Yes. More like 3 hours for the campaign (and 6-7 for empowered) but yes, I’ll probably have a character for each mastery that will inspire me in april.
I like the process. And up to now, there is limits to my enjoyment of grinding monoliths. I welcome the change of pace and breaking the monotony that way.
Also, I like switching between characters. I will not respec my coldvines druid just because I want to stormtotem for an hour and then switch back. That sounds boring and tiresome, respec like 90 passives and releveling all skills. I mean… I’ll do for sure if I don’t like a character instead of flushing him; just like I do now within a mastery (which is quite rare, I usually reroll anyway lol).
So yes, I’ll reroll a lot as always but that doesn’t mean I like the change to mastery respec, as I said before, and it’s super likely that that change will reduce the overall number of characters played (and time played).
Edit : Just to precise : I like pushing some characters as far as possible of course. It’s the repetitivity of the monoliths that often bores me… But I mean, after 1500 hours, that’s totally okay. And I’m hyped for the new monolith stuff!
It was in the works for Season 2 (Mike talked about it on the stream), but it was postponed. Probably wasn’t ready yet. But he did say that it will be coming in Season 3.
Because that would actually decrease the number of available builds, even if it sounds like it shouldn’t.
You’d end up just choosing whichever DPS skill you wanted and then you’d always use the same handful of support/movement skills. For example, you’d almost always take Volatile Reversal (as it is now), Shift, Flame Ward, etc. You’d pick the strongest options only,
You can even see this in PoE1. Most builds will use the same handful of support skills. Molten Shell, Summon Skitters, etc. They have some variation, but many skills are so good that they are transversal to almost all builds.
Honestly, if they wanted to add Mastery Respec so badly. They should have gone the FFIXV route of “your character is your account.” and had a character level per Mastery. With a baseline level of 20 for each Mastery. So you’d reach the end of time, select your Mastery and let’s say you play 30 more levels as Paladin and want to swap to Void Knight. You’d have a lv 50 Paladin and a lv 20 Void Knight.
This change is so baffling to me. Why leveling with Marksman or Blade Master when Falconer is much better for clearing and bossing at lower levels and then you can swap later? I was so excited for 1.2 and now I’m not even sure I’ll play much and just wait for TQ2 while playing Monster Hunter Wilds
Edit:
This would once again be solved with a “your character is your account.” concept. Make a character, pick a class, that class has a level, then if you want to swap the new class starts at lv 1 and gets bonus exp for being under the highest level class on your account. At 20 you can pick a Mastery and each Mastery would have its own Mastery Level where it gains levels as you use it but defaults to 20.
Edit 2: I think the most frustrating thing about this change is there was no communication about this. It’s just on the update page with no announcement for the page, just a link in a post about Twitch Drops. (It’s in the trailer I haven’t seen yet. Thanks DJ.) If I didn’t see this post, I wouldn’t have know until Patch Notes dropped. And knowing EHG, we will likely see 0 devs responses to the concerns about this change expressed in this thread!
@EHG_Mike, how will the Mastery Respec be handled. What’s stopping players from just picking the meta leveling Mastery, swapping to the meta monolith Mastery, then swapping to the meta bossing Mastery for Abberoth? There’s a lot of great points of concern raised in this thread. Hell, the opening of the thread basically confirmed that while a vocal part of the community has been asking for this and equally vocal part of the community has been opposed to this. Can we get a developer response on why you decided to do this, how it’s going to be handled, and possibly something to help alleviate the concerns expressed by those opposed (like myself)?
I’ll edit that then, haven’t had a chance to watch the trailer yet. I’ll check it out now.
Edit: watched the trailer. 1) Mastery Respec make me feel even worse now because the trailer showed there’s 0 cost/penalty to Respec. 2) it’s hilarious how “WASD Beta” got ~2s of footage. Blink and you’ll miss it. But I hope for all of our sakes this is just a “simulate mouse click” WASD and not “WASD w/ mouse-aim”. Because if it’s the latter then I’m definitely done with LE and I hate saying that.
I get what you’re saying, but then shouldn’t the devs look at those skills that nobody uses and improve them? Seems like if everyone is picking specific skills, then the devs have that data and are just sitting on their hands instead of fixing underperforming skills.
Their replay value comes from the cost of respec. Respeccing into another build there is a substantial investment. The power in PoE comes from a combination of the gems (which are expensive or time-intensive for the high end, but not a breaking aspect to do it) and passives… which are a massive investment. Given a archtype respec (for example Totem to non-totem) would substantiate a good 80% respec of the passives. That’s around 100 regret orbs.
Farming up 100 regret orbs personally takes quite a few hours, even in the most top end content available. Buying it costs a substantial amount of currency, usually around 2-3 divine orbs respective to content. This amount is the value of a late mid-game character to invest.
In comparison the LE equivalent is 10-20 minutes time investment for the same thing. The limiting aspect was the fixation on the mastery, which couldn’t be changed, hence allowing only a small spectrum of different builds to be used, usually all in the same archetype given that masteries contain those archetypes quite well, with few exceptions.
For a player with a character that isn’t able to acquire absolute top-end results in returns that means their time investment is fairly equivalent to a full playthrough of the campaign, hence not making it worthwhile since the option for a replay creates a second character while leaving the current one intact. And we’re not getting into equipment there as well, since unlike LE where you can hence just put it on the side and change it back in 10-20 minutes with the respectively higher invested time you simply can’t afford to do it.
If we take away the pure time investment of gems in PoE as well as re-leveling of skills in LE and saying we already have all that stuff acquired on the side then the equivalen comparison is that the cost of a single respec in Path of Exile comes to around 100-300 respecs in Last Epoch.
Edit: To clarify on hwo I get to such a high number for the equivalency… it’s the gold price in LE versus personal acquisition rate of Regret Orbs in PoE, pure time investment. A single altar or a single Monolith with gold return can provide for a full respec, that’s 5 minutes effort. If focused that means around 10-15 minutes per respec.
In Path of Exile with top-end playing we’ll need around 100 maps with top-tier juiced (1000+ corruption equivalent drops) content there to acquire them, as they are darn rare, and also solely if we focus on the mechanics which have a high chance of those dropping in the first place. Which is commonly with a non-speedster character but a ‘general’ character around 15-20 minutes per map.
A character level 100 with full ascendencies costs 163 regrets.
Right now for Phrecia event, the price is 3.4 orbs of regret for 1 chaos. So… 48 chaos, which is a third of a divine orb, not 2 divs, not 3. A third.
Good thing I’m using the rate for that event and not from Settlers league : it was 4 regrets for 1c for a long time and now it’s 5 for 1.
I’m not counting the 20 free regrets points from campaign. I’m not counting that you now can use gold to respec and the first 30 points are really cheap.
I know you really really really really really want to be right and have the last word, always, but there is limit to exagerate. Come on.
League just started, divines are low priced still. Regrets rise to 3 chaos per regret over time commonly.
If you want to speak about earlier in the league then you need to take the respective item costs as well as personal available funds into account. 48 chaos is something the majority sees in the first week at best in total, maybe a lucky divine drop.
Yes, because regrets rise in value over time ever and ever more since they can be exchanged into Atlas respec points which allow switching of farming methods, and that’s done regularly depending on available scarabs.
Gold respec is not yet a core aspect of the game. If it comes in the future then we can talk about it. For now it’s solely a league mechanic with no promise to stay (albeit it should stay).
If it changes I’ll also adjust my arguments accordingly to represent it.
Sure okay, let’s talk about the price in Settlers League, which is not new. It’s 5 regrets for 1c.
Oh but you surely talk about the "old league but not too old, the one just in the middle where suddenly the price goes from 3 regrets for a chaos… to 1 regret for 3 chaos… and then weirdly goes back to a 5 - 1 ratio ?
Or we can check the currency exchange market for better instant deals right now. 600 regrets for 1 div, we’re kinda far from “We need around 100 maps top-tier juiced (1000+ equivalent)”. (what the freaking f- hahahah)
Yes, it rose higher because it’s well past the 4 month common timeline.
So yes, I’m talking about ‘common league length’. Usually that price starts to come up somewhere around the 1 month to 2 month mark, when people have played through the available content - those not rushing and doing it in 3 days while playing non-stop and being top-tier in skill as well - rather commonly already.
We can also go down to around 2c, which is also likely to still be in that timeframe.
And if we go for 5c you’ll make the situation less favorable for LE respec by far, which also puts it into perspective that LE respec is far more firgiving no mattere the time unless PoE respec.
If you’ve had read properly you would’ve noticed that I shifted between 2 distinct situations there.
One including the market.
One without the market.
Given that 50% of LE has no access to the market that needs to be put into consideration.
Then we could also go and compare it to different stages of league/cycle (in a 4 month window for that matter, to keep it comparable with what the standard of the genre currently is still at the top end without exceptions happening) and so on. That would make the need for more examples.
But if you want:
CoF examples are reliant on PoE SSF style playing, no trading.
Regrets are a rare drop. Roughly 100 maps for a full respec needed with top-tier maps. Otherwise you’ll drop a regret regularly between every 10th map (early maps without any juicing yet) or around every 3 maps (mid-game with Atlas points scaling a bit and small investment but no major one).
Now put it into perspective time-wise to acquire the relevant gold in LE versus the relevant direct drops in PoE. There you go.
If we go for MG, hence with the market then we have to take into consideration how the LE market is early on versus the PoE market, as well as what the respective cost of opportunity is to do it in effect.
Early items in PoE have a decent chaos cost of some 10-20 chaos items being farmed swiftly, while early items in LE tend to go easily into the millions already if you’re in the early group of farmers, especially with idols being able to be sold for 20k+ per piece solely for having a single health stat on it, not speaking of both… since people still need that no matter the rolls then.
So once again, with cost of opportunity you’ll need a substantially higher amount of time to make the same thing happen. Even worse so when taking into consideration that buying items early on in PoE is buying those items ‘as is’ without any crafting opportunity, so a finished item which won’t be changed… while in LE at that time you’ll extremely likely only pay for bases, which ‘could’ become a thing, don’t have to though.
So using up that currency in PoE is a guaranteed progression stop while using it in LE is a potential progression stop only.
They do. But balance is really hard to get right. And if it’s hard to balance 20ish skills per mastery so you want to use them (like they want to do with Sentinel now and the VR rework), it’s a lot harder to achieve if you have instant access to 100+ skills on any character.
PoE has had 10 years of balancing to work it out, and (even though their balance is actually pretty good overall these days) there are still skills no one uses.
Not really? Almost all masteries can be played as melee, ranged or minion. The exceptions are the ones that don’t (like Mage not having minions).
Your notion of the price of regrets is skewed for some reason. At no point in a league does a regret ever cost more than 1c. It usually climbs in the first week or 2 until it hits close to 1c, then it plummets always to 3-5 per 1c. You can check this in poe.ninja.
idk. I’m just really skeptical of using play time/retention as a metric. It really doesn’t say anything about how fun the game is. Or perhaps more specifically, it doesn’t say how many of those hours are the fun parts. There are two main reasons: 1) There are all sorts of attention hacking things companies can do to keep people’s attention even when they aren’t really enjoying the experience. 2) Sometimes there are bits of a game that are fun enough that you put up with the bad parts. If endgame is the only or at least significantly more fun part, it might be enough for you to stomach spending some time doing the stuff you don’t like for it. That doesn’t mean I’d be less happy if I got to cut out those hours and just play what I like until I’m satisfied.
I mean, it would always be better if things were better or had more content or whatever. But just suggesting they make more stuff isn’t super helpful. It takes work hours to make stuff and for a given team size, that means choosing to make some stuff instead of others. Even if they make enough money to hire more devs, hiring takes time to find the right people, train them, and get them integrated into the team.
I think we’ve already seen that content production is one of the big things holding the game back. Since months before release, we’ve gotten relatively little new content. Basically just the harbingers, which consisted of a grand total of 3 bosses and one new arena, and some touch ups to the early campaign.
I still think it’s a travesty that the game released in this state at all, but where we’re at now is that there’s an expectation of a new release every few months. So they do have to prioritize what they work on. I think for exactly for the new player experience, getting the campaign right is useful, but for recurring players even if campaign were good, it represents such a relatively small part of the experience that I’m not sure it’s worth prioritizing over endgame content if you have to make that choice.
Systems changes are relatively quicker though. It doesn’t take much new art to make a button that lets you swap your mastery.
Nope. The league restarted in november, so it’s not “well past 4 months”. But no matter
I don’t know what mental gymnastic you’re doing there. You said it takes around 100 map with top-tier juiced (1000+ corruption equivalent). No matter how you twist it, that is false and so dramaticaly exagerate; I trully don’t understand how you cannot see that.
Even with simple alch&go t17 and a basic Atlas setup, regret orbs are not hard to farm at all.
So with a “top-tier juiced 1000+ corruption equivalent” shenanigan ?
Like, we’re talking Maven’s chisel of avarice + Ambush scarab of discernement / containement / hidden compartements / potency ? The kind of setup that can farms around 20 div per hour ? Can’t find more than 1.6 regret orb per map (to get to 163 for a full respec “in 100 maps”) ?
You’re right, absolutely so.
But it shows how much people interact with it.
Obviously a product will do better when people have tons of fun and use it loads. But you won’t get to that part if people… well… don’t use it loads in the first place They after all got bills to pay, and those bills get paid in direct correlation with retention as a metric since retention stands in direct correlation with spendings, up to a point at least, it tapers off. And we haven’t found a better option to discern long-term success yet at least, pointers yes… but no clear-cut metrics.
Agreed! I don’t want to see them either… but it keeps em in business, does it not?
You can’t enjoy a product if the product doesn’t exist anymore after all. So especially with live-service games it’s always walking that fine line.
Partially agree there.
If you enjoy the endgame but not the other bits of the game that showcases that the other bits have fundamental design issues which make them less fun.
So the solution which - once more, long-term in that case - is viable is to fix those issues. Short-term you can cut it, long-term it’ll come biting you in the ass though.
The only time cutting content is viable is when there’s an abundance of available content already. LE though is content-starved, we have too little, so removing the existing content is not a proper option.
Which means it’s possible to be a viable choice given other circumstances allowing it to be warranted. But a method which reduces play-time actively when a fairly big consensus is ‘we are running out of things to do too quickly!’ is hopefully understandably counter-productive.
They are a 100+ people sized company nowadays.
That means mechanical implementations should be doable in a reasonable timeframe.
EHG’s mistake was focusing on implementing content which needed a boatload of animations for 1.1 rather then mechanical improvements. Creating a whole slew of bosses (which are ‘tacked on’ to existing ones) which all need a full set of animations, plus a bossfight which also needs another set of animations… is simply not smart.
There’s a reason why for example GGG managed to churn out ‘Betrayal’ which was one of their biggest-sized content drops back then ever made while with roughly the same company size ‘Nemesis’ feels utterly and entirely lackluster.
That league had a single major UI element which included the majority of stuff, a new type of Affix with a new overlay for an already existing item UI and small UI elements after the end-boss. Animation-wise the boss was the biggest hurdle for them definitely, the normal mobs were reskins from existing models, hence animations existed already.
That’s how you deliver content in a live-service game. You trickle in the ‘big’ things and stuff it left and right with pre-existing things while providing mechanical unique stuff to keep people occupied.
Yes, it was clunky and often not thought out overly well… but the perceived amount of content is magnitudes higher for likely less effort invested then what EHG had to do with 1.1
You can do loads of thing with little effort… or do very little with a ton of effort, solely dependant on the state of a game and the own creativity. EHG simply picked badly.
Which is exactly my point. If they’re already struggling with providing content then EHG needs to make doubly sure that the content they have provided already is up to par. Otherwise they have the need to ‘cut away from it’ which is exactly what happened. And that means in the end we basically get ‘less more content’ in 1.2 then without mastery respec… at least perceived it is such for many people.
They had to prioritize before 1.0 on what they’re working on as well. Did that badly… which brought us to 1.0 that had massive hype but was really low quality… and led to 1.1 which was lackluster but high quality.
EHG needs to direly work on their content-pipeline, the methodology on how they create and deliver their content, because that’s sub-par for where they wanna position themselves into.
The campaign is the first thing anyone sees.
The campaign is also the one thing which should stay in mind the most.
I mean… look over at D4, D4 had basically nothing outside of the campaign. And what did people say? ‘Yeah, the presentation of the campaign is fantastic! Gameplay middling… nothing to do besides it’. And they came again, because playing through the campaign at least was fun enough to warrant it.
Now LE has the opposite thing going on, with people going ‘The campaign isn’t really good, it’s all over the place. The gameplay afterwards is good though… but there’s not much to do!’ So we got a shoddy campaign, good gameplay though… but also little end-game content. And people return at least.
EHG decided to put the focus first onto ‘end-game’, which combined with ‘good gameplay’ is great! Good combo, people will return and maybe stay. Kudos decision wise! 1.2 should’ve been 1.1 though, at least the weaver stuff should’ve been, nobody gives a shit about Aberroth alone after all, good end-game goal, no long-term gameplay.
Now EHG’s weakest point will be the - unfinished and all over the place to boot - campaign. That needs work. Alternating between mechanical end-game content solely + reworking the campaign a piece before switching to a dedicated larger end-game mechanic and so on until fixed is a viable approach.
Ignoring any aspect though is never, has been for no game.
I mean, look at what ARPGs came out over the course of time.
Sacred screwed up, had promise, but they lost what made Sacred great and shut down.
Dawn of Magic is just middling.
The incredible Adventures of Van Hellsing has basically no replay value.
Victor Fran is extremely short.
Wolcen dropped the ball on everything. I’m unsure if it was a scam or just utter and entirely idiotic incompetence (not solely incompetence, their mistakes were so on the nose that only idiots could make them at times), so I’ll go with the least worrysome, the incompetence.
FATE was clunky as hell but a decent one-time game.
Book of Demons is quirky and not classic H&S
Chronicon is very limited before you finish completing it, itemization issue.
Minecraft Dungeons is simply extremely repetitive and barebones, also a bit fun though.
So you see most H&S are ‘fine’… outside Wolcen at least, that was a steaming pile of worthless cow-dung, despite them having actually a decent campaign… but same issue as LE… not finished, and rush-finished after being demanded endlessly.
All the others are mostly ‘fine games’. But a ‘fine game’ doesn’t suffice for live-service, it dies. You need to be ‘fantastic’ to even have a chance. D2 could do it despite being SP based, D3, D4, PoE 1, PoE 2, Torchlight Infinite, Grim Dawn (despite SP) and LE are the only applicable products in the gaming history which made it far enough to even be considered able to be successful in this regard.
Exactly! Which was why 1.1 was a biiig mistake.
How many drop per map? Unlike Chaos Orbs Regret orbs have basically no viable div cards to increase the pool. Also the change-in from scouring is a net-negative as Scourings are needed more. While chaos orbs are in abundance through a variety of divination cards with specific maps dropping them in fairly high amounts. Div orbs and the leftover cards for exalted orbs are as well.
Alch&Go T17? That’s top-end content nigh nobody runs! T16 is still the baseline.
The best pure currency drop-mechanics are Legion, Harbinger, Delirium (less so), Strongboxes (extremely dangerous for many builds) and Expedition and Abyss (but takes long)
If you run anything else either your time investment goes up substantially or they simply have nothing specifically focusing on raw currency drops. Alva temples do nearly nothing, Delve takes a good chunk of time to do and is mostly valued for the special content. Harvest is for the crafts, Heist takes ages, also mostly for special drops, Betrayal is for crafts and not currency, Ritual is middling, Sanctum doesn’t even need to be talked about, you focus on top-end results for the outcomes there and Beyond is only good if it’s supported by other high-quantity mob mechanics like Harbinger for example.
The raw drop-rate is miniscule, much like Chaos orbs. Have you actually gone and seen what really drops as pure currency during maps? It’s not all too much, the majority is at the alchemy tier, which is T3 currency. T2 is chaos/regret/gemcutter, T1 is div/exalt/annul and T0 is mirror.
They’re actually 1:1 with pure chaos drops.
10 div per hour is common since the scarab rework at heavy investment but not ridiculous investment. And that’s with altars taken into consideration… which many people don’t focus on since they either need reading (and PoE players dislike reading) or happen to sometimes cause content to scale into the oblivion of difficulty outside of a few distinct builds which can ignore that no matter what.
Every single map with Harbinger Focus + Beyond provides 1 div in profit btw. And those are perfect speedster maps. But that’s with trade and taking into consideration the fractured shards. Pure drops for regrets are still small despite the massive quantity of enemies and hence rares, including those focusing on currency drops… because then you still need to roll lucky on it being regrets and not alchemy orbs or chaos orbs or whatever else.
ill just say i agree with you, but if you think t17s are the norm you are already cooked in perception.
I agree that the value of regret orbs is paltry and is nothing, but I have a guild of like 20 people that plays every league, and like 1 of them does t17s. The rest dont touch that content. T17s are an extremely niche thing.
100-200c chaos is what id expect to pay tops for a full respec including ascendancy. Which can be gotten fairly easily if you are a market engaged player.
But if you are not a market engaged player, its gonna be more painful. getting 200c in an hour is childs play, selling the junk that amounts to that 200c is the annoying shit part that the vast majority of players simply choose not to do lol.
edit: what ill say on the more broader topic is that, this is a problem with respecs in general. if you make them easy to access so any joe schmo who is a noob can “Experiment” then you will get people doing fucked up hot swapping mechanics as much as they can till it basically becomes a balanced around feature. And if you make them too expensive/hard to get(Id argue poe falls into this situation) then people feel stuck. its hard to make a good middle ground.
Idk how the work to rework and finish the campaign compares to making other new content. But it’s still a choice whether or not to spend those resources there over other things. Also, not needing to do the content you didn’t want to do already isn’t really losing content. The game is still gonna live or die on whether or not these endgame changes and content additions are gonna be good enough to keep me interested.
I suppose I don’t know their finances. Maybe they absolutely had to get the sales that would come with full release to keep afloat. But if the situation wasn’t dire, there was the option to just delay launching the game until we were in a better place to start from. Once you slap 1.0 on it and do a marketing blitz, you now have to deal with way more eyeballs judging you with way less patience than people who knowingly bought into playing a game that was under development. So not only did they give a bad first impression, they got themselves onto a treadmill they’d have to endlessly keep up with.
I used it as an expression of not messing much with the t17. You can’t even use an alchemy on t17. I was simply saying that even the base t17 without rerolling/vaaling/chiselling it, you can get very decent currencies dropping.
What kind of baseless generalisation is that ? lol
But let’s recap.
You said…
Which is false.
Which is false.
Then, you decided that we should not talk about market anymore (even if you were the one bringing it up), because I pointed out that 600 regrets costs 1 div at the moment.
Fine, let’s focus on SSF! And then, after pointing out the absurdity of saying that you need 100 maps “top-tier juiced, 1000+ corruption equivalent” to farm a reroll, you just go all-in-mansplainin and listing all the endgame mechanics for no reason.
Great, thanks, but… nobody asked and it’s not relevant to simply list the mechanics? It’s hilarious that in the same breath you explain aaaall those endgame mechanics and then say that "the raw drop-rate is miniscule, much like Chaos orbs, when chaos is dropping quite a lot.
Anyway, I guess you’ll never admit it was simply an exageration. Enjoy your endless hours of farming for a bunch of orbs of regrets. Or maybe you’ll prefer to pay 3 div for your 100 regrets ?
Never said that! Of course T17 is the deep end part of the game. It’s Kulze that was talking about the hundred “top-tier juiced maps, 1000+ corruption equivalent” (which still makes me laugh) needed to grind the oh-so-rare orb of regrets.
And I’m hyped for the new monolith stuff!