As you go through the game, your character and the game get harder and stronger. When the difficulty matches your character the gameplay is amazing. When you are much stronger than the game, there isn’t any challenge and it eventually becomes boring to play.
Around level 70 I outpaced the mono’s difficulty and grinding stability became a massive chore/barrier to getting to the harder content where my character belonged. The game became tedious and boring, and while I’m thankfully finally to empowered on this guy, there’s no way I’ll play any of my alts through all of this, as they are also having too easy of a time on mono’s, and I do not want to do this chore again.
This is probably why people want empowered mono’s to be account wide, but the underlying issue is our inability to maneuver our content’s difficulty for our character, which is a problem even for main characters sometimes.
So, there’s some feedback, I suppose I’ll leave some ideas just for the sake of it, but I don’t intend for these to be perfect solutions.
Let us change corruption faster. Bigger jumps up and down for killing the shade
Make going outwards on mono’s more impactful for gaining stability (my preference). For example instead of +2 or +1 more stability per mono, make it +5 for some paths but give them harder mods. I completely ignored rewards and just went straight outwards because I was desperate to get through the timelines
Some shared mono progression. Doesn’t help the main but at least the alt’s wont be forced to do the chores too.
Imo the best thing for the corruption grind is to remove it completely. Playing at a difficulty commensurate to the strength of your build should be a given, not something you have to “earn” with wasted hours on relatively trivial and unrewarding content. As far as I can tell the system as it stands right now is not present to fulfil any well-considered role in the overall game design or the player experience, rather it’s just there because eating your time like a black hole is a safe and comfortable default in the looter-RPG design palette.
If you don’t like it you are not forced to do it. But there are players who like to min/max and push their build as far as possible. Why take it away from them?
Isn’t this the intention of any ARPG? Grinding as long as you want to get better gear? With an asymptotic progress in the endgame to never reach ‘perfect’ gear.
But please no shared corruption. Maybe some available bonus corruption to get started but I cannot farm 700+ corruption on an early build.
Of course there should be a way to scale content, it just shouldn’t be anything resembling the Corruption system as it stands right now, IMO.
I guess you can sort of distill the experience of most looter ARPGs to “kill a lot of time”, but does that actually mean anything? If you build a game with “kill time, get gear” as your blueprint, surely the path of least resistance would be some worthless clicker or idler game rather than an ARPG. There’s clearly a lot more to the genre appeal than just that. At a minimum the grind should be situated in a game design that makes it feel worthwhile and rewarding somehow. Personally I’d take a more radical stance and err towards saying that contemporary ARPGs just have too much grind and eagerness to eat your time, but that’s not quite the point I’m trying to make here.
As I see it LE has already pinned down the fundamentals of its offering to hardcore/addicted players with infinite content scaling and a wide array of chase itemisation. It’s the standard core for any endless game-as-service ARPG. It’s not at all clear that the padding from the slow rate of increasing corruption is at all necessary to prop up or motivate this sustainable endgame loop. Rather, it’s just a weird tax on time that has the most significant effect on mid-level players who are interested in the endgame systems but not to the point of playing for thousands of hours. And that effect is pretty much all negative. Raising corruption doesn’t produce any particularly exciting or rewarding moments, rather it’s just a bizarre slog of trivial content that will result in many players losing interest long before they get close to being able to meaningfully test or iterate their build against push contnet.
Well said! This is exactly what I wanted to say in my op. I’d love to be able to get to harder content faster, given that my character can earn it, so that I can have engaging gameplay
Only cosindering difficulty I would totally agree but not when getting more/better loot is also a thing associated with it. Getting better or more items should always have a grind attached to it.
You work your way up the corruption ‘ladder’ to get higher rarity rewards by increasing the difficulty. Switching to an ‘overpowered’ build and being able to instantly increase the rewards to a ‘overpowered’ level feels wrong for me.
But we all share our opinions here. Still feel free to have different ones! I just think that in such cases players are ‘forced’ to switch to more efficient builds in a trade economy as soon as they get an item enabling a build even though they may don’t want to play it. If you first have to re-grind corrption it could be more efficient to keep playing the build you enjoy.
But what do you do if you have a high level character which is doing ~300 corruption. Maybe some others that can do the same difficulty so that you pushed each monolith to that level.
Do you want to do only non-empowered monoliths until you are able to do 300 corruption with your new character? just saying that fully shared corruption can be bad. Some way to push it faster like with the bonus corruption we get from other monoliths right now would be still fine.
Personally I think that corruption just needs better ways to lower it if we have it shared.
Currently you can accidently go too far or god forbid new characters get the bonus corruption stat, you do your first shade on your level 80 character and now you just gained 100 bonus corruption and cant handle that mono anymore, so you most likely just have to not do shades at all.
This stops being a problem if we can simply slider the corruption, you should have to earn corruption first of course, if ive done 300 corruption and unlocked it, there should not be a problem with me sliding the mod to 100 again to quick farm, or what have you.
Until they give a way to easily fix the mistakes, I will never be for shared corruption.
Personally I think the easiest solution going forward if this system is going to remain and I did post this over 4 months ago and my stance has not changed infact become stronger
Corruption should be earned globally across your account but instead of adding a flat corruption to that timeline to that character, you earn a global corruption you can add/remove at will up to your maximum with conditions.
I thought about it and I thought about failsafes against where people can quickly increase/remove corruption ie run monoltih at 100 corruption spawn Orobyss and dial it up to 300 - no. The other is you SHARE the corruption with other characters so if you have 300 corruption unlocked and dump all 200 points into one character, each other character is at 100 until you earn more
You could only set the corruption at a fresh monolith, if you decide to change the corruption mid way ie too hard/easy the monolith is now reset back to 0 stability, so you can see the ways you cant abuse it off hand I can see
Theres no benefit to very high corruption if you cant kill anything in a decent speed or die, corruption has really 2 meanings - farming Omnis and epeen imo. If you want XP you do arena/100 corruption. if you want exalted/rare uniques you farm the Dungeon…the Chronomancer dropped an Omni staff on my 6-7th kill for example
edit: I think the aspect of adding/removing corruption globally will work best for multiplayer groups trying to push corruption together. it will be absolute nightmare to have to sync mono’s up in teams or try different combinations of teams/timelines etc more importantly not farming Spirits of Fire forever because thats your highest timeline on 1 character
Lets say ie you have 700 unlocked and want to push with a team…I would suggest only 1 person needs it ‘unlocked’ for you all to play together otherwise you may need a healer/buffer etc and that would mean they need to unlock 700 on multiple timelines on a non dps character, seems nightmarish the way it is now
I like the general idea! What about this modification/addition:
You have your global corruption level.
If you encounter an Orobyss you can set your target corruption (of course at or below the global corruption level) and Orobyss gives Bonus corruption similar to how it would if you currently have another timeline at this corruption level.
An Orobyss at the outer zones would push you really fast towards this level while an inner node would give only a slight advantage. If you are at 500 in some monolith you get to 400+ in two to three runs currently. Getting back to your highest corruption would still be possible but it would slow down a bit when you get closer.
This would also help to farm Omnis as you could do +16 Orobyss with negative bonus corruption to not increase your corruption level after the fight.
We don’t know yet how they do monoliths in multyplayer, don’t we? If they do it the ‘PoE-way’ we will run the monolith of one player. But let’s see and wait there. We don’t know what they have planed.
True but for end game pushing and other mid game activities its easier to allow players to ‘clean slate’ their timelines with ‘xx’ corruption imo
Seems weird to be in a group wanting to push but it basically is “guys I have 700 unlocked on this Sorc only and only a single timeline…”
Personally I like 300ish corruption, whenever I make a new character and optimise it for going higher i generally just get bored and stop playing before i get there now, when the first iteration came and Omnis was farmable I killed many Shades going to 340ish corruption trying up/down corruption on my Forge Guard Manifest and was so fed up with doing same timeline on the same character. Being able to bring another character there that could do it would of been amazing as I had multiple 100’s rotting doing nothing all stuck at low corruption as I hadnt played them much with the new system
Easier of course. Thought about it for some sort of compromise between our two views. You get rather fast to the level you want but it still needs some work to get to the same level as your highest character. It is still my point of view that you have to at least invest some time to higher levels and ‘overpush’ your old highest corruption character.
Definitely not the way I want to have it but possible… It has the advantage (considering the current system) that you can hop into a prepared monolith. Otherwise you may need a ‘group-monolith’ or have to reset all players monoliths to the same at the group start. This definitely would require a slider to set a corruption level.
The problem I see with group monoliths that it does not support the ‘let’s join and play one echo together’-approach. You would have to invest more time in one group to make it good.
I’m very curious how EHG will do multiplayer in combination with the current content.
How about just adding various difficulty levels to the game?
→ Simple for everything!
I would have, for example, at the start of the game nothing against an adjustable slider (/or input field or whatever) with difficulty levels from 1 to 1000.
→ 1 is about like now.
→ From about 400 it’s for really tough characters and from about 800 basically nobody makes it.
The monoliths we leave in principle as they are, only Empowered Monoliths there are no longer.
Corruption is collected per monolith level, depending on the general difficulty level.
It doesn’t matter in which monolith you collect Corruption.
There is then an account-wide corruption counter, if this is full enough you can compete against Shade.
However, you can also use Corruption proportionally to compete in a normal monolith whose progress bar is full against an Empowered boss to farm the “empowered only items”.
Corruption points could also be farmed in the arena or in the upcoming endgame systems… and more (EHG can work that out ).
I think even with stability increasing faster as I suggested it’d still be quite the grind! There’s a whole topic here of “should end game loot be time locked or power locked” that we could go into. I personally think, “mostly power, some time”. Right now it feels like “mostly time, some power”. I’ll leave it at that for others to discuss if they want I personally won’t go to deep into it today!
This is a trade/player issue, which is separate from the topics issue of stronger characters being forced to do chores for hours. Balancing around this is probably not a good idea. Sorry to pull the same card twice in the same reply lol, but this is again a huge topic. On a personal note, I’ve been striving to not worry about the meta lately and to take things as they come and not zoom, and I have been enjoying games more
).