Suggestion: moar exalteds and Empowered L100 gear

While watching one of last Lizard IRL videos, Last Epoch´s BIGGEST PROBLEM - YouTube, I come to some suggestion to power-up the gearing game.

LTDR about the video: Gear doesn’t contribute much in your character progression.

My personal opinion on his issue is that the current power distribution leaves gear in a very poor progression feeling. The power spike between full T15 gear with proper affixes and a mix of carefully put together legendaries + exalteds (typical peak builds we can reach with enough investment) is minimal. The power mostly comes from passives + skills, and blessing + idols only add a tiny by into this.

I think the problem could be addressed in two ways:

More exalted affixes in general in higher corruption: Is frankly hard to get a decent exalted gear and get a successful craft, and the “more items” tied to corruption doesn’t cut it, and is not enough of an appeal to push corruption above your comfort zone (be it 150-200-300 or 400 corruption). I think also a higher chance for exalted affixes thus double-dipping in corruption benefits would be great.

But my main suggestion would be another tier of item bases at L100, only accessible on empowered monoliths (and T4 dungeons I guess), with much better values in damage/defenses/perks than the current endgame ones, usually sitting at L75 at most.

Lets take a look on swords: the last four swords could be used in sword builds without an issue, depending on your build. The flat damage they add is quite low compared with what you get from skills and passives. I would make a L100 (Empowered) variant of each useful weapon with better stats:

Nagasa Scymitar
Base attack rate 1.24
+36 Melee Physical Damage
(26-56)% increased Damage Over Time

Nagasa Scymitar L100 version:
Base attack rate 1.30
+46 Melee Physical Damage
(56-96)% increased Damage Over Time

Katana
Base attack rate 1.2
+38 Melee Physical Damage
+(38-60)% Critical Strike Multiplier

Katana L100 version:
Base attack rate 1.25
+54 Melee Physical Damage
+(56-90)% Critical Strike Multiplier

Moreover, you often miss some lower level items because while the perks could fit perfectly your build, the level and magnitudes are just too low.

For example:

Exile Coat
+84 Armor
(24-44)% increased Critical Strike Chance

Exile Coat L100 version:
+210 Armor
(48-88)% increased Critical Strike Chance

Jade Ring
+(10-25) Dodge Rating

Jade Ring L100 Version:
+(50-100) Dodge Rating
+(4-8) Dexterity

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I think that its unrelated to gear actually.

Some builds start to feel really good with the right gear set up. A “Vanilla” hammer throw build, with 0 smite idols requires you to get good rings, and getting a perfect ring/amulet is very noticeable. As you get more flat throwing and throwing speed you feel better and better, and the build cant be played naked because hammer throws tree while giving you damage, has low amounts of base damage meaning to scale you NEED your gear.

Before you can tackle adding huge swaths of gear power creep you need to tackle the core problem which is that a skill tree like DO or Serpent strike or Lich mastery etc, solve all your damage needs.

if you are a spell build you scale off crit, cast speed, increased damage. Lich gives you increased damage in massive amounts so you can forgo that on every piece of gear, you just need to get a solid weapon for adaptive spell damage with some cast speed and crit stats and you are good to go.

Where again an example of hammer throw, you need to invest in base damage on rings, throw speed, crit stats, as well as getting increased damage cause your hammer throw sentinel set ups dont provide giga free damage like lich.

You basically have to rework the skill balance from the ground up to solve the problem presented in that video, buffing gear wont fix it, it will make it worse. Because all of the gear agnostic scaling builds will now be even stronger thanks to being able to get crazy defensive implicit stats.

Stuff like VR needs a rework and poison, and trees that give you unlimited stacking stat buffs.

The meta in this game revolves currently around using frankly “busted” combos like sentinels meta being spam VR to get 5 items worth of attack speed and debuffing enemies with double damage, where as something like a basic ignite fireball sorc was only playable to any decent degree when it had a broken ring that gave you 500k ward because fireball does not have bonkers more multipliers or a debuffing tool to double its damage.

I have some legendary fireball sorc gear that gives me well over 1100% firedamage as well as having like 500% ignite chance. And yet my damage was absolutely dumpster compared to baseline abomination or even stuff like combo big slam Erasing strike. Because you take abomination which my build gets something like a total of 1744% more damage when all more values are totaled. So even if my abomination is a slow idiot, he does not do a comparable damage to fireball because even if I had 0% increased, he already does more damage then fireball with full t7 legendaries at a baseline because of just his skill tree and a buffing dreadshade.

Tldr: You need to leave gear where it is, and change skills. if you leave skills in their current state then gear changes mean nothing because the skills are far too unbalanced.

edit2: Just to clarify since I didnt talk too much about the core idea as much as the broader issue with balance currently, I think having stronger level 100 bases is a good potential idea. But it wont solve skill balance. But once the skills are balanced, having level 100 bases to grind out as rare drops would be really cool.

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I am conflicted on your idea.
Buffing bad bases sounds interesting.
But I think that adding powercreep into the game with more powerful bases is also a bad idea.
Gearing is already aggressively reliant on item bases.
The combination of bases and blessings trivializes resistances and crit avoidance for a lot of characters.
Personally, I think that the overeliance on bases makes gearing really boring.
It also does not help that non-class specific, non unique items are really boring to gear.

If anything I am of the opiniont that affixes should be buffed, not bases.

I agree with the previous comment that some skills are just too much powerful compared to everything else. I am not optimistic that this can be easily fixed.
My suggestion would be to move power away from the trees into class specific affixes. Ideally, this would make it so builds have to rely on class specific affixes to get most of their power.

I have read your entire post. I see where yoou’re going. You are talking about sheer skill balance and how some skills are not gear reliant as they are powerful and/or complete without aid. I am talking about making gear more meaningful, gaving easier access to T6-T7 affixes and a idea that came me from Grim Dawn and the Empowered Uniques.

Your concern is also important, but I’m focusing on how gear could be more meaningful in progression.

Well, my suggestion is just the opposite, instead of having to work with just the 2-4 highest level items, you have a wide array of items and low levels with interesting affixes making a comeback.

I think would be a powerful step in endgame and could open so many builds thanks to the wider item variety.

I also agree there seems to be an issue here.

However, I wholly disagree with upgrading items and making another whole “meta” tier of items. That just sounds way too much like the mistakes PoE have made in the past. It would make more sense to me to look at balancing the skills & trees properly, and reducing them instead.

I like to think of it in building terms.
When you want to make a building larger, a lot of times you immediately go higher because it’s easier. Start off with a single storey building, add another floor to make it larger. What happens then when you want to add another 2 floors?
You have 2 options:
1 - Fast, quick, lazy: Add the floors on top.
2 - Costly, slower, more prudent: Reinforce the foundations for the extra load, and expand the lower floors first before adding the next 2 floors.

Now, option 1 is so much easier, but you risk the chance of the building collapsing due to inadequate foundations & added load.
Option 2 is the bulletproof option. It takes longer & costs more but the foundations & lower floors are then equipped for you to add many more floors.

It’s just like this sort of game. If you keep on adding, adding, adding, without ever getting the base right or tweaking it correctly then you end up with an unbalanced mess (like the other game).
On the other hand, as Lizard so brilliantly demonstrated, it’s the “foundation” that needs examining - i.e the skill trees, skills, & class trees. So, spend time examining that, make changes so that it’s once more a great stable base - good enough for newer players, but not OP for experienced players; and then and only then look at the existing available gear and how that scales everything. Is it still adequate for the highest content? Does it need changes?

Get what we have balanced in a perfect way, and only then consider adding things onto it.

That’s my humble opinion anyway, but most ignore my lengthy ramblings anyway as they know I am insane :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I think that you misunderstood my point.
My concern is that good bases are currently so good at covering the basic defensive needs of a build that they make from many gearing decisions less interesting, especially with respect to building resistances.
So, while in principle I am not against more basis being viable, I am concerned that increasing flexibility would make gearing more one dimensional, where you chose the set of bases that perfectly cover your resitance needs and all pieces of gear end up looking the same.

Perhaps the real issue is that the choice of suffixes on most slots basically amounts to geting hybrid and percent health everywhere possible (with some exceptions obviously).

I mostly agree, I could be revising all the building blocks of the character, but this thread is just a simple suggestion of an upper tier of items, and easier access to Exalted affixes with higher corruption for empowered monoliths…

I don’t get you guys, so… My suggestion is not correct because they need to overhaul the whole system instead? But this is not a suggestion for an entire overhaul, is just a suggestion aimed at better items.

Yes there is a problem deeper than “better items”, if you can do what Lizard did in the video, and getting more exalteds and better bases would not fix the problem he was exposing (he was naked saving belt for pots and boots for movement).

Maybe saying this will address that problem was not the right call, but if you fail to see having more meaning full items as a step in the right direction I don’t know what to say.

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I don’t know your personal gaming history mate, but I will guess that maybe you have played PoE at some time or at least heard of it?

Well, like many others here, I played it for years. So, in case you didn’t play it ages ago, I’ll elaborate on my issue with your suggestion. History. I use PoE because it is such a well proportioned example of “power creep”. This is a prime example of the opposite problem we face here currently but also of how trying to add gear levels pushes the instability in the opposite direction. It is a lengthy example, so be warned…

PoE in the old days was much better balanced imho and the opinion of many other “old timer” players. Going a long way back, the balance between player skill trees plus gear vs mobs & maps was fairly good. It was a tough game still, but there were hardly any “meta” builds because most players could make a variety of class build themselves that could get to “end game” and compete in maps. So, you could pick up the game, learn it, play it and make whatever class you wanted comfortable that unless you were ignorant you would be able to do the hardest content, in a hard way or easy depending on the class/build/gear.

Then their design mentality became one of add harder content, make mobs harder, create more end bosses. Shaper & Elder appeared, with much better loot that normal end bosses thus becoming the target farm. So, the mob/environment was increased in difficulty. To balance the player side, they did very minor “nerfs”, tweaks to the skill trees but added in more powerful gear, crafting. The overall counterbalance meant thus that certain gear pieces were BiS and only certain classes/skilltrees could properly utilise the BiS gear. So, to combat the new mob kings (Shaper/Elder) effectively players found themselves pushed towards a collection of several builds. Builds that players just randomly made themselves weren’t as effective unless they applied a ton of intelligent theory crafting to them. No one apparently thought about the concept of testing badly geared builds not needing tons of wealth to buy/make. So, the game started moving towards gear being more important than class/skills and then only BiS gear.

Then along came Uber Elder etc. All mobs got upgrades in lethality, and the bosses were made harder, Uber was very very hard (at the time). So, new gear was brought in, new more expensive ways of crafting it appeared. RMT crept in, and the market started to contain people selling this new BiS gear for mad prices, thus inflation came in, and GOLD was the new thing to chase, but that’s another issue. Meanwhile Skills were nerfed again, trees were nerfed. The balance was kept (in the devs mind) by adding more gear to combat the more powerful mobs/bosses. So, this second round then ended up with fewer “meta” builds but if you wanted to farm Uber Elder chances are you needed to be playing one of these “metas” because gear and certain skill trees were vital, but the gear was more important now than the skill trees. Skills gems (gear item not a tree) were also made with improvements so instead of your old 20/20 gem you now wanted the idea 21/23 version.

Then a few more changes in this same direction happened (leagues). Then we came to Sirus and some would say this was the point where things changed drastically. Sirus, in it’s original form was a supremely overpowered boss, with extreme one shot mechanics, one shot environmental effects, one shot AoE’s, and in short a one shot encounter in its worst form. All mobs were given their usual tune up, environmental damages by this time were also a big factor and tuned up. To summarise, the “mobs” had the upper hand by a huge margin. How was this balanced on the player side of the coin? Skill trees overall had been nerfed league by league, classes were largely irrelevant outside of the “meta” ones so the “passive” player side of the game was for the most part not important at all. Gear, though, gear was everything. From skill gems to chest,gloves to weapons etc. There were more and more ways of getting OP items, most of them crafted not standard unmodified “uniques”. Some uniques were OP, but they were always gated behind extreme RNG or playing hours/streamers or RMT people. Now there were less than 5-10 “meta” builds that could farm Sirus out of potentially hundreds of possible builds. 95%+ of the playerbase were playing these “meta” builds as everyone wanted to farm end bosses.

The cycle goes on over there. TL;DR of it all is this. They never really corrected properly the “foundations” that each player has ready access to: the classes, the skilltrees, everything a naked player has as a proper form of balancing. Despite mobs getting harder, all they did really was use those “naked” systems as a base for nerfs, which in turn were to address the “meta” builds of each league. So, from day one, the “naked” side of a player (foundations) got weaker & weaker as the mobs got tougher & tougher.

On the other hand the gear side (storeys to use my building analogy) got more OP every league. The crafting got better & better. BiS gear became more powerful incrementally and also more restrictive in terms of which “naked” players could use it.

You end up with a building that has almost no foundations left and those left are crumbly and old designed for 1 storey, topped by 25+ storeys 20+ of which on the lower levels are abandoned and the 5+ at the top are shining modern palaces weighing a ton. On top of these are sites for the next 2-3 storeys they have planned. The foundations will never get improved, and eventually the building will come crashing down.

THAT history lesson is why it is more important to keep the “foundations” balanced properly against the content than to keep just band aiding the situation by adding more and more gear/crafting.

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I played it occasionally, one month straight, went partially blind with the wrong defense types (no armor) and the wrong skills (Venom Gyre, Viper Strike), and also the wrong class (Assassin).

In result I had a bit of a miserable experience, but I had a lot of fun too gearing and all the stuff.

Too many deaths out of nowhere I could identify, I min-maxed as much as I knew, quite little as I didn’t take into account the all 2k+ legs, later I discovered seems there’s some boots that give tons of damage and fits my build (Replica Alberon’s Warpath), if I went strength stacking I could have been able to make the build work, but I discarded any strength as there’s too much info and I choose going evasion from the beginning), anyways got to Sirus, I felt I could beat him but the last phase with my setup was just too much, tried twice. I got to 700k damage or so, but any META build gets to 1M with a fraction of my investment.

Anyways… this is not PoE. Most ARPG fans and the devs know to certain degree PoE, all the fun you can have with it, but also all their problems.

Yup, I know very well that this isn’t PoE. I’m one of those people who keep reminding others that it is not the same at all.
But in this instance, as in many others, the overall lessons to be learnt from that game and it’s lengthy history are valuable. Especially as LE is in the same genre. You don’t seem to be grasping the point of my posts, so this will be my last reply so as to stop wasting my time.

I also know full well that the devs here are aware of all this history, because if you hunt it out, a lot of them started there and in Diablo. LE was formed as a result of that dis-satisfaction with those other ARPG’s. I know the history of it, it’s why I am here.

That having been said though, despite all those hard lessons we all learnt from thousands of hours in those games, there are signs already starting to creep in here of the same types of problems beginning to manifest itself. Lizard’s video, the new Dungeon bosses, the new crafting system, there are a few worrying signals starting to twitch my spidey senses. Like others, I only hope that this is nipped in the bud while it’s still relatively early, and the same old historic mistakes don’t go repeating themselves.

Now is the time to ensure solid foundations, while we’re still in Beta, not trying to chase your own tail after release.

Heh, sorry if I tilted you a bit then. We may be on the same page after all.

I am also advocate of that. I doubt they will rework everything at this point in development, or fix the foundation for that matter.

I personally think there are many lights and shadows in what we have in our hands right now. Let me quickly lay out what I think is not in a good place on a global perspective, in my modest opinion.

  • Item quantity over quality, every item-related boost is more items.
  • Enemy health should scale at a higher rate than enemy damage.
  • Enemy level scaling (up to 100), should be a bit more exponential instead of linear.
  • The gap between non-corrupt L90 and 100 corruption L100 is huge.
  • Dungeon bosses are unfair, T4 Julra is an issue as she’s mandatory to access high level Legs.
  • Dungeons, should be much shorter, but keys more difficult to come by, so the key is the prize, but also also some once-only guaranteed keys.
  • Monolith need a bit more spice: secondary global (entire mono) objectives, and special objectives you can access only inside the echoes.
  • When you re-encounter early game mini-bosses on monos, they’re a joke.
  • More chance of exalted affixes, true endgame bases (covered in this post).
  • Increased damage is so common that “More” multipliers feel mandatory.
  • Plus skills affixes are hit or miss depending on skill, and I miss those on idols.
  • You get so much power just from passives + skills (as Lizard pointed out).
  • Game performance. Period.
  • Some clunky animations.
  • We still miss a lot of items, visually speaking.
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Well, I don’t think the issue is strictly that items are not a useful, or required, as they should be. I think that just feeds into another issue I see, and that is that the item-hunt carrot, just isn’t worth the hunt. There are far more feels bad moments in the item hunt, than they are feels good. More often, it’s just feels relieved. Crafting is usually just a big let down, and you’re just relieved to not totally brick that useful/semi-useful drop, instead of feeling great about crafting a great item. Uniques and Legendaries are the same thing – just relieved to have finally gotten a rare drop, but the rolls most likely are terrible or mediocre at best. Crafting that Legendary? Well, thank god it hit the t4/5 %dmg, and not the t3 health on hit. Too bad it usually skips right over your t7 +crit, you were really hoping for.

Now, I know this probably doesn’t apply to everyone. But when I look at why I stop playing, or switch characters in this game. It’s because there just aren’t enough feels good moments. It’s a long ass grind-fest for a bunch “thank god it’s not trash” moments, and very very very very few “holy shit, that’s freaking awesome!” moments. I don’t know how it’s possible, but loot in LE is less climactic than it is in D3… and that’s mind boggling.

See I think you missed the point the video made, and the general theme of the idea that “Gear isnt interesting”

if im already triple over killing everything with current gear why am I excited by exalted and new 100 bases? I need to be put in a position where my defense or damage is lacking a bit to be excited for more gear.

That only comes with radical changes to skills, Gear is relative to skill power and you cant look at in a vaccuum. We should not mess with gear without knowing how the dust will settle from a major rework in skill structure

Not just the skills though, if the mobs received a healthy buff such that you weren’t “triple over-killing” things then there would be room to have “better” base’s. That’s the route D3 took and IMO it’s a bad one’s it eventually needs to a requirement to compress/truncate the damage numbers like D3 does.

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Yeah many more thing have to be looked at to make you gear matter more, and everything else a bit less, in my opinion.

Having more meaningful items faster with more exalteds and better bases is just a step forward, but it won’t completely solve the issue. As another buddy says, possibly something is not right at the foundation of the systems that make you progress.

We need a filter for T7 affixes and the legendary potential of unique items.

Everything else in the current situation is not interesting.

Filter for T7? not sure what you mean on this one - you can already filter for tiers, although filtering for a specific affix at T7 could make for a filter than probably will never proc…

There is a discussion regarding Legendary Potential and Forging Potential being available as loot filter options… If I recall Mike discussed this (could be on discord and/or here - didnt search)… but the tldr of it is that they dont want to include this kind of thing because they want there to still be some sort of interaction with gear drops… Cant recall their exact wording but from my recollection its more about keeping the feel of checking loot and realising its got great LP or FP … lootfiltering “everything” can start to make it that there are potentially no drops except those that match your exact requirement - which, again, in thier view, defeats the purpose of a loot based game…

sort of understand where they are coming from… not sure if I agree entirely, but I can see their perspective… Got to keep something exciting about loot drops…

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Mike talked about it on various streams.

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This post is what you were looking for:

This is the long winded explanation of Mike.

A couple of posts before that he also gave a more short answer.

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As they said above, you can already filter for T7’s. I have that very filter set up on one of my toons.

LP is under discussion, and much requested.