Last Epoch is one of the games on my watchlist and I can’t help but notice how much similar it is to PoE, having played PoE as a casual player for a year. And I would like to share this opinion because we are the silent/passive majority, and like any democratic government, games should appeal to the majority.
My definition of a casual player:
– normally doesn’t register in forums, unless inspired (this is one of those)
– plays 5-15 hours per week
– doesn’t have time/patience to research builds and dig through volumes of uniques.
To be fair, here are good things about PoE first:
– no skill cooldowns.
– fancy talent tree.
– skills leveling & enhancement via support gems.
Here are things that need to be toned down a bit:
- gear imbalance.
In some cases, this is unintentional, it may end up being impossible to test every gear combination on every class. However, when developers release useless skills and then uniques to change the mechanic of those skills to be overpowered, that is intentional. Or when class viability changes with some expansion. - poor crafting system.
You need thousands and thousands of orbs and days of monotone enchanting and wiping, enchanting and wiping, to roll all the desired suffixes. End price tag is hundreds of exalts which is 100% out of reach of casual players. System begets player economy begets overpricing. - death is too punishing.
Cheap casual builds have a level cap (mine is 92) where death rate will wipe any exp gain. Of course there will always be fanatics who beg for permadeath and full loot pvp in hubs, but trust me you are the 1%. - pointless leagues.
I just don’t get it… I see this as the most worthless, time wasting activity, relative to regular playtime. You abandon your main, create a temp char to compete in a league for some cosmetic item. Maybe someone can explain it better to a casual.
Suggestion part:
- gear imbalance.
Imbalance is caused by uniques, and greater imbalance is caused by mechanic-changing uniques. Removing all uniques also removes all gear imbalance. Regular gear (legendaries) have quality. Lowest quality to highest should have 10-20% in power. So our goal would be to farm up high quality gear with good enchants. This also removes meta builds and players won’t have to go to youtube and search for best setups. It depends on what you want more, the joy of getting a unique or the satisfaction that no matter how you gear up, you can do no wrong. - poor crafting system.
Remove all RNG from crafting. Crafting should not be like gambling, but like hard work, slow and steady progress. I can’t express how unrewarding PoE crafting is unless you dump years of farming orbs into it. You can be at 0% progress by using 1000 orbs, but at 90% progress using 1001 orbs. Assign a fixed amount of crafts to get to 100% progress, 10% of crafting should be equal to 10% progress, not 0%!! - death is too punishing.
What i normally go around suggesting is, introduce traumas. Instead of wiping weeks of progress, players should receive temporary debuffs upon death, so instead of grinding for the amount of exp you lost, you take a small break. For example trauma from death1 can be 30% less damage for 20 min, or 1 item slot disabled. 2nd-3rd death will leave you hospitalised/bound to hub for 30 min. Punishing, but no spent time is stolen. - pointless leagues.
Again, as a casual i don’t get it. I would rather have rich endgame content. If game wants players to participate in leaderboards then make sure we do it on our main chars. Dungeon clear speed leaderboards, boss kill speed leaderboards, dominion tower wave survival leaderboards, etc. Beside top 10 places, we should see players’ gear, to know which class/gear is out of balances/most viable. Very effective, no need for youtube:)
Phew… thank you for a reading and hopefully at least some points steer the game in a better direction that make it more enjoyable and light on casual players.