We don’t need normal and empowered monoliths

Feedback and Suggestions
22

IMO - Learning how to “race” unempowered monos, by starting early, strategically getting and using glyph of envy, and speeding up the progression through unempowered is part of the game.

Last Epoch is already VERY speedrun-able, but letting things like this be outright skipped would just remove parts of the game to learn to speedrun!

My typical (SAF hardcore) progression is something like …

  • Level 0-15 in 1 hour, get mastery
  • Level 15-25 in 45 mins, unlock imperial welryn
  • start unempowered monos
    • dont “finish” the first echo right away, farm/reset it, to get XP while avoiding the echo difficulty affix for a while
    • as soon as I get a key, run lightless arbor
    • somewhere 35-40, start finishing echos
    • as soon as I hit 50:
      • I can finally equip some of the gear that’s been dropping in monos
      • I do temporal sanctum as soon as I have a key for campaign skip idols/points
    • return to pushing to empowered

The main thing that feels a bit “long” during this process is the timeline “pre-boss story quests”… because they are the same and repetitive.

Thus I think the best change would be allowing the pre-boss quests to be optional in unempoered, just like in empowered… but have them award a decent about of stability to incentivize new players to do them to gain stability (because they don’t know how to do it as efficiently)

23

Some people complain that the jump in difficulty from normal to empowered is too much. Those can increase corruption in level 90 monos for a smoother curve.

This would only work as the current system if you made the first mono 0c, the second mono 20c, and keep increasing them. Otherwise, you’d start all monos at level 0 and have to keep increasing the corruption in each, which is annoying.

Also, I’m pretty sure the reason this wouldn’t work is area levels. First mono is area level 50 something and it increases gradually. But empowered monos are always level 100.
Jumping to an area level 100 with a level 40 char would likely result in you getting killed all the time, even with 0 corruption.

I’m all for ways to skip normal monos, but we still need something to fill the curve between area level 50 (end of campaign) and area level 100.

As I said, empowered monos is area level 100. Even at 0c, it would still be a huge spike in difficulty.

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24

No man. You’re trying to explain the game as is to me, like I haven’t been around for the last couple years, but not actually getting into what I’m saying.

There is no 0 corruption empowered, just like there is no 50+ corruption normals.
So the system we have now is already a single path of progressing, but forcebly split in two for no reasons anymore as of today.
There’s a deliberate gap there, so we’re missing 51~99 corruption levels.

After Kulze said we’re “not quite there yet”, I put some into thought to it and I do stand by what I said, and I think we’re perfectly fine to have single monolith system already.

We already have all tools for fast pushing and catching up on corruption to all timelines. And now we even have a tool to prevent corruption scaling.

The map levels would scale from 55~90 if you are below 100 corruption, and everything above 100 corruption is always level 100.
It would lead to a way more smooth and intuitive learning and progression curve… People would be learning how to handle corruption as soon as they get into monos, instead of doing everything with 0 corruption, then suddenly jumping straight to 100 corruption.

So the blasters could just use some Envys and rush corruption levels, fastly getting into level 100 maps, without having to do all bosses 2 times.
While people with weaker builds could lock on at whatever corruption below 100 and would get to farm at lvl 90 maximum maps, until they get stronger.

See, this would even make your life easier… I’m aware of the amount of people you had to educate and tell them to go back and farm on normal monos if they can’t handle empowered. :sweat_smile:

25

They’re lvl 100 because they’re at 100c, if they were at 0c they’d be the normal monos (as I’ve said before).

Though TBF, if you take the lvl 90 monos up to 50c, they’re not far off lvl 100.

26

I’ve actually gone and done something I never tried before: raising corruption in normal monos. I went back to the first one and fought the first shade I found. I went up to 6 corruption and the area level went from 58 to 59. It seems that every 5 corruption we increase 1 area level.

I also checked and, after increasing it, the map still shows as area level 58. This means that empowered monos aren’t area level 100 because of being 100c, they’re area level 100 as base.
Does this make 100c empowered monos equivalent to area level 120? That would explain the big jump.
Does this mean that 500c is equivalent to area level 200? Is this how corruption is actually coded?

Anyway, even if it was level 100 from the corruption, that would mean that 0c would still only be area level 80.
We could redo the whole thing so that 0c=area level 50 and 100c=area level 100. Though that would likely also lead to inflating the actual corruption we can achieve and farm at by 2.5 times.

At 5 per level, you should actually reach 100.

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27

It’s not linear as otherwise you could raise the later monos to lvl 100 via corruption & I don’t think you can(?), but yes.

That’s a display bug.

No, the maximum area level is 100.

28

Sure, but the same display bug that would affect the area level 59 showing as 58 would also show empowered as level 80 at 100c. Which seems to lead to the conclusion that empowered monos have an actual base area level of 100. :man_shrugging:

I know that. But a simple way to handle corruption would be to make it scale as if it were higher than area level 100. Programatically speaking. So maybe that’s what’s happening behind the scenes?

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29

In my opinion an easier fix could be scaling monolith monster level with player level . When you start adding corruption it transforms the monolith into empowered one with monsters level 100. Just my 2 cents. :smiley:

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30

When you leave the campaign you’re around level 60 as a average joe, barely having killed Majasa, being happy that you beat a hard enemy.

Being thrown into a level 100 timeline would be massively grating. Even with 0 corruption. A level 90 timeline is hard for a new player just coming from the campaign, and that’s a thing when they go through the shortest possible option of only unlocking a single side of the monoliths. Otherwise the curve is ‘too little’ definitely, but it’s a bit too much with that already.

So what would you think does happen when you throw people into that? :stuck_out_tongue: I don’t think that’ll go well, we already have severe amounts of Lagon posts (which is solely a spike in diffitulty) as well as empowered monolith posts (which is another spike).
Those spikes already existing cause repeated issues for players and what you suggest is a even more severe spike.

No, the campaign needs to be smoothed out first, Acts implemented and a proper transitions which is smooth pre-planned from EHG.

If they don’t do that - they miss the ball regularly for new implementations after all - then you can definitely call it out heavily though.

As for a scaling… how do discern between them? That’s already what we have after all.
Also if you combine corruption with the level range then you get people which farm a boss and suddenly jump from 55 to 90 right away, gazes and runes of envy do that surprisingly well without people realizing what they’re doing.

The systems simply aren’t properly set up to avoid pitfalls, that’s something which shouldn’t generally happen after all, so… give it a bit of time simply.

No, they’re level 100 and 100c.

There is a level scaling in the game and a corruption scaling.

It simply ‘double-dips’ into increasing the difficulty when you switch to empowered.

Could actually be a thing in the background, yeah.

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