Early and late game feel like they were designed by completely different game studios (and not in a good way) (wall of text)

Sidenote: If you're trying to figure out if you should buy the game or not, and stumble upon this post…ignore it and go buy the game. It's more than worth it's price tag.
To put it into perspective, I have 1700 hours in this game.

 

 

None of my comments are related to: it takes me X hours to get item A…I want to it take 0.3X hours.
It's not about that, it's about how the journey of those X hours feel, to the point that I'd rather it take me 1.5X hours to get item A if the journey didn't feel worse than a gambling simulator. Let me explain…

 

In the early game, the char journey feels absolutely AMAZING….
I'm looking for affixes to shatter, bases to craft on, and every time I get to press F I'm doing that meme where I'm singing while playing…..

 

And the as some point you hit the end game, and it's so different that it feel like the late game was designed by a completely different game studio, going from casual friendly amazing progression systems, to something worse than forced gambling.

 

Even something so amazing as the crafting system that feels like a god-send in early game, starts feeling annoying gambling machine.

 

When you start slamming uniques, you basically have to scratch 4 lottery tickets, 2 of which will reset your progress.

 

Lottery ticket 1: buy prophecies to aquire unique with LP, when done you go to next:
Lottery ticket 2: buy prophs to acquire T7 item for unique. =>
Lottery ticket 3: craft T7 item for slam, if you fail, go back to lottery ticket 2.
Lottery ticket 4: slam item, if you fail start all over by getting lottery tickets 1 again. and you're biased to fail for all 1 LP and 2LP items which most of what you will be slamming.

 

This means that you constantly have a game loop where you farm hours, only to fail at step 3 or 4 and then have to restart. And this is the normal flow of the game…this is what's to be expected.

And it doesn't matter if you're MG or CoF, just sub farm favor for farming gold.

I'm not a big enjoyer of gambling, so this feels EXTREMTLY bad. Basically no matter how many times I've slammed it and failed, I'm, always somewhere between 1 and infinity (math is fun sometimes….) slams away from getting my upgrade.
And at that point I start asking myself…why even bother trying?

I'd rather be forced to double corrupt an item in PoE before I can equip it than do this, it feels less punishing.

In PoE ppl even take out lucky RNG drops from farming tests….because RNG can only help you get to your goal faster, it never resets your own progress unless you make the choice to start corrupting your gear. In LE this is how you have to play the game…. Farm a few hours, reset progress….Farm a few hours, reset progress….rinse and repeat.

 

just one example

And the entire endgame is like this, either forced gambling or FOMO.

 

Crafting:
crafting exalts in late game is like a 95% brick chance. => the one awesome crafting system feels like forced gambling with bad win%.

Blessings:
Again, I just need to do somewhere between 1 and infinity more runs to get a good roll on my blessing. Whih is super fun things like crit avoidance in HC…if you have 99% you might just as well have 0%.

 

Another point here, I've never ever heard anyone complain about white maps in PoE, yet everyone here wants so badly to skip non-emp monos even though they are technically more rewarding that while maps in PoE.
for me at least this has to do with how blessings are designed….why waste time in non-emp when I need to redo the entire thing in emp with a 1-to-infinity farm? While PoE white maps give me a sense of achievement and progression that doesn't feel wasted.

 

Can't queue up harbinger attempts:
if you want a chance at abberoth, you need to do habingers, but you can't "queue" them up in some way.
So you're forced into builds that can both good clear and kill bosses fast, which makes balancing so much harder.
 

Loot Tetris on char:
loot Tertis feels so bad. With so many resistances and limited affixes, it's super hard to do loot tetris. In PoE due to res swap and the massive skill tree, you can always move some stuff around and fit in that new piece while getting a bit stronger and feel like you've solved a problem. Here you just need to dump the item in your stash and hope you get another piece later that's gonna perfectly fit with this one.

 

Prophecies:
some prophecies are so bad it feels so bad to sit there and reroll and  feel like you're wasting favor.
e.g. kill named arena champ 6 times…. Even if this prophecy GAVE me 20k favor I would still never pick it… (another 6 to infinity grind design)

 

3LP/ 4LP items:
complete noob trap. Thankfully The curse and FrozenSentinel made an excel where ppl who play a lot can quickly see what's "realistic", and know what to aim for. But if you don't know all this data, it's a massive biat to the point where the universe will end before you get some of the items with 4 LP…. Why is this is thing in a seasonal game?

 

End game:
Adding lizards, egs, stashes, shrines, exiled mages is not expanding the endgame. It's just adding more random things to it.
e.g. if I play a low life build => I have to kill the mages.   If I don't need any experimental affix => I can completely ignore them.
this is not expanding the endgame.

 

To me, end game is the ability to tailor your farming loop late in the game specifically to your chars strengths and weaknesses so that you feel like you're min/maxing this aspect of your char as well, and not feel like an idiot because you didn't just reroll to a FOTM build and farm 2-3-4x as much in the same time.

There's 1 endgame activity on CoF right now, but based on how hard it's to set up (10+ hours) and how easy it's to ruin it so you have to start over, I'd say there's 0.25 endgame…..
this is double enrage beacon setup on specific maps.

And I actually have no problem farming this (as long as I don't brick the setup because I space out for 10 seconds…).
Expanding end game doesn't need to require 100's of hours of artists.
make it possible to set up different efficient Favor farming monos based on what your char's strengths are with the assets you already have while you work on future fancy versions with look aesthetics.

 

Julra:
I've ran into julra a few times to slam items that I don't needs, but could be useful for future builds. I didn't want to have to remember I had these nice drops in my inv so I figured, I'd just run to julra, slam it, it's gonna brick, and I can throw it on the floor and get it out of my mind (kind of a sad state of the game that this is a thing tbh).

And when I did this, since I didn't care about the outcome, I actually found myself exploring the level looking for the egg and mage without being annoyed, it actually felt nice.

And queue me going there 10 min later with an item where I do care about the outcome, and I absolutely hate every second of trying to find the boss…. This is because I know I'm about to erase hours (mostly likely with a 1/6 chance) and hours of farming and you're making me run down dead ends waste even more time….
only to get to Julra and get clipped by a de-synced beam that kills me before I can even see I'm standing in it….
It's like the game is designed to see how much I can take before I do ALT+F4…

and I was there 10 min earlier and was loving it….

 

Arena push...
I'd rather spend twice the time doing D3 pushing with all the fishing, at least I can relax between the go's while i'm fishing. And don't have to be 100% focused all the time on trying to avoiding random desynced deaths and having to start all over again.

There's more, but you get the point.
 

Early game feels like 10/10, and late game feels like 0/10 to a point where PoE feels more causal friendly.
even if I farm 2-3 div/h, after 2 hours I have 4-6 divs I can use towards my next craft. And if there's only a 1/4 or 1/6 chance the craft will succeed with 6 div, I can just chose to do some other upgrade with my currency or save until I have a 80% chance to hit the craft… while LE forces you into a full reset gamble…

 

 

Will I still play the game?
yes, I'll still come back each season but only play for 1-2 days before I start getting into this full on gambling part of the game….
but I do hope that this changes, because I want so badly for this to be my main ARPG (and I spend 100's and 100's of divines on single items in PoE each league, and I would still prefer LE, but I can't take all this forced gambling).
 

The sad part is I had more fun making my dps excels than actually playing chars in the late game…
and the main thing that kept me going was to try and get another increase for my excel sheet :(

https://preview.redd.it/amg87ff17vke1.png?width=2538&format=png&auto=webp&s=9840c6f1e6351b760e4cabdf0a88f709ebdf9460

I know I haven't offered any solutions, this is since I don't know what (if anything) EHG is willing to change. They might love this game loop.
And I would have gone with a completely different route in CoF, instead of increasing random drops, I would have kept drop rates same, and implemented sytems where favor can be used as a step after crafting to help progress items towards their endgame goal while still relying on drops.
and allowing prophecies to increase likelyhood of certain items/bases.

Crossing my fingers for a great season 2.