An enormous pile of feedback/suggestions I wrote over the last month while playing the game

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Last Epoch Feedback

This is an ongoing collection of feedback while playing The Last Epoch for the past several weeks. Presently I have played Bladedancer, Marksman, and Sorcerer to at least the start of endgame. Sorcerer has gone the farthest.

Most of this consists of small observations made while playing the game. I kept a markdown file open while playing and would alt-tab whenever I had an observation.

Before I get into the meat of it, I just want to say that Last Epoch is truly a great game. It is mechanically competent and understands what makes the genre fun while also bringing its own innovations. I have little doubt that it will be a serious competitor to PoE when it releases, assuming the quality continues to the end of development.

Systems

  • Respeccing skills feels bad, especially during early leveling: you get a skill point, try it, don’t like it, and then lose it altogether and have to wait several minutes to get it back. This discourages experimentation. Here are some possible options, and they are not mutually exclusive:
    • Option 1: receive 1/2 to 3/4 of the experience back
    • Option 2: consumable items allow you to reallocate points without xp loss (think orbs of regret)
    • Option 3: build familiarity with a skill that persists even after despeccing the skill. This is in parallel to experience. Familiarity can be spent respeccing and may also raise the minimum level for a skill.
  • Pausing should be available in single-player

Skills

  • More skills which rely on on-kill effects should also have a chance to trigger on bosses and tougher enemies
  • Skills which rely on hitting a certain number of enemies should count tougher enemies as more than one enemy
  • The “Through the Shadows” node of the Shift skill keeps it from being used for general movement and should be rethought
  • Skills in general should be easier to use near barriers, such as when attacking bosses over a cliff
  • Skill effects which only last 1 second don’t feel long enough, especially since you’re typically locked into an animation for part of its duration - Flow from Dancing Strikes in particular feels bad, especially when aiming it is a bit of a chore
  • The fact that damage dealt by a hit has nothing to do with the damage dealt by the resulting dot feels weird and unintuitive. While it might be copying Path of Exile, you could base dot damage on the base damage of the hit that applied it (prior to increased %/other mods) or give every skill a dot damage modifier based on whatever you think is appropriate. A meteor wouldn’t burn the same way a fireball would.
  • The “Exuberance” passive skill at the top of Bladedancer is plainly worse than “Avuson’s Pact” after the first point.
  • Ballista don’t know how to fire at things on a different elevation
  • Black arrow pickup radius could be better to make the skill feel less awkward, or the skill as a whole could be reworked
  • Minion skills should attack the training dummy if you do
  • Skills which have multipliers to their damage should specify either way whether the damage applies to ailments, similar to Hail of Arrows
  • Puncture, despite being a bleed-focused skill, has a number of anti-synergies with bleed damage if you choose to go channeling:
    • There is no dot damage multiplier involved
    • Bleed scales with attack speed since it can apply it faster, but you no longer attack quickly
    • Because it is channeled, it loses the ability to take advantage of the Disembowel passive on the Rogue tree, which is one of the best sources of bleed
    • The Black Quiver modifier “Lacerating Arrows” for Puncture grants a guaranteed bleed stack, but the Puncture modifier “Night’s Descent” indicates Puncture’s channeling should be used with Black Quiver
  • Show what the “Skystrike” modifier for Hail of Arrows does in the more info from holding alt
  • The fact that the “Tear Flesh” modifier for Hail of Arrows does not scale with investment in bleed chance feels very strange and unrewarding
  • Fireball’s hitbox could be a tad bigger to avoid scenarios where it just barely grazes an enemy but doesn’t count as a hit
  • The knockback from the Teleport specialization node is pretty pathetic. While you can further specialize for more knockback, it feels useless
  • Skills specialization nodes with 5-7 points are not interesting compared to nodes with more drastic alterations, and they detract from branching out on the mechanics of the skill; consider condensing them if you can avoid balance issues

Balance

  • Allowing shrine buffs to persist across zone boundaries will be an issue in multiplayer if players can use each others’ portals (e.g., get crit shrine, go to other player’s boss encounter)
  • My experience with hybrid minion/self-cast builds in other games is that they have too many things pulling them in opposite directions. Consider more crossover between self damage and minion damage similar to the ballista nodes, but perhaps as a base feature for certain skills (totems in particular)
  • In general, sources of ward seem very sparse compared to dodge and armor, with certain unique items as big exceptions. Ward could use some love, such as…
    • Discrete chunks of ward generated could decay slower at first or have a hold time
    • More sources of ward generated per second, and in larger quantities
    • Slow down ward decay overall
    • Small sources of ward could be a bit bigger or more reliable (lower/remove cooldowns on certain things)
    • Slight nerfs to existing OP items to compensate (hp drain in exchange for ward per second based on health, namely)
  • The Wengari Matriarch/Patriarch’s leap-slam ability feels overtuned for the very little wind-up/telegraphing it has
  • Classes other than rogue should have more synergistic secondary effects similar to rogue shadows, shadow daggers, etc., to make builds more interesting

Loot

  • Affixes on class gear should be more likely to roll affixes which are both for the same subclass
  • Consider merging HP on hit and HP on kill unless you have plans for them both (wormblaster?); while they are historic affixes, I don’t think they add anything unique, and one is just worse than the other except under rare circumstances
  • Crafting materials should auto-pickup and go straight to your crafting stash, at least as an option.

Crafting

  • Crafting off a base item just isn’t possible since you need low instability + a lot of existing modifiers to get to 20; consider dropping “stable” items which have no mods but extra stability
  • While I have come to be more selective, the dearth of Runes of Shattering feels awkward at times, especially early on
  • Consider adding more glyphs, such as a glyph to improve affix shard retention during shattering
  • Consider more involved - but straightforward - mechanics, such as surviving waves of mobs in order to drive up the success percentage so that the player feels like they’re somewhat in control of the crafting process (take a look at the game Disgaea and the “Item World” mechanic it uses for possible inspiration)
  • Rare glyphs/runes should have more powerful crafting effects, such as increasing critical success chance or actually lowering instability, perhaps at a cost

Polish

Add more weight to the following:

  • Entering a town portal - sound effect
  • Picking up an item - tiny delay along with highlighting the item name, possible animation
  • Dropping an item - Diablo 2-style dropping animation and noise
  • Combat and noises, particularly if a voice line is ongoing - interrupting it with a simple “URGH” would be cool
  • The arrows disappearing at the end of Hail of Arrows is weird and makes them feel artificial; consider adding a fade or something

Add more mid- to high-pitched attack noises (“attack” as in the audio term signifying the beginning of a sound) to give combat more punch:

  • Striking an enemy should have a more pronounced click
  • Killing frozen enemies should have a more satisfying shatter sound
  • Lightning strikes should sound like lightning - if it would get too busy, consider having a limited number of electricity sound layers that get extended rather than copied

UI tweaks:

  • Opening a new menu should bring it to the forefront, closing other windows in the way if necessary, e.g., opening the shop while the forge is open, clicking the new passive skill button while the inventory is open
  • The chat window should have an option to keep it open, and it should move to the center of the screen if you open the stash or a vendor

Fluff/nice-to-have:

  • The world map should default to zooming in on your current zone.
  • Hovering over a stat in your character screen and and holding alt could possibly show a list of sources contributing to that stat.
  • Items on the ground should show their size, possibly when holding alt (I was very confused trying to pick up an idol with 4 width)
  • Architect Laith’s boobs are kind of ridiculous - I noticed them swaying impossibly even fully zoomed out
  • The instant transition between floors of Laith’s tower is unusual, maybe add a fade
  • When you raise the bridge in the quest The Temple of Heorot, there are a number of ice chunks that look like they ought to fall off; cause them to fall or make them more appropriately-sized for the bridge
  • More confirmation to keep from accidentally going back and forth between ages with a misclick, such as if you think perhaps the path is a different direction from where it actually is and mouse over the portal again

Bugs

  • Sometimes channeling skills/spells get stuck in their casting state. Using other skills can break out, but movement cannot.
  • You are not able to respec a single point of a skill if removing all points of the skill would cause you to fail to meet a skill investment requirement. Ex.: I was at 47 points in Bladedancer and had 3 points invested in Critical Eye. I was unable to respec Critical Eye until I had 48 points invested in Bladedancer.
  • Unclear, but I think monoliths fail to apply the modifiers from the first level played (could be that they only last one round)
  • Stash search filters do not apply when going to a tab from the Quick View menu
  • The guy next to the stash after a monolith always complains about the lack of an Arena Key, even when it drops
  • One of the small void worms was untargetable yet kept spitting void attacks at me. I think it may have spawned right as an Idol of Ruin died
  • I once lost the ability to move around. I think I hit escape to open the menu at a weird time, such as just before something loaded, but I honestly don’t remember the context for a proper bug writeup.

Typos and Textual Errors

  • The “high health” more info blurb says “at low health” instead of “at high health” (see Cutthroat node in Synchronized Strike)
  • The duration of the Perfection passive is listed simply as “8” instead of “8 seconds”
  • The word “Puncture” on the “Hidden Blows” node of the Smoke Bomb specialization tree is spelled “Punture”
  • The “Swirling Fog” node on the Smoke Bomb specialization tree does not mention anything about slow in its description, despite the effect.
  • “Cloaked Reaper” Bladedancer passive has an unnecessary “.” after the word “shroud” in its mechanic description.
  • The huge rogue idol suffix “of shadows” has the text “x% increased damage of attacks use by shadows” instead of “used”

Long-Form Critiques

Story

The story is probably fine, but the delivery doesn’t really work. I like to think of Diablo 2’s story as two parts: story and lore. The story of Diablo 2 was basically “BAD GUY THAT WAY GO KILL.” The antagonist was straightforward enough that it didn’t much matter what was going on, and the major story beats were shown in the badass cutscenes between chapters.

If you wanted to stick around and talk to the NPCs, though, that was fine, but that was what I consider lore. If you were interested in it, it was captivating, but it’s not a mechanic the game relied on to keep the player moving forward. It was there to build the world for those who cared.

The important point is that the player always had enough information to contextualize the fights they were engaged in without the assistance of the lore.

This is the one part where I feel like Last Epoch struggles. The context is lost on me for most of the game. The future sucks because there’s some void thing, and maybe it’s the fault of the immortal empire or something? I’m really not sure. I’m sure improvements are coming, but this was easily the weakest part of an otherwise-fantastic game.

Path of Exile manages to convey just enough of the story in a similar fashion to D2 with just a handful of lines, especially those of Piety, Dominus, Sin, and Maligaro. The very few, brief voice lines you’re forced to listen to at key points give just enough of the story that the player has a vague idea of what they’re doing. These typically play at the start and end of boss fights or when you come across important areas. I’ve never once listened to the optional dialogue, yet I can still tell you the story of POE pretty well. I can’t do that for Last Epoch. I don’t even know what the Epoch is, because I keep seeing it referenced as some sort of macguffin. In a story full of time travel, it is hard to square that with the literal meaning of “epoch,” since it seems like it would be referring to the fact that a great deal of the game takes place at the end of time.

It is probably too late in LE’s development to shift the story, and I wouldn’t even want you to do so if you could. I’m sure the story itself is fine. Instead, though, I think you need to innovate on the presentation of the story. In particular, I would add narration on top of the combat at specific points, perhaps giving the players a prolonged segment in which there are fewer or easier enemies so that they have less distracting them. Additionally, utilize the many loading screens to and from different eras to give more context to the era you’re jumping to and perhaps even why you’re jumping this particular time. Add narration, even.

The style for these extra narrated segments should almost certainly be a sort of Lovecraftian recounting of the terrors that befell each era.

Movement Skills are a Feat Tax

If you’re not familiar with the term “feat tax,” it comes mostly from D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder or earlier. The idea is that in spite of the enormous list of character customization options called feats, certain character builds were “taxed” by requiring them to select very specific feats. It undermined a lot of the character customization that was supposed to be present, because there was a correct choice: take these specific feats in a specific order.

Later versions of D&D have made great strides to reduce these kinds of false choices. While that may have come with a number of other controversial sacrifices, the core principle is solid: don’t present players with choices that aren’t really choices. Let their options be meaningful.

In the same vein, almost every build in this game should have their class’s movement skill on their hotbar once they get it. That means they will probably also specialize in it, since it’s going to see frequent use. The skills are too important not to use, and thus at least one of the skill specialization slots is a false choice; you’re going to slot the movement skill.

This may be a controversial suggestion, but consider some ways out of this conundrum. One is to grant movement skills a special place in the mechanics. As an example, you could give them to all classes as a free, extra specialization slot. Assign them to spacebar instead of one of the normal slots. Since everyone is already speccing into it, you may as well give it to them and eliminate the false choice by eliminating choice altogether.

Alternatively, provide more ways to cast a specialized skill without putting it on the hotbar. Flame Ward can be cast on stun, for example. This would let you move unspecialized utility skills (like movement skills) onto the hotbar. The issue here, though, is that it’s something of an out-of-the-box approach, so you could hint at the approach through popups. Example: when the player unlocks Flame Ward, a notification appears to say “While most skills must be cast from the hotbar, certain skills may be cast under certain conditions (or “triggered”) , depending on how you specialize. Using these triggers could be advantageous to your character.”

Lastly, you could create a basic movement skill, such as an evade-jump (don’t be cliche and make it a roll - keep the character upright) which shares a cooldown with the class movement skill and can be cast with space or something. That way if a character decides not to specialize in the movement skill, they still have some way of using an ability to dodge big attacks or get a short boost of speed.

Whatever you decide, the idea should be to ensure the choices players make are real choices.

TL;DR

There is no TL;DR for this. Sorry =(

6 Likes
2

I just quickly read through your feedback, and having just corresponded on a poorly crafted one; I do wish everyone could provide feedback as detailed as yours, so that we can all provide the most constructive conversations that would make the game better.

There are some points that I agree with, and others that I don’t. I’ll follow up with a more detailed response after some rest. Looking after a newborn is tough work =.=

1 Like
3

Great very detailed feedback!

Just some thoughts are quickly going through this.

I really do like this.
I think the only class that has something like this is the Beastmaster with his Aspect of the shark triggering on hit for unique and rare mobs

Having more of this kind of interactions could lead to some more interesting stuff for bosskilling/singletarget dmg opportunities.

That’s the whole point.

This node is meant for “special use cases” and is not blocking your progress towards anything else. If you can’t see a use case for this yourself, just don’t use it.
That doesn’t mean this is not usefull.

Do you mean “Rhythm” in the Dancing Strike Skill Tree? or “Flow” from the Blade Dancers passive tree?

Anyway, both of those are designed to rewards very active playstyles.
Especially the Rhythm Node form DS is design to “just weave in” one or max 2 abilities between dancing strikes.

Both of these nodes are not mandatory and if you don’t like that playstyle there are plenty of other choices.

Other than that i think most other buffs from skills often do have additional skill/passive points to increase the duration slightly.

Which also could be a solution for both of those examples. Just give them a follow up point that increases the druation slightly.

Agrred, alot of the skill/passive points that have a effect that does not scale with further skill points sometimes feel a bit lacking, when you want to put multiple points in.

All damage modifiers inside a skill spec tree do affect ailments applied by that skills, when they do not spefific “with hits”.

Some damage modifiers to specifically state “x% more damage with [ability name]'s hits”, this would not increase ailment dmg by this skill, but all generic modifiers do affect ailments.

Is this feedback from the most recent patch?
There were great changes in terms of affix distribution, especillay for minioins.

How many classes/builds did you play that active use ward?

Ward is one of the mechancis that already went through a number of iteration and is incredibly hard to balance.

I think currently ward is in a very good state.

The devs are aware of this. Rogue is very new and came as a whole package.

Is that than a great implementation? If one is better than the other under certain conditions, that great, gives you choices!

1 Like
4

Not really, since life on hit is always going to be better than life on kill, especially since you’ll only likely need it on bosses where life on kill has very limited benefit (since not all bosses have minions).

I agree with the majority of the OP’s comments, though a few I disagree with:

They’ve added several mechanics to aid respeccing, there are minimum skill levels (which I don’t really think aid respeccing early on since the minimums are low at low levels), when respec’d below a certain level (which is dependant on the character level) skills gain xp at an accelerated rate, in addition to skills needing less xp at lower levels).

Taking your meteor/fireball example, why would a meteor ignite do more damage than a fireball ignite? The meteor would have more impact damage (as it does) but not necessarily more ignite damage. Hollywood aside, I’m not sure that a meteor would necessarily ignite anything since it’s all kinetic damage. Granted, most asteroids (~75%) are carbonaceous & it would catch fire while it’s entering the atmosphere (reaching temperatures of around 1,600 degrees), but that thermal energy is going to be tiny compared to the kinetic energy of a 1 ton rock impacting at ~30,000 mph (48,280 kph → 89.9x10^9 joules = 21.5 tons of tnt). The density of carbon is ~2kg/m^3, so if that 1 ton rock was carbonaceous it would have a volume of 500m^3 which is a cube of about 8m on a side. If it were a nickle-iron asteroid it’d be ~0.1m^3 (a cube of 50cm on a side).

Edit: Sorry for going down the rabbit hole on that one, it was my degree…

1 Like
5

I do have several builds with very little upfront damage, that have no issues against bosses/rares, but can struggle on AoE/clearing small mobs.

On those smaller packs i do get alot of incoming damage and leech isn’t enough to keep me full hp.

Health on kill is great for those scenarios.

6

Is this feedback from long ago? Because this sounds exactly like how the skills are currently implemented with minimum skill level?

It really depends on the intended balance of “on kill” and “on hit” effects. But I understand where you’re coming from and I tend to agree. “On kill” usually end up too weak for people to care using them.

+1

Agree :slight_smile: And the devs do too. They’ve said multiple times rogue skill design is the current standard and that they intend to revisit the older classes and put them up to par.

I’m not sure about this. As it is, I find the “smart loot” in LE too tilted towards being SSF friendly already.

I think that’s exactly the point. Having the flexibility to craft from a blank slate necessarily mean the item cannot go very far (tiers wise). This is to keep magic/rare drops relevant as a base.

Related to this, many people have brought up how awkward it is to be obtaining the bulk of shattering runes from vendor. I also find this rune in an awkward place. I think a better soln for this is some endgame mode or campaign area where you can reliably farm these.

Good idea for squeezing out more rare affix shards on items.

+1 I’ve championed for something like a rune that can control instability in order for a “league goal” crafting project to be viable (currently, instability run out quickly enough, you quite quickly reach the end state of any particular item). But this needs to be properly introduced so that it doesnt reach the power level of eternal orbs in POE.

Dude… I dont know how you notice things like this :laughing:

I’ve complained about this forever. And will until they change it!!!

This is a great point. I absolutely agree with this. It does feel the case for me that in every build I made it is mandatory to have a movement skill as one of the 5 slots (lunge/shield rush for sent, teleport for mage, shift for rogue). I can’t imagine any well-rounded build not having those. I think someone else also brought up the point of move speed affix on boots - that’s another false choice and always feel bad when you cant have the affix on boots. I hope the devs take another pass on movement skills and move speed affix in the game.

1 Like
7

I’m fairly certain this one is going to get tweaked. The rogue introduced several nodes in its trees that have something akin to “on kill and against elites and bosses” (can’t remember the exact wording.) So I think they’ll be filtering this in too many of the other skills that are like this. Probably not all, but I can see this happening down the line.

8

I think if you do something like this the ‘free, extra’ slot has to not have a specialization tree but just be a normal base movement skill (sort of like Runes/Glyphs in Grim Dawn.) Because if they have their own specialization tree you have a lot of griping about people who don’t want/need a movement skill in their build complaining that people get a free sixth slot.

If you DO give it a specialization tree then the fundamentally play style of the game would have to be adjusted because you’d basically be saying everyone MUST take a movement skill and things would have to be adjusted with this in mind for the entire game.

NOTE: I’m not against it, just saying that I don’t think it’s as simple as an ‘extra free movement skill only’ slot.

9

Yes. To clarify, I am not agreeing to the specific idea of giving a free slot for movement skill. I’m agreeing with OP that moveskill and move speed affix feels like false choices in that any self respecting build is going to incorporate them. And I think useful for the devs to review the “mandatory” nature of moveskill and move speed.

In a way, it does feel that way to me. Do you feel otherwise?

1 Like
10

Lowkey I actually noticed it too the other day so when I read OP comment about it I loled. He isn’t wrong. :joy:

11

Hey, glad to see this was received well. I’m not sure how I’ll version my feedback going forward, but I intend to keep gathering it as I play more.

Fun fact: use Notepad++ instead of Visual Studio Code for editing Markdown. When you copy/paste from VSC, it adds a bunch of weird characters that screw it up.

To address some points people have brought up, all of this feedback was from the current major iteration of the game.

On respeccing: I can’t imagine how frustrating the game would be without a minimum level and without catch-up xp rates for low level skills. The main thing I find frustrating though is really, really early in the game when you’re still experimenting. I’m talking like 4 skill points into the game. You can try something new, dislike it, and then be set back five or ten minutes because what you tried didn’t turn out well.

The other problem is that as a new player, you don’t have any idea how quickly skills will catch back up. Now that I’m more experienced, I know it’s fairly quick, but early on it felt like I could be losing a lot. I had no frame of reference other than the fact that there was usually a substantial gap between earning skill points.

One other option here might be that for the earliest levels, the game provides a boost to get you back to where you started and make it clear it will do so. “Respeccing up to level 5 will provide an experience boost until you reach the level from which you started” or something. That way be players are encouraged to branch out more and try more things.

On minion hybrid builds: yes, many of the affixes have been moved not to interfere with each other, but two things are still true: 1) not all of them are out of the way of each other. One of the biggest affixes (the weapon prefix) is still a shared slot. 2) Even if you move all the minion stuff to suffixes, you’re still competing for defensive affix slots.

If it were up to me, minions would scale with spell damage and modifiers, and aside from that, they’d be treated as a damage type, like fire or physical. Aside from possibly alleviating the issue, it would also make more sense. Why would a powerful caster be unable to summon anything more than a puny whelp? Granted, that would require further balancing and refactoring, but I’d be surprised if hybrid builds in their current state are almost universally worse than other builds. There’s just not a ton of synergy that I see.

12

90/10? That’s why I mentioned readjusting that would have to happen. Right now you don’t have to. Sure it slows thing down. But from my, albeit incomplete, attempt to get a feel for how the devs envision the game it feels to me liked it is supposed to be a bit slower. So if they gave everyone free movement that would be more of an adjustment than if they’d intended it to be faster all along. On the other hand, much like power creep, they might think that the speed creep right now is too high so they could tweak those movement skills to not BE mandatory.

1 Like
13

Agree with heaps of the points made. One of the biggest concerns as someone who loves to make my own builds, is the fact that re-speccing either the skill tree or class tree nodes is super un-intuitive and clunky. For example re-speccing skills as you mention takes ages to get the points back, this feels really bad if you want to make quick changes and experiment. Also when it comes to the passive tree, the “you can’t remove x because x needs those points” is stupid and that system desperately needs reworking, for starters a “respec all nodes” option would be nice instead of clicking every single node… and no restriction for removing points or at least changing how that works as atm it is just really bad design. I made a much smaller post outlining similar concerns, mainly with not being able to use abilities while channeling warpath.

14

I have to disagree with almost every significant point in your post. You have listed some minor points which are hard to disagree with, but they’re also just not very important, for example:

Skills in general should be easier to use near barriers, such as when attacking bosses over a cliff

The fact that damage dealt by a hit has nothing to do with the damage dealt by the resulting dot feels weird and unintuitive.

Opening a new menu should bring it to the forefront, closing other windows in the way if necessary, e.g., opening the shop while the forge is open, clicking the new passive skill button while the inventory is open

The chat window should have an option to keep it open, and it should move to the center of the screen if you open the stash or a vendor

The world map should default to zooming in on your current zone.

… Actually, that’s a comprehensive list of points which I wholeheartedly support. (Ignoring bugs, which shouldn’t be in the feedback section of the forum.)

I’ll address some of the more substantial points.

Puncture, despite being a bleed-focused skill, has a number of anti-synergies with bleed damage if you choose to go channeling

The “Through the Shadows” node of the Shift skill keeps it from being used for general movement and should be rethought

These can be addressed together. The point of the skill specialisation tree is to allow for … specialisation. That means skills aren’t always everything at all times. You can’t take every single point on the trees, and that is by design. It’s completely possible to spec Shift as a pure movement skill.

If your objection is that “through the shadows” feels required in order to make use of Shadow synergy, without which the class feels weak - that’s a different question, a question of balance. Channeling puncture is similarly if you want to use it mainly as a hit skill. You can for example use the 3-attack thing to do 2 quick punctures then charge up the 3rd for extra multiplier.

Crafting off a base item just isn’t possible since you need low instability + a lot of existing modifiers to get to 20; consider dropping “stable” items which have no mods but extra stability

Disagree. The path this leads down is one where picking up loot from the ground is no longer a viable source of upgrades - ie., exactly what has happened in Path of Exile. There should not be anything done to weaken dropped loot, because that’s the core loop of this type of ARPG.

Also disagree with your general tone that crafting should be more usable/powerful. It’s already insane - powerful and low cost. Buffing it even further just means that crafting, and acquiring materials for crafting, becomes the game.

Picking up an item - tiny delay along with highlighting the item name, possible animation

This is such a WTF to me. Why do you want to discourage picking up loot?

I also largely have to disagree with your qualitative judgments, eg:

Respeccing skills feels bad, especially during early leveling

You get the minimum level thing + accelerated XP gain, which is more than enough. Do you just want there to be no opportunity cost at all for choosing one skill over another?

Story

I again have the opposite impression. The story was much easier to pick up and follow in this game than PoE, which has basically nothing in the way of supporting information, and the quests are often completely random and unrelated to the “plot,” such as there is.

Void is encroaching the world due to the hubris and selfishness of the empire, you are some special person that can make use of time shards, so your task is to go throughout time and try to prevent the end of the world from the void, or at least improve things. The quests, even the side quests, have so far been clearly indicated as relevant to this, either being about killing or clearing out some void corrupted thing, obtaining helpful information or resources, or finding or rescuing people.

Comparing that to PoE’s “Go kill this bear/skeleton/bandit/witch/templar/unspecified immortal being/deity” “Why?” “Because that’s how you progress.” Last Epoch holds up well here.

Movement Skills are a Feat Tax
As an example, you could give them to all classes as a free, extra specialization slot.

You could instead look at it another way. This “free, extra specialization slot” already exists, and you can also use it for non-movement skills! There are 5 hotbar slots (excluding 1 for movement) and 5 specialisation slots. Where exactly would an additional movement skill fit in?

There are also good reasons to prefer 5 slots. We only have 4 fingers & a thumb on the keyboard, so the highest number of skills you can have “comfortably at your fingertips” is maybe 6 including right-click. 5 skills + potion. If you have a fancy mouse, maybe 7, although moving & using two abilities at once on your mouse is pushing it.

You may object that other games, like PoE, allow many more skills, and PoE additionally has 5 flasks rather than 1. That doesn’t make this fundamental observation any less valid. It’s certainly possible to learn to use so many buttons, but that doesn’t mean it’s ergonomical or that it doesn’t place an unnecessary cognitive burden on the player. People complain constantly about “flask piano” in PoE, and typically make every effort to have their build use mainly one button.

There is definitely a sweet spot where you have enough flexibility of abilities in the moment while also not being overwhelmed by the number of buttons and dying because you took too long to work out the right one to use. Dying that way is extremely frustrating, and breaks immersion, because you didn’t die to something in game, you died to the control scheme.

IMO - and logically, based on typical hands and keyboards - Last Epoch hits that sweet spot already, which means there is a cost to adding additional usable skills.

So, yeah…You’re certainly entitled to your opinions. Mine is that I hope the devs largely ignore yours. : (

15

I’m especially agree about your suggestions on adding more weight to actions, skills and sounds. It’s important in order to make a satisfying action combat feeling.

16

I’m not sure what the best implementation of this idea is, but I love it in general. I’d love to see a way to have all builds have access to a movement skill, and I’d love to see a pass on movement in general. It would be nice to have 2 or 3 charges on most movement skills, and it would be nice to move just a little faster in general without sacrificing other important stats.

17

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.