I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep and I am tried and I can’t be bothered right now to look at the exact formula. I quickly checked this with a excelsheet.
But I think the chances are even better, unless I am missing some permutations.
Rune of Havoc cannot swap affixes of the same Tier, because it has to change something, so by having multiple affixes of the same tier you are increasing your chances by removing some permutations.
I could find 8 different permutations and since the Rune has to change something that is a 1 in 7 chance.
It actually can, as long as some other change as well. So in theory it can change the two T5 affixes, as long as it also changes the T6 with the T7.
The easiest way to calculate the odds is simply to calculate the number of available distinct combinations. Which, in this case, is 12. Since it starts in one of these and has to switch to a different one, it’s always 1/11.
Since we’re eliminating repetitions (permutations) and only using distinct ones (combinations) the formula is simply the multiplication of available results. For 4 different tiers it would be 4x3x2x1, for a total of 24, so worst case scenario for a Havoc would be 1 in 23.
Since we get a repeated tier, it’s 3x2x2x1.
Any system that uses RNG is balanced around averages (& potentially outliers, both high & low, or statistical deviation), so for crafting averages absolutely do matter.
It also feels like you prefer/view/want crafting to be like PoE in that you can potentially craft on a single piece for years to perfect it but that’s not the devs’ desire for crafting. Crafting has had many tweaks to ameliorate the harsher aspects of the system over the years but it’s not going to be turned into PoE’s unending crafting.
It is when the system has lucky rolls. You’ve played PoE, you should know this.
See! You do know what lucky rolls are & how they work, so you’re just being disingenuous.
I personally don’t agree with EHG’s love of high roll rages, but there you are.
Yes, I literally said that. That’s called a macro scale. Macro statistics don’t directly matter to anyone except the developers. So unless the developers are going to play the game and fund it themselves, then averages don’t matter within this specific scenario, as I already said.
This is especially true when there are two “modes” of play; Solo and Trade. And trade is always compromised in some way, in any and every game, or it’s restricted to an extend to be unusable; meaning macro statistics do not matter for individual players.
Trust me, I do not want crafting to be the same as PoE. It’s a mess in its own right. What I want isn’t infinite crafting. If you read the discussions you wouldn’t have come to that conclusion. Don’t strawman me again.
Yeah, wanted to write Demise, not Havoc, it was far too late.
Huh? Where did you get that nonsense from?
ilvl 86 drops specifically retain value because they’re illv 86. Relatively hard to acquire and hence the drop itself has value to craft on. Much like a exalted item. ilvl 85 and below is highly situational depending on what exactly it drops with it on, kinda the rares of PoE so to say.
Also you got 21+ quality bases, you got uniques and you got the lucky rare which is well rolled, be it for your own needs or for sale.
Because why the heck do you think they got value to sell? Because they’re good enough to warrant picking up.
So by design that’s absolutely bollocks. People often don’t pick up rares because the effort comparatively is simply higher then doing the craft.
PoE 2 has the opposite problem. Unidentified items drop and you pick up hundreds or thousands of individual items to only get garbage because the variance is so high. Which is the main issue the community has with the itemization system there.
Which craft exactly do you mean? First of all… it’s 2 div, not 3. Secondly, if you need the whole day to drop 2 divs then your build is either slow or you’re not properly targeting divs. Third… since there’s a myriad of valuable drops existing nobody gives a shit about a individual singular craft as you get a bazillion side-results while trying to achieve anything in PoE.
In LE there are no side results. Shards are worthless, entirely… outside of having ‘1’ of the level specific ones to exchange it with Havoc when needed.
The only things in LE which are picked up regularly are Idols because they need a long time to perfect.
Comparatively in PoE you get the base currency, which is far more valuable then the runes/glyphs in LE since you’re not limited by base acquisition but by currency acquisition. That makes each individual drop more meaningful hence.
Not to speak of the non-core crafting currencies which allow specific enchantments (the heist ones, which need a long time to farm but provide secondary valuable objectives while running too) or alternate crafting systems (like sacred blossoms from Harvest enabling synthezising bases, which is otherwise not possible to do). You simply have a variety of viable things which you can use.
See? And that’s where I’ll begin to laugh. Not a single character of mine managed that. Sure, I played MG for the vast majority of online time… but people which have no clue about the MG situation whine around saying ‘In MG you just buy your stuff after all!’ so it should’ve been faster, right?
In CoF on the other hand 10-20 hours for a single one can come close actually, outside of the rings.
What you describe is quite a lot further inside for a large portion of players.
I’ve played hundreds of hours since 1.0 and stocked up on all really good potential items, always having 10 in store of any specific top-tier sub-type to craft on.
My current goal for my VK is Eternal Gauntlets with T7 attack speed + T5 crit reduction and optimally experimental DoT armor… but the first 2 suffixe as long as health is on it with T5 instead.
That’s a rather generic item I’ve tried to get since 1.0 actually. In over 300 hours of play-time total I’ve had not a single successful craft in that regard. I wanted to make 3 variants total… Cast speed, Attack speed, minion damage. I succeeded in a total of ‘0’ with those.
300… damn… hours.
So plainly spoken your ‘20 hours you got it!’ example is just laughable. I’ve had similar experience with several other items utterly scuffing my progression as well. Once again… as mentioned… MG player primarily. It’s roughly half the time in CoF if not less to acquire stuff as the MG market is simply dead empty for specific base types with specific Affixes, enforcing usage of Demise or Havoc runes for any chance at all, which scuffs your FP leftovers so you succeed barely ever.
Their intentions don’t matter a single bit, only design matters for perception. Unless the whole community leans into something specific, which is commonly through some guided measures.
So yes, I disagree.
Want to look it up? How about numbers there? Compare it Compare the ranges, compare the variety of base types, compare the amount of possible Affixes… you’ll see how ridiculously simplistic D2 is comparatively to modern implementations of their Affix System.
It doesn’t unless you got more Runes and Glyphs then bases in that case.
But those are the limiter, they run out before potential bases do anyway.
And if not… then that means that the drop-rates have a problem nonetheless as the chance itself isn’t substantially different. Given critical successes you still got ‘endless’ craft after all, right?
Well, since the average would be the same the average outcome still would be the same! Still got your ‘endless’ tries!
You just remove the jackpots and ‘shit-pots’. That’s all.
If the only chance for success is based upon a Jackpot craft then plainly spoken the situation is garbage. We’re talking about progression items which people try to get in week 1-2 as a mediocre player, not top-tier. They’re already massively scuffed, and that’s the problem.
Well, it reduces at least the amount of tries to get it since it provides extra chances on the specific type of Idol at least, rather then randomized Idols.
Still not great, but same argument which was brought about Weaver Nodes and the RNG reduction some of those provide ‘But it’s better then before!’
Yes, lets ignore the time investment needed to achieve that, sure! Because during that time we couldn’t have farmed up more weaver Idols instead which go for ridiculous amounts of Gold, or went for boss-farming to acquire potentially rare uniques with high LP, target farmed.
If you’re in a economy your systems generally do vie for the position of most profitable, to a degree. Gameplay enjoyment is still at the top, until profitability is becoming severely sub-par, which makes it then not worthwhile to use at all and hence is a problem as it comes at the cost of the fun the game is supposed to provide.
Never said that
There is no difference.
The major point here is the sellout amount.
If we see Path of Exile and Last Epoch as slot machines then we can say PoE provides a 95% payout rate… and LE provides a 80% payout rate. Both seem like high values, but in reality one makes you non-stop feel like you’re only loosing and the other upholds the fantasy of ‘making it big’ still.
It’s solely about prevalence of outcomes.
The ‘shot’ in this case is actually opening the respective crafting menu or using the respective consumable to make a try on a item.
In LE the amount of tries reduces.
In PoE the amount of viable outcomes reduces. The tries stay the same.
That’s a core difference, one is based around the reduction in pulls on the slot machine, the other is changing the payout table simply.
For example:
In LE I currently play my first dedicated CoF character, my VK. Still not level 100 hence mediocre equipment. My upgrade options to even start crafting currently are:
T7 crit reduction helmet, so a good T7 helmet base.
A omnis which isn’t garbage.
2 LP World Splitter
3 LP Titan Heart
3 LP Siphon of Anguish
2 LP Shattered Chains
A T7 Strength Ring which isn’t bottom roll for my 1 LP Flames of Midnight, all bricked… all 60 rings saved up bricked.
Eternal Gauntlets with T7 attack speed and T5 crit reduction.
2 LP Darkstride
1 LP Anchor of Oblivion to finally not use a garbage Nemesis random Affix.
I’ve farmed specifically for those items, the armor was achieved because I had it before I started, the Siphon as well. Everything else is relatively low and I’ve - as said - played to level 96 without a focus on levelling but on boss-item acquisition a lot, so I’ve likely passed a ton of experience echos. A large portion was available already, the play-time is ~40 hours on this character. Despite being a utterly broken OP build some items are simply missing which I can’t for the love of it get my hands on. Everything else is ‘worthless’ after all.
In PoE:
I farm, I get currency, I use currency. The difference is solely how often depending on the type of craft.
If it’s fracturing then I use 1-2 crafts a day… but I have potentially a bow on the side where essences are needed, rings or cluster jewels stored up for synthezising have a base for alteration spamming always at the ready and likely a prepared base of something where I’m fossil crafting on.
Stuff drops along the way, if I go for fractures then I’ll also be able to alteration spam, if I got for the synthezising I can set it up to get essences and fossils at the same time, still alteration spamming.
It’s always several things at once happening if you do it properly progression wise.
That’s a massive difference. Amount of chances. Even if the play-time for outcomes is the exact same comparatively… one system still provides more engagement with the vast majority of people then the other.
Then whoever choose that has failed their job and should be exchanged.
That’s 101 game design.
So I imagine it’s not the case, I’ll explicitly always take the more lenient route and go with ‘oversight’ or ‘incompetence’ by not knowing.
Because if it’s a intentional design then the respective person responsible should be fired, it goes counter to any game-design methodology. ‘Yes, remove longevity, engagement and retention because we wanna shoehorn players into what we specifically want them to do rather then having fun their way’. Always went well… right?
If you wanna switch to a new character you do… if you wanna stay you do… it’s not up to the devs to decide that and plainly detrimental to take the extra steps needed to enforce one above the other.
That’s baseline for any ARPG of the genre nowadays, not a argument anymore, that’s in the 101 part since over a decade.
Yeah, but what was pointed out is not how the average works, it’s the distribution graph, the average is a fixed value and not a range.
That was what I wanted to point out.
They do matter for most players. They just don’t matter for players that fall into the outliers (either extremely lucky or extremely unlucky).
The average is what gives you information on what it will actually cost. If you know that slamming a 2LP item will have a 1/3 chance to get both affixes you want, you might want to try your chances. If you know that it will have a 1/50 chance, then you might want to avoid it.
And this is true even though there are players that will fail 12 times in a row and there will be players that will succeed 6 times in a row.
Knowing that you’ll get a red ring every 750 unique ring drops and that you’ll get a phantom grip every 50 is the difference between wasting RoAs or favour hunting one or the other.
So averages do matter. They just don’t matter when you’re at the short end of the stick. Which, as long as there’s RNG, someone will always be. It’ll just be a longer or shorter stick on the spectacular failures side, though that works both ways as well, meaning it will also be shorter on the spectacular successes side.
Fair, when I said that I meant from the point of view of being able to continually craft on an item until it was perfect. Because that’s how you’re coming across to me & that’s not strawmanning, that’s how I’m interpretting what I’ve read (which isn’t all of it 'cause I statted to get bored of the entire thing which often happens when Kulze gets into it).
That depends how much a deviation is. Sure, we got a number for the ‘50%’… but where’s the 20%? And where’s the 5% range? How far apart? The more narrow that stuff is the more true your statement holds. But if the deviation range is large it looses the meaning entirely.
So with the example for the phantom grip… 50 is the 50% range. But what if the 20% range is 5 or 500? That makes the 50 relatively meaningless despite being the average. But if the 20% range is 25 or 100 then it becomes far more doable.
Not only the average matters, the deviation of the average also matters.
I meant in the way of an item dropping and being taken as is (as is the case with D2, for example).
There are, for the most part of endgame, only 2 uses for drops: rare high ilvl bases so you can craft on (or sell) and rare valuable items so you can sell and fund your crafting.
Very soon in the game (at least into red maps, if not sooner) you’re not expected to just take an item of the floor, give it a couple crafts and equip it. Drops only have value for their inherent market value or because it’s a base to be crafted on, regardless of what affixes/sockets it actually has when it drops (which are totally irrelevant, other than some very fringe outliers).
It was just an example. It’s the same equivalent result. You could also just as easily say that it will require one of the special exalted orbs, since those are things that are used in crafts, no? If you need Crusader exalted orb for your next craft, then most players will actually be playing for more than a day just to get a chance at trying a single craft. And if you need a Veiled one, well, most players won’t make as much in a league.
In LE most players, as you said, will take a whole day to get one drop to craft on (if you get very specific it’s actually longer). In PoE most players will take a whole day (again, if you get very specific with high cost currency, it’s actually longer) to get enough currency.
There’s no real difference between both systems other than you liking one more than the other.
You mentioned “most players” implying casual players. Most casual players won’t be doing effective farming strategies because that goes beyond being a casual player. Casual players will do whatever shows up.
Sure there are. It’s called crafting for alts. Or for selling, if you’re MG.
Also you need more than 1 of the rare shard, since most crafts are designed to fail. Common shards are meaningless, though, that’s true.
I have most idols filtered out. The vast majority of drops are pure rubbish and I can’t be bothered to check them individually to try and assess if the affixes are valuable together and if they have good roll ranges.
I only see the class idols my current build is aiming for (with either 1 desired affix or 2 if I already have some), health class idols since those tend to be used a lot, and double weaver idols.
Everything else is filtered because you only get a good one out of 500 and you have no way to assess their quality without looking individually at them.
This was even on a fresh start. I created my first offline character, so I had no stash, shards, gold anything. True, it was a void warpath VK, so it was faster than most to get to 300c+, but after 20h I had 80% of the build potential already done. And the build actually uses a bunch of boss specific drops, including nihilis.
This actually included at least 100 Clotho’s Needles (used runes of weaving, I’m not crazy), 100 sentinel relics, 2LP Titan Heart, 1LP Nihilis, 1LP chains, 1LP siphon, etc.
Since most drops were boss specifc, I actually spent most of the favour into the exalted slots (helmet, gloves, boots) and it was pretty simple to get a very good version of them with the correct base by using Havocs on promising items.
I created a Leonine Greathelm with Vit, Increased Echo Damage (T7), health, health and it only had Vit+one of the healths on it, and something else was exalted. But I got lucky and managed to create a pretty good item because the current system allows you pick trash and make it good.
It was also designed in a way where most builds have no chance of killing him, so it’s by intention and design.
The chance to get a 2/20 is one in 1700. And that’s considering that you’re actually spending currency (perfect gems) for it.
Yes, it’s not as bad as LE or PoE, but it’s a far cry from having no variety.
You mean compared to the time AND gold investment you need to farm currency to buy the much higher priced perfect roll ones?
At least this way you’re working towards your item and generating gold for a different one at the same time.
Well, according to your (as usual, very broad) definition, then every single game (other than puzzle games) is gambling. In Elden Ring you’re gambling that if you do a dodge roll now you’ll avoid the attack. And if you attack now, you won’t be pulverized by a boss mechanic.
In a racing car you’re gambling that the steering vs velocity you have is enough for you to go past that car in that corner.
All of them are systems where you control your actions, you have knowledge of the possible actions of the system and have a chance to succeed or fail, either because you misjudged or because the system did something you weren’t expecting.
You tend to have very broad definitions for terms that end up applying to almost everything in the world.
Not true.
In LE you need a 4T5 rare. You get a bunch of tries. Now you need a T73T5 exalt. You get less tries. Now you need a 2T7/2T5 exalt. You get even less tries.
In LE you need a rare with sockets. You get a bunch of crafts with basic currency. Now you need a more specific base and more specific affixes. You now need to craft with essences or fossils. Now you need very specific endgame gear. You need to use much more valuable currency, so you get less tries over time than you did at the start because that currency is much more expensive/rare and you can’t get as much of it.
I’m sorry, if you bricked 60 exalted rings where you only need to get T7 strength and the other 3 affixes are meaningless (as is the base type) and can even be T1 (since you can select the affix for the T1 slam) then you’re doing crafting very very very wrong.
Stat exalted rings drop like candy. The only affix that rolls T7 more than stats is resistances (and ailments in weapons). But even without a single natural drop (filter issues, maybe?), pretty much any ring with any exalted affix and either an open prefix or a T1 prefix (guaranteed seal) has a very high chance of getting a T7 str.
This makes me think that you’re not actually using the crafting system properly.
You can do the same in LE where you’re crafting lower value exalted gear for alts. Or for selling in MG. You usually even work on several slots at the same time for your build as well.
No. It’s not because we want them to do that. It’s because that is the game that they want to play. And so do others which enjoy the same thing.
LE started out as being the game they want to play. And it has always been more targetted towards altoholics (which rarely ever do the min-max grind for long) than towards the top-tier grinders.
So it’s not a bad design choice. It’s actually a good one because it caters to the players that your game is aiming for.
So they make entry level easy and min-max grind very hard.
Variability won’t change that, though. Because the issue players are having with the system is because of repeated variability. And that will always spread in a similar manner over time given enough players and enough repetition. Same for a 1/3 2LP slam as for a 1-20 roll.
Or use em yourself rather then selling.
Those drops have gotten far far more valuable with the implementation of the recombinator as well.
Nowadays you can cobble together your perfect item gradually.
So basically you have a system where you - for example - get a garbage item which has a T1 res on it though, nothing else remotely usable. You keep it. Then you find a second res with as bad of a base. You go to the recombinator and throw both in, either randomly mixing and matching the items together - cheaper - at the hope of it retaining those 2 resistances… you always get a item back this way.
Or you choose the second options which is usually more expensive and has a percentile to function. For example with 2 T1 res Affixes it’s around 20% success chance. Succeed and you get a item with double T1 res and nothing else on it, which makes it already viable for crafting lower-end items, or for SSF especially.
This system has improved the value of individual rare drops substantially for your own usage, meaning that unlike before where you simply removed them being visible at all you now can go and either gradually improve items via the ‘doubling up’ method and hence making it nearly impossible to loose Affixes but needing a ton of time investment… or repeatedly slamming stuff together until you get a fitting 3 T1 item this way.
It’s ‘solved’ a majority of the drop-table issues arising in combination with the crafting mechanics, making drops actually valuable again while retaining the effectiveness of crafting with currency.
So PoE nowadays does a better job in the same methodology that LE uses for their crafting mechanic… but while retaining the alternative still. Both are in a good spot actually as they provide a myriad of options this way.
A prime example for using it well is to create a ring with has the Prefixes handled, especially the more rare ones like ‘elemental damage with attacks’ that’s similar to a rare Affix in LE. You can hence have the ‘base’ item at the ready and either go the cheap route with multi-mod crafting which is a ‘one and done’ thing anyway. Or you go with 3 T1 and crafting with meta-crafting from there for the absolute top-end of crafts. You can also use 2 T1 and then enforce veiled crafts on it… or multi-mod and enforce a influenced Affix on it… and so on and so forth. Simply stays relevant from start to end.
It’s made SSF more then viable with that and also allows a focus on rare drops from the ground since a vast amount doesn’t need ilvl 86 to be finished, rolling before already. And even then you can enforce a base to become ilvl 86 along the way by combining it with a ilvl 86 item, which makes alteration orb rolling more viable and the bases not a ‘one and done’ thing.
This is a way of freedom towards how you nowadays wanna handle the game mechanics which simply is not available in Last Epoch currently.
You cannot go and re-craft items, hence the whole aspect of repeated usage of currency is non-existent.
You only got the method similar to the recombinator in PoE, but unlike PoE where you can easily get 100 base items to start off from a day… you get 1-2 viable ones to even have the starting line.
That’s a distinct important difference and creates another timeline for success entirely. Because even in the PoE method while you uphold the ‘one and done’ aspect of bricking crafts with the deterministic combination you still get the respective amounts of tries to allow it being ‘reasonable’ and feeling a form of progress. Even if it easily goes towards 0,9% chances it still keeps that up this way because you get the bases in a reliable way.
The LE system simply doesn’t provide you the amount of bases to make the 0,9% chance still feel good… but still has that included as a point which has to be heavily used, namely a ‘garbage item’ which is then turned via Havoc towards a decent base.
So why am I comparing it to the 0.9%? Because if we take the success chance of a craft to turn into a T7 3T5 as 1 in 10 and then have the Havoc craft be a 1 in 4 in suceeding we still need at average 80 tries to ‘hit’. But the acquisition of making this route takes at least 20 times longer. So for the player it doesn’t feel like a 1 in 80 but like a 1 in 1600 comparatively. Not quite as our brain alleviates that a little… but it goes in that direction.
You got a bazillion things to do in PoE on the side though.
In LE you got ‘the Havoc’ and nothing else can provide you with progress in that situation. You got no backup base to prepare, you got no secondary craft that can turn into something great… that’s a major problem. Sure, you’ll likely do 1-2 other crafts on the side for other characters if you’re a multi-character player… but in PoE you simply got 5 items in the making at once, with a focus on a single one but the ability to ‘take a step to the side’ when your option to work on that dry up and actually keep doing something which promises results.
Yes, nowadays my argument is true. The average player makes around 3 div per hour currently. Someone actually using a decent farming strat makes at least 5+ div per hour.
PoE changed a lot, you get showered in currency nowadays. If you do effective farming strats it goes to 10+ at least, several 20+ existing.
Basically everyone specializes since the Atlas passives enforce that. You got 3 ways to specialize as a choice, those are run… the others provide jack-all comparatively so people don’t do it, including ‘average joes’.
Unless you wanna take people which can’t even pick defensive nodes on the passive tree in LE as a comparison… it’s the same level of ‘don’t dare turning on brain’. Stuff which is solely left for the casual player… which is not the target audience of either game and hence can be ignored.
First off… if you design around them rather then including them as a side-effect then the game is already dead, plain and simple. No reason to even talk on.
Secondly… if you ignore the first point anyway it would actually make your argument worse as we would need to take into consideration that the crafting process is always non-optimal as a baseline, hence the average being entirely different in a vastly worse way.
Basic brain function is to be included as a prerequisite
Nigh nobody crafts for selling as the chance for a sell-worthy outcome is often less then the value of the base. It’s a big gamba to do it in LE since you need not only to make a outcome fitting for a prevalent build but also one which hence is relatively easy to achieve from the base… otherwise it’s usually better to sell solely the base as it has that ‘potential’ to achieve a good outcome.
True about the 1 shard though, but I meant ‘per craft’ there. You generally pick up those rare shards along the way in a larger quantity then exalteds which have the right base + Affixes which could even remotely turn into something good without having to exchange nigh everything.
Fair, for MG they’re a goldmine as most people do it exactly like you do, leaving the market rather open there
CoF it’s different definitely, which makes it not really a positive point though for the variety of tasks now, does it?
Gratz on your luck.
Or well… shit for my bad luck? Whichever it is. Circumstantial evidence is a problem after all, hence why the actual math behind it is so important.
First off: That’s generally bad design when your game has no other avenues of progression. Piss-poor job done.
Secondly: If you provide content where you have to play extremely specific and few builds rather then the ability ‘to make it work, even somehow’ then that’s always a bad design. Just crap quality.
Obviously all chance-based systems are ‘a gamble’. If it’s chance based you don’t have it in your hand as a player.
Be it the deviation of the shots in World of Tanks. Be it the dispersion of shots in some shooters (not Counter Strike for example, that follows a fixed pattern actually and hence can with immense skill be counteracted), if it’s a shit layout in a rogue-like game which screws you over, a RPG like Baldur’s Gate 3 where your rolls decide your storyline happening or whatever else. It makes no difference.
And as mentioned… in moderation it can enhance the experience, but that’s for most things the case now isn’t it? Have a lack of something and it’s bad… have too much of something and it’s bad. The RNG of LE is easily visible too much.
Sure.
Now look solely at the basic system without economic aspects included.
You need to prepare a item or have a lucky drop to have a working base.
The bases get harder to achieve, ok! A ilvl 86 is harder to get then a ilvl 85. From ilvl 1 to ilvl 85 it’s a completely smooth gradual progression without any differences. Take the next level of zone and you get the next ilvl possible, simple.
You might need 20 alteration orbs or 5 alchemy orbs to get what you need, limitation likely scourings, fair! But the amount of crafts stays the same. You get tons of bases - ignoring the sockets, as they can be handled retroactively starting at mid-game -, basically showered in it. And you got your core Affix pool.
Now… obviously to get something like a ‘champion Affix’ you need something special, but that does break out of the core system, doesn’t it?
And essences or fossils are purely RNG reductors, much like Demise and Havoc are. They are functionally identical for that sake. You can achieve everything without either of those… but the chances are simply so atrocious that it’s not worthwhile to even try.
The first time any reduction in tries happens in PoE is when you reach crafting with influenced bases… as you get a single try of slamming the ‘right’ Affix on it and then it’s forever ‘influenced’. Those are already pure end-game crafts as well, with specialized mechanics. 95% of items don’t use this method even. And we don’t need to talk about 3-4 LP rare uniques in LE either, since that’s kinda the equivalency of empowered influenced Affix crafts. Possible but nobody does it and vastly beyond end-game power scale. We’re reaching mirror-tier pricing ranges gradually.
Also to make that you have to pre-prepare the item already anyway, in that system the gamba is kinda ‘confined’. You need to roll a good item to even consider the special currency. Or for fracturing you want a single specific mod (which is achieved through alteration spam, quite low-tier hence) to then try to fracture it… that becomes your base, that bit is never lost again. If you slam for the third T1 on a base as a influence then that is also never lost again from then on forward. You got it once, you got it until the craft is done completely, whatever you wanna do.
As I mentioned already, while you don’t enjoy those ‘safespots’ of crafting they are a integral part of any other multi-Affix modern ARPG system nowadays. For a reason. Once more your preference is vastly miniscule amounts of players enjoying it. The others love the system until they reach the point where the system hates em and they quit, simple as that.
Nah, just RNG dicked me over… happens, welcome to RNG!
For my other character I needed 2 tries, hurray! Once more, welcome to the world of RNG.
You cannot do anything ‘wrong’ when you even got the ability to simply exchange any Attribute to Strength… but alas… not a single Havoc or Demise hit… Not… a… single… one.
I know I had shit luck, but those situations are exactly what cause people to ragequite ultimately. The more avenues you create in your system to have such ‘shit-pots’ happening the more likely people quit. It doesn’t feel good… you feel deprived of success in a medium which is supposed to give you vastly easier success then reality does.
Sure… and how about a single-char player in CoF?
I wrote the example from the perspective of a SSF player in PoE, with a single char. Because it upholds still.
So… rather then simply leaving the option open and hence create player agency we now limit it by forcing people to play as the devs want? Despite it providing no distinct downside?
Great! Worked so well in gaming history! Hurray and let’s go there!
Nuff said about that…
If your chance-count over a specific timeframe is substantially lower then comparable systems then the deviation does indeed cause a severe issue.
We’re talking hundreds of tries versus 10… tens of thousands of tries versus hundreds. Which system do you think will showcase the law of large numbers more? The one where you use it 10k times or the one where you use it 100 times?
I was playing casually this league (mostly in 1-2h stretches due to time constraints) and other than the 3 divs I got during the campaign (which is a ridiculous result), I got another 3 div drops in 30h of gameplay. I didn’t follow a farming strat guide, as most casuals won’t. I decided first on map sustain/bump to finish the atlas and then focused all on harbinger (still wasn’t finished by the time I stopped playing).
What you mean is that a player that actually knows how PoE works well enough will be able to make 3+ divs an hour. Not a casual.
Besides, the same thing holds up for LE. With CoF, casually farming at 400c-ish, which isn’t hard nowadays for almost all builds, you’ll easily make around 20k favour per hour, which equates to a whole lot of prophecies.
That’s no different from PoE. For most players, it’s better to just sell the base than to craft on it. But when you get a good craft, you sell for more. And players will buy it (and pay more) because they will bypass all the RNG from having to buy multiple bases and crafting themselves.
In LE this doesn’t happen much yet because people haven’t realized that this can actually make decent money. And because a lack of a good price checker makes it extremely hard to actually judge the value of it.
Idols just need what the rest of the other gear already has, which is a way to somewhat target what you want to achieve.
As I said before, if they made it so that instead of rerolling both affixes you could lock one and only reroll the other, getting good idols would be way better than now.
The fact is that idols are 100% a slot machine with no interaction and all you can do is add another coin and roll again.
And when we consider that we currently have several ways to interact with even uniques, which used to be drop only like idols, you can see that idols are being left behind and are the hardest piece to get in a good spot (not even talking about BiS, just the whole reaching about 80% potential).
Or maybe it’s because I store every single T7 affix drop, other than a few annoying affixes like melee related ones, or ailments/resistances when I already have a few?
And because I try to craft on every one of them that seems like it might remotely work, no matter how unlikely. Which sometimes works, resulting in a good item out of a crappy one.
With the proposed change this wouldn’t be possible. I would be storing much less items and crafting on even less. Because the upper limit on number of crafts reducing means that crappy items will forever stay crappy items.
Same thing can apply to almost everything in life. There’s always a chance that you’ll get hit by a car when crossing the road. You can take precautions but you don’t “have it in your hand”.
There’s always the chance you’ll slip in your bath and break a leg. Is taking a bath a gamble?
As I said, you usually take these definitions to such an extreme that they become meaningless because they apply to everything (and thus to nothing).
But you don’t control the behaviour of other players/bots, so you’re gambling that they’ll behave in a certain way and that you’ll be able to outsmart them/outreact them.
Other than PoE2.
It’s Redemption, not Demise. And why would you use Redemption on such a basic craft? That’s a total waste, when it’s much easier to remove/seal a prefix (if it doesn’t have an open slot), place str in it, then get all tiers to the same level. You don’t even need to get them to T5. There are lots and lots of single exalted items that drop where the highest other affix is T2 or T3. Even T1.
With those you spend 2-4 crafts to get it ready to Havoc and you get a 1/3 chance to succeed. And, on average, you’ll get at least 2-3 tries per item.
What you’re describing happening due to bad luck seems like a 1 in a million chance. Or the result of bad choices (like using Redemptions or trying to craft on exalted gear that has T4-T5 affixes.
I could accept you saying you bricked a dozen. 60 seems highly unlikely. 5 magnitudes unlikely.
SSF experience is the same in both games. You only take what is worth to your current build and everything else is trash.
And in both you’re working on the same number of items at once, which is each of your gear slots.
Their kickstarter was very clear. They wanted to make the game they wanted to play. You’re a stickler for adhering to the letter of what is in there.
So let me ask you. If they add that isn’t a part of the game they want to play, are they fulfilling their promise?
They didn’t say they wanted to make a game they wanted to play and also please everyone else.
Much like they could have made levels 90-100 much easier. But they want it to be hard so players don’t feel forced to reach 100. And also feel encouraged to switch to another build.
In both cases they could have left the option open and create player agency. But LE would no longer be a game that encouraged you to create new characters at level 90-95ish. It would be a game that encouraged you to reach level 100, probably grind for min-max and then maybe make a new character.
Your argument is basically the same thing as for mastery respec. They left the option open (you don’t actually have to use it) and yet it actually discourages making multiple characters.
Both systems will have the same variation and both systems will showcase the law of large number the exact same, since the average chance is the same.
The only difference is that one is a narrower bell and the other is a wider one.
This means that the narrower bell will have less spectacular failures, but it will also have less spectacular successes.
The law of large numbers is actually what ensures that the distribution is pretty much the same for both. The only thing that changes is the range (for both failures and successes).
So yes, you’ll have less outlier failures, but you’ll also have less outlier successes.
Yeah, I don’t make anywhere near 3 divs an hour. As you say, that’s not casual, that’s just not hardcore (as in focussing on the game & min-maxing, not the game mode).
You’re talking about ‘raw’ drops here, which yes, was a bit ill-fitting from me to state it like this.
If you want raw divines you go for mechanics like expedition, ritual or even better… strongboxes (ambush).
For expedition you focus on the currency guy, for ritual on ‘special tables’ and re-roll chance and for strongboxes on the currency strongboxes.
Each of them provides from 1-4 raw div per hour. If you use a map with divination cards you can also use the divination card strongboxes or go a step further if you’ve got a really powerful char to let them be taken in by the boss and duplicated this way.
The majority - outside the advanced ones with the div cards - are piss easy beginner strats that anyone can do. Heck… for the strongbox strat you don’t even need to go anywhere besides T1 maps as they don’t scale up with content! So you can speedrun it with a awful char too.
But repeated divine orb usage is not the norm by any means, you need really few. Commonly achieved along the way simply for the 1-2 multi-craft items and the few possible no attacker/caster modifiers one for end-game ones.
Besides that it’s base currency mostly… and along the way specialized one for specific rare individual crafts.
CoF only, for MG the issue is massive, acquisition of higher end bases is extremely expensive as each one costs 5+ mil often, uncrafted. Not to speak of crafted ones which actually go into 100+ mil. That’s a harsh ask for many, even those actively trading.
That’s entirely different from PoE. You don’t buy any half-crafted stuff, you buy bases or finished items.
There’s exceptions… but they’re not prevalent. Things that are done regularly is to create bases or provide rare Affixes on an item. Like a alteration spammed amulet for + level or fracturing specific Affixes on specific bases which are hard to acquire commonly. But besides that you either buy a base or you buy a item ‘as is’ without any changes. Best case a simple singular craft.
For that it needs to be relevant enough to return the invested effort for the creator. This is currently not the case in LE. The most common outcomes with crafting in LE is a direct loss as the result is sub-par, hence the base would’ve been more profitable to sell. The second most likely outcome is a very specific item for a specific build hence, and given the price-tag needed to allow the sale to be actually profitable it means that a large portion of people will rather go with the self-crafted option or acquire it by luck along the way as they try to save up to buy that item.
Also the majority of slots are taken up with uniques in LE, contrary to PoE where the chance to use a rare item rather then a unique rises the more invested a craft becomes, with a few overall exceptions obviously. Not to speak of the aspect that in LE uniques can take in parts - or the full amount of it at times - of the power of exalted items via LP, something which simply isn’t possible in PoE. There the items compete for the same slot directly without combining their power.
By your logic the most wanted thing to do for someone which wants to make profit is to hence craft either top-base exalted items… or provide high LP legendaries.
But that’s simply not something done. The LP base - like the exalted base - is simply more expensive as it allows adjusting it according to need rather then limiting it to a singular build. You cannot re-sell items under any circumstances, so they’re ‘one and done’ which makes reliable acquisition of bases for a specific craft unfeasable. So as a crafter you would hence need to know a large variety of builds being currently played to know if your item even is viable to craft on, as well as what the specific outcome has to be to then use the tries to achieve those specific ones… which is a quite massive entry level for that. Because if it’s a off-meta build it likely won’t sell while the base would’ve sold. If you’re badly timed and the community shifts over a bit your item also won’t be sold anymore. Since we also can’t re-price without investing favour again this would come at a cost… which goes counter to making as much profit as possible. As a result the risk simply is in most cases not worth it.
To alleviate it EHG could’ve set up their system different. For example since we got faction tags and ‘cannot be sold’ tags separate already they could’ve allowed someone to acquisition a item… then crafting on it and the craft removes the ‘cannot be sold’ tag to allow redistribution. This would’ve opened up the ability for crafters to directly target specific builds and provide for them to make profit, the people having no clue about builds actually selling their bases more reliably and the people which need items to acquisition them easier as they’re actually on the market as a finished product rather then a base only, removing the risk of creating it for them as the law of large numbers might screw em over massively. But for a crafter it’ll always align to be at least a mild profit to do so instead.
Well, it might actually be true, I’m not 100% sure for that as the price-checker might provide a big enough impact to slightly change it into this direction. I doubt though that’ll will even remotely be enough, but it’s a good start for sure.
We’ll see in 1.3 with the comparison they implemented… and especially how it’s implemented in reality rather then ‘we’ve done something’. If it’s well designed it could’ve an impact potentially… if not then it’s still staying at the same position.
You think I don’t? The only reason I’m throwing out T7 items is when my storage is becoming full… which I then cull accordingly by using up all crafting materials acrued to create properly fitting equipment according to my characters needs as well as planned ones when those don’t properly hit.
I’ve gone through 3 of those ‘cycles’ since I began CoF properly. Each 8 tabs filled to the brim. I currently own… I think… 5 or so exalted rings? I’ve kept every single even senseless T7 + 3 T5 outcome at the off-chance anything remotely useful can be done still at another char. Firts is checking the ‘finished’ crafts, then is Havoc or Demise crafting those which have FP left in hopes for a success as the initial outcomes went badly in some way… and then it’s crafting up the leftover ones while trying to get a very specific setup happening rather then ‘they’re simply maxed’.
My limit is not potential items to even craft on… it’s consumables to craft with. Runes and glyphs run out. Heck… I’ve managed to run out of hopes twice in those 3 cycles and I’ve used up half my chaos glyphs on the third since I didn’t wanna wait on more hopes and it at least allows to craft ‘something’ up with a miniscule chance of success.
Kinda hard to get hit by a car when the car is sufficiently far away or none there at all. Also kinda hard when you move over the road when it’s green for you and cars are standing still at the crossing because of it.
I mean… at least provide sensible examples and not ‘you could be hit by a meteorite while taking a dump’ ones…
Also to give you a bit of thought here: In general generalizations are used as the capability to realize exceptions exist are a basic sign of cognitive ability to discern between them and special cases.
Generalizations are used because they uphold… in general.
Exceptions exist… no shit sherlock! But they’re not prevalent, that’s why they’re called exceptions.
If an exception is prevalent enough it’s taken into consideration.
So where exactly in the generalization of ‘All chance-based systems are a gamble’ is the statement wrong?
Yep, they shot themselves in the foot with that heavily
But even they implemented the Recombinator at least since they realized it’s an issue, allowing to slap items hence together without restarting always from scratch.
Cause I got 50 left but not a single Havoc, so should I instead throw the bases away as they acrue enough for that craft to wait for Havocs? Or should I instead use another potentially winning method despite it being sub-optimal?
Depends, as you mentioned after all.
Are you a single-char player or a multi-char player? The range of value shifts massively.
Also you gotta take into consideration that the sheer breadth of potential results is simply vastly higher in PoE then in LE. In LE your T7 exalted won’t be exchanged unless you find a T7+T6 exalted for example… in PoE there’s a large potential for your item to have to be completely exchanged. Be it getting a rare drop with messed up resistances and hence demands adjusting to another item since the drop in power there is lower then the the upside of the new item acquired… or by full-scale traversing to different methods of offense or defense.
Nigh every character has the ability to go full chaos-res build with converting that damage to a large degree over to it. But it needs not only timeless runs for a high RNG timeless jewel outcome but also adjusting the items over accordingly to the most rare resistance roll - a rare Affix - on any item, while upholding the power formerly already achieved. In total stronger but needs a complete re-build of defensive measures and inclusion of more offensive ones along the way to provide the upsides instead of being worse until achieved. Higher potential but more effort needed.
You could also go with several builds into scaling negative lightning resistance to increase damage with a doryani’s prototype, which is reliant on rare drops from the kalandra mirrors in T16 maps, but if you get one you can exchange your items accordingly to lean into that.
Those types of interactions simply don’t - yet - exist in LE, the sheer scale of itemization is completely different. You can start rolling for your cluster jewel which you can only start using after getting a specific item setup right away… and it’ll need a ton of resources anyway. So while you acquire the other stuff needing different resources you can always fall back to try and achieve that. Hence a high-investment item becomes feasable because it’s started early on and finished along the way potentialy.
The point in SSF is that when a build enabling rare drop happens which aligns roughly with the direction of your existing build then you’ll switch over to adjust your strategy accordingly… unless you’re so stubborn to forego progress for the sake of build purity, saying ‘I want this exact specific build and not anything else of the myriad of viable ones existing which use the same core skill’. But that’s on you personally as a player then.
This type of build-development simply does not exist in LE yet either. Builds are extremely limited. If you scale time-rot then you scale DoT, you know exactly the items along the journey which can drop and where you farm to have em drop. There is basically no variance existing. If you go with hit damage instead then your targeting is different. If you use a smite build instead your targeting is once again different.
LE provides a clear-cut pre-established route to you and you have to adhere to it or it becomes a entirely new build instead, enforcing to switch everything… passives… items… idols… that’s a extreme investment.
Comparatively in PoE the sheer mass of viable options beyond the ‘basic build’ enforces a player to be opportunistic. You follow a clear-cut guideline until you drop one of the rare and extremely powerful options which allow you to shift over. And also only when you’ve got the full build basically set up before exchanging. Hence you don’t roll for ‘that single item’ but you keep them in the way of 'Ah, this one rolled with chaos res, I wanted to have lightning and fire res though… this means now I can target this other Affix instead since it might align with this unique I could get from this boss when I get the access by running this specific mechanic. So you start running the mechanic while improving your base gear, setting that item on the side for the future.
In LE you don’t set ‘items aside’ usually… you either cannot use it yet because of level limitations or you use it since it’s simply stronger as there are basically no options available to exchange things. Class idols - as you stated - are so rare that exchanging them means you’ll likely not have them available for another build. Acquisition of uniques is so piss-easy if you can do the specific content that it’s better to keep up the current build as it’s all based on repeated drops rather then individual extra rare ones. There’s only a distinct few uniques which break out of this, like red ring or immortal vise for example, uber-rare items… which either have a ‘everyone uses it anyway’ or ‘only those builds profit from it anyway’. If there were 30-40 of those items sure… but there’s not.
LE simply lacks the content for such things to happen, so it has to make up in different ways.
Yes, I am. Obviously so, as anyone should be
Plainly spoken as a customer you shouldn’t care what the company wants… you should care what they promise to provide and if those promises align with you. ‘Yeah, we wanted to make a quad bike… but upon further revision we decided to instead make it a tri bike instead’… you wanted a quad though, not a tri. But that’s what they realized they actually wanna make… so… should you be happy for em? Maybe. Is it what you were promised? Nah, absolutely not.
What is that argument?
Are you a part of their family? A personal friend? Some long lost son maybe?
No?
Then what meaning do those things have? There are none.
‘We wanna make a game enjoyable to play!’ Duh? I mean… would someone make a game and tell everyone ‘Yeah, I want you guys to simply suffer, be frustrated and feel like it’s shit!’ and hence sell it?
You’re falling for the age old trap of ‘humanizing’ a company. You don’t have any relation with the devs. They’re not some social connection. All they do is provide a product, simple as that. If they’re the friendliest and most likeable people on the planet while providing atrocious quality products riddled with incompetence left and right then you still shouldn’t buy it as it won’t provide YOU with what is wanted as a customer from it. On the other hand if they’re the biggest asshole and unlikely as possible but provide a god-like top-tier quality cohesive product… then YOU as a customer get what you want. Should you abstain from buying it because the devs are assholes then? Nah… that would be nonsensical.
A product has NOTHING to do with who creates it, it has everything to do with how it’s made and if it fulfills what the customer is searching for.
If it aligns with what a dev wants to make it’s great!
If their passion simply doesn’t align with what people want then they either are out of luck or they got to compromise on their passion project.
That’s life. It’s pure entitlement to think otherwise there. Don’t buy into promises, only buy into guarantees… and if only that guarantee is a return of paid value if the product isn’t what you intially used the money for.
If you get promised a car with an AC and instead they provide a board-computer which wasn’t provided beforehand but no AC then friggin yes you’re allowed to be pissed off as it’s a breach of contract, plain and simple.
It’s laughable that ONLY the software sector can repeatedly get away with doing that under the pretense of ‘But that stuff is complex and you never know!’
Though luck… that’s what every other sector has to deal with as well, from restaurants to services to producing factories. But nah… in software it’s seemingly special snowflakes which need special treatment seen nowhere else.
As for the premise that this does remove the reasoning to create secondary characters… what?
That’s clear bollocks.
Ask yourself first why people create second characters before going to something like that.
Different experience. Not ‘sated’ with the product after finishing the first. Simply variety and not wanting to do ‘the same’ repeatedly.
Those things don’t simply creep up when someone is not of the mindset to do that… unlike with mastery respec which has a clear-cut reason to exist as it has upheld retention time as a lack of content causes the ‘not sated but nothing else to experience’ state to not come into play formerly… which has been reduced substantially now it has no such downsides presented. The opposite, it allows more variety, not less.
At least stay with the same premise and not turn it 180° around. That argument you made is ‘Because you could get more then you need you should instead use this other thing which provides you less then you want.’ What the heck kind of argument is that?
You still didn’t get the point. That totally missed the mark!
If the rule of large numbers causes 99% of players to reach within 5% of the expected outcome with 50k tries then we got issues obviously.
With 10k tries it’s 99% of players reach within 20% of the expected outcome for example.
With 100 tries it’s within 70% of the outcome.
So less tries means more deviation from the average. That’s the basis.
You cannot say that everyone has the same experience when the sheer count to achieve the law of large numbers isn’t upheld because there is no large number.
Sure DJ… everyone can get all items possible in the game! It’s upheld! With a long enough playtime and hence enough drops everyone will get everything! Lets ignore the timeframe needed, right? Because that’s the argumentation point you don’t seem to understand… if it’s reached by the time the sun has burned out nobody gives a shit. Stuff has to stay in a reasonable framework, if it’s outside of it then it’s a problem.
To achieve that you either have to enforce less variance at the drop system (hence simplify the drop-system by for example targeted drops), empower the crafting mechanic to allows alleviating it so the outliers go vastly more into the positive, or you reduce the RNG to make it more straightforward.
The solution of ‘Just wait for a few extra hundred hours’ is not included in the list of viable ones Because that’s the premise to get closer to the rule of large numbers here. That’s the issue. That’s what’s talked about. Variance too high → feeling hence shit → reduce variance in some way. End of topic.
You saying ‘but all is fine’ is like talking to a blind man and showing them a picture it seems. It’s shoved in your face but for some reason you lack the ability to see what people are talking about, hence always diverting over to talking about the material the picture is on rather then the picture itself.
Exactly!
So the average joe of players which isn’t simply just a casual visiting the game and leaving… but someone which actually sees it as a dedicated hobby already, in a healthy investment. Get to the nitty gritty and it happens for those automatically, knowledge base through experience or interest.
Someone simply turning on the game, experiencing it and then leaving without trying to understand will obviously not get to any reasonable stage in a game focused on a big knowledge base. Hence why helping solutions are there like Empyrian’s ‘based or cringe’ series for farming strats… all those builds guides and so on and so forth. If you neither put in the effort to learn and don’t use pre-created materials from content creators to guide you then obviously you won’t get any results. That’s why many people fail in the campaign in PoE 1, and even more do so when reaching maps failing to progress. Use stuff provided and you get it without effort, learn it yourself and you do as well. Do neither and you don’t.
Hence the target audience of both games, LE far less so then PoE but also. Even D2 has that aspect. Any game with complexity does.
Do you mean per category?
Seriously though, I have 8 tabs alone for chests. I currently have arond 30 tabs full of exalted gear, separated by item type. I don’t throw them away as long as I can keep making more gold than stash costs. Tab gets full, make a new one.
I’ve had no issues with anything other than havocs and weaving. And I solved weaving by doing some prophecies for them specifically and I solved Havocs by taking a bunch of general rune drops. Same for glyph of insights (I have over 100).
As CoF you’re only starving for crafting materials if you don’t use prophecies for runes and for insights. Everything else drops like candy, especially when you focus on lizards in the weaver tree. Most echoes I have 4-5 lizards at least, which is a buttload of crafting materials.
Plus I also went for all the mages/champions/nemesis nodes (not maxed though) so I always do those as well.
All of that combined generates a huge surplus of anything that aren’t those 3 runes (and redemptions, but those are mostly useless anyway).
Yes, because no one in the history of the world has ever crossed a red light. And because no one in the history of the world has ever run over someone because they were speeding too much and you couldn’t get out of the way or see them in advance. The world is perfect.
I did. Is showering a gamble? You can get hurt during one.
Even going into the street in general is a gamble. Some crazed guy can come along to rob you and knife you in the process. Or is that a hyperbolic example as well that very rarely happens? Or is it something that occurs on a daily basis worldwide?
The statement isn’t wrong. Much like “This statement is true” isn’t wrong either. It just tells you absolutely nothing because everything everywhere is a chance based system, other than some very isolated science experiments.
But in the generally accepted definition of the term, neither LE’s nor PoE’s crafting systems are gambling. Because for them to be gambling (as well as for most other examples mentioned) you’re missing one important key ingredient, which is addictiveness.
Gambling leads to addictive behaviour. Neither crafting system does (quite the contrary).
No, you should buy more tabs and accumulate more, while doing rune prophecies to get a bunch more havocs.
If you’re SSF you’re a single char by design (other than the special SASF mode LE has, but that’s not what we’re talking about when we say SSF). So you can get a ton of great drops for your alt, but you have no idea to transfer them.
So you’re saying you only equip perfect T7 items in LE but you equip sub-optimal ones in PoE?
I don’t know about you, but I go through all the ranges, much like in PoE. I first get a T7 for my affix and get maybe one T5 affix. Then I improve on that a few times until I have a 7555 that I won’t be improving. At which point, I start looking for both double exalted gear and for a 7555 in my desired base.
Sometimes you get lucky and jump a few steps, but there are as many of the in LE as in PoE.
Neither does every character have the ability of running a couple of red rings and a wall of nothing. Or immediately going low life.
Which means that you’ll be filling your build with a second best unique, slamming it and getting it better and better, until you find one of those items and then start working on them.
Honestly, at this point I’m not sure what you’re arguing about or if you’re even playing LE at all.
It most certainly is. One of those promises was making the game they want to play. And like minded players followed along.
FromSoftware does. And some others like Super Meat Boy.
Also, “enjoyable” is a very subjective term. What they enjoy isn’t (clearly) what you enjoy. So adding a choice that they don’t enjoy, actually goes counter to the whole thing they set out to do. Even if more people would enjoy that.
After all, in terms of pure numbers, more people enjoy D4 than LE or PoE. It doesn’t mean that EHG should cater to them.
They actually do. By placing a huge wall at that point in the game, players that have a tendency to create more characters will hit that wall and go “Well, this isn’t as fun anymore, so I’ll make a new one”. If the wall wasn’t there, they might have kept playing for a while, with diminishing returns on enjoyment. The wall actually encourages people that like to make characters to make new ones when they reach it.
And yes, some will hit the wall and leave. But that is the case with any decision, so it’s all a matter of which players they’re targetting. And for the majority of the life of LE it was the former. Though they’re starting to cave to the latter lately.
I think you’re the one getting confused. That will happen when you with both systems.
The only difference between them is that the outliers in one are closer to the average than with the other system. But that is true for both successes and failures.
The distribution is always the same. The only difference is that with one everyone gets similar items with smaller variations and with the current one you can fail spectacularly or you can succeed spectacularly.
The only way not to have the same distribution is to not have a range roll, where every craft costs 6FP. Because then everyone gets the same result.
Otherwise you’re just narroing the cone of the deviation. That’s how averages work and how they distribute.
And yes, I understand that you don’t want those 1k players that are on the extreme end of the curve to feel bad. But that is also at the expense of those 1k players that are on the other end of the curve and that are feeling great.
idk i think its fine right now … it really pushes you to search for exalted items later while giving you the power to decide what you want on magic and rare items earlier … i do think they could lower the forging potential costs maybe a little but not all the way down to like 5
maybe they could half the costs they are now but then add a glyph that makes critical successes more likely at the cost of doubling it back to what it is now
I’ve only played up a single char in CoF properly, which is my VK currently. That’s why it’s so little.
Yeah, which I don’t do as I’m instead pushing for better quality direct drops. I’m lacking bases for my current build, not overall for characters, those are always far far far too few. As per example with the exalted rings.
In general you’ll always run out of one thing, albeit plainly spoken I would argue running out of the ability to even try to craft something for the current character played rather then all at once is a worse state then having too many bases and too few crafting materials.
Kinda the point of it being their responsibility not being upheld as they had the option? Their choice to not do it? That’s not ‘chance’ that’s ‘neglecence’
People give ‘luck’ far far too much power, luck is when influences you didn’t take into consideration or couldn’t take into consideration take action. Obviously if you don’t do the things in your power then it’s solely down to chance. But that’s not because you didn’t have the option… it’s because you gave it away.
No? Solo-self-found just means you play alone and you acquire everything on your own. No group, no economy. Nothing in SSF states non-shared items with your own characters.
That would be character-self-found what you mean.
Are you intentionally missing the points now? It’s getting kinda hard to speak about something because you perfectly sidestep things by now like a damn magician.
That was an example for comparison. Obviously you equip sub-optimal items, it’s about the progression there, not about perfectionism.
If you got a T6 item with perfect 3T5 Affixes before getting a proper T7 item then that T7 item is still hard pressed to be viable if the other 3 Affixes on it become trash.
I’m not simply stating 200 use-cases but imagine you got the capacity to inherently take that as a given to be the case.
‘Nigh’ not ‘Neither’.
It’s a equivalent to ‘Nearly’ there.
But you’re absolutely right! You pointed it out perfectly!
In PoE nearly every character can go the chaos res route in that way… but in LE you’re forced to build solely inside your pre-demanded defensive area as the other will be inadequate.
ES based melee class in PoE? Doable! Evasion based caster? Dumb but sure… if you wanna scuff yourself go ahead Armor based ranged char? Absolutely manageable! Smarter to go ES though anyway.
You’re making my point here.
I’ve stated that the variety causes more options and hence allows a SSF char - and partially demands even - to craft for the items with the most possible potential outcomes rather then for a specific one. Which is a distinct difference to LE.
Then you really didn’t understand what exactly FromSoftware does, or what Super Meat Boy did.
First off, Super Meat Boy is a game dedicated to hardcore platformers, a group of people which had no challenging content available, hence highly praised but designed for a small audience.
Last Epoch is not designed for a small audience. You know, live-service and all the stuff enforced through it.
Secondly, FromSoftware’s game design is not limiting without reason. You’re liking speaking about the fixed difficulty without choice there, right?
Which has a direct play into environmental storytelling, the games made by FromSoftware are based about immense immersion into the gritty dark worlds they create, which enforces them to use unfair designs at times a player cannot reasonable foresee (like a enemy at the ready to backstab you for turning a corner without visibility) as well as demanding a inherently challenging - for most people - amount of difficulty onto the player. They use frustration versus reward masterfully.
Don’t compare top-tier design for a very specific aspect that they’ve mastered to a high degree with a product of large-scale mediocrity like LE please, that’s plainly insulting to FromSoftware. LE has great points… but it’s not well designed in the current state.
The reasoning was never enjoyment there. Much like Fear&Hunger. Those developers took a very specific aspect of design, polished it to extremely high standard and that caused people to enjoy the game because of it.
Comparatively LE promises a lot, executes at barely mediocre when finally bringing it out and barely stays above water without drowning. There is no ‘polished execution’ visible, it’s laughable. Story is unfinished and mediocre. Balancing is atrocious. Combat is ok-ish. Crafting is riddled with fundamental issues because of scaling issues. Economy is outright awful.
The only reason LE still exists is because the whole segment of live-service ARPGs is absolutely starved for competition. We got 1 massive franchise which struggles with their second game but their first is rock-solid. We got a Pay2Win game which is well designed with Torchlight Infinite and we got a casual unrefined game with the Diablo franchise that produced their last top-tier entry 20 years ago.
Heck… even Wolcen… which was outright awful in core design survived for years despite it being a complete disaster front, back and center.
So don’t start with the nonsensical argument of ‘but what you enjoy and others enjoy…’. This is a damn product based around a large playerbase with demands to have that to even survive as they massively mismanaged. Deal with reality here what the demands for upholding such a product are and what compromises have to be taken from the purist viewbase. They cannot afford to cater to the few anymore to uphold their vision, they screwed that up, it’s over there. The best EHG can do is gradually recover and then piece by piece after recovering shift over to the initial wanted state. If they execute that nigh perfectly.
Won’t happen.
Yes, dumbest decision to do.
Has no underlying reasoning besides ‘do as we tell you’. No immersion basis. No gameplay basis. Just pure idiocy if that’s intended.
Intentionally removing the fun without severe upsides… what the heck is even wrong with your thought processes to consider that? Are you out to create garbage?
Another follow-up BS argument! ‘Oh, I don’t have that much fun anymore after playing for a long while. Guess I’ll simply stop!’ Yep! That’s actually true! And healthy since that causes a player to return.
You know what causes a player to leave? ‘Ah, this is becoming frustrating and is simply not fun anymore!’. And by not having fun you expect them to go ‘Well, since I don’t have fun lets re-do it from scratch instead!’. They haven’t gotten the ability to reach their self-proclaimed goal even if it aligns with a reasonable progression expectation and you think people generally get the urge to start anew this way?
That’s… plain and simple delusional… what the heck? Really… it’s in no way realistic, it’s such a twisted and mangled reasoning it’s beyond baffling.
For one it stays in that range for 400 hours of game-time.
For the other it does for 40.
Find the point there yourself, I’ll leave it at that, it’s enough said there. The blind man example is far too apt.
You still seem to be missing the point, I’m a divorced father with a job & a gf (/partner/whatever she wants to be called). I get to play 1-2 hours a day most days, I think that’s a reasonable definition of casual. I get into & clear red maps most seasons (unless I get bored) & I’ve been playing PoE since closed beta, but I don’t treat it like a job by following a particular strat, I do the content I find fun.
I told you I started fresh playing offline with my warpath VK as well. All those chests is simply from 30-ish hours playing with that character.
T7s drop like candy, especially once you reach rank 11. And I even throw away a bunch of them when they have melee affixes or others I don’t care about.
Sure it is. You’re taking a chance that those around you are going to obey laws and social norms. Even though you know that not everyone does it.
Oh yeah, my bad. I mixed it up. LE is the one with the special mode where you can solo just a character.
I’ve never really played SSF, so fair mistake.
My point is that in both games you will first gear up for a different setup. You don’t immediately start going CI in PoE. You start as life and you prepare your items for when the unique drops and you can switch.
Same thing with LL in LE. If you don’t have the chest or boots, you don’t go LL. You start with a health setup while you prepare your gear for the switch.
In both cases you’re crafting for what you have and what you will change into.
And yes, you can be a caster and go full evasion in PoE. But so can you in LE. If you want you can decide to invest into dodge rating and glancing blows. Either is dumb, but both are available, so what’s your point there? I honestly lost the thread of this part of the discussion.
No, I’m talking about refusing to add QoL features.
Both systems are equivalent in end result and will only change for outliers.
You want to remove the outliers of people that fail lots of crafts and feel like crap. While also removing the outliers of people that succeed in impossible crafts and feel awesome. While the rest of the players feel “meh”.
Because you can’t remove one without removing the other.
It also changes the minimum gear that is valuable for crafting. Currently any piece of gear can potentially become great, no matter how crappy. With a narrower roll you need a higher minimum quality to drop to even start crafting on it because you know that a crappier item has no chance to ever become good.
Instead of crafting on 20 items for 5 minutes (because you immediately know when it fails and don’t even pursue it to the end) you craft on 5 items for 20 minutes.
So those are the 3 things that change with a narrower roll range:
Less people feel crappy, less people feel awesome.
Less gear is good enough to craft on, so less drops are even worth looking at.
And rather than doing fast crafts which can potentially become good you do slower crafts on less items that have a higher potential to become good.
I certainly prefer the current system. I’d rather not waste too much time crafting. When an item I’m looking for drops I’ll often craft on it on the spot and after 2-3 tries, if it fails, dump it on the ground and move on. Wasted 15s and kept playing the game.
Neither is inherently better or worse (just like the philosophy behind LE crafting or PoE crafting, neither is better or worse), they just appeal to different players.
I prefer the current system, you prefer a narrower one.
You’re trying to sell me out on the notion that one is definitely better than the other, when they’re both equivalent (just like it would be equivalent with a fixed cost). They just appeal to different people and you happen to prefer a different one.
But… LL setup is a health-setup since it scales with max health? So you don’t ‘traverse over’ like you would do in CI, which generally goes from either a hybrid playstyle or pure armor/evasion playstyle into ES then since you get the immunity to bypassing it via chaos damage. In LE you just slap on the new item and suddenly strong!
The point is that you don’t need to adjust stuff commonly in LE currently, it’s not designed that way yet. Maybe it’ll be along the way as more content comes and hence more dependencies… but for now that simply is not the case.
So to ensure itemization is varied the game simply needs to do other methods to ensure it, but EHG kinda has taken the methodology of the itemization progression of PoE but not taken into consideration that it only works well when you got those dependencies included, otherwise growing streamlined and ‘stale’.
Which QoL features?
There’s a ton of em in Elden Ring comparably to Dark Souls 1. They just don’t do QoL which affects immersion. Like a combined trader where you can simply go and acquire everything unlocking more over time, or a singular smith. Instead enforcing to seek out the respective masters of their specific crafts for example.
Besides that I really don’t know which kinds of QoL you would mean.
That’s… the… point.
Prevalence of outliers higher in one then the other because of numerical value of repetitions.
You have a harder time when the turnover to be in the 5% range happens after 50k tries when one system allows you to use it 100 times versus the other 10000 times.
Obviously there’s hence more outliers in the one with 100 since the law of large numbers hence has taken no significant effect yet.
That’s why games like Torchlight Infinite and PoE allow you to re-craft base crafts thousands of times on a single item, to ensure the law of large numbers comes into effect.
That’s the point LE doesn’t uphold yet as it doesn’t allow you those thousands of tries.
Both TLI and PoE only move away from the law of large numbers by the time the base setup is done, which is in both systems a ‘safespot’ of crafting.
In PoE you got alterations, to ensure you get a third working Affix at top-tier without risk you can ‘imprint’ it and always return to that state no matter how far along you go. You get your T1 via a Regal for example and then need a specific influenced Affix as well? If it doesn’t hit you use the imprint and voila… back to magic stage.
If you need a specific very rare and powerful Affix on an item like +1 all level, +2 additional arrows or +35% effect on clusters then you fracture and hence ‘make it a base’. At this point it’s guaranteed to stay permanently.
If you have need a 3 T1 base for meta-crafting or multi-mod you can go the recombinator route and enforce it this way, ensuring via ‘prefixes/suffixes cannot be changed’ to always keep that up.
If you have to hit a severely risky craft which can cause a already pre-established extremely expensive item to become massively less valued you can use a ‘Hinekora’s Lock’ to see what the outcome will be when you craft and hence use something else like a divine orb to re-roll values and hence create a new seed for the next craft, guaranteeing your item doesn’t break.
The point is that along the way you either have the law of large numbers applying for the bases, for both low-end ones as well as nowadays high end ones. Then you have methods depending on how far along the way a craft is to ensure it doesn’t all go to waste. The follow-ups generally tend to have a low variance, hence you don’t need 1000 tries but only ~50 to hit your end result, often even vastly less. A 1 in 4 chance is nothing uncommon to exist depending on the type of craft.
So each step in itself feels ‘obtainable’. It’s not a massive uphill battle at once but a set of individual smaller hills together making up that massive hill, but you can always rest at the plateaus of those individual hills to re-try climbing the next one.
The major aspect is that the more complex and varied a system becomes the more ‘safety nets’ you need to introduce instead of shoving the full scale of the RNG at the player. You ‘chunk’ it. While the overall outcome chance stays mathematically the same it simply removes the high ends and the low ends accordingly. Both become less likely.
People don’t do well with repeated critical failures, but people do absolutely well with small setbacks they can reliably fix with effort. As soon as realistic amounts of effort don’t cut it anymore they stop, often that line is beyond their frustration limit which makes it a permanent choice, which is happening from personal management of those emotional states… but has to be taken into consideration.
Also one major point between the system of Last Epoch and TLI or PoE is the end-goal.
By the time the variance becomes so massive it becomes a hefty gamble and really severe time investment the ‘top end’ is not all too far off in both TLI and PoE. Total possible itemization road. People are willing to go ‘the last step’ beyond their usual limits if it’s not too far out there. In Last Epoch though you don’t even come close, it’s the argument I made about the maximum obtainable items in the game theoretically and the maximum obtainable realistic ones as we don’t have time until the sun burns out. You can at best with ridiculous effort achieve 2 T7 (maybe even with a T6) items with fitting Affixes in CoF, and 1 T7 + 1 T6 in MG. Those are ‘mirror-tier’ items comparably in effort for PoE. But there’s a lot above that still.
Most people have a higher capacity for the last stretch of something and then being extremely happy about achieving the peak possible even if it’s only a small part of the total gearing process of their character. But they’re vastly less inclined to do the exact same thing in a system which showcases a good 40% of potential power scaling still being available beyond.
That’s not a problem of the change but a problem of the core setup of itemization in Last Epoch.
Something I mentioned already several times when it came to this topic.
The missing aspect of ‘item level’ and hence tieing the inherent possible power of a drop specifically to the content run rather then a pure chance-based system is something where EHG simply shot themselves in the foot.
It makes it so a massive jackpot can happen for a new player traversing into empowered monoliths. In theory they could now drop as their first exalted a 4 T7 item with fitting affixes and a sealed champion affix.
GGG also talked about this issue with Headhunter and nowadays Mageblood. Stating that initially implementing such items were ‘a mistake’. Why? Because when your player got the potential to simply skip nigh the entire itemization progression in a single second then any future goals are gone. Great! Amazing drop! You got the jackpot of jackpots! So… and now? They get bored as nothing can be improved anymore, you already got ‘the best’ and nothing can compare, no other item upgrade feels ever as substantial as that one, all achievements seem in comparison ‘lackluster’ to the natural ‘high’ you got there. It’s called the ‘letdown-effect’ in psychology.
Basically you can see it similarly to a story where a hero saves the world. They achieved the biggest accomplishment possible, so in comparison now everything else feels just not adequate in comparison. The baseline of achievement has shifted and hence leads to not being fulfilled anymore.
This is a common issue when it comes to many aspects.
Gambling is primarily based on this psychological aspect. You seek the jackpot, a ever higher high.
Adrenaline seeking is the same. Ever more dangerous, ever more risky and demanding peak performance without failure, with ever higher stakes when a failure occurs.
And it also does go into effect when getting rewards in games.
That’s why managing the ‘peak accomplishment’ for any time is usually limited. In Grim Dawn you cannot find the best equipment right away. In Path of Exile outside of those problematic uniques you cannot get the top-tier equipment outside of doing top-tier content. In TLI you cannot even get the resources needed to attempt the top-end crafts without doing end-game content! Only Last Epoch is an outlier with this, allowing players to potentially get the best possible item in 100c while content progression is not even at the halfway point of time investment there to reach the peak.
And not only that, another issue is that it’s all based on a singular aspect of itemization systems. You got a unique? It inherently competes without LP with exalted items, which is good… but as soon as you got LP it now is all once again focused on exalted acquisition.
You need exalted for uniques, you need exalteds as a standalone, you need exalteds for everything. Shards are nigh worthless, crafting materials only focus around changing exalteds, rares are completely phased out and worthless, set items with very very few exceptions only are there to be shattered… and put on exalted items. Experimental affixes only are valuable on exalted items, champion Affixes are worthless unless it drops as exalted and fits. All is ‘exalted’ non-stop.
Look what other games do. TLI? Pick up the base and start crafting! It has no Affixes? Doesn’t matter! It has low power value? Doesn’t matter either, can be improved! It’s the same potential as a rare drop which has good Affixes. The only difference is that the road to achieve greatness is reduced. But you need to be in the top content to get the top bases to start that. You need the top content to gather the top materials to improve em.
In PoE the same. Your base is ilvl 86? Go ahead, you can make it into anything. Once again, only achievable in top content. And consumables to change it? Many only available in top content either.
In both you don’t come into the end-game and immediately have a shot at the top-end.
To make up for it the chance for a jackpot is respectively lower but it also reigns in the chance to utterly and entirely fail.
It manages rewards both in good and bad… because both are detrimental for the fun.
That’s because if I remember right you dislike crafting as a concept. So obviously so.
You’re not the prevalent player type in a system where the variance is so high. As I mentioned… check comparatively D2 and the variance there. Drop-rate was low but the variance of Affixes is too, hence individual drops have high potential value.
In LE the Affix count and range is vastly higher, also more base-types. That reduces the chance for a valuable drop substantially. Which as that aspect grows bigger it simply demands counteracting it through more powerful crafting options.
Up to a point where we have to go into systems like those from TLI or PoE as otherwise the sheer percentile of success with no methods to remove the outliers does cause significant divergence from the intended road of progression. For one person everything is piss-easy and they’re bored out of their minds while with the same time investment another person is frustrated as they’re getting demolished left, right and center. The only difference? RNG.
The point there is that really… they’re not even remotely equivalent.
One is designed will with the focus fitting specifically to their target audience and hence being well executed.
The other is designed with a focus on… who knows what, only adhering to very few people like you while the vast majority gets frustrated after an initial high feeling and causes them to leave ultimately.
If EHG would’ve stayed small in scale and not be so ‘smart’ (yes, sarcastic) to upscale to a 100 people company while making a live-service game then yes… I would be entirely on your side. They could do that. But alas… the target audience of this exact type of design is miniscule for long-term engagement. It’s better in a ‘one and done’ type of game where the only replay-value is variety of builds. LE doesn’t have variety of builds comparable to their competition yet. They don’t have content comparable to their competition yet. So why the heck would you think their strategy is in any way feasable?
Low target audience for that system. High competition for the other systems which could make up for it. Lack of invested time to compete on the parts they directly compete with others.
I would say they utterly failed to position themselves properly on the market long-term. Last Epoch is currently a ‘come in as a backup game and leave when the exhaustion from the main game has vaned’ type of game. A emergency solution, sub-par hence as it doesn’t ‘shine’.
Compare the ranges, compare the variety of base types, compare the amount of possible Affixes… you’ll see how ridiculously simplistic D2 is comparatively to modern implementations of their Affix System.
