The layers of RNG and compounding frustration of dying.

As of writing, I have played 483 hours of this game, nearly all of it on my lvl 97 deadeye ranger, and while I have several smaller gripes with the game, like the amount of interactions required to reforge, and how I have to keep tabs on a 10 second buff all the time (seriously, just make tailwind buff you lose on being hit).

But I digress, my main gripe is how many layers of RNG there is to the game, and how a single moment of being either unlucky or goofing it up just feels monumentally bad.

Up until the endgame, dying wasn't too big of a deal, and while it didn't happen often, I didn't feel like I had to backtrack a whole lot to get back to where I was.
That all changes in the endgame, where dying not only loses you hours of experience at the higher levels, but the game encourages the player to take bigger risks for better rewards. I don't feel that the rewards are *that good* in comparison to the risk you take on, but I don't have too many issues on 90% of maps, consistently running t16 maps with highest possible modifiers and towers to boost them.

But therein lies the issue - Vast majority of the time its fine, then all of a sudden I get a ritual circle that has 2/3 of it inaccessible, the enemies deals tons of extra damage, the spawns are increased by 100%, and the sheer volume of enemies and their on death effects means I literally can't do anything to survive.
(The example in question made me lose 2 omen's of resurgence, but the omen of amelioration didn't do its job, ofc.)

But on top of me losing 10% of my experience despite specifically using the game's own contingency, I lost a particularly good t16 map, a good corrupted waystone, the buff of the 5 surrounding towers AND the ilvl 82 items from the rituals and the other drops.
But the icing on the cake for me is how I then have to complete the map AGAIN, without any of that, which always feels like a slap in the face.

A lot of these losses have inherent rng tied to them (map rolling well with correct league mechanics, waystone rolling and corrupting in good ways, the towers having good overlap, getting precursor tablets with good rolls), so while the example in question was by all means my own fault to some degree, I've lost equally desirable maps before due to being plain unlucky, which means that the hours of setup and careful consideration of the things you got otherwise lucky with, goes down the drain.

I know they said that they want deaths to matter, but that goes off the assumption that your death is always your own fault, and with the amount of rng in the endgame, that isn't the case. And at that point, I don't feel like I have much room to play better, only the ability to take less risks.

I have taken a break due to this too.
Deaths are just much too punishing at 90+ for me to bring myself to play currently. Losing hours of gameplay on top of map bonuses and on ground trash is just a frustrating experience.
No death log also compounds this experience, dying with no enemies in melee range with breach, delerium or expedition ground/visual effects on screen is not an issue when you don't know what happened.

Hoping for some of this to resolved with 0.2.0 as I would like to continue playing

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Darkbutt#4311 schrieb:

But therein lies the issue - Vast majority of the time its fine, then all of a sudden I get a ritual circle that has 2/3 of it inaccessible, the enemies deals tons of extra damage, the spawns are increased by 100%, and the sheer volume of enemies and their on death effects means I literally can't do anything to survive.
(The example in question made me lose 2 omen's of resurgence, but the omen of amelioration didn't do its job, ofc.)

Yep, that's true, the risk/reward structure is completely out of whack.
Now imagine you survive that ritual, it was the 3rd out of three rituals in that maps, you have a earned a total of 1658 tribute because of the shitty layouts, you look at the rewards, all bad, you reroll, you have 1008 left, you look again - there is an Omen of Sinistral Annulment, shit's worth like 15 divines, you are elated, outside of 1 or 2 audiences with the king you have gotten nothing from running like 200 rituals except low level trash omens and exalts - you look at the cost: 23k tribute.
That's alright you say to yourself, you have set the atlas tree point into having 50% reduced deferal cost, you have set up two precursor tablets with 10% reduced deferal cost. You look at the deferal cost: 1035 tribute.

You close the game. You contemplate what you are even doing here.