Any general rules for a successful build?

General
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Hello, everyone. I’m not an experienced player (3 characters around lv 80 total) and I’ve been playing this Druid build (most item rolls are closer to maximum than to the middle). It started off very powerful, like everything up to the empowered monolith totally trivial. Build strategy includes being in Swarmblade form 100% of time, active use of skills and avoiding dangerous attacks, sometimes leaving the fighting to wolves and locusts until the area is clear of DoT area effects. My dps with basic attack is around 23K (not including buffs from howl and extra damage from swarm strike) and the lowest resistance a few points short of 100%

Now I enter empowered (char level 88) and it suddenly seems like I’m dying almost instantly no matter where I go. Especially Tombs and Woven Echoes (Bloodline Glade, Champion’s Colosseum - die from the 1-st attack that hits). Also any type of Champion enemy is trouble. A couple Champions together - run away or see the respawn screen. I don’t feel like going after a Harbinger at all. Now, I’ve been reading some guides, saying that my defensive stats are not that bad. Am I wrong and they are actually bad, or is it my skills as a player that are lacking? Then how come all content up until Empowered was child’s play? First Harbinger I met on normal killed the character once because I was surprised when it appeared after the boss (didn’t read the spoilers before playing) but then a totally easy fight.

And now I’m just stuck. Is there something I don’t know? I wanted to try a Forge Guard and a Spellblade later but I wonder what if I hit the same wall?

I don’t have any super ambitious goal with this game. Just beating the basic version of Aberroth once for the sake of lore and other than that simply enjoying different playstyles.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

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Welcome to Eterra, Traveller.

Without getting into specifics about your unique build, this article does a pretty good job of explaining the many defensive layers in Last Epoch. You will need to layer multiple types of defences to be successful in the late game.

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Thank you. I’ll take time to study this.

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Looking at your build, you have good defenses - crit immunity, capped endurance, armor too. But for a Druid your HP could be higher.

  • I would add %Health and %Hybrid Health affixes to your chest, belt, boots and gloves.
  • Your resistances are overcapped, which is rarely useful in this game. You should be able to trade resist affixes for HP affixes and still stay around 75%.
  • You should definitely throw away those unique Gloves. 5-10% increased Damage Taken means you take extra damage from everything.
  • You’re vulnerable to damage over time attacks and effects. Adding more HP will automatically boost your Endurance Threshold, this will help with DoTs thanks to Endurance, but consider wearing Oracle Amulet or one of its unique variants like Inheritance of the Erased.
  • Finally I noticed all your mastery points are spent in Primalist and Druid. Did you know you can put points into Shaman and Beastmaster too? Even as a Druid :slight_smile: At minimum Ursine Strength and Boar Heart are amazing damage reduction nodes in Beastmaster that you should definitely use.

Now to answer the question from the title. A successful build can be of several varieties.

  • Builds that are balanced between offense and defense, this is the majority of builds. These builds can take some hits, but also rely on the player skill to avoid the biggest hits and “oneshot” mechanics. A successful balanced build should be able to clear maps fast and comfortably above 300 corruption, be able to defeat bosses in a reasonable timeframe and even tank some hits from bosses.
  • Tanky builds that focus more on defense rather than offense. These builds often try to “ignore” boss mechanics so to speak, because they focus on the ability to take even the biggest hits and survive, so a successful tanky build needs to have amazing EHP.
  • High damage builds that kill everything before it gets a chance to kill them (often called 0hp, zhp or “paper” builds). These builds are successful when you reach crazy levels of damage and delete even bosses in seconds, plus when you obtain good piloting skills - the player’s ability to avoid getting hit.
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Wait a second.
If you’re in Swarmblade Form 100% of the time, how do you heal? Leech on a minion build won’t be amazing, and when you’re not hitting, you only have 100 HP regen, but DoTs at 100 corruption tick way higher than that.

And you can’t cast Entangling Roots in Swarmblade Form either. So you have two specialized skills that barely see any use?

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Thank you for pointing all of this out. So I’ll try to focus on getting more health, replace gloves and amulet. From the guides I read I got the impression that I should aim to get all resistances to around 150% since enemies in high level areas penetrate up to 75% resistance, but from what you are saying it seems there are more efficient ways to increase survivability. I’ll try that and respec some passives.

How do I heal? Leech and health on kill. The build can actually clear hordes of regular enemies almost instantly and leech back to full health from near death in 2 seconds. It is weak to ranged fire focusing, creatures that explode on kill and bosses of course since life replenishment drops down by a large margin when not hitting multiple entities at once.

So did I get it right that if I fix low health problem and make it heal even faster I’ll somewhat qualify for a Balanced Build?

About the skills, since I haven’t used Roots and Eterra’s Blessing once I got Swarmblade those two are just placeholders. Maybe I should replace say Roots with something like Summon Scorpion that’ll keep working for me once I transform (not Spriggan since I scale with Strength, not Attunement)?

Since I posted the question I killed the easiest Habringer (Fall of the Outcasts timeline)… well my minions killed the Harbinger while I was running from it to not get oneshot. I guess this still counts but it felt disappointing that I couldn’t even approach it. Only got a couple of punches in.

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This penetration is applied after resistance cap, it doesn’t matter if you have 75%, 150% or 300% resistance, only 75% counts, and that 75% ALWAYS gets penetrated to 0%.

This is a mental trap that LE players created upon themselves. Players always keep worrying about this mechanic and even gearing towards overcapping resistances. But that does nothing. There’s exactly ZERO things you can do about it. So why worry about it?

My advice is to forget that it exists.
At 0% resistance vs. 75% resistance in your character screen, you will most certainly feel the difference, so like in all ARPG games, max out your resistances and that’s it.

Yeah, well, nobody talks about hordes of small enemies when we talk about survivability :slight_smile:

Your goal for improvement right now is to fight that Harbinger in melee range and kill it. From the stats on your planner, you shouldn’t be dying in one hit. You will take a lot of damage sure, and the goal here is to have enough healing so that you can heal that boss’ damage in those 2 seconds or faster with leech (or otherwise) in this single (boss) enemy situation.

Yes.

Remember that another companion skill will share your companion limit with Wolves, so that’s -1 Wolf.
If you choose to go that way anyway, I would still consider Spriggan. It may have less HP since you don’t have ATN, but his healing aura can provide nice buffs (and additional healing ofc), and he can cast his version of entangling roots.

I would spec Swarmblade Form into Maelstrom on Dive and get Maelstrom for permanent Haste and Frenzy buffs.

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No, not really. The game guide in the game says that this mechanic plays a role, so EHG has definitely promoted this interpretation. The usual enemy penetration can’t be influenced by overcapping resistances but other sources of resistance reduction can.

These may not be as important but to say that overcapped resistances does nothing is incorrect.

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This might be pendatic, but the way you phrased that makes it seems that this only applies to this speicfic penetration.

But this applies to all penetration even the one we have as players against monsters. So if you have no other forms of resisatance reduction and a monster would have 75% or 100% resistance your penetration would do the exact same thing.

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I strongly disagree with this. Especially in LE offense and defense are seperate in most cases on gear, expect when you usign a lot of uniques.

So having a tanky build or a high damage build does usually not trade off with each other.

The way more meaningful distinction usually would be how good a builds damage projection is. So how good is a build for regular echo content vs. bosses.

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But that requires people to read the game guide & not just the loading screen.

True, but shred isn’t a particularly big thing, most mobs don’t have it by default. If it saves an affix by only getting to 60%-70% resist rather than overcapping by a lot, then that additional suffix can be used for a more effective defensive affix.

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Yes, overcapping resistances works against shock and mark of death etc. - but that’s not what we are talking about. We were specifically talking about penetration from area level. And overcapping resistances does nothing against penetration from area level.

The section of Game Guide you screenshotted is irrelevant to penetration from area level. Penetration from area level is only briefly mentioned in Game Guide under Penetration.

My advice still stands.

Heh, that’s so easy to refute. I can give you many examples where this is not true.

  • Off-hands with Spell Crit and Resistance/Ward affixes.
  • Body Armors and Helmets that provide Armor and other implicit defensive bonuses, where you look for offensive stats like +skill levels, attributes and various class-specific affixes.
  • Relics that very commonly come with mixed offensive and defensive affixes.

The only items where people usually don’t get any defensive bonuses are non-unique weapons.

And you probably know the saying “the best defense is good offense”. This is valid here aswell. Not only killing enemies faster lowers the total amount of incoming damage over a period of time, but majority of builds also depend on their damage to leech, which is a purely defensive mechanic that scales with your offensive stats.

Well, that makes sense you’re trying to compare builds only by clearspeed. That’s great if you’re choosing a farming build.

But if your goal is to survive “oneshot” mechanics so you don’t have to move around like a gazelle, clearspeed is secondary.
And if a random monster in the maps can oneshot you, because you sacrificed everything to be able to delete a boss in 3 seconds, then that build has no place to be in the same category as “normal” builds.

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You did refute nothing here.

What I was refering to is that prefixes for the most part are offensive and suffixes are defensive in LE. This is true for the majority of cases, except some very few exceptions. (Most notably weapons, which have offensive suffixes and defensive prefixes and calss specific prefixes, which can be defensive). There are a few more general examples like Armor Shred being a suffix even on non-weapon item types.
But other than those few exceptions every single slot in LE has defensive suffixes and offensive prefixes.

Except some exceptions like certain build enabling uniques or using very niche interactions for the most part every build in LE will have a respectable level of defense just from a good mix of suffixes without sacrificing much offense.

You do not have to sacrifice offense for defense or vice versa within a certain build or archetype that much. Even when switching out choice of weapons (1H, 2H, Shield, Off-Hand Catalyst, DW etc.) and some implicits a build will not go from glass cannon to super tanky. Because in LE you can’t really build glass cannon builds to beging with for the most part.

That is incorrect, weapons do have defensive affixes. Parry Chance, Reduced Damage From Crits, Chill, Frailty, Dodge, Leech, Health on Hit etc.

No I am not only comparing them by clearspeed, it is just one of the bigger factors.
Also damage projection is not only for clearspeed but also a defensive characteristic of a build

As mentioned above a good damage projection does serve as a defensive component of a build and damage projection mostly comes from the choice of skills and skill spec trees and not so much from the gear. So you don’t have to sacrifice any defensive stats on gear for that.

But still you can have builds that do echoes very well or builds that excel at boss killing. Both builds can have good defenses.

While this is obviously a hyperbolic example it exactly outlines what I wanted to say:

Even for a “maximum damage build” in LE you don’t have to be a glass cannon, because there will still be a lot of slots that will be used for the defensive characteristics fo your character.