What do we want farming to look like in a release version of LE

[Azikiel]

This I think is a lot more of a complex question than it might sound, and I’m not really sure how best to layout this issue for discussion.

I have most fun in ARPGs when the game is in what one might describe as a “progression” setting. That is to say when I am playing against foes who are both dangerous to me, and what I need to defeat in order to obtain rewards.

So let’s look at examples in my gaming past of when I’ve experienced this level of challenge. Most notably, modern Path of Exile provides this level of challenge, however in a way I don’t enjoy. To maximize loot collection a roughly apt description is that one needs to fight mobs that can instantly kill them, but they also roughly instantly kill. There exists a few bosses in teh game that some players farm, but for the most part people are farming in a very insta kill environment.

From what I understand this community already seems to understand that this is NOT what we want, but what exactly DO we want? I think that question is one that I don’t think we have answered yet.

An example that I found closer to my ideal for an endgame system was Diablo’s on release “inferno” difficulty. In this difficulty the game became incredibly difficult however not 1 shotty. Mobs took a long time to kill however most builds outside of some glass cannon ones from previous difficulties could die in close to 1 shot. I really enjoyed this difficulty system for myself, however there were massive issues with it in my view for players who were better than me, and other players had issues with the system that I thought were unfounded but I think we also need to discuss (to decide if we think they are worth paying attention to).

To start, I need to describe how the D3 system had “progression” system for me. The difficulty had the player replay through the 4 acts of teh campaign with all the mobs buffed up. Act 1 dropped max ilvl i think it was 61 gear, act 2 63, act 3 64 and act 4 ilvl 65. Each acts mobs also got progressively harder. This deals with the issue that if the only thing that changes at endgame difficulties, for example in higher monolith levels, is the # of rare drops or their rarity/unique rate this will still make farming easier to kill mobs the most beneficial way to play. In other words, a “speed clear meta” can still emerge due to there simply be no actual gear improving value to facing challenges besides doing it once to be able to say “i beat it.”

Diablo 3 further attempted to add to this by guaranteeing a legendary drop every time a player played all the way through teh campaign again, encouraging not facing just act 1 mobs rather than the harder later acts.

Now lots of players hated this for reasons such as

1. You faced the same early act zones/mobs repeatedly when early in the grind
2. A lack of granularity in difficulty levels. Lots of builds went from wrecking in the end of the previous difficulties campaign to getting wrekt in inferno.
3. Lots of more hard to define factors, e.g lack of balance between melee and ranged, players not wanting to do content below what teh best players did etc.

Please read all the questions before answering to keep feedback as precise to each question as possible
So my question to all of you is 2 fold
(Try and copy my layout so we can aggregate thoughts on individual aspects if you can.)

1. Can you try to describe what your ideal farming session looks like? Lets break this into a few parts,
   A: Do you like feeling like you should kill everything you see, or skip to rare or boss mobs (be specific)
   B: What level of mobs should take significant time to kill? even whites? should each rare be a 10-20 second encounter?
   C: How big of threats should individual mobs be? Currently i often just charge to the end of a zone while pulling as much as possible to AoE everything down
   D: Anything I missed you would like to mention

2. The harder question:
   A: Do you agree with my general assessment that farming in places where enemies are somewhat difficult to defeat is more fun, and should be the quickest way to gear (tho maybe not the safest for HC players), ideally provide examples of your gaming experiences that you felt matched your ideal farming experience in this way.
   B: The hard part: What sorts of systems can you think of that accomplish this goal of constantly enouraging a player to fight smth harder to continue getting better gear. Ilvl? affix ranges going up at higher tiers (still effectively ilvl lul)? Systems like the monolith system where completion for the first time on a higher difficulty rewards a permanent boon?

PS: I look forward to hearing your feedback, love yall for being such a positive community <3 I’ve really enjoyed my brief time interacting with people here, very patient and constructive y’all are.

PSS: Many people don’t like giving suggestions as they believe that developers ideas will always be better than theirs, and while I partly agree with this, I think this kinda discussion is worthwhile because not only might it spark an idea for them, but also I want to help this game be as good as it can be and there is very little else we can do to help in that regard lol, so why not !

[Vidya]

A: Do you like feeling like you should kill everything you see, or skip to rare or boss mobs (be specific)

Given the way most ARPGs work, I’d have to say yes.

I think having trash mobs that get one shot adds a nice ebb and flow to the combat. You’ve got your trash mobs where you can chill, you’ve got your rares/elites with mechanics and abilities that require you turn on your brain, then there’s the adrenaline-pumping boss encounter.

This isn’t to say I’m against tougher trash mobs. But if the trash mobs are expected to take time, then I think they also need to be interesting encounters with a nice mix of auto attacks, telegraphed abilities, and openings that can be capitalized on. I would also expect them to be able to kill me, and drop better loot, given the effort required to take them down.

I have no interest in bullet sponge style trash encounters.

B: What level of mobs should take significant time to kill? even whites? should each rare be a 10-20 second encounter?

It depends (get used to seeing this).

Whites - I don’t mind if some whites take longer to kill. For example, if I see a hulking brute, I’d expect it to last a bit longer than say a swarm of rats. Ideally I’d want the drop rates to scale with their challenge level though, so rats would have worse drop rates than brutes. Goes back to point A though. If they’re time-consuming, I want them to be interesting.

Rares - I’d like rares to last long enough for me to actually have the time to look at their mods, be forced to pay attention to their abilities, and possibly be forced to adjust my playstyle to account for those abilities.

LE doesn’t do this. LE rares feel too similar to whites IMO. I never read the ability text because I never have the time to since they die so fast.

They don’t come with visually unique abilities. In D3, if you saw acid pools, fire chains, and mortars, you knew what you were up against. You’d also have to adjust how you’re playing to dodge pools, refocus targets, maintain a certain distance, etc.

C: How big of threats should individual mobs be? Currently i often just charge to the end of a zone while pulling as much as possible to AoE everything down

I’ve touched on this above. I’m okay with having trash mobs, but I want challenging encounters to be mechanically interesting.

A: Do you agree with my general assessment that farming in places where enemies are somewhat difficult to defeat is more fun, and should be the quickest way to gear (tho maybe not the safest for HC players), ideally provide examples of your gaming experiences that you felt matched your ideal farming experience in this way.

It depends, but yes in general. If it’s challenging and takes time, the loot should be better.

Sometimes I want to just turn off my brain after a long day at work for some chill killing. I want my white mobs to go down in one hit, my rares to force me to turn my brain on, and my bosses to give me a rush.

When I’m itching for a challenge, then yes, I do have more fun vs mobs that can kill me and have interesting abilities that force me to pay attention to them.

I think a game like Monster Hunter does this well. You have to observe the monster so that you can spot the tells. You need to react accordingly to avoid damage or so that you can capitalize on its openings. You need to worry about your positioning. You need to worry about what attacks to use so that you don’t overcommit.

Most of the challenges feel fair. If I’m dying, it’s because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I overcommitted to an attack, I didn’t read the tells correctly. It has a nice balance between gear/stats, where gearing a certain way will let you counteract some of a monster’s abilities, while still requiring mechanical player skill and decision making.

ARPG challenge too often feels like a stat race where it’s ultimately about who has the bigger numbers, so I practically never feel that level of engagement.

Even in LE, I also feel like combat is a bit too binary. Not PoE binary, but binary enough. I don’t feel punished for a series of bad decisions where my HP is gradually decreasing, I feel punished for making a single bad decision that takes me from 100% to 0%. Not saying I shouldn’t be because I should, but I also want a more attrition style as well.

B: The hard part: What sorts of systems can you think of that accomplish this goal of constantly enouraging a player to fight smth harder to continue getting better gear. Ilvl? affix ranges going up at higher tiers (still effectively ilvl lul)? Systems like the monolith system where completion for the first time on a higher difficulty rewards a permanent boon?

This is a super tough one.

I feel like games in general tend to encourage the reverse when it comes to farming. It’s usually about finding the most time efficient content. That often ends up being easiest content that you can farm the quickest with the least or no chance of dying because dying = lost time.

In order to encourage players to tackle harder content, I think gear needs to be more closely tied to difficulty. If the best gear only drops from the hardest content, then players will naturally gravitate to it. If you let trash mobs and barrels drop the same gear, chances are players will find the most time efficient way to acquire it (which usually won’t be the hardest content).

Also helps if the hard encounters are interesting and not just stat races.

[Deliya]

@Vidya

LE doesn’t do this. LE rares feel too similar to whites IMO. I never read the ability text because I never have the time to since they die so fast.

They don’t come with visually unique abilities. In D3, if you saw acid pools, fire chains, and mortars, you knew what you were up against. You’d also have to adjust how you’re playing to dodge pools, refocus targets, maintain a certain distance, etc.

This is something I realized recently too. When I was playing D2, for example, any Lightning Enchant + Multishot rare mob was nearly instant death, and unless I was playing a super tanky character, or ranged, you pretty much steer clear of them. This added an element of excitement to the typical grind, since you really wanted to check the modifiers on mobs before committing to the fight. I’ve noticed that in a lot of games recently this hasn’t really been the case, both GD and POE being examples of this, where I don’t really even bother reading the characteristics. The sole difference in LE that I’ve noticed is when I didn’t 1shot an elite mob, and saw it was “of the Ox” for affix, and went “oh, ok”, and moved on.

I think that adding intermediate challenges to make encounters during grinding a bit more heart-racing, there should be some real stand-out modifiers. As of right now, the boss fights (specifically, Emperor and Lagon) are the only ones that really give you an adrenaline pump, because of their mechanics.

To address some of your questions:

@Azikiel

Can you try to describe what your ideal farming session looks like? Lets break this into a few parts,
A: Do you like feeling like you should kill everything you see, or skip to rare or boss mobs (be specific)
B: What level of mobs should take significant time to kill? even whites? should each rare be a 10-20 second encounter?
C: How big of threats should individual mobs be? Currently i often just charge to the end of a zone while pulling as much as possible to AoE everything down
D: Anything I missed you would like to mention

I’m in the camp of “likes to clear everything”, but I do find that in most ARPGs this is more choice, with no real benefit other than faster xp. Even for myself, I find myself zipping through levels where the enemies are too tedious to kill (a map where it’s nearly all high HP mobs spawning, for example, that take too long to kill). I feel like there should be more incentive to kill elite/high hp enemies, either through ramped up XP given (lets be honest, after lvl 85 it starts really dragging per lvl), or through higher quality drops. Only issue is that drops in LE aren’t really that exciting… maybe higher drop chance for purples?

I do like the balance of hordes of trash mobs vs individual challenges. I just think that both sides of it really need to ramp up later in the game, whereby rares become challenging with high rewards, and trash mobs are more numerous. Going into a virtually deserted map and zipping through it to the goal is a bit boring, and there needs to be some tweaks to the randomization of mobs to introduce some requirements for spawns to balance it out a bit (good mix of “horde” type mobs with stronger enemies peppered in).

@Azikiel

The harder question:
A: Do you agree with my general assessment that farming in places where enemies are somewhat difficult to defeat is more fun, and should be the quickest way to gear (tho maybe not the safest for HC players), ideally provide examples of your gaming experiences that you felt matched your ideal farming experience in this way.
B: The hard part: What sorts of systems can you think of that accomplish this goal of constantly enouraging a player to fight smth harder to continue getting better gear. Ilvl? affix ranges going up at higher tiers (still effectively ilvl lul)? Systems like the monolith system where completion for the first time on a higher difficulty rewards a permanent boon?

It is a bit harder of a question, yes, but I think one that breaks down into a few options.

1. Challenge often equals gear-check in these games. Most notably, games like GD and Diablo are good examples. In GD, doing the end-game dungeons with sub-par gear will just get you 1 shotted and ejected. In D3 you will just get nuked to pieces. Typically the “harder = better loot” becomes a stepping ladder, where you complete one tier of challenge, gear up there, then move up.

Think WoW gearing, where you do regular dungeons, then the epic dungeons, then intro raids, then harder raids. The question is whether you want a system like that or not. For me, I’m fine with it, because these games are, at the end of the day, looter games, so it should be all about the loot/gear. But that’s opinion.

I hate to say it but of the games I can think of, POE and GD probably do the best job. POE for pure variety, GD due to the power high you get. That being said, POE is also a game that’s been around for a VERY long time, so having that kind of variety in endgame would be very ambitious and likely disasterous. The vanilla POE experience was pretty much on par with what LE is right now, if not a step below.

I loved GD for the pure variety of builds, and what it got right (and something that LE does really well too) is making me constantly want to reroll alts and try new builds, something that reminds me a lot of D2, where there was no such thing as respecs or resets on skills. You wanna try something else, you start a new character. This is a form of end-game in and of itself. Some people will find 1 build that they stick to, others will have 30 different characters that they tinker with.

At the end of the day, the real gripping part of end-game comes down to what encourages people to keep going, and what makes them give up in frustration. Some people are motivated by cool looking gear, some people by being able to stand in the middle of a screen full of enemies and shrug it off, others to obliterate waves and waves of enemies with a single button click. Some people are excited by gear, others by skill combinations, and an ARPG that wants to find a large market success has to balance all these different draws in order to gain the biggest possible number of people looking for different things.

By way of example, when I reach a point where all my character’s gear is T18-T20, my motivation to play really goes down to nothing, since I don’t feel that my character’s power will increase any further. Any further upgrades will be marginal at best, almost not worth the time investment on return. This is where having something else to chase becomes interesting, or something else that will provide you with a sense of increased power or achievement. Inevitably, a character will reach its end-of-life, and you move on when you feel you’ve “finished” that character, and you try something else. End-game is really just a way to stretch out the time it takes to get there. Several different ways are out there, from trying to get uniques to roll with near-perfect stats for your build, maxing out all your gear, killing the hardest boss in the game solo, etc, and there are endless examples of this in other games like GD, D3, POE. At the end of the day it really comes down to loot and gear, and how juicy that chase is.

In summary:

1. Farming should balance risk vs. reward. Fighting harder enemies should be rewarding (even if it’s just something like rares drop at least one T10 item).
2. Endgame should provide a balance between several goals, in order to appeal to more people (eg. loot grind, achievement farming, ladders, etc).
3. Gear checks and similar mechanics are pretty much a staple of any looter game at this point, and LE is no exception, so the real choice in my opinion really is just how to implement it, and how to give players some sense of growth/progression on a consistent basis. That’s really where I feel the biggest loss of interest, when progression slows to a crawl.
4. Exciting gear drops are a must in any looter, and one area where I hate to say it, but LE is currently lacking. In a looter, the loot must be exciting, and I’m currently more stoked to see blue items with two T4 affixes I want than I am seeing my 3000th Slab drop. Exciting gear in drops needs to be figured out (see the 100 other posts about this on the forums for details).

Hope I didn’t ramble too much there.

[darkdeal]

@Azikiel

A: Do you like feeling like you should kill everything you see, or skip to rare or boss mobs (be specific)

I don’t feel like one should be forced to kill everything. I think there should be mechanics in the game that reward people that are able to avoid or sneak around things.

@Azikiel

B: What level of mobs should take significant time to kill? even whites? should each rare be a 10-20 second encounter?

Whites probably shouldn’t matter more than just as an annoyance. In groups they could be dangerous, especially if they inflict stun, slow, freeze, etc. They are good support for Rares that should make the encounter harder.

Rares should take some time and require a bit of strategy. Not Boss level, but harder than current.

@Azikiel

A: Do you agree with my general assessment that farming in places where enemies are somewhat difficult to defeat is more fun, and should be the quickest way to gear (tho maybe not the safest for HC players), ideally provide examples of your gaming experiences that you felt matched your ideal farming experience in this way.

Yes and No.

@Azikiel

B: The hard part: What sorts of systems can you think of that accomplish this goal of constantly enouraging a player to fight smth harder to continue getting better gear. Ilvl? affix ranges going up at higher tiers (still effectively ilvl lul)? Systems like the monolith system where completion for the first time on a higher difficulty rewards a permanent boon?

Item systems that aren’t focuses solely on loot dropping. Systems that allow your gear to level up to become better. If exp gain doesn’t happen if you are in a zone level/monster level more than 3 levels below your level, it would force people to farm harder content (assuming there is harder content). You hit on it earlier that most content isn’t really much harder though as monsters just die too fast.

I think if LE could find a loot balance that combined drops, exp, and crafting with minor overlap, it would be amazing.

I imagine running through the campaign and having the base item drop that I want to build around, a katana for example. It happens early so that I get the feel of it early (disregard current item level req). I put on the Katana and continue. As I go through the game, I get more adept with my Katana and the weapon “levels up”. These levels could range from more base damage, base crit, additional affix slots (level 50 and 100 maybe?), etc. I get to a point where I want to craft on the item so I slap on some affixes. It gets pretty unstable so I slap an “enchantment” on it that gives it “durability”. Enchanting a piece of gear could even take an extremely hard, repeatable challenge (Only 1 enchantment per item). The durability enchantment lets me put more affixes onto the item with a lower chance of fracture. Maybe it even negates that chance for damaging fractures so you just keep crafting until it fractures without worry.
At item level 50, you get to name your item. That binds it to your character so you can’t just move max level gear around all your toons. Enchantments, assuming you get to pick the enchantment, would also bind the item to your character. This also serves the purpose of people grinding gear on each character rather than just moving around the same set of gear to all of their toons.

[doombybbr]

Perhaps more arena rewards(MUCH MORE, as currently 80 waves doesn’t even match a single mono run), extra monolith/arena content that involves taking extra difficulty but gives non-craftable affixes and uniques not found elsewhere.

The Arena not being a place to farm, even for tanky builds is a HUGE problem.