Yes, I think we need to bear in mind that there’s another layer to the item acquisition grind that is still missing. Come February we’ll have a better feel for how this all plays out.
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back in the day I played a lot of LI & LI2 and I was okay with a .006% of dropping the last item I need once a week. Since then I’m grown up a little bit and I think most peoples expectations are low enough but the numbers are to drastic.
This might change with the faction system and I’ll play a whole lot of non market toons to see if the drops are better by a meaningfull margin. If not I’ll sure opt in the market faction and call ita day becaue time vs effort vs progress is a calculation I make these days. It’s just silly to implement items hundrets of thousands of players need hundrets of thousands of hours to get. At this point you can simply remove it from the game because it’s a useless piece of work that has been put in.
Sure some people can fool themselfs into "There is something that can drop arround the corner even if it’s morerealistic to win the lotory jackpot!"is aggod thing I just can’t anymore.
Good thing is the build I like to play needs 0 uniques and everything is optional so I’m a happy camper anyway. On the other hand everyone with little time on their hands (no matter how much they love the genre) will have a worse experience knowing the inability, or rng, to get certain items. There is a lot of grey between D3 showers of loot and a not at all reasonable rng to get a desirered item at any point of the game.
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Some people also confuse having a 2nd job grinding rocks looking for a diamond as ‘fun’, but we still let them post here. The OP was talking about obtaining mid-level 2LP uniques… hardly ‘chase’ items. Unless we’re redefining that moniker just to fit whichever ‘the game is fine’ narrative we’re playing with that particular day.
Certain builds require specific unique items just to function. Those uniques may, or may not have other useful stats with them. So having some LP on them to raise them up a notch or 2 isn’t exactly something you shouldn’t be able to plan around. Especially if the LP-level isn’t absurd, or the item itself isn’t a chase item.
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Some people see 2LP items as something very special they should be happy about to get and other people see 2LP items as something that is midtier and commonly dropping at a certain stage in the game. As long as noone is communicating how they see things and how many drops should be LP drops the whole discussion is pretty uselee ^^.
I think starting at lvl 75+ 2LP items should be more common while 3LP items should be something for level 95+ while 4LP items have a very low chance to drop at lvl 100 at corruption whatever stages. On top of it i think it should not be a rare occasion and a 4LP drop at level 100 at 1k corruption should drop every 5h-10 of active mob slaying.
I don’t understand why there is stuff that drops on so low numbers that it would almost make no difference if the item was ingame or not like most 4LP items. I hope the devs will shed some light into those topics like loot and balancing of the game because right now all we can say is: “There is rng and you maybe drop something or not.” Or stuff like “7k corruption is endgame you noobs lurking arround at 3k!”. We know nothing about it… we don’t have difficulty tiers that ramp up the possibility to get something and I hope they don’t tie it to corruption that much because right now we have builds that crawl through the game and don’t work that well while other builds push crazy corruption numbers. I realy don’t want to end up in cycles where mostly one class is played because it’s completely broken and the only good way to farm stuff because it’s able to farm 4k more corruption then other classes.
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Honestly its going to get worse. Theres an official post on here by EHG.
With trade coming in 1.0 there will be a drop rate nerf in 1.0. Ill have to see of i can find it. But i think this info was tucked away in there post about factions if i remember correctly
I think the faction mechanics will actually make acquiring stuff easier.
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Relatively speaking to now some stuff will get rarer. But then through either of the two faction mechanics item acquisition will be easier and more desterministic.
EGH also said that with fully leveled up CoF it might atually be slightly more than what it is right now (all subject to change though).
And trade is self explanatory how deterministic that is, once you have the rank to buy all teh stuff you want.
Honestly, what it’s done for me is just made me stop playing characters once I get them into empowered monoliths, and play in there for 30 or so echos. I’ll hit my 80s and just stop because the loot carrot has been replaced with moldy bread. I’ve played enough characters into the 90s, and seen how loot really drops, and have come to the realization that the loot chase in this game ends, 95% of the time, at “good enough” rares, with a couple exalted sprinkled in for good measure. And no, I don’t count all the exalted drops since most of them just end up gathering dust in my stash… and are only collected in the event I need something to LP craft with.
I’ve been saying this all along. I’ll never understand the aversion to players actually acquiring high-end gear. Especially if seasons are to be introduced. “Hi, there’s a bunch of loot that you’ll never realistically see in seasonal play… have fun with the moldy bread we replaced the carrot with!”
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Yes and no. This drop rate nerf is coming across the board. For this exact reason.
How nerfed drop rates get is yet to be seen. May not effect much. If not then yes. If its nerfed to keep balance for trade faction (MG). Imo no it wont.
If u go with the CoF faction based on what is said here. Once all ranks have been unlocked u will have the drop rates the game currently has. In MG factiob u wont
Edit as DJSamhein points out. If majority go with CoF vs MG trade will suffer and not work out very well. A player needs to find said item in order to trade it. Bigger trade community helps this alot.
I think we need to wait and see how the balance becomes after factions come in.
First it will be important to know if most people will join the trade or SSF faction. Trading needs many people in it otherwise it won’t work. It’s only because the RNG works better in very large numbers that trade can become a good system. You might never have that drop that you’re looking for within a season but with enough players someone will have that drop and you may buy it from them. If most people join the SSF faction then trading will suffer from that.
Likewise, the balance for the SSF faction will be very important. You’ll need to boost drops enough that you have a reasonable chance to get the most rare items as long as you play long enough. If you play for 10h a day and yet barely ever see 4LPs, then SSF faction becomes useless as well.
Right now, good loot is really hard to get, especially for more casual players. But it’s still EA. Personally I’ll wait for 1.0 and the factions to see how it works out and keep an open mind until then.
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I’m afraid it will be even worse. The chances right now are not good enough and for traders could be a nightmare. But who knows…
For CoF I would expect it to be better than what we currently have, so I was very excited about the factions. Once they said they would nerf the actual drop rate It put a damper on my excitement.
If a maxed CoF Faction will have the same drop rate as we have nowadays, I ain’t thrilled about this. The deterministic factor alone in my opinion won’t be able to sustain a good balance of enjoyment with the current system.
I hope I’m wrong;
As you have said:
We need to wait and see how that pays off.
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Personally I hope it’s significantly easier than current, otherwise the drop nerf will feel bad.
The devs haven’t said that. They’ve always positioned CoF as a way to get stuff you want dropping more deterministically.
But they can trade (assuming there’s a sufficiently large amount of people trading for stuff to be available).
It’ll be very interesting to see how the MG/CoF split pans out.
I enjoy that things don’t drop like candy, but the fact that you:
1: Need to find the unique without trash rolls
2: Find the unique to drop with at least 1 LP
THEN
3: Find the exalted item with the correct affix
4: Find the exalted item without trash rolls
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
5: Hope beyond hope after a month or 3 of farming, the cache doesn’t pull the affixes you don’t want.
There is way too much RNG to the randomness of the RNG mechanics to ever really feel like you accomplished something.
After a couple months of farming, I end up having more fun leveling a character where the drop actually benefit me, even if only slightly.
I think that’s a very safe assumption, personally. I honestly think that RNG loot in ARPGs doesn’t rise past the level of “tolerated” for most people, and if the Trade faction isn’t more popular by miles I would be amazed.
Even with drop rate reductions or whatever, I can’t imagine anything that CoF will offer can compare to being able to directly convert items you don’t want into specific items that you do want, and being able to do so on a many-to-one basis (IE, sell ten items to afford one).
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I think one problem with the way you portay it is: You make it look very black and white. Either fail or success, but there are things in between that.
The unique can possibly be not rolled perfect, but there is a difference between perfect and “trash”
Depending on the slot and build there are also possibly mor than one or two good exalted affixes. And even on thsoe there are rolls ranging from lowest to highest.
And then if you have 1, 2 or 3 LP unqieus its on you using that for items that potentially have completely useless affixes or try using them on exalted items that at least have somewhat useable affixes, even in the worst case.
Yes there is a lot of RNG, but you do have a lot of control over how and what you use it.
I personally adore the dynamci between 1 or 2 LP uniques and almsot perfect exalted items.
On one side you don’T want to use those perfect exalted items for 1 or 2 LP unqiues.
On the other side the chance of not hitting something that is useless is negated for the most part.
Obviously it depends on the exact items and build using it, but I still love the dynamic.
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Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how the costs for trading (MG favour) & benefits for CoF pan out.
I thought I remember the devs saying a max rank CoF-aligned character would get similar drop rates to what we have now with MG having worse drop rates, then CoF get some other benefits (“prophecies” or whatever that skew the drop rates in a particular direction) but what those benefits are & how they’re costed (favour) we don’t know.
Until it gets to the closed testing. 
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Fair point. I should have been a bit more specific in that I was moreso speaking to min\maxing. You are absolutely correct, a bad roll here and there or non optimal cache transfer isn’t going to make most items trash. I meant that you once you have most of the items you need, but want to squeeze out another 10% or even 20% from your build, anything that doesn’t roll just right and then transfer right is essentially a trash bound item because you really needed everything to be just right.
I know it’s ‘just a meme’ but I kind of feel LE is definitely ‘listening’ when we talk about the levels of RNG.
https://x.com/LastEpoch/status/1722733282335285340?s=20
This gives me a more positive bent to thinking 1.0, with all of the things being added, will have some sorts of good adjustments to the current dilemma.
In one kingdom, the king called all the adventurers and told them that there was a huge black mountain on the border of his kingdom. And inside the mountain there is a magnificent diamond. And every adventurer can get it. You just need to dig up to this diamond and it’s yours. And he gave all the adventurers spoons to dig with.
Adventurers have come to the mountain, and wise men are sitting in front of the mountain.
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You need to dig faster, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the first sage.
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You need to dig more efficiently, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the second sage.
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You need to dig in one place, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the third sage.
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You need to dig in different places, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the fourth sage.
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And why with a spoon? - I asked.
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Shut up!! - other adventurers shouted to me - Who are you to argue with the sages?
I then returned to the town, took the train and in 15 minutes found myself in a neighboring kingdom. I went to the nearest shop and bought a black mountain diamond for $ 5.
The end.
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Because it will hurt more!
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