Suggestion for mechanism to buff Blessing farming

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I think Blessings are currently in a Catch-22 place that reduces build diversity, ESPECIALLY for casual players. First let me lay out the two problems as I see them.

  1. Re: casual players: Blessings are often treated as an afterthought because in Standard or Offline you’ve got access to all the Blessings you’ve ever found, however I’ve been playing for years and there are some Blessings I still have never found at all (much less gotten a good roll on) because I’ve never played a build that’s needed those Blessings. So for example I’m now playing a new offline build where I need to get a few blessings from scratch, even after years of play.

  2. Re: Catch-22 and build diversity: Running empowered monos at 200c is the optimal Blessing farming strat because it unlocks 5 Blessings per boss run, but many homebrew builds really start to struggle around the 100c mark even WITH decent Blessings, and they’re even worse without them. This pushes casual players towards either using builds that work with Blessings you’ve already got, or using build guides instead of enjoying whatever build you can come up with on your own.

This game has gods. I propose placing a temple somewhere in the game (accessible to both CoF and MG) where you can pray to one of the game’s gods for help obtaining specific Blessings. Let’s call it a Dispensation. You should only be able to select 1 Blessing at a time, and the buff to your Blessing hunt will follow a sawtooth pattern over time.

Let’s say you want the All Resistances Blessing from Reign of Dragons, and let’s say you guys (EHG) think a player should see the All Res Blessing on average once out of every 100 opportunities (and by opportunities, I mean there are 4 opportunities per boss fight at 100c, and 5 opportunities at 200c), and a perfect roll after 10,000 opportunities.

So by that math you should see All Res once every 20 boss fights at 200c, and get a perfect roll after 2,000 boss fights. With no Dispensation the Blessing’s appearance would be pure RNG, so on average with these numbers it SHOULD appear within every 20 boss fights, but it could also take anywhere from 20 to 50, theoretically.

When a Dispensation is selected the game should add a buff to the chance of seeing the requested Blessing, and that buff should increase after every boss fight, approaching 100% until that Blessing appears, after which the Dispensation buff will drop back down to its initial setting and start to rise again if you want to keep farming that same Blessing for a better roll.

You can tune the amount the buff raises after each boss fight to dial in how many attempts a player should need to get a guaranteed drop of that Blessing, however I’m only talking about the appearance of the Blessing, not its roll, and this is why I described the pattern over time being a sawtooth. The Dispensation buff won’t ensure a great roll, but it will at least put an upper limit on the RNG related to appearances, which should help the farming process.

And, in case anyone has an issue with putting an upper limit on the RNG, let me address that. It’s said that the reason people like RNG is because of how happy they are to get that random drop. I have two comments on this.

First, putting an upper limit doesn’t eliminate the joy of a great random drop. If you think it should take me 10,000 opportunities to get a perfect roll and I get that on the 200th opportunity, I’m still going to feel that joy, just as I would on the 8,000th, because either way it’d be like getting an unexpected early present. Defining an upper limit doesn’t take away the joy of the drop. What it does is cap the JOY-ROBBING side of RNG that could make you have to farm 15,000-20,000 opportunities to get that perfect roll.

Second, this buff would only be in place if you’ve requested a Dispensation, and only for 1 Blessing. Without that the drops will still be 100% RNG. So if you need multiple Blessings and decide to farm some different monos for a bit without changing your Dispensation you could still have that joy where you get a perfect roll on a different Blessing other than the one you’ve requested a Dispensation on. One does not negate the other.

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2

I like the idea of being able to lean your kills towards a specific blessing. I have had instances on annoying bosses like Lagon (annoying just due to phases) where I’ve killed him what felt like 100 times just to finally see the blessing I want rolled at the very bottom end. RNG madness to the highest degree!

I also think over all they need a lot more blessings added in general. When you play the same 2-3 classes each season irrespective of which build you’re using you generally end up with the same 5. It would be really nice if there were some new ones thrown into the mix. I will not hijack your thread with proposed names already in my skull.

+1 for a way to lean towards specific blessings

3

Blessings respec didn’t exist for all those years, so the blessings only started to unlock account wide at that time.
Also, it unlocks every blessing you roll, even the ones you didn’t select, so I find it hard that there are blessings you still haven’t unlocked, unless they’re in a mono that you barely play.

The only blessings I don’t have unlocked at this point (and I haven’t even been playing that much for over a year) are the normal mono ones, which don’t actually matter anyway, being a much lower roll.

As for the idea itself, it seems much too complicated for something which can be very simplified and without any need of adding new systems to the game (which consume development time, which already is a very sparse resource).

The easiest solution would be:
1- Undiscovered blessings have a higher chance to show up.
2- Blessings don’t spawn with a lower roll than what you already found.

This makes it so that you can quickly have at least a base roll blessing reasonably quick and you can farm for better rolls in a more progressive manner.
Eventually you might even have all belssings at max roll, in case you want to respec and use them.

This doesn’t affect alts, because alts always get blessings at the lower roll, but at least all blessings would be available for that base value, even if they also have to farm them again.

At this point in time for LE there really is no reason why we should have to farm 5 bosses 100 times each just to get a decent roll for your blessing, especially when blessings aren’t even that powerful anymore.
Their importance has been diluted by power creep with new uniques and primordials.

So yeah, I think the easiest and best solution is to let the blessings stay random as they are now (you usually have around 1/5 chance for your blessing to show up in a 5 slot run) but don’t let them roll below your max.
It’s very frustrating to have the desired blessing show up but it’s a lower roll.

On a sidenote, blessings themselves could do with a overhaul.

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4

Option 2 makes so much sense! The amount of times you hit say 19 out of 20 all resistances and then continue getting 11 or 13 etc.

It’s a shame you can’t juice a boss with say a primodial rune for a chance of a T8 blessing, hah!

5

Thank you lol … but I will encourage you to create a new thread for that!

It’s a combination of the two things you just mentioned. I’d leveled one character to lvl 100 offline years ago and then never touched it again until after account-wide unlocks were implemented. I’d created 2 other offline characters during server outages (but stopped playing them at levels 45 and 29 respectively), and for the level 100 character when i went back to it I never bothered to go unlock better rolls of some the Blessings because the rolls I did have were at least enough to let me test a new build. And, as just a matter of luck, I did have an 88/90 roll on the Blessing I needed from Lagon, so I haven’t spent much time with him since I started playing this offline build again a few months ago. So there are 6 empowered Blessings from him that I’ve still never seen since they implemented the account-wide unlocks.

I would be in support of that regardless of whether or not they implement any other mechanism in addition, but I still think they’d need to because…

If they were to implement both of your suggestions that could lead to a situation where you get your initial roll of the Blessing, but then don’t see any roll of it again for a very long time because the lower-rolled ones are being hidden. I think this would actually be worse for player experience. I’d rather see that I’m getting low rolls than not seeing it show up at all, because I’d interpret that as I’m not getting that Blessing to show up at all, which I’d find even more frustrating than a bad roll.

On the other hand, if that second mechanism’s being applied to all of the blessings, even the ones you aren’t farming for, then what you’re saying would be to hide ALL blessing rolls that are lower than your currently highest-seen rolls for all of them. On paper that might sound good but I’d have to see it in testing. If you made it impossible for any blessings to be shown that are worse than the rolls you already have I suspect that would make you blaze through the farming of all blessings way faster than the devs would want us to. Now that I think about it … you’d essentially be asking them to buff the rolls of all blessings where I’m just asking to be able to select one for buffing.

I think this is mainly because it’s affected by two RNG rolls. One for whether the blessing appears, the other for the roll it gets. I suspect capping the ability for the appearance RNG to roll poorly should be enough to make this less of a slog, but they could certainly do more later if my suggestion doesn’t move the needle enough.

I think we’re in a similar situation with the Weaver idol rerolls (with some mods being insanely harder to get than any of the others), but we can keep that to a separate thread.

6

No, that is not what I proposed. They aren’t hidden. They just roll equal or higher.
For example, if a blessing has a roll of 50-100 and your first blessing rolls a 60, when next it shows up, it will now roll 60-100 instead. And if it upgrades to 80, then the next time it shows up it rolls 80-100.

It still shows up with the same frequency, it just never rolls lower.