I just think that, gameplay wise, Rage of Morditas is incredibly fun. I'm a bit concerned that every season ground loot becomes increasingly irrelevant, and I'm always a little concerned that this widens the gap between MG and CoF. Aside from all of that, though, it's just an absolute blast to play.
I'm probably getting "rare trash" procs somewhere between 1/3 - 1/5 trash clearings rather than 2% as the perk states. I leave the ocean after a day clearing trash with between 100-200 coffers, usually netting like 10-30k money.
So uhh...has this been discussed at all? Others experiencing this?
I'm approaching the end of the 3rd major area, and I'm growing increasingly frustrated with my very, very limited hotbar. In any given fight, I have 4 companion abilities I would like to use, plus 8 player abilities I would like to use. Going into a menu, or even a sub-menu in the case of player abilities, to activate things in an action-oriented combat game multiple times per fight is absolutely terrible gameplay (to me).
Is there some way around this? Why is the hotbar limited to 6 buttons? Maddening design choice, probably just to not make the PC version and console version different in that way.
Don't get me wrong, I think that playstyle should exist for people who enjoy it, but it feels like so many mage builds that are viable are being propped up by triggering a bazillion secondary effects. I'm extremely tired of how many things are just about int-stacking with fragment of the enigma, Reowyn's Frostguard, and spark charges.
I can't be the only person who just wants to use an ability and have IT deal the primary damage of my build.
I want a pure fireball build. I want a pure static orb build, a pure mana strike build (I still think mana stacking mana strike should be viable), a pure Ice Barrage build, a pure elemental nova build, etc.
I think mage has SO MANY COOL SPELLS that just can't be used as a primary tool because they don't scale past level 60, and even in campaign are clearly second-rate compared to other spells that you can test and see immediately work well. My preferred build style is AoE Damage Spell + ST Damage spell + Defensive Steroid + Offensive steroid + Movement
I understand that people want content faster, and it's just objectively true that EHG is slow in comparison to GGG, the game they are most compared to.
But it's also true that the game has deep flaws that a 3-4 month update cycle will not address, especially given EHG's development speed. EHG should focus on releasing bangers (which I think Season 2 was) over releasing every 3 months. Season 1 was a disaster, even at launch, and Season 2 was the best one yet, despite the long wait. Season 3 had a higher peak playercount than season 1 did.
The danger of a slow or inconsistent cadence is players losing interest. The danger of low-quality releases is that interested players won't come back. Quality before cadence.
Time will tell if we will get either.
Each of the dungeons has it's own mechanic and unique gameplay, interesting bosses, and unique reward structure. I find the dungeons more fun than monoliths. Unfortunately, they've just been left in the dust.
Trivial difficulty for endgame characters means all of the mechanics of the dungeons are actually meaningless. The Fire Lich fight in soulfire is actually really interesting if you don't one-shot him and he can realistically kill you. I feel this way about each of the boss fights, honestly. The dungeon bosses are way better than the timeline bosses.
The rewards also haven't kept up. There's no reason to do the dungeons aside from slamming legendaries, doing vault with infinite money, or farming boss uniques. The rewards are scaled from 0.9 and before, which is to say that they're terrible. For people who weren't around back then, imagine a world where soulfire bastion is legitimately the best way to target farm items.
I think it's a shame. The dungeons need some modernizations, map generation, and some new carrots. If they were actually content worth doing, or if we actually cared about acquiring keys so we could do them. The game would be SO MUCH BETTER.
Portal keys are probably the single element in the game that makes me the saltiest. A clear sign from the devs that they intend for dungeons to be skipped for the foreseeable future.
Seriously, these have so many design issues.
Low cost, low impact. 3950 for the main idol prophecies, dropping FORTY idols. It takes so much rerolling and purchasing to dump favor into these MFers
No Class Bias. I have absolutely no idea why they designed it this way. Probably the reason they are so cheap is because they drop a fuck ton of idols, but equally distributed amongst all classes means I'm only getting 0.2*40 = 8 idols per prophecy for my class. I'm not playing trade, I don't have my filter set up to look for other class's idols, and I don't want to. Let me spend more favor to chase the idols I want.
No unique icons. Everything in this thing shares an icon, so you have to mouse over and read EVERY SINGLE PROPHECY to figure out if it's one you want.
SO MUCH GARBAGE. This telescope probably has 80% of its prophecy types literally never picked. I have a lens focusing on grand idol prophecies and I still only get them 1/5th of the time because there are so many other things to roll. Dungeon Keys, Runes of discovery, etc. etc. etc. Who the hell has ever picked those prophecies on purpose?!?!
Idol problems. Idols aren't craftable, so if by some miracle you actually get the affix pair you want dropping, it's still probably garbage.
I know they're reworking the prophecy system, but god damn. This is the only way to get enough idols and it's so, so bad. I just want +mana, %mana grand idols. That's all I want.
I hope I can articulate this clearly. This is mostly two pieces of simple feedback:
Something like 80% of end-game itemization flows through Nemesis. For how simple and direct Nemesis is as a gameplay mechanic, I think this is very unsatisfying. Nemesis should play a small but important role in itemization, proportionate to its gameplay, not the be-all-end-all of itemization. Everyone running dozens of conquered towers back to back just for nemesis seems like nemesis is taking up too much space.
This is also true for Omens while leveling. The corrupted gear that drops there completely carries characters through to monoliths, invalidating almost all other sources of gear.
Most of the game is trivial except Season mechanics. When nemesis released, it was BY FAR more challenging than anything else. When rift beasts released, same thing. In Season 4, the only thing that can come anywhere close to killing me are omens. It makes the rest of the game feel vestigial by comparison. If I can survive omens, then the rest of the game is absolutely trivial.
I think LE has this deeper issue with new content overshadowing and invalidating old content, and these two are strong instances of that
There are obviously exceptions to this rule for people whose MMR is in the process of changing rapidly, but that realistically applies to a pretty small amount of people in any given lobby.
When I see someone make a play that is questionable to me, it is extremely helpful to remember two things
Like it or not, they are about as good as I am at this game. Maybe they're worse in this one way, but they're better in others.
Dwelling on what my teammates are doing wrong is actively harming my ability to win games
What I describe below is something I feel pretty clearly for myself. I'm hoping it's relatable to otheres.
LoL is somewhat unique in that your PoV and your allies/enemies PoV are effectively exactly the same. You get to see what your allies are doing as if you are them. You constantly think about what you'd be doing in their position. Every click, every spell, every skillshot, every decision, you have the power to (consciously or subconsciously) evaluate what you would be doing in their position.
When what they do doesn't match what you would do, it causes this kind of shock. Like the character isn't doing what it should. And when what they do doesn't go well, and you think what you would do would have gone better (you think), it causes this evaluation that they are worse than you. They clearly did the wrong thing, and you would have done the right thing.
Unfortunately, the reverse doesn't happen. You don't get to see all of the times that what you do is worse than what they would do in your position, and how often that would be better.
The game was 100 different skills in 10,000 different scenarios. Even if you can correctly identify something your ally seems terrible at, maybe they move better on the map, track objectives, clear vision, teamfight, etc. etc. etc., better than you do!
If they're at your MMR, the best assumption during every moment in every game is that they're not worse than you, even when you can identify their mistakes.
And what good does dwelling on such things do for you, anyway?
EHG has a tendency to add content that then does not get adequate support, making it increasingly useless as time goes on. Today, dungeons are the topic.
Dungeons feel like a complete waste of time in almost every case, but that wasn't always true. When dungeons released, they were primo content. People wanted more things to do in the game, and EHG delivered the dungeons. They weren't perfect - they had their problems. EHG's solution of fixed map randomization through random walls was extremely frustrating.
But still, they were widely praised on release. They have unique(ish) and interesting mechanics. They had, at the time, the most interesting bosses thus far in the game. And, most importantly, they were often the most rewarding content available, hence the keys! You wanted keys because you wanted to do dungeons! You were gated by how often you got access to the most rewarding content by how many keys you had. Now, the keys seem like a joke.
Temporal Sanctum was released when Exalted items were released, and were by far the most lucrative way to farm them, especially with floor bonuses. And I'll just say it, I think the time swapping mechanic is dope, although it could be utilized in more interesting ways.
Soulfire Bastion was the only target farming option in the game. If you wanted a specific world drop, Soulfire Bastion was the only way to target it, outside of Rune of Ascendance. I can't quite recall which of those came first. But back then, there was no reliable way to get Runes of Ascendance.
Lightless Arbor is actually still relevant for MG characters due to it being so lucrative. It's gold gated, but very good at dropping lots of high value stuff.
Over time, the dungeons have just been power crept. The content is a total waste of time not because it's terrible, but because its rewards and challenges are terrible. Now, 1000 corruption is routine and 10,000 corruption is attainable by a dozen builds. Many builds can one-shot uberoth, what chance does Julra have?
That, and the rewards feel like a joke compared to everything else we have available. One of the common T4 Julra rewards is that the boss drops AN extra glyph of despair. Holy shit! AN ENTIRE GLYPH OF DESPAIR.
Overall, the thing that frustrates me most about LE as a player is that I actually like the game, and I've liked it for years, but I feel like it's getting worse over time not because new content is bad, but because old content feels abandoned. That the experience of playing the game feels like a monster of stitched together pieces that don't make sense as part of a cohesive whole.
LE has so many vestigial pieces, and they tear the experience down, imo. Personally, I would much rather see EHG prioritize making the game they HAVE make sense, rather than adding new sprawling content at a breakneck pace (lol). For example, I'd much rather have a comprehensive and compelling system to upgrade exalted items than have corruption added. The gear was already good, I don't need corruption. I want the game to make sense with the things that are already in it.