saying that this game is 100% rng progression is not true at all. Once you understand, and grasp the loot filter, then you can craft easy t15’s and start feeling good about your character, thats also assuming you know what passive points to put in the skill and mastery trees for whatever type of build you are wanting to play. Anything extra after that, is purely for arena pushing, or theorizing other builds to play. You don’t even need blessings, or t20’s or exalted, or unique items to steam roll monolith content in non empowered, and empowered timelines. Everything else is extra icing on cake basically. After that point you start becoming very very powerful, so after the t15’s and how cheap/easy it is to make those based purely on drop find, and a little bit of gambling, it makes sense to have rng to make better things or get better things for optimization purposes for your build. End game is done after you do roughly 700 echoes anyways, at this point in the beta until more content and changes are added. Keep this in mind we are min maxing right now for what, roughly 50% of the games total overall content. Please realize this, and take into consideration that the game is far from being in a polished, and completed state.
Given that at the moment the monoliths are our only end game ‘chase’, they need to be a time sink or we’ll have nothing to do. As we get more activities and more things to chase I’m confident we aren’t going to be just chasing our blessings.
If the final reward screen does stay the same when we have new content, I’d argue strongly for an additional option that lets you reroll the blessing you have and then keep/replace the roll.
With the current system, even if you want a blessing from the common pool you only have 1/3 chance for it to pop. It is very easy to go 5+ entire mono runs without seeing one of the common blessings. Then, assuming you have a 50% roll and want better, you are looking at very common losing streaks as the OP describes which we all know are one of the things that makes us walk away from games.
The problem is much worse for the uncommon blessings. To get one and then get an upgrade roll in another run is simply not practical – if the monos were to stay like this and we have no other options. Lucky for us we have more goodies coming soon!
It is time that they bring more end game options .
Arena and monoliths are boring for me after 600+ hours .
Especially when you reach your chars around lvl 80.
To clarify my frustrations were over min/maxing, not making acceptable tier 15 pieces and I have a table of all the blessings available for each area, I wasnt trying to get for example endurance threshold in the empowered version of the 55 timeline.
After the 30th rerun of that timeline with no glyph bonus and a week straight of no succesfull crafts I abandoned the character and just started a different one. Im a stay at home dad mon-fri and work night shift on the weekends so when I say a week straight of no progress im literally talking like 40 real life hours, thats absurd.
But ya you can throw together stuff with x2 tier 5 rolls and x2 tier 2 or 3 rolls, sure, endgame though I like to min/max and go for perfect stuff, idm grinding but there has to be a reward at some point.
If you ask someone what kind of percentage they’d rate a landline at for reliability/uptime they’d probably say 99% since it’s virtually never down. The thing is 99% availability means almost 4 full days of downtime in a year.
In reality pots landlines are rated at 99.999% uptime, the famous “Five Nines”.
The problem is that human brains are terrible at intuitively grasping the meaning of a numerical statistic. It’s why most games that reveal statistics to players, like the infamous X-Com series for example, actually cheat in your favor even though it doesn’t feel like it.
Since genetic engineering isn’t a thing yet and the developers probably don’t want to wait for evolution to fix this glitch the only real solution is implementing sympathy mechanics. Track how much effort/time/resources has been put into something and pick some point to cut off the bell curve.
This. This. This.
The problem with most ARPG systems is that the RNG results in “chunks” of progress. Need a particular item ? The probability disctribution says it takes, on average, 100 tries. But that means somebody could come along and it takes them 300 tries.
that’s all very nice , but it leaves the unlucky player hating the game, because they just happened to be the one that took 3x as many tries as it “should” have to get something they wanted.
what you want is RNG that converges over time, i.e. people can get very lucky, but you limit how unlucky they can be. Easier said than done.
Say you want a particular unique. The game doesn’t know what you want. it might take you 100 runs, on average, but you’re not lucky so it takes you 1000, except by the time you get to 500 you’re probably going to go find something else to do.
However the crafting system is more incremental. earn crafting shards, craft your item bit-by-bit, so much more deterministic. But, then there is the cliff that is fracturing. so now you may have to craft 20 items, each of which requires a lot of farming to get the crafting items you need, to get the one item you want/need.
I think this is a very difficult problem to solve.
I just wanted to chime in and say please err on the side of making the game more deterministic.
I don’t think the game is ready for character 80+ yet (from 1 to 80+ at patch 8.1). Progression after that is tedious, boring and unrewarding. If I would created all my character in 8.1 i would have stopped at 85 max.
The game need many patches for real end game content and progression beyond 80+. 8.2 seems to be one of them. I’m quite existed to see what’s gonna happen, especially for all my 90+ characters
The entire game is no 100% rng progression. It would be more accurate to say that 90% of the game is 0% RNG progression. The only way you could get to 75 without T15 of good mods in every slot is if you did not use the excellent crafting system that drops enough mats and bases to say that T15 good mods is 0% RNG (just a small amount of time, which you are spending as you level and gain passive points, both of which are 0% RNG).
We absolutely need and depend on RNG to make content replayable. If the devs make a nice map and a cool boss but he drops 100% there is very little interest in replayability. If the boss is guaranteed to drop 1-5 class-specific shards, 50% to drop a rare crafting mat, 10% to drop his unique and 1% to drop a ‘chase’ item, then you have content that can be farmed.
But the devs understand that critically people play the game in different ways and keeping everyone happy–the different playstyles–leads to a large and active community which supports the long term life of the game.
People who want to play their character for 10-20 hours need content. Playing like that you want to feel like you accomplished something and ‘won’ before moving onto another character. If you want to keep playing that character for another 20 hours, you need new things to do, and if you want to play for 100 hours, you need even more things to do.
If you are going to support different playstyles for the long term success of the game you need content (and rewards) for the 10 hour crew and you need different stuff for the 100 hour crew. If your playstyle is the 10-hour game by preference, you can’t look at rewards designed for people who want to spend 100 hours playing. Making those rewards easier to achieve it directly shortening the content for the people who like 100 hours.
I have more faith in the devs of this game to support all these playstyles than any other devs I’ve seen for a long time. It is very impressive how much of the long term vision is already clearly visible while we are in beta and the majority of endgame content and rewards haven’t even been revealed yet!
I’ve been experiencing exactly the same frustrations as the OP, and have been spending many hours grinding empowered monos. Yes, we want more content and things to chase for our progression, but I would argue that pointing the finger directly at the RNG process isn’t good if you consider the entire playerbase and the longterm life of the game.
The crafting system isn’t too bad RNG-wise I think, and monolith boss trigger finally became deterministic so totally happy with that.
But the blessings, they are such a pain in the ass. Things such as crit avoidance, endurance, and resistance shred, to name a few, are an absolute essential in completing a decent build. Farming a single mod endlessly to no avail is simply a terrible experience and it’s the main reason I’m reluctant to put more time into this game.
They could maybe make it so that a mod that hasn’t appeared in a row accumulate a counter of sorts to raise their probability of appearing, that gets reset when they finally appear. If they want a time sink, they should at least make it rewarding.
Didn’t read the whole thread, so forgive me if it’s already been asked/answered, but…
What would be the harm in just letting people choose from all the available blessings? If the concern is about stacking too much of one thing, well…
a) Would that be so bad?
b) If so, they could offset this by making certain blessings only available from certain timelines.
Seems like it would help a lot. I’m super sketched out about how much RNG is in this game because it looks like it’s doing some of the things I hate about PoE (despite still really liking that game), and in certain areas doing them in worse ways.
This game is much more deterministic than most ARPGs or even looters in general, in fact a little to deterministic I think.
In some ways, but it still puts RNG in the places where it hurts most, and the trend I see it going is to do that even more.
So true
I agree that min/maxing can be pretty hard even with a lot of playtime in the current system. I got my void knight to 100 before the monolith rework strictly through monoliths (24 empowered rah’yeh and no chest :)). I was able to get full optimal t20s on optimal bases, but only successfully crafted 1 exalted piece that was an actual upgrade. The monolith rework makes it much harder to finish items, that % success change for t4/5 is a big difference.
On the other hand, the exalted nodes give a huge bump on finding crazy items. I think finding/crafting t20s with ideal bases is probably in worse spot, but gambling a removal on exalted bases is way more likely now.
I’d just give EHG some time to tune the craft rates and droprates on items. Maybe add some more crafting runes/glyphs too. I’d like to see some very rare endgame crafting tools available.
I think it’s going to take more than time and tuning to solve this. The system has fundamental issues outlined in a few other threads here.
I understand. At the time of writing the blessings were the major incentive to finish monoliths (I don’t know about the current state - will pick it up again soonish). When the end game expands to a multitude of things to do I think your suggestion is perfectly feasible.
Would they though? All the last Epoch streamers must have dozens of stash tabs of such items and they still play regularly. I have zero stash tabs of such items and no intention of even trying to obtain them, and I still enjoy playing… that is, until this mentality of “Players must grind” kicks in.
For many people playing these games “CharLv, Gear, some Boss” are big goals and maybe get bored after ‘finishing’ these.
Streamers have another reason to play games… making money.
Ofc many also like the game they play but ‘normal’ players get bored + quit faster then them.
Not a good comparison.
Isn’t the point of this thread about getting bored before finishing these?
Focusing on the choice of comparison misses the point entirely, but no problem, let’s compare with a hypothetical instead:
A ‘normal’ player starts Last Epoch as a Rogue, and beats the final boss with lots of kickass gear they crafted. They enjoyed playing the game.
Do they then quit the game because their gear is too good? Do they say - oh well, no use trying the Acolyte because I crafted gear too easy?
I’m saying this is unlikely, and I’m saying that the evidence is in how many players have lots of good gear and yet choose to keep playing - be they streamers, normal players or people who just played their first run through.
Hence, in a thread full of good points, I’m simply challenging the assumption that making crafting universally less frustrating will lead players to quit.
Looks like many in PathOfExile do stop after finishing (personal) goals of a League, after some weeks. And that would be faster with ‘easy gear/progression’. While streamers play that much longer or for the entire league.