have described, could be bumped up or down moderately as a passive reward selection from beating such foes. Also ‘neutral’ should always be an option (leaving the loot space exactly as-is), but the idea is the player can repeat these bosses to make changes to item affix distributions just like with blessings for shard affix distributions currently.

It is way beyond my level of understanding to decide quantitatively how to do this, but the devs would design the probability strengths and the affix groupings. Perhaps one boss can roll you a handful of choices for weapons, one for jewelry, one for helmet/body/relic, and one for the rest? Should the strengths be +20%/-20% or +200%/-75% or anything between? IDK. Or better yet, what if this was a sliding scale :open_mouth: - the longer you have one choice active (measured in kills or exp) the stronger it gets over a range. That way, you’d still feel like all the grind time even prior to getting an excellent drop, is “making progress”!

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And I’m not against build variety either, myself. In fact, one of my main criticisms of the game’s current state is that end-game items dictate too strongly which builds are viable and which ones are not. Exalted items having too many different possible affix combinations actually contributes to this because of the hundreds that you get, a tiny percentage will ever actually line up with your build. The more possible builds and possible items there are, the less frequently they fall in line with each other, not more. This is the same reason why I don’t like forging involving RNG and failure - The more items that are ruined in that process, the longer it will take to find items that allow you to actually create and test a build that you enjoy.

Consider though that the majority of ARPG players want it to take longer to find useful items to craft and it to be less likely for that crafting to succeed. This isn’t a case for the item system supporting build variety. It’s a case for it taking exponentially longer to find useful items such that it can take a theoretically indefinite amount of time to complete a build.

It’s also a case for artificial achievement. The longer it takes everyone else to get the items I randomly got, the more exclusive and special I feel for having gotten them. These are not visions for an ARPG that I personally subscribe to, because they extend the play time far beyond the actual point at which you’ve completed the content in the game.

I want more content and things to do in these games, not more grind. That’s why I advocate against these two attitudes, even if they’re common / popular.

That being the case, what I believe would be most appropriate is that there was a fairly high chance for you to gain the items and resources you need to complete a build within about 80 to 100 hours, IE from what you pick up during the leveling / boss and dungeon challenging process, or before the content of the game itself is fully exhausted. Were this the case, most of the time you wouldn’t have to grind to set up and test out your build. And anything additional that you picked up could be gifted to other new characters. Whatever combination of streamlining drops, forging and tuning abilities would allow for that to happen would make the most sense, since it would not be asking the player to play for an extended period of time just to see if what they’re trying to do works or can work the way they intend it to. As someone who has made and tested a lot of builds at this point, I have found Exalted items to be the one invariable roadblock to this being possible.

I think removing RNG entirely from forging, streamlining which affixes can appear together on which items and reducing the overall amount of affixes down to something more reasonable, as well as pushing more of the stats you need from items over to skills and passives, could all help create that balance. Your idea about tuning the affix groupings might help if it was done by item to take into account their implicit stats. (I guess you could also increase the drop rates, but I don’t think that would actually help unless it was multiple times what it is now. I understand how that would make Exalted items less interesting, but that has been the solution in most games so far. Personally I think the drop rate is probably fine, if you were to fix the other issues.)

But as it stands, the people who are mainly compelled to play for the loot grind would reject any of those changes, even if they would be happier with what dropped and it would take them less time to do things they enjoyed in the game as a result. This is also why I don’t have a lot of optimism for the grind in this game being reduced. These are things that have to be thought through beforehand before a game is released and has an audience.

As an aside, at least LE doesn’t have these problems to the extent POE does, but once seasons and ladder become a thing, I’m afraid that it might eventually. That’s why I have taken the time to push back on the idea that more grind is somehow better.

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Not sure I agree with that premise. The main effect that will have, other than making more gear “viable” to wear is that said gear will be less impactful & this is already a complaint.

The devs have already agreed that the amount of player power from gear isn’t as much as they would want.

I’m kinda interested in the concept of streamlining the affix combinations, assuming that would only affect drops. I’d be concerned that it’d be a slippery slope towards restricting build viability due to what can drop, though this would be less of an issue if said gear were less impactful.

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This is something I wondered about quite a lot the first time I reached the real grinding stages of playing LE and messing with “Chaos Crafting” concept. My first real negative experience with incompatible affixes was with Idols where its a HUGE issue on idol viablility for specific builds - e.g. rogue idols with affixes for bows and daggers on the same idol is just silly imho and is like the RNGods taking the piss just because they can rather than there being valid reasoning behind it - other than annoying the player.

Linking affix combinations on items - either in drops or as part of chaos crafting (where you are more likely to chaos a matching affix than an incompatible one) could be a very interesting approach to adjusting the potential for mid to later game gearing to be less negative in terms of the RNG on top of RNG in the grinding / crafting process. Personally, I dont feel that gearing & itemisation is negative at all, but I have come to realise that I am an outlier wrt how I approach gearing & grind so I need to play devils advocate for myself on this topic.

At first glance it would definitely make for a more “easy” gearing process with matching affix in drops or just making it more likely to match up crafts with discovery/chaos use. It would probably be similar in some respect to tailoring drops to the class played so the concept exists to some degree. It would reduce the RNG pool without needing to reduce the number of possible affixes (something I would hate - variety is the spice of life) available in the game. It would likely make for a more positive view by average players making crafts or drops way more “wow” factor etc.

But its not gonna come without compromise or reprecussions. Build variety is an obvious casualty that doesnt need much explaination. Power creep is also a possibility considering the current and already well discussed gear vs skill power imbalance. Crafting possibilities would also be limited - which would likely mean some kinds of crafting adjustments too - if a chaos is always likely to match affixes to what an item already has or what its implicts are, then its gonna take any “fuck yes!” crafting joy away which isnt good for longevity imho. If the current “issues” with crafting arent adjusted, then no-one is gonna manually add affixes anymore vs this alternative approach. And those are just the obvious potential problems I can quickly think of.

Personally, I would also be worried about making the game too easy - which is potentially what changes like this would, imho, do. Torchlight 2 is fun, but its easy as shit and has zero challenge for most arpg players. I have probably 10s of thousands of hours in games like PoE, LE, GD, Diablo# over the years… but only a few hundred in games like Torchlight because it offers no challenge, no grind, no purpose beyond stroking a temporary need to bash mobs for loot or fishgambling.

LE has a box price, so one would expect a certain number of hours in “value” from it, but the issue here is - if the devs want to make money beyond this arbitrary value timeframe, the game has to have something beyond that. If additional content is available to the box price payer, then the only other thing to keep people is the challenge - perhaps this is the grind for better gear that a lot of us diehards enjoy. Perhaps its game difficulty over time represented by harder and harder mobs etc. through effectual scaling that doesnt exclude box payers if they want to try it.

Personally, the idea has merit and is probably worth some whiteboard time from the devs but I dont think its entirely without its own set of problems.

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I think the problem with endgame farming isn’t so much about drops/gear (it is a little), but more about how tedious the endgame systems are. Monos are boring. If the endgame was fun and engaging then maybe people would play to play and the items will just happen over time. Gear being the only driving force is a flaw.

My thought for a first modification would be to make monos have a system similar to dungeons. Have a few checkpoints in each mono. Each checkpoint allows you to choose a modifier for that echo only that alters the difficulty and rewards of that echo. These checkpoints could be killing a spire in the spire monos, or killing a patrolling mob in the patrol monos, etc.

The potential difficulty I see in this is how the monos are generated. Is it even possible to modify mobs that you haven’t gotten to yet in a mono or are they all generated when you open the mono?

The gear/loot problem isn’t something that can be fixed easily. I think it stems from gear being too simple in design. Four affixes and a lack of game changing mods makes most gear uninteresting. Most are just stats. When people are at the endgame grind they are most likely just farming for incremental stat increases and that is incredibly boring and unsatisfying.

There needs to be more build enabling items in the game. Items that change how skills work or allow triggering of other skills or even give skills to classes that wouldn’t otherwise have access to that skill. More skill/gear synergy and interactions. The Life’s Journey bleed build is one of my favorite examples. That one item leads you on a “journey” in character development that makes everything in the build fit. It’s a melee build to trigger the effect, so Harvest. Harvest has great bleed nodes. Spirit Plague has great bleed nodes. Along with that comes self bleeding so you try to find a way to mitigate that and you land on Exsanguinous to make you immune. Now you also have extra synergy with Int stacking for Ward and Bleed chance in Harvest. There is more, but that is an example of what can be fun about items that there needs to be more of.

People complain about how hard it is to get Exsanguinous and other build enabling items, but I hope that will be mostly worked out with the factions. Exsanguinous is one of those items that should be much more common imo.

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I have the same problem with this post as I had from the post about some dude “losing interest”, the one I got banned from and will probably get banned from this one too.

There is nothing of substance in here except suggestions that make the game play better FOR YOU. The game is not designed to make finding the items you need take as long as possible.
Grinding is not a low quality experience unless that’s how YOU find it. Grinding is what makes games fun. Its called working for your rewards. Maybe expand what you are looking for and you won’t find it so unrewarding.

These are the kinds of posts that ruin good games. If you don’t have it in you to put in the time and effort to get the items you want then be content with what you do achieve and find your balance. Stop trying to make games easier.

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Good meta-discussion as well here, those are a lot of reasons why I tried to emphasize keeping a balance between existing loot roll systems vs streamlining/tailoring one’s farming process. Obviously this is all a weight/capstone game design problem for devs of this genre to constantly tackle.

It is interesting that you make a comparison across ARPGs. IDK how the system works for torchlight, but I imagine that LE having periodic leagues or seasons or whatever where characters that want to get on leaderboards need to start fresh/solo will definitely help with player retention regardless of the state of loot farming.

Speaking of the meta conversation, this topic is part of a broader challenge of designing games for vastly different investment times of players, and there is no easy answer. How do you create a balanced and always rewarding but also never too slow/stagnant experience for both the person that wants to put 10k hours into one ARPG, vs someone who is also playing an FPS here, an RTS there, a story/adventure RPG sometimes, etc?

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Yep, reaching the items needed to make a build-defining combo like you described is a big motivation for my post. It could be the Life’s Journey example, or getting a good seal on 1/2LP Aberrant Call for wraiths, or a good seal on 1/2LP Apathy’s Maw; these should just feel more reliable to reach, even if they still take some time.

And since you mentioned factions, I do have a lot of hope that multiple features that factions will introduce are already being designed in a way to address what I put in my OP!

Again, I’ll emphasize my understanding that 3/4LP of many/all uniques should be left as very far away reach goals and that no one should be expecting to get that in anywhere near every slot.

To briefly put numbers to my thoughts here, for example the idea to ban 1 affix from a 1LP cache craft improves ideal craft to 1/3 chance from 1/4. Plus with a couple of the other points about improving our frequency of being able to target that specific unique with >0LP, this is already a big deal. For 3LP, if you can pick 1, ideal craft chance goes to 1/3 from 1/4 (note for comparison that ‘ban 1’ for 3LP would subvert the system entirely). This is still stronger than the 1LP feature because it avoids the previously 1/4 chance of missing your top affix entirely - but 3LP are already that much rarer! I have yet to craft a 3LP but if I got that 1/4 awful roll and missed the exalted stat I imagine that’s a break keyboard moment lol.

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