After several hundred hours of play I now feel like Idols are kind of a mess. You have to keep picking them up because you can’t have encyclopedic knowledge of what bonuses you’ve already seen on them, or foreknowledge of how many of each you might need. Overall it’s just a long frustrating process and it takes up way too much room in your inventory.
My proposal is to make an Idol Codex, where each combination of bonuses for each idol you’ve already seen at the highest value you’ve seen them show up as options in a list that is searchable the same way your bank is searchable. And when selected, you can put any number of copies of them into your idol slots. When picking them up as loot, instead of going into your bank or inventory, they update your codex. Simple, easy, no hassle.
This would save a massive amount of sorting and dawdling, as well as missing out because you just didn’t pick up all the idols for the other classes you aren’t playing right now. For these reasons, I think this would be a massive improvement over the current system.
I think a similar idea has been proposed for Unique items too…
Dont recall any feedback from the Devs if its something they may consider but I’d definitely guess that if they did, it would be waaaaaaayy down at the bottom of the to-do list.
Here’s hoping. I can’t imagine people are going to want to manage their inventory this much. If anything, people will just stop picking up idols past a certain point and then never have the ones they need when they start playing with a new build and moving things around. Anything that makes it harder to tinker that way is going to hurt the game.
So you want to find one perfect idol and be able to fill your idol slots with it? You do know the entire point of these games is loot chasing, right? They’re never going to let you find one item and make infinite copies of it.
As you say, there is an argument out there that it should be as long and tedious as possible to find loot to use so that the rewards feel more unique and rewarding to the people who have the highest amount of free time available to play the game, grinding down the same dungeons and bosses over and over again to find them. And that somehow this is the point of playing a game, rather than having fun actually playing the game.
As you might imagine, that’s not really an argument I buy into, personally. I think the game being more about trying new builds and fighting bosses than sensations of artificial achievement, or in this case, idol management, is more fun for the player. Anything that is tedious or a hassle or becomes more about memorization and organization rather than play only bogs down the experience.
Hope that helps clarify my thoughts on this a little bit.
That’s true. I wish there was a way to change it. In the age of mobile games and battle royales, I’m afraid ARPG’s are falling behind in relevance. The perception of “T-minus thousands of hours until you get to see the fun part of the game” is probably not helping in that regard.
Why does that matter? I kinda get it for the larger developers deciding what genres to develop games in, but arpgs haven’t been a main genre for years/decades and IMO good quality games are at least as likely to come out of smaller studios as larger ones.
Yeah. I am wondering if they have any plans to improve idols more generally too. I have always wondered as it seems like idols are a placeholder to test things out and when the first Unique idols were added I was definitely excited at the possibilities that they could bring through evolving the idol system to something more than just topping up stats etc.
Then the devil on my shoulder also wonders how dangerous messing with idols could change things and add another whole dimension on the power creep and itemisation problems that already exist like the current power distribution between skills/items.
I still think that idols could be a great way to add “way out” builds and interesting interactions to the game beyond what traditional items could. Not sure if the game is ready for it yet… but I could imagine a post 1.0 content launch entirely devoted to the “Idols of the Gods”…
It matters because games are gradually getting simplified and reduced down to the minimum number of things necessary to hold player’s attention. That trend will continue (and get worse) if new audiences aren’t introduced to classic PC gaming. Eventually, the audience for this type of game will dwindle to the point where they’re only made occasionally, or only occasional updates are made to the existing ones.
A lot of people probably don’t realize, this is a cultivated genre. When we were introduced to Diablo, it was a broad cultural event. The social incentive to try it was overwhelming. The people ten and twenty years behind us didn’t experience that and they don’t know why they should care, for the most part. They don’t have a common unifying experience to get them to pay attention to these games going forward like we did.
Consider that if audiences for these games do continue to shrink, we’re going to lose content. Even if quality does not go down, the scope of games made and their frequency definitely will, because making a large complicated ARPG with tons of items and mechanics is hard, and requires at least some built-in audience that will be on board with buying it. It’s not a style of small art game that you can sell five hundred copies of and still make money.
Games like Path of Exile or Torchlight 2 somewhat prove it doesn’t have to be that way though, at least in my view. There’s still mass appeal and future audiences for ARPG’s that are grand and complex, if we can make games that everybody wants to play and that get new and interesting content on a regular basis. But that’s also going to require fixing things that are broken and outdated about the format that discourage new players from playing them.
To make an extra philosophical argument here, a thing’s ability to exist and improve is also based to a extent on its appeal. If people didn’t pay attention to Chess continuously after it was invented, we probably wouldn’t have it today. Sure, they didn’t have the technology to record information the way we do, but it would still be a footnote in a wikipedia article somewhere rather than a sport people all over the world compete in. It probably won’t happen in our lifetimes, but allowing classic PC gaming to become totally irrelevant would be a disaster for future generations, because they wouldn’t know about games like Diablo or Titan Quest. Those games would be wikipedia articles people study academically rather than have any real interest in themselves. I personally don’t want that for the people I know and like who are much younger than me. I want to see them still sharing and enjoying these things at the end of my life the way I did myself at the beginning. That’d be a nice outcome for everybody involved, I think.
Also, highest value is not always desireable. For example, chance to spawn putrid/flame wraith goes upto 50 but Abom builds want it at 30% to get all 3 types of wraiths.
Cooldown related mods might also want some specific numbers(Transplant/Surge/Minion).
It would need to be adjustible.
Tho I mean currently even Blessings aren’t stored for a char so… kinda a longshot.
That’s a good point, I wasn’t aware of that. In that case, it would need to be adjustable. Kind of counterintuitive. I will have to try that build sometime.
I do not enjoy much the current idol drops, e.g. I’ve got only one (out of 4 needed) idols on my 100 level character + quite some time grinding ~300 corruption echos. But suggesting to keep all dropped idols is crazy. What’s next? Let’s keep all the loot? Otherwise after being tired of your mage and wanting to switch to a bow character you can find out that you haven’t picked up any bows…
Well it’s either that or memorize exactly which ones you haven’t seen out of tens if not hundreds of potential ones you might actually need. To grind, as you said, hundreds of extra hours on the same character to see the ones that you need for that character doesn’t strike me as being valuable or worthwhile content, or indeed, a fun experience for the player in general.
Adding a codex that will simply update when you pick up the idols and then let you select up to the highest bonus for the combinations you’ve already seen would make this seemless and easy, and nothing but positive for the player.
There’s a principle that I like in general for when you start a new character, and that’s the idea that you can’t be worse off for starting one. But in addition to needing the idols you’ve already banked, you also don’t get separate bank storage for each character. So you’re talking about playing 40-50 hours before you start making enough money from what you’re doing to start affording new bank tabs if you’re already capped out from one or two previous characters. Also bear in mind that idols and certain pieces of gear are unique to each class, so if you’re playing a new class for the first time it’s even worse. That’s a long time where you’re not getting the opportunity to pick up and keep anything that you see that you might like but can’t use right now, which forces the player to resort to either creating mules or just not picking up anything. In either case, neither of those are really fun. You would actually be better off at a certain point starting a new file on a new copy of the game. And the current idol system puts immense pressure on that problem precisely because there are so many of them.
It would be much better over-all if each character had their own storage and there was just a shared tab between them. But also if idols were banked in the same way crafting materials already are. That’s why I’m proposing an idol index to streamline the game and make it less annoying to play alternate characters.
Again, I think idols system requires some work. But Codex with the suggested implementation has a lot of downsides:
It reduces grinding. Yes, sometimes grinding is annoying, but ARPGs are about getting loot (and killing monsters obviously). Not everyone will want to automate the process of collecting items for all possible builds they might want to play later. It is also a reason why they are not craftable in the first place.
There are 9 types of idols with 794 combinations of affixes in total (according to lastepochtools).
a) it requires quite a lot of work to make a good UI, and I think this time is better spent somewhere else;
b) it requires a lot of database space for such a small feature.
There is no coming back to the old system if Codex turns out to be worse than the current system: we lose all existing itemised idols.
Also it is worth to mention: while idols are important, (most?) builds can function without them; and later you will be able to buy them on market (which obviously comes with its own downsides).
My suggestions for the two issues I see:
It is difficult to find a combination of two good affixes. It can be solved by:
a) allowing to lock one affix and craft/reroll another (crafting both is too easy);
b) allowing to merge two existing idols: create a new idol by keeping the base and one prefix and one suffix at random (original idols are destroyed).
After you get a good idol, you still usually need 3 more. It can be solved by introducing a way to copy the idol. E.g. a unique idol which can
a) copy as it is (boring and forces to wait for an idol with perfect rolls);
b) copy with 80-90% values of affixes (to force people continue looking for a better one);
c) copy with 90-110% values of affixes (to force people farming these unique idols).
I don’t think my suggestions are good enough (it might be appealing that some items are hard to find and impossible to craft in any way), but they have lighter flaws than solution with Codex. It can also be a part of some season as a testing ground before making it permanent.
I disagree, I think idols are essential for good builds and testing out changes to builds, and not keeping a good portion of the idols you find would be catastrophic if you decided your build doesn’t work lategame. (I’ve experienced this myself several times, I like to create and test new builds on the same character.) I also think if you make the codex searchable by prefix / suffix, and by the text of the effect you want, you’d have absolutely no issue creating a quick snappy UI that will let you look at all of them. You could even have separate categories you can sort by for class specific idols. That might also make it a little more organized.
As far as transitioning from the old to the new system or vice versa, that wouldn’t be all that difficult to do. All you would do is make it where the idols are usable like consumable items and they get added to a list. And if for whatever reason people wanted to go back to the old system, you’d just keep that list and create bank tabs inside the codex that house all the idols they originally used to stow them into it. From a technical perspective this would be really simple to do. Just database / text file stuff. The one snag there I could think of is that you have to make it where the player does that instead of equipping them, and any they already have equipped are either automatically added to the codex or get unequipped in some nondestructive fashion. All of that could also be worked out.
One of the fundamental problems with the game in general is that you can find out at level 50 or 90 that your build simply isn’t viable in Monolith or Empowered Monolith and have to dramatically change your gear and passives. Changing your idols is also a big part of this. If you don’t have them, then you have to go back and grind ridiculous amounts of time to find bonuses you may have missed out on already, or not found in the first place.
A codex would make this seemless because instead of missing out, you still have all of the bonuses you’ve seen drop from the minimum up to the maximum and you aren’t requiring the player to do anything additional in order to use them. If you can do that for crafting, I don’t see any reason it would be negative or detrimental to the game or its content to do the same with idols.
