Rune of Removal

+1 fpr what is a skinner box? I’m intrigued

He’s saying any rng grind is inherently a Skinner box. You can google the term. It’s basically saying the grind for loot is conditioning us to go through a monotonous action to obtain a reward.

He’s basically saying he doesn’t want to grind for loot. And his interest is only in the theory crafting and engaging in intriguing combat.

I would however argue that the grind itself and the loot is a key aspect of what makes ARPG fun.

Oh he would be very interested in the theory crafter builder program. He wouldnt even have to open the game and kill his gpu
And intriguing items will be all over wiki soon.

What do I see but a bunch of pedantic posts presuming people know my own tastes and desires better than I do. How… pretentious.

The description above is correct: Skinner boxes are psychological exercises to determine just the proper amount of intermittent reward to give to keep people invested in repeating a repetitive task. Examples of this include the variety of rewards (lots of little rewards vs rare large rewards), rarity of rewards, ambiance, and type of investment (series of dull tasks vs tasks interspersed with high-intensity brainpower). It’s no surprise that casinos invest a huge amount of investment in psychological research to determine the type of games, space layout, even frequency of lights, to keep people hooked. The most insidious Skinner box example I’ve heard was some Chinese lootbox gambling system where not only the odds of winning were atrocious and required both time and money investment, but at the end of the day, the game rewarded the player who opened the most lootboxes. The reward? More lootboxes! At least casinos give you the chance - however small - to win something that’s actually useful in the real world. But for fake items? I don’t have time for this nonsense.

Properly designed ARPGs skip the Skinner box mentality completely by providing an engaging skill system, responsive abilities and controls, ambiance that reflects the environment you’re in, multiple ways to branch off into creative and unique builds, and a progression system that rewards players for understanding the game’s mechanics and exploring more than the minimum path to get from A to B. Badly designed ARPGs are little more than gambling simulators with slightly more investment than “pull lever, get prize (or not).” Last Epoch is unique from other ARPGs in that skill progression is detached from equipment entirely - you obtain skill nodes strictly by experience. Passive nodes give bits of damage here and provide certain conditions there, but considering how long it takes to level up to earn that passive point, it’s hardly game-defining. And as of now, there aren’t many Unique / Legendary / Set equipment that really define a build (or even give good resistances to patch up a build until that sought-after drop is finally found). Which means that normal equipment - with all the prefix/suffix combinations that abound - play a huge role as to whether a player’s build will survive or not.

How many of you have begun to think about the number of RNG gates there are in this game:
RNG of having a not-garbage base item (like leather hats when you’re at the level where you can get Gladiator helms)
RNG of the base values not having garbage-tier rolls (when you’re a minion build who wants Turquoise rings for minion health and damage, that’s a 25% of having even decent rolls)
RNG of having affixes you want while not having the affixes you don’t want - especially if the affix you want is specific to that slot (like Cooldown Reduction for helms)
RNG of Rune of Removal removing the affix you don’t want while keeping the affix you do want.
RNG of having the affix you do want being at a reasonable tier (I’m not picking up a blue item that has 2 T1 affixes)
RNG of getting at least 2 crafts without early fracture (roughly a 25% of failing if you start with at least 10 instability)
Then once you finally get past all those layers:
RNG of not having a fracture that actually reduces the stats you just put so much time and material investment!

Now repeat that for every equipment slot, and the numbers are staggering. This, in a game where equipment decides much of whether your build will succeed or not. You can try all the passive node routes you want; you can try all the skill combinations and node routes you want; if your equipment is not up to snuff, you’re not able to test out whether your ideas work or not.

Now mind what I’ve said above as to what goes into a good ARPG. The passive system is still undergoing a lot of work as there’s a lot of pointless filler and nodes that are outright terrible. Many of the mastery skills are undergoing a big redesign themselves, and besides, how can you test if a skill is at an appropriate level if you either don’t have the damage to test its power or the resistances to keep yourself from getting easily killed? Interesting zones and boss fights? The game would be much more interesting if there were end-game instances where you can fight difficult boss battles repeatedly in the quest for good loot, but so far you’re limited to Arena and Monolith, where the boss encounters and maps are layered behind… RNG!

I’d much rather wade through 99 trash items to get 1 good item I’d use on my build than to wade through 75 trash items, have 25 promising items, only to have 24 of them end up being trash anyway. I want an ARPG, not a dolled-up gambling simulator.

You may want to lose that condescending attitude and tone.

I can be bad with numbers, but i read this a few times. Both these ways you end up the same, with only 1 Good item. So tell me whats the difference between what you want and what you currently have?

Name one please.

I do agree with you in general: Poorly designed games hide the lack of content behind layers of rng. Being unlucky with rolls on item affixes increases time to get propper items. This is exactly what Bioware did with Anthem. But I don’t think this is the case with LE here.

The droprates seem fair (do not know if they are increased for testing). Also the ranges of affixes that roll on items are small. You do not get a +1% damage on one item and +200% on another.

The only 2 things that can happen are that

  1. you can get an item with affixes you don’t need or
  2. affixes are lower tier than you need.

This happens in any (a)rpg I know. And this is where crafting comes in in LE. You can increase tier levels on items, add affixes or remove affixes. Just LE does not let you control this completely. If crafting would not have the chance of failure it would be much to easy to obtain maxed out gear.

This said there are ways to grand the player more or 100% control about the outcome of crafting. EHG could invent ressources that add 100% success chance to crafting. For example: Daily quest - Kill 500 Skeletons to get a Rune Of Sucess.

By implementing this EHG could control the time players spend to max out gear and also the player has a visible progress and does not rely on luck - just play time.

I can be bad with numbers, but i read this a few times. Both these ways you end up the same, with only 1 Good item. So tell me whats the difference between what you want and what you currently have?

The difference is that with the first one, the game is honest about its drop rates and my time investment is where it should be: going to dungeons, piloting my build, and getting loot. The second way, as it currently is, there’s a lot more time being spent in the crafting tool, getting my hopes up that the drops will be an improvement over what I currently have, and usually coming out with no improved gear and fewer of the shards I spent all this time getting.

Here’s some realtime data on this crafting process:

Digging into the peculiars of the Beastmaster aspect buffs and wanting to apply them to my build (specifically, the Viper buff for my DoT pet build), I realized quickly that I needed to use Melee attacks to get the buffs. I decided that Serpent Strike was the way to go, but I never stashed any polearms before. At this point, I just wanted a single suffix - apply poison on hit - the other affixes didn’t really matter as I just wanted to level up the skill. I went to the gambler and was pleasantly surprised that you can instantly reroll his stash for 500 gold. Here were my results:

First polearm: Good prefix, 2 crappy suffixes. I use Rune of Removal → it removed the good prefix. Trash.
Second polearm: Had a suffix slot empty → fractured at 90% success rate
Third polearm: Had a suffix slot empty → fractured at 82% success rate

It took a fourth polearm just for me to the poison on hit value to be acceptable to use for the build. I’m not talking about getting 4 T5 perfect affixes here, I’m asking for ONE usable affix and then build around whatever secondary affixes there are. Thankfully, the gambler allowed me to purchase the items I wanted - none of the monolith runs I tried came up with a polearm that was remotely close to the merely decent one I ended up getting and that would have taken ten times as long with no end in sight. This is not fun.

There doesn’t have to be anything complicated to give control back to the player. Make the Rune of Removal drop the rarest rune, but make the rewards worth it. Give removing an affix much more instability so that you can’t abuse the process to give yourself instant perfect items. Make it so that people look forward to drops instead of the current “this item may be decent, but I have to run it through the crafting / gambling simulator first before I can know if it will end up being trash or not.”

@boardman21: Thank you for at least trying to understand me and asking me what I want, instead of putting words in my mouth I never said, taking it upon yourself to tell me what I REALLY want, and getting it completely wrong,. It makes discussing these matters much, much better.

Even if you think I am off the mark, how difficult is it to simply say, “no, that is not what meant.” and go on to clarify yourself as you did instead of those snarky remarks you chose to make? I read what I read, and I reacted as I interpreted it. Are you expecting everyone should first clarify their understanding of what you said before they react? I think simply getting to the point and clarifying would make discussing these matters much, much better.

I’ll also respond to your latest post by explaining why I still think it appears to me you’re opposed to the grind.

You said you would much prefer the game be honest about the drop chance and give control back to the player. And you suggest the game can do this by thinning out the skinner boxes mechanics. I would argue the two are simply different philosophy of getting to the same end goal.

Hypothetically, suppose we consider the case of a decent item obtained with a 1 in 100 chance. Your preferred way is to see 99 trash and be sure that one decent item would indeed be usable. But the fact is that in both approaches, I eventually learn that the true rate of obtaining decent item is 1 in 100. You are annoyed with the latter only because without prior knowledge, you think you have 1 in 4 chance to get a decent item. But for some other players they may rather get the 1 in 4 potentially useful item and get to do some crafting activity instead of continuing with the grind.

My second point is with reference to the below quote.

This is what made it seems to me you are fundamentally opposed to the grind. Technically, the grind itself and the wading through 100 items to find 1 usable one IS an rng-gated process. Otherwise, are you saying that your quote isnt suggesting that making the grind insanely long to get a decent item or build-defining unique isnt a shallow game design practice to get people to continue playing?

So I don’t appear to be dodging your request, I will respond to this.

Grim Dawn:
Compared to Last Epoch, Grim Dawn has the following which make it a far more enjoyable leveling process than Last Epoch:

  • Factions that - once you kill the appropriate number of enemies - provide you with equipment items that provide a solid base and additional points to skills that you may focus your build around. After enough of a grind, you can even obtain build-defining items from them.

  • Nearly all the zones in the game have either Rare-level monsters or miniboss-level monsters that provide their own drops that are the most comparable to the equipment in Last Epoch. Except that even their base level have valuable resistances and skill bonuses where you can valuable improvements just from the base item. An example would be a ring that has the same prefix-suffix grind as Last Epoch, except the base bonus is a T3 Void Protection that you can build around. Last Epoch’s base items - outside of a few like the Catalysts, Infernal Wands, and Bone Amulets - are really awful.

  • Grim Dawn’s skills provide much more in protections than the skills in Last Epoch, so that you’re not reliant on the item drops to give you the boost you need to reach the tougher dungeons. I would have much less of a problem with Last Epoch’s RNG if I could level up a skill that gave me enough defenses to hold my own until I feel safe enough with the equipment I get that I can de-specialize in the skill and level up something more offensive.

  • Grim Dawn’s Uniques and Legendaries are much more numerous and varied than Last Epoch’s, and they had been since its own beta testing. Again, it would make life much easier if I only had to worry about 4-5 equipment slots and have solid paths to get the remaining slots, but in this game, every equipment slot is subject to this crafting nightmare.

  • Grim Dawn’s blueprints allow you to, once you have the appropriate materials, create a powerful item, and once you have it, you keep it. No worrying about losing your materials half-way through because one of your components failed a RNG test and shattered all over the place.

  • Treasure Troves are much more bountiful than Last Epoch’s. In Grim Dawn, exploring the map gives you near-guaranteed Potions and the potential for the above blueprints. Treasure Chests in Last Epoch are predominately a whole bunch of white items, even at level 70. The treasure chests in Last Epoch, especially those in the opposite corners of the map where you have to go out of your way to reach them, should contain many crafting shards as a reward for going off the beaten path.

And so on, and so forth. Grim Dawn gives you everything you need to create a decent baseline for builds, and all of those can be done without being dependent on RNG to get that prefix - suffix combination. Even if you don’t get the specific affix drops you want, you’re getting blueprints, faction favor points, base item drops based off which location you’re fighting in, etc.

Thankfully, the Last Epoch team is doing a great job improving the skills and passive nodes; those improvements alone make Monolith grinds a lot more tolerable. I’ll get really excited when the next endgame system that isn’t Arena Waves or random maps gets introduced.

I disagree here. Grim Dawns itemization is more random and wierd then Last Epochs. In LE I just look at the name of an item and I know what I get and if it’s usefull to pick it up. Grim dawn offers more trash items then D3 in my eyes and the forced grind for faction points isn’t a bonus neither. I realy don’t want to be forced to grind out factions to get the good stuff. In LE everything is gated behind level restrictions and that’s fine and on top of that you could simply shatter each an every item because different builds will benefit from.

As soon as the lootfilter is there people will realise how much good stuff is dropping. It took a while to come up with my own lists what items to look for but when I finished those I realised I was showered in usefull items.

Just as a bottom line… it looks like you want Grim Dawn 2.0 like many others do but I like Last Epoch for what it is. People are divided over the crafting system and I’m able to understand the frustration it might bring but after you get it it isn’t that hard. The Devs are at a good spot and bring many intresting things to the table and outside of their nerf mentality everything goes a great way. In the time you need in GD to max out factions to be able to buy everything for example you can have a decently equipped toon of every base class in LE with ease.

The only thing that’s bad in LE from my point of view is the little space we have in our stashes and everything else is rather promising.

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The crafting system in LE is very helpful at the beginning and mid game. But as soon as you start to min/maxing your gear it can get frustrating.

The problem is there are many stats you have to balance. Imagine you have balanced all your resistances at an equal level. Now you find gloves with all stats being way better than your current gloves. Only problem is your old gloves have +166 void protection, while the new ones have +174 poison protection. By using the new gloves your damage goes up but you die to void damage more often. In this case this is only a tradeoff but no improvement of your gear. You can try and use the rune of removal to get rid of the poison protection to add void protection instead. But this is a gamble. If the rune removes any other affix instead of poison protection your item is trash. And even if you are lucky and it removes the wanted affix it may happen to fracture the item when you craft the new affix.

So at a certain level we rely on rng completely. And every crafting attempt that results in a failure increases frustration.

So I’d like to see mechanics to reduce the rng and give more control to the player. Choosing the affix that we want to remove is necessary.

I don’t use the rune of removal on any item that is of use for me. I already destroyed many useful items this way.

So i followed this thread a little while now but never felt the need to respond myself because i didn’t feel i had to say anything valuable.

Now i wanna give my 2 cents

Comparing Grim Dawn and LE to some degree is not fair, Grim Dawn already had an extensive beta/EA Phase + 4 years of updates after release.

I do agree Grim Dawn is an awesome game with very cool mechanics and a very good and fair loot System.

Same goes for Grim Dawn, if you know all the bases and pre-/suffixes.

There are masses of trash items on both games LE and GD but Grim Dawn for example has a very nice loot filter, which does not let you realize how much junks Drops.

LE does not have a loot filter yet.

But regarding the original topic i do think that LE is at a good place lootwise and with the rune of removal.

There is just one thing that Needs to be changed in my opinion:
The loot bracket of base item types

I thinks it’s pretty weird that basically almost all items that drop from lvl 1-10 still can drop in mid/high lvl. Don’t get me wrong i think there should be somewhat of a range from “medicore” to “high value” base items but getting some lvl 10 boots that have a fraction of the armor of any level appropiate items just feels weird.

Tree already mentioned this:

So LE is not released yet and i think there is still a Long way to go with several small thigns that add up, but i really trust in the devs because they seem very passionate about this project.

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How is this wierd? If an enemy carrys those with him you get them maybe he don’t want to get used to other boots. Bad real world example incoming watch out… I have 20 year old butterknifes and I’ll keep them them because those do their job even if meanwhile a ton of new butterknife models came out. Sure it’s frustrating to get the 5th Slab in 4 minutes at lvl 80 on monolith stage 58 but after all it’s 1k gold ^^. After all it’s no game that advertises “What you see is what you get” and enemys drop the item type they are wearing.

IF LE drops only level appropiate stuff the game would be done in 24h tops because everyone would swim in gear. There are a lot of options to make the progress of minmaxing longer and one option is like in every other game to drop a ton of “useless” stuff.
The other option is to drop less loot with low rolls so crafting destroys most items and noone would like that to happen :D.
Sure they could simply implement a “if you outlevel base item class by 20 levels it won’t drop anymore” to still have a range of possible drops but if only level appropiate stuff drops it would be far to easy from a balancing view. You only need 2T3 +1Tx to make a 4T5 item with a little luck. If a lot of such items drop while at the best base possible… nah to easy.

Back to the rune: As I said I threw more items with little to none fracture chance away because of a fracture then items I gambled on removing one stat I disliked. I think Runes of removal are in a good spot.

They already have implemented a mechanic of that kind in the other direction. You don’t find items that are higher than your actual level. White trash items are white trash items no matter what level they are. Number of items dropping and chances for certain rarities would be the same. Just item level would fit better. But makes no difference for me.

If it really was is the case you must be a very lucky guy or the system is broken. I’d bet you crafted way more affixes than using rune of removal. You have a 3:1 chance on a yellow item to remove the wrong affix and trash the item. And even if it works you’re work is not done. You wanna craft another affix onto the new free slot and start gambling again. So the rune of removal in all cases is only an additional chance to trash items.

…No, I don’t want Grim Dawn 2.0 (seriously, what is with people thinking they know my own desires better than I do?), I just wanted to sufficiently answer your question about how other ARPG’s remove the Skinner Box mentality of “how can we force players to throw out a ton of gear because of Rune of Removal RNG fails or 80+% crafting fractures and still keep them coming back?” There is a lot that Last Epoch does right, and the new Beastmaster passive tree is really great; there are builds I really enjoy that could never be duplicated in Grim Dawn. I can’t enjoy these builds, however, if the only endgame systems are either random maps with random modifiers or Arena that goes from 0 to 100 (pardon the pun) at a fast pace.

I’ve probably heard the “it’s too easy” moniker 10+ times from people who defend the current gambling simulator. This premise has to be rejected from the start. There’s no level of human skill involved when it comes to loot. There is nothing “easy” or “hard” about rolling the same 1-100 RNG generator lever hundreds of times. There is no difficulty in stacking accessible items behind layers of RNG. All gambling simulators accomplish is either funnel people behind the “broken” build of the month so they can brute-force their way past the RNG gates. The “whales” (a term in the gambling industry to describe those are most willing to throw in obscene amount of money and time to their pet project) who stream the game for 8+ hours a day have no problem brute-forcing their way through. The people who get negatively affected the most are those who want to experiment with interesting builds and don’t want to go through the same “golden path” that has already been done many times before. That’s no way to attract a fan base.

Hello,

For me the craft system is good. Developpers have already say that they want to add plenty of type of rune. So the crafting system is not finished yet. All opinion is good to take for making it work better. For my opinion it is a good equilibre betwwen gambling and control.

You have control on affix and suffix and which you want to augment with the risk clearly indicated. OK for remove you don’t. Let’s see what are the other rune that will come if you don’t like gamble. Perhaps one that allow but it’s really rare drop could do.

I really like Grim dawn, but the two games are entirely different. As a player that now is father I don’t have a lot of time to play. I find that grim dawn was extremely hard to get double green with the affixes you want because there is so much differents affixes. Here it’s easy to get a last 3 affixes that you want per item with two T4 and one T2 for example.

You tell that you don’t have control to test your build, but too me, of what I read, you seem to want not perfect item but very ggod item. Your exemple of chance to poison is for me on contrary a good exempple of control!

To get it fractured at 80%, you don’t use gardian or you want it more than T3. The minor fracture keep the affix.
I don’t feel that for testing you need it to get over T3.
If all of your equipment is T3 you can test your build and do all the campaign and monolith test.

Your right, RNG is not difficulty, but time. But time is important, if you have the perfect gear just by doing the campaign, you won’t stilll play after a couple of hour. It’s important that get that gear need play time.

I often said the crafting in LE isn’t in a good place. Like there are items with already 3 T3 mods on them dropping that still have 100 stability and that this makes no sence at all for example. There is no magical way to get a Base to XTX affixes and prefixes without hurting it’s stability like dropping items grew on trees or something like that. It’s inconsistent and that’s my major gripe with the craftin in LE.
Having items fractured at 10% fracture chance is a bummer but 10 min later almost the same item drops again… and again… and again… and again… and I think you got it. If it is to easy to get items there is no way to play the game. THat’s the same boat for me like people who already advocate faster leveling or leveling the without playing the story and so on and so forth. The system itself is fine and sometimes you are lucky and sometimes you aren’t. It is easy to get items to 4xT4 mods of your choice without a sweat when you are over level 70 and with a “good” build that makes sence you can enjoy the game with only T3’s crafted on your gear.

Sure it creeps me out when I think about getting piece of equipment with 4T5 max rolls but that’s a first world problem. This game is as much of a “skinner box” as every other game that involves min and max rolls and so far I farmed FAR less then for example in D3 or PoE or other ARPG’s I played and that’s why I’m happy with the crafting system and it seems rather easy to me.

You don’t need a broken build you just need to know what you do and play for arround 15h a week to accomplish stuff. Sure that’s a big ammount of time for some but for others it’s piece of cake. Things changed a bit with the endgame modes at the moment but you can still do Monoliths rather fast even with goofy builds so I’m against the quoted stuff because it simply isn’t true and I’m by all means no well skilled player.

Well let’s agree to disagree if our standpoints are that far from each others but after all your view is intresting and valid to certain degree and that’s great compared to “gimmegimmegimme” threads :).

Just wanted to pop in to clarify a few things about RNG in LE. I haven’t read through all of these posts, so apologies if someone has previously mentioned one or more of these things. As far as RNG goes with both itemization and crafting, there isn’t as much as many people think. Here are some examples that a lot of players don’t consider:

  • Glyph of Stability and Glyph of the Guardian give the player a great deal of control over crafting. A player who gets familiar with these glyphs can make very powerful items pretty consistently.
  • Rune of Removal is not simply a 25% chance to remove any affix when there are 4 affixes. Chance to remove an affix is determined by the tier of that affix, with each tier adding another chance that the affix will be the one removed. This allows for greater strategy on which items should have this rune used on them. (However, I still think this is a relatively low amount of control, but I am not for simply being able to choose the affix I want. There needs to be some risk that I will not get what I want or else the game becomes way too easy)
  • Higher level characters gain access to higher tier affix drops on gear. From my testing, a character must be level 81 before they see tier 5 affixes, and once they reach that level they will see a lot of tier 4 and 5 affixes on gear that drops. Players who make a high level farmer will significantly improve their drops.
  • The new gambling system allows player to pick out great bases and roll on them. It may seem like a small thing, but it has transformed my item hunt and substantially decreased the time it takes me to find a good item to craft on.

I expect both the crafting system and itemization will be improved further as the game progresses, but it’s not right to say the game is a pure RNG grind in its current state. If it was, I wouldn’t play. The control I have over crafting and itemization is one of the things that has made me so addicted to this game.

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