Nah, the point wasn’t missed. It was subverted with a reasonably argument.
The argument being that ‘want’ supersedes ‘need’, it’s higher hierarchically for video games.
You play video games to not make compromises you would commonly have to do in reality as things are impossible to achieve. This doesn’t mean it needs no effort, just that the effort to achieve the baseline of it should be respectively lower then if you’re actually trying to achieve something in society.
Games can come in 2 specific variants, one is ‘learning enhancing’ and one is pure ‘fun’.
Clearly we’re not in any sort of learning environment in LE… hence it’s the ‘fun’ category.
And the ‘fun’ category demand a game to provide a fitting experience for the respective type of player you wanna get into the game. LE also markets itself very clearly as ‘more intensive then Diablo’ but ‘less intensive then PoE’.
That’s what the devs have to work with. It’s the core audience they wanna pull in… so, outside of very rare exceptions to traverse players over to another category the whole game needs to align with it.
This means core itemization, core progression, core complexity.
Things like Lagon, the jump from monoliths to empowered monoliths, end-game item hunting and some others don’t align with the core audience. Which is bad, very… very bad.
Shade is clearly placed into the core progression aspect of the game (as it’s the main measure for corruption) and hence should drop the rewards accordingly. Which Omnis doesn’t align with. Also bad.
Same with timeline bosses and their very rare item variants. Badly positioned.
Which is no deal-breaker for the short-term, but it is if it’s a persistent thing in the game. Common progression and hard to acquire ‘chase’ content need to be distinct from each other. A ‘cohesive’ experience it’s called.
That was discerns LE from the large competitors Diablo 3 and Path of Exile currently still. Those are both ‘cohesive’.
Diablo 3 is very casual, time-investment is not huge, optimization can get quite far but doesn’t provide you much. It leads to many people flooding in and playing for a shorter timeframe. Functional system for a box-priced game definitely. Many sales.
Path of Exile on the contrary laughs at you if you’re not a ‘sweatlord’. It makes it abundantly clear that you won’t get your prize unless you ‘invest’ into it. So you do… or you leave. That’s why in PoE the general retention time is higher, but core audience smaller. The growth relates over longer periods of time compared to the massive peaks of Diablo 3 which taper off quickly. People stay. Which is fantastic for a F2P game with vanity transactions in masses! Because you play long you’re open to paying a lot of money over time, more then any full-priced game even, regularly so.
Last Epoch? Box-priced game, few transactions possible… piss-easy campaign, sudden spike in difficulty after monoliths, uneven campaign difficulty. Extreme long-term item hunt, middling complexity for crafting, skills and passives. Low complexity for item variance. It’s all over the place, the game provides no ‘cohesion’ and hence so many people complain.
So since that all happens and the easier parts are front-loaded entirely (to a ridiculous amount) it leads to people becoming unhappy when that methodology is not followed through. It diverts, it promises you ‘a’ and then shifts to ‘b’ instead. That feels like shit. And if you point it out you’re generally right about it feeling shit. Because it is. It’s a mistake in design.
So expecting a Omnis in a reasonable amount of time after everything else in the game before has been acquired vastly easier is to be expected, same with every other very rare unique. You expect them to drop more often. You expect exalted items advancing your build more often. But it doesn’t happen. You’re hence deprived of the ‘fun’ that the game gave you before by giving those successes out in the pace you’ve looked for and you’ve adjusted to.
So it’s utterly reasonably to say ‘give me an omnis vastly earlier’ or ‘give me higher LP items’ or ‘give me better items’ because that’s to be expected after all.
So EHG either needs to adjust early game to change this perception so players ‘expect’ to invest more effort or they need to make the game after the campaign more rewarding overall. One of them, their choice, different playerbase. Neither though is a lose-lose option.
Doesn’t matter.
In their respective expected timeframe. Which LE does a bad job in properly conveying up-front.