Suggestion: Echoes modifiers update

I think I’m not alone here. When I think of modifiers I find these main problems:

  • Due to the abundance and magnitude of some damage modifiers, corruption quickly gets a seat back as the metric for your echo difficulty. A 200 corruption echo with several increased damage mods is much more dangerous than a 400 corruption with one or no damage mods.

  • There are too many high magnitude “increased damage” modifiers and these can quickly lead to cheap one-shots. Specially the “Enemies deal X% increased physical/void/elemental damage” you can easily reach a point you cannot deal one of those modifiers without risking one-shots.

  • Some modifiers with higher corruption go out of control, all modifiers should have some cap, or a at least soft cap. 230% increased Void damage, or 450% shred effect on enemies are too much to handle to most builds.

  • There’s some lack of variety in echo modifiers. I will propose some additional modifiers that could help make these modifiers more interesting.

These damage-related modifiers shouldn’t exist. Period:

Enemies deal X% Increased Damage
High health enemies deal X% increased damage
Rare enemies have X% increased health and damage
Enemies deal X% increased physical/void/elemental damage

I would add these instead, with much lower magnitudes:

Enemies have X% increased stun chance, stun duration and damage.
Enemies have X% increased attack speed, cast speed and damage.
Enemies deal X% increased physical/void/elemental damage and resistance (with much lower magnitude…).
Rare enemies have X% increased health and Y% increased damage. (Y would be of much lower magnitude than X)

On the other side, I think these are fine due to their low magnitude:

Enemies have X% increased movement speed and damage.
Enemies deal X% Increased Damage and Y% Increased critical chance.

I would also change these modifiers as they are free modifiers most of the time:

Enemies heal if they have not been damaged recently
→ Enemies heal X% of their health per second.

The original is basically a free modifier, due to how the game operates, and the proposed one would be a harder modifier for damage over time builds, witch have a far easier time compared to flat damage/crit builds already.

Rare enemies regenerate health

→ Rare enemies have X% increased health and regenerate health.

Rare enemies have X% increased cooldown recovery speed

→ Rare enemies have X% increased health and increased cooldown recovery speed.

Regeneration and less cooldowns alone are a very weak modifiers, if you add some extra health into the mix can make these modifiers a bit more challenging.

Also, here are some interesting modifiers to add into the mix:

Enemies have X% increased armour.
Enemies deal X% increased damage for 4 seconds each time they hit.
Enemies will take X% less damage for 4 seconds each time they are damaged.
Enemies have a X% chance to inflict critical vulnerability on hit (very small chance).
Enemies have a X% chance to freeze on hit (very small chance).
Enemies have a X% chance to ignore dodge on hit and deal X% Increased Damage.
Enemies deal X% Increased damage and a chance to poison on hit.
Enemies deal X% Increased damage and a chance to bleed on hit.
Enemies deal X% increased damage for each negative effect the player has.
Enemy packs will often have rare enemies.
Non-rare enemies are invulnerable if they have a rare enemy nearby.
Enemy packs will often have a [Insert nasty monster here] among them.
Players lose X% of their maximum health per second.
Players deal X% less damage if they have dealt damage recently.
Players have X% less leech and regeneration.
Players have X% less armour.

Lastly, about the a possible soft cap in all modifiers:

  • Any increased damage related should have a 25%/33% soft cap.
  • Any chance to deal an ailment should have either a 50% or 100% soft cap.
  • Any increased health related should have a 33%/50% soft cap.
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This issue comes up every few months… To the point where i think most people agree with the fact that the modifiers could use some reworking to some degree…

Personally, your first point regarding a lower corruption being more difficult that a higher corruption purely because of modifiers is the most important issue for me… There needs to be some sort of predicatable difficulty curve where this kind of thing shouldnt be nearly as pronounced as it is right now… For me the issue is caused not only by modifiers but also by mob combinations that compliment each other so well that it can make an echo 10x harder than the one before even if you didnt chose a bad modifier…

Lastly and on a more creative note regarding modifiers… (I have suggested this in a post a long time ago with pretty good responses from other players)… we need POSITIVE modifiers too… I dont see why echos are restricted to negatives only for mobs…

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I agree with you

https://ibb.co/hR5Gk1M

This change seems to me vastly more punishing to low DPS builds. I really hate regen without a counter because it can lead to negative dps and turn fights into minimum dps checks.

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Yep, huge no unconditional regen.

it literally is 100% a dps check, and skews mobs with more hp even harder then they already are.

I don’t know what you have in mind, but the magnitude would be quite low to begin with.

For example, compared to “Enemies have 40% increased health” I would add “Enemies heal 10% of their health per second.” (gives the same effective HP over 4 seconds provided the monster is not at full health).

Yes, combined with other defensive mods it would ramp up, but that’s a feature of many offensive/defensive mods.

it means if you deal less then 10% of their hp a second their EHP is infinite.

Thats the concern, and that you are saying is just where it starts? 90% of my builds wouldnt get passed normal monos because id run into an encounter like a juicy wandering profane flesh that heals for more then my dps lol.

Take the level 66 boss, shadow rahyeh, I fought him last night in solo with an abomination build. My abomination was doing 10k hits a tick, it took more then 10 hits to kill him. At level 66. This mod would brick every single boss encounter.

its okay to have a monster get 99% damage reduction through some combo of mods, its not okay to make them literally immune to damage that is low enough.

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Well, looking at normal mobs, if you have trouble doing more than 10% a second with your build, you have a severe damage problem. If the same is true with rare mobs, your build is just not very good.

About this mod with bosses, you will not want it around with bosses if you don’t kill the boss quite fast. Is the same with the “Enraged at half health” mod: they are too dangerous against many bosses.

The objective of mods is to ramp up difficulty, you should manage to not be too greedy stacking too many offensive or defensive mods.

To me the game never had a damage output issue, always has been a damage soaking issue, you should be able to kill instantly or almost instantly normal mobs, and rares within a few seconds.

This highlights the huge problem with mods as a system imo, and why just redoing them does not solve the problem.

Mods suck because unlike say PoE who has a host of build hampering or dps checky mods on maps.

In last epoch you have very little option on how you get or remove mods

In poe you simply dont run the map, or reroll it. In LE you either dont do the echo which requires either huge amounts of rerouting into possibly more bad mods, so what do you do if your entire options available at all points are mods you cant handle?

Then lets say you get a mod you cant handle, how do you get rid of it? Go throw your head at some close to center echos and pray none of those have crappy mods too?

Echos currently as a system make no sense with mods, the mods feel like they were a copied idea before LE had more of a sense of what it wanted to be endgame wise and I dont think the mod system is right for LE monolith system as a whole unless the player has more ways to deal with the echo web like a reset button that just wipes out your progress but lets you start over from the center.

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I don’t dislike the mod system, the only ones that I see as unmanageable are the increased damage high magnitude mods as stated in my initial post, other than that, dodge/crit avoidance mods are annoying for crit builds, or the “focus on players” for minion builds, but you eat the shit and go on. DoT builds don’t have any particularly bad mods to deal with.

As the system works, is about managing a bit what mods you’re stacking, if you can’t manage a few mods of the same side (offensive / defensive), you should consider lowering corruption.

Not the best system ever, but see it mostly fine as a concept, as it implies some decision-making advancing through echoes.

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This is the one thing that I am 100% agreed on regarding Monoliths… The decision making required when selecting the next echo to chose… It counters some of the mindlessness of running monoliths to some degree and whatever solution to the mods is implemented, I would like this aspect to remain…

However, at the moment this decision making is based on chosing the least NEGATIVE path… I would much prefer a more positive approach and at the moment, echo modifiers (the guaranteed negative) far outweigh (imho) the echo rewards (the RNG based positives)…

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