I think you hit the nail on the head. I get there may be some EMs to avoid. The question is, are there EMs like that for everyone and are these EMs easy to recognize and actually easy to avoid?
There are mob-sets per echo type that you can learn either by looking it up or just having played long enough. X mono has Y mob, so on and so forth. Knowing what enemies are likely to be in an echo type helps a lot with being able to survive it bc you know if you can or cannot jump in all willy-nilly or not.
For example, Wengari are found only in snowy/tundra echos. Corrupted/Void echos will have Void Horrors. Divine Era can have Siege Golems. Desert echos can have wraiths and giant scorpions.
The information you gather will let you come up with better plans, or even just let you know to take it slow and play it more safe in a given echo. After that, it’s just knowing what mobs have what skills available to them that do a lot of damage and making sure to avoid them. I’d never sit idle in a Void Horror slam, for instance and save my movement skills for such slams.
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You’ll need to come up with a better example than that.
Unless corrupted, you can simply reroll your map - no need to trash it.
If corrupted, you can simply put a reflect immune sextant (common if ssf, easily purchasable if trade) on one of the voidstones.
There are builds that are less optimal for certain things, very rarely not viable. The only thing that comes to mind as far as very niche, almost pigeon holed builds go is deep delving, but that’s something you literally have to choose, as there is no need to run that content in order to progress your character.
Last Epoch’s endgame repeats the mistakes of both d3 and d4, which is sad to see.
Infinitely scaling content that you’re essentially forced into running gets boring real, real fast. It’s not just repetitive gameplay that’s at issue here, but rather that the outcome is predetermined - ergo - you WILL reach a point where your character gets deleted - the only question is when.
A game development team that calls themselves arpg enthusiasts seem to fail the basic understanding of what makes the whole genre compelling in the first place.
Which is the ability to build your character up to a point at which you outscale certain content, not the other way around. For that, however, you need a suitably fleshed out end game, with enough systems present so that once you conquer one aspect of the game, you can move on to the next, etc.
I shall wait and see what the future holds for Last Epoch, for right now it doesn’t pass on the basics of the genre for me, same as d4.
We are aware of, and have been discussing the eternal melee vs ranged debate internally. Ranged is generally able to push further for a number of reasons, mostly due to the intrinsic benefits of not being in melee range, haha. It’s a very complex matter, particularly when infinite scaling is involved, but we have certainly been discussing the topic of how ranged tends to pull ahead of melee at high corruption (about 600-800C~) as the unavoidable attacks for melee start becoming unsurvivable.
Generally for balance, we shoot for all reasonable builds to complete around 300C. Of course, different people set different goals for themselves, and may only consider clearing 1000C to be ‘viable’, but roughly 300 is what we shoot for. As far as I’m aware, Spellblade is capable of this with a number of builds. Of course, we do listen very closely to feedback, so if we get a bunch of feedback about the Spellblade falling behind other masteries, we will certainly bump it up in priority.
The polarity of one-shots from normal enemies is never fun, and can be a side effect of infinite scaling (eventually everything scales to a point of one-shots), but from what I was reading, it doesn’t sound like you’re that deep in corruption. In which case, more information about what you’re experiencing, what enemies, and so on can help a lot for both us, and other community members who may have tips and tricks.
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Well, that explain it 
Sometimes, you don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
Being in melee range (very close range) means you have less time to react to abilities as they connect sooner. Hard to beat math on that one. Though there’s certainly things we do such as making those more instant melee attacks weaker than ranged attacks, but with infinite scaling everything hits a point eventually.
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You can do 20 different things, the easiest being is giving melee an equivalent time to react to mechanics compared to ranged.
Literally impossible. YOu are closer, as such have less time to react.
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hint This is a video game, not reality.
What would be your proposal for actually achieving that in a way that wouldn’t then give Ranged an even greater advantage? The same enemies have to mesh with both Ranged and Melee builds.
Hint: The answer isn’t hit-scan on everything.
No, tbh you are just on a squishy skillbased mastery and are getting owned.
Spellblade is def in need of some reworking, but its totally playable, and no, the different monoliths are not harder/easier to a degree that will be night and day. Some are slightly harder because of mob types then others, but for the most part if you can do one, you can do the other.
Spell blade just requires you to play around your defensive cooldowns or get better end game gear.
Melee in general requires you to pay a bit more attention to whats happen on the screen.
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Simple, the time before you receive damage is reduced by the range from which the attack took place in relation to your character’s position.
Should the skills just wait a second or two after they connect if you were too close to the enemy to actually do damage or?
I’m on board with what you’re describing, honestly. However, I have personally seen how this situation still becomes a negative one very quickly.
- Rewards can be gated behind incompatible mob comps.
- If you run into both a bad modifier and incompatible mob comp, your options are to either die or just quit.
- You might know what mob types are within a certain echo, but you don’t necessarily know the affixes, etc.
- Right now, some masteries don’t have to deal with these problems at all (or nearly as much)
At the very least, if there were a way to know what types of mobs could spawn in an echo, 1 and 3 would be absolutely fine, imo. Risk/reward, mystery, etc. Throw in a bestiary and voila.
Number 2 would be mostly solved simply by adding more mods to the mix or forcing out duplicate mods within an echo cluster. Or some kind of protection like that.
Number 4 might be the biggest issue because it ultimately forces people into fewer masteries/builds which, simply put, is not why people play LE. It’s definitely why people don’t play D4.
My ideas to fix these might be crap, but you get the idea.
no, that would be too simplistic and easily abusable.
The bosses are def. geared towards ranged classes. Too many big bonks for melees. You can kinda avoid them with 1 sec invulnerablity skills but its kinda slap happy. Maybe less 100% kill shots from bosses would help. True tanks with lots of life/resists/etc shouldn’t be 1 shotted ever.
Kain–thanks for the response. 300C is actually what I’m aiming for; however, there seems to be a misunderstanding here. I am not saying Spellblade can’t get to 300C or higher. I’m saying it is much more difficult to do so with said mastery. I think you’ve essentially agreed.
interesting point here, have you guys considered deconnecting the corruption health/damage mechanic?
Right now the two scale the same. it will be 250% more damage and health, the two never split in scaling.
A small indie arpg chronicon had this very issue, where damage and health both scaled the same. So eventually the name of the game was “pump damage, off screen and chance to not take damage” so the devs changed the scaling of damage on the infinite mechanic to scale much slower then the tank of the mobs. This causes you to still want to build defenses, and once mobs get to tanky for you to kill in a reasonable time, you have many more chances to make a mistake.
Sorta can help fix that shotgun style of “oops I ate all the shot in the shell for this shot, so im dead”
It’s been a while since I’ve personally played Spellblade, though it’s certainly had its times being the meta leader, haha. Sometimes all it takes is a small tweak, or a single unique for something to go from obscurity to OP supermeta, or reverse. From a neutral balance standpoint, maybe other builds having an easier time getting to 300 and above is what we should be looking at, haha 
. Though of course, as I mentioned, it largely comes down to the feedback we get, and we’re listening!
I feel like most people in this thread just want to tell me how to play Spellblade or that I somehow suck at it, even though it’s a skill-based class I’ve managed to progress with further than most.