I’m running into an issue leveling alts that is hurting my desire to reroll more. The class fantasy and build variety in this game is amazing, I really want to try out more of the masteries. But once I have one character at high corruption and have farmed out good gear, the corruption regrind on a second character feels very tedious.
The problem is largely an issue of difficulty not matching the strength of the new character. If I’m rerolling in an arpg, it’s often because a really cool item dropped that inspires an idea. In LE, that’s usually a 2 or 3 LP unique that unlocks something special. When I level my alt, I’m going to use this unique as well as some of the exalted items I’ve already farmed. Even if I don’t go straight to best in slot gear, I’m going to have a character that is way too strong for non-empowered monos or 100 corruption. This creates a lot of tedium as I grind to get the difficulty level up to an appropriate amount. To be clear, the issue is less a case of lack of rewards (which actually feel fine even at 100 corruption), and more about the boredom from doing content that has 0 risk involved.
To solve this, I think you could borrow a couple of ideas from PoE’s delve implementation:
- Have access to content be account wide
- Allow players to pinpoint their desired difficulty a bit better.
- Still require players to earn difficulty and reward progression at least once per cycle. You don’t want players be incentivized into jumping into content above their head before they have a sense of what it takes to succeed there.
My suggestion for this is as follows:
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Change the corruption system so it is account wide per monolith (although still reset every cycle of course). As a part of this, let empowered monos also be unlocked once per account per cycle.
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Change the way corruption works to a slider/counter rather than a fixed value per mono: when we kill Orobyss, instead of raising the actual corruption level, let it raise the max corruption level players can pick, and allow players to pick corruption levels between 100 and the max corruption they have unlocked (maybe in installments of 10 or 20 to keep the slider count reasonable but that would also involve a numeric change on what Orobyss gives). I do realize that infinite scaling might make the UI of a slider impractical but being able to enter in a number could work around that.
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To prevent abuse, make bosses only give gazes and Orobyss only raise the max corruption if they are fought at max corruption, and reset progress towards the boss if corruption level is changed. Since the rewards from other echoes scale with corruption, I don’t see a large abuse case from allowing players to play at lower than their max unlocked corruption.
This would address both the issue of raising alts involving too much tedium, and also allow for players to reroll their current characters to a totally new build more easily, since you could test out lower corruption levels without necessarily resetting overall corruption progression.
I do want to state that this isn’t the biggest issue at the moment on season 1 launch. The game doesn’t have that much end game content, so grinding up corruption is sort of a goal in itself. But it is already a bit tedious to do so, and will only get worse as more end game content gets added.