Too much loot...and I don't care enough about it

[headroom]

As the title says. There’s just too much useless loot. I spend half my time looking at stats, and to make it worse, and I don’t even know what stats are important. Bow damage? Physical %? Bleed chance? I try new combinations based on these stats and it just feels…flat. What even makes a difference? I cant tell. It all feels the same. Resistances are the same too. At what point do stats even matter?

It feels like a very convoluted stats system with no clear direction, or you if want, multiple paths. Its just a list of stats with near zero explanation.

No, I don’t want to set up a loot filter. Yes, I do want to the game to drop less, but more relevant items.

As much as I like finding loot, this game has so many stats and loot. I don’t even know what I’m looking for or why! And if I equip something that should technically be better or align more with my stats, why does it not feel more powerful? The item/stat system just feels flat and boring. Being honest, it makes me wanna log out…

[vapourfire]

@headroom

No, I don’t want to set up a loot filter. Yes, I do want to the game to drop less, but more relevant items.

Cannot really help you then. This is one of the exact reasons that the lootfilter exists and after 2k+ hours I can tell you that its required to enjoy the game. I love that the game has so many affixes and depth AND that it provides tools to use to minimise complexity and narrow search criteria.

And no, I dont want an ARPG game to drop less loot - thats contradictory to the entire point of the hack and slash genre.

As to developing more understanding of the game features/skills/affixes, I recommend the following:

The in-game guide opened by pressing G

And other online aids:

Community Game Guide

Preface First, I’d like to thank EHG for providing the tremendous resource that is the in-game Game Guide. I’ve often wanted to access it outside the game so I’ve recreated it here, with some additional content. While this Game Guide is nearly identical to its in-game counterpart, I did add the word community to the title because all sections of this guide effectively function as ‘wiki’s’ - that is to say, they can be edited by most members of this forum community. If you find any errors, or w…

Last Epoch Tools

Last Epoch Info

This forum is also pretty good at helping people and there are lots of discussions on specific skills and other things.

But hey. Feedback, even if you dont agree with it, is always valuable.

[Ninakoru]

@headroom

No, I don’t want to set up a loot filter. Yes, I do want to the game to drop less, but more relevant items.

Well, then you have a fundamental problem in how loot is designed in most ARPGs.

[Mad_Moo]

I’ve felt similar to OP about this. Even when you have a loot filter properly set up I still feel this.

I boil this down to a few things. Selling items to a vendor has no reward so I don’t pick up anything that I can’t personally use.

The items dropping often aren’t what I am looking for in gear. I can’t reuse those items in any way to further my gearing efforts aside from doing some math to determine if my limited number of shattering runes is worth breaking down the affixes.

Crafting leaves a lot to be desired, its generally not even worth before T6 gear.

The loot filters are extremely clunky to set up and edit. There is no real discoverability of which shards are rarer than others. Often times, the conditional rules sometimes intermittently don’t work properly.

Its hard to progress when you can’t evaluate the changes or differences you make to your character so its moving in a forward direction. There’s no clear comparison if a change you make is beneficial or not. This limits min-maxing to those with scientific backgrounds or a lot of time (and isolating damage for a build isn’t really an acceptable use of time for these types).

Dummy’s stopped working with server authoritative making this even harder.

End-game is monotonous, there’s no redemption mechanisms, you can’t easily drop buffs that overpower a mono, and the stability reduction for boss fails of later mono’s creates a lot of grinding with no real clear benefit towards progression, which isn’t fun. You get nothing if you fail once. Gold lacks meaning because there’s nothing to buy with it aside from more inventory space. Inventory space also doesn’t scale down (i.e. boxes don’t scale down to allow 4 inventory pages viewable as one).

You have a number of factors that basically are just a hamster wheel loop with no payoff. If there is no or little progress, and its all based on a poor PRNG implementation which has its own problems its just not fun. With Reign of Dragons I’ve had to run a 40-60m set of mono’s to recover the stability to just try again. That’s not touching on poor or non-existent telegraphing.

Most ARPGs I’ve seen use some random seed assigned to an account and server uptime that iterates based off actions and when a divisibility check hits, loot drops. You play enough or multiple accounts and you often see that some seeds are ‘blessed’ and get better drops. This was definitely the case with PoE and to a lesser degree the Diablo games.

If you apply the Octalysis Framework to existing game systems, there’s some significant deficits.

[SolidMetalKnight]

One of the arguments for there actually not being enough loot is that the very end-game items and buffs are actually insanely rare. Talking about one drop every 500 hours or so. And then you need those to add to other items in the Eternity Cache where you basically have a 1 in 4 chance of the buffs you want being added to them. (Unless you have an LP 3 or 4, then it’s not quite as bad, but those take tens or hundreds of hours to drop with the right implicit stats also.) That or you can craft that item to try to make it perfect and have less than a 1 in 4 chance to succeed at that. At end game we’re talking tens of thousands of hours to grind for a single best-in-slot.

To me, if it takes any more than 120 hours to max out a character, that’s a month of work in real life. I just don’t think that’s a good use of anyone’s time. Especially if you’re not doing anything that is actually fun during that time. The reason we call it a “grind” is because it’s mundane and uninteresting. Would much rather play a new build or a different game than subject myself to that.

What is actually the case is that there are an insane number of different stats characters need and too few ways to get them. The game might actually be better if there were 6 total suffix / affix slots on items without using Eternity Cache. That or stats given by endgame items were altogether higher in general. You start to find this out when you max your passives and populate your gear and idols to the point where you realize you just can’t afford certain things in your build.

[vapourfire]

Quite a lot to unpack there in your post so I am gonna leave that for someone else to do.

What I would like to do is ask if you are willing to consider approaching the problems you are having from a different perspective to see if you can adjust to how the game is intending you to play rather than forcing any existing methods you have learnt from other games onto how LE does things differently?

Lots of the issues you mention disappear if you learn the games own ways of doing things and take the time to learn the ins-and-outs of its particular skill/affix system. And still others disappear if you accept that you may be approaching the problem in a manner that may not be optimal for LE.

[Mad_Moo]

I’ve been gaming for more than two decades. I even tried my hand at designing a few games. I’m a very good problem solver, so much so that I problem solve professionally (as a Systems Engineer). I take a first-principled approach when looking at problems.

A lot of the issues I mention are not new issues in gaming. Its also not about how I approach the problems either because if professional practices can’t identify and isolate the problem, its not a problem worth spending time solving because those problem types lack inherent system properties required to optimally solve them, and thus require guess and check as the only strategy, and my life/time is more valuable. That disconfirming response reminds me a lot of Chat-GPT type responses.

I’ve a few hundred hours spent playing the game now so I’ve given it a fair shake, anything that I haven’t already found out about the game isn’t worth finding out at this point.

EQ did a lot of similar antipatterns, and people ultimately left for games that had more reasonable time risk/reward ratios. EQ set the record for extreme (196 consecutive hours camping for an item; eyepatch of plunder), and then nerfing it. Bad behavior like this in past games has led to lower tolerance for what’s ‘acceptable’ in newer games.

There is an inherent player promise that if you spend time you will make progress as you play the game. That stops happening at about lvl 70, though it differs somewhat between classes.

Currently there’s nothing that offsets bad RNG and other friction, and 90% of the time is spent wasted running endless Mono’s, in a loop, where the Echo bosses often don’t even drop loot. Any glitches that might insta kill you and you lose all rewards, and have to spend the same amount of time clearing it successfully for virtually no reward. Its not a resilient system.

[Ninakoru]

@Mad_Moo

Selling items to a vendor has no reward so I don’t pick up anything that I can’t personally use.

Probably is intentional, so you don’t waste your time gathering useless loot to make a quick buck, this is annoying in the RPGs that allows to do it.

Other than selling uniques and arena keys, I rarely bother to sell anything else for extra cash.

Crafting leaves a lot to be desired, its generally not even worth before T6 gear.

Uh… maybe you are not approaching crafting as I do. I place the rare affixes and the ones I use most on a special loot filter rule, and I clear affixes as i get 30-40 of the shards.

I craft all the time, I just don’t use the rare affixes until a bit later. But all the common ones? you will end up with hundreds of shards for each on the long run, so there’s an incentive to craft as you progress.

Boosting health, damage types, flat health and resistances can be greatly useful through the campaign, and there’s no opportunity cost.

About the crafting system itself, I think the intention of the devs was mostly fulfilled, I am happy with the crafting itself.

The loot filters are extremely clunky to set up and edit.

I think the filters in essence are great, they are designed to leave some items you still have to manually check out, but takes out most of the junk effectively.

I think it could be more streamlined, because we have several ways to approach the filters, should be more restricted, without losing functionality of course: for example, you can hide all and the show with conditions, or show all and hide with conditions. Or mix a bit of both depending on item types, etc. Same with the item sum of tiers, or number of affixes, too many unnecessary “freedom” to make your filter.

Its hard to progress when you can’t evaluate the changes or differences you make to your character so its moving in a forward direction. There’s no clear comparison if a change you make is beneficial or not.

Actually there are some things that can be solved by math and others that not. You can make a DPS calculator, and a EHP calculator. I think is part of the beauty of ARPGs. Many times the best builds doesn’t have the best DPS or the best defenses, but things like mobility, fluidity, quality of life, how easy is to keep DPS uptime while avoiding enemy mechanics, etc.

If something get me a bit angry about all of it, is some systems are obtuse on purpose: why there’s such a huge range between min and max damage (I believe is from 80% to 120%, making VERY hard to estimate your damage on the go), also, why the DPS tooltip is so bad? even Wolcen has a more accurate DPS tooltip. WOLCEN.

Most ARPGs I’ve seen use some random seed assigned to an account and server uptime that iterates based off actions and when a divisibility check hits, loot drops.

Yeah, in BDO also was the case, some people just had insane luck, ALL THE TIME, without any reason at all. But this is an obscure metric, hard to prove, and I feel it shoudn’t exist if it is the case.

[vapourfire]

@Mad_Moo

I’ve been gaming for more than two decades.

Gotcha beat on that one. Xyzzy anyone?

@Mad_Moo

A lot of the issues I mention are not new issues in gaming.

No, they arent, but LE is trying to take a different approach or antipatterns as you put it - which is the only way to move something forward imho. And that needs a more open mind in playing it.

I have been here on the LE forums for years now with over 2100 hours in the game across almost all the currently available characters and a common thread I see is that people overlay their assumptions about older and other games in the genre onto what LE does and in some cases it can and does cause backlash.

The crafting system in LE is exactly one example of this where people coming from D# and PoE scream blue murder until they understand how to do it. Its gone through at least 3 major iterations in the years and the current one is, imho, brilliant - sure its needs a little tweaking here or there, but it works really well throughout the stages of the game - from new chars boosting very specific needs (usually defences) to end game crafting BiS items. But assume it works like other games crafting and you will 100% feel like its broken or in your words “leaves a lot to be desired”.

The same is true for a lot of the other problems you mention - although I will agree that being a beta and having experienced the devs willingness to revamp entire systems / components of the game over the years - there are definite issues that are still not resolved. Thats the beauty of beta imho.

@Mad_Moo

its not a problem worth spending time solving because those problem types lack inherent system properties required to optimally solve them, and thus require guess and check as the only strategy, and my life/time is more valuable.

Dont agree with this. Part of what I find fun in ARPGs is this exact component - put on some gear, spec some skills and go for it until you get your arse kicked by something and go back to the drawing board. I MUCH prefer the LE approach to this than say a game like Torchlight 2 - which is great fun to play - but I am bored out of my mind in a single playthrough because its not engaging enough. And LE is nowhere near as complicated as PoE.

This is a subjective view on my part.

@Mad_Moo

That disconfirming response reminds me a lot of Chat-GPT type responses.

Interesting, I may fire up ChatGPT to answer more forum posts then… The intention of my response is based on literally years of reading the same kinds of things as you posted AND seeing people change their minds over time when they consider approaching the game differently. Sure some still think its horrible and dont like it no matter how long they play, but a lot of people are surprised how differently they view something or realise how much better it actually is when taking other players suggestions into account.

@Mad_Moo

There is an inherent player promise that if you spend time you will make progress as you play the game. That stops happening at about lvl 70, though it differs somewhat between classes.

I would agree with you on this statement but I subjectively experience it at different times in the character development. I also personally play differently to a lot of people so my definition of progress is likely different and it changes as I mature in the game. for example, I may level up a few chars to 100 and then progress in different ways like testing out entirely different builds/playstyle or even mindlessly farming for gear to enable an entirely new char of a different class… or test if I can make a way out build that beats T4 Julra. The key thing for me here is that the game is not finished so progress is simply paused rather than stopped. There is a lot more content coming, changes to end game and even an LE version of the D# paragon levels etc.

@Mad_Moo

Currently there’s nothing that offsets bad RNG

There is no such thing. RNG is RNG. Being good or bad RNG is impossible. Its your perception of the RNG as luck that is good or bad.

@Mad_Moo

90% of the time is spent wasted running endless Mono’s, in a loop, where the Echo bosses often don’t even drop loot.

That one is gonna have to be backed up with objective fact before I can take it seriously because the grind is part of all ARPGs and expecting otherwise means you should probably go play a different genre for a more tailored experience. I have spent many many many hours doing exactly that and I would not call it wasted - I call it grinding/farming in a favourite genre ARPG.

Does it feel bad when you have a 5h playsession and dont really find what you were looking for, sure, but this is a game in a genre that is designed in that way.

@Mad_Moo

Any glitches that might insta kill you and you lose all rewards, and have to spend the same amount of time clearing it successfully for virtually no reward. Its not a resilient system.

Again, dont 100% agree here. Glitches I take to meaning bugs - so thats an entirely different issue which should be addressed as the game dev. As to losing all rewards to dying or being killed etc - well personally I wouldnt want to get a participation award for failing. It has to be difficult to the point of frustration else there is no challenge, no endorphin rush, no sweaty playsession… and ultimately no fun.

So… sure the game has issues and ways of doing things that may or may not be ideal but sometimes I think I am playing a wholly different game when I read comments like yours and the OP.

That said, everyone is entitled to their opinions and feedback - doesnt mean everyone else has to agree with it.

[Travoas]

@vapourfire

@Mad_Moo

I’ve been gaming for more than two decades.

Gotcha beat on that one. Xyzzy anyone?

Yeah, a little over four decades here.

[AuroraClaire]

Will say for the filter points brought up, I’m a firm believer that having some form of template/starter filters in the game for people to just click on and use would go a long way. Loot is clearly designed around using a filter, so not having a quick easy way to have a filter going seems like a clear thing that’s missing.

Once you’ve put a lot of time in the game, making a quick filter isn’t really a problem, but when you’re starting it’s definitely an off-putting thing.

[Nekhebu]

Wall of text incoming!

Even though I have comprehensive loot filters set up that pretty much only show exalted and unique items I’m interested in 99.9% of the loot that drops is complete junk. The problem in this game is that it’s RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG and it doesn’t really become apparent until you’re ~50+ hours into the game. The chance of getting lucky and having an item that you actually need (as in the one having the correct affixes and implicit attributes) is close to zero.

I’ve been trying to farm Aberrant Call for the last few days. Was doing nothing but uncovering echoes in The Stolen Lance. First problem is that even after uncovering the whole web you’re lucky if you find 2-3 nodes that can drop a unique staff. However, what’s compounding the issue is that the node is actually “Unique or Set Staff or Scepter”. So that’s not only unique staves but also set staves and unique scepters AND set scepters. And EVEN if you get lucky enough for that Aberrant Call to drop, as it did once, it either has no LP or the affixes are low rolls (or both).

As for exalted gear - I’m currently playing as a totem druid (poison damage). My other level 100 “main” character is a Lightning Blast sorcerer. Without exaggeration at least half of the gear that drops for me (no matter which character I’m playing as) has improved healing effectiveness, cold damage, freeze rate or very very rarely fire damage.

Even if eventually something with 3 decent affixes does drop trying to reroll the bad one using glyph of chaos very rarely results in anything useful. Trying to remove a random affix with rune of removal most of the times removes the T6-T7 one (despite people claiming that’s been changed). Sealing an affix with glyph of despair doesn’t even work half the time on T1-T2 affixes, let alone on higher tiers. Rerolling affix values using rune of refinement very rarely rerolls them towards the upper bounds. I’ve ruined so many decent items trying to get better ranges that I’ve mostly stopped risking.

If you got lucky and all 4 affixes are semi-useful to you, then the forging potential RNG will just shaft you and deduct something between 15 and 22 potential completely ruining all your chances at finally having something decent.

Having lots of stats and affixes of course could be seen as a good thing but it becomes a problem when there are so many classes, so many damage and defense types and none of the drops are targeted to your class or loadout (and there is no way to target-farm anything). Except of course for helmets and body armor that only seems to drop for my class so I can’t even farm any good gear for my other characters because apparently that’s not allowed.

This game looks good and feels good for the first 100-200 hours but my god, once you gear up a character or two with some decent gear and start trying to minmax and squeeze those last few drops of DPS… Goodbye sanity because you will be doing nothing but running those few echoes for hours upon hours, running around the same few convoluted labyrinth maps, killing the same few enemy types and shattering everything you pick up.

They will be on the right path IF they are listening to players and improving the end game so that it’s meaningful and target farming is a thing. However, seeing how utterly stubborn they are even when it comes to auto picking up shards I doubt I’ll be coming back to this game once D4 is out.

Edit:
Another thing I wanted to add in regards to affixes - there are just too many ways of boosting the same stats. Why do we have +50% spell damage, +12 spell damage, 100% increased spell damage, then all the same ones for elemental damage and then the same for lightning/fire/cold. In the end all these ~15 modifiers affect the same stat - damage. Making minion builds is doubly worse because anything that doesn’t have “minion” in its name is automatically useless because my character doesn’t do any damage.

Finally, as others have mentioned - after all the work you’ve put into farming and upgrading a piece of gear, once you equip it you can’t even see if it’s any better because the dummy crit numbers randomly range from e.g. 16k to 30k. I put the other piece of gear and they range from 14k to 32k, and then I’m left there wondering what was even the point in spending all those shards and glyphs even though it looked like it was a good piece.

[Macknum]

@Nekhebu

The problem in this game is that it’s RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG and it doesn’t really become apparent until you’re ~50+ hours into the game.

I say this for a long time but people tend to discard the matter that LE is the biggest slot machine on the market. Right base? Good base roll? Right affxes or craftable? All affixes you want with decent rolls? not starting with sealing or LP on uniques. The whole itemisation in LE is a big timesink and again I think system is in place because there is not much to do in LE but that’s just my oppinion on the matter.

I realy hope stuff get’s better when the guilds are in place but sadly I think trading will be the way to go even if I would hate to pick the trade guild.

@Nekhebu

Why do we have +50% spell damage, +12 spell damage, 100% increased spell damage, then all the same ones for elemental damage and then the same for lightning/fire/cold. In the end all these ~15 modifiers affect the same stat - damage

To me it looks like a lot of games these days are made with a lot of useless clutter that is reworked at some point when the game was running some time and streamlining will happen.
There has already been debates about this a long time ago and in the past people who played minion builds got EHG to a point where they introduced minions that work with char stats. I realy don’t know how people can like the systems in place that are obviously flawed in many ways.

On top of it late game renders items mostly completely useless because it takes dozens of hours to get a upgrade.

[sirmathew]

A lot of valid points here!
Have returned in the game after a 1 year break and i am already regretting all the endless search for better items that need so much good rng.
Am already half bored and am not at empowered monos yet.

[Ninakoru]

I cannot understand this mindset, sorry.

ARPGs, no matter how friendly and forgiving are with progression, for the nature of RNG, there will be always a point that upgrades will be exponentially harder to obtain.

Trying to avoid RNG in an ARPGs is like trying to make an action FPS turn-based.

As I said many times, by comparison with many other ARPGs, this one is particularly generous, you have an endgame character full-equip in three days.

Seems that deep down you don’t like the nature of these games, still, you throw in hundreds of hours.

[Nekhebu]

@Ninakoru

there will be always a point that upgrades will be exponentially harder to obtain

That’s fine if I’m minmaxing the last 1% of my DPS. It’s not fine if after roughly 300 hours I have 2 main characters which are level 100 that I just can’t complete and that are stuck with average gear at probably 60-70% of their potential.

As for the grind - obviously I wouldn’t have played this game for so many hours if I couldn’t stand it. I’ve played The Division 1/2, Destiny 2, Lost Ark and many others for hundreds of hours too but none of them ever felt so fruitless, pointless or unrewarding as Last Epoch. I have not had one single upgrade in the last ~20-30 hours of playing. Most of the gear I have on these chars is what I got around level 70. That is not normal to me.

@Ninakoru

Seems that deep down you don’t like the nature of these games, still, you throw in hundreds of hours.

Not sure why I would even do that but I won’t try to convince you otherwise.

[Chrichton21]

EQ omfg you took me back to my late teens lol

[Erbo]

It’s an ARPG.

Either enjoy grinding or don’t play. Even with a trader, you would need to grind the gold to get the gear you would want anyways.

Also, the filter takes no time to set up and anybody can easily understand it within a few minutes, at least for clearing up a lot of the garbage that drops.

[squidgyxombie]

I think I know where most the replies are going to side on this, so I’ll jump on the other side. It’s totally normal to not want to set up a loot filter. Coding is fun for some people, and most defending loot filters are just going to a 3rd party site and downloading one, which, I will remind those people, is not normal nor fun for a game to ask that of you. Sadly PoE, through a little of their own fault for incorporating the filters, set the standard some 8 years ago, and now LOOT FILTERS, LOOT FILTERS EVERYWHERE. Sigh, can’t you just design the loot to not require this much sifting?

Most the appeal for ARPGs is figuring out the systems it gives you, and min-maxing the (hopefully simple) damage and defense formula. Now there’s also the game part, where there’s appeal in filling some fantasy archtype. If everything is just abstract purple cube hitboxes, the game isn’t as fun.

But I do counter that Last Epoch’s stats are pretty straightforward in what they’re doing. There are fundamentals which Path of Exile set forward in the language of ARPGs which you might not be accustomed to, and that could be the barrier to entry. The in-game guide will give you info on the damage formulas if you can stomach the homework… This phrasing isn’t to discourage the game guide. Final Fantasy Tactics has an amazing in-game tutorial, but in my early months of playing I never bothered to touch it… you have to first get enthralled with the gaming experience before someone can expect you to go hardcore research mode.

So in the end: if you enjoyed the setting and interface, got attached to your characters enough, then I recommend homework on the damage formula of the game. If not, no worries. And if it’s the end-game lack of progression, well… I mean, you can’t be expected to play the same character forever. There is an end, a goal post, and that’s not where all your numbers are 100% in line with the mythical “best-in-slot”, that’s when you decide your character isn’t fun anymore.

Just want to reiterate that point from earlier once more. EIGHT years ago, loot filters entered the scene. ARPGs have existed and been enjoyed longer than that.

[Heavy]

@squidgyxombie

Just want to reiterate that point from earlier once more. EIGHT years ago, loot filters entered the scene. ARPGs have existed and been enjoyed longer than that.

There were “loot filters” way before that in other similar games.

Titan Quest for example released in 2006 had loot filters added a short time after release, can’t find the exact time, but it’s at least 12+ years ago.

That was a very rudementary system and just allowed to hide items of specific rarities.

How you describe loot filters sounds very negative and I totally disagree with that.
I see them as an evolution of an ever changing genre.
Loot driven games, especially aRPG’s become more and more complex and offer significant depth with itemization.

All those games decades ago didn’t really need a loot filter, because the itemization system was not complex enough for a loot filter to make sense.

Having dozen of items drop and needing to figure out which ones you want or not is half the fun for me.

Especially LE makes it super easy to set up a loot filter.
A loot filter in LE doesn’t even need to be super complex, a simple 3-5 rule loot filter can already get rid of stuff that you are not interested in anyway.