Hello,
First of all, I’d like to mention that I purchased this game a long time ago and have tested it intermittently by playing. I have approximately 700+ hours invested in it. I’m 40 years old and have spent more than half of this time on this type of game. I also have experience in designing game mechanics, and I have worked as a programmer for a long time. I spent a long time providing feedback on a popular ARPG game, then realized that these feedbacks weren’t actually being read much. Now, I would like to provide feedback for another game that I love; although English is not my native language, so it’s possible that I may make some language errors, but I hope you’ll understand.
I’ll try to summarize everything under different topic headings. These will include errors, deficiencies, end-game issues, and/or improvements.
1- Health vs Ward
Frankly, this situation used to bother me in Path of Exile as well (sorry for the comparison). With Ward, the increase in effective health pool is significant. We can easily use a low-life build with just three items. It’s true that not much is gained in terms of defense layers with Ward, but because the effective health pool is so high, it withstands more than a defense-layered build. This doesn’t include DoT; I’ll mention that later.
With health builds, we need to establish defense layers, and despite trying every possible defense layer, I felt that the hits I received were still excessive, even at 300-400 corruption. I tried or stacked 2x red rings, ravenous void, glancing blow, endurance (60%), high armor, but they didn’t seem to help much against multiple creatures. I’ll address the situation with creatures later.
What I’m expecting here isn’t a significant nerf but rather for Health and Ward to be somewhat closer to each other. Currently, there’s a huge gap between them, which forces me to use Ward for end-game content.
2- Less Damage Taken, Defense Layers
I don’t think the formula works very well, or even if it does, the damage scaling of creatures compared to our defense scaling is too high, which makes the damage I take feel excessive. Despite stacking, I still felt that the damage I received was too high. I tried this in mid-corruption monoliths and in dungeons as well. I know that Less Damage Taken is multiplicative, but still, it doesn’t feel balanced.
3- Monster Damage Over Time vs Player Damage Over Time
It’s evident that monster damage scales based on Monolith corruption, but damage over time was hitting hard even before the Monolith, and unfortunately, it doesn’t quite match up with a player fully specced into any damage over time skill in the skill tree. Even if we stack a lot of it, we still can’t deal as much damage. What I’m most complaining about is Poison Damage Over Time. There’s quite a difference between what a player takes in one poison tick and what a monster takes. There are amulets and gloves that mitigate DoT, and it seems to prevent everything except poison.
4- Monster Target Lock Against Player
Some monsters (like wisps, golden elementals) still hit you even if you dodge when they telegraph their attack. You can even see the monster’s turning animation. I don’t know if this is intentional, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
5- Ranged Monster Aggro Range and Ground Effects
I was particularly annoyed by the pollen artillery of Sacred Bloom. With already high aggro ranges, this creature can spam this skill in areas where many of them are present, causing chaos. Ground effects can sometimes be overshadowed by player skill effects. For example, I often can’t see the poison pool of a doggy plant when it spews poison. And if I’m not casting skills, I still can’t see it if the pool is in a green area. I’m in favor of creatures having a glow effect around their ground skills.
6- Character Stat Screen, Tool Tips, and Missing Tags
It seems like a lot of information is missing from the Character Stat Screen. Honestly, it forces me to manually calculate some skill-based calculations. I think I should be able to see a skill’s critical hit chance. It would be nice if you could detail this through tooltips or by selecting the skill on the character screen. Also, the damage of some skills doesn’t appear in the tooltip; for example, I can mention the ballista. Speaking of ballista and since the ballista bug fix has been done, I want to draw attention to this. The Ballista itself doesn’t hit in an area, but the Explosion part does have area damage and width. The blast radius passive in the Falconer trees adds width to area skills. This passive specifically mentions affecting some skills, including decoy (probably for taunt area and explosion area). The explosion areas of the ballista are not affected by this, even if we have area affixes on our items. This might be due to the lack of an Area Tag. I think the explosion from the ballista skill tree should also have an area tag when we take the explosion node. Otherwise, we won’t be able to increase the radius other than through dex, and even with 130 dex, the area is low. Ultimately, to expand the area, we’ll need an area passive or item affix. This isn’t a buff but rather a balance; after all, we need to give up a passive point or affix slot as a downside, but at least we’d gain a width similar to before. Its current state doesn’t seem usable alongside mana cost.
7- Monoliths & Blessings
I’d like you to consider the option of shared monoliths. It wouldn’t be bad if, when playing with another character, it asked us at the monolith whether we wanted to continue from the previous character’s monolith. Similarly, I’m tired of the blessing window popping up every time I defeat a boss. Putting a stone in the boss room and selecting it could be abused, so you might need to make changes to the blessing system. If blessings went into a pool as they were discovered, and as better rolls came in as they were discovered, and we could change the blessing whenever we wanted, that wouldn’t be bad.
8- Circle of Fortune
I absolutely hate tier 9, but I don’t want to complain since it might become useful when set items get buffed. Instead, I think it would be nice if we could filter in the prophecy section. After all, if we’re going to a boss, it’s a bit torturous to check all prophecies every time to see how many prophecies are left for that boss.
9- Stash Filtering
I hope it becomes a bit more comprehensive; its current state doesn’t filter very well. Maybe I don’t have enough filtering knowledge. If I can do detailed searches with more parameters, could you inform me?
10- Special Items That Can Give Us Buffs
I would like to see more items like Core of the Mountain. Auras could also be included. After all, every build ends up within limited things, which leads to a repetitive cycle. It would be nice to see different interactions.
11- Unique Quivers
There are very few of them, and most of them aren’t used.
12- Dungeons
Julra is generally a place visited for legendary farming, aside from exalted farming, and I really enjoy the dimension change aspect. The atmosphere and boss mechanics of the Lightless Arbor boss are amazing. Soulfire Bastion is also a mechanically pleasing location. I would like to see similar but more long-lasting new dungeons, especially ones that reward group play.
13- Pinnacle bosses
They absolutely should be introduced. We need bosses on the level of The Mountain Beneath and Orbyss, with multiple phases.
14- I'm not sure if this is just happening to me, so I'll title it "DMG depends on Echo."
In mid-corruption, despite encountering monsters with significant defensive buffs on some echo maps, I’m able to cut through them like paper. This can happen even in the middle tiers of the web. However, sometimes, despite having few modifiers and no defensive mods on monsters, I find myself dealing very little damage and running out of mana quickly (I might be spamming skills due to noticing low damage). What used to catch my attention in these maps was the slow movement and attack speed, and I’d usually have to check if I was affected by slow or chill effects. Then I realized that there seems to be a performance issue with the map itself, causing a slight frame slowdown, almost like slow motion, noticeable enough. You mentioned a new patch related to movement speed and desync issues, but it seems like this other issue hasn’t been fixed. As I said before, this might just be happening to me.
15- Performance Issues
These need to be addressed for sure. Experiencing the same problems on both mid config and high config on two different computers is troublesome. Sometimes, these issues can dampen the enthusiasm for playing the game.
16- Unity Game Engine Cons
I understand all of you; this tool is truly incredible. It’s an excellent engine for .Net enthusiasts and also does well in terms of community contributions. However, unfortunately, if we’re going to talk about the above situation, performance issues are a bit too common in these types of games. It’s also much more conducive to reverse engineering (related to .Net). Bots written for the game can be easier to develop compared to bots written in a native language because all the function names and required variables are easily visible without much effort. Therefore, it can be challenging to prevent some situations without anti-cheat integration. Although most anti-cheats can be bypassed, you might encounter situations in the future where bots shouldn’t abuse certain features, so I assume you’ve started taking precautions.
17- Private Message Notification
It would be nice to have an audio alert when receiving a private message. It is also necessary to have the option to enable/disable this alert.
Final Thoughts
Although I’m not fond of the Unity game engine in games like this (Albion Online has similar issues, especially regarding performance), I sincerely congratulate you for creating such a beautiful game and bringing in fresh perspectives. Flowing seamlessly between monoliths feels like continuously munching on chips. The game never stops us at a point, which is why you continue to make it addictively engaging. I’ve played Path of Exile for a long time (sorry for repeating it again), and I’ve been playing it since beta. I still love the game in its original state, but when it started to repeat itself over time and many mechanics intertwined, I couldn’t enjoy it as much. This might be due to some aspects becoming monotonous, but I still can’t say it’s a bad game. I can’t say Last Epoch is a bad game either; I believe once performance issues are primarily addressed, this newborn baby will go much further. Thank you again for developing such a game, and I wish you continued success.
P.S.: Public API is eagerly awaited.
Best Regards,
Vystrix
Edits: I forgot to add some topics, I’ve included them now.
21.03.2024 - #3, #4, #17 added
