Im at 497 Stability out of a required 1350 for the final quest yet I have completed 35 echoes already.
I'm currently getting around 35 stability per echo so by my calculation I will need to have completed 60 echoes to finish the timeline. Pre-patch it took around 30 echoes. Why has this been doubled? I thought one of the objectives of the updates was to reduce the grind of monoliths, not make it even more grindy?
External link →Stability gain increases with both corruption and how far an echo is from the centre of the web. Because of this, as long as you're killing the shade to increase corruption, or running echoes far from the centre your stability will go up much faster. For example at 200 corruption echoes far from the centre of the web can give 75 stability, so you only need around 18 of them of them to unlock the final quest echo, which is much less than pre patch, and it can go higher than that.
Even if you don't increase corruption by much, as long as you're doing echoes further out from the start (e.g. ones giving around 45 stability) it'll be as fast as it is pre-patch. It's just the initial run of an empowered timeline where it's particularly slow.
Would you ever consider a modest account-wide "bonus stability per-echo" based on "number of characters you've already completed this timeline on" or something like that?
I guess what I'm getting at is that Monolith IS the whole endgame right now for the most part, and people do enjoy it, but people don't seem to enjoy having to start over at square 1 every single time they want to try a new build.
Right now, starting a new character feels like "prestiging" in other games, but with none of the benefits.
If you got say, +1 (or even +1%) stability per echo, per character you've already completed the timeline on, I think it could help people progress a little faster on subsequent playthroughs without being too game-breaking.
Example- you've completed the full "Fall of the Outcasts" timeline on 6 different characters, and you've completed the Empowered variant on 1. When you open the timeline on a new character you see:
- Timeline: Fall of the Outcasts (Empowered)
- Level: 55 (100)
- Stability for completion: 250 (1000)
- Bonus stability per-echo: +7 (+1)
You could keep the empowered bonuses separate - in this case, empowered completions apply to the regular timeline, but regular timeline completions don't apply to empowered. You could also make it toggle-able on the chance that people don't want the bonus stability for whatever reason.
Thoughts?
It's definitely something we'll consider, especially once cycles are underway.
For now the course of action we're planning to take is to reduce 3rd quest echo stability requirements in all timelines except the first. This will apply to both empowered and non-empowered timelines. This change will likely be included in 0.8.2c, but not 0.8.2b.
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