Things that Last Epoch does better than POE.

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billclinton48 wrote:

First and foremost. There is NO death penalty.

This alone sounds fucking brilliant. It's so frustrating, infuriating even, to lose hours or even days of progress because I'm stupid enough to take on Maven when I'm 30% towards level 99 or whatever. The consequence is that you end up doing "safe" content for days on end, until you have JUST levelled up. Then it's finally okay to take on bosses and other tough content again, because if you die you don't lose the last two days' progress for example.

I'm more divided on some of the other points you mention, but this is a definite WIN for Last Epoch in my view =)

poe feels more like a job and LE more like a game for fun

Preface: I think LE is going to be at least solid and maybe possibly a banger and hope it presents a legitimate "middleground" ARPG experience because quite frankly POE itself needs a "middleground" solo version balanced for real normal/arverage players instead of streamers or the meta cucks because the trade version is borderline psychotic, balanced towards being sweaty (unless you meta /trade/no life in which case its actually one of easiest and most trivial ARPG experiences available) So in other words there's no middle ground between SC trade and no life SSF "challenge mode".

So that said lets dig into this:

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billclinton48 wrote:

Short answer: well, basicly everything.

Okay so thats a disingenuous or uninformed take. POE is deeper more complex and more developed, with more stuff to do and more aspirational items. Its also better looking and sounding, has some of the best music in any game, and despite being from 2013 has better animation* also if you're a "screens have to explode or I can't get an erection" type POE is also much more of that. (just being thorough I am not one of those guys)

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billclinton48 wrote:

First and foremost. There is NO death penalty.

this just means the game is lighter and more casual less consequences for your poor choices somewhat objectively means that the game is less of a game... Or more bland if that makes sense.

I like games with consequences for poor choices... No death penality makes the game less interesting and shifts it away from what I like and towards the sort of light weight MMO/mobile types of games where almost nothing you do actually matters. Being closer to this type of game is not in any way "superior to POE" bear iun mind I feel POE has some of these as well (most notably in the meta/clear speed cookie clicker combat).

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billclinton48 wrote:

EVERYTHING is pre-identified.

Another malus. Same exact reasoning and subjective preference as death penalty. there's less consequence thus your choices matter less than they might otherwise.

I've played pretty much every type of videogame game ever made, ID'ing items has subtle "weight" implications its about deciding if you pick something up and ID it... if there's no ID'ing this choice is less of a choice. Also Items feel a little less like Magical items in a D&D descended game.

Less authentic less imersive less convincing that the pixels in the game have value. The human mind can be tricked into valuing pixels... but it actually has to be tricked and less weight and less consequence less friction all make that trick less possible.

In my experience if you combine no ID'ing with auto pickup "loot vacuum" your items become the thinest most trash itemization thats possible before you can no longer even call them loot or items. D4 has this exact same issue. Lost Ark is even worse and has "items" that in no way shape or form feel like things in a world. There's ZERO value, they aren't even really items any more.

LE will need to compensate in some way or their items will feel less like items than POE's items.

I want my loot driven ARPG to have items that feel as authentic and important as possible. Not numbers in a automatically updated spreadsheet.

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billclinton48 wrote:

Gold is picked up automatically by walking over it, and all crafting materials in the area are picked up by 1 click.

I agree if a currency or resource is never manipulated (i.e its not really an "Item") and has no interesting gameplay choices then sure, auto pickup is the right call. If its also ubiquitous and would be annoying to click on constantly then IMO it should ALWAYS as a point of "design philosophy" be auto looted. GGG could stand to learn this lesson: ANY TIME you put in something that never has an impactful "manipulation" (like looking at an item and deciding whether to equip it) decision loop it definitely should be automatically picked up unless there's a strong rationale for making the player click on it. GGG could stand to permanently learn this lesson instead of making the same mistake every time they put in such a thing.

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billclinton48 wrote:

Boss Fights.
So far looking quite good.
POE has some of the most poorly designed boss fights with en even poorer loot table. Sirus, Maven, need I say more? Eater of worlds takes forever to grind to and he drops a 1c glove as reward. Well done GGG.

I wont comment of LE's bosses as its been over a year for me but I will say that Sirus is unquestionably the worst boss fight I've ever experienced and I've played videogames since the 1980's. Maven absolutely has no business having a short term memorization and recall puzzle mini game.

For the same reason that it doesn't have any business having an Algebra test, a spelling bee, a dance dance revolution control matt sequence or a Wii sing along into a mic song recital puzzle. They are all just as utterly out of place in an ARPG as a game of "Simon" from 1980 is.

IMO ARPG's should have boss fights that test your character your gear and reasonable telegraphs/puddles and such. I don;'t think this is a controversial idea. it is after all the base premise for the entire genre.

Also ideally Phases in boss fights only exist because Developers have done a bad job balancing and bounding the mathematical extents of their game. I can live with phases for developers that have a hard time with that and GGG is clearly one of those but they can be done MUCH better, and Sirus is the absolute most dogshit example of how to do them.

I actually have less issue with Ghost and Goblin's final boss forcing me to REPLAY THE ENTIRE GAME to then be able to finish its final "phase", than I do with the design of Sirus LOL.

As for ID scrolls...

I think it should be considerably rare but to ID a special type of item that would be(most of the time) worth the search for such scrolls.

Let's say you have 5 types of ID scrolls. If you drop special item with a green mark for instance, you'd need the correct type of ID scroll to identify it.

Something like that. But the items should be worth the search for these scrolls.

Other than that I would prefer if ID scrolls were removed from PoE

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Mmmannn wrote:

his game been in development and early access for how many years now? Yet they are releasing an unfinished product and have the balls to charge money for it and shill it aggressively. Sad

So sad but true. Most new games these days only exist to milk out all the early access cash while keeping the game in early access as long as possible only to never use a single gained cent on a faster and better development. Gaming folks these days is just stupid enough to buy every shit and of course the gaming industry is going to just take more and more advantage of it..

Yep agree with ALL of these.

The XP penalty is too much @95+, even 1 bar loss is too much (let alone 2) when you have to do 100s of map reruns just to get back to the same place you were before being 1 shot without any possible means of mitigation (knowing full well the risk of another WTF 1 shot)
I would prefer no penalty at all and let GGG increase XP requirement so at least you are going to reach the top of the mountain if you put in the hours, at least you feel like you are making progression even if its small rather than climbing a ladder made of tissue paper (ths would increase player concurrency/more time in game GGG...certainly would for me) Most players getting to 100 are just carried doing 5-way/leaching XP off of some 50+ mirror build, completely oppositie to what GGG intended by 'making you earn lvl 100'.All you see in global (besides beggars) are leechers.

Items should be ID'd by default. What purpose does it serve by having to pick up an item, use a scroll on it, see if its useful, then drop it..other than just waste your time and p!$$ you off because eventually you just stop bothering and walk past everything.

It would be good if item stat tiers were also scaled based on player level so something decent could actually drop, whats the point in seeing lowest level tiers items with +3 life at level 95+, better you dont even see the drop and stop spamming the screen with complete crap.This way at least when something does drop at least it MIGHT be decent, rather than 1 in a billion chance rolling every single tier weight available for every single stat - that you will never see because you stopped bothering to look anyway..

Filter should be in game, I would also like to see some UI option for picking up filtered items, who doesnt want to pick up Mirrors/devs,Ex etc..a nice currency tab option (check box besides each etc) would be nice to auto pick up those items if you have stash space.

While we are talking QoL option, can we have some simple options to clear down stash tabs, especially at the league end. A simple DELETE ALL button for a stash tab would help immensely for all of us. People might stop HIDING read only stash tabs if they didn't have to spend X hours clearing them down 1 by 1 at the end of a league. I expect this alone would massively reduce DB size/storage for GGG (and costs/updates/migrations).I used to clear mine down to be good to GGG, and now I'm not sitting there clicking 100,000 times to drop/vendor quad tabs full of stuff (you want us to buy them right GGG - try vendoring just 1 quad tab full of gems to nothing to delete the tab ). I just use hide read only like everyone else is doing...millions upon millions of unwanted DB items GGG across your player base (if you pay for storage GGG - wow..)

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Dryxios1 wrote:

The XP penalty is too much @95+, even 1 bar loss is too much (let alone 2) when you have to do 100s of map reruns just to get back to the same place you were

That's not even remotely true. Not reading anything else you wrote.

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Mmmannn wrote:

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Dryxios1 wrote:

The XP penalty is too much @95+, even 1 bar loss is too much (let alone 2) when you have to do 100s of map reruns just to get back to the same place you were

That's not even remotely true. Not reading anything else you wrote.

I'll never understand why people have to dilute their arguments with gross exaggerations like what Dryxios said. Can't have a discussion without someone doing this and it's tiring

My super-important opinions on this thread:

1) XP penalty is objectively lame, partly because it doesn't differentiate between server desync (looking at you lab and you expedition) and even if it weren't lame, it needs to be toned down a bit. It feels more like it punishes playing the game than being reckless.

2) POE has more depth than LE, but LE is technically not even released yet. Thematically, POE is cooler, this is also a fact. POE is more grimdark and honestly, the uniques in POE are cooler than any game. No contest.

ON the flipside, a lot of the "depth" in POE is mostly just renaming armor as something else and making you play swapsies with other damage types to get it. FFS, most of the endgame deep delvers right now are using the same low tier damage conversion uniques for a reason. Half the depth is not meta, POE balances around meta, meaning much of the depth is extraneous and really just filler that got left by the roadside leagues ago.

3) Item ID needs a middleground. POE has no such thing as middlegrounds. Rares are too common and usually have junk modifiers, I'm so tired of stopping constantly to go through a pile of fractured items only to find they all were bad. One thought would be having one extra loot tier between rare and unique that has to be ID'd or even some sort of compromise system where you click once on the scroll and then click on items to identify. Click and reclick for every single thing is just madness. Pretty sure even many of the devs secretly think so.

4) POE has exploding everything, I'm tired of running away from 5 different kinds of pulsing meatballs all. the. time. Some stuff exploding? YES! COOL! But not everything. Mobs need to die more when you kill them and stop being sore losers. LE may not have enough exploding things, I'm not sure yet.

All in all, POE is great, LE likely won't do it all better, but POE needs to not take itself quite as seriously. This is also a fact.

Naw, I don't like it, that was sincere.