Time invested to reward gained

[asdfractal]

I want to start off by saying that I think Last Epoch is fundamentally a great game and has a lot of potential. As a long time gamer and ARPG player, this game has a lot to offer and some unique ideas. I very much enjoy the general gameplay, the passive trees and especially having a tree for each skill. Overall I think it has a lot going for it.

Unfortunately after playing for 150 hours my playtime recently has drastically dropped for a few reasons. It has naturally taken me getting to end current end game to realise these things - the majority of those hours are on one character, and I have another one beginning monoliths. Some may say I haven’t played enough, but I would argue that to realise this only requires running a few empowered monoliths. Additionally I believe as a new player my perspective is important. I don’t believe veterans input is less valuable however they could be skewed by a heavy investment.

I want to give a couple of examples to illustrate the feeling that at the moment feels quite pervasive and I’m not quite sure if it’s a conscious design decision or not. That feeling is a lack of respect for my time.

Crafting

In general I like the ideas behind the crafting system, but there are some pretty big flaws. I really like that strongest items are a combo of drop (T6/7) and crafted, rather than just crafted. I also like the idea behind the instability/fracture system that prevents endless scour crafting like PoE.

There are many more things about it I dislike -

• White and yellow items are 99% of the time undesirable due to instability/affixes.
• White items cannot be crafted on enough to make them worth it, whereas yellow items have 3/4 affixes and often 2/3 of them are not what you want. In order to fix this you need to cleanse but that risks bricking the item by removing affixes you want as well as adding instability.
  • The above situation is so common that I use my filter to only show blue regular items, which feels pretty strange.
• Due to this finding a good item to craft on is very rare, then on top of it not fracturing too early, then getting high enough tiers on affixes not to fracture with a damaging one anyway and lose some of those tiers is very very rare.

T7 affixes dropping on low level bases is just a terrible experience. In my levelling from 90-100, I saw 2 T7 drops, one of them on an ‘Ancient Spear’ (+58 melee phys) as opposed to the highest level polearm ‘Sovnya’ (+88 melee phys). I think this should never happen.

Even though I just mentioned the endless scouring of PoE, I think their crafting has a great balance between time investment and reward. If I decide to spend 5 hours aligning all the stars I can probably create a build defining, 10ex item with reasonable consistency. It requires a lot of knowledge, external resources and time, but the reward is there. I personally don’t want to do that, but it exists.

Right now I have spent more time crafting and have only mediocre items due to them all fracturing before they become good. I collect a lot of items that show in my very strict filter for crafting. I’m not saying I want guaranteed T5 on all my crafts, and I understand that you want people to keep playing and strive for improvement but constantly creating sub-optimal gear feels really bad. I like the direction LE crafting is going but it definitely needs some improvement.

Monolith blessing farming

Currently this is the real motivation killer for me. When I think about starting the game to farm for blessings, I often don’t start it. This has been discussed in another thread and I just want to address one point first -

• It is true that a build may be strong without optimal blessings, but the fact that they exist and are quite powerful means that players are going to want the best blessing for them. This is especially true for min/max players like myself.

Once I realised the scale of the grind I find it very hard to justify putting my time into it. Right now there are 5 ‘combat’ blessing monoliths - ones that affect your combat such as resist, dodge, etc. Not even mentioning the other 5, it’s still a lot.

There are 11-13 choices per monolith, with a selection of 3 upon each completed monolith. So a 3/11 or 3/13 chance of seeing the blessing you want, about 25%. So one in four completed monoliths you might see the blessing you want. But then you also have to get a good power roll for it to even be worth it. Take for example the grand resist blessing with a 45-75% resist. Range of 30, roughly 3% chance of each number. Actually the first reaction I had to blessings having power rolls was “why?”
(If my math is very far off I’m happy to be corrected, but I believe my points still stand)

If you take all of the above that is a fuckload of grinding for a small chance at what you want on even 1 monolith, let alone 5. Even doing 1 monolith to completion can be a large chunk of time invested and not trivial for every build or player, and if you promote just zooming to the objective and teleporting out then that is highlighting another issue of pointless content just to skip it. I understand there need to be incentives to keep people playing and constantly striving for character improvement, but this frankly is ridiculous and absolutely disrespectful of the time investment. When I brought this up someone said to me “you’re playing aren’t you?” Well actually, no. This to me is a game killing amount of grinding and the balance between time and reward is vastly skewed to the time and frustration side.

To add further to this here is an example. If I decided to take the lightning resist blessing and get a good roll and then I drop a T7 lightning resist item, what am I going to do? Not use this epic drop, or have to go through the whole grind again to find a different blessing at a good roll? Either way it is a bad feeling choice to the player.

Now people might say it is a small thing, but as I said above the fact it exists is reason enough to address this. Myself I enjoy the challenge of pushing content like arena, and small advantages like this can compound to a large advantage. On top of that, I know there are other end game systems in development, which could potentially be even more of a challenge than what we currently have, making strong blessings even more necessary. And what if I want to make another character and progress that into end game, am I expected to do this again on every single character?

This is getting into the levels of unfriendly progression of WoW in recent times, which is again a game killer for me and why I don’t play it anymore. Finding a balance between respecting the players time, reward and character progression is extremely important and right now the monolith system does not feel very rewarding at all.

To end I just want to reiterate that I believe Last Epoch is an awesome game it has a lot of potential and great future. The reason I decided to put my thoughts into a post like this is because I care about it, and I bought it after watching a video and thinking it looked incredible. I hope stuff like this can be addressed so I want to invest my time into it, because I find it very fun to play.

[Shtrak]

Interesting points.
I don’t agree about crafting, but probably because I’m less a min/max player than you are. I’m globally happy with what I find, even “trash” items can be usable.
And I rather agree about Monoliths, but it did not bring me to the point where I don’t want to play anymore. Sometimes, I just feel “I don’t want to do it once more” when I don’t get the blessing I wanted.

[Macknum]

@asdfractal

T7 affixes dropping on low level bases is just a terrible experience. In my levelling from 90-100, I saw 2 T7 drops, one of them on an ‘Ancient Spear’ (+58 melee phys) as opposed to the highest level polearm ‘Sovnya’ (+88 melee phys). I think this should never happen.

Dropped a t7 Chance to ignite on a short bow… couldn’t care less for the base because I played an ignite build. Why should this never happen? Just one example :D.

If I find crappy items i ignore them or shatter them and be good with it.

@asdfractal

Right now I have spent more time crafting and have only mediocre items due to them all fracturing before they become good.

Crafting can be frustrating but I have some rules I apply to myself when I craft. First use stability runes up to arround ~20% fracture chance. If the item fractures there it never wanted to be with me anyway :D. After this treatment there is more then enough stability left to have a good chance to get a 4T5 item (maybe 20-25 chance if I consider all trys).
I’m simply in the mind set to not get my hopes up high and to make the best out of all 4T3 items because normaly they most likely are enough to get arround.

@asdfractal

Once I realised the scale of the grind I find it very hard to justify putting my time into it.

When I take a look at the time it needs to reach level 100 I think it’s hard to justify putting time into the game because the grind is real. Then again I tell myself “I’m playing a grind game!”. If I don’t want to grind I simply do something else. Grinding is a fun part of a grind game from my point of view.
is it to much? Maybe. Do I need the monolith blessings for example? Never needed them. Is there a way to make the monolith blessings a better experince for anyone? For sure!

@asdfractal

If you take all of the above that is a fuckload of grinding for a small chance at what you want on even 1 monolith, let alone 5

i don’t think 10-15 minutes are to much to ask for the chance of of a 75% resist passive. Just my point of view. [edit] Rofl… I had some very veeery strange days and found the error in my asupmtion. It takes far more time, the day I was testing “how fast I can go” I was on a phone call and came to an end in “15 minutes” but I started 4pm and ended half past 5 pm after the phone call while I was somewhere in the middle of the run. With my build I’m fast but it’s arround 45 to 60 mins if everything works like a charm but mostly it don’t. Still even 2h per 5 monos to have a chance for a 75% resi buff is still very good in my book.

@asdfractal

The reason I decided to put my thoughts into a post like this is because I care about it, and I bought it after watching a video and thinking it looked incredible

Your feedback is great and I get your point of view. I guess for more casual player or even veterans with only a little time this is a terrible setup but even with 10h gametime a week you can progress if you don’t want everything as fast as disgusting burger at McD.

[asdfractal]

@Macknum

i don’t think 10-15 minutes are to much to ask for the chance of of a 75% resist passive. Just my point of view.

Are you saying you can do every empowered monolith from beginning to boss kill in 10-15 mins? I find that very hard to believe, especially on all builds and with “make the best out of all 4T3 items”. I also addressed that it’s problematic that it promotes skipping content, which that time frame implies.

I have between T12 and T18 on all my items, currently dual wield Rive VK with regular over 100k crits, full resist, 45% armour, 50% dodge with potion and 60% end/400 threshold and there’s no way I can even come close to that. The last 3 monoliths with high epochs can even become quite risky with stacks of affixes, and sometimes trying to skip causes deaths with stacks of crazy mobs.

@Macknum

Then again I tell myself “I’m playing a grind game!”. If I don’t want to grind I simply do something else. Grinding is a fun part of a grind game from my point of view.

I do agree in part, but the fun is also in the reward of strengthening your character by getting the item/blessing you want, or making it 10 waves further than your best in arena. If you just grind for hours, skipping monolith content and are not rewarded with anything I don’t really think that’s fun.

[Macknum]

As I said on the last part: I get your point and I understand this can be frustrating. For the Monoliths: I do only the objectives when I go for blessings, rush it, deal with it and be good. Most time is spent on the big bad boss at the end. On top of it I talk playtime, no loadingscreens no looking at loot from the chests because if there is something good in it or dropped durig the run it can take up to 1h to get 5 runs done depending on the luck I have.

[Jerle]

@asdfractal

Actually the first reaction I had to blessings having power rolls was “why?”

I think it does help to give incentive to continue the monolith grind. I think the real problem is that there isnt other intermediate goals when doing your monolith grind, so when the only perceived reward is hitting a blessing with power roll you want, the activity → reward loop feels out of proportion.

I think the devs just need to add smaller goals and things to chase while you work towards another round of monolith boss clear so that the routine feels less punishing.

[Heavy]

@Jerle

I think the real problem is that there isnt other intermediate goals when doing your monolith grind, so when the only perceived reward is hitting a blessing with power roll you want, the activity → reward loop feels out of proportion.

This only applies to normal characters, that use a shared stash or if you use a build that need a specific item.

Bit i think all of the MoF unique drops are incredibly interesting and cool.
Especially the ones that only drop in Empowered.

[Llama8]

@Macknum

@asdfractal

If you take all of the above that is a fuckload of grinding for a small chance at what you want on even 1 monolith, let alone 5

i don’t think 10-15 minutes are to much to ask for the chance of of a 75% resist passive. Just my point of view.

Are you talking about just the boss or the entire run from 0 timelines to the boss? 'Cause I’m calling BS on that if you mean the latter even on normal early monoliths let alone the later monoliths empowered. And don’t tell me you’re ignoring the load times.

[Heavy]

Yesterday, while i was streanming i had a nice idea, that could maybe be a good solution for OP.

I created a thread because i am really curious what other people think.

Skipping early Echoes in Monolith | Another possible gold sink?

I had an idea regarding grinding Monolith for Blessings and/or Unique Items. When we start a Timeline (when you choose you want to play the normal or empowered variant), we can choose to skip X Number of echoes and start at a relatively high echo count already. Possible restriction: Cost a large amount of Gold Only avaialble, when we completed the timeline on the difficulty we want to skip, at least once already Just to give you some numbers (which are of course subject to change). We coul…

[asdfractal]

@Jerle

I think it does help to give incentive to continue the monolith grind.

I don’t think monoliths at this stage are interesting enough to warrant incentivizing them for endless grinding, every empowered one is the essentially the same difficulty level. In PoE you have procedural generation and awakener levels in mapping to scale up the bosses and keep it interesting and progressing. You can juice the maps up to crazy levels making them difficult and lucrative.

Right now monolith just feels like the means to an end, which is blessings. From what I read majority of players at end game are just zooming monoliths as fast as possible to farm blessings.

I also want to emphasize that I said these are examples of a bigger issue, there is more than just this. Another one - in arena, if I want to get a level 80 key I must end my run, thereby exchanging my progress for a key to access it from 80 again. Meaning I can’t push as far as I want and die, I must end it early. Otherwise I always have to start from wave 1. Why should I start from wave 1 when I am pushing close to 200? Grim Dawn crucible however long ago that was released had checkpoints you could start from as often as you want.

People might say it’s a short time to get to wave 80 but if you want to do multiple rounds of arena that can easily be an extra hour of pointless low wave easy mode. It comes back to design that doesn’t respect the players time.

@Heavy I like that idea a lot, and it could easily be implemented with some system to pick affixes. I think it’s fine to have to do it initially, but once you have done it there should be checkpoints. It’s pretty much the same feeling as I said just now about early arena waves.

[Jerle]

@asdfractal

I don’t think monoliths at this stage are interesting enough to warrant incentivizing them for endless grinding, every empowered one is the essentially the same difficulty level.

Yes, agree. This is exactly my point:

@Jerle

I think the real problem is that there isnt other intermediate goals when doing your monolith grind, so when the only perceived reward is hitting a blessing with power roll you want, the activity → reward loop feels out of proportion.

[Llama8]

@asdfractal

From what I read majority of players at end game are just zooming monoliths as fast as possible to farm blessings.

From what I read that’s what people do in PoE as well… Part of it’s just people deciding that killing mobs (playing the game) isn’t the most “efficient” way to play the game.

[Heavy]

@asdfractal

Right now monolith just feels like the means to an end, which is blessings. From what I read majority of players at end game are just zooming monoliths as fast as possible to farm blessings.

It really depends on what you want to do.

Sure if you want to farm blessings, you will most likely try to complete as many timeline as fast as possible.

But actually killing mobs in MoF, especially when you reach higher echoes, is very profitable in terms of loot.

Even when i actively try to farm blessings i always start clearing alot of mobs, when i reached high echo counts (like 15-20+)

Also don’t forget you can simply do monolith for farming gear, without trying to get blessings.
If you push a empowered monolith to echo 30+ the loot is incredible.

Tbh, i don’t know what “the majority of people” doing in MoF and i really don’t care, because i always felt killing stuff is worthwhile in MoF (especially since 0.8 and now even more with the new empowered timelines in 0.8.1)

[darkdeal]

Yea, I kinda hope that Legendary items add a lot to the game. As it stands, the game is lacking depth for me.

There are a couple things that make these type of games “fun”. Gearing and killing mobs.

Leveling should be something that just happens while you are having fun playing the game. The fact that some people grind levels as if getting to the end is going to increase fun may be an indication of something missing. It won’t get more fun once you hit level 100, it gets worse because it is one less thing to strive for.

Loot and crafting in this game are boring. Everything is just filtered down to affixes. There are a few exciting uniques, but not enough. This is why nothing seems rewarding.

I do think skills and killing mobs is fun in this game. That is only half of the equation though, and without the reward side, it is just pointless grind at some point.

I basically just log in now to try our neat new skills/classes. I get them to around level 80 and I’m done. I am bored with them at that point as I won’t see anything new. Skills are done. Gear is done but maybe a very few minmax points. Playing through the game so much even makes subsequent characters boring faster, because there isn’t any new content. (Class specific content could be cool)

Obviously, there is more to come with the game. More end game content. Legendary items. I am just hoping these things add to the longevity of play. It kinda sucks getting to the point of little growth potential so quickly in the game.

[acuteapathy1]

I suspect the only way to address the issue with monoliths not feeling rewarding until the last boss (for the drop/blessing) is to rework the earlier quests to provide greater rewards than they do currently. That ensures there’s some feeling of reward as you grind through the endless echoes until you hit 25+ to spawn the final boss. Right now, the story quests are interesting the first time you do them given that their objectives are slightly different to the normal echo objectives, but there’s no feeling of payoff once you complete them. For all intents and purposes, they are normal echoes.

Add a mini boss at the end of each or a small reward or a combination of the two. Heck, if the quest echoes started providing things like small stacks of Shattering Runes or Runes of Shaping I’d be grinding monoliths happily all day long.

[darkdeal]

That is actually a really good idea. Have a known item reward for each echo. That would maybe incentivize someone to choose a specific echo over another other than just the mods added. It could be randomized, but should be weighted on the difficulty of the mods of the echo.

I could even see a point where someone has a choice of the final quest echo vs an echo with a great purple item. How many would put off the quest echo to get the purple item only to make the quest echo harder when they get to it again?

[Nastharius]

Leveling is a important thing in a RPG. You think about skills, skill tree, passives, synergies, your gear and so on. It’s realy rewarding to see you character growing and growing. The problem is in these days, many people are only looking for meta builds and want to rush through the game to be much powerful as possible. Then they reach a certain level in the game, where they need special gear and things slow down fast. At his point it begins to be frustrating. So there has to be Endgame, Endgame, Endgame.
RPGs are most fun if you realy like your character. In Marvel Heroes for examble, you could prestige your hero. This means, you reset your char to level 1, you need more exp to level up and so on. And you could do this multiple times. The only reward was a new font color of the character name! And many people did this, because they loved thier hero, or two or three and want to show it.

So in LE you have the option of SSF and HC. But if the game gets to much in the aspect of endgame, this important part of the RPG core dwindles.

Endgame is fun yes, but if i see what happens to other ARPG games, because of the endgame i’m realy sad. If your character gets boring after a few hours, it’s simply not yours and you will never have realy fun.

I hope it’s mostly correct written, i have to translate my thoughts and it’s not easy for me

[Shtrak]

@Nastharius

many people are only looking for meta builds and want to rush through the game to be much powerful as possible

I guess this is mainly true for people who have played Diablo 3 much. Because after the campaign, this game is all about completing rifts the faster possible. And from what I read, Path of Exile may have the same approach.
As many people come from D3 or PoE (or both), it’s a reflex that has to be forgotten. In Last Epoch, I really do love the slower pace. Even when I rush an echo, it’s not as fast as D3 and it’s really enjoyable. But I can understand people that have been “formated” by other games and who try to reproduce the same model: harder, faster, stronger.

[Nastharius]

mh… on the other side there is the multiplayer part, if i want to play with friends it’s not very fun if i have to play the main story first, in a party i don’t have the time to figure out my build, so everybody in the party has to wait te most time
for this case, a multiplayer option would make sense, where you get a lvl 55 character with all the relic slots and passives and a couple of gold, as long the game can still deliver a good leveling experience combined with a fun endgame

[asdfractal]

@Llama8

From what I read that’s what people do in PoE as well… Part of it’s just people deciding that killing mobs (playing the game) isn’t the most “efficient” way to play the game.

That’s not exactly correct, most people will clear high tier maps to within a few mobs remaining because it is so lucrative. It also has a much better scaling system that includes boss difficulty. I’m not saying PoE is perfect and there are a few reasons I don’t play it anymore as well.

@darkdeal

I do think skills and killing mobs is fun in this game. That is only half of the equation though, and without the reward side, it is just pointless grind at some point.
[…]

Yea I agree, actually the gameplay of it is very fun. For me as I’ve mentioned I really like pushing arena, which is literally just waves of mobs. People could find that a very boring grind, but to me once you get to high waves it is action packed and you must be constantly thinking and on your toes. I like that type of gameplay, and getting new personal bests is very rewarding. But I also don’t want to feel like I am limited by my gear/blessings and arena is not very good for loot, especially if you die.

I agree also that it’s harder to get further with new characters, I just started normal monoliths on a new one and already don’t really feel like doing it. Personally though, large amounts of new content is not the main thing to me. It’s the time/reward ratio and scaling of things. I played WoW mythic+ almost exclusively outside of weekly raids and that is just running the same dungeons over and over, but if you are pushing higher difficulty it is endlessly interesting and rewarding to complete, even if you don’t get loot.

@Nastharius

Leveling is a important thing in a RPG. You think about skills, skill tree, passives, synergies, your gear and so on. It’s realy rewarding to see you character growing and growing. The problem is in these days, many people are only looking for meta builds and want to rush through the game to be much powerful as possible.

I enjoy levelling and building my character, and I hardly look at build/meta guides (only maybe once I’ve got high level and I want to compare my build vs what others have done or tweak it a bit). I like playing with skills that I think are fun, even if it’s not the strongest, and making it as strong as I can.

---

Overall I think this is a great discussion to be having and important to address. Gaming is very different than in was years ago when it wasn’t so mainstream and we all (or most) somehow had ridiculous time to throw away. But these days there are so many games to choose from and I think games that demand too much time for little reward are not going to do well. In a previous thread about monoliths someone brought up roguelites, which have taken off in recent years. I actually play a lot of this genre and a big reason is the time/reward.

Roguelites are actually very repetitive, but that isn’t a problem if the progression and scaling are done well. Dead Cells, Hades, Curse of The Dead Gods - these all have you running through the same areas, when you die you restart, but you become stronger over time and the difficulty scales up to match your strength. After every run - which usually takes ~1hr - you feel tangibly stronger.

You also feel a sense of achievement when making progress and defeating bosses. Similar to how I said about progress in arena above. I think this is a big issue with monoliths, once you have done it once doing it subsequent times doesn’t give that sense of achievement.