Death penalty

That’s an awful elitist attitude you’ve got there, or at least that’s how you’re coming across.

The reason people don’t like the death penalty in PoE is that losing progress sucks. It doesn’t matter how good at the game you are. Losing hours of grind sucks. Sorry, it’s the truth. (See, I can do that too…and we’re both wrong to claim things as fact when these are our opinions, nothing more.)

In PoE, once you break into the 90s, a death really starts to chafe because of the amount of grind time you lose out on. I suspect this is a reason a lot of build guides I look at tend to finish off in the low 90s and consider passive points beyond that to be a bonus. There are people in PoE who like that, and that’s fine.

LE is not PoE, unless I’ve missed a blog post where the devs indicated their desire to build a PoE-like game in terms of difficulty that excessively punishes the player for a single mistake at high levels. (It is also only my opinion, but making a single mistake doesn’t make someone a bad player, either. If someone wants to focus on deathless play, HC exists.)

Also, “casual” tends to mean someone without tons and tons of playtime - not someone who has a hard time with game mechanics. Most people who play games are casuals in the sense that they have responsibilities and can’t sit around playing games all day.

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If everybody is allowed to reach level 100 then the whole point of level 100 is null and void. This is not elitist, its how the game was made from the get go and how it retains some of its populace. Besides, even casuals can reach level 95 or at the very least level 90. The difference of 5-10 skill points means nothing(really, the skill points there are less important than here).

So yes, there is a clear divide between people who can and put in the work and people who cant. This is good.

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I always felt a good idea for death penalties would be to incorporate them into the different difficulties other games use.
In most other RPGs like diablo and grim dawn etc we see normal mode, veteran, elite, mastery etc. where mob health and damage are increased but so are the rewards. Why not add the death penalty into something like this:

Normal Mode - No penalties or bonuses.

Hard Mode - Mob health, damage, crit chance and speed increased by 50%. No death penalty. Rare/Unique drop rate increased by 100%

Veteran Mode - Mob health, damage, crit chance and speed increased by 100%. Player/minion protections decreased by 100. Upon player death, experience lost = 50% of current level. Rare/Unique drop rate increased by 250%
****Gold loss per death - 1 on first death, 10 on second death, 100 on 3rd death. 1000 per death thereafter

Elite Mode - Mob health, damage, crit chance and speed increased by 200%. Mob ability cooldowns decreased 100%. Player/minion protections decreased by 250. Upon player death, current level experience is reset. Rare/Unique drop rate increased by 500%.
****Gold loss per death - 1 on first death, 10 on second death, 100 on 3rd death, 1000 on 4th death and 10000 per death thereafter

NOT TO 50! Mode - Mob health, damage, crit chance and speed increased by 500%. Mob ability cooldowns decreased by 200%. Player/minion protections decreased by 500. Dodge, glancing blow, stun avoidance and ward retention decreased by 25%. Upon player death, player level is decreased by 1. Rare/Unique drop rate increased by 1000%. Cosmetic items may drop in game.
****Gold loss per death - 1 on first death, 10 on second death, 100 on 3rd death, 1000 on 4th death, 100k on 5th death and thereafter.

Your mileage may vary…

I made a pretty detailed Explanation why i think a death Penalty is good in another post here:

TL:DR: it brings a bit of dynamic to the overall gameplay/combat and can be beneficial for a meanigful economy if it’s tied to gold loss

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If everybody is allowed to reach level 100 it would make it null and void? You say it is not elitist to say that? Allowed? Seriously?
That’s classic gatekeeping, but it seems to me you think that it’s a good idea.

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And this a problem…why? The content is not barred. A level 80 character with sufficient gear can clear everything (except the endless mine of course). Reaching level 100 doesn’t mean anything other than a personal achievement which is exactly how it should be.

Dude, you said allowed, that’s what I am having problems with.

Things like hitting level 99 in Diablo 2 and hitting level 100 in PoE are insane grinds. There’s nothing “elite” about accomplishing either one - it comes down to how many hours you’re willing to dump into it, often times involving running content that has a minimal chance to kill you (because that would set you back hours of “work”) ad nauseum. It sounds interminably boring, but if not wanting to chase that kind of stretch goal makes me “casual”, then I’m rather happy to be casual.

There are a lot of options for handling death penalties and I look forward to seeing what the devs have rolling around in their heads. A death penalty should encourage a player to weigh risk vs potential reward, but not give the player the metaphorical finger every time they make a mistake.

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Get good enough at the game and you’ll be allowed too.

I think his point is that you can’t allow or disallow someone to hit max level. All max level represents is an insane time investment. That isn’t a measure of skill or “worthiness”, it’s a measure of free time (and, some would argue, of masochism).

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Exactly, thank you.

So why want it then? Why feeling so distraught when you die and your exp goes down? If this is all it is - a representation of time spent(neither here nor there by the way, people reach it in less than a week) then why care.

I am not talking to you specifically but to anti-death penalty people who seem entitled to get what they want regardless of everything else.

Not to detract from the PoE discussion, but LE does have a masochism mode, and if the rewards for playing masochism mode are worth the damage penalties vs standard mode (higher chance of legendaries, larger xp and gold rewards, etc.), then masochism mode is a good place to test out any death penalties. Besides, we have ladders and HC mode for “serious business” players, especially as HC is a great ladder as those who die are put into SC mode so people aren’t devastated at losing months of grinding when their character dies.

For standard play, though, I wouldn’t recommend anything outside of resetting encounters / monoliths / getting kicked out of Arena and having to reset progress in other end-game systems. Since most great passives are at the top of the class bar, having your exp reset every time would frustrate people who want to see the fruits of their efforts. Harsher penalties for death also discourages players from testing out under-utilized or under-performing class passives, skill nodes, Unique equipment, or skill synergies; we need people testing out many ideas so that the devs can take feedback and provide adjustments that increase build diversity. It should take 6 months of no new content for a metagame to become more optimized / stagnant, not halfway through beta testing. :blush:

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Punishing people for playing a game is a rather old construct. Look at D3 for example… uh I died I need to rep my gear and it costs 500k I still hope my 35 billions of gold will be enough. That’s a joke and could be completely gone.

The only meaningfull way of a death penalty is an XP loss. When I think back to the good ol L2 times i Get the chills. Dieing in high levels set you back about a month. I still think there should be a normal game mode without merits or flaws. If you die you die and get back to the last control point and be done.

There could be a lot of optional gamemodes to care for all players. They want death peneltys? Sure give it to them like loosing 50% of level xp and 10% gold each death but don’t force this on people who just want to play and have a good time. A death penelty is nothing but an artifical grind increase and can be totaly neglected if you build enough tank and that’s it. This has nothing to do with skill it’s simple math.

At the end of the day it’s the devs descission. Do they want to appeal to everyone or do they want to decrease a potential playerbase if they force to harsh stuff on everyone. There is a reason why many games have different game modes and why there is stuff like “Story Mode” or “Very Easy”. At the end of the day I think it’s best to get in as many players as possible.

Best example: I already know 30 people who won’t touch D4 if “open world” PvP is forced on them. On the other hand there are 2 others as well that are more intrested in D4 because of it. At the end of the day I’m still thinking: “Why don’t you make 2 servers? PvP and PvE and everyone is a happy panda?” between all the PvP players want to show ther big e peen and bash everyone who is against PvP for whatever reason ^^.

Just make everyone as happy as possible without surrendering the basic vision of the game and everyone should be fine.

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Just to clarify; modes such as Masochism and Hardcore do not offer any such rewards.

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I think with everything the devs already said About their plans for trading/Bazaar they could really make a difference here with MEANINGFUL economy.

Devs stated that they admire PoE for it’s economy and they want LE to have a similar meaningful economy but with gold instead of “artifical currencies” (like other valueable crafting items like it is the case for PoE)

So while i understand your example that D3 and many other similar games just have stuff like repair costs and other Things were you have to spend marginal amount of Money which makes the system obsolete.

But let’s give the devs a Chance making a meaningful economy.

All of this is invalid of course if devs decide to make a pure exp penalty instead of gold.

But still i find some sort of death penalty appealing. I myself do not play machoism or HC and i think a good tuned death penalty brings more statisfaction to leveling up and EARNING exp/level

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…how is the many modes thing even going to work? This is supposed to be a multiplayer game in the end, right? We can play together, compete on leaderboards, this is not a completely single player game with 5 difficulty modes you can switch on a whim. Everybody should have the same start and progress (except the HC/SC divide of course) Separating the player base over something as meaningless as a death penalty (and trust me, it barely means a thing in PoE) would not be wise considering how many people play Last Epoch.

The problem is, as I’ve said many times in the PoE forum itself, in your heads. You believe that holding you back from achieving the next level is a big deal. Its not. What level you are does not prevent you from playing the game to the fullest, it is a personal achievement you can opt out of completely without losing sleep over it.

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Don’t think we should be too hung up with a single choice of word. Maybe the better word here is “can”.

If we don’t have any leveling penalties, then this is indeed what it would come down to.

I’m totally cool with a death penalty. I just don’t want it to cost me an evening of grind to recoup.

There have been some good suggestions in this thread. I’m looking forward to seeing what the devs come up with.

…that is obviously not meaningless after all, given the amount of debate/discussion.

No, thank you.

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