10 things I hate about Last Epoch

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Sorry for the click-bait title, but it reflects the framing of this feedback. It’s also a throwback to an old film I liked. Before I go into the list of things I “hate”, I would like to commend EHG on the continued improvements to performance and season launch. I have a pretty old PC now and yet I haven’t noticed any significant slowdowns in season 3, unlike every previous season.

Anyway, here’s that list:

  1. Tombs and Cocoons
  2. Locking echo web customisation behind cemeteries
  3. Corruption
  4. Bad bosses
  5. Lack of echo variety
  6. Beelining to the edge of an echo web
  7. Nerfing enemies too much
  8. Bugs
  9. Nearby Allies Take Much Less Damage aura
  10. Lack of EHG response on these forums

Tombs and Cocoons

I know a lot of effort went into tombs for season 2, but if it weren’t for the fact they provide memory amber and (more importantly to me) weaver idols, I would just avoid them. I’m not entirely sure why I hate them but I think it’s a combination of factors:

  • Too much visual noise (I just can’t tell what’s going on most of the time)
  • Extra enemy tankiness (and visual noise) from cocoons
  • Monotony of enemies and visuals

The cocoons particularly bother me because there is often very little control over whether they pop or not. They seem to behave similarly to Tormented Spirits except there are way more cocoons in an echo/tomb than Tormented Spirits in a PoE map. I could perhaps live with tombs if there were no cocoons.

Locking echo web customisation behind cemeteries

I find it so frustrating that I have to complete a cemetery just to customise my echo web. Yes, I dislike cemeteries because they’re basically tombs and I hate tombs, but even if I loved tombs, I would still be frustrated.

Most of our interaction with the echo web is via the Echo of the World (is that what it’s called?) hub we visit after completing an echo. This is where I want to plan my path through the echo web, including woven echoes. Requiring us to visit a cemetery first seems like a needless aggravation.

Corruption

While I don’t have an issue with the concept of infinite progression in the Monolith of Fate, I do think there’s a major psychological problem with the granularity of the system. I find the thought of grinding through hundreds of corruption levels dispiriting. It just “feels” like too much, even if we can actually jump corruption levels in 50+ increments.

I’m pretty sure I would be happier in a tiered system that provides fixed advances in difficulty per tier. Something that behaves more like a ladder than a ramp (if that simile works). Going up a tier would be equivalent to increasing corruption by 25 or 50 say. Going up a tier would just require a single gaze of Orobyss.

As it stands, I rarely play for long after reaching empowered monoliths and I think the fine granularity of the corruption system is a significant factor in that.

Bad bosses

I hate complaining about things that people have put a lot of work into, but I find a lot of the bosses uninteresting, particularly in the campaign and timelines. The Lagon and Majasa fights I like because they’re challenging and reward learning the boss patterns. The Architect Liath and Wengari Patriarch/Matriach (screw Avalanche!) fights also keep me on my toes. Hardly any of the others are memorable in the campaign.

Some of this is down to very old bosses, but I’m worried because new bosses are a very mixed bag too. Nothing stood out in the new campaign chapter. Even the Observer fight seemed to be lots of effects, but little actual danger.

As for the timeline bosses, I guess most are OK, but I don’t feel excited to fight many of them. Heorot and Emperor of Corpses in particular seem in dire need of overhauls.

Lack of echo variety

I believe this is already on the team’s radar. I would love something like PoE’s blighted maps as an actual echo type. That kind of variety. At the moment, most echo objectives are “go to location, kill some things”. The much-improved arena helps break up the monotony, as do the echoes with a whole bunch of shrines.

Beelining to the edge of an echo web

I don’t know if I’m missing something, but the echo web seems to heavily incentivise heading as far away from the centre as quickly as possible, since that’s how you can gain stability quickly. That makes pathing decisions far less interesting. I don’t really understand why stability gain increases as you move away from the centre. I think this is particularly harmful for woven echoes that affect surrounding echoes, since the priority (for me at least) is to push out rather than find good slots for those woven echoes.

Nerfing enemies too much

I have to admit, before the season 3 fixes to enemy scaling I was actually enjoying the game. Yes, there were some frustrating moments, but it just felt good to be concerned about lots more enemies than usual. Now I only really feel the need to concentrate when there are a couple of champions plus an exiled mage at the same time, and often that’s because I can’t see what’s happening with all the visual effects.

I understand enemy design is really hard, but I would love for there to be more danger from combinations of basic enemies rather than the only danger coming from souped-up champions.

Ultimately, when gear, level and skill progression slows down significantly, the basic gameplay has to carry the game. And right now, that isn’t the case for me.

Bugs

The issue for me isn’t so much that there are bugs (few games are bug free after all), but how there regularly seem to be issues with the basic behaviour of skill nodes, passives and items. Forgemaster’s Might from season 2 stands out to me as does the frog primal unique from this season. New things that players will likely want to try out in a new season really, really should work.

More generally, when experienced players are complaining that they simply can’t trust that skill/passive nodes will work as stated, the overall effect is corrosive to player sentiment about the game.

Nearby Allies Take Much Less Damage aura

OK, I’ve complained about this before, so I won’t go into it again. It’s really a filler entry! Put simply, I think the aura penalises melee builds far too much, especially when it’s on tanky enemies. I would be much less annoyed if units with this aura had some sort of melee vulnerability.

Lack of EHG response on these forums

OK, not an issue with Last Epoch itself. Regardless, I find it frustrating that posts on Reddit seem far more likely to get a response from EHG than posts here. Especially as this is one of the “official” places to provide feedback. It feels like I’m shouting into the void.

I think it’s right to be wary of getting bogged down in forum discussions, but it would be nice to know if the feedback we provide is useful and/or appreciated.

Anyway, I hope I can at least summon up the enthusiasm to “finish” my Vilatria’s Holy Smite/Meteor Paladin character, which is only now possible due to the Legends Entwined ring. I have to say, the primordial uniques have made this season pretty interesting for builds.

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2

Good list, agreed with most of it. For me, #8 and #1 are at the top of my aggravation’s list, I worry that the focus of devs will become more and more on new content, with bug-fixing put on the proverbial back-burner. I would probably fall out if we got something like “Season 4: we fixed it!”

While I agree with the catch-22 of answering some of the bug reports on these forums, it would be nice to get some kind of update on the myriad bugs I’ve submitted this season. I’d really like to know if the problems are only happening to me, or to the wider audience. It makes troubleshooting on my end much easier to deal with when I can pinpoint the source to my setup.

3

I dislike many of the same things you mentioned, but the reasons are a bit different:

  1. Where are the randomized map layouts? All the maps are static, with only a bit of reoritentation and/or “customizing blockers” trying to create variance. This is junk and gets old really fast. We need fully random maps… for both dungeons and monos, and even for parts of the campaign IMO.

  2. Why is everything in the game just “kill enemies”? There are no mechanics to break it up. Here’s a tomb mechanic, go kill enemies. Here’s a beast mechanic, go kill enemies. THe tomb maps have a little more mechanical variety, but not much really. The dungeons at least have some mechanical variety, though i don’t find them particualrly fun. THe obvious comparison here is POE1, where many of the seasonal mechanics were way more than just “kill enemies”. Things like Blight, Height, and Kingsmarch, for example. There are so many POE1 seasonal minigames there that LE can just flat out steal whichever ones seem fun, and it would break up the monotony.

4

Are blight & heist not just killing things?

5

Not really? Especially blight not.
You can play blight as a pure tower-defense game (which not really great RNG at times) and heist is a bit of a balancing act for how far you push the alertness level.
It’s like saying ‘Sanctum’ is only about killing enemies… which… yes… but in a completely different feeling style then the majority of mechanics otherwise provide.

6

Which is still killing things last I checked. If the mobs don’t die, you loose.

It’s fair about heist, you could probably just run through & not kill anything.

Fair.

7

Yeah, but if the tower kills stuff and you only manage the tower upgrades without using abilities it’s kinda hard-pressed to say ‘similar playstyle’.

Otherwise ‘Bloons’ could be compared to Diablo-likes… both killing mobs after all! :stuck_out_tongue:

8

That just feels like minions to me.

No idea what that is.

9

It’s one of the most well known Tower defense games and formed from a flash game series.
Same as Gemcraft or Plants vs. Zombies for example.
Those 3 I think are the biggest Tower defense games besides hybrid games like Dungeon Defenders.

And yes, they’re like minions… which you can’t move, which have potentially effects on each other, which also can only be summoned from a limited pool of a resource which only recovers by killing enemies and which are immortal on top of that.

So kinda quite different then what a minion commonly is :stuck_out_tongue:

10

I think his point (Kuro’s) is that in LE mechanics are only about killing mobs. There is no decision making involved that has future ramifications other than on a limited sense (like choosing the evolution for the drops, or where you place your woven echoes).

But other than that, it’s kinda mindless.
Arena is basically kill everything and then deciding if you want to continue or not. Dungeons is just find the exit killing stuff on the way. The door rewards are irrelevant and you never go check what the other door has unless they spawn literally next to each other. More often you just skip them.
The only thing approaching some decision making is woven echoes because you can use them to spawn the space to a specific echo reward you want or, more often, you can use them to simply drill outwards to the edge (and it does have an edge, it’s not infinite).

Whereas PoE does have many mechanics that require you to analyze the current game state and act accordingly.
Like Sanctum (as much as I hate it) where you have to figure out if you’re going to be needing that font in 2 rooms or if you’re going to risk getting a boon and also a penalty.
Or Alva, where you have to choose which room to spawn/upgrade.
Or Expedition, where you have to figure out the optimal way to place your charges to get the best rewards.

As much as I love LE, I have to admit most things are kinda done on autopilot. You get an objective, you mow down mobs on the way, you move on to the next.
I don’t find it strange LE doesn’t have them yet. After all, what was the first PoE league that had a mechanic like that? Incursion, I think, which was 5 years after launch. Most of these types of mechanics were actually implemented in the last 5 years, with Heist, Expedition and Sanctum among them.

So there’s still time for EHG to implement stuff like that. But one has to admit that the current content is kinda mostly autopilot braindead stuff.

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