The current state of the endgame is really killing my motivation to make new builds. What is the point of building a character with good AoE damage if the best way to farm monoliths is to rush the echo objective? What is the point of building a character with good single target damage when you either do something so broken you literally oneshot bosses or get cockblocked hard by dynamic DR?
There is a couple of problems I can identify here.
Loot from monoliths is mostly concetrated in the specific reward chests at the end. Actually killing the monsters isnāt really unless you can do it without being slowed down in the run to the objective.
The distribution of monsters in this game is really bad. In echoes thereās pretty much two type of monsters, the big powerfull ones that often like to dash/teleport around or even run away from the player and the small ones that can get oneshot even by unspecced movement skills. Fighting either one of them isnāt particularly fun, especially since echoes tend to be populated by mostly one of the types. And then thereās the long stretches where thereās just nothing at all. Iāve had echoes where the objective was ākill monsters to reveal Xā and then it got revealed after I killed 1 dude. Or a Solaris ascent where there was nothing for like 200m until I ran into a group of 3 Ruby Captian Arjanis and a Diamond Matron. How fun! (/s)
Arenas are even worse. Thereās nothing more boring than just camping around waiting for the next ragtag bunch of monster to spawn. It doesnāt even really matter how fast you kill them. And this absolute snoozefest is supposed to be the main ācompetitiveā mode in this game? lol
Iāve come up with some ideas to remedy the dire situation of LE endgame.
Imo the most welcome and needed change would be to shift the specific echo rewards (set or unique boots, glyphs, exalted rings etc.) from a chest at the end to a significant magic find bonus to that type of item for the next couple echoes. In an arpg I want to get items by killing monsters not by running to a stupid chest. You could even throw in some modifiers to what kinds of monsters spawn or maybe a pack size increase as a reward for some additional fun and variety.
Another thing is to reduce the extremes to which the monster quantity vs monster eliteness slider can go. What I mean is maybe make the little spiders and skeletons tankier and the big āmore hpā enemies a bit less tanky but most importantly make sure thereās always plenty of both breeds on the map. (And hopefully a global increase to monster density as well)
I would also like to see something like a boss rush echoes added in additions to the normal ones and arenas to give the more single target oriented build something sink their teeth into while running monos. Obviously the time to clear and loot amounts should be well balanced for the different types of echoes.
As for the arena I think the spawn rate should also scales up in addition to monster stats. Make so that at high waves of endless arena youāre facing a literal tide of monsters and stand knees deep in their dead bodies. That might actually make the mode a fun experience one in a while. The arenas in monolith could maybe scale the spawn rate with corruption or something.
Iām not saying it has to be specifically my suggestions, Iām sure the devs can come up with an even better solution than me ( itās their job after all). But something really needs to be done to make this gameās endgame something worth my while to engage with.
There is content that rewards clear speed, you just need to clear so fast you overcome the downsides of fast clear speed.
LE never wanted to be a Zoom Zoom game in the fist place and itās hopefully unlikely this changes.
First off, did you even read my post or are you just responding to the title? Second, so you have to hit a breakpoint for the game to feel good and incremental upgrades donāt do much for you? Not such a great design for an ARPG if you ask me.
Itās the same thing with bosskilling, for a normal build doubling you damage makes you kill a boss maybe 30% faster. But for a build that does 60% of boss health in one hit doubling your damage makes the kill 10x as fast.
These mechanics that punish everything in between the bare minimum damage to clear the game and the most turbo broken builds suck hard.
They dont, as far as I am aware, the boss DR should be applying to single hits that do damage, atleast thats what has been stated.
The most broken builds just need to be nerfed.
The boss DR exists to smooth the curve between barely able, and decent builds so players dont feel the need to only play the builds that delete the game.
I get it, it feels antithesis to the genre, and in some aspects it is, but its there for a game design reason that has a sound reasoning.
Id much rather have the DR stuff then phases where the goal is still to 1 shot each phase. and instead you do 3 rotations of 1 shotting. edit: or even worse, they dont nerf the op builds and instead just buff bosses so the weaker builds just get deleted from the game instead.
The monster killing stuff is something they do need to work on for sure though. Killing monsters in echos isnt worthless despite what people claim imo, its just no where near efficient for certain item farming, so I get that complaint.
In case you donāt know about it bosses in this game have dynamic damage reduction. If you half health the boss in one hit the 2nd hit does massively reduced damage. It makes ācomboā style builds based around setting up 1 burst skill to do massive damage feel rather bad to play unless you can actually kill the boss in 1 rotation.
But anyways Iād really like if we could actually have discussion about improving the endgame systems of this game instead of stupid arguments.
In case anyone misunderstood me I donāt want a poe style āzoomzoomā game or whatever you want to call it. I want a game where I get good loot by fighting difficult content.
Well, itās not absolutely worthless. Anecdotally Iāve gotten plenty of items Iāve been target farming for as a random drop. My issue is that the best way to go about it is too only kill the monsters if doing doesnāt significantly slow you down in chasing the arrow.
It creates a meta of autobombers, āclearing with movement skillsā builds and one shotting bosses. At least in my opinion this isnāt super healthy for the game.
Builds that do big aoe damage donāt really have much to do in this game which is kinda sad since mass murder of powerful monsters is among the best feelings in video games.
Of course there has to be a well balanced variety of content so that every kind of build can get similar loot/time. Avoiding a meta of nuke the screen and zoom at 1000% speed to the next screen should be avoided by good balance, not by making killing monsters worthless.
Not a big fan of the DR on bosses myself.
Feels so bad when you make a character that is actually designed to deal massive damage if you set up a combo, do like 1/4th of the bosses health with that combo and afterwards you only deal like 10% of that damage.
I kind of understand the reasons behind it, but to me it feels bad and tedious to have to do the same combo again and again and againā¦ feels kind of punishing.
Like whatās the point in making a char that does massive damage when you set up your combo when you could instead play one of the broken builds that, for some reason, are not affected by the DR or they just deal nearly unlimited damage to ābypassā it.
Weāre kinda going on a tangent here. But, if you ignore the fact that it can invalidate life leech as a mechanic than itās kinda acceptable for builds that dish out a steady stream of damage.
However builds that do high burst damage with some downtime get punished rather unfairly. The game sees the boss take huge damage and raises the damage reduction as if you were gonna keep up the same ridiculous DPS. I however have no idea how to fix this without making it abusable.
Apart from getting rid of all the high dps builds. Though that would probably get rid of any medium-low dps builds using the same skills as collateral damage. So the boss dr (and yes, Iām aware of what it is, I was there when it was implemented) is probably the least bad thing they could do to try and make boss mechanics irrelevant for very high dps builds. Or just stick on a large hp modifier to the boss which would #### over those low dps builds.
I kinda knew you knew, why act like you donāt though lol
If there are two builds using the same skill as main DPS but one of them does gamebreaking amounts of damage and the other doesnāt surely thereās something that could be changed other than numbers on the skill itself.
But yeah, I do agree that balancing a game is hard.
This is where you have to get into the detail/numbers. Given that the only way to do damage is via skills (even if theyāre only being used to apply ailments), the ānumbers on the skillā are kinda the only thing that matter, whether theyāre direct damage, % modifiers or any other thing that makes the target take damage.
Afaik overpowered builds are generally overpowered because of some broken interaction between the skill and and item or another skill etc. You can make the interaction not work, nerf the item in question, change the problematic skill nodes into something that does ~same dmg in normal use case but is less abusable. Thereās other ways to nerf stuff than nuking a skill from the orbit.
And if a skill is broken by itself then any build using it that seems ābalancedā is probably just a bad build.
Acutally both PoE an LE make killing monsters feel somewhat pointless, but in different ways.
In PoE itās because youāre not really fighting the monsters youāre kinda just turning them into loot piles en masse.
In LE the actual combat feels much better but unfortunatelly taking your time to fight the monsters is less efficient than just rushing the echo reward chest and only bothering with the monster you can easily dispatch without slowing down much.
Thatās why I suggested shifting the echo rewards from a chest to a magic find modifier. Ideally youād still get about the same amount of loot per time spent but the items would be dropped from the monsters themselves.
