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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You’ll need to be a bit more specific. Besides I’ve said multiple times I think PoE has the balance of time/reward pretty good. I don’t have a problem with grinding with a good system, the discussion is about the balance of time/reward in LE currently.
I really want you to address this statement. For one, I think it’s completely unachievable for almost every build - if not flat out impossible - even without empowered monoliths. But once you add on all the stacks of empowered affixes and get above 20 echoes there is just no way you can run them this fast.
Also I want to know what builds you do this on. Have you done this consistently across classes and builds? Can you safely accumulate half the instance of mobs and fight a boss with 100%+ damage/health and other buffs?
Following is a video of 27 echo mobs and situations like this are a regular occurrence for me. So why don’t I just run past them? Well I have to fight a boss at the end, who has many buffs, and this instance is full of these guys, Wisps, Sirens and Lightning Elementals. Death is a real danger at all times and skipping increases that risk. So the safest option is to kill the majority of the mobs on the way to the objective (except for the first few echoes). This means each one takes about 5 mins, often longer at higher echoes. There is a very high chance of death at least once (usually more) per empowered monolith run as this build (I can’t speak for others yet), punishingly decreasing 4 echoes and adding even more time to the tedious process.
and want to show it.
