No, it’s not different context; it’s a lack of context. How can someone offer a well reasoned opinion if they lack that? Not saying you, but in general.
I don’t know or care how much you or the other guy play. I was responding originally to a rhetorical question, with a bit of snark and disgust from the horseshit this topic brings.
Should be a nobrainer. The imprinting change made the game worse.
That is very debatable for many reasons.
For one, like I said about this in another post (replying to Donzpie that proceeded to block me because of a lack of argument), casuals aren’t impacted by this at all. Casuals already ignored imprints before the change. They didn’t play enough for it to drop in any meaningful quantity, they didn’t understand what items they should place there for optimal drops (because this is the only crafting mechanic in LE that is very obscure and in the vein of PoE) and they didn’t realize you have optimal ways of triggering it.
Casuals only placed something there and if they got an imprint drop, most of the time they didn’t even realize it’s an imprint drop because the item that drops is very different from what they placed in the imprint slot.
For another, it all has to do with balance and expectations. Should the game be dropping 4xT7 exalts/2LP Red Rings at all at this point in LE’s progression? Does LE have enough gameplay to justify it?
Should all gear be easy to get?
Exalts and LP are an open ended system. They were created with the clear intent that some things (4xT7 or 4LP Red Ring) are out of reach currently and will eventually be achievable when the game requires it.
Just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean we should be able to get it at this point. Much like 1 million coruption is theoretically possible but I don’t see anyone enraged that we can’t get there yet.
The fact that there some builds can kill Uby in seconds with 1LP legendaries is a separate issue. It should be fixed. It’s part of the overall game balance, but they’re separate balance issues in themselves.
The imprint changes only really affect the top 1% of players that kept on min-maxxing in endgame. And imprint was allowing for 4xT7 exalts when the game shouldn’t be producing them yet. So they nerfed it. It clearly needed a nerf based on what the game currently has to offer.
One might argue on the scale of the nerf, but not really on the need of the nerf itself.
While I agree with your post this “top 1% player” part does not really apply here
The imprint change impacted a much much larger portion of the community. Even just imprinting some medium rare uniques just to get a few more 1 or 2lp drops from that got noticeably impacted already by the change.
While the very very upper echelons of players got impacted more by the imprint change, it still affects everybody, even casuals and people. Playing a lot but don’t push 600+ corruption.
I think one of the major factor why this change seems to be so dramatic and causes a lot of negative feedback is some people not realizing how strong imprints were when used to its full extend. And some people that didn’t completely abuse it as much as possible just see them being impacted while the imprint system wasn’t giving them these insane items.
And of course also the “top 1% players” because that is were the impact is the most significant.
I think we could see a change where EHG adjust the imprints to be more impactful again for the lower and medium range of items, but still keep the absolute top end nerfed as it is right now.
As the person who started this thread i would like to remind you all that i specifically said “killed ENDGAME farming”. The problem that i was trying to highlight is that it, the killing of imprint drops, has removed the reason for continuing to play for the endgame min max players. Now if EHG intended that, once you quickly have all your 300c t7+76 gear, your only further reason to continue is to play the slot machine, then i think they have made a very bad choice in game design.
Yes I fully understand that, I just still disagree with the overall sentiment that this was a bad change.
I think this very well was one of these things where they maybe should have started lower and raise trhe bar, instead of having a overtuned system that later gets nerfed.
I want to reiterate, that I think the imprint system itself is a very cool system, that allows some good flexibility for farmign both exalted items and LP uniques(also for jsut simply getting en mass uniques to corrupt as well).
I just think that a lot of the “they killed the game” “they killed endgame farming” etc are very dramatic. While the imprint system was a good addition, LE worked before that even existed and it is not required to have meaningful endgame farming.
“quickly” “300c” and “T7+76 gear” those three don’t add together for me.
Most of my characters don’t even have multiple exalts(or legendaries with multiple exalted affixes) when I reach 500c or 600c. When I do 300c and kill Aberroth I for the most part have a mix of T6 and T7 exalts with some 1LP uniques that have a T7 affix slammed.
Multiple exalt gear (with actual relevant exalted affixes) does come in much later for me everytime I played and pushed a character significantly further than jut 300c
Well welcome to loot driven games. LE already has significantly more target farming and things that affect your loot compared to any other ARPG. Even with the old imprint system it is still playing the slot machine, it was just a much “stronger” slot machine in terms of its output and chances. So much so, that some multiple exalt gear didn’t even mean that much and were not really exciting.
I want the top items to be meaningful and have me excited when I get them or successfully craft them into something useable. The threshold is obviously different for different people, but I think having dual exalt items with two meaningful exalted affixes be it T7T7 or T7T6 should be the upper limit for the top 5-10% of characters and only the “top 1%” should be able to even have a chance to get triple exlalt items.
With the old imprint systems probably the top 20-30% had multiple exalt affix items. That just devalues them quite a lot and doesn’t make them as exciting, whic hshouldn’t be the case for the top rarity item.
I disagree with you, and I agree with DJSamhein. The very next person who replies to you:
…Is reinforcing DJ’s point:
The change to the imprint system had a negligible impact on 99(,99)% of the players.
People who:
Are already a small subgroup within the playerbase.
People who were addicted to the imprint system and used it as their main source of item upgrades, then, were the 0,01% of players. The people who play 10 hours per day every day, the “min max players”, etc.
And exactly the kind of player who is unwilling to accept that something that is good for them may not be good for the game as a whole.
So yeah, of course people were going to complain about this. It’s the same thing as if EHG had nerfed an overpowered build, those who were exploiting it would complain. The thing is, those complaints are not worth listening to.
I am not sure what your point is? I said and agreed that the very top players are affected considerbly more than other type of players
BUT
As much as I am generally a big fan of looking at things like this to see who is really affected and I use this “top 1% of players” argument a lot of the times myself, I still think this imprint system impacts alot mroe players than these 1 digit upper percentiles.
The bullet point list you did is artifically bigger than it is in practice. You automatically unlock some weaver points while progressing regular monoliths. And you do NOT need to be an absoltue min maxer to utilize the imprint system.
Also most notabley there are also players that don’t push towards 4 digit corruption but still unlock almsot all weaver points and do some endgame grinding on the lower and medium levels of corruption.
So I am still not sure where you want this argument of yours to be going? It seems like we agree on some parts but disagree on the exact details of what players are affected and how much? Not sure 
That one I amen too. The players that are ultra deep invovled into a game an are grinding out countless of dozens, if not hundreds of hours each season often don’t see the bigger picture and only look at things from a very small and narrow perspective.
Yes I agree and that is what I am trying to do here in general. Try to give some coutnerweight to some of the drama and outcry. At the end of the day EHG needs to see how happy they are with how it is now.
But from my perspective the actual impact on the game as a whole is a lot lower as many people make it out to be.
Especially on some other platforms like Reddit I got absolutely annihilated with negativity when I spoke out about the imprint nerfs. Which really strenghtened my thought about what kind of bubble of players are on reddit for the most part.
I got a solid 80 or so hours out of this season, previously 250 hours in season 2 alone, and I have to agree. The imprint nerfs significantly shortened both my playtime and desire to stick around for longer, let alone play multiple builds per season. Which mind you, EHG, different builds and abilities were always a great motivator for me to purchase mtx beyond the seasonal supporter pack. As it is, I’ll have to seriously reconsider going forward because the game is currently going towards a direction I’m just not finding as enjoyable as previously.
As for the imprint nerfs, I’ll just play one or two full unique builds in the future and call it good enough when I slammed my LP1. Throwing in a corruption or two is fun, when it hits, but anything above LP2 feels unreasonable right now. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
In my opinion LE just doesn’t have enough endgame (yet) to warrant dozens of hours grinding for that mythical 7 6 or 7 7 item, which most of the time you can’t even properly craft on because FP is fucked, and then you want me to roll the dice, hit the slam AND possibly roll the dice again, winning the corruption?
This works for games like PoE, but here? Nah.
Expecting anything resembling constructive conversation to come out of Reddit is already an exercise in futility.
With regards to the OP: Telling new players that a 3LP Unique with 3 high-rolled T7 affixes is the minimum to get a build working is guaranteed to drive more prospective players away from Last Epoch than nearly anything the developers can do. Telling players “the real game” doesn’t start until you invest nearly 1,000 hours in the game is a guaranteed method to ensure people don’t purchase Last Epoch in the first place.
A lot of complaints stem more from how wildly imbalanced the game is to the point where people feel like they need Uber items in order to compete for the leaderboard. It’s a valid complaint, and one that’s not really going to be resolved since emergency nerfs will surely drive away anyone who has to focus on their jobs and can’t play the fun, OP build in the 1st 24-48 hours of a season.
As for imprints themselves, there are no clear-cut expectations of what the devs promise in this regard. It would be nice to have one imprint focus on maintaining the base implicits for those who really need a specific type of equipment, and another focus on maintaining the affix count (so that T25 items may drop slightly more often, but there’s no guarantee on having the exact affix you want being T7).
Clearer language from both the devs and the playerbase is key, because it’s hard to know how much the complaint is the opaqueness of the system and how much the complaint is “I need all this gear to be good because the skills themselves suck and need this much juice to function.”
Yep, that’s pretty much it.
Reddit is basically a massive echo chamber, it’s almost expected that negativity (or toxic positivity) would reign there.
But if you are going to stop playing the game thanks to the nerf to the imprint system, does your “always” include 1.0 and 1.1, when the imprint system didn’t exist yet?
I’m just a filthy casual and didn’t play in ye olden days of yore pre-release, but wanted to add my two cents.
Imprints were likely dropping too much in S3, but it definitely feels like it has gone too much in the other direction this season. I did the troves/coast/imprint grind last season, and just gave up early on it this season. Imprinted costs spawn much less frequently, which slows down amber farming to place troves. The troves themselves drop less due to imprint nerfs. Between both of these, you can place like 15 troves without a single imprint drop, then need to grind much longer (even if you juice the troves) to replace the amber due to the decreased coast frequency. When I started a second char, I honestly didn’t even bother putting anything in the imprints.
I play weird builds, I’m not interested in the meta or 1-shot builds or pushing corruption into the 5 digits. I enjoy finding ways of making things like bees or void volcanic orb. This comes with the need for additional farming to make the build usable at 500-1000c which is fine, but it also means there is a true need to find double slams or T7/T7 T7/T6 with the right base for crafting. This season added some nice things, but I hit a wall much much earlier in the gameplay loop due to these nerfs and the grind to get past it is just unbearable, and I’ve already put down the game for this season.
The problem with the imprint nerf is it doesn’t address the core issue that made it necessary in the first place, which is the multiple layers of RNG to find that viable item. You need multiple exalted affixes, and the right affixes, and the right base, and enough FP, and hope you don’t hit a bad FP roll when crafting, and hit the right slam if you want to make it a legendary. The way to overcome all this RNG is sheer volume, imprints had to drop like candy. If the devs don’t like there were so many triple or quad T7s, then there’s 2 things that can be done to solve this:
Remove the ability for imprints to proc and drop higher/more exalted affixes. In season 3, it was well known that the progression path was find a T7/T6, imprint it, proc T7/T7, re-imprint, proc T7/T7/T6, etc. Make people farm the base item through normal means (nem towers, higher corr, or just plain luck) rather than relying on imprint procs and speed-running troves. Let the imprints drop true “similar” items, if you imprint T7/T6, that’s what it drops.
Limit the number of times an imprinted item can proc. You imprint an item, it can drop 5 times (just as an example), you can’t imprint that specific item instance again and have to refarm it.
The devs still need to improve target farming of items and are wasting the timeline system. Instead of alt timelines just giving different blessing or unique item rewards, rework it so you can target certain class items, affixes, etc in different timelines or bosses. Add a variety of weaver nodes that weight affix drops. Add more runes/glyphs that weight certain affix rolls. There’s tons of potential options here with LE’s systems, the answer doesn’t have to be straight buffs or nerfs.
Corruption also needs a rework. It’s way way too much RNG right now, and I don’t mean between the chance to get a positive or negative effect. I farm to craft a great item, corrupt it and get a T2 sealed affix in no way useful to my build. I know corruption is supposed to be random and not just another guaranteed affix, but it’s not fun right now.
It isn’t enough to say “well POE does the same thing”, this game isn’t POE, it’s not supposed to be trying to be POE. If the devs are just going to copy the systems from another game and say “good enough”, then I might as well just go play that game that has more frequent updates and bugfixes and way better balancing.
@Heavy is correct that i have used emotive language but the main point i was making is exactly what you say. Builds hit a practical wall much sooner now hence me saying it has “killed the endgame farming”. The probability of improving items has dropped dramatically which leads to the other important point you make
I was quite happy with the layers of RNG of removal, havoc, FP, julra etc but this necessitates lots of mutli-exalt affix exalted item drops to be able to get what you looking for. It makes me wonder if those saying it was OP ever went through the process of days / weeks of farming, failing, farming and on to eventually get even one item that you were hunting.
How often do casuals even trigger an imprint? Most don’t know that they can use special woven echoes to trigger more often and probably would still not do it (because they don’t have enough amber to keep buying them and they don’t drop that often).
Not to mention that when you do get a few drops from imprints, the most likely scenario is that it drops a completely different unique that you won’t be using. Especially if you imprint medium rare uniques.
It does affect those players that are in between casuals and grinders. Players that tend to play more often and for longer and have a higher knowledge of the game, even if they don’t play 10h every day.
But ultimately, this is about balance. Last season we looked at the arena ladder and almost every single item was 2xT7+, with even a few 4xT7. This season we look at the same ladder and we see that there are a few 2xT7 still but now they’re rarer.
The problem is that there are builds that can kill Uby in seconds and do 10k corruption with 1xT7 gear. And then players feel like every other build should be able to do the same and so they “need” double and triple exalteds.
But the problem is the existence of the super broken builds, which need to be nerfed, not the existence of builds that struggle with Uby, which don’t need a buff for now (other than the very underpowered ones that can’t even kill Uby in the hands of very skilled player).
As I said before, the nerf was necessary. There shouldn’t really be a discussion on that point. What is open to argument is the magnitude of the nerf.
Was it maybe too much? Possibly. But they wanted to stop the large amount of 3xT7+ that was spawning and they seem to have done so.
And we still have players with several 2xT7 legendaries on the ladder, so it’s still possible to farm them.
The problem is that there are builds that can kill Uby in seconds and do 10k corruption with 1xT7 gear. And then players feel like every other build should be able to do the same and so they “need” double and triple exalteds.
I completely agree with the first part of this. The gap between these broken builds and other ones is insane. They don’t need to pull a “fun detected fun nerfed” approach, but they have got to do a better job testing these things and balancing. The game can have some builds better than others, that’s normal ARPG, what’s going on now isn’t.
I do disagree with the second part. The reason Uber Abby is held up as the standard for whether a build is viable is due to the lack of endgame loops at all. After normal Abby which is quickly becoming just like a training dummy fight, the options are Uber Abby, Arena, and pushing corruption. Arena has no point, Corruption hits diminishing returns quickly and becomes just about bragging rights, and Uber Abby has actual unique rewards. Right or wrong, that’s going to be seen as the standard by whether a build is good or not.
Even if you don’t want to do uber abby, pushing corruption to even just around 1k does start necessitating multi-exalted slams or crafts if you aren’t playing a meta build. It doesn’t have to be T7/T7, and I agree a lot of complaining you’ll see on chat about an item being “trash” because it’s 1 point off a max roll or something is hyperbole. But there is very much a set of builds that should be viable with the current system but aren’t with just 1x T7 slams once you hit about 500c. It’s gotten better with corruption runes and primordial affixes, but it’s still very much present.
I really don’t think too much should be read into the top spots on the ladder. The existence of multi-T7 by people playing like it’s a fulltime job or running broken builds that clear exponentially faster than others isn’t reflective of what the typical game experience is like. It’s “possible” to kill uber abby at level 38 like we saw this season, it doesn’t mean it’s even remotely plausible for everyone.
If it was about balance then perhaps EHG should consider looking at problematic classes / build archtypes, not systems that were largely fine and well received. I’m specifically talking about Rogue, there hasn’t been a single season where it wasn’t busted. Period.
Imprints on the other hand affect builds and build diversity alike. People defaulting to LP1 T7 as a result isn’t what I call good balance, even less so when the top end remains unchanged as you’ve pointed out.
You’re just hurting the larger part of the playerbase by nerfing imprints to the state it’s currently in. And respectfully, imprints were one of the better systems this game had to offer.
Never said I’ll stop playing, it’ll just be much less. There are better games in the genre if I felt the need to grind 100h+ for one item slot to be considered “perfect” in my books.
It’s still hard to understand how we’re entering another season with these broken builds not being nerfed but seemingly being used as the basis for “balancing” systems that affect all other builds. Is it really a good decision from a game dev perspective to start by nerfing imprints instead of a few multipliers for ballista?
I’m not trying to armchair-gamedev too much because I certainly don’t have a game out that a lot of people are playing. But it really feels like at times the devs don’t understand their own game or how to do root-cause analysis on problems instead of putting bandaids on symptoms.
I think this just has to do with the disconnect between player expectations and the dev expectations. I feel like Uby was set into place to create a tangible balance goal. And the first goal they wanted to achieve was that all builds would be barely able to do it, requiring a skilled and dedicated player to do so. Casuals weren’t meant to be able to do Uby yet.
But the fact that they keep having broken builds every season that trivialize Uby, where even a casual can take that build and clear him in seconds makes this a futile goal.
Imprints weren’t largely fine, though. There were lots of 3xT7s and even a few 4xT7s. That’s a huge power creep when you compare it to Season 1. In just 2 seasons you went from 2xT7 is very rare to 4xT7 is somewhat rare.
And the fact that they need to get build balance right doesn’t mean that they can’t balance other things as well. That would be like saying “I should be able to take a bat and break everyone’s arms because those guys got away with murder”.
Builds definitely need a lot better balancing. It’s always been an issue for EHG to balance them. The only time they actually managed to balance things properly was going from season 0 to season 1, mostly because they nerfed ward which was being abused by almost every build. There were still some broken builds, but there were far less of them and the difference was far less as well.
But since then gap only increased massively, partly because of unbalanced new skills and partly due to enormous power creep in gear we’ve seen.
The larger part of the playerbase barely benefitted from imprints. The larger part of the playerbase placed a unique in the imprints and very rarely, if ever, saw that same unique drop from an imprint. Almost always, they’d get a different unique.
Imprints are an obscure mechanic that only a few players understand how it actually works. It could have been a great system if they only made it so that you’d have a small chance to have the exact same item drop with a small chance of having some sort of upgrade, like a tier increase, a sealed affix, or a little more FP. That would actually be a good system that would let you slowly improve your item over time.
As it is now, imprints just drop random stuff with an overly complicated ruleset that almost no one actually understands or knows how to optimize.
Build balance is actually very hard to achieve. PoE required 6-7 years until balance was actually pretty decent. PoE2, despite all the experience GGG already had and despite the systems being very similar, also has abismal balance.
That being said, it’s hard to understand some of EHG’s decisions, especially not nerfing clearly broken builds, Ballista being the most obvious culprit.
But build balance being this terrible doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try to balance anything else and should instead just say “screw it” and unbalance everything even more.
Imprints were 4xT7 already. With corruptions this would mean that 5xT7 would also be a reality.
2xT7 were very common and 3xT7 wasn’t that rare. With corruption they would make 3xT7 common.
LE doesn’t have enough gameplay content yet to justify the need for everyone running around with triple exalts.
Just because something in the game is broken doesn’t mean that everything in the game should be broken as well to compensate.
Lets see how many players have this many in a season or two. Many players (like myself) have lots of 2t7 exalts stored away from last season but this is not being replenished and spent on new builds. Also many of the builds you are looking at were probably put together last season and are being replayed because making “new” builds of similar level power level is largely unattainable.
If it is not to be “expected” or “achievable” that top end builds have 2t7 and a few higher than 2t7 gear then we are back to the main point again and that is the playability loop ends way sooner than it was in s3.
I’ll add too that the legendary and crafting/slam system is what sets LE apart from other games. It feels like incredibly poor design to have a system that presents “you can get items with multiple exalted affixes, you can slam up to 4 affixes onto uniques” along with “actually we don’t really want people having items with more than 1 exalted affix, the good uniques really shouldn’t drop with more than 1-2 LP”.
If a new player looks at the system on paper, there’s an enormous gap between what the game says you can do, and what the game actually wants you to be able to do.